Chapter 5 Flashcards
What is status?
-A recognized social position that an individual occupies
-Contributes to a person’s social identity
-Imposes responsibilities and expectations that defines that person’s relationship to others
What is a status set?
-A collection of statuses people have over a lifetime
-E.g., daughter, wife/partner/, mother; student, intern teacher; trainee employee, manager, business owner; youth, adult, elder
-Change as we age
Describe the ascribed and achieved status.
Ascribed: A status one is born into or enters involuntarily
-E.g., daughter, son, teenager, cancer survivor
Achieved: A status you entered into at some stage of your life, you weren’t born into it
-E.g., academic standings, professional positions
Some are both
-E.g., citizenship
What is colourism?
Describes the preferential treatment of people within a minority group based on their lighter skin tone
What is white-passing? (or racial passing)
When a person of colour belonging to a marginalized community “passes” to identify as white, allowing them to have access to a certain amount of white privilege
What is biological determinism?
-Theory that all social phenomena are determined by biological factors such as genetics, not social or cultural influences
What is master status and who founded it?
-Everett C. Hughes
-Dominates all of an individual’s statuses in most social contexts
-Plays the greatest role in the formation of the individual’s social identity
-E.g., “race,” ethnicity, gender, occupation
What is status consistency?
The condition a person experiences when all of their statuses fall in the same range in the social hierarchy
-E.g., male, white, of British heritage, rich, heterosexual, and able-bodied
What is status inconsistency? How does it play a role in marginalization?
Occurs when a person holds social statuses that are ranked differently and do not align
-E.g., Indigenous cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, Olivia Chow
-Groups are assigned into categories that set them at or beyond the margins of dominant society
What is a role?
Set of behaviours and attitudes associated with a particular status
-Roles attached to a status may differ across cultures
What is a role set?
-According to Robert Merton (1968): all the roles are attached to a particular status
-A status may be associated with more than one role (professors play the role of teacher, colleagues, mentors, employees, activist, etc.)
What is Role strain?
Develops when there is a conflict between roles within the role set of a particular status
-E.g., a student catching a classmate cheating, they are obligated to report the cheating but also do not want to be considered a snitch
What is Role conflict?
Occurs when a person is forced to reconcile incompatible expectations generated from two or more statuses they hold
-E.g., conflicting demands of being a mother and a student
What is role exit?
The process of disengaging from a role that has been central to one’s identity and attempting to establish a new role
-Involves shifting one’s master status (Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, 1988)
-E.g., divorce, death
-Something we all experience throughout our lives
Who was George Simmel?
-Microsociologist and symbolic interactionist
-One of the first sociologists to study daily, one-on-one interactions of individuals
Who was Charles Cooley?
-Identity formation through the looking-glass self
Who was William I. Thomas?
-Symbolic interactionist
-Coined the concept of definition of the situation
-Influence for the Thomas Theorem
What is the concept “definition of the situation” coined by William I. Thomas
-Individuals define situations based on their subjective experience and respond accordingly
-We must study these definitions to understand individual action
What is the Thomas Theorem?
-Process in which interpretations and definitions produce a reality
-“Situation we define as real become real in their consequence” (William I. Thomas)
What is a social organization?
Social and cultural principles around which people and things are structured, ordered and categorized
-E.g., cultures, institutions, or corporations are all socially organized around principles such as egalitarianism, hierarchy, capitalist/communist, democratic/autocratic, etc.)
What is organizational structure?
-Comprised of the organizing principles that are upheld by shared cultural beliefs and maintained through a network of social relations
-Organizations are based on understanding and knowledge of the world shaped by cosmology (account of the origin and ruling principles of the universe)
What are the three models of feminist organizations and who identified them?
-Identified by Carol Mueller
1. Formal social movement organizations -professional, bureaucratic, and inclusive, and which make few demands of their members (organizations dedicated to woman’s rights)
2. Small groups or collectives -organized informally, require large commitments of time, loyalty, and material resources from its members (publishing companies dedicated to promoting women authors)
3. Service-provider organizations -Combine elements of both formal and small-group organizations (dedicated to specific women’s rights such as counselling services and protection to victims of domestic abuse)
What is Interaction Process Analysis? (IPA)
-Robert F. Bales and his colleagues developed a system of coding for social interaction in small groups
-Determined whether groups and their members were task-oriented or relationship-oriented to identify patterns of behaviour such as dominant/submissive, friendly/unfriendly, and accepting/non-accepting authority
Who was Frederic Thrasher?
-Symbolic interactionist
-Composed classic study of gangs in Chicago through fieldwork
-Saw the gangs that he studied as small clusters of intense interaction socially separated form the larger world
What is the pecking order?
-In small-group settings, statuses are a valuable way to establish the pecking order
-Creates a hierarchal arrangement of people based on responsibilities and reporting structure
What is referred to as a status hierarchy?
When status can be ranked from high to low based on prestige and power
Describe the problem area with sexual orientation and status.
-Primarily an ascribed status but can be achieved
-much more complicated due to the way one’s own sexuality is recognized by others
-Status then lies in what you do, not in what you feel. (e.g., a homosexual marries into a heterosexual relationship due to the social pressure)
What is bureaucracy?
-Arose out of the formation of states and writing systems 5000 years ago, expanded alongside imperial expansions
-According to Max Weber, bureaucracy is marked by formal rationalization and its four elements: Efficiency, Quantification, Predictability, Control
-The place where officials work, necessary for the successful functioning of complex societies
-Can lead to disenchantment and alienation
What is Formal Rationalization and its four elements?
-Efficiency, Quantification, Predictability and Control
-Developed due to the Industrial Revolution
-It is a component of an organization’s social structure designed to guide and constrain the behaviour of the organization’s members
-Can lead to disenchantment and alienation
What is substantive rationalization?
Involves the substance of values and ethical norms
Who was Francis Galton?
-Considered the father of modern statistical analysis
What is the “McDonaldization of the World” and who coined the concept?
-George Ritzer: “The process by which rationalizing principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society and the rest of the world”
-Applied the four fundamental elements of Weber’s formal rationalization
1. Efficiency - Streamlined movement in time and effort of people and things through small, repeated tasks
2. Quantification - Success is measured by completion of large number of quantifiable tasks
3. Predictability - The “uniformity of rules” and clear expectations
4. Control - Hierarchal division of labour and supervision
What is scientific management and who developed its practice?
-Developed by Frederick W. Taylor
-Also known as ‘Taylorism’
-designed to discover the “one best way” of doing any given job
-Objective was to eliminate wasteful or inefficient motions or movements (e.g. with bricklayers)
-Didn’t allow workers to develop a broad set of skills due to single-task repetition, causing alienation
What is an organizational ritual?
A form of social action where a group’s values and identity are publicly demonstrated
What are critical management studies and how did they come to attention?
-Max Weber’s work on bureaucracy shifted from examining social institutions to business corporations which brought about a surge in studies in the fields of organizational theories and organizational behaviour
-The critiques of traditional theories of management led to the rise of critical management studies in which they challenged the dominant assumptions of organizations (issues of race, ethnicity, class, or gender)
Explain the importance of social order through social organization
-Foundation principles and forms of organizations have a profound effect on society individuals so they must be critically examined and questioned
-Organizational structure intended to promote social order, social cohesion and to influence how organizations and systems are held together
-Bureaucratized organizations dictate values and interactions and lose sight of greater good
