Chapter 5

Question 1

What is status?

Answer 1

-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

Question 2

What is a status set?

Answer 2

-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

Question 3

Describe the ascribed and achieved status.

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What is colourism?

Answer 4

Describes the preferential treatment of people within a minority group based on their lighter skin tone

Question 5

What is white-passing? (or racial passing)

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What is biological determinism?

Answer 6

-Theory that all social phenomena are determined by biological factors such as genetics, not social or cultural influences

Question 7

What is master status and who founded it?

Answer 7

-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

Question 8

What is status consistency?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

What is status inconsistency? How does it play a role in marginalization?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What is a role?

Answer 10

Set of behaviours and attitudes associated with a particular status
-Roles attached to a status may differ across cultures

Question 11

What is a role set?

Answer 11

-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.)

Question 12

What is Role strain?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What is Role conflict?

Answer 13

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

Question 14

What is role exit?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Who was George Simmel?

Answer 15

-Microsociologist and symbolic interactionist
-One of the first sociologists to study daily, one-on-one interactions of individuals

Question 16

Who was Charles Cooley?

Answer 16

-Identity formation through the looking-glass self

Question 17

Who was William I. Thomas?

Answer 17

-Symbolic interactionist
-Coined the concept of definition of the situation
-Influence for the Thomas Theorem

Question 18

What is the concept “definition of the situation” coined by William I. Thomas

Answer 18

-Individuals define situations based on their subjective experience and respond accordingly
-We must study these definitions to understand individual action

Question 19

What is the Thomas Theorem?

Answer 19

-Process in which interpretations and definitions produce a reality
-“Situation we define as real become real in their consequence” (William I. Thomas)

Question 20

What is a social organization?

Answer 20

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.)

Question 21

What is organizational structure?

Answer 21

-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)

Question 22

What are the three models of feminist organizations and who identified them?

Answer 22

-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)

Question 23

What is Interaction Process Analysis? (IPA)

Answer 23

-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

Question 24

Who was Frederic Thrasher?

Answer 24

-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

Question 25

What is the pecking order?

Answer 25

-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

Question 26

What is referred to as a status hierarchy?

Answer 26

When status can be ranked from high to low based on prestige and power

Question 27

Describe the problem area with sexual orientation and status.

Answer 27

-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)

Question 28

What is bureaucracy?

Answer 28

-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

Question 29

What is Formal Rationalization and its four elements?

Answer 29

-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

Question 30

What is substantive rationalization?

Answer 30

Involves the substance of values and ethical norms

Question 31

Who was Francis Galton?

Answer 31

-Considered the father of modern statistical analysis

Question 32

What is the “McDonaldization of the World” and who coined the concept?

Answer 32

-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

Question 33

What is scientific management and who developed its practice?

Answer 33

-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

Question 34

What is an organizational ritual?

Answer 34

A form of social action where a group’s values and identity are publicly demonstrated

Question 35

What are critical management studies and how did they come to attention?

Answer 35

-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)

Question 36

Explain the importance of social order through social organization

Answer 36

-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