chapter 4 Flashcards
Social Structure: A Guide to Everday Living.
Members of every society rely on social structure to make sense of everyday situations. As our family’s introduction to the busy streets in Vietnam suggests, the world can be confusing, even frightening, when society’s rules are unclear.
State the importance of status to social organization.
In every society, people build their everyday lives using the idea of status.
Define status.
A social position that a person holds.
In everyday use, the word status…
Generally means “prestige”, as when we say that a college or university president has more “status” than a newly hired professor. But sociologically speaking, both “president” and “professor” are two statuses, or positions, within the post-secondary organization.
Status is part of our social identity and helps define our relationship with others, why?
As Georg Simmel, one of the founders of sociology, once pointed out, before we can deal with anyone, we need to know who the person is.
Define status set.
All the statuses a person holds at a given time.
Example of status set.
A teenage girl may be a daughter to her parents, a sister to her brother, a student at her school, and a goalie on her soccer team.
Status sets change over the life course. Explain.
A child grows up to become a parent, a student graduates to become a lawyer, and a single person marries to become a partner. Joining an organization or finding a job enlargers our status set; withdrawing from activities makes it smaller.
Define ascribed status.
A social position a person receives at birth or takes on involuntary later in life.
Define achieved status.
A social position a person takes on voluntarily that reflects personal ability and effort.
In the real world, of course, most statuses involve a combination of ascription and achievement.
That is, people’s ascribed statuses influence the statuses they achieve. People who achieve the status of lawyer, for example, are likely to share the ascribed benefit of being born into relatively well-off families. By the same token, many less desirable statuses, such as criminal, homeless person, or unemployed worker, are more easily achieved by people born into poverty.
Physical Disability as a Master Status.
Physical disability works in much the same ways as class, gender, or race in defining people in the eyes of others.
Define master status.
A status that has special importance for social identity, often shaping a person’s entire life.
State the importance of role to social organization.
A second important social structure is role, behavior expected of someone who holds a particular status.
A person holds a status and performs a role (Linton). Explain.
Holding the status of student leads you to perform the role of attending classes and completing assignments.
Both statuses and roles vary by culture. True or false?
True.
In every society, actual role performance varies with an individual’s unique personality, and some societies, such as Canada, permit more individual expression of a role than others. True or false?
True.
Define role set.
Robert Merton introduced the term role set to identify a number of roles attached to a single status. Consider, for example, how the status of a student consists of a specific role set. As a student you attend classes, but chances are you also carry out research to complete assignments, take part in study groups, and possibly participate in student-organized social events.
A global perspective shows that the roles people use to define their lives differ from society to society.
In low-income countries, people spend fewer years as students, and family roles are often very important to social identity. In high-income nations, people spend more years as students, and family roles are typically less important to social identity. Another dimension of difference involves housework. Especially in poor countries, housework falls heavily on women.
Define role conflict.
Conflict among the roles connected to two or more statuses.
When do we experience role conflict?
When we find ourselves pulled in various directions as we try to respond to the many statuses we hold. One response to role conflict is deciding that “something has to go.” More than one politician, for example, has decided not to run for office because of the conflicting demands of a hectic campaign schedule and family life. In other cases, people put off having children in order to stay on the “fast track” for career success.
Define role strain.
Tension among the roles connected to a single status. A university professor may enjoy being friendly with students. At the same time, however, the professor must maintain the personal distance needed to evaluate students fairly.
Define role exit.
The process by which people disengage from important social roles (ex-nuns, ex-doctors, ex-husbands, ex-alcoholics).
According to Ebaugh, when does the role exit process begin? … AND MORE!!
The process begins as people come to doubt their ability to continue in a certain role. As they imagine alternative roles, they ultimately reach a tipping point when they decide to pursue a new life. Even as they are moving on, however, a past role can continue to influence their lives. Exes carry with them a self-image shaped by a previous role, which can interfere with building a new sense of self. For example, an ex-nun may hesitate to wear stylish clothing and makeup. Exes must also rebuild relationships with people who knew them in their earlier life. Learning new social skills is another challenge. For example, Ebaugh reports, ex-nuns who enter the dating scene after decades in the church are often surprised to learn that sexual norms are very different from those they knew when they were teenagers. Exiting a role is made more complicated if that role is seen by society as deviant, such as the role of sex worker. Saunders argues that national policies that reinforce “exiting” through compulsory rehabilitation and the criminalization of sex work make leaving the role very difficult for those involved.
Baldovino.
He suggests that although behavior is guided by status and role, we have the ability to shape who we are and to guide what happens from moment to moment. In other words, “reality” is not as fixed as we may think.
Define social construction of reality.
The process by which people creatively shape reality through social interaction. This idea - introduced by sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman - is the foundation of the symbolic-interaction approach.
As Baldovino’s remark suggests, quite a bit of “reality” remains unclear in everyone’s mind, especially in unfamiliar situations.
So we present ourselves in terms that suit the setting and our purposes, we try to guide what happens next, and others do the same, reality takes shape. Social interaction, then, is a complex negotiation that builds reality (Berger & Luckmann).
“Street Smarts”.
What people commonly call “street smarts” is actually a form of constructing reality.
Thomas theorem.
Situations that are defined as real are real in their consequences.
Ethnomethodology.
Most of the time, we take social reality for granted. To become more aware of the social world we help create, Harold Garfinkel (1967) devised ethnomethodology, the study of the way people make sense of their everyday surroundings.
This approach begins by pointing out that everyday behavior rests on a number of assumptions.
When you ask someone the simple question “How are you?” you usually want to know how the person is doing in general, but you might really be wondering how the person is dealing with a specific physical, mental, spiritual, or financial challenge. In Canada, however, people tend to assume that others are not really interested in the details about these things. Upon arrival in Canada from Sweden, one of the authors soon learned that Canadians asked “How are you?” out of politeness, not because they wanted to listen to an honest answer of how he was feeling. One good way to try to uncover the assumptions we make about everyday reality is to break the rules. For example, the next time someone greets you by saying, “How are you?” offer details from your last physical examination. The results are predictable, because we all have some idea of the “rules” of everyday interaction. The person will most likely become confused or irritated by your unexpected behavior - a reaction that helps us see not only what the rules are but also how important they are to everyday reality.
