Notes For Lectures, Soc 101-03, Winter 2004


Jan. 6th

WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY? 

First, a couple of things it is not:

1. It is not just the expression of personal feelings on issues.  We all 
   have feelings, but to be a sociologist is to keep these in check as 
   much as possible.


2. Sociology is not just the study of groups.  People form all kinds of
   groupings, and these can be important, but we study not just gruops
   but individuals, specific actions by individuals, items of culture
   (explanation on what that means later in the course), and also 
   large aggregates such as whole societies.


-More on what is sociology next class..


Jan 8th


What it is:


-It is "critical", which sometimes means saying something is bad,
 but also is meant in the sense of  critical evaluation.  

-It can be disturbing for some. Although I said last time that we
 put feeling aside, we can't stop lessons learnt about the world
 we live in having impact on our own feelings.  This relates to
 the discussion on "sociological imagination", in Knuttila, early
 in ch. 1.

-It is a science.

     Knuttila gives some detail in ch. 1

	-see p. 3- "to think systematically..."   Part of the
         "system" is exposing ideas to others.  

	-p 7- where he says that social sciences "make an effort to
 	 be scientific".  In other words, sociology is not as
	 definite a science as, say, physics.  

	-p 8- he discusses some core assumptions of science

	a) "an external objective world exists..."  Think for
	  yourselves about what this means.
	b) "we can secure knowledge by observation".  But of course,
          it is also true that the senses can mislead us, and give
   	  false observations.
	c) there is order to the world.

	The term "social structure" (see page 11) is one way in which
	we describe order sociologically.  When events are not structured,
        we refer to "agency" at work.  Agency is self-determination, for
        reasons unique to one's own biography.  Structure is due to how
        we fit into the socieity, in some fashion or another. 


Sociology as differentiated from other disciplines:


Discipline     Stresses        Has Specific        Stresses Rational 
               "Nurture" +     Subject Matter      Behaviour (+) or
               or "Nature" -  + (or not, -)        Irrational (-)

__________________________________________________________________

Anthropology   between + and -     +                   +

Economics      +             	   +                   +

Geography      + (?)               + (independent var) + (?)
                                   - (dependent vars)

History        + and -       	   -                   + and -

Political Science   +              +                   + and -

Psychology     towards -           -                   towards -

Sociology      +                   -                   + and -   


Notes: an independent variable (above, re geography), means one that
is deemed a cause.  A dependent variable is the effect, the thing
caused.
"Nurture"= things like upbringing
"Nature"= the genes you were born with

_________________________________________________________________


See also Knuttila, pages 10 and 11


January 12th


===========================================================================
Sample Test Questions, So Far:


1.   As presented in lectures, which two of the following are not
     characteristic of how sociologists do their work?

     a) Sociologists use evidence
     b) Sociologists believe there is at least some order to the world
     c) Sociologists study groups, not individuals
     d) Sociologists assume that we can secure knowledge through     
        observation
     e) Sociologists assume that personal feelings and intuition are the most  
        powerful scientific tools of all


2.   When Knuttila writes in Chapter 1 that Sociologists "try to think
     systematically", what does the "system" refer to?

_____________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________


===========================================================================


Where it Came From:

The existence of Sociology is not inevitable.  It exists as a response
to some currents in European history over the past 500 or so years.

The chart below lays out some factors:


Some Origins for Sociology



Pre-1600          1600         1700         1800         1900         2000

-------time scale------------------------------------------------------->

Medieval   The Scientific          Industrial    Beginnings of         By
period,    Revolution.             Revolution    Sociology            now,
with        Names such as:         gets under way                   fairly
feudal       Copernicus                                       established!
organization   (1473-1543)
of society   Francis Bacon 
               (1561-1626)
             Thomas Hobbes               
               (1588-1679)
             Ren‚ Descartes
               (1596-1650)
             John Locke
               (1632-1704)
               
                    English Civil
                    War, 1640-60
                              American
                              War of
                              Independence,
                              1775-83
                                 French Revolution
                                 begins, 1789


_________________________________________________________

Knuttila has discussion on some of the names, pp. 13-18.     
           
 
Comments on material in the chart-



-Medieval times were  characterized by-
	-Fatalism
		-e.g, the poem that reads 
		"Sit very still
		 Wait God's will."

	-Mysticism
		-"The mystic hopes to arrive at a feeling of
		deliverance from the world and the flesh, and,
		free from the chain of causality, to enter into
		the knowledge of God and into God's very existence."

	-Collectivism (the importance of living in close-knit groups)
		-E.g., the "frankpledge" from pre-Norman Conquest in 
		1066.  "All the village's male residents over the age
		of twelve belonged to units of ten or a dozen called
		frankpledges or tithings, each of which was collectively
		responsible for the behaviour of its members."

    -compare these far off times with our own, for example, the
     book noted in class entitled Lives of Their Own: The
     Individualization of Women's Lives."  That is a very late
     20th century theme, looking at the individual as in charge of
     his or her life and destiny. 


January 15

Exploring the Social Environmental Perspective

From Knuttila, ch. 1- see page 17, middle of column 2, for one of his first references to "social
environment".

     (Additional reading note on the text.  I haven't said too much about Mills and the
     sociological imagination, but this is material you should know, so read the text carefully
     here.)

See the passage on p 21, 2nd col. "To understand. . . for self-understanding."  That's our jumping
off point for topic two, "Exploring the Social Environmental Perspective". 



Nature vs nurture - these terms are often used as a shorthand descriptor of the issue at hand.

nature= your genes

nurture= everything else- - how your parents treated you, physical things like the nutrition you
received, the climate you live in, schooling, relations with siblings, with extended family
members (e.g., uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins), friendships, enemy-ships!, marriage. . . 

See Knuttila's treatment of this on pages 39-40, in chapter 2. 

     (Reading note on ch. 2: read the whole chapter, but the passages on culture are less
     important for the moment.  I'll get to culture as a separate topic later).
 
So when I refer to the "social environment", that is the same as referring to "nurture".  But the
more cumbersome term social environment does cue us to an important aspect of nurture.  I refer
to the term "social", which used constantly by sociologists.

What does "social" mean?

-not just being a party animal!
--reminds us that humans are highly dependent in each other, on each other's "society".
     -partly this is due to the long dependency period for human intants (see text, page 33).
     -but more, it may be that most humans just do not do well as loners.

     Example, Globe and Mail story from August 26th 1999: "(a)fter two years of it, I decided
     that living alone is bad for you. Bad for your health, bad for your personality, bad for your
     love life."




A brief History of the Nature-Nurture Debate:     

Historical Period/time        What was Happening?
___________________________________________________________________________

Let's start with John Locke,  He was saying that humans are a "blank slate".
Mr. "Tabula rasa" (Essay on   Genetics and instinct are un-important.
Human Understanding, 1690). 

Charles Darwin, The Origin of The famous, controversial study on natural selection,
Species, 1859; The Descent of with the implication that humans are evolved beings with
Man, 1871.                    ties to apes.  

Francis Galton, study on      Tallies up evidence showing that genius
Hereditary Genius, 1869.      runs within families             

Early 1900s-               period of intense empirical work on Galton's idea.
                           Many of the statistical tools still used 
                           originate as part of this research.  (Pearson, 
                           concept of correlation; Thurstone,concept of 
			   factor analysis)

1930s                     Hitler and the Nazi part take power in Germany.  Genetic 
                          arguments become deeply discredited

1950's                     High period of social environmentalism.  Just about 
                           everything is interpreted socially.

1975 Edward Wilson's book  Analyzes humans as one would animals.  See also   
Sociobiology              Knuttila's section on Desmond Morris (p. 39 of text).
                          Much discussion and controversy.  In US, largely 
around
                         race and IQ

1979                     Cyril Burt fraud exposed

Now                      Increasing knowledge of the physiology of the brain, 
                         Popularised by authors such as Stephen Pinker.
__________________________________________________________________________



Jan. 20

I began with talking about the essay assignment (there was a handout).


Nature-Nurture- More

Francis Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin.  That explains a few things!   Galton was a
geographer. 

     -he is the one who coined the phrase "nature and nurture", in his book English Men of
     Science: Their Nature and Nurture, published 1874. See Matt Ridley's book Nature Via
     Nurture, HarperCollins, 2003, for details (page 71 and elsewhere) 

          -he wrote: "The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it
          separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality
          if composed."

          -Ridley (p. 71) notes that he may have borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare,
          from The Tempest: "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never
          stick."

The notion of correlation

1950s climate.  Example of schizophrenia.

     "The schizophrenic is painfully distrustful and resentful of other people due to the severe
     early warp and rejection he encountered in important people of his infancy and childhood,
     as a rule, mainly in a schizophrenogenic mother."

          The psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, written in 1948. (Details in Ridley, p.
          102)

A good recent source on these issues (which I've drawn from here, is
Matt Ridley's Nature Via Nurture (HarperCollins, 2003).


January 22nd

How do we Decide between "Nature" and "Nurture" Explanations, aside
from blind prejudice, preconception, faith and other such useless 
approaches?

We'll take intelligence as an example

The methodological problem: parents pass on both genes and a social environment to their
children.  How to separate the effects?  One Answer: examine different kinds of families.

Some family possibilities:

A family of biological but un-twinned children
A family with twins - two sub-types-
     "Fraternal" twins
     "Identical" twins - from a single egg
Parents whose twins were adopted by two different families (conceptually informtive, but very
     rare)
A family with adopted children
Other possibilities- blended families, not as extensively studied, due to
	recency of these forms

Identical twins are rare, so let's look at a study comparing biological vs adopted children.  By
Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg, "The influence of 'family background' on intellectual
attainment."  In the American Sociological Review of October 1978.

The figures on recruitment are worth examining.  For the adoptive sample, 
there were about 100 families, with children between the ages of 16 and 22. They were
recruited from families who had adopted children between 1953 and 1959.  The addresses were
thus 15 to 20 years old, which explains the high undeliverable rate:


Letters sent out by Department of Public Welfare, of
the State of Minnesota, USA                                 1,620
Letters returned undelivered                                  477
No response                                                   345
Eligible to participate
     Said yes                 327
     Said no                  471
          Participated
               By mail                                        164
               By interview                                   110

     They used only the interview sample, because they gave the most complete data.

The biological families were recruited from referrals from the adoptive families and through the
media (hence, non-random, probably).  

IQ measured by the Wechsler Adult Intellilgence Scale (WAIS)- one of the well-known standard
IQ tests.  Components are vocabulary, arithmetic, block design, and picture arrangement. 

Mean adoptive child IQ was 113, biological, 106.  Population mean for IQ is always set to 100.

Correlation between parents' and child's IQs were:


               Biological Sample   Adoptive Sample

Mother's IQ              .39            .04

Father's IQ              .39            .15


The difference is reflecting the genetic, or nature, component.  The "multiple" correlations,
including further information such as birth rank, were:

                         .56            .27



Now some results from twin studies. This table from Sandra Scarr's book (same author as above)
Race, Social, Class and Individual Differences.  BF432 a1r33 1981 - in Porter library.  She
reproduces a table prepared from several studies.

          CORRELATIONS FOR INTELLECTUAL ABILITY

Unrelated Persons
     Children reared apart                   - .01
     Foster parent and child                  +.20
     Children reared together                 +.24
Collaterals
     Second cousins                           +.16
     First cousins                            +.26
     Uncle (or aunt) and nephew (or niece)    +.34
     Siblings, reared apart                   +.47
     Siblings, reared together                +.55
     Dizygotic twins, different sex           +.49
     Dizygotic twins, same sex                +.56
     Monozygotic twins, reared apart          +.75
     Monozygotic twins, reared together       +.87
Direct Line
     Grandparents and grandchildren           +.27
     Parent (as adult) and child              +.50
     Parent (as child) and child              +.56


-issues and observations: representativeness of the samples is always
an issue.  There is controversy over whether intelligence can be 
measured.  See for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. 
The variance due to social environment can be acted upon, even if it
is the smaller component than the genetic.  


January 29th

Reviewing from last time - we've been touching on the importance of genetic in
heritance. It is a tricky subject because we are using the concept of 
variance, and explaining variance, which will be unfamiliar to many of 
you.  As a simplified statement, let's just say that for many traits, there
clearly is a genetic component, which becomes visible in studies of twins 
and adopted children. 

Ridley (in Nature Via Nurture - the book I've referred to several times), 
notes one difficulty in trying to apportion the shares of nature and 
nurture: the studies are all conducted within a normal
western (US, UK etc.) social environment.  Thus, if we took a child with 
great genetic gifts and deprived him or her of a normal childhood, that 
child would score terribly on a IQ test by age five or so. 

This is what we mean by the INTERACTION between nature and nurture.   
Parents who put their young children in special education programs are 
intuiting this interaction. 

One reason I've been stressing genetics is that it supplies the COUNTERFACTUAL 
(the alternative, the other possibility)  for discussions about the social 
environment.  It's time now to begin looking more carefully at this social 
environment, starting with the "social construction of
reality".


The great old classic is by Berger and Luckman, The Social Construction of 
Reality, published in 1966.


The Social Construction of Reality - Race and Ethnicity as an Example

One of the favourite ideas of Sociologists is that reality is "socially 
constructed".  The concepts and ideas in a society, the meanings 
attributed to objects, the categories we use, are not naturally
ordained, but rather emerge out of the interaction of people in daily life. 

-We can use race and ethnicity, the topic of Knuttila's chapter 11, to 
illustrate and work with this concept of social construction.  

-If, by the way, it occurs to you that it is a social construction to say 
that knowledge is socially constructed, then truly you are an intuitive 
philosopher. 

As for ch 11, note his discussion early on about the changing meanings of 
the term race, and also that the notion of ethnicity is of quite recent 
origin. 

     -read the quotation from Michael Banton, on page 234.  That expresses the
     constructedness of race very well

     -the whole section from 230-241 is core to the course. You should know about 
     Philippe Rushton, the book The Bell Curve, Stephen Jay Gould, findings from the
     genome project.  

          -note: "Race is a social concept, not a scientific one" (p. 241).

     -read section on Sociological Theory, Race, and Ethnicity on a quick-skim basis for the
     moment (no direct test questions on this section, in Test 1).  We'll come to these ideas
     later. Pick up closer reading on page 246, section on "Race, Ethnicity, and Colonialism in
     Canada and follow through to end of chapter.  One thing we learn from this more
     historical section is that issues of race and ethnicity are important to people.  To say that
     something is socially constructed does not necessarily trivialize it. 

Natural scientists tend not to like social constructionism. It can be construed as challenging the
notion of an external reality, which Knuttila says is a fundamental part of science.

     -for example Edward Wilson, the noted zoologist, criticizes the view that

      "reality...is a state constructed by the mind, not perceived by it.  In the most extravagant
     version of this constructivism, there is no 'real' reality, no objective truths external to
     mental activity, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups."

     From Edward Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998, p. 40.   Note that his
     constructivism = our constructionism.


     Or, consider the words of Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, 2002):

     "According to the relativistic wisdom prevailing in much of academia today, reality is
     socially constructed by the use of language, stereotypes, and media images. The idea that
     people have access to facts about the world is naive, say the proponents of social
     constructionism. . . " (page 198).



-I think social constructionism is a strong idea that, like strong medicine, needs to be used with
caution.  

     -the danger is that, if reality is socially constructed, different people can have different
     realities.  The end point is that nothing is universally "true".  Every group works from
     "standpoint epistemology".  It can no longer be said that murder is bad; that voting is
     good (or any example). 


-Some examples of pay-off from social construction-

1. Ethnic relations, the theme from chapter 11.  Patterns of inequality 
changed so massively over the 20th century that we cannot merely attribute 
such inequalities to genetics.

2. Role of women.  Here too, massive changes.

3. Interpretation of technology.  E.g. the bicycle.  The bike took a long
	time to assume its present form because initially the bike was
	defined as a toy.

4. Berger and Luckman wrote, in their book from long ago: 

     "Among the multiple realities there is one that presents itself as the reality par excellence. 
     This is the reality of everyday life." (p. 21).



Feb 3rd

More Sample Questions for Test 1


1.   True or false, race is a concept first invented in the 20th century?

     a) true
     b) false

          -false, see Knuttila section beginning p. 232



2.   The "Quiet Revolution" refers to

     a) the period in Quebec from 1960 to 1966
     b) the period in the 16th century, where Cromwell gained power in England
     c) the period from 1989 to 1990, when communism disappeared in Russia
     d) the period around 1776, when the United States gained independence from England
     e) 1867, the Confederation year for Canada

          -(a), see text, 253 and 257


3.   What is the difference between "race" and "racism"?

     _______________________________________________________________


     -race refers to distinctions based on "some biological or genetic 
      characteristic or feature"
     (p. 256, text), racism to the conclusions drawn from race (256)

============================================================================


Culture

The stuff that people socially construct is called . . . culture. Construct is the verb, culture
is the noun.  Note that although we're talking about "construction" here, much of culture
is intangible - - not a physical thing, but instead ideas or meanings

-the counterpoint to culture?  That would be behaviour and ideas/meanings that are
instinctual. See discussion in text, page25 onward.  Note Knuttila's discussion on human
physiology (page 29 and on). This is one reason why we have to be careful 
about over-attributing social construction to everything.  These "social constructions" are influenced
by erect posture, prehensile hands, forward vision etc. (page 29). 

-language is of particular interest here (p. 30-33). Do humans have an evolved
predisposition toward language, or is this too entirely social construction?

     -Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct, says the basic structure of language is in
     our nature.

-We'd better trace the origin of the term "culture".

  -French- civilization - a "high", valuable, universal, aristocratic
  -German "kultur" - national, authentic, of the common people

     Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologist's Account (Harvard UP, 1999), p. 34.

     -On 1930s views of culture in Germany

     The intellectuals, fearful of materialism and what Weber was to call
     the rationalization of public life, faced what they saw as a renewed
     but more powerful challenge to culture from a soulless civilization,
     and they reacted by drawing upon the resources of philosophical
     idealism and of romanticism, and by encourage national pride.
     Rational, universal civilization threatened the spiritual culture of a
     Volk.  Nations should not allow their unique values to be swallowed
     up in a common civilization. The world is made up of 'contending
     national spirits. . . qualitatively different cultures.'
     
-Cultural relativity- Franz Boas (and students such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict).
     -see text, beginning page 34.

-Culture often makes more sense than first appears

-Note definition, p. 47

     "Culture- the totality of the various material and non-material aspects of human
     existence that characterize how a specific people live and 'do things'  The non-
     material dimension  includes beliefs, myths, knowledge, ideas, ideals, values,
     habits, and traditions, while material artifacts are those human-made and natural
     products that have acquired a socially defined existence and use among a group of
     people. Culture is complex, shared, diverse, and cumulative." (47- and earlier
     discussion).

     - note inclusion of material things.  It's the meaning attributed to the "thing" that
     makes it part of culture (Gods Must be Crazy example)

-culture is pragmatic- it's the accumulated wisdom for solving problems. 

-Trend toward a universal culture?  

-Criticism of the way sociologists use culture: admittedly, we do use this as a "residual"
category.  Perhaps we have reified it.  Steven Pinker quotes this from the anthropologist
Krober:

      "Civilization is no mental action but a body or stream of products of mental
     exercise...Mentality relates to the individual.  The social or cultural, on the other
     hand, is in its essence non-individual.  Civilization as such begins only where the
     individual ends."

-Pinker likes Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs. And Steel.  It gives natural explanation of
where some culture comes from.



Finally, Nacirema (page 42) - American!


Feb. 10
Review of Test 1

Then,

Culture- More

Example of culture as "residual category" - research on the prestige of occupations in different
societies- 

Some passages from a famous article entitled "a comparative study of occupational prestige," by
Hodge Treiman and Rossi (and printed in the book Class, Status and Power, by Bendix and
Lipset. 1966).

     Looking at how occupations are rated in different countries, there is "little evidence to
     favor the 'culturalist' position that 'within each country or culture the distinctive local
     value system would result in substantial - and , indeed, sometimes extreme- differences in
     the evaluation of particular jobs in the standardized modern occupational system." 

     "Whatever variations local cultural traditions generate in the prestige standings of
     occupations must be of such a minor order that they tend to be obscured in the national
     comparisons which have been made." 

	-there is no measure of culture in this discussion.  The cultural 
	explanation is the one left if other ones don't work.  

"Measuring" culture - difficult - consider case of Margaret Mead in Samoa 
(this is another one her studies, from the one discussed in Knuttila).

     -she wanted to show that tension between teenagers and parents was not biologically
     inevitable.  Later research questioned her interpretation, and said that the Somoan
     islanders she lived with were simply telling her what she wanted to hear.  It is a famous
     academic dispute not entirely resolved even today. 


Culture and Genetics - an important theme for Matt Ridley in his book Nature Via Nurture.

     -he argues that culture came comparatively late to the evolving human being. "Culture
     seems to be the cart, not the horse." (228)


Feb. 12

Social Structure

Social= well, social, we've already talked about that.

Structure= form (culture, in contrast =content).  By another analogy,
structure is the skeleton, culture the flesh.

  
Many academic disciplines have a notion of structure: in
chemistry and physics, the structure of molecules; in literary
studies, the structure of a poem or the structure of a language;
in geography, the structure of the earth's crust; economics,
topics such as the "structure" of the banking system; political
scientists, when they examine different forms of government. 


Sociological structure is mainly about behaviour ("action" is a
synonym here)- and behaviour that is non-random and non-nature-
based (that's where the social comes in).  


Let's take careful note of Knuttila's definition, which is saying
what I've just said:

     "...the fact that the human relationships, interactions,
     actions, and behaviours that make up society are both social
     and structured, as well as ordered, patterned, routinized,
     and regularized." (p. 62, see also 51)


Examples: 

Obvious ones-

- Ocktoberfest Parade (or Christmas, or any such event).

-  Almost any sports event.


More subtle-

-The Milgram "Small World" experiment

     -one person can make contact with another within, usually,
      four to six links, the links being between people with whom
      one is on a first name basis.

     -for internet web sites, 18 and a half "clicks" to go from  
     one site to another randomly selected one.

- Social structure in the sense of "positions" ["statuses"].     
Sometimes called the "sociodemographic structure".

     e.g. age, sex, social class, ethnicity

- Forms of organization such as bureaucracy.  
     
-Social structure involving institutions (a topic I'll address
later)

-The power structure (e.g., Marx, drawing implications from
economic structure of capitalism to social structure). 


Other comments on chapter 3- take careful note of his discussion
of status, role set, role conflict/strain, values, norms.


Re Groups, text, pp.  58-60, note that these are not just
aggregations of people.  There is a notion of relationships
within the group.


General Comment

-we're using all kinds of different jargon-y words here. Remember
that we don't invent norms, say, when we coin the term.  Whether
our jargon is useful or not depends on whether it helps us make
useful distinctions- that enable us the better to analyse
societies, as Knuttila says.  

Tuesday, Feb. 24th

Crime and Deviance

Our plan-
Today (Feb. 24th)- lecture on crime and deviance (text, ch 12)
Thurs the 26th- looking at social institutions (text, ch. 13)

I'm away week of March 1st

Tues, March 2nd- video on crime and social deviance
Thurs, March 4th- Test 2- Evens come first.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Crime and deviance is a good illustration of the sociological
mode of explanation, and of the use of the concept of social
structure.

-First, we should pause to note that our on-going issue of social
versus biological explanation is very much at play here.

     -see Knuttila, ch 12, pages 260-262.

     -here are some additional figures on the issue of biological
     vs social determination

          Criminal "concordance" (from Eysenck) -

               Identical twins     55% (i.e., biologically      
                                   identical)
               Fraternal twins     13%


     -The sociological view -

          -stresses range of seriousness (look for Hagan
          comments, in film)
          
          -variation in what is defined as crime (look for Inuit  
           section in film- see also ch 12 opening page)

          -view that society makes the criminal
     
               -the details take various forms, as the text  
               illustrates.  I showed cartoon about culture as
	       defense in a courtroom. 


-Now let's go through chapter 12, with a particular eye to how
Knuttila uses the concept of social structure. 



p. 259- "deviance tends to be socially defined and constructed."

Same page-note distinction between deviance and crime
also, social control

page 261- example of what I'd regard as a fair test question-

Herrnstein and Murray concluded that the average IQ of criminal
offenders is

     a) 38 points below the mean
     b) 8 points below the mean    
     c) exactly at the mean
     d) 8 points above the mean
     e) 38 points above the mean

-p 263- shaded section, about age and gender profile of
criminals- this is an argument based on social structure (even
though it comes from Wilson and Herrnstein, and they call it a
"constitutional factor"). 

-Emile Durkheim is mentioned several times, and we'll hear of him
later in the course.  Note his interesting ideas- that crime may
be the leading edge of social change (e.g., legalization of
marijuana).  Also, that punishment of crime is a form of
affirmation of what is agreed upon. 

-we meet more key figures, Parsons and Merton, starting on page
267.  Parsons, especially, is reminding us of the cultural
components to deviance (see discussion on p. 267 about
"internalize the society's value orientations" etc.).   Merton
gives the clearest example of a social structural approach to
crime and deviance.  See page 268, left column, lines 17 to 19. 

-note esp page 268, left, bottom four lines, quoting from Merton.
Here he's bringing together ideas about culture and about social
structure. 

     It is when a system of cultural values extols, virtually
     above all else, certain common success-goals for the
     population at large while the social structure rigorously
     restricts or completely closes access to approved modes of
     reaching these goals for a considerable part of the same
     population, that deviant behavior ensues on a large scale.



-look for the section on the "structural functionalist theory" in
the video. It's what I'm talking about here. 



In diagram form:
  

"Mode          Accept              Accept
of             Cultural            Conventional
Adaptation"    Goals?              Means for Achieving Goals?
_____________________________________________________________

CONFORMITY          Y                   Y

INNOVATION          Y                   N

RITUALISM           N                   Y

RETREATISM          N                   N


___________________________________________________

Source: Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 1957
edition, 140.
Note- I'm deliberately excluding "rebellion" here.


see pp 268-70 for Knuttila's write-up on each mode.


Page 270- concept of "subculture".  

Merton's theory suggests why conflict occurs in societies- see
Knuttila's discussion around page 270-73.  Note that in the
video, "conflict" is presented as a separate approach- topic for
discussion- is that logical, and what is the distinction between
structural functionalist and conflict positions as depicted in
video?

The symbolic interactionist view (p. 274-5). This is looking more
at how social structure comes about- see page 274, left column,
bottom third. 

Feminist theories of crime, at end of chapter.  Many issues being
raised here.  Note the "stag effect".


SUPPLEMENT:  Some Notes on the video on Crime and Deviance


The video stresses norms (a component of culture) as the basis
for defining crime, with respect both to punishment, assessment
of harm, and degree of consensus about crimes.

Classification of deviance: John Hagan:

     *consensus= serious offenses
     *conflict = more minor forms of drug abuse, for e.g.
     *deviation= things only partially addressed by the police
                 (e.g., more minor forms of juvenile delinquency)
     *diversions=minor norms transgressions, but not crimes. 
     E.g., opening sequence of walking backwards, or the          
           juggler shown in the film

Example of cultural factors: the e.g., of hoarding as crime in
Inuit culture, but not in mainstream culture.

Video mentions the centrality of property in definitions of crime

Two types of criminal shown in film:
    *"John" the bank robber, from poor background
    * the "white collar" criminal who embezzled

Three modes of explanation:
     *Structural functionalism.  Note: this is from the famous    
      American sociologist Robert Merton, referred to in text and 
      class. Merton's scheme is an classic example of structural  
      analysis.
      Note that the actor in the film in fact used the term 
      "innovator".
     *Symbolic Interactionist.  Concerned with issues of defining
      crime, denial of responsibility, denial of injury,          
      condemnation of the condemners, consequences of labelling
     *Conflict theory. Stress on selective enforcement of law,    
      biased by class interests

Interview with Charles Reasons.  This follows up on the conflict
theory idea about selective enforcement.  Example of deaths in
industrial setting (men entering pipe contaminated with poison
gas).  Note reference to C. Wright Mills (encountered in Knuttila
re the "sociological imagination").

For discussion- how do the social characteristics of the actors
tell us something about the three theories?



Feb. 26

The Concept of Social Institution - the Family as an Example (ref Knuttila,
ch 3, pp. 51-55 and ch  13)



Let's go back to the concept of social institutions, in ch 3. 

-"Institution" in general language means specific organizations.  "The University of Waterloo is a
good institution of higher learning."    Sociologically, we use the term in the general sense- "The
University of Waterloo is one university which is part of the institution of higher education."
It's more akin to the way one might say, "for years my family have rented
a cottage at Thanksgiving- it has become quite an institution."

-With institution, we start to talk about needs - and this is a tricky issue.

     -see Knuttila, page 51, second col, middle. 

     "As a species, human beings meet needs, solve problems, and deal with various drives
     through conscious, intentional, knowledgeable social action and interaction.  These
     deliberate actions are what we call social practices. Over time these social practices
     become regularized, routinized, patterned, and established as 'the way things are done'. 
     As they become firmly established, the social practices become a solidified part of life in
     the form of institutions."

     -a few lines later- institutions "are geared to or serve to meet some problem, need, or
     drive."


-Knuttila (p. 52-3) points out that it may be useful to speak of clusters of institutions.

-See page 54, giving examples of institutional orders and institutions.

     Economic
     Educational
     Political 
     Religious
     Family

     Anything missing?  One of you mentioned the need for people to
     meet and get in touch with one another.  Activity such as
     dating services might represent a response to that need.  Maybe "the
     press" is another example.


-Now let's skip to chapter 13, looking at "the family" as an institution. P. 279- "Although there
are a number of other social issues or institutions that could be used to illustrate the nature of
sociological analysis, familiar relations are appropriate for discussion here. . ."


The "functionalists" referred to by Knuttila look at things in terms of - - their functions! 
Function here can mean need served, or consequence.  These terms not quite the same thing.

So the functionalist says, if we witness the family as an institution present in every society on
earth, we should infer that the family is meeting one or more key functions (needs).

     -these may even be especially important functions, or "system prerequisites".

-Problem with this argument- the functions seem to have changed over time. See ch 13 around
pages 282-83.   Are the functions then simply a social construction?  

-Illustrated by notions of expressive and instrumental roles.  Is this a 1950s social construction,
or something tied up with nature?  Or something tied up with male patriarchy, still at work?

-Knuttila now talks about Marxian analysis, as an alternative to functionalist analysis.  The
functionalist begins from the assumption that what is, is good, is serving a legitimate collective
need for the whole society.  The Marxist says that, given that we live in a divided, capitalist
society, what is, is wrong, is a manifestation of oppression.  The burden of proof is to show that
an institution is serving more than just the interest of one social class.

     -as pages 286 to 88 detail, the modern family is all tied up with capitalist economic 
     organization.

     -themes to note here- - labour power as a commodity ( a "thing"); family as "social
     factory" for producing labour; domestic labour is free labour for the economy; ideologies
     of sexism; role of the state; concept of "reserve army of labour"; nuclear as "an ideal
     consumption unit"; feminist theories.  See shaded sections of text for further exposition
     of some of these themes.

     -we'll get to feminism later on, but for the moment, here is a diagram:


                    Assume:

                    One society              More than one
                    (unity of 
                    interest)
               __________________________________________________

                    Functionalism       Marxism- two societies,
                                        Bourgeois and proletariat

                                        Feminism - two societies,
                                        Men and woman
              ______________________________________________________




-P. 290- comments on mental illness.  Here's another example of a heavy handed use of
"nurture" explanations. 


     


Sample Questions for Test 2


Knuttila lists four reasons why the family is a good institution to use as an
example of sociological analysis.  Name one of his reasons.

     ________________________________________________

     (Family is universal/ seen as important by people/ has implications for
     understanding gender relations/ family is key agent of socialization)







True of false, there is much debate in sociology about whether it is
appropriate to use the term the family"

     a) true
     b) false

               (That is true)


"Kinship" refers to 

     a) social positions
     b) networks of people who define themselves as being related 
     c) any collection of people who know each other on a first name basis
     d) a cruise ship in which lectures on principles of kinesiology are          
     offered
     e) none of the above

          (b)! 


March 9

NOTE- I didn't get through all this in class, but I'll include some
	points to assist you as you read chapter 4

Socialization

=process of acquiring the society's knowledge.  See Knuttila's exact words on page 65 and again
on 86.

-This is an area where sociologists need to consider carefully the biological aspect. See text,
section beginning on page 65.  Also section on page 79, re cultural determinist position.

     -Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct.  Also, Chomsky.

          -Pinker, drawing from Chomsky, says that "most utterances are brand-new
          combinations of words" but also that all languages obey rules.  We can understand
          the meaning of "my car has been eaten by wolverines" but not "Car my been eaten
          has wolverines by".  (The Blank Slate, page 36).

          -verbs, nouns, prepositions  are universal even though the ordering varies.  E.g., in
          English, "drink beer from the bottle"; in Japanese, "beer drink the bottle from").


     -page 73 of text, see passage talking about language being "picked up".

-Personality (pp. 67-8).  "A good deal" of personality is social, but not all.

-Types of socialization.  Some commonsense distinctions here.  Primary, secondary,
resocialization, anticipatory.

-Agents of socialization.  Education and the mass media might be the most controversial here.
 In the wake of 9/11, we should also include religion.

-Concept of "internalization".  


-Feral children (section beginning on page 80). 

     Knuttila mentions-

     Victor, circa 1800
     Anna , Isabelle, late 1930s
     
     Genie, discovered in Los Angeles in 1970 is a more recent example.  

     Other more apocryphal are "wolf children" - inspiration for Kipling Jungle Books,
     also Baden-Powell and Scouts. 

-note implication of feral children for intelligence (shaded section, 83-84). 

-why is socialization so powerful?  Because the  "social self"   is "reflexive".

     -   From Prof. Prus here at UW:
              "Through interaction with others, and taking the viewpoint of the other with respect to
	     oneself, people become 'objects unto themselves' or objects of their own awareness."  (P.
              12, Subcultural Mosaics. . )



-One's identity is largely an outcome of socialization.  The Twenty Statements Test, that you did
yourselves in class,  reflects this. 


March 11

Theories of Socialization - Knuttila Chapter 5

The material on conditioning is interesting for its own sake, but also for understanding what
George Herbert Mead was all about.  First, a couple of comments on conditioning and
behaviourism.

     -Pavlov-work on dogs- this is very famous and well known.

     -p. 90, quotation from John Watson.  This is one of the most famous quotations in all of
     social science, so note it well.  

     -Skinner, another very famous name.  Note distinction on page 90 between classical
     conditional and operant conditioning.   The difference is in the ordering of stimulus and
     response.  Classical- stimulus, then response.  Operant- can also include response, then
     stimulus. 

     -we call the Pavlov-Watson-Skinner approach "behaviourist" because it concentrates on
     behaviour and sets aside motivations, aspirations, free will etc.  Skinner described the
     mind as a "black box".

     -between, say, the 1940s and the 1960s, behaviourism was very influential to
     psychological thought.  Starting in the 1970s, it slipped out of fashion.  All of social
     science became much more impressed with the power of free will and voluntary actions. 
     Today, behaviourism is probably under-appreciated. Question: has free will actually
     become more important over the last quarter of the 20th century?

-Piaget (text pp 92-95) is of interest for the way he reconciles biology with behaviourism and
issues of free will.  Work through this on your own.


-George Herbert Mead and the Symbolic Interactionist Approach (95-100)

     -note how this differs from behavourism.  It virtually defines the sociological approach.

          -note importance of "temporal dimension" (time) and communication.  Neither is
          necessary to behaviourism.


     -note the idea of the "self" (p. 97). 

     -importance of play, among children (97).

     -The "I" and the "me" (p.99). As a very rough analogy,
          Me=your hard drive
          I= the RAM in your computer.-The "looking glass self" concept from Cooley (p. 99).  Important, I think, because it is such a
          compelling metaphor.  

-Freud, like the behaviourists, helps us differentiate the symbolic interactionist approach.

     Id= the "nature" part of our selves
     Superego= our internalized knowledge of our society
     Ego= a kind of regulator which mediates the id and the superego. 

-the last section of this chapter, from p. 109 on, you should find quite easy because we have
already looked a twin studies.  Refer back to notes for January 15th, 20th and 22nd. 


March 16

Sociological Theory- Introduction

Now we begin part two of Knuttila, "theorizing society".   Let's think about "theorizing".

Point one- we're all theorists - "lay theorists", one might say.  Whenever we ask a "why"
question (see Knuttila, page 119), we are theorizing.

Point two- theories should simplify (even if that is not how it initially seems to you).

     -illustration: there may be examples from your own lives, where "fitting a model"
      resolves a dilemma or anomaly.   It's a matter of "finding an explanation", but this
      "finding" involves not just tracing a sequence of causes, but fitting this sequence into
      a larger or general category of events   "Theory is a 'story' about how and why events in
     the universe occur" (Jonathan Turner, The Structure of Sociological Theory, 5th edition,
     page 1).  


Point three- In the real world of science, both natural science and social science, the use of theory
is generally not on a shopping cart basis.  That is, we tend to adopt a favourite theory, which we
tend apply to all events.  
     
     -this becomes our "theoretical perspective".  (Picasso overhead!).

     -an advantage that Soc 101 students have is that you come into the field less contaminated
     by a theoretical perspective, in some ways.


-What are the components of social theory?  Answer, first, a set of assumptions and definitions.   
Often theories use categories (or "variables"). Propositions are statements about relationships
between these variables.  Social scientists interested in theory spend much of their time
classifying types of theory, examining their "tree structure" (the way one fits or nests inside
another), and considering the historical lineage of theories.  The chapters in Knuttila give some
sense of this.

-Some initial examples of theory.

1.     Significance testing.  The assumption here is that most observations we see are samples
     from  a larger universe.  A second assumption is that patterns within a sample often come
     about by chance.  This theory draws on two pieces of knowledge that, unlike most social
     theories, are known to be true-

     a) the "central-limit theorem"- if random samples are drawn from a normally distributed
     population, the bigger the sample size the more the mean for each sample will fall close
     to the population mean (this wording a simplification from statistical textbook wordings).

     b) the "law of large numbers" - if samples are drawn from any population (normal or not),
     as sample size becomes large the distribution of sample means becomes normal. 

     There is also a "Popperian" assumption embedded - that we don't try to prove things to
     be true, we try to prove them to be not false!  There is a difference.  So in significance 
     testing, "null hypotheses" are tested.  For example, not "basketball players tend to be
     tall", but, as null hypothesis, "basketball players are no taller than any other sample of the
     population", as gauged by examining a sample.  To "reject the null hypothesis" is to come
     as near as we dare to accepting the underlying hypothesis that basketball players are tall.

2.   Freudian theory, from chapter 5.  Assumes three different components to the personality,
     the importance of various drives etc.  
     

3.   Symbolic Interactionism, from chapter 5, page 95 and on.  Certainly some of the
     components of theory are seen here (a set of definitions of concepts, assumptions).  Some
     would say the predictive power of SI is low.   Turner (ref above) says on page 376 that SI
     simply stresses that "change is frequently unpredictable".  It's a sociological analogue to
     the "indeterminancy principle" from physics, perhaps.  There may be more "how" than
     "why" to SI.  We might say that SI is a sensitizing perspective- it directs us to look to the
     meanings people have formed about their world, based on their interaction with others. 


-Theories of Society.  Part two of Knuttila concerns theories of society.  Society is taken here as a
"thing", as an entity not entirely reducible to the people in it.  This can be a hard concept to
absorb, but consider the following.  Canadian society today includes the dead!  - - the dead live
as memories, for the events they influenced, for the ideas we hold today.  The same is in a way
true of the not-yet-born.   Try to think of society as a "thing" (a thing described with concepts
such as culture and social structure), and part 2 of the text will be easier.  

-Theories of society often hold key assumptions about the following questions-
 

     -the source of order (e.g., Hobbes, cross-reference text pp. 16-17)
     -the source of differentiation (e.g., Marx, cross-ref to pp. 6-7)
     -how rational are humans (e.g., Skinner, cross-ref to p. 90)

-There is a to-and-fro between theory and observation.

     -Deduction= predicting an outcome from a theory
     -Induction= constructing (or modifying) a theory, based on observation, or events
          -E.g., events of Sept 11th 2001 challenged the assumption that the world is
          fundamentally a safe place. 

March 18 

Theory- more

Durkheim, Marx, Weber, the "three dead white males".  

Knuttila, chapter 6


-note the "historical background" remarks Knuttila makes on page 120.  This applies not only to
Comte but to all the figures mentioned in this sequence of chapters.  

     -make sure you follow the argument on p 120 and 121- prevailing thought was that there
     was a distinctive human nature ("by nature competitive, acquisitive, possessive" etc.).  It
     was an historical period (post French Revolution) when this seemed plausible.  Society
     thus was simply an arrangement that catered to this human nature.  Comte is of interest
     because he reversed the sequence, arguing that human nature is flexible and follows from
     the society people live in.  Again and again we'll see this same theme of writers reacting
     to the world and the historical stage around them.  

-"organic analogy", top page 122.  Consider merits and demerits of this idea.  It does help us
visualise society as a "thing".  But it also leads us to over-interpretation.  

Marx- consider his world- some legislation 

     The Cotton Mills Regulation Act of 1825- imposes a maximum 12-hour day for workers
     under the age of 16. [Marx is 7 years old]
     
     The Factory Act of 1833- forbids factory labour for children under 9, and sets a 9-hour
     day for those under 13. [Marx is 15 years old]

     The Mines Act of 1842- forbids employment of children under 10 and women below
     ground. [Marx is 24 years old]

     Factory Act of 1844- sets a maximum 12-hour day for women and a 6-hour day for
     children aged between 8 and 13. [Marx is 26]

     Ten Hours Act of 1847 - set a 10-hour working day for women and for children between
     13 and 18. [Marx is 29]

     1848-publication of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels!

-Marx adds another component to the argument that the society "thing" is more than the sum of
its people.  His stress on domination and power (p. 125, text) reminds us that some people are
more influential than others. 

Durkheim.

He was born 40 years later than Marx, and witnessed a gentler form of capitalism.  By now
capitalist/industrial society - - the product of the Industrial Revolution - - is well established, and
Durkheim was mindful of the extent of the change since more pastoral times.  

     -the book on Suicide is a classic because it so clearly suggests how a trait of society - -
     anomie - - has implications for individuals.  But note that he works with rates of suicide,
     not explanations of each individual one. 

Max Weber

-He was witness to the rise of corporate, bureaucratic, office-bound society.   Among other
contributions, he analyzed this new form of social structure. 



March 23

Theory-3

-As I said a couple of classes ago, social theories "nest" within
each other.  That is, one derives from another, in a historical
progression.


               |    |              |    |    
              ||____||            ||____| |
              |      |            |       | 
               ------              -------


-we can see this when tracing the lineage from Emile (or "E-mail"
as the cartoon says) Durkheim and structural functionalism.

-we have encountered this term structural functionalism several
times now.  See for examples sections around pages 256 and 280. 
Now let's pull this together.

     -functionalism took the focus on order from Durkheim, and made
     it the central question
     -it also borrows from anthropological work, both by Durkheim
     and later figures such as Malinowski.  For example, Durkheim
     wrote:

     Durkheim himself (using secondary sources),wrote: 

     "There are no religions which are false" (Elementary Forms of
     Religious Life, p. 3). 


-what is the difference between straight-up Durkheim, and
functionalism?  Perhaps that the focus on order became an obsession
with order; that shared values became ever more emphasized (perhaps
because the US was a very individualistic society in which a unity
of values could not be taken for granted. See Knuttila page 137 for
details.
     -The McCarthy period in the US(1950s) might be analyzed from 
     a s-functionalist viewpoint.

-there are different versions of s-functionalism.  A milder form is
that of Robert Merton (encountered in the crime and social deviance
video and in ch 12). If Merton says that sociologists should trace
out the unintended consequences of polities, who can disagree with
that?

     -another version is one that thinks about the functional
     prerequisites for a stable society.  The work of Parsons
     followed that line.

     -functionalism could take the extreme form of positing that
     any social arrangement in society that exists over time must
     be functional, must be filling some need or another.  Think
     about the  defects in that argument.

-Marxist theory too has developed over time. In Marx's time to
speak of the bourgeoisie and the proletarians as the two main
classes made sense.  In our time, there is a "new" middle class of
highly skilled knowledge workers. They don't fit into the old
scheme.

-still the assumptions of all the Marxisms are different from those
of the Durkheimian-functionalist school.  Note Knuttila's
discussion of the Marxian concepts of alienation, ideology and
dominant ideology.  

     -alientation is saying there is an inherant force in   
     capitalist industrial society making people not part of the 
          society.
     -ideology is saying that the "values" so celebrated in 
     functionalist theory as being spontaneous bases for agreement 
     are in fact class weapons.  The dominant class forces dominant
     ideology down the throats of the rest.

which theory is right? I can't tell you.  I can, however, note that
a functionalist and a Marxist will interpret the same event in
different ways. 

-Symbolic interactionism.  I've already said a bit about this
earlier, so this section of the chapter can serve as a review.  

-How does symbolic interactionism fit in with functionalism and
Marxism?


                      Assume parts of
                    society fit together
                      
                         in harmony

                              |    FUNCTIONALIST
                    I         |
                    N         |
                    T         |
                    E         |
                    R         |
                    A         |
         Micro ------------------------------------Macro
        (Small,     C         |             (Big, the society)
       individuals  T         |
                    I         |
                    O         |
                    N         |
                    I         |
                    S         |         CONFLICT
                    T         |
                              |
                         Assume conflict


-Knuttila chapter 8- a brief mention: some of these theories can be
thought of as the third dimension in my scheme above.  E.g.,
feminist theory is drawing an essential difference between men and
women.  


The Future of Social Theory

-We have a tendency in Sociology to see theory as developing toward 
a final truth, a little like the "theory of everything" in physics. 

-I think it's more useful to say that we have a stock set of ideas
that go into theories, just as we have a fixed alphabet of 26
letters.  Just as we will continue to re-arrange the letters of the
alphabet, we will modify theories to try to describe our current
times.  Post-modernist theory is an example of re-arranging ideas 
into a new combination.  

-if this is right, there is a fundamental difference between
natural and social science.  Natural science has an end point, in which 
all knowledge is known (unless knowledge is as un-limited as outer
space).  Social science has no end point, and also, frustratingly,
no real closure, topic by topic. 


March 25

Chapter 9- "explaining social inequality"

-Read this chapter as a way to better understand the two main theories of society we have been
discussing.  We'll imagine what a structural functionalist theorist (SF) and a neo-Marxist (NM)
theorist would say about some of the main points.

1. Income is unevenly distributed in the Canadian population.

SF- this is a functional necessity for a modern economy.  Different occupations have differing
levels of importance.  The most important ones make the most demands on workers, and require
the biggest investment of time and money in terms of educational and professional preparation.  
In general, a society needs inequality to provide incentive and goals.  The inequality actually
makes the poor richer, by making the whole society richer.  E.g., Canada's poor have more than
the poor in a third world country.

NM - this tendency for the rich to get richer, the poor poorer, reflects on of the "contradictions of
capitalism", as Marx termed it.  Eventually the poor will become so demoralized and alienated
from the society that adverse consequences will follow.  Productivity will suffer when workers
merely go through the motions.  In the extreme case, class revolution may occur.

2. Inequality in terms of prestige

SF - It is via prestige that the population recognizes the realities of differential importance of
occupational tasks.  Studies of occupational prestige show very high consensus across all strata
of society, showing that the prestige order is part of the core value system of Canadian society. 

NM - prestige is an epiphenomenon of class inequality.  Canadian society is divided into social
classes which endure over generations.  Class position depends on one's position in the economy,
and here we are not just speaking of occupation.  A mechanic who owns his or her garage  is of a
different social class than a mechanic who works on salary for a dealership, for example.  Ideas
about prestige are ideas from the top, imposed on the lower orders of society.  If you analyse
prestige data in the right way, this can be seen.

3. Power

SF - power stems from the legitimate authority that accrues to different social positions.  Let's all
read Max Weber on this.  (E.g., page 185 of Kniuttila text). Of course people like the Prime
Minister, a general in the army, or the president of a company have power.  

NM - Power comes from class, and part of having real power is that you are powerful enough
that other people accept your power as legitimate and right.  This is done, for example, by control
and ownership of the mass media.  Who do you think owns the Globe and Mail or CTV?   

4. The "discovery" of class in North America.

SF - It is true that when Canada and the States were simpler societies, based mainly on small
farms, there was less inequality and no social classes. It is part of economic growth that the
whole society gains wealth, and these are driven by legitimate inequalities. 

NM - class has always been there.  Women, for example, were a "reserve army of labour"
mobilized during World War One.  The "discovery" results from Marxist scholars exposing
various feature of capitalism.  A Marxist note about the Middletown study (page 177)- the Lynds
were closet Marxists.  They don't cite Marx, but many telltale assumptions of Marxist analysis
can be seen.  Example, their distinction between a business class and a working class; comments
on lack of satisfaction among workers; comments on decline of craftsmanship.  Marxist comment
on Warner study- Warner was fixated on the consequences of class society (the nuances of
prestige differentiation around old and new money, for example), but rather unreflective about
the root causes of the inequality.  As Marxists, we don't very much trust what people say about
inequality because it is so likely to be clouded by "false consciousness".  

5. Parson, Davis, and Moore

SF- here we encounter our sacred texts of structural functionalist theory.  These guys had it right!

NM - Parsons implies that everything in a society runs like a stock market composed of many
small players, but that's the wrong model.  The "market" of society is dominated by a small
group of big players.   As for Davis and Moore, the shortcomings of their theory are plain to see,
and Knuttila captures some of this around page 182.   First, all occupational functions are
important, it's impossible to define how one is more important than another. Even Durkheim,
poster-boy of the structural-functionalists, realized that.  Next, inequality is not just a system of
motivation.  It is a system of de-motivation.  People from the working class know that it is
hopeless to aspire to be a brain surgeon.  Inequality is dysfunctional (as Merton would have said),
not functional. 

6. Marxist theories of class

SF - Marx may have accurately captured some aspects of the Industrial Revolution circa 1850,
but his ideas do not apply today, and evidence of that is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
"Workers" today have huge amounts of power, because they are bearers of "human capital"
acquired through education.  Luckily, students of the University of Waterloo, with its co-op
programs and technological ethos, realize that and are not mislead by neo-Marxists polemics!
The confusion Knuttila describes (191-4) around Wright's various attempts to classify social
classes in the late modern period illustrates the futility.

NM - The section on Clement (page 195) illustrates the continuing relevance of the Marxist
approach.  The elite as of 1950s was cohesive enough, what larger social need was served by the
drift over the next 20 years to an even more entrenched corporate elite?



Do different Social Classes Agree About the Prestige of Occupation?

Average Correlation between different categories of people - from the 1965 Canadian study
referred to in Knuttila (184).  

Between:
 White collar and white collar          .70   (=high level of agreement)

 White collar and blue collar           .61 (=lower level...)
      
 Blue collar and blue collar            .49 (=lowest...)

____________________________________________________________________________
From: L. Neil Guppy, Occupational Prestige and Conscience Collective: The Consensus
Debate. Reassessed."  Ph.D. thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Waterloo, 
1981. 


March 30th

Power as "Generic Social Process"

-Bob Prus, a member of the Department of Sociology here at Waterloo, has been a leading figure
in developing the notion of the "generic social process".  Quoting one of Prof.
Prus's works:

     generic social process refers to

     ". . . the transsituational elements of interaction; to the abstracted , transcontextual
     formulations of social behavior.  Denoting parallel sequences of activity across diverse
     contexts, generic social processes highlight the emergent, interpretive features of
     association. They focus our attention on the activities involved in the 'doing' or
     accomplishing of human group life." 

          Robert Prus, Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research (Albany, State
          University of New York Press, 1996, page 142).

-He's saying that some aspects of life follow the same mould across many situations
(transsituational) and contexts (tanscontextual).  
"Emergent" means the social structure is in part created out of the actions of people (it
"emerges").  "Interpretative" - saying that people interpret, they think about how and why they
act, they are not just robots following a program.  "Doing of human group life"- looking at what
actually happens as people deal with one another.

     -this is all part of the "symbolic interactionist" tradition, which you already know about
     (text, page 95, 108, 146  and elsewhere).


-So I'm suggesting that power is a generic social process - it is seen at every level of society, big
and small, top and bottom.  Prus himself published a book in 1999 entitled Beyond the Power
Mystique: Power as Intersubjective Accomplishment. 


-A study by Felmlee (in the journal Sex Roles, 1994), illustrates the importance of power in
everyday life.  She studied power in romantic relationships.

     -this is a little different from power within marriages, where earnings - money - will be a
     factor. 

     -Felmlee makes the point that power is good for you - powerless people tend to suffer
     more psychological distress than those more powerful.

     -the study looked at 598 students from sociology classes at two large midwestern
     universities in the US.   They were interviewed twice (447 the second time).  Things
     measured:

     1. Power. "In your relationships, who has more power?" 1 to 7 scale, where 7="my     
     partner has much more power than I do."

     2. Decision making. "In your relationship, who makes more of the decisions about what    
       the two of you do together?"  1 -7, with 7= "my partner makes most of the decisions."

     3. Emotional involvement.  "Who would you say is more emotionally involved in the    
     relationship?"   1-7, 7 means partner more involved,.

     4. Equity. 1-7, 7= my partner is getting a much better deal than I.

     5. Relationship longevity. 

     Some results.

                         Male Respondents         Female Respondents


% saying
 Female has more power             12.8                19.3
 equal                             41.6                48.0
 Male has more power               45.6                32.8

Female more decisions              14.4                25.0
Equal                              32.8                43.2
Male more decisions                52.8                31.8

Female more emotionally involved   45.6                36.8
Equal                              30.4                43.6
Male more                          24.0                19.6

Female gets better deal            16.0                18.4
Equal                              53.6                53.6
Male gets better deal              30.4                28.0
______________________________________________________________________
Source: Diane H. Felmlee, "Who's on top? Power in romantic relationships."
Sex Roles vol. 31, nos 5/6, 1994, page 284.

Those least involved have the most power. 

Longevity. I won't give the stats, which are complex, but the hypothesis was that equal power
relationship would last the longest, but the effect is too weak to pass statistical significance
(meaning, it is most likely zero relationship). 


Felmlee's interpretation is interesting for our purposes.  "The results also, may reflect the
overinvolvement in emotional attachments on the part of women ...that can occur in our society
with the 'feminization of love,' that is, the association of love solely with expressive, emotional,
feminine behavior." (290)




Chapter 10 of text- I won't go through this in detail, because most the themes should be
becoming familiar by now.  Note references to the theoretical positions such as structural
functionalism and Marxism. 

-resolving these views suggested by theory is difficult because power is invisible.  That's true
even at the level of romantic relationships, but even more so at the top of the society.

     Briefly, the approaches are to examine the likelihood of power being exercised, or to
     conduct case studies.

April 1st

Sociological Prediction 

Successful science can predict things.  How do we do this in Sociology?  

Three approaches to mention-

1. Via social theory.  We've talked about this already, and Knuttila comes back to the same issue
in his epilogue.

2. From "Demography".  Demography is the study of population. It is one of the sub-fields of
sociology, and one with some of the best predictive ability.  Why?  Because when people have
children, a somewhat predictable set of life events begin to unfold.  If people of some cohort (a
people of such and such an age, in such and such a period - e.g., people in their twenties, in the
late 1940s and 1950s) have high "fertility" (have lots of babies), the implications of the "baby
boom" have consequences down to the decades to the present day. 

     David Foot wrote a highly successful book called Boom, Bust, and Echo.

     Demographers express things per 1,000 ( or 10,000, 100,000 etc.) of population- in terms
     of rates, in other words.

          -for example, the "crude birth rate" is number of live births per 1000 total
          population.  One might instead put number of women of child-bearing age into the
          denominator, but that's much harder to know.

     The crude death rate is another key demographic indicator.  Again, "crude" because the
     denominator is the whole population, not the number of old or sick people.

           "migration" is important in demography.  It refers to people moving about- thus-
          -internal migration (within the country)
          -international ==> either immigration or emigration.

               With reference to internal migration, John Porter referred to Canada as a 
                "demographic railway station".

     The "demographic transition" refers to an historical progression in the ratio of births to
     deaths.

     Here is one reason why I like to abstract society away from those of us currently living:
     Somewhere in Canada, a baby is born about every 77 seconds.  A person dies every 161 
     seconds- - nearly once every three minutes.  At about the same rate, once every 169
     seconds, a case of net migration occurs (an immigrant arrives in Canada, and we subtract
     the incidence of people for the US or elsewhere).

3. Third, it is tempting to arrange data in a time series, like so,

     




   Incidence of      |
     your favourite  |
       phenomenon    |
                     |
                      _______________________________________

               19??                                     now      2???

     
The prediction involves extending the graph beyond the present.  There are various statistical
techniques for this.  The stock market is one place with obvious applications.  Statisticians speak
of "data mining" as the guiding philosophy.




               

     Sample Essay Question

The Instructions will look like this:

PART II- Essay question.  Answer one question only, and use the space
provided below and overpage, not the lined exam booklet (which is for
rough drafts or notes). 
Worth 25 marks.


Sample Questions:

1. What does it mean to say that power is a "generic social process"? 
What is "social" and "processual" about power?  


2.  Financial mismanagement within the federal government was in the
news this winter.  What sociological ideas from the course might help
explain why normal bureaucratic procedures were not followed by
crown corporations such as Via Rail?


3. Knuttila repeatedly refers to the "sociological imagination."  It is a
running theme throughout the book, and one he returns to in the
epilogue. What is the sociological imagination, and how might it relate
to your own life?


4. I said in class more than once that the dead live on within the culture.
What does this statement mean.  Give an example.