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Chambliss, W. J., & Eglitis, D. S. (2016). Discover sociology (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Chapter 1

DISCOVER
SOCIOLOGY

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Media Library
CHAPTER 1Media Library

VIDEO video

What is Sociology?
Sociological Imagination
Weber and Marx
Tuskegee Airmen & Double Consciousness
PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE video

Sociology in Everyday Life
JOURNAL video

Mill’s Sociological Imagination
Sociological Imagination Critique

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IN THIS CHAPTER
The Sociological Imagination
The Development of Sociological Thinking
Sociology: One Way of Looking at the World—or Many?
Principal Themes in This Text
Why Study Sociology?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

1. Can societies be studied scientifically? What does the scientific study of societies entail?
2. What is a theory? What is the role of theories in sociology?
3. In your opinion, what social issues or problems are most interesting or important today? What questions about them would you like to study?
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A CURIOUS MIND
MAURICIO HANDLER/National Geographic Creative

Agoal of this book is to take you on a sociological journey. But let’s begin with a basic question: What is sociology?First of all, sociology is a discipline of and for curious minds! Sociologists are deeply committed to answering the question, “Why?” Why are some people desperately poor and others fabulously wealthy? Why does racial segregation in housing and public education exist, and why does it persist half a century after civil rights laws were enacted? What accounts for the declining marriage rate among the working class and the poor in the United States? How can we explain the fact that low-income people are more likely to be overweight or obese than their middle-class counterparts? Why is the proportion of women entering and completing college rising while the proportion of men has fallen? Why, in spite of this, do men as a group still earn higher incomes than women as a group do? And how is it that social media are being simultaneously praised as instruments of transformational activism and criticized as causes of social alienation and civic disengagement? Take a moment now to think about some whyquestions you have about society and social life: As you look around you, hear the news, and interact with other people, what strikes you as fascinating—but perhaps difficult to understand? What are you curious about?
Sociology is an academic discipline that takes a scientific approach to answering the kinds of questions our curious minds imagine. When we say that sociology is scientific, we mean that it is a way of learning about the world that combines logically constructed theory and systematic observation.The goal of sociological study and research is to base answers to questions like those above on a careful examination of the roots of social phenomena such as poverty, segregation, and the wage gap. Sociologists do this with research methods—surveys, interviews, observations, and archival research, among others—which yield data that can be tested, challenged, and revised. In this text, you will see how sociology is done—and you will learn how to do sociology yourself.
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Unemployment is not equally distributed among U.S. demographic groups; those without a high school diploma or college degree have been hit hard by the loss of well-paying jobs in manufacturing since the late1970s. The cost of not getting an education increasingly includes not just higher rates of unemployment but also diminished earning power. image
Concisely stated, sociologyis the scientific study of human social relationships, groups, and societies.Unlike natural sciencessuch as physics, chemistry, and biology, sociology is one of several social sciencesengaged in the scientific study of human beings and the social worlds they consciously create and inhabit. The purpose of sociology is to understand and generate new knowledge about human behavior, social relations, and social institutions on a larger scale. The sociologist adheres to the principle of social embeddedness: the idea that economic, political, and other forms of human behavior are fundamentally shaped by social relations.Thus, sociologists pursue studies on a wide range of issues occurring within, between, and among families, communities, states, nations, and the world. Other social sciences, some of which you may be studying, include anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology.
Sociology is a field in which students have the opportunity to build a broad spectrum of important skills, ranging from gathering and analyzing information to identifying and solving problems to effective written and oral communication. Throughout this book, we draw your attention to important skills you can gain through the study of sociology and the kinds of skills employers in different occupational fields are seeking in potential employees. Sociology opens the door to both greater understanding of the social world and a range of career and graduate study possibilities.
Doing sociology requires that you build a foundation on which the knowledge you gain will rest. Some of the key foundations of sociology are the sociological imaginationand critical thinking.We turn to these below. image
THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
As we go about our daily routines, we may forget that large-scale economic, political, and cultural forces shape even the most personal aspects of our lives. When parents divorce, for example, we tend to focus on individual explanations: A father was devoted more to his work than to his family; a mother may have felt trapped in an unhappy marriage but stuck with it for the sake of young children. Yet while personal issues are inevitable parts of a breakup, they can’t tell the whole story. When so many U.S. marriages end in divorce, forces larger than incompatible personalities or marital discord are at play. But what are those greater social forces, exactly?
As sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959/2000b) suggested half a century ago, uncovering the relationship between what he called personal troublesand public issuescalls for a sociological imagination. The sociological imagination is the ability to grasp the relationship between individual lives and the larger social forces that shape them—that is, to see where biography and history intersect.
In a country like the United States, where individualism is part of the national heritage, people tend to believe that each person creates his or her life’s path and to largely disregard the social context in which this happens. When we cannot get a job, fail to earn enough to support a family, or experience marital separation, for example, we tend to see it as a personal trouble. We do not necessarily see it as a public issue. The sociological imagination, however, invites us to make the connection and to step away from the vantage point of a single life experience to see how powerful social forces—for instance, changes in social norms, ethnic or sex discrimination, large shifts in the economy, or the beginning or end of a military conflict—shape the obstacles and opportunities that contribute to the unfolding of our own life’s story. Among Mills’s (1959/2000b) most often cited examples is the following:

Mill’s Sociological Imagination
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What is Sociology?
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PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ISSUES
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WHY ARE DIVORCE RATES SO HIGH?

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Marriage is one of the most private and personal forms of a relationship between two people. How can marriage—and divorce—be viewed through a sociological lens? image
In the United States, the probability of a first marriage ending in separation or divorce within 5 years is 22%; after 10 years, it rises to 36%. Over the longer term, the rate of marital dissolution is closer to 50% (Goodwin, Mosher, & Chandra, 2010). Just half a century ago, most marriages were “’til death do us part.” What accounts for the change?
The sociological imagination shows us that marriage and divorce, seemingly the most private of matters, are as much public issues as personal ones. Consider the fact that when wages for working people lagged from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, growing numbers of women went to work to help their families make ends meet. Many middle-class women also went to college and pursued careers as a means of personal fulfillment. In fact, today more women than men finish undergraduate degrees. As a result of trends like these, women today enjoy a higher measure of economic independence than ever before. The combination of educational attainment and satisfying careers reinforces women’s independence, making it easier for those who are in unhappy marriages to leave them. Greater social acceptance of divorce has also removed much of the stigma once associated with failed marriages.
Social trends like those described have made it more likely that an unhappy couple will divorce rather than stay in a failing marriage. Thus, this private troubleis in many respects strongly influenced by public issuessuch as women’s rising economic independence and the dynamism of cultural norms related to marriage and divorce.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageWhat other “private troubles” could sociologists identify as “public issues”?

When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals. (p. 9)
To apply the idea to contemporary economic conditions, we might look at recent college graduates. If many of the young people who graduated from college in the middle years of the 2000s found the jobs they wanted, they may have accounted for their success by citing personal effort or solid academic qualifications. These are, of course, very important, but the sociological imagination suggests that there are also larger social forces at work—a booming economy in this period contributed to a low rate of unemployment among the college educated. Consider, for instance, that while unemployment among young male college graduates was just under 7% in 2007 (just before an economic crisis hit in the United States), by 2010 it had peaked at more than 12%. For young female college graduates, it grew from less than 5% in 2007 to a peak of more than 9% in 2011. In 2013, it took a downward turn for both groups before rising slightly in 2014 (Figure 1.1). If your friends or relatives who graduated into the labor market during the economic crisis or even the first years following that period encountered difficulties securing solid first jobs, this suggests that personal effort and qualifications are only part of the explanation for the success of one graduating class and the frustration of another.

Sociological Imagination
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C. Wright Mills highlighted the use of the sociological imagination in studying social issues. When 16% of urban residents are poor by the government’s official measure, we cannot assume the sole cause is personal failings but must ask how large-scale social and economic forces are implicated in widespread socioeconomic disadvantage experienced in many communities. image
Understanding this relationship is particularly critical for people in the United States, who often regard individuals as fully responsible for their own successes and failures. For instance, it is easy to fault the poor for their poverty, assuming they only need to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” We may neglect the powerful role of social forces like racial or ethnic discrimination, the outsourcing or automation of manufacturing jobs that used to employ those with less education, or the poor state of education in many economically distressed rural and urban areas. The sociological imagination implores us to seek the intersection between private troubles, such as a family’s poverty, and public issues, such as lack of access to good schooling or jobs, to develop a more informed and comprehensive understanding of the social world and social issues.
It is useful, when we talk about the sociological imagination, to bring in the concepts of agency and structure. Sociologists often talk about social actions—individual and group behavior—in these terms. Agencycan be understood as the ability of individuals and groups to exercise free will and to make social changeson a small or large scale. Structureis a complex term but may be defined as patterned social arrangements that have effects on agency—structure may enable or constrain social action. For example, sociologists talk about the class structure,which is composed of social groups who hold varying amounts of resources such as money, political voice, and social status. They also identify normative structures—for instance, they might analyze patterns of social norms regarding “appropriate” gender behaviors in different cultural contexts.
Sociologists take a strong interest in the relationship between structure and agency. Consider that, on one hand, we all have the ability to make choices—so we have free will and we can opt for one path over another. On the other hand, the structures that surround us impose obstacles on us or afford us opportunities: We can make choices, but they may be enabled or constrained by structure. For instance, in the early 1900s, we would surely have found bright young women in the U.S. middle class who wanted to study to be doctors or lawyers. The social norms of the time, however, suggested that young women of this status were better off marrying and starting families. There were also legal constraints to women’s entry into higher education and the paid labor force. So while the women in our example might have individually argued and pushed to go to college and have professional careers, the dreams of this group were constrained by powerful normative and legal structures that identified women’s place as being in the home.

imageFIGURE 1.1 Unemployment Rates Among Young College Graduates in the United States, 1989–2014
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SOURCE: Shierholz, Heidi, Natalie Sabadish, and Hilary Wething. (2012). “The Class of 2012: Labor market for young graduates remains grim.” Briefing paper 340. Figure G. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Reprinted with permission.
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Consider the relationship between the class structure and individual agency as another way of thinking about social mobility in U.S. society. If, for instance, a young man today whose parents are well educated and whose family is economically prosperous wishes to go to college and become a doctor, his position in the class structure (or the position of his family) is enabling—that is, it makes it likely that he will be able to make this choice and to realize it. If, however, a young man from a poor family with no college background dreams of being an engineer and wants to study in college, his position in the class structure is likely to be constraining: Not only does his family have insufficient economic means to pay for college, but he may also be studying in an underfunded or underperforming high school that cannot provide the advanced courses he needs to prepare for college. His lack of college role models may also be a factor. This does not mean that inevitably the first young man will go to college and the second will not; it does, however, suggest that probabilities favor the first college aspirant over the second.
Put succinctly, in order to understand why some students go to college and others do not, sociologists would say that we cannot rely on individual choice or will (agency) alone—structures, whether subtly or quite obviously, exercise an influence on social behavior and outcomes. At the same time, we should not see structures as telling the whole story of social behavior, because history shows the power of human agency in making change even in the face of obstacles. Agency itself can transform structures (for example, think about the ways women’s historical activism has helped to transform limiting gender norms for women today). Sociologists weight both agency and structure and continue to seek to understand how the two interact and connect in affecting social behavior. For the most part, sociologists understand the relationship as reciprocal—that is, it goes in both directions, as structure affects agency and agency, in turn, can change the dimensions of a structure (Figure 1.2).

imageFIGURE 1.2 Structure and Agency
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CRITICAL THINKING
Applying the sociological perspective requires more than an ability to use the sociological imagination. It also demands critical thinking, the ability to evaluate claims about truth by using reason and evidence.In everyday life, we frequently accept things as “true” because they are familiar, feel right, or are consistent with our beliefs. Critical thinking takes a different approach—recognizing poor arguments, rejecting statements not supported by evidence, and questioning our assumptions. One of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber, captured the spirit of critical thinking in two words when he said that a key task of sociological inquiry is to openly acknowledge “inconvenient facts.”
Critical thinking requires us to be open-minded, but it does not mean that we must accept all arguments as equally valid. Those supported by logic and backed by evidence are clearly preferable to those that are not. For instance, we may passionately agree with Thomas Jefferson’s famous statement “that government is best that governs least.” However, as sociologists we must also ask, “What evidence backs up the claim that less government is better under all circumstances?”
To think critically, it is useful to follow six simple rules (adapted from Wade & Tavris, 1997):
1. Be willing to ask any question, no matter how difficult.The belief in small government is a cherished U.S. ideal. But sociologists who study the role of government in modern society must be willing to ask whether there are circumstances under which more—not less—government is better. Government’s role in areas such as homeland security, education, and health care has grown in the past several years—what are the positive and negative aspects of this growth?
2. Think logically and be clear.Logic and clarity require us to define concepts in a way that allows us to study them. “Big government” is a vague concept that must be made more precise and measurable before it provides for useful research. Are we speaking of federal, state, or local government, or all of these? Is “big” measured by the cost of government services, the number of agencies or offices within the government, the number of people working for it, or something else? What did Jefferson mean by “best,” and what would that “best” government look like? Who would have the power to define this notion in any case?

Sociological Imagination Critique
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Major metropolitan areas like New York City, Paris, and London are heavily monitored by security cameras, especially since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Defining the appropriate balance between privacy and increased security is a contemporary challenge for governments and societies. image
3. Back up your arguments with evidence.Founding Father Thomas Jefferson is a formidable person to quote, but quoting him does not prove that smaller government is better in the 21st century. To find evidence, we need to seek out studies of contemporary societies to see whether there is a relationship between a population’s well-being and the size of government or the breadth of services it provides. Because studies may offer contradictory evidence, we also need to be able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of arguments on different sides of the issue.
4. Think about the assumptions and biases—including your own—that underlie all studies.You may insist that government has a key role to play in modern society. On the other hand, you may believe with equal passion that big government is one root of the problems in the United States. Critical thinking, however, requires that we recognize our beliefs and biases. Otherwise we might unconsciously seek out only evidence that supports our argument, ignoring evidence to the contrary. Passion has a role to play in research: It can motivate us to devote long hours to studying an issue. But passion should not play a role when we are weighing evidence and drawing conclusions.
5. Avoid anecdotal evidence.It is tempting to draw a general conclusion from a single experience or anecdote, but that experience may illustrate the exception rather than the rule. For example, you may know someone who just yesterday received a letter mailed 2 years ago, but that is not evidence that the U.S. Postal Service is inefficient or does not fulfill its mandates. To determine whether this government agency is working well, you would have to study its entire mail delivery system and its record of work over time.
6. Be willing to admit when you are wrong or uncertain about your results.Sometimes we expect to find support for an argument only to find that things are not so clear. For example, consider the position of a sociologist who advocates small government and learns that Japan and Singapore initially became economic powerhouses because their governments played leading roles in promoting growth of a sociologist who champions an expanded role for government but learns from the downturn of the 1990s in the Asian economies that some things can be better achieved by private enterprise. The answers we get are sometimes contradictory, and we learn from recognizing the error of our assumptions and beliefs as well.
Critical thinking also means becoming “critical consumers” of the information—news, blogs, surveys, texts, magazines, and scientific studies—that surrounds us. To be a good sociologist, it is important to look beyond the commonsense understanding of social life and develop a critical perspective. Being critical consumers of information entails paying attention to the sources of information we encounter and asking questions about how data were gathered.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL THINKING
Humans have been asking questions about the nature of social life as long as people have lived in societies. Aristotle and Plato wrote extensively about social relationships more than 2,000 years ago. Ibn Khaldun, an Arab scholar writing in the 14th century, advanced a number of sociological concepts we recognize today, including ideas about social conflict and cohesion. Yet modern sociological concepts and research methods did not emerge until the 19th century, after the Industrial Revolution, and then largely in those European nations undergoing dramatic societal changes like industrialization and urbanization.
THE BIRTH OF SOCIOLOGY: SCIENCE, PROGRESS, INDUSTRIALIZATION, AND URBANIZATION
We can trace sociology’s roots to four interrelated historical developments that gave birth to the modern world: the scientific revolution,the Enlightenment, industrialization,and urbanization.Since these developments initially occurred in Europe, it is not surprising that sociological perspectives and ideas evolved there during the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, sociology had taken root in North America as well; somewhat later, it gained a foothold in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Sociology throughout the world initially bore the stamp of its European and North American origins, though recent decades have brought a greater diversity of perspectives to the discipline.

Sociology in Everyday Life
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The harnessing of waterpower and the development of the steam engine helped give rise to the industrial era and to factories, immortalized by writers such as Charles Dickens, in which men, women, and even children toiled for hours in wretched working conditions. Poet William Blake called these workplaces the “dark satanic mills.” image
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION The rise of modern natural and physical sciences, beginning in Europe in the 16th century, offered scholars a more advanced understanding of the physical world. The success of natural science contributed to the belief that science could also be fruitfully applied to human affairs, thereby enabling people to improve society or even perfect it. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) coined the term sociologyto characterize what he believed would be a new “social physics”—that is, the scientific study of society.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT Inspired in part by the success of the physical sciences, French philosophers in the 18th century such as Voltaire (1694–1778), Montesquieu (1689–1755), Diderot (1719–1784), and Rousseau (1712–1778) promised that humankind could attain lofty heights by applying scientific understanding to human affairs. Enlightenment ideals such as equality, liberty, and fundamental human rights found a home in the emerging social sciences, particularly sociology. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), considered by many to be the first modern sociologist, argued that sociological understanding would create a more egalitarian, peaceful society, in which individuals would be free to realize their full potential. Many of sociology’s founders shared the hope that a fairer and more just society would be achieved through the scientific understanding of society.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the mid- to late 18th century and soon spread to other countries, dramatically changed European societies. Traditional agricultural economies and the small-scale production of handicrafts in the home gave way to more efficient, profit-driven manufacturing based in factories. For instance, in 1801 in the English city of Leeds, there were about 20 factories manufacturing a variety of goods. By 1838, Leeds was home to 106 woolen mills alone, employing 10,000 people.
Small towns, including Leeds, were transformed into bustling cities, showcasing extremes of wealth and poverty as well as opportunity and struggle. In the face of rapid social change and growing inequality, sociologists sought to gain a social scientific perspective on what was happening and how it had come about. For example, German theorist and revolutionary Karl Marx (1818–1883), who had an important impact on later sociological theorizing about modern societies and economies, predicted that industrialization would make life increasingly intolerable for the masses. He believed that private property ownership by the wealthy allowed for the exploitation of working people and that its elimination, and revolution, would bring about a utopia of equality and genuine freedom for all.
URBANIZATION: THE POPULATION SHIFT TOWARD CITIES Industrialization fostered the growth of cities, as people streamed from rural fields to urban factories in search of work. By the end of the 19th century, more than 20 million people lived in English cities. The population of London alone exceeded 7 million by 1910.
Early industrial cities were often fetid places, characterized by pollution and dirt, crime, and crowded housing tenements. In Europe, early sociologists lamented the passing of communal village life and its replacement by a savage and alienating urban existence. Durkheim, for example, worried about the potential breakdown of stabilizing beliefs and values in modern urban society. He argued that whereas traditional communities were held together by shared culture and norms, or accepted social behaviors and beliefs,modern industrial communities were threatened by anomie, or a state of normlessness that occurs when people lose sight of the shared rules and values that give order and meaning to their lives.In a state of anomie, individuals often feel confused and anxious because they do not know how to interact with each other and their environment. Durkheim raised the question of what would hold societies and communities together as they shifted from homogeneity and shared cultures and values to heterogeneous masses of diverse occupations, cultures, and norms.
19TH-CENTURY FOUNDERS
Despite its largely European origins, early sociology sought to develop universal understandings that would apply to other peoples, times, and places. The discipline’s principal acknowledged founders—Auguste Comte, Harriet Martineau, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber—left their marks on sociology in different ways.
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The Granger Collection, NYC—All rights reserved
As a founding figure in the social sciences, Auguste Comte is associated with positivism, or the belief that the study of society must be anchored in facts and the scientific method. image
AUGUSTE COMTE Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a French social theorist, is credited with founding modern sociology, naming it, and establishing it as the scientific study of social relationships. The twin pillars of Comte’s sociology were the study of social statics, the way society is held together,and the analysis of social dynamics, the laws that govern social change.Comte believed social science could be used effectively to manage the social change resulting from modern industrial society, but always with a strong respect for traditions and history.
Comte proclaimed that his new science of society was positivist. This meant that it was to be based on facts alone,which should be determined scientifically and allowed to speak for themselves. Comte argued that this purely factual approach was the proper method for sociology. He argued that all sciences—and all societies—go through three stages. The first stage is a theologicalone, in which key ways of understanding the world are framed in terms of superstition, imagination, and religion. The second stage is a metaphysicalone, characterized by abstract speculation but framed by the basic belief that society is the product of natural rather than supernatural forces. The third and last stage is one in which knowledge is based on scientific reasoning“from the facts.” Comte saw himself as leading sociology toward its final positivist stage.

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The Granger Collection, NYC—All rights reserved
Interestingly, Harriet Martineau translated into English the work of Auguste Comte, who dismissed women’s intellect, saying, “Biological philosophy teaches us that . . . radical differences, physical and moral, distinguish the sexes . . . biological analysis presents the female sex . . . as constitutionally in a state of perpetual infancy, in comparison with the other” (Kandal, 1988, p. 75). image
Comte left a lasting mark on modern sociology. The scientific study of social life continues to be the goal of sociological research. His belief that social institutions have a strong impact on individual behavior—that is, that our actions are the products of personal choices andthe surrounding social context—remains at the heart of sociology.
HARRIET MARTINEAU Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) was an English sociologist who, despite deafness and other physical challenges, became a prominent social and historical writer. Her greatest handicap was being a woman in male-dominated intellectual circles that failed to value female voices. Today she is frequently recognized as the first major woman sociologist.
Deeply influenced by Comte’s work, Martineau translated his six-volume treatise on politics into English. Her editing helped make Comte’s esoteric prose accessible to the English-speaking world, ensuring his standing as a leading figure in sociology. Martineau was also a distinguished scholar in her own right. She wrote dozens of books, more than a thousand newspaper columns, and 25 novels, including a three-volume study, Society in America(1837), based on observations of the United States that she made during a tour of the country.
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Martineau, like Comte, sought to identify basic laws that govern society. She derived three of her four “laws” from other theorists. The fourth law, however, was her own and reflected her progressive (today we might say feminist) principles: For a society to evolve, it must ensure social justice for women and other oppressed groups. In her study of U.S. society, Martineau treated slavery and women’s experience of dependence in marriage as indicators of the limits of the moral development of the United States. In her view, the United States was unable to achieve its full social potential while it was morally stunted by persistent injustices like slavery and women’s inequality. The question of whether the provision of social justice is critical to societal development remains a relevant and compelling one today.

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Émile Durkheim pioneered some of sociology’s early research on such topics as social solidarity and suicide. His work continues to inform sociological study and understanding of social bonds and the consequences of their unraveling. image
ÉMILE DURKHEIM Auguste Comte founded and named the discipline of sociology, but French scholar Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) set the field on its present course. Durkheim established the early subject matter of sociology, laid out rules for conducting research, and developed an important theory of social change.
For Durkheim, sociology’s subject matter was social facts, qualities of groups that are external to individual members yet constrain their thinking and behavior.Durkheim argued that such social facts as religious beliefs and social duties are external—that is, they are part of the social context and are larger than our individual lives. They also have the power to shape our behavior. You may feel compelled to act in certain ways in different contexts—in the classroom, on a date, at a religious ceremony—even if you are not always aware of such social pressures.
Durkheim also argued that only social facts can explain other social facts.For example, there is no scientific evidence that men have an innate knack for business compared with women—but in 2012, women headed just 18 of the Fortune500 companies. A Durkheimian approach would highlight women’s experience in society—where historically they have been socialized into more domestic values or restricted to certain noncommercial professions—and the fact that the social networks that foster mobility in the corporate world today are still primarily male to help explain why men dominate the upper ranks of the business world.
Durkheim’s principal concern was explaining the impact of modern society on social solidarity, the bonds that unite the members of a social group.In his view, in traditional society these bonds are based on similarity—people speak the same language, share the same customs and beliefs, and do similar work tasks. He called this mechanical solidarity.In modern industrial society, however, bonds based on similarity break down. Everyone has a different job to perform in the industrial division of labor, and modern societies are more likely to be socially diverse. However, workers in different occupational positions are dependent on one another for things like safety, education, and the provision of food and other goods essential to survival. The people filling these positions may not be alike in culture, beliefs, or language, but their dependence on one another contributes to social cohesion. Borrowing from biology, Durkheim called this organic solidarity,suggesting that modern society functions as an interdependent organic whole, like a human body.
Yet organic solidarity, Durkheim argued, is not as strong as mechanical solidarity. People no longer necessarily share the same norms and values. The consequence, according to Durkheim, is anomie. In this weakened condition, the social order disintegrates and pathological behavior increases (Durkheim, 1922/1973a).
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Karl Marx was a scholar and critic of early capitalism. His work has been thoroughly studied and critiqued around the world. image
Consider whether the United States, a modern and diverse society, is held together primarily by organic solidarity, or whether the hallmark of mechanical solidarity, a collective conscience—the common beliefs and values that bind a society together—is in evidence. Do public demonstrations of patriotism on nationally significant anniversaries such as September 11 and July 4 indicate mechanical solidarity built on a collective sense of shared values, norms, and practices? Or do the deeply divisive politics of recent years suggest social bonds based more fully on practical interdependence?
KARL MARX The extensive writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883) influenced the development of economics and political science as well as sociology. They also shaped world politics and inspired communist revolutions in Russia (later the Soviet Union), China, and Cuba, among others.
Marx’s central idea was deceptively simple: Virtually all societies throughout history have been divided into economic classes, with one class prospering at the expense of others. All human history, Marx believed, should be understood as the product of class conflict, competition between social classes over the distribution of wealth, power, and other valued resources in society(Marx & Engels, 1848/1998).
In the period of early industrialization in which he lived, Marx condemned capitalism’s exploitation of working people,the proletariat, by the ownership class,the bourgeoisie. As we will see in later chapters, Marx’s views on conflict and inequality are still influential in contemporary sociological thinking, even among sociologists who do not share his views on society.
Marx focused his attention on the emerging capitalist industrial society (Marx, 1867/1992a, 1885/1992b, 1894/1992c). Unlike his contemporaries in sociology, however, Marx saw capitalism as a transitional stage to a final period in human history in which economic classes and the unequal distribution of rewards and opportunities linked to class inequality would disappear and be replaced by a utopia of equality.
Although many of Marx’s predictions have not proven to be correct, his critical analysis of the dynamics of capitalism proved insightful. Among other things, Marx argued that capitalism would lead to accelerating technological change, the replacement of workers by machines, and the growth of monopoly capitalism.
Marx also presciently predicted that ownership of the means of production, the sites and technology that produce the goods (and sometimes services) we need and use,would come to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As a result, he believed, a growing wave of people would be thrust down into the proletariat, which owns only its own labor power. In modern society, large corporations have progressively swallowed up or pushed out smaller businesses; where small lumberyards and pharmacies used to serve many communities, corporate giants such as Home Depot, CVS, and Best Buy have moved in, putting locally owned establishments out of business.
In many U.S. towns, small business owners have joined forces to protest the construction of “big box” stores like Walmart (now the largest private employer in the United States), arguing that these enormous establishments, while they offer cheap goods, wreak havoc on local retailers and bring only the meager economic benefit of masses of entry-level, low-wage jobs. From a Marxist perspective, we might say that the local retailers, in resisting the incursion of the capitalist behemoth Walmart, are fighting their own “proletarianization.” Even physicians, many of whom used to own their own means of production in the form of private medical practices, have increasingly been driven by economic necessity into working for large health maintenance organizations (HMOs), where they are salaried employees.
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Max Weber made significant contributions to the understanding of how capitalism developed in Western countries and its relationship to religious beliefs. His work on formal rationality and bureaucracy continues to influence sociologists’ study of modern society. image
Unlike Comte and Durkheim, Marx thought social change would be revolutionary, not evolutionary, and would be the product of oppressed workers rising up against a capitalist system that exploits the many to benefit the few.
MAX WEBER Max Weber (1864–1920), a German sociologist who wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, left a substantial academic legacy. Among his contributions are an analysis of how Protestantism fostered the rise of capitalism in Europe (Weber, 1904–1905/2002) and insights into the emergence of modern bureaucracy (Weber, 1919/1946). Weber, like other founders of sociology, took up various political causes, condemning injustice wherever he found it. Although pessimistic about capitalism, he did not believe, as did Marx, that some alternative utopian form of society would arise. Nor did he see sociologists enjoying privileged insights into the social world that would qualify them to wisely counsel rulers and industrialists, as Comte (and, to some extent, Durkheim) had envisioned.
Weber believed that an adequate explanation of the social world begins with the individual and takes into account the meaningof what people say and do. While he argued that research should be scientific and value-free, Weber also believed that to explain what people do, we must use a method he termed Verstehen,the German word for interpretive understanding.This methodology, rarely used by sociologists today, sought to explain social relationships by having the sociologist/observer imagine how the subjects being studied might have perceived and interpreted the situation. Studying social life, Weber felt, is not like studying plants or chemical reactions, because human beings act on the basis of meanings and motives.
Weber’s theories of social and economic organization have also been highly influential (Weber, 1921/2012). Weber argued that the modern Western world showed an ever-increasing reliance on logic, efficiency, rules, and reason. According to him, modern societies are characterized by the development and growing influence of formal rationality, a context in which people’s pursuit of goals is increasingly shaped by rules, regulations, and larger social structures.One of Weber’s most widely known illustrations of formal rationality comes from his study of bureaucracies, formal organizations characterized by written rules, hierarchical authority, and paid staff, intended to promote organizational efficiency.Bureaucracies, for Weber, epitomized formally rational systems: On one hand, they offer clear, knowable rules and regulations for the efficient pursuit of particular ends, like obtaining a passport or getting financial aid for higher education. On the other hand, he feared, the bureaucratization of modern society would also progressively strip people of their humanity and creativity and result in an iron cageof rationalized structures with irrational consequences.
Weber’s ideas about bureaucracy were remarkably prescient in their characterization of our bureaucratic (and formally rationalized) modern world. Today we are also confronted regularly with both the incredible efficiency and the baffling irrationality of modern bureaucratic structures. Within moments of entering into an efficiently concluded contract with a wireless phone service provider, we can become consumers of a cornucopia of technological opportunities, with the ability to chat on the phone or receive text messages from virtually anywhere, post photographs or videos online, and pass the time playing downloaded games. Should we later be confused by a bill and need to speak to a company representative, however, we may be shuttled through endless repetitions of an automated response system that never seems to offer us the option of speaking with another human being. Today, Weber’s presciently predicted irrationality of rationality is alive and well.

Weber and Marx
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Public domain—Library of Congress
W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard, wrote 20 books and more than 100 scholarly articles on race and race relations. Today many of his works are classics in the study of African American lives and race relations in the United States. image
EARLY 20TH-CENTURY U.S. SOCIOLOGY
Sociology was born in Europe, but it took firm root in U.S. soil, where it was heavily influenced by turn-of-the-century industrialization and urbanization, as well as by racial strife and discrimination. Strikes by organized labor, corruption in government, an explosion of European immigration, racial segregation, and the growth of city slums all helped mold early sociological thought in the United States. By the late 1800s, a number of universities in the United States were offering sociology courses. The first faculties of sociology were established at the University of Kansas (1889), the University of Chicago (1892), and Atlanta University (1897).
ROBERT EZRA PARK The sociology department at the University of Chicago, which gave us what is often known as the “Chicago School” of sociology, dominated the new discipline in the United States at the start of the 20th century. Chicago sociologist Robert Ezra Park (1864–1944) pioneered the study of urban sociology and race relations. Once a muckraking journalist, Park was an equally colorful academic, reportedly coming to class in disheveled clothes and with shaving soap still in his ears. But his students were devoted to him, and his work was widely recognized. His 1921 textbook An Introduction to the Science of Sociology,coauthored with his Chicago colleague Ernest Burgess, helped shape the discipline. The Chicago School studied a broad spectrum of social phenomena, from hoboes and flophouses (inexpensive dormitory-style housing) to movie houses, dance halls, and slums, and from youth gangs and mobs to residents of Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast.
Park was a champion of racial integration, having once served as personal secretary to the African American educator Booker T. Washington. Yet racial discrimination was evident in the treatment of Black sociologists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, a contemporary of many of the sociologists working in the Chicago School.
W. E. B. DU BOIS A prominent Black sociologist and civil rights leader at the African American Atlanta University, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) developed ideas that were considered too radical to find broad acceptance in the sociological community. At a time when the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that segregated “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and Whites were constitutional and when lynching of Black Americans had reached an all-time high, Du Bois condemned the deep-seated racism of White society. Today, his writings on race relations and the lives of U.S. Blacks are classics in the field.
Du Bois sought to show that racism was widespread in U.S. society. He was also critical of Blacks who had “made it” and then turned their backs on those who had not. One of his most enduring ideas is that in U.S. society, African Americans are never able to escape a fundamental awareness of race. They experience a double consciousness, as he called it—an awareness of themselves both as Americans and as Blacks, never free of racial stigma.He wrote, “The Negro is sort of a seventh son… gifted with second-sight… this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, 1903/2008, p. 12). Today as in Du Bois’s time, physical traits such as skin color may shape people’s perceptions and interactions in significant and complex ways.
THE MID-20TH CENTURY IN U.S. SOCIOLOGY
After World War II, sociology began to apply sophisticated quantitative models to the study of social processes. There was also a growing interest in the grand theories of the European founders. At Columbia University, Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) undertook wide-ranging studies that helped further establish sociology as a scientific discipline. Merton is best known for his theory of deviance (Merton, 1938), his work on the sociology of science (Merton, 1996), and his iteration of the distinction between manifestand latentfunctions (Merton, 1968). He emphasized the development of theories in what he called the “middle range”—midway between the grand theories of Weber, Marx, and Durkheim and quantitative studies of specific social problems.

Tuskegee Airmen & Double Consciousness
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The “sociological imagination” involves viewing seemingly personal issues through a sociological lens. C. Wright Mills is best known for coining this catchy and popular term. image
Another Columbia University sociologist, C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), renewed interest in Max Weber by translating many of his works into English and applying his ideas to the contemporary United States. But Mills, who also drew on Marx, identified himself as a “plain Marxist.” His concept of the sociological imagination can be traced in part to Marx’s famous statement that “man makes history, but not under circumstances of his own choosing,” meaning that while we are agents of free will, the social context has a profound impact on the obstacles or opportunities in our lives.
Mills synthesized Weberian and Marxian traditions, applying sociological thinking to the most pressing problems of the day, particularly inequality. He advocated an activist sociology with a sense of social responsibility. Like many sociologists, he was willing to turn a critical eye on “common knowledge,” including the belief that the United States is a democracy that represents the interests of all the people. In a provocative study, he examined the workings of the “power elite,” a small group of wealthy businessmen, military leaders, and politicians who Mills believed ran the country largely in their own interests (Mills, 1956/2000a).
WHY SO FEW FOUNDING MOTHERS?
Why did so few women social scientists find a place among sociology’s founders? After all, the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions elevated such lofty ideals as freedom, liberty, and equality. Yet long after these historical events, women and minorities were still excluded from public life in Europe and North America. Democracy—which gives people the right to participate in their governance—was firmly established as a principle for nearly a century and a half in the United States before women achieved the right to vote in 1920. In France, it took even longer—until 1945.
Sociology as a discipline emerged during the first modern flourishing of feminism in the 19th century. Yet women and people of non-European heritage were systematically excluded from influential positions in the European universities where sociology and other modern social sciences originated. When women did pursue lives as scholars, the men who dominated the social sciences largely ignored their writings. Feminist scholar Julie Daubié won a prize from the Lyon Academy for her essay “Poor Women in the Nineteenth Century,” yet France’s public education minister denied her a diploma on the grounds that he would be “forever holding up his ministry to ridicule” (Kandal, 1988, pp. 57–58). Between 1840 and 1960, almost no women held senior academic positions in the sociology departments of any European or U.S. universities, with the exception of exclusively women’s colleges.
A number of woman scholars managed to overcome the obstacles to make significant contributions to sociological inquiry. For example, in 1792 the British scholar Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women,arguing that scientific progress could not occur unless women were allowed to become men’s equals by means of universal education. In France in 1843, Flora Tristan called for equal rights for women workers, “the last remaining slaves in France.” Also in France, Aline Valette published Socialism and Sexualismin 1893, nearly three-quarters of a century before the term sexismfound its way into spoken English (Kandal, 1988).
One of sociology’s most prominent early figures, Jane Addams (1860–1935), never won a full-time position at the University of Chicago in spite of the school’s “progressive” leanings. The University of Chicago even denied her an honorary degree—though she wrote 11 books and hundreds of articles and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her dedication to social reform.
Addams is best known as the founder of Hull House, a settlement house for the poor, sick, and aged that became a center for political activists and social reformers. Less well known is the fact that under Addams’s guidance, the residents of Hull House engaged in important research on social problems in Chicago. Hull House Maps and Papers,published in 1895, pioneered the study of Chicago neighborhoods, helping to shape the research direction of the Chicago School of sociology. Following Addams’s lead, Chicago sociologists mapped the city’s neighborhoods, studied their residents, and helped create the field of community studies.
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The Granger Collection, NYC—All rights reserved.
Underappreciated during her time, Jane Addams was a prominent scholar and early contributor to sociology. She is also known for her political activism and commitment to social reform. image
As sociologists like Harriet Martineau, Jane Addams, Julie Daubié, and others experienced, early female sociologists were not accorded the same status as their male counterparts. Only recently have many of their writings been “rediscovered” and their contributions acknowledged in sociology.
SOCIOLOGY: ONE WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD—OR MANY?
Often, multiple sociologists look at the same events, phenomena, or institutions and draw different conclusions. How can this be? One reason is that they may approach their analyses from different theoretical perspectives. In this section, we explore the key theoretical paradigms in sociology and look at how they are used as tools for the analysis of society.
Sociological theoriesare logical, rigorous frameworks for the interpretation of social life that make particular assumptions and ask particular questions about the social world.The word theoryis rooted in the Greek word theoria,which means “a viewing.” An apt metaphor for a theory is a pair of glasses. You can view a social phenomenon such as socioeconomic inequality or poverty, deviance, or consumer culture, or an institution like capitalism or the family, using different theories as lenses.
As you will see in the next section, in the discipline of sociology there are several major categories of theories that seek to examine and explain social phenomena and institutions. Imagine the various sociological theories as different pairs of glasses, each with colored lenses that change the way you see an image: You may look at the same institution or phenomenon as you put on each pair, but it will appear different depending on the glasses you are wearing. Keep in mind that sociological theories are not “truths” about the social world. They are logical, rigorous analytical tools that we can use to inquire about, interpret, and make educated predictions about the world around us. From the vantage point of any sociological theory, some aspects of a phenomenon or an institution are illuminated while others are obscured. In the end, theories are more or less useful depending on how well empirical data—that is, knowledge gathered by researchers through scientific methods—support their analytical conclusions. Below, we outline the basic theoretical perspectives that we will be using in this text.
The three dominant theoretical perspectives in sociology are structural functionalism, social conflict theory,and symbolic interactionism.We outline their basic characteristics below and will revisit them again throughout the book. Symbolic interactionism shares with the functionalist and social conflict paradigms an interest in interpreting and understanding social life. However, the first two are macro-level paradigms, concerned with large-scale patterns and institutions.Symbolic interactionism is a micro-level paradigm—that is, it is concerned with small-group social relations and interactions.
Structural functionalism, social conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism form the basic foundation of contemporary sociological theorizing (Table 1.1). Throughout this book we will introduce variations on these theories, as well as new and evolving theoretical ideas in sociology.
THE FUNCTIONALIST PARADIGM
Structural functionalism(or functionalism—the term we use in this book) seeks to explain social organization and change in terms of the roles performed by different social structures, phenomena, and institutions.Functionalism characterizes society as made up of many interdependent parts—an analogy often cited is the human body. Each part serves a different function, but all parts work together to ensure the equilibrium and health of the entity as a whole. Society too is composed of a spectrum of different parts with a variety of different functions, such as the government, the family, religious and educational institutions, and the media. According to the theory, together these parts contribute to the smooth functioning and equilibrium of society.
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imageTABLE 1.1 The Three Principal Sociological Paradigms
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The key question posed by the functionalist perspective is, “What function does a particular institution, phenomenon, or social group serve for the maintenance of society?” That is, what contribution does a given institution, phenomenon, or social group make to the equilibrium, stability, and functioning of the whole? Note the underlying assumption of functionalism: Any existing institution or phenomenon does serve a function; if it served no function, it would evolve out of existence. Consequently, the central task of the functionalist sociologist is to discover what function an institution or a phenomenon—for instance, the traditional family, capitalism, social stratification, or deviance—serves in the maintenance of the social order.
Émile Durkheim is credited with developing the early foundations of functionalism. Among other ideas, Durkheim observed that all known societies have some degree of deviant behavior, such as crime. The notion that deviance is functional for societies may seem counterintuitive: Ordinarily, we do not think of deviance as beneficial or necessary to society. Durkheim, however, reasoned that since deviance is universal, it must serve a social function—if it did not serve a function, it would cease to exist. Durkheim concluded that one function of deviance—specifically, of society’s labeling of some acts as deviant—is to remind members of society what is “normal” or “moral”; when a society punishes deviant behavior, it reaffirms people’s beliefs in what is right and good.
Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) expanded functionalist analysis by looking at whole social systems such as government, the economy, and the family and how they contribute to the functioning of the whole social system (Parsons, 1964/2007, 1967). For example, he wrote that traditional sex roles for men and women contribute to stability on both the micro familial level and the macro societal level. Parsons argued that traditional socialization produces instrumentalor rational and work-oriented males, and expressiveor sensitive, nurturing, and emotional females. Instrumental males, he reasoned, are well suited for the competitive world of work, while their expressive female counterparts are appropriately prepared to care for the family. According to Parsons, these roles are complementary and positively functional, leading men and women to inhabit different spheres of the social world. Complementary rather than competing roles contribute to solidarity in a marriage by reducing competition between husband and wife. Critics have rejected this idea as a justification of inequality.
As this example suggests, functionalism is conservative in that it tends to accept rather than question the status quo; it holds that any given institution or phenomenon exists because it is functional for society, rather than asking whether it might benefit one group to the detriment of others, as critics say Parsons’s position on gender roles does. One of functionalism’s long-standing weaknesses is a failure to recognize inequalities in the distribution of power and resources and how those affect social relationships.
Robert Merton attempted to refine the functionalist paradigm by demonstrating that not all social structures work to maintain or strengthen the social organism, as Durkheim and other early functionalists seemed to suggest. According to Merton, a social institution or phenomenon can have both positive functions and problematic dysfunctions. Merton broadened the functionalist idea by suggesting that manifest functionsare the obvious and intended functions of a given phenomenon or institution.Latent functions, by contrast, are functions that are not recognized or expected.A manifest function of war, for instance, is usually to vanquish an enemy, perhaps to defend a territory or to claim it. Latent functions of war—those that are not the overt purpose but may still have powerful effects—may include increased patriotism in countries engaged in the war, a rise in the profits of companies manufacturing military equipment or contracting workers to the military, and changes in national budgetary priorities.
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The manifest function of a vehicle is to transport a person efficiently from point A to point B. One latent function is to say something about the status of the driver. image

THE SOCIAL CONFLICT PARADIGM
In contrast to functionalism, the social conflict paradigm(which we refer to in this book as conflict theory) seeks to explain social organization and change in terms of the conflict built into social relationships.Conflict theory is rooted in the ideas about class and power put forth by Karl Marx. While Durkheim’s structural functionalist lens asked how different parts of society contribute to stability, Marx asked about the roots of conflict. Conflict theorists pose the questions “Who benefits from the way social institutions and relationships are structured?” and “Who loses?” The social conflict paradigm focuses on what divides people rather than on what unites them. It presumes that group interests (such as social class interests) drive relationships, and that various groups in society (for instance, social classes or genders or ethnic or racial groups) will act in their own interests. Conflict theory thus assumes not that interests are shared but rather that they may be irreconcilable and, importantly, that only some groups have the power and resources to realize their interests. Because of this, conflict is—sooner or later—inevitable.
From Marx’s perspective, the bourgeoisie benefits directly from the capitalist social order. If, as Marx suggests, the capitalist class has an interest in maximizing productivity and profit and minimizing costs (like the cost of labor in the form of workers’ wages), and the working class has an interest in earning more and working less, then the interests of the two classes are difficult to reconcile. The more powerful group in society generally has the upper hand in furthering its interests.
After Marx, the body of conflict theory expanded tremendously. In the 20th century and today, theorists have extended the reach of the perspective to consider, for instance, how control of culture and the rise of technology (rather than just control of the means of production) underpins class domination (Adorno, 1975; Horkheimer, 1947), as well as how the expanded middle class can be accommodated in a Marxist perspective (Wright, 1998). Some of feminist theory’s key ideas also reflect a conflict-oriented perspective, though the focus shifts from social class to gender power and conflict (Connell, 2005), as well as ways in which race is implicated in relations of power (Collins, 1990).
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INEQUALITY MATTERS
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WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE POOR AND OTHERS RICH?

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© Lisa Wiltse/Corbis
Why are children of poor parents more likely to be poor as adults? This is a question of fundamental interest to sociologists. image
The concentration of wealth in the hands of a small elite and the widespread struggle of millions to make do with scant resources are critical issues on both the domestic and global levels. One common explanation of the wealth disparity in the United States is that it results from individual differences in talent and ambition. While such factors play a role, the fact that more than 15% of the population lives below the poverty line, including disproportionate numbers of Blacks, Latinos, and women (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2012), should lead our sociological imaginations to recognize that social and economic forces also underlie inequality.
Discrimination can place entire groups of people at an economic disadvantage. Women as a group continue to earn less than men as a group—as do Blacks and Latinos relative to White Americans. Importantly as well, educational opportunity is not equally distributed, because in most U.S. states schools are still funded primarily by local property taxes; consequently, high-value areas have more funds than low-value areas to spend on teachers, textbooks, and technology. Without a strong educational foundation that prepares them for a competitive economy, already poor children are likely to remain poor as adults.
Economic changes have also spurred the growth of inequality. Automation and the movement abroad of factory work have significantly reduced employment opportunities for less educated workers. Service jobs, including restaurant and retail work, have expanded as the manufacturing sector has contracted, but these positions are far less likely to pay a living wage or give workers a lift into the middle class. Education is thus more critical than ever, but poor children are the least likely to get the solid skills they need to succeed.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageIn his inaugural address of 2013, President Obama stated that one of his goals in his second term as president was to see that a young girl born into poverty would know that she had every opportunity to realize her hopes. How are such opportunities created and expanded? What do you think?

Recall Durkheim’s functionalist analysis of crime and deviance. According to this perspective, society defines crime to reaffirm people’s beliefs about what is right and dissuade them from deviating. A conflict theorist might argue that dominant groups in society define the behaviors labeled criminal or deviant because they have the power to do so.For example, street crimes such as mugging someone to get his wallet and carjacking are clearly defined and punished as criminal behavior. They are also amply represented in reality television programs, movies, and other cultural products as images of criminal deviance. On the other hand, corporate or white-collar crime, which may cause the loss of money or even of lives, is less likely to be clearly defined, represented, and punished as criminal. From a conflict perspective, white-collar crime is more likely to be committed by members of the upper class (for instance, business or political leaders or financiers) and is less likely to be punished harshly than street crime, which is associated with the lower-income classes, though white-collar crime may have even greater economic and health consequences. A social conflict theorist would draw our attention to the fact that the decision makers who pass our laws are mostly members of the upper class and govern in the interests of capitalism and their own socioeconomic peers.
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A key weakness of the social conflict paradigm is that it overlooks the forces of stability, equilibrium, and consensus in society. The assumption that groups have conflicting, even irreconcilable, interests and that those interests are realized by those with power at the expense of those with less power fails to account for forces of cohesion and stability in societies.
SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
Symbolic interactionismargues that both the individual self and society as a whole are the products of social interactions based on language and other symbols.The term symbolic interactionismwas coined by U.S. sociologist Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) in 1937, but the approach originated in the lectures of George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), a University of Chicago philosopher allied with the Chicago School of sociology. The symbolic interactionist paradigm argues that people acquire their sense of who they are only through interaction with others. They do this by means of symbols, representations of things that are not immediately present to our senses.Symbols include such things as words, gestures, emoticons, and tattoos, among others.
Recall our earlier discussions of the theoretical interpretations of deviance and crime. A symbolic interactionist might focus on the ways in which people label one another as deviant (a symbolic act that uses language), the factors that make such a label stick, and the meanings underlying such a label. If you are accused of committing a crime you did not commit, how will the label of “criminal” affect the way others see you? How will it affect the way you see yourself, and will you begin to act differently as a result? Can being labeled “deviant” be a self-fulfilling prophecy? For the symbolic interactionist, sociological inquiry is the study of how people interact and how they create and interpret symbols in the social world.
While symbolic interactionist perspectives draw our attention to important micro-level processes in society, they may miss the larger structural context of those processes, such as discovering who has the power to make laws defining what or who is deviant. For this reason, many sociologists seek to utilize both macro- and micro-level perspectives when analyzing social phenomena such as deviance.
The three paradigms described above lead to diverse images of society, research questions, and conclusions about the patterns and nature of social life. Each “pair of glasses” can provide a different perspective on the social world. Throughout this text, the three major theoretical paradigms—and some new ones we will encounter in later chapters—will help us understand key issues and themes of sociology.
PRINCIPAL THEMES IN THIS TEXT
We began this chapter with a list of whyquestions with which sociologists are concerned—and about which any one of us might be curious. Behind these questions, we find several major themes, which are also some of the main themes in this book. Three important themes for sociology—and for us—are (1) power and inequalityand the ways in which the unequal distribution of social, economic, and political power and resources shapes opportunities, obstacles, and relationships; (2) the societal changes occurring as a result of globalizationand the rising social diversityof modern societies; and (3) the powerful impact of technological changeon modern lives, institutions, and states.
POWER AND INEQUALITY
As we consider broad social topics such as gender, race, social class, and sexual orientation and their effects on social relationships and resources, we will be asking who has power—the ability to mobilize resources and achieve goals despite the resistance of others—and who does not. We will also ask about variables that influence the uneven distribution of power, and how some groups use power to create advantages for themselves (and disadvantages for others) and how disadvantaged groups mobilize to challenge the powerful.
Power is often distributed unequally and can be used by those who possess it to marginalize other social groups. Inequalityrefers to differences in wealth, power, opportunity, and other valued resources.The existence of inequality not only raises moral and ethical questions about fairness; it can tear at the very fabric of societies, fostering social alienation and instability. It may also have negative effects on local and national economies. Notably, economic inequality is increasing both within and between many countries around the globe, a fact that makes understanding the roots and consequences of this phenomenon—that is, asking the whyquestions—ever more important.
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GLOBALIZATION AND DIVERSITY
Globalizationis the process by which people all over the planet become increasingly interconnected economically, politically, culturally, and environmentally.Globalization is not new. It began nearly 200,000 years ago when humans first spread from their African cradle into Europe and Asia. For thousands of years, humans have traveled, traded goods, and exchanged ideas over much of the globe, using seaways or land routes such as the famed Silk Road, a stretch of land that links China and Europe. But the rate of globalization took a giant leap forward with the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated the growth of global trade. It made another dramatic jump with the advent of the information age, drawing together individuals, cultures, and countries into a common global web of information exchange. In this book, we consider the variable manifestations, functions, and consequences of globalization in areas like the economy, culture, and the environment.
Growing contacts between people and cultures have made us increasingly aware of social diversity as a feature of modern societies. Social diversityis the social and cultural mixture of different groups in society and the societal recognition of difference as significant.The spread of culture through the globalization of media and the rise of migration has created a world in which virtually no place is isolated. As a result, many nations today, including the United States, are characterized by a high degree of social diversity.
Social diversity brings a unique set of sociological challenges. People everywhere have a tendency toward ethnocentrism, a worldview whereby they judge other cultures by the standards of their own cultureand regard their own way of life as “normal” and better than others. From a sociological perspective, no group can be said to be more human than any other. Yet history abounds with examples of people lashing out at others whose religions, languages, customs, races, or sexual orientations differed from their own.
TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
Technologyis the practical application of knowledge to transform natural resources for human use.The first human technology was probably the use of rocks and other blunt instruments as weapons, enabling humans to hunt large animals for food. Agriculture—planting crops such as rice or corn in hopes of reaping a yearly harvest—represents another technological advance, one superior to simple foraging in the wild for nuts and berries. The use of modern machinery, which ushered in the Industrial Revolution, represents still another technological leap, multiplying the productivity of human efforts.
Today we are in the midst of another revolutionary period of technological change: the information revolution. Thanks to the microchip, the Internet, and mobile technology, an increasing number of people around the world now have instant access to a mass of information that was unimaginable just 10 or 20 years ago. The information revolution is creating postindustrial economies based far more heavily on the production of knowledge than on the production of goods, as well as new ways of communicating that have the potential to draw people around the world together—or tear them apart.
WHY STUDY SOCIOLOGY?
A sociological perspective highlights the many ways that we both influence and are powerfully influenced by the social world around us: Society shapes us, and we, in turn, shape society. A sociological perspective also helps us to see the social world through a variety of different lenses (recall the glasses metaphor we used when talking about theory): Sociologists might explain class differences and why they persist, for instance, in many different ways. Each one may illuminate particular aspects of the phenomenon, enabling us to assemble a fuller, more rigorous perspective on social life. In this sense, “the” sociological perspective is really a collection of sociological perspectives we can use as analytical tools.
Why are the issues and questions posed by sociology incredibly compelling for all of us to understand? One reason is that, as we will see throughout this book, many of the social issues sociologists study—marriage, fertility, poverty, unemployment, consumption, discrimination, and many others—are related to one another in ways we may not immediately see. The sociological perspective helps us to make connections between diverse social phenomena.When we understand these connections, we are better able to address social problems and to make (or vote for) policy choices that benefit society.
For example, a phenomenon like the decline of marriage among the working class,which we mentioned at the start of the chapter, is related to growing globalization, declining employment in the manufacturing sector, and the persistently high rate of poverty among single mothers. Consider these social phenomena as pieces of a puzzle. One of the defining characteristics of economic globalization is the movement of manufacturing industries away from the United States to lower-wage countries. As a result, jobs in U.S. manufacturing, an economic sector dominated by men, have been declining since the 1970s. The decreasing number of less educated men able to earn a good enough wage to support a family in turn is related to a decline in marriage among the working class. While marriage rates fall, however, many women still desire to have families, so the proportion of nonmarital births rises. Single mothers with children are among the demographic groups in the United States most likely to be poor, and their poverty rate has remained relatively high even in periods of economic prosperity.
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GLOBAL ISSUES
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YOU, THE GLOBAL CONSUMER

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AP Photo/Richard Vogel
The expensive sneakers that many Americans enjoy wearing in and outside the gym are often made by poorly compensated female labor abroad. Do labor conditions matter to U.S. consumers? Should they matter? image
Try a simple experiment. Walk through your dorm room, apartment, or house and make a list of the places of manufacture of some of the products you find. Be sure to examine electronic equipment such as your television, laptop, or smartphone. Go through your closets and drawers, checking the labels on your clothing and footwear. What about your bicycle or your car? If you are a good detective, you will find that people who live outside the United States made many of the necessities of your everyday life. Even your U.S.-manufactured car is likely to have parts that have passed through the hands of workers abroad.
According to a recent story in the New York Times,fully 90% of footwear sold in the United States is manufactured elsewhere (Manning, 2009). So much of our apparel is made abroad that some student groups have campaigned to ensure that the college apparel marketed by their schools is not made in sweatshops. United Students Against Sweatshops (www.usas.org) now has chapters across the United States.
While global production based on the use of low-wage labor around the world has reduced the prices of many things we consume, it has also contributed to declining wages and lost jobs for manufacturing workers in the United States, as well as the employment of millions of people around the world in factories that are poorly regulated and operate largely outside the view of the consumers who buy their products. On one hand, these new industrial workers potentially benefit from expanded job opportunities. On the other hand, the world’s workers, many of whom are women, are vulnerable to exploitation and their wages are often very low, their hours long, and their work sites unpleasant or even hazardous. The conditions under which some workers toil today recall the 19th-century English factories that inspired Karl Marx to advance his powerful critique of capitalism’s darker side.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageMany questions remain for sociological investigation: Who benefits and who loses as a result of the explosive growth in global production? Will globalization bring a better world to all or to only a select few? What is our role as consumers in the global chain of production, and how do our consumption choices affect industries and economies at home and abroad?

While the relationships between sociological factors are complex and sometimes indirect, when sociology helps us fit them together, we gain a better picture of the issues confronting all of us—as well as U.S. society and the larger world. Let’s begin our journey.
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TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
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THE EXPLOSIVE GROWTH OF THE INTERNET

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©iStockphoto.com/Lance
Today’s digital age has given us Internet access virtually everywhere, whether we are 35,000 feet in the sky, traveling on a bus, or waiting for class to begin. image
The Internet, which has revolutionized the way the world shares information, is barely four decades old. The first Internet message was sent from the University of California, Los Angeles, to Stanford University in 1969 on a small, experimental Department of Defense network. The initial effort experienced a glitch—the system reportedly crashed as the letter Gof the word LOGINwas typed! Not until the mid-1980s was Internet technology sufficiently developed to make it possible for anyone with a computer to plug into the network. Since it was initially difficult to send anything more than simple text-based messages, the early Internet was used mainly by a handful of researchers and scholars.
Part-time University of Illinois programmer Marc Andreessen developed the easy-to-use World Wide Web, with its graphical interface and ability to send sound and images, in 1992. Andreessen called his new program Mosaic and gave it away free on the Internet. Within a year and a half, the number of Internet users had tripled to 20 million, and Mosaic had morphed into the Netscape browser. In 1998, Netscape spun off Mozilla, a company that today maintains the Firefox browser. In the summer of 2000, there were 93 million Internet hosts worldwide. By the summer of 2012 there were 908 million and counting, along with about 200 million active websites. In 2014 it was projected that 44% of households worldwide would have Internet access by the end of that year, and there would be almost 3 billion Internet users. The rate of growth shows no signs of slowing (International Telecommunication Union, 2011, 2014; Internet Systems Consortium, 2012; Netcraft, 2012).
A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project estimated that 90% of U.S. adults own some type of portable electronic device (Gahran, 2012). As you pass through a public space such as an airport or a mall or ride on public transportation in a metropolitan area, you see people engaging in a multitude of behaviors and activities facilitated by the growth of high-tech gadgetry. Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat, and Tumblr allow individuals across the globe to post videos and other media to share within the Internet community of millions.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageWill such widely accessible and vastly powerful technology enable people to play a greater role in shaping their own destinies? Will digital technology be emancipating, or will it come to threaten our privacy and security in ways we cannot yet grasp?

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WHAT CAN I DO WITH A
SOCIOLOGY DEGREE?
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CAREER DEVELOPMENT AND SKILLS AND CAREERS: AN INTRODUCTION
A short feature will appear near the end of each chapter of Discover Sociologythat links your study of sociology to potential careers. It is intended to help you answer the question “What can I do with a sociology degree?” An important goal of these features is to highlight the core knowledge and professional skills that you will develop through your education as a sociology major. This set of competencies and skills, which range from critical thinking and writing skills to aptitude in qualitative and quantitative research to the understanding of diversity and conflict dynamics, prepares you for the workforce, as well as for graduate and professional school. Many of the chapters ahead will highlight information about the occupational fields, job titles, and work activitiesthat can be linked to the knowledge and skills you will learn as a sociology major. The Skills and Careersessays (Chapters 5–11 and 14–17) will describe professional skills, discuss their development through the study of sociology, and link them with specific occupational fields and jobs in which employers seek employees who have the skills discussed.
A second goal of the feature is to help you more fully identify and articulate your current and developing job-related skills, interests, and values, as well as to show you how to begin to explore careers, how to perform an effective internship or job search, and how to create a personal career action plan (see the career development wheel). These Career Developmentfeatures are intended to benefit both sociology majors and students majoring in other disciplines—career planning is important no matter your chosen field. The first chapter essays (Chapters 2–4) discuss the basics of career development. Two later chapters (Chapters 12and 13) offer discussions of how graduate or professional school may fit into your career development plans. We hope that you find these features useful!
THINK ABOUT CAREERS
imageWhat are your potential career interests? Did you come to college with a specific interest, or have you developed new interests during your studies?
imageHave you spoken with anyone—family members, career counselors, professors, practitioners, or others—about your career interests? With whom might you speak to learn more about your field of interest?

Anne V. Scammon, Managing Director, Curricular and Strategic Initiatives, Center for Career Services at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, contributed to the skills and careers feature (“What Can I Do with a Sociology Degree?”) in this text and accompanying online supplements. With Anne Scammon’s support, key skills developed through the study of sociology were identified and linked to specific job titles and occupations. She also developed information related to career self-assessment, exploration, obtaining experience, job search strategies, and graduate school options for students.

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SUMMARY

• Sociologyis the scientific study of human social relationships, groups, and societies. Its central task is to ask what the dimensions of the social world are, how they influence our behavior, and how we in turn shape and change them.
• Sociology adheres to the principle of social embeddedness, the idea that economic, political, and other forms of human behavior are fundamentally shaped by social relationships. Sociologists seek to study through scientific means the social worlds that human beings consciously create.
• The sociological imaginationis the ability to grasp the relationship between our individual lives and the larger social forces that help to shape them. It helps us see the connections between our private lives and public issues.
• Critical thinkingis the ability to evaluate claims about truth by using reason and evidence. Often we accept things as true because they are familiar, seem to mesh with our own experiences, and sound right. Critical thinking instead asks us to recognize poor arguments, reject statements not supported by evidence, and even question our own assumptions.
• Sociology’s roots can be traced to the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, industrialization and the birth of modern capitalism, and the urbanization of populations. Sociology emerged in part as a tool to enable people to understand dramatic changes taking place in modern societies.
• Sociology generally traces its classical roots to Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. Early work in sociology reflected the concerns of the men who founded the discipline.
• In the United States, scholars at the University of Chicago focused on reforming social problems stemming from industrialization and urbanization. Women and people of color worked on the margins of the discipline because of persistent discrimination.
• Sociologists base their study of the social world on different theoretical perspectives that shape theory and guide research, often resulting in different conclusions. The major sociological paradigms are structural functionalism, the social conflict paradigm, and symbolic interactionism.
• Major themes in sociology include the distribution of powerand growing inequality, globalizationand its accompanying social changes, the growth of social diversity, and the way advances in technologyhave changed communication, commerce, and communities.
• The early founders of sociology believed that scientific knowledge could lead to shared social progress. Some modern sociologists question whether such shared scientific understanding is indeed possible.
KEY TERMS
scientific, 4
sociology, 5
social embeddedness, 5
sociological imagination, 5
agency, 7
structure, 7
critical thinking, 8
norms, 10
anomie, 10
social statics, 11
social dynamics, 11
positivist, 11
social facts, 12
social solidarity, 12
collective conscience, 13
class conflict, 13
proletariat, 13
bourgeoisie, 13
means of production, 13
Verstehen, 14
formal rationality, 14
bureaucracies, 14
double consciousness, 15
sociological theories, 17
macro-level paradigms, 17
micro-level paradigm, 17
structural functionalism, 17
manifest functions, 18
latent functions, 19
social conflict paradigm, 19
symbolic interactionism, 21
symbols, 21
power, 21
inequality, 21
globalization, 22
social diversity, 22
ethnocentrism, 22
technology, 22
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Think about Mills’s concept of the sociological imagination and its ambition to draw together what Mills called private troublesand public issues.Think of a private trouble that sociologists might classify as also being a public issue. Share your example with your classmates.
2. What is critical thinking? What does it mean to be a critical thinker in our approach to understanding society and social issues or problems?
3. In the chapter, we asked why there were so few “founding mothers” in sociology. What factors explain the dearth of women’s voices? What about the lack of minority voices? What effects do you think these factors may have had on the development of the discipline?
4. What is theory? What is its function in the discipline of sociology?
5. Recall the three key theoretical paradigms discussed in this chapter—structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. Discuss the ways these diverse “glasses” analyze deviance, its labeling, and its punishment in society. Try applying a similar analysis to another social phenomenon, such as class inequality or traditional gender roles.

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Chapter 2

DISCOVER SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

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Media Library
CHAPTER 2Media Library

AUDIO video

Fallout from a contemporary experiment based on the Milgram study.
Facebook’s Newsfeed Study
VIDEO video

Milgram’s Experiment
Qualitative v. Quantitative Research Methods
Steven Colbert on Validity Research
Asch Conformity Experiment
Ethnography in Context
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
CQ RESEARCHER video

Sentencing Reform for Drugs
PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE video

Survey v. Public Opinion
The Organ Detective
JOURNAL video

Validity and Reliability homicide studies
Field Work Methods
Unobtrusive Research in Criminal Justice
Participatory Research Methods in Skid Row Los Angeles

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IN THIS CHAPTER
Sociology and Common Sense
Research and the Scientific Method
Doing Sociological Research
Doing Sociology: A Student’s Guide to Research
Sociology and You: Why Learn to Do Sociological Research?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

1. What kinds of research questions could one pose in order to gain a better understanding of sociological issues like bullying, long-term poverty, gang violence, or the high dropout rate in some high schools? What kinds of research methods would be appropriate for studying these issues?
2. What factors do you think affect the honesty of people’s responses to survey questions?
3. What makes a sociological research project ethical or unethical?
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RESEARCHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE U.S. PRISON BOOM
REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

The United States imprisons more of its people than any other modern country on the planet. About 3% of U.S. adults are in the correctional system: “2.2 million people in prisons and jails, and an additional 4.8 million on probation or parole” (Goffman, 2014, p. xi). Data show that the climb in the prison population began in the 1970s and rose steeply in the 1980s, with significant numbers of poor men and women of color pulled into the criminal justice system, many for minor drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses. The effects of this “prison boom” are not only individual; mass incarceration has also had consequences for already struggling neighborhoods in urban America (see Figures 2.1aand 2.1b).
In On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City(2014), sociologist Alice Goffman writes that her work is an on-the-ground account of the U.S. prison boom: a close-up look at young men and women living in one poor and segregated Black community transformed by unprecedented levels of imprisonment and by the more hidden systems of policing and supervision that have accompanied them. Because the fear of capture and confinement has seeped into community members’ basic activities of daily living—work, family, romance, friendship, and even much-needed medical care—it is an account of a community on the run(p. xii).
Goffman explores the norms and practices that govern life in a neighborhood ravaged by economic and social marginality and the pervasive effects of the reality and threat of imprisonment. For example, in the absence of opportunities for legitimate employment, she notes the birth of a shadow economy that caters to the “fugitive life” she describes: Some wily entrepreneurs peddle “clean” urine to neighbors who are on parole and subject to drug testing. Goffman’s work is significant because it carefully examines the effects of the mass incarceration phenomenon on personal lives and relationships and the daily life of a community.
Goffman conducted research in the city of Philadelphia for six years, combining interviews with individuals working in the criminal justice system, including police and prison guards, and regular interactions with residents of her adopted neighborhood. She utilized participant and nonparticipant observation in gathering information about the social environment. Goffman’s work is a good example of qualitative sociological research, and she recognizes its potential significance to academic and policy debates. Utilizing a scientific approach and rigorous field research, Goffman is able to cast light on how neighborhoods and their residents, whether or not they are involved in criminal activity, understand and experience the powerful consequences of mass imprisonment.image
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imageFIGURE 2.1A Imprisonment Rates in Selected Philadelphia Neighborhoods, 2008
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SOURCE: Based on data from the The Justice Mapping Center.

imageFIGURE 2.1B Percentage of Non-Whites in Selected Philadelphia Neighborhoods, 2008
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In this chapter, we examine the ways sociologists like Alice Goffman study the social world. First, we distinguish between sociological understanding and common sense. Then we discuss the key steps in the research process itself. We examine how sociologists test their theories using a variety of research methods, and, finally, we consider the ethical implications of doing research on human subjects.
SOCIOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE
Science is a unique way of seeing and investigating the world around us. The essence of the scientific methodis straightforward: It is a process of gathering empirical (scientific and specific) data, creating theories, and rigorously testing theories.In sociological research, theories and empirical data exist in a dynamic relationship (Figure 2.2). Some research begins from general theories, which offer “big picture” ideas about social life: Deductive reasoningstarts from broad theories but proceeds to break them down into more specific and testable hypotheses.Sociological hypothesesare ideas about the world that describe possible relationships between social phenomena.Some research begins from the ground up: Inductive reasoningstarts from specific data, such as interviews or field notes, which may focus on a single community or event, and endeavors to identify larger patterns from which to derive more general theories.
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imageFIGURE 2.2 The Relationship Between Theory and Research
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Sociologists employ the scientific method in both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research, which is often done through methods such as large-scale surveys, gathers data that can be quantified and offers insight into broad patterns of social behavior(for example, the percentage of U.S. adults who use corporal punishment with their children) and social attitudes(for example, the percentage of U.S. adults who approve of corporal punishment) without necessarily delving into the meaning of or reasons for the identified phenomena. Qualitative research, such as that conducted by Alice Goffman, is characterized by data that cannot be quantified (or converted into numbers), focusing instead on generating in-depth knowledge of social life, institutions, and processes(for example, why parents in particular social groups are more or less likely to use spanking as a method of punishment).It relies on the gathering of data through methods such as focus groups, participant and nonparticipant observation, interviews, and archival research. Generally, population samples in qualitative research are small because they focus on in-depth understanding.
Personal experience and common sense about the world are often fine starting points for sociological research. They can, however, mislead us. In the 14th century, common sense suggested to people that the earth was flat; after all, it looksflat. Today, influenced by stereotypes and media portrayals of criminal behaviors, many people believe Black high school and college students are more likely than their White counterparts to use illegal drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, crack, and heroin. But common sense misleads on both counts. The earth is not flat (as you know!), and Black high school and college students are slightly lesslikely than White students to use illegal drugs (Table 2.1).
Consider the following ideas, which many believe to be true, though all are false:
Common Wisdom:
I know women who earn more than their husbands or boyfriends. The gender wage gap is no longer an issue in the United States.
Sociological Research:
Data show that men as a group earn more than women as a group. For example, in the first quarter of 2014, men had a weekly median income of $872 compared to $722 for women for all full-time occupations (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014f). According to statistical data, women earn about 82% of what men earn. This statistic compares all men and all women who work full-time and year-round. Reasons for the gap include worker characteristics (such as experience and education), job characteristics (such as hours required), devaluation of “women’s work” by society, and pay discrimination against female workers (Cabeza, Johnson, & Tyner, 2011; Reskin & Padavic, 2002). So while some women, of course, earn more than some men, the overall pattern of men outearning women remains in place today. This topic is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 10.
Common Wisdom:
Homeless people are poor and lack adequate shelter because they do not work.
Sociological Research:
Some of the homeless cannot find work or are too disabled by mental or physical problems to work. Many, however, do work. Research suggests that about 44% of homeless adults work for pay (National Coalition for the Homeless, 2009b), and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (2011) reports that 15% of the homeless are regularly employed full- or part-time. However, low wages and poor benefits in the service industry, where many less educated people work, as well as a shortage of adequate housing options for low-income families, can make finding permanent shelter a challenge even for those who work for pay. To under stand how declining wages magnify the strain on low-income families, consider this: In many U.S. cities, to make ends meet, a household needs more than one full-time minimum-wage employee to afford the fair market rent price for a two-bedroom apartment (National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2009). The contemporary reality is that wages are not keeping up with the rate of inflation, which further adds to the economic hardships that low-income families endure. These topics are discussed in fuller detail in Chapter 7.

imageTABLE 2.1 Annual Prevalence Rate of Drug Use by 12th Graders, 2013.
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Johnston, L. D., O’Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., Schulenberg, J. E. & Miech, R.A. (2014). Demographic subgroup trends among adolescents in the use of various licit and illicit drugs, 1975–2013.Monitoring the Future Occasional Paper No. 81. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research.

Milgram’s Experiment
Click to Show

Fallout from a contemporary experiment based on the Milgram study.
Click to Show
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© Bettmann/CORBIS
The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments distinguishes between the “permanently supported homeless,” who have housing but are at risk due to extreme poverty and/or disability, and the “chronically homeless,” who are continually homeless for a year or more or at least four times in three years. Do you think that these categories fully encompass the homeless population? image
Common Wisdom:
Education is the great equalizer. All children in the United States have the opportunity to get a good education. Low academic achievement is a personal failure.
Sociological Research:
Public education is free and open to all in the United States, but the quality of education can vary dramatically. Consider the fact that in many U.S. states and localities, a major source of public school funding is local property taxes, which constitute an average of about 44% of funding (state and federal allocations make up the rest). As such, communities with high property values have richer sources of funding from which to draw educational resources, while poor communities—even those with high tax rates—have more limited pools. As well, high levels of racial segregation persist in U.S. schools. In fact, Latino and Black students are more likely to be in segregated schools today than were their counterparts in earlier decades. Research shows a relationship between academic performance and class and racial segregation: Students who are not isolated in poor, racially segregated schools perform better on a variety of academic measures than those who are (Condron, 2009; Logan, Minca, & Adar, 2012). The problem of low academic achievement is complex, and no single variable can explain it. At the same time, the magnitude and persistence of this problem suggests that we are looking at a phenomenon that is a public issue rather than just a personal trouble. We discuss issues of class, race, and educational attainment further in Chapter 12.
Even deeply held and widely shared beliefs about society and social groups may be inaccurate—or more nuanced and complex than they appear on the surface. Until it is tested, common sense is merely conjecture. Careful research allows us to test our beliefs to gauge whether they are valid or merely anecdotal. From a sociological standpoint, empirical evidence is granted greater weight than common sense. By basing their decisions on scientific evidence rather than personal beliefs or common wisdom, researchers and students can draw informed conclusions and policy makers can ensure that policies and programs are data driven and maximally effective.
RESEARCH AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Scientific theoriesanswer questions about how and why scientific observations are as they are.A good scientific theory has the following characteristics:

• It is logically consistent.One part of the theory does not contradict another part.
• It can be disproved.If the findings contradict the theory, then we can deduce that the theory is wrong. While we can say that testing has failed to disprove the theory, however, we cannot assume the theory is “true” if testing confirms it. Theories are always subject to further testing, which may point to needed revisions, highlight limitations, or strengthen conclusions.

Sentencing Reform for Drugs
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Qualitative v. Quantitative Research Methods
Click to Show
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© Martin Ruetschi/Keystone/Corbis
Some research on bullying relies on self-reports, while other data come from peer reports. Recent research (Branson & Cornell, 2009) suggests that more than twice as many students (11%) were labeled bullies in peer reports than in self-reports (5%), highlighting the fact that any method of data collection has limitations. image
Theories are made up of concepts, ideas that summarize a set of phenomena.Concepts are the building blocks of research and prepare a solid foundation for sociological work. Some of the key concepts in sociology are social stratification, social class, power, inequality,and diversity,which we introduced in the opening chapter.
In order to gather data and create viable theories, we need to define concepts in ways that are precise and measurable. A study of social class, for example, would need to begin with a working definition of that term. An operational definitionof a concept describes the concept in such a way that we can observe and measure it.Many sociologists define social class in terms of dimensions such as income, wealth, education, occupation, and consumption patterns. Each of these aspects of class has the potential to be measurable. We may construct operational definitions in terms of qualitiesor quantities(Babbie, 1998; Neuman, 2000). In terms of qualities, we might say, for instance, that the “upper-middle class” is composed of those who have completed graduate or professional degrees, even though there may be a broad income spread between those with master’s degrees in English and those with master’s degrees in business administration. This definition is based on an assumption of class as a social position that derives from educational attainment. Alternatively, using quantity as a key measure, we might operationally define “upper class” as households with annual income greater than $150,000 and “lower class” as households with annual income of less than $20,000. This definition takes income as the preeminent determinant of class position, irrespective of education.
Consider a social issue of contemporary interest—bullying. Imagine that you want to conduct a research study of bullying to determine how many female middle schoolers have experienced bullying in the past academic year. You would need to begin with a clear definition of bullying that operationalizes the term. That is, in order to measure how many girls have experienced bullying, you would need to articulate what constitutes bullying.Would you include physical bullying? If so, how many instances of being pushed or punched would constitute bullying? Would you include cyberbullying? What kinds of behaviors would be included in that category? To study a phenomenon like bullying, it is not enough to assume that “we know it when we see it.” Empirical research relies on the careful and specific definition of terms and the recognition of how definitions and methods affect research outcomes.
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN VARIABLES
In studying social relationships, sociologists also need variables.A variableis a concept that can take on two or more possible values.For instance, sex can be male or female, work status can be employed or unemployed, and geographic location can be inner-city, suburbs, or rural area. We can measure variables both quantitativelyand qualitatively.Quantitative variablesinclude factors we can count,such as crime rates, unemployment rates, and drug use frequency. Qualitative variablesare variables that express qualities and do not have numerical values.Qualitative variables might include physical characteristics, such as gender or eye color, or attitudinal characteristics, such as a parent’s preference for a private or public school or a commuter’s preference for riding public transportation or driving to work.
Sociological research often tries to establish a relationship between two or more variables. Suppose you want to find out whether more education is associated with higher earnings. After asking people about their years of schooling and their annual incomes, both of which are quantitative variables, you could estimate the degree of correlationbetween the two. Correlation—literally, “co-relationship”—is the degree to which two or more variables are associated with one another.Correlating the two variables “years of education” and “annual income” demonstrates that the greater the education, the higher the income (Figure 2.3). (Do you see the exception to that relationship? How might you explain it?)
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© Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis
Getting enough sleep is one factor that can help students maintain good grades in college. How would you design a research study to examine the question of which factors correlate most strongly with solid grades? image
When two variables are correlated, we are often tempted to infer a causal relationship, a relationship between two variables in which one is the cause of the other.However, just because two variables are correlated, we cannot assume that one causes the other. For example, ice cream sales rise significantly during the summer, as does the homicide rate. These two events are correlated in the sense that both increase during the hottest months. However, because the sharp rise in ice cream sales does not causerates of homicide to increase (nor, clearly, does the rise in homicide rates cause a spike in ice cream consumption), these two phenomena do not have a causal relationship. Correlation does not equal causation.
Sometimes an observed correlation between two variables is the result of a spurious relationship—that is, a correlation between two or more variables caused by another factor that is not being measured.In the example above, the common factor missed in the relationship is, in fact, the temperature. When it’s hot, more people want to eat ice cream. Studies also show that rising temperatures are linked to an increase in violent crimes—though after a certain temperature threshold (about 90 degrees), crimes wane again (Gamble & Hess, 2012). Among the reasons more violent crimes are committed in hot weather is the fact that people spend more time outdoors in social interactions when it is hot, which can lead to confrontations.

imageFIGURE 2.3 Correlation Between Education and Median Weekly Earnings in the United States, 2013
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SOURCE: Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2013). Education pays. Employment projections.Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Let’s take another example that is close to home: Imagine that your school newspaper publishes a study concluding that coffee drinking causes poor test grades. The story is based on a survey of students that found those who reported drinking a lot of coffee the night before an exam scored lower than did their peers who had consumed little or no coffee. Having studied sociology, you wonder whether this relationship might be spurious. What is the “something else” that is not being measured here? Could it be that students who did not study in the days and weeks prior to the test and stayed up late the night before cramming—probably consuming a lot of coffee as they fought sleep—received lower test grades than did peers who studied earlier and got adequate sleep the night before the test? The overlooked variable, then, is the amount of studying students did in the weeks preceding the exam, and we are likely to find a positive correlation and evidence of causation in looking at time spent studying and grade outcomes.
Sociologists attempt to develop theories systematically by offering clear operational definitions, collecting unbiased data, and identifying evidence-based relationships between variables. Sociological research methods usually yield credible and useful data, but we must always critically analyze the results to ensure their validity and reliability and to check that hypothesized relationships are not spurious.
TESTING THEORIES AND HYPOTHESES
Once we have defined concepts and variables with which to work, we can endeavor to test a theory by positing a hypothesis. Hypotheses enable scientists to check the accuracy of their theories. For example, consider state-level data on obesity and poverty (Figures 2.4and 2.5). Data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2012 show that some positive correlation exists between obesity and poverty rates at the state level. A positive correlation is a relationship showing that as one variable rises or falls, the other does as well.The variables’ common trajectory suggests a possible relationship between poverty and obesity (Table 2.2), although, as we noted above, sociologists are quick to point out that correlation does not equal causation. Researchers are interested in creating and testing hypotheses to explain cases of positive correlation—they are also interested in explaining exceptions to the pattern of correlation between two (or more) variables.
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imageFIGURE 2.4 Self-Reported Obesity Rates by State, 2012
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SOURCE:Centers for Disease Control. (2011). Prevalence of self-reported obesity among U.S. adults. Behavior risk factor surveillance system.Washington, DC.

In fact, researchers have explored and hypothesized the relationship between poverty and obesity. Among the conclusions they have drawn is that living in poverty—and particularly living in poor neighborhoods—puts people at higher risk of obesity, though the risk is greater for women than for men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012d; Hedwig, 2011; Smith, 2009). Among the factors that researchers have identified as contributing to a causal path between poverty and obesity are the lack of access to healthy food choices, the lack of access to safe and nearby spaces for physical exercise, and a deficit of time to cook healthy foods and exercise. They have also cited the stress induced by poverty. While the data cannot lead us to conclude decisively that poverty is a cause of obesity, research can help us to gather evidence that supports or refutes a hypothesis about the relationship between these two variables. We look at this issue in greater depth in Chapter 16.
In the case of a negative correlation, one variable increases as the other decreases.As we discuss later in Chapter 11, which focuses on the family and society, researchers have found a negative correlation between male unemployment and rates of marriage. That is, as rates of male unemployment in a community rise, rates of marriage in the community fall. Observing this relationship, sociologists have conducted research to test explanations for it (Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Wilson, 2010).

imageFIGURE 2.5 Poverty Rates by State, 2012
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SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” 2010 American Community Survey.

Keep in mind that we can never prove theories to be decisively right—we can only prove them wrong. Proving a theory right would require the scientific testing of absolutely every possible hypothesis based on that theory—a fundamental impossibility. In fact, good theories are constructed in a way that makes it logically possible to prove them wrong. This is Karl Popper’s (1959) famous principle of falsification, or falsifiability, which holds that to be scientific, a theory must lead to testable hypotheses that can be disproved if they are wrong.
VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY
For theories and hypotheses to be testable, both the concepts used to construct them and the measurements used to test them must be accurate. When our observations adequately reflect the real world, our findings have validity—that is, the concepts and measurements accurately represent what they claim to represent.For example, suppose you want to know whether the crime rate in the United States has gone up or down. For years sociologists depended on police reports to measure crime. However, researchers could assess the validity of these tallies only if subsequent surveys were administered nationally to victims of crime. If the victim tallies matched those of the police reports, then researchers could say the police reports were a valid measure of crime in the United States. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) enables researchers to assess validity because it offers data on victimization, even for crimes that have not been reported to authorities.
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imageTABLE 2.2 Top 10 States: Obesity and Poverty, 2012
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SOURCES: U.S. Census Bureau. (2013). Poverty: 2000 to 2012, American Community Survey Briefs; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.(2014). Prevalence of self-reported obesity among U.S. adults, 2012.

Sociologists are also concerned with the reliability of their findings. Reliabilityis the extent to which the findings are consistent with the findings of different studies of the same phenomenon, or with the findings of the same study over time. Sociological research may suffer from problems of validity and reliability because of bias, a characteristic of results that systematically misrepresent the full dimensions of what is being studied. Bias can creep into research due to the use of inappropriate measurement instruments. For example, suppose the administrator of a city wants to know whether homelessness has risen in recent years. She operationally defines “the homeless” as those who sleep in the street or in shelters and dispatches her team of researchers to city shelters to count the number of people occupying shelter beds or sleeping on street corners or park benches. A sociologist reviewing the research team’s results might question the administrator’s operational definition of what it means to be homeless and, by extension, her findings. Are the homeless solely those spending nights in shelters or on the streets? What about those who stay with friends after eviction or camp out in their cars? In this instance, a sociologist might suggest that the city’s measure is biased because it misrepresents (and undercounts) the homeless population by failing to define the concept in a way that captures the broad manifestations of homelessness.
Bias can also occur in research when respondents do not tell the truth (see Table 2.3). A good example of this is a study in which respondents were asked whether they used illegal drugs or had driven while impaired. All were asked the same questions, but some were wired to a machine they were told was a lie detector. The subjects who thought their truthfulness was being monitored by a lie detector reported higher rates of illegal drug use than did subjects who did not. Based on the assumption that actual drug use would be about the same for both groups, the researchers concluded that the subjects who were not connected to the device were underreporting their actual illegal drug use and that simply asking people about drug use would lead to biased findings because respondents would not tell the truth. Do you think truthfulness of respondents is a general problem, or is it one researchers are likely to encounter only where sensitive issues such as drug use or racism are at issue?
OBJECTIVITY IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
Even if sociologists develop theories based on good operational definitions and collect valid and reliable data, like all human beings they have passions and biases that may color their research. For example, criminologists long ignored the criminality of women because they assumed that women were not disposed toward criminal behavior. Researchers therefore did not have an accurate picture of women and crime until this bias was recognized and rectified.

Steven Colbert on Validity Research
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INEQUALITY MATTERS
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HOW MANY PEOPLE SUFFER FROM HOMELESSNESS?

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The Washington Post/Contributor/Getty Images
Understanding of research methods will help you recognize the challenges in gathering reliable statistics on populations that are outside the mainstream. In this photo, a volunteer conducts an interview with a homeless man, which helps local authorities assess how many homeless people are in the city and why they lack shelter. image
Homelessness is a social problem in the United States. But how extensive is it? The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (2012) estimates that more than 3 million people experience homelessness over the course of a year across the United States. Of these, 1.3 million are children; more than one-third of the entire homeless population is made up of families. While the majority of the homeless have access to transitional housing or emergency shelters, approximately 4 out of 10 are unsheltered, living in improvised conditions that are not suited for human habitation. Despite a decrease in the homeless population nationally, the rates for 24 individual states and the District of Columbia increased between 2009 and 2011 (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2012).
Statistics vary, however, depending on the definitions and counting methodologies employed. In the early 1980s, the U.S. government was under pressure to provide services and assistance to a population of homeless that some claimed was large and growing. In response, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) conducted a study to determine the number of homeless people in cities and towns across the country. After analyzing all existing studies, government researchers called providers of services to the homeless and other experts in 60 cities and asked them to estimate the numbers of homeless people in their communities. Based on this research, the government concluded there were 250,000 to 350,000 homeless people in the United States. This figure was considerably lower than the estimate of 2 million that came from other sources outside the government (Burt, 1992).
Politicians used the HUD figures extensively, although some sociologists were skeptical (Appelbaum, 1986; Appelbaum, Dolny, Dreier, & Gilderbloom, 1991). First, HUD’s operational definitionof homelessness included only people sleeping on the streets and in shelters; it effectively excluded homeless people living in cars or abandoned buildings or taking temporary shelter with friends. Second, HUD based its figures on the estimates of shelter providers, police officers, and other local experts who admitted they were often only guessing. Finally, the HUD figures were based almost entirely on estimates of the homeless in the downtown areas of big cities, a methodological bias that excluded the numerous homeless people who lived in surrounding towns and suburbs. As a result of these problems, HUD’s estimate of the national homeless population lacked validity.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageSubsequent research has confirmed that by the early 1990s there were as many as 1 million homeless in the United States—three to four times the estimate produced by the government study. An axiom of sociological research is that it is not what you think you know that matters, but how you came to know it. The homeless represent a transient population that is challenging to count. The homeless have no fixed addresses, no consistent billing statements, and no easy way for researchers to locate them. What methods might you employ to attempt to systematically count the homeless people in your community? What kinds of resources do you think you would need?
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imageTABLE 2.3 How Truthful Are Survey Respondents? (in percentages)
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SOURCE:Adams, J., Parkinson, L., Sanson-Fisher, R. W., & Walsh, R. A. (2008). Enhancing self-report of adolescent smoking: The effects of bogus pipeline and anonymity. Addictive Behaviors, 33(10), 1291–1296.

Personal values and beliefs may affect a researcher’s objectivity, or ability to represent the object of study accurately.In the 19th century, sociologist Max Weber argued that in order for scientific research to be objective it has to have value neutrality—that is, the course of the research must be free of the influence of personal beliefs and opinions.The sociologist should acknowledge personal biases and assumptions, make them explicit, and prevent them from getting in the way of observation and reporting.
How can we best achieve objectivity? First, recall Karl Popper’s principle of falsification, which proposes that the goal of research is not to prove our ideas correct but to find out whether they are wrong. To accomplish this, researchers must be willing to accept that the data they collect might contradict their most passionate convictions. Research should deepen human understanding, not prove a particular point of view.
A second way we can ensure objectivity is to invite others to draw their own conclusions about the validity of our data through replication, the repetition of a previous study using a different sample or population to verify or refute the original findings.For research to be replicated, the original study must spell out in detail the research methods employed. If potential replicators cannot conduct their studies exactly as the original study was performed, they might accidentally introduce unwanted variables. To ensure the most accurate replication of their work, researchers should archive original materials such as questionnaires and field notes and allow replicators access to them.
Popper (1959) described scientific discovery as an ongoing process of “confrontation and refutation.” Sociologists usually subject their work to this process by publishing their results in scholarly journals. Submitted research undergoes a rigorous process of peer review, in which other experts in the field of study examine the work before the results are finalized and published. Once research has been published in a reputable journal such as the American Sociological Reviewor the Journal of Health and Social Behavior,other scholars read it with a critical eye. The study may then be replicated in different settings.
DOING SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Sociological research requires careful preparation and a clear plan that guides the work. The purpose of a sociological research project may be to obtain preliminary knowledge that will help formulate a theory or to evaluate an existing theory about society and social life. As part of the strategy, the researcher selects from a variety of research methods—specific techniques for systematically gathering data.In the following sections, we look at a range of research methods and examine their advantages and disadvantages. We also discuss how you might prepare a sociological research project of your own.
SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH METHODS
Sociologists employ a variety of methods to learn about the social world (Table 2.4). Since each has strengths and weaknesses, a good research strategy may be to use several different methods. If they all yield similar findings, the researcher is more likely to have confidence in the results. The principal methods are the survey, fieldwork (either participant observation or detached observation), experimentation, working with existing information, and participatory research.

Validity and Reliability homicide studies
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imageTABLE 2.4 Key Sociological Research Methods
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SURVEY RESEARCH
A surveyrelies on a questionnaire or interviews with a group of people in person or by telephone or e-mail to determine their characteristics, opinions, and behaviors.Surveys are versatile, and sociologists often use them to test theories or simply to gather data. Some survey instruments, such as National Opinion Research Center questionnaires, consist of closed-ended questionsthat respondents answer by choosing from among the responses presented. Others, such as the University of Chicago’s Social Opportunity Survey, consist of open-ended questionsthat permit respondents to answer in their own words.
An example of survey research conducted for data collection is the largest survey in the nation, the U.S. Census, which is conducted every 10 years. The census is not designed to test any particular theory. Rather, it gathers voluminous data about U.S. residents that researchers, including sociologists, use to test and develop a variety of theories.
Usually, a survey is conducted on a relatively small number of people,a sample, selected to represent a population, the whole group of people to be studied.The first step in designing a survey is to identify the population of interest. Imagine that you are doing a study of behavioral factors that affect grades in college. Who would you survey? Members of a certain age group only? People in the airline industry? Pet owners? To conduct a study well, we need to identify clearly the survey population that will most effectively help us answer the research question. In your study you would most likely choose to survey students now in college, because they offer the best opportunity to correlate grades with particular behaviors.
Once we have identified a population of interest, we will usually select a sample, as we seldom have the time or money to talk to all the members of a given population, especially if it is a large one. Other things being equal, larger samples better represent the population than smaller ones. However, with proper sampling techniques, sociologists can use relatively small (and therefore inexpensive) samples to represent large populations. For instance, a well-chosen sample of 1,000 U.S. voters can be used to represent 100,000 U.S. voters with a fair degree of accuracy, enabling surveys to make election predictions with reasonable confidence. Sampling is also used for looking at social phenomena such as drug or alcohol use in a population: CNN reported recently that 17% of high schoolers drink, smoke, or use drugs during the school day, based on a 1,000-student sample polled by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (Azuz, 2012).

Survey v. Public Opinion
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© James Marshall/Corbis
Since it is often impossible to sample every person in a target population, being well versed in research methodology enables a researcher to produce empirically rigorous data with a representative population sample. image
Ideally, a sample should reflect the composition of the population we are studying. For instance, if you want to be able to use your research data about college students to generalize about the entire college student population of the United States, you would need to collect proportional samples from 2-year colleges, 4-year colleges, large universities, community colleges, online schools, and so on. It would not be adequate to survey only students at online colleges or only female students at private 4-year schools.
To avoid bias in surveys, sociologists may use random sampling, whereby everyone in the population of interest has an equal chance of being chosen for the study.Typically, they make or obtain a list of everyone in the population of interest. Then they draw names or phone numbers, for instance, by chance until the desired sample size is reached (today, most such work is done by computers). Large-scale random sample surveys permit researchers to draw conclusions about large numbers of people on the basis of relatively small numbers of respondents. This is an advantage in terms of time and money.
In constructing surveys, sociologists must take care to ensure that the questions and their possible responses will capture the respondents’ points of view. The wording of questions is an important factor; poor wording can produce misleading results, as the following example illustrates. In 1993, an American Jewish Committee/Roper poll was taken to examine public attitudes and beliefs about the Holocaust. To the astonishment of many, results indicated that fully 22% of survey respondents expressed a belief the Holocaust had never happened. Not immediately noticed was the fact that the survey contained some very awkward wording, including the question “Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?” Can you see why such a question might produce a questionable result? The question’s compound structure and double-negative wording almost certainly confused many respondents.
The American Jewish Committee released a second survey with different wording: “Does it seem possible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened, or do you feel certain that it happened?” The results of the second poll were quite different. Only about 1% of respondents thought it was possible the Holocaust never happened, while 8% were unsure (Kagay, 1994). Despite the follow-up poll that corrected the mistaken perception of the previous poll’s results, the new poll was not as methodologically rigorous as it could have been; a single survey question should ask for only one type of response. The American Jewish Committee’s second survey contained a question that attempted to gauge two different responses simultaneously.
A weakness of surveys is that they may reveal what people say rather than what they do. Responses are sometimes self-serving, intended to make the interviewee look good in the eyes of the researcher. As we saw in an earlier example, a respondent may not wish to reveal his or her drinking or drug habits. A well-constructed survey, however, can overcome these problems. Assuring the respondent of anonymity, assigning interviewers with whom respondents feel comfortable, and building in questions that ask for the same information in different ways can reduce self-serving bias in survey research.
FIELDWORK
Fieldworkis a method of research that uses in-depth and often extended study to describe and analyze a group or community.Sometimes called ethnography,it takes the researcher into the “field,” where he or she directly observes—and sometimes interacts with—subjects in their social environment. Social scientists, including sociologists and anthropologists, have employed fieldwork to study everything from hoboes and working-class gangs in the 1930s (Anderson, 1940; Whyte, 1943) to prostitution and drug use among inner-city women (Maher, 1997) and Vietnam veterans motorcycling across the country to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Michalowski & Dubisch, 2001). Alice Goffman’s (2014) work on the underground economy is another example of the use of fieldwork in sociological research.

Field Work Methods
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Most fieldwork combines several different methods of gathering information. These include interviews, detached observation, and participant observation.
An interviewis a detailed conversation designed to obtain in-depth information about a person and his or her activities.When used in surveys, interview questions may be either open-ended or closed-ended. They may also be formal or informal. In fieldwork, the questions are usually open-ended to allow respondents to answer in their own words. Sometimes the interviewer prepares a detailed set of questions; at other times, the best approach is simply to have a list of relevant topics to cover.
Good researchers guard against influencing respondents’ answers. In particular, they avoid the use of leading questions—that is, questions that tend to elicit particular responses.Imagine a question on attitudes toward the marine environment that reads “Do you believe tuna fishing with broad nets, which leads to the violent deaths of dolphins, should be regulated?” The bias in this question is obvious—the stated association of broad nets with violent dolphin deaths creates a bias in favor of a yes answer. Accurate data depend on good questions that do not lead respondents to answer in particular ways.
Sometimes a study requires that researchers in the field keep a distance from the people they are studying and simply observe without getting involved. The people being observed may or may not know they are being observed. This approach is called detached observation.In his study of two delinquent gangs (the “Saints” and the “Roughnecks”), William J. Chambliss, coauthor of this text, spent many hours observing gang members without actually being involved in what they were doing. With the gang members’ permission, he sat in his car with the window rolled down so he could hear them talk and watch their behavior while they hung out on a street corner. At other times, he would observe them playing pool while he played at a nearby table. Chambliss sometimes followed gang members in his car as they drove around in theirs and sat near enough to them in bars and cafés to hear their conversations. Through his observations at a distance, he was able to gather detailed information on the kinds of delinquencies the gang members engaged in. He was also able to unravel some of the social processes that led to their behavior and observe other people’s reactions to it.
Detached observation is particularly useful when the researcher has reason to believe other forms of fieldwork might influence the behavior of the people to be observed. It is also helpful for checking the validity of what the researcher has been told in interviews. A great deal of sociological information about illegal behavior has been gathered through detached observation.
One problem with detached observation is that the information gathered is likely to be incomplete. Without actually talking to people, we are unable to check our impressions against their experiences. For this reason, detached observation is usually supplemented by in-depth interviews. In his study of the delinquent gang members, Chambliss (1973, 2001) periodically interviewed them to complement his findings and check the accuracy of his detached observations.
Another type of fieldwork is participant observation,a mixture of active participation and detached observation.Participant observation can sometimes be dangerous. Chambliss’s (1988b) research on organized crime and police corruption in Seattle, Washington, exposed him to threats from the police and organized crime network members who feared he would reveal their criminal activities. Goffman’s (2014) work also included participant observation; she spent significant amounts of time with the residents of the Philadelphia neighborhood she studied, seeking to carefully document their voices and experiences.
EXPERIMENTATION
Experimentsare research techniques for investigating cause and effect under controlled conditions.We construct experiments to measure the effects of independent or experimental variables, variables we change intentionally,on dependent variables, which change as a result of our alterations to the independent variables.To put it another way, researchers modify one controllable variable (such as diet or exposure to violent movie scenes) to see what happens to another variable (such as willingness to socialize or the display of aggression). Some variables, such as sex, ethnicity, and height, do not change in response to stimuli and thus do not make useful dependent variables.
In a typical experiment, researchers select participants who share characteristics such as age, education, social class, or experiences that are relevant to the experiment. The participants are then randomly assigned to two groups. The first, called the experimental group,is exposed to the independent variable—the variable the researchers hypothesize will affect the subjects’ behavior. The second group is assigned to the control group.These subjects are not exposed to the independent variable—they receive no special attention. The researchers then measure both groups for the dependent variable. For example, if a neuroscientist wanted to conduct an experiment on whether listening to classical music affects performance on a math exam, he or she might have an experimental group listen to Mozart, Bach, or Chopin for an hour before taking a test. The control group would take the same test but would not listen to any music beforehand. In this example, exposure to classical music is the independent variable, and the quantifiable results of the math test are the dependent variable.

The Organ Detective
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Asch Conformity Experiment
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Daniel Hurst/Stock Connection Worldwide/Newscom
When looking at the relationship between violent video games and violent behaviors, researchers must account for many variables. What variables would you choose to test? image
To study the relationship between violent video game play and aggression, researchers took a longitudinal approach by examining the sustained violent video game play and aggressive behavior of 1,492 adolescents in grades 9 through 12 (Willoughby, Adachi, & Good, 2012). Their results showed a strong correlation between playing violent video games and being more likely to engage in, or approve of, violence. This body of literature represents another example of the importance of research methodology; the same researchers, in a separate study, found that the level of competitiveness in a video game, and not the violence itself, had the greatest influence on aggressive behavior (Adachi & Willoughby, 2011). More research on this topic may help differentiate between the effects of variables and avoid conclusions based on spurious relationships.
WORKING WITH EXISTING INFORMATION
Sociologists frequently work with existing information and data gathered by other researchers. Why would researchers choose to reinterpret existing data? Perhaps they want to do a secondary analysis of statistical data collected by an agency such as the U.S. Census Bureau, which makes its materials available to researchers studying issues ranging broadly from education to poverty to racial residential segregation. Or they may want to work with archival data to examine the cultural products—posters, films, pamphlets, and such—used by an authoritarian regime in a given period to legitimate its power or disseminated by a social movement like the civil rights movement to spread its message to the masses.
Statistical datainclude quantitative information obtained from government agencies, businesses, research studies, and other entities that collect data for their own or others’ use. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example, maintains a rich storehouse of information on a number of criminal justice social indicators, such as prison populations, incidents of crime, and criminal justice expenditures. Many other government agencies routinely conduct surveys of commerce, manufacturing, agriculture, labor, and housing. International organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank collect annual data on the health, education, population, and economies of nearly all countries in the world. Many businesses publish annual reports that yield basic statistical information about their financial performance.
Document analysisis the examination of written materials or cultural products: previous studies, newspaper reports, court records, campaign posters, digital reports, films, pamphlets, and other forms of text or images produced by individuals, government agencies, private organizations, and others.However, because such documents are not always compiled with accuracy in mind, good researchers exercise caution in using them. People who keep records are often aware that others will see the records and take pains to avoid including anything unflattering. The diaries and memoirs of politicians are good examples of documents that are invaluable sources of data but that must be interpreted with great caution. The expert researcher looks at such materials with a critical eye, double-checking with other sources for accuracy where possible.
This type of research may include historical research,which entails the analysis of historical documents.Often such research is comparative, examining historical events in several different countries for similarities and differences. Unlike historians, sociologists usually identify patterns common to different times and places; historians tend to focus on particular times and places and are less likely to draw broad generalizations from their research. An early master of the sociological approach to historical research was Max Weber (1919/1946, 1921/1979), who contributed to our understanding of—among many other things—the differences between religious traditions in the West and those in East Asia.
Content analysisis the systematic examination of forms of documented communication. A researcher can take a content analysis approach by coding and analyzing patterns in cultural products like music, laws, tweets, blogs, and works of art. An exciting aspect of social science research is that your object of curiosity can become a research question. In 2009, sociologists conducted a content analysis of 403 gangsta rap songs to assess whether rap’s reputation of being misogynistic (hostile to women) was justified (Weitzer & Kubrin, 2009). The analysis found that the songs did contain significant misogynistic undertones, reflecting larger stereotypical views of male and female characteristics.
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TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
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DOES TECHNOLOGY AFFECT STUDYING?

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© Sam Bloomberg-Rissman/Blend Images/Corbis
Has technology helped or hindered your studying in college? Does it mostly offer research help—or additional distractions? image
In 2011, as it has every year since 2000, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) surveyed about 416,000 U.S. students at 673 institutions of higher education, asking about student relationships with faculty, note taking and study habits, and hours spent studying. One of the 2011 findings, consistent with the results of other recent surveys, was that students were spending far fewer hours studying than did their counterparts in previous decades. If in 1961 the average student reported studying about 24 hours per week, by 2011 the average student reported about 14 hours of study time (Babcock & Marks, 2010; NSSE, 2012). Within this figure are variations by major, ranging from about 24 hours per week for architecture majors to 10 for speech majors. Sociology majors reported studying an average of 13.8 hours per week (de Vise, 2012).
This study presents a number of interesting research questions, few of which are answered by the NSSE, which collected quantitative data but did not analyze the results. What factors might be behind the precipitous decline in self-reported hours spent studying?
Some existing hypotheses implicate modern technology for at least two reasons. First, it has been suggested that students study less because they are spending substantial time using social media such as Facebook. One pilot study at Ohio State University concluded that students who used Facebook had poorer grades than those who did not (Karpinski & Duberstein, 2009). These data suggest that another study could profitably look for correlations between social media use and study time.
Second, students may be reporting less study time because technology has cut the hours of work needed for some tasks. While preparing a research paper in the past may have demanded hours in the library stacks or in pursuit of an expert to interview, today an online search engine can bring up a wealth of data earlier generations could not have imagined. Far fewer students consult research librarians or use library databases today. Notably, however, a recent study suggests that the quality of data students have the skills to find in their searches is mixed and often low (Kolowich, 2011).
Technology is only one possible factor in the decline in the time U.S. students spend studying. Two economists, for instance, suggest that studying time has decreased as achievement standards have fallen (Babcock & Marks, 2010). But there is no denying that one of the most dramatic differences between the 1960s and today is the proliferation of technology, which suggests that an explanatory relationship may exist.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageImagine that your final paper for this semester involves answering the research question, “What is the impact of technology on studying and learning?” How would you go about answering this question? How would you collect data for your project?
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PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH
While sociologists usually try to avoid having an impact on the people they study, one research method is employed specifically to foster change. Participatory researchsupports an organization or community trying to improve its situation when it lacks the necessary economic or political power to do so by itself. The researcher fully participates by training the members to conduct research on their own while working with them to enhance their power (Freire, 1972; Park, 1993; Whyte, 1991). Such research might be part of, for instance, empowering a community to act against the threat of HIV/AIDS, as has been done in places like San Francisco and Nairobi, Kenya. Participatory research is an effective way of conducting an empirical study while also furthering a community or organizational goal that will benefit from the results of the study.
DOING SOCIOLOGY: A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO RESEARCH
Sociological research seldom follows a formula that indicates exactly how to proceed. Sociologists often have to feel their way as they go, responding to the challenges that arise during research and adapting new methods to fit the circumstances. Thus, the stages of research can vary even when sociologists agree about the basic sequence. At the same time, for student sociologists, it is useful to understand the key building blocks of good sociological research. As you read through the following descriptions of the stages, think about a topic of interest to you and how you might use that as the basis for an original research project.
FRAME YOUR RESEARCH QUESTION
“Good research,” Thomas Dewey observed, “scratches where it itches.” Sociological research begins with the formulation of a question or questions to be answered. Society offers an endless spectrum of compelling issues to study: Does exposure to violent video games affect the probability of aggressive behavior in adolescents? Does religious faith affect voting behavior? Is family income a good predictor of performance on standardized college entrance tests such as the SAT? Beyond the descriptive aspects of social phenomena, sociologists are also interested in howthey can explain relationships between the variables they examine.
Formulating a research question precisely and carefully is one of the most important steps toward ensuring a successful research project. Research questions come from many sources. Some arise from problems that form the foundation of sociology, including an interest in socioeconomic inequalities and their causes and effects, or the desire to understand how power is exercised in social relationships. Sociologists are also mindful that solid empirical data are important to public policies on issues of concern such as poverty, occupational mobility, and domestic violence.

imageFIGURE 2.6 Sociological Research Formula
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Keep in mind that you also need to define your terms. Recall our discussion of operationalizing concepts. For example, if you are studying middle school bullying, you need to make explicit your definition of bullying and how that will be measured. The same holds true if you are studying a topic such as illiteracy or aggressive behavior.
REVIEW EXISTING KNOWLEDGE
Once you identify the question you want to ask, you need to conduct a review of the existing literature on your topic. The literature may include published studies, unpublished papers, books, dissertations, government documents, newspapers and other periodicals, and, increasingly, data disseminated on the Internet. The key focus of the literature review, however, is usually published and peer-reviewed research studies. Your purpose in conducting the literature review is to learn about studies that have already been done on your topic of interest so that you can set your research in the context of existing studies. You will also use the literature review to highlight how your research will contribute to this body of knowledge.

Unobtrusive Research in Criminal Justice
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Ethnography in Context
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Participatory Research Methods in Skid Row Los Angeles
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SELECT THE APPROPRIATE METHOD
Now you are ready to think about how your research question can best be answered. Which of the research methods described earlier (1) will give the best results for the project and (2) is most feasible for your research circumstances, experience, and budget?
If you wish to obtain basic information from a relatively large population in a short period of time, then a survey is the best method to use. If you want to obtain detailed information about a smaller group of people, then interviews might be most beneficial. Participant observation and detached observation are ideal research methods for verifying data obtained through interviews, or, for the latter, when the presence of a researcher might alter the research results. Document analysis and historical research are good choices for projects focused on inaccessible subjects and historical sociology. Remember, sociological researchers often use multiple methods.
WEIGH THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS
Research conducted on other human beings—as much of sociological research is—poses certain ethical problems. An outpouring of outrage after the discovery of gruesome experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II prompted the adoption of the Nuremberg Code, a collection of ethical research guidelines developed to help prevent such atrocities from ever happening again (Table 2.5). In addition to these basic guidelines, scientific societies throughout the world have adopted their own codes of ethics to safeguard against the misuse and abuse of human subjects.
Before you begin your research, it is important that you familiarize yourself with the American Sociological Association’s Code of Ethics (www.asanet.org/about/ethics.cfm), as well as the standards of your school, and carefully follow both. Ask yourself whether your research will cause the subjects any emotional or physical harm. How will you guarantee their anonymity? Does the research violate any of your own ethical principles?
Most universities and research institutes require researchers to complete particular forms before undertaking experiments using human subjects, describing the research methods to be used and the groups of subjects who will take part. Depending on the type of research, a researcher may need to obtain written agreement from the subjects for their participation. Today, a study like that conducted by Philip Zimbardo in the 1970s at Stanford University (described in the Private Lives, Public Issuesbox) would be unlikely to be approved because of the stress put on the experiment’s subjects in the course of the research. Approval of research involving human subjects is granted with an eye to both fostering good research and protecting the interests of those partaking in the study.

imageTABLE 2.5 The Nuremberg Code
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SOURCE: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

COLLECT AND ANALYZE THE DATA
Collecting data is the heart of research. It is time-consuming but exciting. During this phase, you will gather the information that will allow you to make a contribution to the sociological understanding of your topic. If your data set is qualitative—for example, open-ended responses to interview questions or observations of people—you will proceed by carefully reviewing and organizing your field notes, documents, and other sources of information. If your data set is quantitative—for example, completed closed-ended surveys—you will proceed by entering data into spreadsheets, comparing results, and analyzing your findings using statistical software.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Click to Show

Facebook’s Newsfeed Study
Click to Show
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Galerie Bilderwelt/Contributor/Getty Images
During the Nuremberg Trials, which brought key figures of the Nazi Party of Germany to justice, the practices of some Nazi medical personnel were found to be unethical and even criminal. The Nuremberg Code, which emerged from these trials, established principles for any type of human experimentation. image
Your analysis should offer answers to the research questions with which you began the study. Be mindful in interpreting your data and avoid conclusions that are speculative or not warranted by the actual research results. Do your data support or contradict your initial hypothesis? Or are they simply inconclusive? Report allof your results. Do your findings have implications for larger theories in the discipline? Do they suggest the need for further study of another dimension of the issue at hand? Good research need not have results that unequivocally support your hypothesis. A finding that refutes the hypothesis can be instructive as well.
SHARE THE RESULTS
However fascinating your research may be to you, its benefits are amplified when you take advantage of opportunities to share it with others. You can share your findings with the sociological community by publishing the results in academic journals. Before submitting research for publication, you must learn which journals cover your topic areas and review those journals’ standards for publication. Some colleges and universities sponsor undergraduate journals that offer opportunities for students to publish original research.
Other outlets for publication include books, popular magazines, newspapers, video documentaries, and websites. Another way to communicate your findings is to give a presentation at a professional meeting. Many professional meetings are held each year; at least one will offer a panel suited to your topic. In some cases, high-quality undergraduate papers are selected for presentation. If your paper is one, relevant experts at the meeting will likely help you interpret your findings further.
SOCIOLOGY AND YOU: WHY LEARN TO DO SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH?
The news media provide us with an immense amount of round-the-clock information. Some of it is very good; some of it is misleading. Reported “facts” may come from sources that have agendas or are motivated by self-interest, such as political interest groups, lobbying groups, media outlets, and even government agencies. Perhaps the most problematic are “scientific” findings that are agenda driven, not scientifically unbiased. In particular because we live in a time of information saturation, it is important that we learn to be critical consumers of information and to ask questions about the quality of the data presented to us. Carefully gathered and precise data are important not only as sources of information but also as the basis of informed decision making on the part of elected officials and others in positions of power.
Because you now understand how valid and reliable data are gathered, you can better question the veracity and reliability of others’ claims. For example, when a pollster announces that 80% of the “American people” favor Joe Conman for Congress, you can ask, “What was the size of the sample? How representative is it of the population? How was the survey questionnaire prepared? Exactly what questions were asked?” If it turns out that the data are based on the responses of 25 residents of a gated Colorado community or that a random sample was used but the survey included leading questions, you know the results do not give an accurate picture.
Similarly, your grasp of the research process allows you to have greater confidence in research that was conducted properly. You should put more stock in the results of a nationwide Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of college students’ drug use or safe-sex choices that used carefully prepared questionnaires tested for their validity and reliability and less stock in data gathered by a reporter untrained in scientific methods who interviewed a small, nonrandom sample of students on a single college campus.
You have also taken the first step in learning how to gather and evaluate data yourself. Realizing the value of theories that can be tested and proven false if they are wrong is the first step in developing your own theories and hypotheses. By using the concepts, processes, and definitions introduced in this chapter, you can conduct research that is valid, appropriate, and even publishable.
In short, these research tools will help you be a more critical consumer of information and enhance your understanding of the social world around you. Other benefits of learning sociology will become apparent throughout the following chapters as you discover how the research process is applied to cultures, societies, and the institutions that shape your life.
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PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ISSUES
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ZIMBARDO’S EXPERIMENT: THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE
SOCIAL ROLE

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Stanford University archives
Despite questions about the ethics of Philip Zimbardo’s experiment, sociologists still study his work. Is it wrong to use research data gathered by means we now consider unethical? Do the results of research ever justify subjecting human beings to physical or psychological discomfort, invasion of privacy, or deception?
Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo (1974; Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973) wanted to investigate how role expectations shape behavior. He was intrigued by the possibility that the frequently observed cruelty of prison guards was a consequence of the institutional setting and role, not the guards’ personalities.
In an experiment that has since become well known, Zimbardo converted the basement of a Stanford University building into a makeshift prison. A newspaper ad seeking young men to take part in the experiment for pay drew 70 subject candidates, who were given a battery of physical and psychological tests to assess their emotional stability and maturity. The most mature 24 were selected for the experiment and randomly assigned to roles as “guards” or “prisoners.” Those assigned to be prisoners were “arrested,” handcuffed, and taken to the makeshift prison by the Palo Alto police. The behavior of the guards and the prisoners was filmed. Within a week, the prison setting took on many of the characteristics of actual prisons. The guards were often aggressive and seemed to take pleasure in being cruel. The prisoners began planning escapes and expressed hostility and bitterness toward the guards.
The subjects in the experiment so identified with their respective roles that many of them displayed signs of depression and anxiety. As a result, some were released early, and the experiment was canceled before the first week was over. Since the participants had all been screened for psychological and physical problems, Zimbardo concluded that the results could not be attributed to their personalities. Instead, the prison setting itself (the independent variable) appeared to be at the root of the guards’ brutal behavior and the prisoners’ hostility and rebelliousness (the dependent variable). Zimbardo’s research shows how profoundly private lives are shaped by the behavioral expectations of the roles we occupy in social institutions.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageZimbardo’s experiment could not be repeated today, as it would violate guidelines for ethical research with human subjects. How might a researcher design an ethical experiment to test the question of the circumstances under which apparently “normal” individuals will engage in violent or cruel acts?
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WHAT CAN I DO WITH A
SOCIOLOGY DEGREE?
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image

CAREER DEVELOPMENT: GETTING STARTED AND ASSESSING YOUR INTERESTS, VALUES, AND SKILLS
The skills and knowledge of career development and your job search are learned, practiced, and mastered over time. You will learn about yourself, make career decisions, manage workplace expectations, and pursue new opportunities throughout your professional life. Your career success starts with self-reflection, exploration, the effective implementation of career and job search action plans, and a personal and professional commitment to your career.The basic activities linked to these processes are shown in the career development wheel.
In this chapter, we focus on your assessment of career interests and preferences and your exploration of career and job options.
Assessment of Individual Career Interests and Preferences
Self-knowledge is an important element of career assessment and development. Learning about your career identity—the values, aspirations, interests, talents, skills, and preferences related to careers—is fundamental to your career success.
Careful self-assessment will help you determine what you do well and enjoy, what skills and talents you possess, how you prefer to work, what interests you actively pursue, what values drive your choices, and where your strengths and weaknesses lie. By matching your characteristics to careers and occupations, you will establish a basis for identifying your career options and a guide to further research and exploration.
Assessments may be completed individually, online, in a group setting, and/or with a career professional. Assessments often include information linking your career interests to potential academic majors. You may want to access the following online assessment resourcesto research your career identity:

• www.jobhuntersbible.com(What Color Is Your Parachute?)
• www.focuscareer.com(Focus 2OnlineCareer Planning System)
• www.humanesources.com/products /program/do-what-you-are(Do What You Are)
• www.careerinfonet.org/occupations(CareerOneStop)
THINK ABOUT CAREERS
imageConsider the components of a career identity noted above. What characteristics of your career identity can you identify at this point? How will you begin to establish the key aspects of your career identity?

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SUMMARY

• Unlike commonsense beliefs, sociological understanding puts our biases, assumptions, and conclusions to the test.
• As a science, sociology combines logically constructed theory and systematic observation in order to explain human social relations.
• Inductive reasoninggeneralizes from specific observations; deductive reasoningconsists of logically deducing the empirical implications of a particular theory or set of ideas.
• A good theory is logically consistent, testable, and valid. The principle of falsificationholds that if theories are to be scientific, they must be formulated in such a way that they can be disproved if wrong.
• Sociological conceptsmust be operationally defined to yield measurable or observable variables. Often, sociologists operationally define variables so they can measure these in quantifiable values and assess validityand reliability, to eliminate biasin their research.
• Quantitative analysis permits us to measure correlations between variables and identify causal relationships. Researchers must be careful not to infer causation from correlation.
• Qualitative analysis is often better suited than quantitative researchto producing a deep understanding of how the people being studied view the social world. On the other hand, it is sometimes difficult to measure the reliability and validity of qualitative research.
• Sociologists seek objectivitywhen conducting their research. One way to help ensure objectivity is through the replicationof research.
• Research strategies are carefully thought-out plans that guide the gathering of information about the social world. They also suggest the choice of appropriate research methods.
• Research methods in sociology include surveyresearch (which often relies on random sampling), fieldwork(including participant observation and detached observation), experiments, working with existing information, and participatory research.
• Sociological research typically follows seven steps: framing the research question, reviewing the existing knowledge, selecting appropriate methods, weighing the ethical implications of the research, collecting data, analyzing data, and sharing the results.
• To be ethical, researchers must be sure their research protects the privacy of subjects and does not cause them unwarranted stress. Scientific societies throughout the world have adopted codes of ethics to safeguard against the misuse and abuse of human subjects.
KEY TERMS
scientific method, 31
deductive reasoning, 31
hypotheses, 31
inductive reasoning, 31
quantitative research, 32
qualitative research, 32
scientific theories, 33
concepts, 34
operational definition, 34
variable, 34
quantitative variables, 34
qualitative variables, 34
correlation, 34
causal relationship, 35
spurious relationship, 35
negative correlation, 36
principle of falsification, 36
falsifiability, 36
validity, 37
reliability, 37
bias, 37
objectivity, 39
value neutrality, 39
replication, 39
research methods, 39
survey, 40
sample, 40
population, 40
random sampling, 41
fieldwork, 41
interview, 42
leading questions, 42
experiments, 42
independent or experimental variables, 42
dependent variables, 42
statistical data, 43
document analysis, 43
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Think about a topic of contemporary relevance in which you may be interested (for example, poverty, juvenile delinquency, teen births, or racial neighborhood segregation). Using what you learned in this chapter, create a simple research question about the topic. Match your research question to an appropriate research method. Share your ideas with classmates.
2. What is the difference between quantitative and qualitative research? Give an example of each from the chapter. In what kinds of cases might one choose one or the other research method in order to effectively address an issue of interest?
3. Sociologists often use interviews and surveys as methods for collecting data. What are potential problems with these methods of which researchers need to be aware? What steps can researchers take to ensure that the data they are collecting are of good quality?
4. Imagine that your school has recently documented a dramatic rise in plagiarism reported by teachers. Your sociology class has been invited to study this issue. Consider what you learned in this chapter about survey research and design a project to assess the problem.
5. In this chapter, you learned about the issue of ethics in research and read about the Zimbardo prison experiment. How should knowledge collected under unethical conditions (whether it is sociological, medical, psychological, or other scientific knowledge) be treated? Should it be used just like data collected under ethically rigorous conditions?

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A personalized approach to help you accomplish your coursework goals in an easy-to-use learning environment.

Chapter 3

CULTURE AND
MASS MEDIA

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RICHARD NOWITZ/National Geographic Creative

Media Library
CHAPTER 3Media Library

AUDIO video

Ideas and Customs
Language and Cultural Destruction
VIDEO video

The ramifications of a vast material culture on the lives of ordinary Americans.
The Harlem Shake
TV Violence
Exporting Culture
CQ RESEARCHER video

The Media Violence Debate in America
PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE video

Commercializing Counterculture
Race and the Culture of Excellence
JOURNAL video

Effects of an “appearance culture” on high school girls
Cultural Control
Cultural Transmission

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IN THIS CHAPTER
Culture: Concepts and Applications
Culture and Language
Culture and Mass Media
Culture, Class, and Inequality
Culture and Globalization
Why Study Culture and Mass Media Through a Sociological Lens?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

1. Is the decision to cheat—whether in school, in a relationship, or otherwise—solely an individual choice, or should it be understood in the context of the culture in which a person lives?
2. What is the relationship between popular culture and violence? Do cultural representations of violence in films, television, music, and video games have an effect on attitudes and behaviors?
3. Does a shared “global culture” exist? If so, what are its components? How is it spread?
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ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
Peter Macdiarmid/Staff/Getty Images

In October 2013, more than 16 million viewers tuned in to watch the first episode of season 4 of the television program The Walking Dead.The program follows a small band of human survivors trying to evade flesh-eating zombies who have taken over. The main character, Rick, and his compatriots fight for survival against the fearsome “walkers,” who relentlessly hunt human and beast. The undead have not only overrun the planet on this TV show, however; they also appear to have made some headway in taking over U.S. popular culture in recent years. Along with following the adventures of The Walking Dead,consumers of horror can read zombie books (such as World War Z,which was also made into a movie, and The Zombie Survival Guide), play zombie video games (for instance, Resident Eviland House of the Dead), and watch zombie films (like the popular I Am Legendand 28 Days Later). In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even used the public interest in zombies to launch a disaster preparedness campaign, offering the U.S. public tips for surviving an onslaught of the undead. According to Dr. Ali Khan, the architect of the campaign “If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack” (www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies.htm).
Why have zombies become a cultural phenomenon in the 21st-century United States? Some writers suggest that films, television, and other cultural forms are a mirror of social anxieties: As sociologist Robert Wuthnow (1989) has written, “If cultural products do not articulate closely enough with their social settings, they are likely to be regarded… as irrelevant, unrealistic, artificial, and overly abstract” (p. 3). In the post–World War II period of the 1940s and 1950s, Americans were dogged by fears of technology run amok (particularly nuclear fears after the first use of an atomic weapon) and the threat of communist infiltration or invasion (Booker, 2001). Popular science fiction films like The Day the Earth Stood Still(1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956) captured paranoia about alien beings who possessed powerful weapons and could arrive at any moment to destroy society and the state. The fear of communism and the concern about proliferation of destructive technology were embodied in otherworldly creatures who could enter a community undetected and crush resistance with deadly force.
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Today, some writers suggest that the cultural proliferation of zombies is a window into contemporary fears. Kyle W. Bishop (2010) argues that the rise of zombie popularity after traumatic societal events like the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, the disease fears generated by deadly outbreaks of viruses like SARS, and even Hurricane Katrina is not a coincidence. Rather, zombie stories resonate with a public that is anxious about the threat of societal calamity, whether natural or human-made. Zombies evoke, Bishop (2009) suggests, a fear response, though the object of fear is not necessarily the zombie itself: “Because the aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters so closely resemble the scenarios of zombie cinema… [these films have] all the more power to shock and terrify a population that has become otherwise jaded by more traditional horror films” (p. 18).
In a recent entertainment publication article on The Walking Dead,the highest-rated cable program on television, a journalist observes: “There’s a fascinating question critics should be answering: What is it about a show that is so relentlessly bleak that allows it to still resonate at such unexpected scale? What does it say about America?… it’s the polar opposite of the escapist fare that typically serves as popular entertainment, a dystopian nightmare if there ever was one” (Wallenstein, 2014). If critics don’t have an answer, then sociologists might: Cultural products are more than just entertainment—they are a mirror of society. Popular culture in the form of films or television may capture our utopian dreams, but it is also a net that catches and reflects pervasive societal fears and anxieties. image

The ramifications of a vast material culture on the lives of ordinary Americans.
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In this chapter, we will consider the multitude of functions of both culture and media, which constitute a key vehicle of culture, and we will seek to understand how culture both constructs and reflects society in the United States and around the globe. We begin our discussion with an examination of the basic concept of culture, taking a look at material and nonmaterial culture as well as ideal and real culture in the United States. We then explore contemporary issues of language and its social functions in a changing world. The chapter also addresses issues of culture and media, asking how media messages may reflect and affect behaviors and attitudes. We then turn to the topic of culture and class and the sociological question of whether culture and taste are linked to class identity and social reproduction. Finally, we examine the evolving relationship between global and local cultures, in particular the influence of U.S. mass media on the world.
CULTURE: CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS
What is culture?The word culturemight evoke images of song, dance, and literature—the beat of Latin salsa, Polish folk dances performed by girls with red ribbons braided into their hair, or the latest in a popular series of fantasy novels. It might remind you of a dish from the Old Country made by a beloved grandmother, or a spicy Indian meal you ate with friends from New Delhi.
Culture, from a sociological perspective, is composed of the beliefs, norms, behaviors, and products common to the members of a particular group.Culture is integral to our social experience of the world. It offers diversion and entertainment, but it also helps form our identities and gives meaning to the artifacts and experiences of our lives. Culture shapes and permeates material objects like folk costumes, rituals like nuptial and burial ceremonies, and language as expressed in conversation, poetry, stories, and music. As social beings we make culture, but culture also makes us, in ways that are both apparent and subtle.
MATERIAL AND NONMATERIAL CULTURE
Every culture has both material and nonmaterial aspects. We can broadly define material cultureas the physical objects created, embraced, or consumed by society that help shape people’s lives.Material culture includes television programs, computer games, software, and other artifacts of human creation. It also emerges from the physical environment inhabited by the community. For example, in the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, including Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, amber—a substance created when the resin of fallen seaside pines is hardened and smoothed by decades or centuries in the salty waters—is an important part of local cultures. It is valued both for its decorative properties in jewelry and for its therapeutic properties; it is said to relieve pain. Amber has become a part of the material culture in these countries rather than elsewhere because it is a product of the physical environment in which these communities dwell.
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New York Daily News Archive/Contributor/Getty Images
Many people find flag burning offensive because the flag, an object of material culture, is a symbol of the country and its ideals. The Supreme Court, however, has held in a series of cases that symbolic expression is protected by the First Amendment, which explicitly protects free speech. image
Material culture also includes the types of shelters that characterize a community. For instance, in seaside communities, homes are often built on stilts to protect against flooding. The materials used to construct homes have historically been those available in the immediate environment—wood, thatch, or mud, for instance—although the global trade in timber, marble and granite, and other components of modern housing has transformed the relationship between place and shelter in many countries.
Nonmaterial cultureis composed of the abstract creations of human cultures, including ideas about behavior and living.Nonmaterial culture encompasses aspects of the social experience, such as behavioral norms, values, language, family forms, and institutions. It also reflects the natural environment in which a culture has evolved.
While material culture is concrete and nonmaterial culture is abstract, the two are intertwined: Nonmaterial culture may attach particular meanings to the objects of material culture. For example, people will go to great lengths to protect an object of material culture such as a national flag, not because of what it is—imprinted cloth—but because of the nonmaterial culture it represents, including ideals about freedom and patriotic pride. In order to grasp the full extent of nonmaterial culture, you must first understand three of the sociological concepts that shape it: beliefs, norms,and values(Table 3.1).
BELIEFS We broadly define beliefsas particular ideas that people accept as true.We can believe based on faith, superstition, science, tradition, or experience. To paraphrase the words of sociologists W. I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas (1928), beliefs may be understood as real when they are real in their consequences. They need not be objectively true. For example, during the witch hunts in early colonial America, rituals of accusation, persecution, and execution could be sustained in communities such as Salem, Massachusetts, because there was a shared belief in the existence of witches and diabolical power. From 1692 through 1693, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft; of these, 20 were executed, 19 by hanging and 1 by being pressed to death between heavy stones. Beliefs, like other aspects of culture, are dynamic rather than static: When belief in the existence of witchcraft waned, so did the witch hunts. In 1711, a bill was passed that restored “the rights and good names” of those who had been accused, and in 1957, the state of Massachusetts issued a formal apology for the events of the past (Blumberg, 2007).
NORMS In any culture, there exists a set of ideas about what is right, just, and good, as well as what is wrong and unjust. Norms, as we noted in Chapter 1, are accepted social behaviors and beliefs,or the common rules of a culture that govern the behavior of people belonging to that culture.
Sociologist Robert Nisbet (1970) writes, “The moral order of society is a kind of tissue of ‘oughts’: negative ones which forbid certain actions and positive ones which [require certain] actions” (p. 226). We can think of norms as representing a set of “oughts” and “ought nots” that guide behavioral choices such as where to stand relative to others in an elevator, how long to hold someone’s gaze in conversation, how to conduct the rites of passage that mark different stages of life, and how to resolve disagreements or conflicts. Some norms are enshrined in legal statutes; others are inscribed in our psyches and consciences. Weddings bring together elements of both.

imageTABLE 3.1 Values, Norms, Folkways, Mores, Taboos, Laws, and Beliefs
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© GL Archive/Alamy
One folkway of the traditional U.S. wedding dates to the reign of Queen Victoria (1819–1901). In her 1840 wedding to the handsome Prince Albert, the “plain” Victoria wore a beautiful white gown. By the end of her life, the tradition was firmly in place, and the white gown had acquired new symbolism, representing purity and virginity (Ingraham, 1999). image
The wedding ceremony is a central ritual of adult life with powerful social, legal, and cultural implications. It is also significant economically: The term wedding industrial complex(Ingraham, 1999) has been used to describe a massive industry that in 2011, for instance, generated more than $53 billion in revenues. This comes as little surprise when we consider that in 2011, the estimated average amount spent on a wedding was just over $25,000 (Wedding Report, 2012). The wedding as a key cultural image and icon is cultivated in families, religions, and the media. Wedding images are used to sell products ranging from cosmetics to furniture, and weddings constitute an important theme in popular movies, including My Big Fat Greek Wedding(2002), Wedding Crashers(2005), Bridesmaids(2011), and The Big Wedding(2013). Popular television series such as The Officeand Sex and the Cityhave used weddings as narratives for highly anticipated season finales. Today, the reality program Say Yes to the Dressenthralls viewers with the drama of choosing a wedding gown and Four Weddingspits four brides against one another to pull off the “perfect wedding,” while Bridezillasfollows the adventures of brides behaving badly. Clearly, the wedding ritual is a powerful artifact of our culture. In light of this, a sociologist might ask, “What are the cultural components of the ritual of entering matrimony, the wedding ceremony?”
Sociologist William Graham Sumner (1906/1959) distinguished among several different kinds of norms, each of which can be applied to weddings. Folkwaysare fairly weak norms that are passed down from the past, the violation of which is generally not considered serious within a particular culture.A folkway that has become part of many U.S. wedding rituals is the “giving away” of the bride: The father of the bride symbolically gives his daughter to the groom, signaling a change in the woman’s identity from daughter to wife. Some couples today reject this ritual as patriarchal because it recalls earlier historical periods when a woman was treated as chattel given—literally—to her new husband by her previous keeper, her father.
Some modern couples are choosing to walk down the aisle together to signal an equality of roles and positions. While the sight of a couple going to the altar together might raise a few eyebrows among more traditional guests, this violation of the “normal” way of doing things does not constitute a serious cultural transgression and, because culture is dynamic, may in time become a folkway itself.
Mores(pronounced MOR-ays) are strongly held norms, the violation of which seriously offends the standards of acceptable conduct of most people within a particular culture.In a typical American wedding, the person conducting the ceremony plays an important role in directing the events, and the parties enacting the ritual are expected to respond in conventional ways. For instance, when the officiant asks the guests whether anyone objects to the union, the convention is for no one to object. When an objector surfaces (more often in television programs and films than in real life), the response of the guests is shock and dismay: The ritual has been disrupted and the scene violated.
Taboosare powerful mores, the violation of which is considered serious and even unthinkable within a particular culture.The label of taboo is commonly reserved for behavior that is extremely offensive: Incest, for example, is a nearly universal taboo. There may not be any taboos associated with the wedding ritual itself in the United States, but there are some relating to marital relationships. For instance, while in some U.S. states it is not illegal to marry a first cousin, in most modern communities doing so violates a basic taboo against intermarriage in families.
Lawsare codified norms or rules of behavior.Laws formalize and institutionalize society’s norms. There are laws that govern marriage in general: For instance, in some U.S. states, marriage is legally open only to heterosexual adults who are not already married to other people. As of March 2014, 17 states (Hawaii, Washington, California, New Mexico, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) and the District of Columbia were permitting same-sex marriage, 10 states recognized some type of civil union or domestic partnership, and 33 states explicitly limited marriage to opposite-sex couples (Ahuja, Barnes, Chow, & Rivero, 2014).

Effects of an “appearance culture” on high school girls
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© Christie’s Images/Corbis
Do you think that being alone is stigmatized in our connected and busy world? Could it be considered a violation of U.S. cultural norms? image

Marriage equality groups and their supporters continue to fight prohibitions against same-sex marriage. A poll conducted in 2011 by the Pew Research Center (2012a) found that 47% of U.S. adults agreed same-sex marriage should be recognized as legally valid—43% disagreed. Just 3 years earlier, in a similar poll, 39% of adults agreed while 51% disagreed. This shift in poll results suggests that norms codified in laws are dynamic, too, and are not necessarily shared by all.
VALUES Like norms, values are components of nonmaterial culture in every society. Valuesare the abstract and general standards in society that define ideal principles, like those governing notions of right and wrong.Sets of values attach to the institutions of society at multiple levels. You may have heard about national or patriotic values, community values, and family values. These can all coexist harmoniously within a single society. Because we use values to legitimate and justify our behavior as members of a country or community, or as individuals, we tend to staunchly defend the values we embrace (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961).
Is there a specific set of values we can define as “American”? According to a classic study by Robin M. Williams Jr. (1970), “American values” include personal achievement, hard work, material comfort, and individuality. U.S. adults value science and technology, efficiency and practicality, morality and humanitarianism, equality, and “the American way of life.” A joint 1998 study on American values by Harvard University, the Washington Post,and the Kaiser Family Foundation identified similar points—hard work, self-reliance, tolerance, and the embrace of equal rights—though respondents also voiced important disagreements about such issues as the ideal size of the U.S. government and the degree to which the government should promote economic equality (Kaiser Family Foundation, 1998).
A 2010 study found an interesting split between those who agreed they would like to see “the federal government provide more services, even if it costs more in taxes” (49%) and those who agreed they would like to see “the federal government cost less in taxes,” even if it meant the provision of fewer services (47%). In 2010, the proportion of survey respondents in favor of more services (even with higher taxes) rose by 10 percentage points (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010b). What we value, then, varies across time and communities and may even be contradictory. Do these differences matter? Can we still speak of a unified body of “American values”? What do you think?
Structural functionalists including Talcott Parsons (1951) have proposed that values play a critical role in the social integration of a society. However, values do not play this role by themselves. They are abstract—vessels into which any generation or era pours its meanings in a process that can be both dynamic and contentious. For instance, equality is a value that has been strongly supported in the United States since the country’s founding. The pursuit of equality was a powerful force in the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence declares that “all men are created equal” (Wood, 1993). However, equality has been defined quite differently across various eras of U.S. history. In the first half of the country’s existence, “equality” did not include women or African Americans, who were by law excluded from its benefits. Over the course of the 20th century, equality became moreequal, as the rights of all citizens of the United States, regardless of race, gender, or class status, were formally recognized as equal before the law.
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Ursula, a character from the Disney film The Little Mermaid,is one of many children’s story characters who combine an unattractive appearance with a flawed personality. How do we reconcile the idea that “beauty is only skin deep” with messages of popular culture? image
IDEAL AND REAL CULTURE IN U.S. SOCIETY
Beauty is only skin deep. Don’t judge a book by its cover. All that glitters is not gold.These bits of common wisdom are part of U.S. culture. We rarely recall where we first heard them; we simply know them, because they are part of the cultural framework of our lives. These three statements represent a commitment of sorts that society will value our inner qualities more than our outward appearances. They are also examples of ideal culture, the values, norms, and behaviors that people in a given society profess to embrace,even though the actions of the society may often contradict them.
Real cultureconsists of the values, norms, and behaviors that people in a given society actually embrace and exhibit.In the United States, for instance, empirical research shows that conventional attractiveness offers consistent advantages (Hamermesh, 2011). From childhood onward, the stories our parents, teachers, and the media tell us seem to sell the importance of beauty. Stories such as Snow White, Cinderella,and Sleeping Beautyconnect beauty with morality and goodness, and unattractiveness with malice, jealousy, and other negative traits. The link between unattractive (or unconventional) appearance and unattractive behavior is unmistakable, especially in female figures. Think of other characters many American children are exposed to early in life, such as nasty Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians,the dastardly Queen of Hearts of Alice in Wonderland,and the angry octopod Ursula in The Little Mermaid.
On television, another medium that disseminates important cultural stories, physical beauty and social status are powerfully linked. Overweight or average-looking characters populate shows featuring working- or lower-middle-class people, for example Family Guy, The Office,and New Girl.Programs such as Modern Familyand Mike & Mollyoffer leading characters who are pleasant and attractive—and often overweight. In the latter, for instance, Mike is a police officer and Molly, for the first three seasons, is an elementary school teacher (she later becomes an author). They have not broken the glass ceiling of high-status jobs that remain largely reserved for their thinner prime-time peers. Characters such as those we encounter on Scandal, Mad Men, House of Cards,and Sex and the Cityare almost invariably svelte and stylish—and occupy higher rungs on the status hierarchy.
There is a clear cultural inconsistency, a contradiction between the goals of ideal culture and the practices of real culture,in our society’s treatment of conventional attractiveness. Do we “judge a book by its cover”? Studies suggest this is precisely what many of us do in a variety of social settings:

• In the workplace, conventionally attractive job applicants appear to have an advantage in securing jobs (Hamermesh, 2011; Marlowe, Schneider, & Nelson, 1996; Shahani-Denning, 2003; Tews, Stafford, & Zhu, 2009). A significant earnings penalty has been associated with shortness and unattractiveness (Harper, 2000).
• Women in one study who were an average of 65 pounds heavier than the norm of the study group earned about 7% less than their slimmer counterparts did, an effect equivalent to losing about one year of education or two years of experience. The link between obesity and a “pay penalty” has been confirmed by other studies (Harper, 2000; Lempert, 2007). Interestingly, some research has not found strong evidence that weight affects the wages of African American or Hispanic female workers (Cawley, 2001; DeBeaumont, 2009).
• In the courtroom, some defendants who do not meet conventional standards of attractiveness are disadvantaged (DeSantis & Kayson, 1997; Gunnell & Ceci, 2010; Taylor & Butcher, 2007). Mazzella and Feingold (1994) note that defendants charged with certain crimes, such as rape and robbery, benefit from being attractive. This is consistent with the “beautiful is good” hypothesis (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972), which attributes a tendency toward leniency to the belief that attractive people have more socially desirable characteristics. Ahola, Christianson, and Hellstrom (2009) suggest that female defendants in particular are advantaged by attractive appearance.
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Mike and Molly, Roseanne, and The Honeymoonersare examples of sitcoms that feature main characters who are working-class people who also happen to be overweight. The next time you’re flipping through the channels or watching a movie, take note of the relationship between socioeconomic status and appearance. image

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• Studies of college students have found that they are likely to perceive attractive people as more intelligent than unattractive people (Chia, Allred, Grossnickle, & Lee, 1998; Poteet, 2007). This bias has also been detected in students’ evaluations of their instructors: A pair of economists recently found that the independent influence of attractiveness gives some instructors an advantage on undergraduate teaching evaluations (Hamermesh & Parker, 2005).
Another example of cultural inconsistency can be seen in our purported commitment to the ideal that “honesty is the best policy.” We find an unambiguous embrace of honesty in the stories of our childhood. Think of Pinocchio: Were you warned as a child not to lie because it might cause your nose to grow? Did you ever promise a friend that you would not reveal his or her secret with a pinky swear and the words “Cross my heart and hope to die; stick a needle in my eye”? Yet most people do lie.
Why is this so? We may lie to protect or project a certain image of ourselves. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1959), a symbolic interactionist, called this misrepresentation.Goffman argued that all of us, as social actors, engage in this practice because we are concerned with “defining a situation”—whether it be a date or a job interview or a meeting with a professor or boss—in a manner favorable to ourselves. It is not uncommon for job seekers to pad their résumés, for instance, in order to leave the impression on potential employers that they are qualified or worthy. According to an overview of this issue posted on the website of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM; 2008), almost half of 3,100 hiring managers surveyed by CareerBuilder indicated that they had detected lying on a job candidate’s résumé. Common lies included misrepresentations of educational credentials, salary levels, and even criminal records. About 43% of hiring managers also said they spent less than a minute looking at a single résumé during the initial screening process, suggesting that some dishonesty probably goes unnoticed.
Studies also suggest that cheating and plagiarism are common among high school students (Table 3.2). In one study of 23,000 high school students, about half reported that they had cheated on a test in the past year. Just under a third also responded that they had used the Internet to plagiarize assigned work (Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics, 2012). Interestingly, a 2009 study suggests that about half of teens age 17 and younger believe cheating is necessary for success (Josephson Institute of Ethics, 2009).
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PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ISSUES
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MEDIA, MARKETS, AND THE CULTURE OF THINNESS
IN AMERICA

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This billboard in Hollywood, California, features excessively thin models. The models are selling clothing, but they are also sending a message to viewers about thinness and glamour. How significant is this message in U.S. culture? What are might be its consequences? image
Whether you are male or female, you may sometimes experience feelings of inadequacy as you leaf through magazines like Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vogue,and Maxim.You may get a sense that, in this media-constructed universe, your face, hair, body, and clothing do not fit the masculine or feminine ideal. You may wish that you had the “right look” or that you were thinner. You would not be alone.
One survey of college-age women found that 83% desired to lose weight. Among these, 44% of women of normal weight intentionally ate less than they wanted, and most of the women did not have healthy dieting habits (Malinauskas, Raedeke, Aeby, Smith, & Dallas, 2006). According to a Canadian study, chronic dieters’ sense of identity is often frail and reflects others’ perceptions of them (Polivy & Herman, 2007). Indeed, a recent study examining body weight perceptions among college students found that women with exaggerated body weight perceptions were more likely to engage in unhealthy weight management strategies and were more depressed than those women with accurate perceptions of their weight (Harring, Montgomery, & Hardin, 2011).
Using our sociological imagination, we can deduce that the weight concerns many people experience as personal troubles are in fact linked to public issues: Worrying about (and even obsessing over) weight is a widely shared phenomenon. Millions of women diet regularly, and some manifest extreme attention to weight in the form of eating disorders. By one estimate, fully 9 million people in the United States are afflicted with eating disorders over the courses of their lives (Hudson, Hiripi, Pope, & Kessler, 2007), most of them women. The National Institute of Mental Health (2010) has reported that “women are three times as likely to experience anorexia (0.9 percent of women vs. 0.3 percent of men) and bulimia (1.5 percent of women vs. 0.5 percent of men) during their life. They are also 75 percent more likely to have a binge eating disorder (3.5 percent of women vs. 2.0 percent of men).”
The diet industry in the United States is extremely profitable—by some estimates worth $60.9 billion a year (LaRosa, 2011). The fashion industry (among others) primarily employs models who are abnormally thin and whose images are airbrushed or digitally altered to “perfection.” Psychologist Sarah Grogan (2008) asserts that the dieting, fashion, cosmetic surgery, and advertising industries are fueled by the successful manipulation and oppression of women. That is, manufacturers and marketers create a beauty culture based on total but artificial perfection and then sell products to “help” women achieve a look that is unachievable.
As individuals, we experience the consequences of this artificially created ideal as a personal trouble—unhappiness about our appearance—but the deliberate construction and dissemination of an unattainable ideal for the purpose of generating profits is surely a public issue. Reflecting a conflict perspective, psychologist Sharlene Hesse-Biber (1997) has suggested that to understand the eating disorders and disordered eating so common among U.S. women, we ought to ask not “‘What can women do to meet the ideal?’ but ‘Who benefits from women’s excessive concern with thinness?’” (p. 32). This is the sociological imagination at work.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageHow would you summarize the key factors that explain the broad gap between ideal culture, which entreats us not to judge a book by its cover, and real culture, which pushes women and men to pursue unattainable physical perfection?
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imageTABLE 3.2 Ethical and Unethical Behavior Among High School Students in 2012 (in percentages)
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SOURCE: Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics. (2012). 2012 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth.

Why do you think there is such a big gap between what we say and what we do? Do you think most people are culturally inconsistent? What about you?
ETHNOCENTRISM
Much of the time, a community’s or society’s cultural norms, values, and practices are internalized to the point where they become part of the natural order. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) describes these internalized beliefs as doxic: To a member of a given community or cultural group, common norms and practices appear as a part of the social order—just the way things are.But the social organization of our lives is not natural, though it comes to appear that way. Instead, norms, values, and practices are socially constructed.That is, they are the products of decisions and directions chosen by groups and individuals (often, a conflict theorist would argue, those with the most power). And though all human societies share certain similarities, different societies construct different norms, values, and practices and then embrace them as “just the way things are.”
Because we tend to perceive our own culture as “natural” and “normal,” it emerges as the standard by which we tend to judge everything else. This is indicative of ethnocentrism, which, as noted in Chapter 1, is a worldview whereby we judge other cultures by the standards of our own.That which deviates from our own “normal” social order can appear exotic, even shocking. Other societies’ rituals of death, for example, can look astonishingly different from those to which we are accustomed. This description of an ancient burial practice from the North Caucasus provides an illustration:
Scythian-Sarmatian burials were horrible but spectacular. A royal would be buried in a kurgan[burial mound] alongside piles of gold, weapons, horses, and, Herodotus writes, “various members of his household: one of his concubines, his butler, his cook, his groom, his steward, and his chamberlain—all of them strangled.” A year later, 50 fine horses and 50 young men would be strangled, gutted, stuffed with chaff, sewn up, then impaled and stuck around the kurganto mount a ghoulish guard for their departed king. (Smith, 2001, pp. 33–34)
Let us interpret this historical fragment using two different cultural perspectives. From an etic perspective—that is, the perspective of the outside observer—the burial ritual looks bizarre and shockingly cruel. However, in order to understand it fully and avoid a potentially ethnocentric perspective, we need to call upon an emic perspective, the perspective of the insider,and ask, “What did people in this period believe about the royals? What did they believe about the departed and the experience of death itself? What did they believe about the utility of material riches in the afterlife and the rewards the afterlife would confer on the royals and those loyal to them?” Are there death rituals in the U.S. cultural repertoire that might appear exotic or strange to outsiders even though we see them as “normal”?
Putting aside the ethnocentric perspective allows us to embrace cultural relativism, a worldview whereby we understand the practices of another society sociologically, in terms of that society’s own norms and values and not our own.In this way we can come closer to an understanding of cultural beliefs and practices such as those that surround the end of life. Whether the body of the departed is viewed or hidden, buried or burned, feasted with or feasted for, danced around or sung about, a culturally relativist perspective allows the sociologist to conduct his or her examination of the roots of these practices most rigorously.
We may also call on cultural relativism to help us understand the rituals of another people, the Nacirema, described here by anthropologist Herbert Miner (1956):
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people’s time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people….

Ideas and Customs
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In the Tibetan sky burial, the body is left on a mountaintop exposed to the elements. This once-common practice of “giving alms to the birds” represented belief in rebirth and the idea that the body is just an unneeded empty shell. In Indonesia, mass cremations take place where bodies are placed in sarcophagi of various sizes with animal representations. In New Orleans, a casket is paraded through the street. Death and burial rituals are components of culture. image

The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in this society have several shrines in their houses….
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners…. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm. (pp. 503–504)
What looks strange here, and why? Did you already figure out that Naciremais Americanspelled backward? Miner invites his readers to see American rituals linked to the body and health not as natural but as part of a culture.Can you think of other norms or practices in the United States that we could view from this perspective? What about the all-American game of baseball, the high school graduation ceremony, the youth language of texting, or the cultural obsession with celebrities or automobiles?
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SUBCULTURES
When sociologists study culture, they do not presume that in any given country—or even community—there is a single culture. They may identify a dominant culture within any group, but significant cultural identities exist in addition to, or sometimes in opposition to, the dominant one. These are subcultures, cultures that exist together with a dominant culture but differ from it in some important respects.
Some subcultures, including ethnic subcultures, may embrace most of the values and norms of the dominant culture while simultaneously choosing to preserve the values, rituals, and languages of their (or their parents’ or grandparents’) cultures of origin. Members of ethnic subcultures such as Armenian Americans and Cuban Americans may follow political events in their heritage countries or prefer their children to marry within their groups. It is comfort in the subculture rather than rejection of the dominant culture that supports the vitality of many ethnic subcultures.
In a few cases, however, ethnic and other subcultures do reject the dominant culture surrounding them. The Amish choose to elevate tradition over modernity in areas such as transportation (many still use horse-drawn buggies), occupations (they rely on simple farming), and family life (women are seen as subordinate to men), and they lead a retreatistlifestyle in which their community is intentionally separated from the dominant culture.
Sociologists sometimes also use the term countercultureto designate subcultural groups whose norms, values, and practices deviate from those of the dominant culture. The hippies of the 1960s, for example, are commonly cited as a counterculture to mainstream “middle America,” though many of those who participated in hippie culture aged into fairly conventional middle-class lives.
Though there are exceptions, the vast majority of subcultures in the United States are permeated by the dominant culture, and the influence runs both ways. What, for example, is an “all-American” meal? Your answer may be a hamburger and fries. But what about other U.S. staples, such as Chinese takeout and Mexican burritos? Mainstream culture has also absorbed the influence of the United States’ multicultural heritage: Salsa music, created by Cuban and Puerto Rican American musicians in 1960s New York, is widely popular, and world music, a genre that reflects a range of influences from the African continent to Brazil, has a broad U.S. following. Some contemporary pop music, as performed by artists such as Lady Gaga, incorporates elements of British glam, U.S. hip-hop, and central European dance. The influence is apparent in sports as well: Soccer, now often the youth game of choice in U.S. suburbs, was popularized by players and fans from South America and Europe. Mixed martial arts, a combat sport popularized by the U.S. organization Ultimate Fighting Championship, incorporates elements of Greco-Roman wrestling, Japanese karate, Brazilian jujitsu, and muay Thai (from Thailand).
CULTURE AND LANGUAGE
Well over a billion people on our planet speak a dialect of Chinese as their first language. English and Spanish are the first languages of another 300 million people each. More than 182 million people speak Hindi, the primary official language of India, as a first language. In contrast, the world’s 3,500 least widely spoken languages share just 8.25 million speakers. Aka, another language of India, has between 1,000 and 2,000 native speakers. The Mexican language of Seri has between 650 and 1,000. Euchee, a Native American language, has four fluent speakers left. According to a recent article in National Geographic,“one language dies every 14 days,” and we can expect to lose about half the 7,000 languages spoken around the world by the end of the 21st century (Rymer, 2012). What is the significance of language loss for human culture?
Symbols, like the names we assign to the objects around us, are cultural representations of social realities,or, as we put it in Chapter 1, representations of things that are not immediately present to our senses. They may take the form of letters or words, images, rituals, or actions. When we use language, we imbue these symbols with meaning. Languageis a particular kind of symbolic system, composed of verbal, nonverbal, and sometimes written representations that are vehicles for conveying meaning.Language is thus a key vehicle of culture.
In the 1930s, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf developed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,which posits that our understandings and actions emerge from language—that is, the words and concepts of our own languages structure our perceptions of the social world. Language is also closely tied to cultural objects and practices. Consider that the Aka language has more than 26 words to describe beads, a rich vocabulary suited for a culture in which beads not only are decorative objects but also convey status and facilitate market transactions. In the Seri language, to inquire where someone is from you ask, “Where is your placenta buried?” This question references a historical cultural practice of burying a newborn’s afterbirth by covering it with sand, rocks, and ashes (Rymer, 2012).
As languages like Aka and Seri die out, usually replaced by dominant tongues like Spanish, English, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian, we lose the opportunity to more fully understand the historical and contemporary human experience and the natural world. For instance, the fact that some small languages have no words linked to specific numbers and instead use only relative designations like “few” or “many” opens the possibility that our number system may be a product of culture rather than of innate cognition as many believe. Or consider that the Seri culture, based in the Sonoran Desert, has names for animal species that describe behaviors that natural scientists are only beginning to document (Rymer, 2012). Language is a cultural vehicle that enables communication, illuminates beliefs and practices, roots a community in its environment, and contributes to the cultural richness of our world. Each language lost represents the erasure of cultural history, knowledge, and human diversity (Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, n.d.).

Commercializing Counterculture
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Language and Cultural Destruction
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imageFIGURE 3.1 Endangered Languages Worldwide
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SOURCE: Mason, Virginia W. National Geographic Stock. Reprinted with permission.

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION
Conflict theorists focus on disintegrative forces in society, while functionalists study integrative forces. Where social conflict theorists see culture as serving the interests of the elite, functionalists argue that shared values and norms maintain social bonds both between individuals and between people and society (Parsons & Smelser, 1956). By serving as a vehicle for the dissemination of these values and norms, culture functions to keep society stable and harmonious and gives people a sense of belonging in a complex, even alienating, social world (Smelser, 1962). To illustrate, consider the issue of language use in the United States.
In part as a response to the increased use of Spanish and other languages spoken by members of the nation’s large immigrant population, an English-only movement has arisen that supports the passage of legislation to make English the only official language of the United States and its government. Proponents argue that they want to “restore the great American melting pot,” though the movement has roots in the early 20th century, when President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans… and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.” Like today, Roosevelt’s era was characterized by high rates of immigration to the United States.
How would a functionalist analyze the English-only movement? He or she might highlight language as a vehicle of social integration and a form of social glue. Indeed, the English-only movement focuses on the function of language as an integrative mechanism. For example, the organization ProEnglish states on its website (www.proenglish.org), “We work through the courts and in the court of public opinion to defend English’s historic role as America’s common, unifying language, and to persuade lawmakers to adopt English as the official language at all levels of government.” The organization points out that 31 U.S. states have legislation declaring English the official language. From this perspective, the use of different primary languages in a single country is dysfunctional to the extent that it undermines the common socialization that comes from a shared language and culture.
A substantial proportion of U.S. residents support legislation making English the official language: a 2014 Huffington Post/YouGov survey found that 70% of respondents agreed with this position (Swanson, 2014). At the same time, most homes and residents are already active users of English, even if one-fifth also use another home language. Census data suggest that about 80% of U.S. residents 5 years of age and older use only English at home. Just under 20% use a language other than English. Of this 20%, the majority of respondents (about 56%) indicate that they speak English “very well,” though there is variation by age and primary language (Shin & Kominski, 2010).
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imageFIGURE 3.2 Percentage of U.S. Population Speaking a Language Other Than English at Home, 2010
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SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). “Population 5 Years and Older Who Spoke a Language Other Than English at Home by Hispanic Origin and Race: 2009.” American Community Survey Briefs.

Many people embrace cultural diversity and emphasize the value of multiculturalism, a commitment to respecting cultural differences rather than submerging them into a larger, dominant culture.Multiculturalism recognizes that the country is as likely to be enriched by its differences as it is to be divided by them. In a globalizing world, knowledge of other cultures and proficiency in languages other than English is important. In fact, a functionalist might also regard the U.S. Census data cited above as indicative of boththe common language that proponents of official English see as crucial to national unity and the cultural diversity that enriches the country and allows it to incorporate a variety of languages in its national and global political, cultural, and economic dealings—which is also positively functional for the country (Figure 3.2).
CULTURE AND MASS MEDIA
From the sociological perspective, we are all culturedbecause we all participate in and identify with a culture or cultures. In one conventional use of the term, however, some classes of people are considered more culturedthan others.We refer to people who attend the symphony, are knowledgeable about classic literature and fine wines, and possess a set of distinctive manners as cultured, and we often assume a value judgment in believing that being cultured is better than being uncultured.
We commonly distinguish between high culture and popular culture. High cultureconsists of music, theater, literature, and other cultural products that are held in particularly high esteem in society.It can also encompass a particular body of literature or a set of distinctive tastes. High culture is usually associated with the wealthier, more educated classes in society, but this association can shift over time. William Shakespeare’s plays were popular with the English masses when they were staged in open public theaters during his lifetime. Lobster was a meal of the poor in colonial America. This suggests that high culture’s association with educated and upper-income elites may be more a function of accessibility—the prohibitive cost of theater tickets and lobster meat today, for instance—than with “good taste” as such.
Popular cultureencompasses the entertainment, culinary, and athletic tastes shared by the masses.It is more accessible than high culture because it is widely available and less costly to consume.Popular culture can include music that gets broad airplay on the radio, television shows and characters that draw masses of viewers (for example, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Dance Moms, Orange Is the New Black), blockbuster films such as the Hunger Gamesor X-Menseries, Oprah’s Book Club, and spectator sports such as professional wrestling and baseball. Because it is an object of mass consumption, popular culture plays a key role in shaping values, attitudes, and consumption in society. It is an optimal topic of sociological study because, as we noted in our opening story about zombies, it not only shapesbut is shaped bysociety.
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GLOBAL ISSUES
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LANGUAGE, RESISTANCE, AND POWER IN NORTHERN IRELAND

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This chapter raises the problem of language loss—that is, the persistent and expanding extinction of small languages across our planet. In a few places, however, little-used languages are being revived for reasons that range from cultural to economic to political. In some instances, as in the case of Northern Ireland, language revival fits into all three categories.
The dominant language in the country of Northern Ireland has long been English, but there is a growing campaign to revive the Irish language, a tongue with little in common with English (consider the Irish word for independence: neamhspleáchas). The Irish language (also known as Irish Gaelic or Gaeilge) is a minority language in Northern Ireland. As of the country’s 2001 census, 167,487 people (10.4% of the population) had “some knowledge of Irish” (Zenker, 2010). The use of Irish in Northern Ireland had nearly died out by the middle of the 20th century, but today efforts are under way to bring the language back to education, commerce, and political life (“In the Trenches,” 2013).
Northern Ireland has a history of violent conflict with its British neighbor. Early in the 20th century, Ireland was shaken by conflict between the Irish Catholic majority and the Protestant minority, who supported British rule and feared the rule of the Catholic majority. In 1920, the British Parliament passed the Government of Ireland Act, which sought to pacify the parties with the separation of Ireland into a free state of southern counties. In 1922, the larger part of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom to become the independent Irish Free State (after 1937, this became the current state of Ireland). The six northeastern counties, together known as Northern Ireland, remained within the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland has since been the site of sporadic conflict between (mainly Catholic) nationalists and (mainly Protestant) unionists (Kennedy-Pipe, 1997).
The area remained largely peaceful until the late 1960s, when violence broke out in Londonderry and Belfast, foreshadowing three decades of armed conflict between British troops stationed in Northern Ireland and the rebellious Irish Republican Army (IRA), which represented primarily the interests of the Irish Catholic population. The violent conflicts over home versus British rule, which included terrorism committed by the IRA against British interests and populations, resulted in more than 3,000 deaths in this period (BBC, 2014b). A U.S.-brokered agreement helped to quell the violence in 1998, though sporadic problems remained. Nearly a decade later, in 2007, key parties to the conflict, including leaders of the Catholic and Protestant factions, took the reins of the country in a power-sharing agreement.
The interest in revival of the language dates back to the period of conflict, known locally as “the Troubles.” In the 1960s, a small number of language enthusiasts set up a tiny Irish-speaking community in a Belfast neighborhood. By the 1970s, with the conflict in progress, Irish nationalist prisoners being held by the British in Maze Prison also began learning Irish, calling out words between cells and scrawling their words on the prison walls (Feldman, 1991). The effort spread to neighborhoods where families of the prisoners resided and, according to author Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh (2013), it became part of an “anti-colonial struggle.”
Today, Irish nationalists, some of them veterans of the war against British rule, have taken up the mantle of Irish language revival, and the language is now the medium of instruction for about 5,000 schoolchildren in the country. While this is just a tiny fraction of the total school population, supporters of language revival occupy some key governmental positions in Northern Ireland, and there has been an effort to enact the Irish Language Act, which would establish new rights to the use of the language in official business, thus creating new job opportunities for fluent speakers (“In the Trenches,” 2013).
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Today Northern Ireland is peaceful. The Irish language, a part of the local heritage, is being revived. It remains to be seen, however, whether this will serve to draw together two communities with a long history of conflict (the country is about evenly split between the Catholic and Protestant communities) or will deepen the divide as the nationalist Catholic population embraces Irish while the pro-British Protestants resist.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageWhy does language matter to communities large and small? What does the Irish language revival movement share with movements like the official English movement in the United States, which supports a powerful and widespread language? How is it different?

Mass mediaare media of public communication intended to reach and influence a mass audience.The mass media constitute a vehicle that brings us culture, in particular—though certainly not exclusively—popular culture. While mass media permeate our lives today, their rise is more recent than we may realize. Theorist Jürgen Habermas (1962/1989) points out that the public sphereas a fundamental part of social life emerged only with the rise of industrial society; that is, prior to the development of printing presses and the spread of literacy, most communication was oral and local. The appearance of mass-circulation newspapers in the 1700s and the growth of literate populations spurred the growth of a public sphere in which information could be widely circulated and, as Habermas points out, public attitudes shaped. In the 20th century, mass media gained influence through the adoption of electronic means of communication ranging from the radio to television to the Internet.
Marshall McLuhan (1964) sought to understand the influence of mass media on society, suggesting that “the medium is the message”—that is, the medium itself has an influence on how the message is received and perceived. Television, for instance, is fundamentally different from print in how it communicates information. In looking at only a particular message, in other words, we may miss the power of the messenger itself and how that transforms social life. McLuhan also asserted that electronic media like television were constructing a global villagein which people around the world, who did not and never would know one another, could be engaged with the same news event. For example, it was reported in the summer of 2010 that more than 3 billion people (nearly half of the world’s population) watched some part of the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa (Lipka, 2014).
From a sociological perspective, the function of the mass media can be paradoxical. On one hand, mass media are powerful and effective means for conveying information and contributing to the development of an informed citizenry: Mass-circulation newspapers, television networks like CNN and BBC, and radio news programs inform us about and help us to understand important issues. On the other hand, some sociologists argue that such media promote not active engagement in society but rather disengagement and distraction. Habermas (1962/1989), for instance, writes of the salons and coffeehouses of major European cities, where the exchange of informed opinions formed a foundation for later public political debates. However, he suggests, the potential for the development of an active public sphere has been largely quashed by the rise of media that have substituted mass entertainment for meaningful debate, elevating sound bites over sound arguments. (See the Technology and Societybox for discussion of the ideas of other sociologists on this topic.) Do the mass media contribute to or diminish active engagement in the public sphere? Do they help to construct citizens,or do they create consumers? What do you think?
The mass media bring us the key forms of modern entertainment that constitute popular culture. While some researchers theorize the effects of mass media on the public sphere, others look at how these media shape attitudes and practices—sometimes in negative ways. In the section that follows, we turn our attention to another dimension of culture: the controversial relationships among culture, mass media, and the negative but pervasive phenomenon of sexual violence against women.

The Harlem Shake
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TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
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POWER, TECHNOLOGY, AND TELEVISION

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GREG DALE/National Geographic Creative
Most conflict theorists, following the lead of Karl Marx, maintain that capitalism is a system characterized by oppression and rife with inequality. If this is so, why do working people, victimized by an economic order that enriches the upper socioeconomic classes at their expense, not rise up in protest? Sociologists Herbert Marcuse and Douglas Kellner have offered a few ideas.
Marcuse, writing in 1964, described technology in modern capitalist society as paving the road to a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” (p. 1). He believed that modern technology, employed in the service of capitalist interests, would lead to ever more effective—and even pleasant—methods of exerting external control over individuals. After all, spending the evening immersed in a reality TV program or an action film is much easier than rising up in protest or revolution. And we may not like the conditions of our work, but we are willing to work hard so we can get our hands on the newest iPhone. From this perspective, mass media (for instance, television) serve to socialize and pacify populations and are thus instruments of domination. Marcuse (1964) argued that the freedom of individuals had been “invaded and whittled down” by modern technology, and that the result was a “one-dimensional” society in which the ability to think negatively and critically about the social order was progressively crushed (p. 10).
Kellner (1990) expanded the argument that modern technology and media—and television in particular—constitute a threat to human freedom of thought and action in the realm of social change. Kellner suggested that the television industry “has the crucial ideological functions of legitimating the capitalist mode of production and delegitimating its opponents” (p. 9). That is, mainstream television appears to offer a broad spectrum of opinions, but in fact it systematically excludes opinions that seem to question the fundamental values of capitalism (for example, the right to accumulate unlimited wealth and power) or to critique not individual politicians, parties, and policies but the system within which they operate. Because television is such a pervasive force in our lives, the boundaries it draws around debates on capitalism, social change, and genuine democracy are significant.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageKarl Marx wrote that the ruling ideas of any society are those of the ruling class. Arguably, many of those ideas are conveyed through the vehicle of TV. Does television, which delivers images and messages to our homes as we watch for an average of 7 hours a day, foster passivity and make us vulnerable to manipulation? What about the Internet? How does it expand human action, creativity, and freedom? How does it limit them?

CULTURE, MEDIA, AND VIOLENCE
Recent statistics suggest that rape and sexual assault devastate the lives of thousands of U.S. women every year. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), in 2012 there were 346,830 rapes, attempted rapes, or sexual assaults in the United States (Truman, Langton, & Planty, 2013). Men and boys also fall prey to these crimes, but women are the most commonly victimized.

Cultural Control
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One explanation for this number might be that sexual assaults are perpetrated by thousands of deviant individuals and are the outcomes of particular and individual circumstances. Applying the sociological imagination, however, means recognizing the magnitude of the problem and considering the idea that examination of individual cases alone is inadequate for fully understanding the phenomenon of rape and sexual assault in the United States. To paraphrase C. Wright Mills, it is clearly a personal trouble anda public issue.
Some researchers have posited the existence of a rape culture, a social culture that provides an environment conducive to rape(Boswell & Spade, 1996; Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 2005; Sanday, 1990). According to some scholars, rape culture has been pervasive in the U.S. legal system. Feminist theorist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon (1989) argues that legislative and judicial processes regarding rape utilize a male viewpoint. Consider, for instance, that until the late 1970s most states did not treat spousal rape as a crime. This conclusion was based, at least in part, on the notion that a woman could not be raped by her husband because sexual consent was taken as implied in the marital contract.
Some researchers argue that the legal culture takes rape less seriously than other crimes of violence (Taslitz, 1999). Legal scholar Stephen J. Schulhofer (2000) has written that the law
punishes takings by force (robbery), by coercive threats (extortion), by stealth (larceny), by breach of trust (embezzlement), and by deception (fraud and false pretenses)…. Yet sexual autonomy, almost alone among our important personal rights, is not fully protected. The law of rape, as if it were only a law against the “robbery” of sex, remains focused almost exclusively on preventing interference by force. (pp. 100–101)
Schulhofer notes that this problem is linked to a culture that treats male sexual aggression as “natural.” Taslitz (1999) asserts that the cultural stories brought into courtrooms render proceedings around rape problematic by situating them in myths, such as the idea that a female victim was “asking for it.”
Some research in the fields of sociology and communications suggests that popular culture promotes rape culture by normalizing violence.This is not to argue that culture is a direct cause of sexual violence, but rather to suggest that popular culture renders violence part of the social scenery by making its appearance so common in films, video games, and music videos that it evolves from being shocking to being utterly ordinary (Katz & Jhally, 2000a, 2000b). How does this process occur?
Some scholars argue that popular media embrace violent masculinity,a form of masculinity that associates “being a man” with being aggressive and merciless. As well, the messages of popular culture may serve to normalize violence against women in particular. Tyler, The Creator, winner of the 2011 MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist, has come under fire from parents, media outlets, and fellow musicians for his violently misogynistic and homophobic lyrics. Hip-hop has long been associated with the use of misogynistic lyrics (Morgan, 1999; Pough, 2004; Weitzer & Kubrin, 2009). Many commercial films and music videos also feature rough—even very violent—treatment of women, offered as entertainment. The most gratuitous violence in films such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo(2011), The Killer Inside Me(2010), The Last Exorcism(2010), and Final Destination 5(2011) is reserved for female victims. In early 2010, citizens in Japan and around the world expressed dismay and disgust when reports emerged about the popular dissemination of the video game RapeLay,in which a player stalks a young woman, her mother, and her sister on a train. In the game, the player uses the mouse to grope—and eventually rape—his victims.
Popular culture’s most predictable normalization of violence against women occurs in pornography, a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States. Fictionalized portrayals of sexual activity range from coercion of a compliant and always willing female to violent rape simulations in which consent is clearly refused.
While researchers do not propose that lyrics or images disseminated by mass media cause sexual violence directly,some suggest that popular culture’s persistent use of sex-starved, compliant, and easily victimized female characters sends messages that forced sex is no big deal, that women really want to be raped, and that some invite rape by their appearance. In a study of 400 male and female high school students, Cassidy and Hurrell (1995, cited in Workman & Freeburg, 1999) determined that respondents who heard a vignette about a rape scenario and then viewed a picture of the “victim” (in reality a model for the research) dressed in provocative clothing were more likely than those who saw her dressed in conservative clothing, or who saw no picture at all, to judge her responsible for her assailant’s behavior, and to say his behavior was justified and not really rape. More recent studies have reproduced findings that rape myths are widely used to explain and even justify sexual violence (Hammond, Berry, & Rodriguez, 2011).
A 2003 study found that victims’ attire is not a significant factor in sexual assault. Instead, rapists look for signs of passivity and submissiveness (Beiner, 2007). Why, with evidence to the contrary, do such rape myths, common but rarely true beliefs about rapists and rape victims, exist? Recent studies link regular exposure to popular print, television, film, and Internet media with acceptance of rape myths among college-age men and women (Kahlor & Morrison, 2007; Katz, 2006, cited in Lonsway et al., 2009; Reinders, 2006). Is this indicative of the existence of a rape culture? Is culture, particularly culture that includes vehicles like music and movies that give a platform to expressions of violence against women, a sociological antecedent of real sexual violence? What do you think?

The Media Violence Debate in America
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TV Violence
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© Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier,a young man deemed unfit for the military is prepared instead for a top secret role as Captain America, a character who, according to the film, is “a superhero dedicated to defending American ideals.” In this film, as in many others, the hero achieves key goals with violence. image
CULTURE, CLASS, AND INEQUALITY
In their studies of culture and class, sociologists consider whether the musical and artistic tastes of different socioeconomic classes vary and, if so, why. While the answer may be interesting in itself, researchers are also likely to go a step farther and examine the links among culture, power, and class inequality. Particularly when using a social conflict lens, sociologists have long sought to show how elites use culture to gain or maintain power over other groups.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has used culture to help explain the phenomenon of social class reproduction, the way in which class status is reproduced from generation to generation.Bourdieu (1984) discusses the concept of cultural capital, wealth in the form of knowledge, ideas, verbal skills, and ways of thinking and behaving.Karl Marx argued that the key to power in a capitalist system is economic capital,particularly possession of the means of production. Bourdieu extends this idea by suggesting that cultural capital can also be a source of power. Children from privileged backgrounds have access to markedly different stores of cultural capital than do children from working-class backgrounds.
Children of the upper and middle classes come into the education system—the key path to success in modern industrial societies—with a set of language and academic skills, beliefs, and models of success and failure that fit into and are validated by mainstream schools. Children from less privileged backgrounds enter with a smaller amount of validated cultural capital; their skills, knowledge base, and styles of speaking are not those that schools conventionally recognize and reward. For example, while a child from a working-class immigrant family may know how to care for her younger siblings, prepare a good meal, and translate for non-English-fluent parents, her parents (like many first-generation immigrants) may have worked multiple jobs and may not have had the skills to read to her or the time or money to expose her to enriching activities. By contrast, her middle-class peers are more likely to have grown up with parents who regularly read to them, took them to shows and museums, and quizzed them on multiplication problems. While both children come to school with knowledge and skills,the cultural capital of the middle-class child can be more readily “traded” for academic success—and eventual economic gains.
In short, schools serve as locations where the cultural capital of the better-off classes is exchanged for educational success and credentials. This difference in scholastic achievement then translates into economic capital, as high achievers assume prestigious, well-paid positions in the workplace. Those who do not have the cultural capital to trade for academic success are often tracked into jobs in society’s lower tiers. Class is reproduced as cultural capital begets academic achievement, which begets economic capital, which again begets cultural capital for the next generation.

Cultural Transmission
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Frank Micelotta/Invision/AP
The worldwide success of North American pop artists such as Beyoncé (shown here) fosters imitation abroad. The threat of a homogenized global culture does not just mean the music of these artists is played everywhere—it means locally produced music often sounds nearly identical as well. image
Clearly, however, the structure of institutional opportunities, while unequal, cannot alone account for broad reproduction of social class across generations. Individuals, after all, make choices about education, occupations, and the like. They have free will—or, as sociologists put it, agency,which is understood as the capacity of individuals to make choices and to act independently. Bourdieu (1977) argues that agency must be understood in the context of structure. To this end, he introduces the concept of habitus, the internalization of objective probabilities and the expression of those probabilities as choice.Put another way, people come to want that which their own experiences and those of the people who surround them suggest they can realistically have—and they act accordingly.
Consider the following hypothetical example of habitus in action. In a poor rural community where few people go to college, fewer can afford it, and the payoff of higher education is not obvious because there are no immediate role models with such experience, Bourdieu would argue that an individual’s “choice” not to prioritize getting into college reflects both agency andstructure. That is, she makes the choice not to prepare herself for college or to apply to college, but going to college would likely not have been possible for her anyway due to her economic circumstances and perhaps due to an inadequate education in an underfunded school. By contrast, the habitus of a young upper-middle-class person makes the choice of going to college almost unquestionable. Nearly everyone around her has gone or is going to college, the benefits of a college education are broadly discussed, and she is socialized from her early years to understand that college will follow high school—alternatives are rarely considered. Further, a college education is accessible—she is prepared for college work in a well-funded public school or a private school, and family income, loans, or scholarships will contribute to making higher education a reality. Bourdieu thus suggests that social class reproduction appears on its face to be grounded in individual choices and merit, but fundamental structural inequalities that underlie class reproduction often go unrecognized (or, as Bourdieu puts it, “misrecognized”), a fact that benefits the well-off.
CULTURE AND GLOBALIZATION
There is a pervasive sense around the world that globalization is creating a homogenized culture—a landscape dotted in every corner of the globe with the Golden Arches and the face of Colonel Sanders beckoning the masses to consume hamburgers and fried chicken. The familiar songs of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Beyoncé are broadcast on radio stations from Bangladesh to Bulgaria to Belize, while rebroadcasts of such popular U.S. soap operas as The Bold and the Beautifulprovide a picture of ostensibly “average” U.S. lives on the world’s television screens.
We see the effects of globalization—and of Americanization in particular—in cultural representations like McDonald’s restaurants, U.S. pop music and videos, and bottles of Coca-Cola spreading around the world. According to press reports, even in the Taliban era in Afghanistan, a time when a deeply conservative Islamist ideology was enforced throughout society, the culture of global Hollywood seeped in through the cracks of fundamentalism’s wall. In January 2001, the Taliban rounded up dozens of barbers in the capital city of Kabul because they had been cutting men’s hair in a style known locally as the “Titanic”: “At the time, Kabul’s cooler young men wanted that Leonardo DiCaprio look, the one he sported in the movie. It was an interesting moment because under the Taliban’s moral regime, movies were illegal…. Yet thanks to enterprising video smugglers who dragged cassettes over mountain trails by mule, urban Afghans knew perfectly well who DiCaprio was and what he looked like” (Freund, 2002, p. 24).
How should a sociologist evaluate the spread of a globalized culture? Is globalization, on balance, positive or negative for countries, communities, and corporate entities? Is it just business, or does it also have political implications? The conflict and functionalist perspectives offer us different ways of seeing contemporary global culture, a culture that draws heavily, though by no means exclusively, on U.S. trends and tastes.

Race and the Culture of Excellence
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Exporting Culture
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Everett Collection
Did all of the actors who were part of Slumdog Millionaire, a blockbuster film, benefit from its success? The local extras—as well as some of the central characters—took away little financial gain from the film. image
A functionalist examining the development and spread of a broad global culture might begin by asking, “What is its function?” He or she could deduce that globalization spreads not only material culture in the form of food and music but also nonmaterial culture in the form of values and norms. Globalized norms and values can strengthen social solidarity and consequently serve to reduce conflict between states and societies. Therefore, globalization serves the integrative function of creating some semblance of a common culture that can foster mutual understanding and a foundation for dialogue.
Recall from Chapter 1that functionalism assumes the social world’s many parts are interdependent. Indeed, globalization highlights both the cultural and the economic interdependence of countries and communities. The book Global Hollywood(Miller, Govil, McMurria, & Maxwell, 2002) describes what its authors call a new international division of cultural labor,a system of cultural production that crosses the globe, making the creation of culture an international rather than a national phenomenon (though profits still flow primarily into the core of the filmmaking industry in Hollywood).
The blockbuster film Slumdog Millionaire(2008) offers an example of the international division of cultural labor. The film was directed by Englishman Danny Boyle and codirected by New Delhi native Loveleen Tandan from a screenplay by Boyle’s countryman Simon Beaufoy that was based on the 2005 novel Q & Aby Indian writer Vikas Swarup. In 2009, the film, distributed in the United States by Warner Independent Pictures but shown internationally, received nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The Indian cast of Slumdog Millionaireincludes both established local actors and young Mumbai slum dwellers, some of whom were later found to have earned very little from their efforts. Boyle has argued, however, that the filmmakers worked to ensure future educational opportunities and shelter for the young actors. The film’s global appeal was huge, and it generated almost $378 million in box office returns, leading the Wall Street Journalto label it “the film world’s first globalized masterpiece” (Morgenstern, 2008).
From the social conflict perspective, we can view the globalization of culture as a force with the potential to perpetuate economic inequality—particularly because globalization is a product of the developed world. While a functionalist would highlight the creative global collaboration and productive interdependence of a film like Slumdog Millionaire,a conflict theorist would ask, “Who benefits from such a production?” While Western film companies, producers, and directors walk away with huge profits, the slum dwellers used as actors or extras garner far less sustained global interest or financial gain.
A conflict theorist might also describe how the globalization of cheap fast food can cripple small independent eateries that serve indigenous (and arguably healthier) cuisine. An influx of global corporations inhibits some local people from owning their own means of production and providing employment to others. The demise of local restaurants, cafés, and food stalls represents a loss of the cuisines and thus the unique cultures of indigenous peoples. It also forces working people to depend on large corporations for their livelihoods, depriving them of economic independence.
While functionalism and conflict theory offer different interpretations of globalization, both offer valuable insights. Globalization may bring people together through common entertainment, eating experiences, and communication technologies, and, at the same time, it may represent a threat—real or perceived—to local cultures and economies as indigenous producers are marginalized and the sounds and styles of different cultures are replaced by a single mold set by Western entertainment marketers.
Journalist Thomas Friedman has suggested that while most countries cannot resist the forces of globalization, it is not inevitably homogenizing. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization,Friedman (2000) writes that “the most important filter is the ability to ‘glocalize.’ I define healthy glocalization as the ability of a culture, when it encounters other strong cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to compartmentalize those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different” (p. 295). The concept of glocalizationhighlights the idea of cultural hybrids born of a pastiche of both local and global influences.
In The Globalization of Nothing(2007), sociologist George Ritzer proposes a view of globalization that integrates what he calls “grobalization,” the product of “the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like and their desire… to impose themselves on various geographic areas” (p. 15). Ritzer adds that the “main interest of the entities involved in grobalization is in seeing their power, influence, and in many cases profits grow (hence the term grobalization) throughout the world” (p. 16). The concept of grobalizationdraws from classical sociological theorists like Karl Marx and Max Weber. For instance, where Marx theorized capitalism’s imperative of economic imperialism, Ritzer offers contemporary examples of grobalization’s economic and cultural imperialism, exporting not only brand-name products but also the values of consumerism and the practical vehicles of mass consumption, such as credit cards.
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© Joachim Ladefoged/VII/Corbis
In its more than half-century of operation, McDonald’s has become one of the most recognized icons of U.S. life and culture; Ronald McDonald is said to be the most recognized figure in the world after Santa Claus. McDonald’s serves 47 million customers every day in an estimated 31,000 restaurants in 119 countries around the globe. image
How will the world’s cultures shift in the decades to come? Will they globalize or remain localized? Will they glocalize or grobalize? Clearly, the material culture of the West, particularly of the United States, is powerful: It is pushed into other parts of the world by markets and merchants, but it is also pulled in by people eager to hitch their stars to the modern Western world. Local identities and cultures continue to shape people’s views and actions, but there is little reason to believe that McDonald’s, KFC, and Coca-Cola will drop out of the global marketplace. The dominance of U.S. films, music, and other cultural products is also likely to remain a feature of the world cultural stage.
WHY STUDY CULTURE AND MEDIA THROUGH A SOCIOLOGICAL LENS?
Culture is a vital component of a community’s identity—through language, objects, and practices, culture embodies a community and its environment. Culture is powerful and complex. As we have seen in this chapter, cultural products, including those disseminated by the mass media, both reflect and shape our societal hopes and fears, norms and beliefs, and rituals and practices. From flesh-eating zombies and classical music to folk dances and folkways, culture is at the core of the human experience. We are all profoundly “cultured.”
Culture can be a source of integration and harmony, as functionalists assert, or it can be a vehicle of manipulation and oppression, as conflict theorists often see it. There is compelling evidence for both perspectives, and context is critical for recognizing which perspective better captures the character of a given cultural scenario.
The study of culture is much more than just an intellectual exercise. In this chapter, you encountered several key cultural questions that are important objects of public discussion today. Do the mass media foster viewer engagement in public life, or do they distract and disengage us from the pressing problems of our times? Is violence in the media just entertainment, or does it contribute, even indirectly, to violence in relationships and society? Will the evolution of a more global culture play an integrative role between societies, or will smaller cultures resist homogenization and assert their own power, bringing about conflict rather than harmony? These are questions of profound importance in a media-saturated and multicultural world—a sociological perspective can help us to make sense of them.
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WHAT CAN I DO WITH A
SOCIOLOGY DEGREE?
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CAREER DEVELOPMENT: EXPLORING CAREERS AND SETTING GOALS
Explore and Target Careers and Job Options
When you have completed an initial career identity assessment, reflect on your career options. Enlist the support of friends, family, and career professionals as you review career options. You can start by using online tools and library resources. Review general information about occupational fields and industries to identify a wide spectrum of career options. Examine specific aspects of careers and occupations, including types of employers, job skills and titles, responsibilities, entry-level educational requirements, advancement potential, work environments, salaries and benefits,and employment trends.
Use your research results to identify potential employers and link to their websites. Compare results for a variety of employers. Your career and occupational exploration and your employer research are the best ways to support and validate your career aspirations. Online career exploration and employer resourcesinclude the following:

• www.careerinfonet.org/Occupations/select_occupation.aspx(CareerOneStop)
• www.vault.com(Vault Career Intelligence)
• www.bls.gov/ooh/home.htm(U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook)
• www.onetonline.org(O*Net OnLine)
In addition to researching career trends and data, learn about career options firsthand through informational interviews.An informational interview is similar to any interview, except that you interview the individual working in your career field of interest to learn about his or her profession, career skills, education, current position, and/or employer. To request informational interviews, make contact through family members, friends, or school faculty and alumni and their networks.
Other options for exploring careers include internships, field studies, and part-time jobs. Internships offer opportunities for you to learn about career options in real-world settings, to test your career skills and interests, and to meet professionals in your field.
Make Career Decisions and Set Career Goals
Making career decisionsis a key aspect of the career development process. Evaluate your alternatives and identify the advantages and disadvantages of each career. From here, you can begin to make a career choice, which will influence your career goals.
Career goalsare important milestones that provide a structure enabling you to evaluate progress on your career path. Goals are not absolute, and you may update and change them as you continue to move ahead. Long-term goals are generally accomplished in 1, 5, or 10 years and incorporate your dreams and aspirations. Short-term goals (or objectives) are completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis and identify specific tasks associated with your career plan.
THINK ABOUT CAREERS
imageExplore some sample employer websites to gather information. What are the career and employment options in each organization? What information is highlighted and what do you learn about the employer? What can you conclude about the industry?
imageCreate three goals that you hope to accomplish in the next 5 years, then add short-term goals that support the completion of the long-term goal.

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SUMMARY

• Cultureconsists of the beliefs, norms, behaviors, and products common to members of a particular social group. Languageis an important component of cultures. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis points to language’s role in structuring perceptions and actions. Culture is a key topic of sociological study because as human beings we have the capacity to develop it through the creation of artifacts such as songs, foods, and values. Culture also influences our social development: We are products of our cultural beliefs, behaviors, and biases.
• Sociologists and others who study culture generally distinguish between material and nonmaterial culture. Material cultureencompasses physical artifacts—the objects created, embraced, and consumed by a given society. Nonmaterial cultureis generally abstract and includes culturally accepted ideas about living and behaving. The two are intertwined, because nonmaterial culture often gives particular meanings to the objects of material culture.
• Norms are the common rules of a culture that govern people’s actions. Folkwaysare fairly weak norms, the violation of which is tolerable. Moresare strongly held norms; violating them is subject to social or legal sanction. Taboosare the most closely held mores; violating them is socially unthinkable. Lawscodify some, though not all, of society’s norms.
• Beliefsare particular ideas that people accept as true, though they need not be objectively true. Beliefs can be based on faith, superstition, science, tradition, or experience.
• Valuesare the general, abstract standards of a society and define basic, often idealized principles. We identify national values, community values, institutional values, and individual values. Values may be sources of cohesion or of conflict.
• Ideal cultureconsists of the norms and values that the people of a society profess to embrace. Real cultureconsists of the real values, norms, and practices of people in a society.
• Ethnocentrism is the habit of judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own.
• Sociologists entreat us to embrace cultural relativism, a perspective that allows us to understand the practices of other societies in terms of those societies’ norms and values rather than our own.
• Multiple cultures may exist and thrive within any country or community. Some of these are subcultures, which exist together with the dominant culture but differ in some important respects from it.
• High cultureis an exclusive culture often limited in its accessibility and audience. High culture is widely associated with the upper class, which both defines and embraces its content. Popular cultureencompasses entertainment, culinary, and athletic tastes that are broadly shared. As “mass culture,” popular culture is more fully associated with the middle and working classes.
• Rape cultureis a social culture that provides an environment conducive to rape. Some sociologists argue that we can best understand the high number of rapes and attempted rapes in the United States by considering both individual circumstances and the larger social context, which contains messages that marginalize and normalize the problem of sexual assault.
• Global culture—some would say U.S. culture—has spread across the world in the form of Hollywood films, fast-food restaurants, and popular music heard in virtually every country.
KEY TERMS
culture, 55
material culture, 55
nonmaterial culture, 56
beliefs, 56
folkways, 57
mores, 57
taboos, 57
laws, 57
values, 58
ideal culture, 59
real culture, 59
cultural inconsistency, 59
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doxic, 62
etic perspective, 62
emic perspective, 62
cultural relativism, 62
subcultures, 64
language, 64
multiculturalism, 66
high culture, 66
popular culture, 66
mass media, 68
rape culture, 70
social class reproduction, 71
cultural capital, 71
habitus, 72
global culture, 72
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. This chapter discusses tensions between ideal and real culture in attitudes and practices linked to conventional attractiveness and honesty. Can you think of other cases where ideal and real cultures appear to collide?
2. The chapter suggests that mass media may play a paradoxical role in society, offering both the information needed to bring about an informed citizenry and disseminating mass entertainment that distracts and disengages individuals from debates of importance. Which of these functions do you think is more powerful?
3. What is cultural capital? What, according to Bourdieu, is its significance in society? How is it accrued and how is it linked to the reproduction of social class?
4. The chapter presents an argument on the relationships among culture, mass media, and sexual violence with a discussion of the concept of a rape culture. Describe the argument. Do you agree or disagree with the argument? Explain your position.
5. Sociologist George Ritzer sees within globalization two processes—“glocalization” and “grobalization.” What is the difference between the two? Which is, in your opinion, the more powerful process, and why do you believe this? Support your point with evidence.

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Chapter 4

SOCIALIZATION
AND SOCIAL
INTERACTION

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Will & Deni McIntyre/Photo Researchers, Inc.

Media Library
CHAPTER 4Media Library

AUDIO video

Careers & Self-Identity
Gender and Self-Talk
VIDEO video

Wild Child: The Story Of Feral Children
South park and Gender Socialization
Teen Shaming
Advertising Invades the Classroom
Virtual Identities
CQ RESEARCHER video

Deprivation of Social Interaction
Socialization and Education
PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE video

Socialization and Men
Parenting and Empathy
JOURNAL video

Socialization and Teenage Activism
Media Socialization, Kids and Food
Social Roles in Total Institutions
REFERENCE video

Total Institutions

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IN THIS CHAPTER
The Birth of the Social Self
Agents of Socialization
Socialization and Aging
Total Institutions and Resocialization
Social Interaction
Why Study Socialization and Social interaction?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

1. Is the personality of an individual determined at birth?
2. Arethe media today as important in a child’s socialization as the child’s family? Might the media be more important?
3. Dopeople adjust the presentation of their personalities in interactions in order to leave particular impressions? Might we say that we have different “social selves” that we present in different settings?
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GIRLS, BOYS, AND TOYS
REUTERS/Aly Song

We can find a box (or several boxes) of toys inmost U.S. homes with children. Many of us can look back on our childhoods—whether they are a recent or distant memory—and recall a favorite toy. It might have been a smiling doll, a stuffed animal, a hardy truck or tank, or a set of colorful blocks. If we were lucky, we had an array of toys from which to choose our fun. In this chapter, we talk about agents of socialization, that is, the entities (like families, peers, and schools) that teach us the norms, rules, and roles of society. From a sociological perspective, toys are not just toys—rather, they too are agents of socialization, contributing to children’s early ideas of who they are and who they can be in society.
Like other key agents of socialization—families, peers, the media, school, and organized sports, among others—toys may contribute to a child’s sense of socially accepted roles, aspirations for the future, and perceptions of opportunities and limitations. If we as social beings are made not born, as sociologists argue, then toys contribute to the construction of boys and girls in ways that can be both predictable and surprising.
In 2014, two researchers at Oregon State University published a study with some attention-getting results. In this research, 37 girls ages 4 to 7 were each given one of three toys with which to play: a Mrs. Potato Head, a glamorous Barbie doll, or a doctor Barbie doll. After a short period of play, each subject was shown pictures depicting 10 female- and male-dominated professions, like librarian, teacher, and flight attendant (“female” jobs) and pilot, doctor, and firefighter (“male” jobs). With each picture, the subject was asked, “Could you do this job when you grow up?” and “Could a boy do this job when he grows up?” (see Figure 4.1). Notably, girls who played with either of the Barbie dolls identified fewer jobs that they could do than did the girls who played with Mrs. Potato Head—and all of the girls in the study thought that a boy would be able to do a greater number of both the male- and female-dominated jobs (Sherman & Zurbriggen, 2014). Other research has shown that young girls exposed to Barbies express a stronger desire to be thin and have lower body self-esteem than do girls exposed to dolls with more realistic body proportions (Dittmar, Halliwell, & Ive, 2006).
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imageFIGURE 4.1 Number of Jobs Girls Think They Can Do Better or Worse Than Boys Based on Occupation Type
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SOURCE: Sherman, A.M. and Zurbriggen, E.L. (2014). “‘Boys Can Be Anything’: Effect of Barbie Play on Girls’ Career Cognitions.” Sex Roles,online publication, March 5. Copyright © 2014 Springer Science + Business Media New York. Reprinted with permission.

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TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/Staff/Getty Images
A young girl prays for blessings in the New Year on the shoulders of her father at the Meiji shrine in Tokyo. Many components of one’s culture are seamlessly passed down through habit, observational learning, and family practices. image
These findings are provocative and raise some interesting questions: What is the power of toys? Do toys affect children’s aspirations and perceptions? And why didallof the girls in the 2014 study judge themselves less capable than boys of doing a variety of jobs? Efforts have been made to expose young girls to more career options through toys; for instance, the popular Lego brand has introduced female Lego scientist figures, including an astronomer, a paleontologist, and a chemist, complete with a beaker (Gambino, 2014). Might such changes encourage greater future interest among girls in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, where women are underrepresented? Do “boyish” toys already do that for boys? What do you think?image
In this chapter, we examine the process of socialization and the array of agents that help shape our social selves and our behavioral choices. We begin by looking into the “nature versus nurture” debate and what sociology says about that debate. We then discuss the key agents of socialization, as well as the ways in which socialization may differ in total institutions and across the life course. We then examine theoretical perspectives on socialization. Finally, we look at social interaction and ways in which sociologists conceptualize our presentation of self and our group interactions.
THE BIRTH OF THE SOCIAL SELF
Socializationis the process by which people learn the culture of their society.It is a lifelong and active process in which individuals construct their sense of who they are, how to think, and how to act as members of their culture. Socialization is our primary way of reproducing culture, including norms and values and the belief that our culture represents “normal” social practices and perceptions.
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Given the choice in an experiment between a wire mother surrogate and a surrogate covered with cloth, the infant monkey almost invariably chose the cloth figure. How are human needs similar to and different from those we find in the animal kingdom? image
The principal agents of socialization—including parents, teachers, religious institutions, friends, television, and the Internet—exert enormous influence on us. Much socialization takes place every day, usually without our thinking about it: when we speak, when others react to us, when we observe others’ behavior—even if only in the movies or on television—and in virtually every other human interaction.
Debate has raged in the social sciences over the relative influence of genetic inheritance (“nature”) and cultural and social experiences (“nurture”) in shaping people’s lives (Coleman & Hong, 2008; Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). If inborn biological predispositions explain differences in behaviors and interests between, say, sixth-grade boys and girls, or between a professional thief and the police officer who apprehends him, then understanding socialization will do little to help us understand those differences. On the other hand, if biology cannot adequately explain differences in attitudes, characters, and behaviors, then it becomes imperative that we examine the effects of socialization.
Almost no one today argues that behavior is entirely determined by either socialization or biology. There is doubtless an interaction between the two. What social scientists disagree about, however, is which is more important in shaping a person’s personality, life chances, philosophy of life, and behavior. In this text we lean toward socialization because we think the evidence points in that direction.
Social scientists have found little evidence to support the idea that personalities and behaviors are rooted exclusively in “human nature.” Indeed, very little human behavior is actually “natural.” For example, humans have a biological capacity for language, but language is learned and develops only through interaction. The weight of socialization in the development of language, reasoning, and social skills is dramatically illustrated in cases of children raised in isolation. If a biologically inherited mechanism alone triggered language, it would do so even in people who grow up deprived of contact with other human beings. If socialization plays a key role, however, then such people would not only have difficulty learning to speak like human beings, but they would also lack the capacity to play the social roles to which most of us are so accustomed.
One of the most fully documented cases of social isolation occurred more than 200 years ago. In 1800, a “wild boy,” later named Victor, was seen by hunters in the forests of Aveyron, a rural area of France (Shattuck, 1980). Victor had been living alone in the woods for most of his 12 or so years and could not speak, and although he stood erect, he ran using both arms and legs like an animal. Victor was taken into the home of Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a young medical doctor who, for the next 10 years, tried to teach him the social and intellectual skills expected of a child his age. According to Itard’s careful records, Victor managed to learn a few words, but he never spoke in complete sentences. Although he eventually learned to use the toilet, he continued to evidence “wild” behavior, including public masturbation. Despite the efforts of Itard and others, Victor was incapable of learning more than the most rudimentary social and intellectual skills; he died in Paris in 1828.
Other studies of the effects of isolation have centered on children raised by their parents, but in nearly total isolation. For 12 years, from the time she was 1½ years old, “Genie” (a pseudonym) saw only her father, mother, and brother, and only when one of them came to feed her. Genie’s father did not allow his wife or Genie to leave the house or have any visitors. Genie was either strapped to a child’s potty-chair or placed in a sleeping bag that limited her movements. Genie rarely heard any conversation. If she made noises, her father beat her (Curtiss, 1977; Rymer, 1993).
When Genie was 13, her mother took her and fled the house. Genie was unable to cry, control her bowels, eat solid food, or talk. Because of her tight confinement, she had not even learned to focus her eyes beyond 12 feet. She was constantly salivating and spitting, and she had little controlled use of her arms or legs (Rymer, 1993).

Wild Child: The Story Of Feral Children
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Gradually Genie learned some of the social behavior expected of a child. For example, she became toilet trained and learned to wear clothes. However, although intelligence tests did not indicate reasoning disability, even after 5 years of concentrated effort on the part of a foster mother, social workers, and medical doctors, Genie never learned to speak beyond the level of a 4-year-old, and she never spoke with other people. Although she responded positively to those who treated her with sympathy, Genie’s social behavior remained severely underdeveloped for the rest of her life (Rymer, 1993).
Genie’s and Victor’s experiences underscore the significance of socialization, especially during childhood. Their cases show that however rooted in biology certain capacities may be, they do not develop into recognizable human ways of acting and thinking unless the individual interacts with other humans in a social environment. Children raised in isolation fail to develop complex language, abstract thinking, notions of cooperation and sharing, or even a sense of themselves as people. In other words, they do not develop the hallmarks of what we know as humanity (Ridley, 1998).
Sociologists and other social scientists have developed a number of theories to explain the role of socialization in the development of social selves. What these theories recognize is that whatever the contribution of biology, ultimately people as social beings are made, not born. Below, we explore four approaches to understanding socialization: behaviorism, symbolic interactionism, developmental stage theories, and psychoanalytic theories.
BEHAVIORISM AND SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY
Behaviorismis a psychological perspective that emphasizes the effect of rewards and punishments on human behavior.It arose during the late 19th century to challenge the then-popular belief that human behavior results primarily from biological instincts and drives (Baldwin & Baldwin, 1986, 1988; Dishion, McCord, & Poulin, 1999). Early behaviorist researchers such as Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) and John Watson (1878–1958), and later B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), demonstrated that even behavior thought to be purely instinctual (such as a dog salivating when it sees food) can be produced or extinguished through the application of rewards and punishments. Thus, a pigeon will learn to press a bar if that triggers the release of food (Skinner, 1938, 1953; Watson, 1924). Behaviorists concluded that both animal and human behavior can be learned, and neither is just instinctive.
When they turned to human beings, behaviorists focused on social learning, the way people adapt their behavior in response to social rewards and punishments(Baldwin & Baldwin, 1986; Bandura, 1977; Bandura & Walters, 1963). Of particular interest was the satisfaction people get from imitating others. Social learning theory thus combines the reward-and-punishment effects identified by behaviorists with the idea that we model the behavior of others; that is, we observe the way people respond to others’ behavior.
Social learning theory would predict, for example, that if a boy gets high fives from his friends for talking back to his teacher—a form of encouragement rather than punishment—he is likely to repeat this behavior. What’s more, other boys may imitate it. Social learning researchers have developed formulas for predicting how rewards and punishments affect behavior. For example, rewards given repeatedly may become less effective when the individual becomes satiated. If you have just eaten a huge piece of cake, you are less likely to feel rewarded by the prospect of another.
Social behaviorism is not widely embraced today as a rigorous perspective on human behavior. One reason is that only in carefully controlled laboratory environments is it easy to demonstrate the power of rewards and punishments. In real social situations the theory is of limited value as a predictor. For example, whether a girl who is teased (“punished”) for playing football will lose interest in the sport depends on many other experiences, such as the support of family and friends and her own enjoyment of the activity. The simple application of rewards and punishments is hardly sufficient to explain why people repeat some behaviors and not others.
In addition, behaviorist theories violate Popper’s principle of falsification (discussed in Chapter 2). Since what was previously rewarding may lose effectiveness if the person is satiated, if a reward does not work, we can always attribute its failure to satiation. Therefore, no matter the outcome of the experiment, the theory has to be true; it cannot be proven false. For these reasons sociologists find behaviorism an inadequate theory of socialization. To explain how people become socialized, they highlight theories that emphasize symbolic interaction.
SOCIALIZATION AS SYMBOLIC INTERACTION
Recall from the introductory chapter that symbolic interactionismviews the self and society as resulting from social interaction based on language and other symbols. Symbolic interactionism has proven especially fruitful in explaining how individuals develop a social identity and a capacity for social interaction (Blumer, 1969, 1970; Hutcheon, 1999; Mead, 1934, 1938).
An early contribution to symbolic interactionism was Charles Horton Cooley’s (1864–1929) concept of the looking-glass self, the self-image that results from our interpretation of other people’s views of us.For example, children who are frequently told they are smart or talented will tend to see themselves as such and act accordingly. On the other hand, children who are repeatedly told they lack intelligence or are “slow” will lose pride in themselves and act the part. According to Cooley (1902/1964), we are constantly forming ideas about how others perceive and judge us, and the resulting self-image—the way we view ourselves—is in turn the basis of our social interaction with others.

Deprivation of Social Interaction
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CHRIS WALKER/KRT/Newscom
As a reference group, high school peers may provide the normative standards for a young person to judge his or her fashion sense, musical tastes, behavioral choices, and academic commitment. Does the power of peers as a reference group change in the college years? image
Cooley recognized that not everyone we encounter is equally important in shaping our self-image. Primary groupsare small groups characterized by intense emotional ties, face-to-face interaction, intimacy, and a strong, enduring sense of commitment.Families, close friends, and lovers are all examples of primary groups likely to shape our self-image. Secondary groups, on the other hand, are large and impersonal, characterized by fleeting relationships.We spend much of our adult lives in secondary groups, such as college classrooms and workplaces, but secondary groups typically have less influence in forming our self-image than do primary groups. Both kinds of groups act on us throughout our lives; the self-image is not set in concrete at some early stage but continues to develop throughout adulthood (Barber, 1992; Berns, 1989).
Both primary and secondary groups also serve as reference groups, or groups that provide standards for judging our attitudes or behaviors.When you consider your friends’ reactions to your dress or hairstyle or the brand of mobile phone you plan to buy, you are using your peers as a reference in shaping your decisions.
George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), widely regarded as the founder of symbolic interactionism, explored the ways in which self and society shape one another. Mead proposed that the self comprises two parts: the “I” and the “me.” The Iis the impulse to act; it is creative, innovative, unthinking, and largely unpredictable.The meis the part of the self through which we see ourselves as others see us.(Note the similarity between Mead’s “me” and Cooley’s “looking-glass self.”) The I represents innovation; the me, social convention and conformity. In the tension between them, the me is often capable of controlling the I. When the I initiates a spontaneous act, the me raises society’s response: How will others regard me if I act this way?
Mead further argued that people develop a sense of self through role-taking, the ability to take the roles of others in interaction.For example, a young girl playing soccer may pretend to be a coach; in the process, she learns to see herself (as well as other players) from a coach’s perspective. Mead proposed that childhood socialization relies on an ever-increasing ability to take on such roles, moving from the extreme self-centeredness of the infant to an adult ability to take the standpoint of society as a whole. He outlined four principal stages in socialization that reflect this progression: the preparatory, play, game, and adult stages. The completion of each stage results in an increasingly mature social self.
1. During the preparatory stage,children younger than 3 years old relate to the world as though they are the center of the universe. They do not engage in true role-taking but respond primarily to things in their immediate environments, such as their mothers’ breasts, the colors of toys, or the sounds of voices.
2. Children 3 or 4 years of age enter the play stage,during which they learn to take the attitudes and roles of the people with whom they interact. Significant othersare the specific people important in children’s lives and whose views have the greatest impact on the children’s self-evaluations.By role-playing at being mothers or fathers, for example, children come to see themselves as their parents see them. However, according to Mead, they have not yet acquired the complex sense of self that lets them see themselves through the eyes of manydifferent people—or society.

Socialization and Men
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© Jim West / Alam
Game playing is an activity found in some form in every culture. Some games, including basketball and soccer, require teamwork, while others, including checkers and mancala, are played by one person against another. Team sports games provide many socialization benefits, as young children learn how to interact with one another and develop their motor skills. image
3. The gamestage begins when children are about 5 and learn to take the roles of multiple others. The game is an effective analogy for this stage. For example, to be an effective basketball player, an individual must have the ability to see him- or herself from the perspective of teammates, the other team, and the coach, and must play accordingly. He or she must know the rules of the game. Successful negotiation of the social world also requires that people gain the ability to see themselves as others see them, to understand societal “rules,” and to act accordingly. This stage signals the development of a self that is aware of societal positions and perspectives.
4. Game playing takes the child to the final, adult stage,which can appear as early as the first and second grades. Children at this stage have internalized the generalized other, the sense of society’s norms values by which people evaluate themselves.They take into account a set of general principles that may or may not serve their self-interest—for example, voluntarily joining the army to fight in a war that might injure or kill them because patriotic young people are expected to defend their country. By the adult stage, a person is capable of understanding abstract and complex cultural symbols, such as love and hate, success and failure, friendship, and morality.
Mead also had a vision that in the future people would be able to assimilate a multitude of generalized others, adapting their behavior in terms of their own but also other people’s cultures. Mead’s “dream of a highly multicultural world” may someday be a reality as globalization makes ever more people aware of the value of other cultures.
STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT: PIAGET AND KOHLBERG
Like Mead and Cooley, the Swiss social psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) believed humans are socialized in stages. Piaget devoted a lifetime to researching how young children develop the ability to think abstractly and make moral judgments (Piaget, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932). His theory of cognitive development, based largely on studies of Swiss children at play (including his own), argues that an individual’s ability to make logical decisions increases as the person grows older.Piaget noted that infants are highly egocentric, experiencing the world as if it were centered entirely on them.In stages over time, socialization lets children learn to use language and symbols, to think abstractly and logically, and to see things from different perspectives.
Piaget also developed a theory of moral development, which holds that as they grow, people learn to act according to abstract ideas about justice or fairness. This theory parallels his idea of cognitive development, since both describe overcoming egocentrism and acquiring the ability to take other points of view. Eventually children come to develop abstract notions of fairness, learning that rules should be judged relative to the circumstances. For example, even if the rules say “three strikes and you’re out,” an exception might be made for a child who has never played the game or who is physically challenged.
Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) extended Piaget’s ideas about moral development. In his best-known study, subjects were told the story of the fictitious “Heinz,” who was unable to afford a drug that might prevent his wife from dying of cancer. As the story unfolds, Heinz breaks into the druggist’s shop and steals the medication. Kohlberg asked his subjects what they would have done, emphasizing that there is no “right” or “wrong” answer. Using experiments such as this, Kohlberg (1969, 1983, 1984) proposed three principal stages (and several substages) of moral development:
1. The preconventional stage,during which people seek simply to achieve personal gain or avoid punishment. A person might support Heinz’s decision to steal on the grounds that it would be too difficult to get the medicine by other means, or oppose it on the grounds that Heinz might get caught and go to jail. Children are typically socialized into this rudimentary form of morality between ages 7 and 10.
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2. The conventional stage,during which the individual is socialized into society’s norms and values and would feel shame or guilt about violating them. The person might support Heinz’s decision to steal on the grounds that society would judge him callous if he let his wife die, or oppose it because people would call Heinz a thief if he were caught. Children are socialized into this more developed form of morality at about age 10, and most people remain in this stage throughout their adult lives.
3. The postconventional stage,during which the individual invokes general, abstract notions of right and wrong. Even though Heinz has broken the law, his transgression has to be weighed against the moral cost of sacrificing his wife’s life. People at the highest levels of postconventional morality will go beyond social convention entirely, appealing to a higher set of abstract principles.
Some scholars have argued that Kohlberg’s theory reflects a strong male bias because it derives from male rather than female experience. Foremost among Kohlberg’s critics is Carol Gilligan (1982; Gilligan, Ward, & Taylor, 1989), who argues that men may be socialized to base moral judgment on abstract principles of fairness and justice, but women are socialized to base theirs on compassion and caring. She showed that women scored lower on Kohlberg’s measure of moral development because they valued how other family members were affected by Heinz’s decision more than abstract considerations of justice. Because it assumes that abstract thinking represents a “higher stage” of development, Gilligan suggests, Kohlberg’s measure is necessarily biased in favor of male socialization.
Research testing Gilligan’s ideas has found that men and women alike adhere to bothcare-based and justice-based forms of moral reasoning (Gump, Baker, & Roll, 2000; Jaffee & Hyde, 2000). Differences between the sexes in these kinds of reasoning are in fact small or nonexistent. Studies of federal employees (Peek, 1999), a sample of men and women using the Internet (Anderson, 2000), and a sample of Mexican American and Anglo-American students (Gump et al., 2000) have all found no significant difference between men and women in the degree to which they employ care-based and justice-based styles of moral reasoning. In her effort to correct Kohlberg’s research, which looked only at men, might Gilligan have also contributed to gender stereotypes?
BIOLOGICAL NEEDS VERSUS SOCIAL CONSTRAINTS: FREUD
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), an Austrian psychiatrist, had a major impact on the study of socialization as well as the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry. Freud (1905, 1929, 1933) founded the field of psychoanalysis, a psychological perspective that emphasizes the complex reasoning processes of the conscious and unconscious mind.He stressed the role of the unconscious mind in shaping human behavior and theorized that early childhood socialization is essential in molding the adult personality by age 5 or 6. In addition, Freud sought to demonstrate that in order to to thrive, a society must socialize its members to curb their instinctive needs and desires.

imageFIGURE 4.2 The Id, Ego, and Superego, as Conceived by Freud
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According to Freud, the human mind has three components: the id, the ego, and the superego (Figure 4.2). The idis the repository of basic biological drives and needs,which Freud believed to be primarily bound up in sexual energy. (Idis Latin for “it,” reflecting Freud’s belief that this aspect of the human personality is not even truly human.) The ego(Latin for “I”) is the “self,” the core of what we regard as a person’s unique personality.The superegoconsists of the values and norms of society, insofar as they are internalized, or taken in, by the individual.The concept of the superego is similar to the notion of a conscience.
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Freud believed that babies are all id. Left to their own devices, they will seek instant gratification of their biological needs for food, physical contact, and nurturing. Therefore, according to Freud, to be socialized they must eventually learn to suppress such gratification. The child’s superego, consisting of cultural “shoulds” and “should nots,” struggles constantly with the biological impulses of the id. Serving as mediator between id and superego is the child’s emerging ego. In Freud’s view, the child will grow up to be a well-socialized adult to the extent that the ego succeeds in bending the biological desires of the id to meet the social demands of the superego.
Since Freud claimed that personality is set early in life, he viewed change as difficult for adults, especially if psychological troubles originate in experiences too painful to face or remember. Individuals must become fully aware of their repressed or unconscious memories and unacceptable impulses if they ever hope to change (Freud, 1933). Freud’s psychoanalytic therapy focused on accessing deeply buried feelings in order to help patients alter current behaviors and feelings. Whereas Mead saw socialization as a lifelong process relying on many socialization agents, for Freud it stopped at a young age. Table 4.1compares Mead’s and Freud’s views point by point.

imageTABLE 4.1 Comparison of Mead’s and Freud’s Theories of Socialization
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SOURCE: Adapted from Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

imageFIGURE 4.3 Agents of Socialization
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AGENTS OF SOCIALIZATION
Among primary groups, the family is for most people the single most critical agent of socialization. Other significant agents are school, peer groups, work, religion, and technology and mass media, including the Internet and social media (Figure 4.3).
THE FAMILY
The family is a primary group in which children, especially during the earliest years of their lives, are physically and emotionally dependent on adult members. It plays a key role in transmitting norms, values, and culture across generations, and as a result it is the first and usually the foremost source of socialization in all societies.
Children usually first encounter their society in the family, learning socially defined roles like father, mother, sister, brother, uncle, aunt, and grandparent, and the expected behaviors attached to them. Parents often hold stereotypical notions of how boys and girls should be, and they reinforce gender behaviors in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. A father may be responsible for grilling and yard work, while a mother cooks dinner and cleans the house. On the other hand, some families embrace egalitarian or nonconventional gender roles. Although same-sex couple families are more likely than families headed by opposite-sex couples to challenge gender-normative roles and behaviors, they sometimes still enforce or support typical gender roles for their children (Ackbar, 2011; Bos & Sandfort, 2010).
The way parents relate to their child affects virtually every aspect of the child’s behavior, including the ability to resolve conflicts through the use of reason instead of violence and the propensity for emotional stability or distress. The likelihood that young people will be victims of homicide, commit suicide, engage in acts of aggression against other people, use drugs, complete their secondary education, or have an unwanted pregnancy also is greatly influenced by childhood experiences in the family (Campbell & Muncer, 1998; McLoyd & Smith, 2002; Muncer & Campbell, 2000). For example, children who are regularly spanked or otherwise physically punished internalize the idea that violence is an acceptable means of achieving goals and are more likely than peers who are not spanked to engage in aggressive delinquent behavior. They are also more likely to have low self-esteem, suffer depression, and do poorly in school (Borgeson, 2001; Straus et al., 1997). (See the Private Lives, Public Issuesbox on page 88.)

South park and Gender Socialization
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Parenting and Empathy
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PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ISSUES
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SPANKING AND AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR

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Spencer Grant/Photo Researchers, Inc.
Should parents spank their children? Ask some friends or classmates what they think. You may find a wide range of opinions on this practice. image
While many people still believe in the adage “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” the use of physical punishment in socializing children varies largely by social class. At a rate that has largely held steady in the past decades, about 65% of U.S. adults approve of spanking under certain circumstances. Interestingly, these adults are most likely to be members of the working class, rather than the middle or upper class (Berlin et al., 2009; Borgeson, 2001; Rosellini & Mulrine, 1998). Remember Kohn’s (1989) research, which concluded that the experience of people in working-class employment is reflected in their child-rearing practices: Working-class parents are more likely to emphasize obedience than are middle-class parents, who tend to stress independent thinking. The use of corporal punishment, however, is not only a matter of social class or a private decision made by parents in the home. It is also a public issue with social consequences.
Murray Straus, a prominent sociologist at the University of New Hampshire, found that when boys and girls 6 to 9 years old were spanked, they became more antisocial—more likely to cheat, tell lies, act cruelly to others, break things deliberately, and get into trouble at school (Straus, Sugarman, & Giles-Sims, 1997; also see McKee et al., 2007). Straus and his colleagues concluded that reducing corporal punishment would not only benefit children but also possibly reduce antisocial behavior.
Other research evidence supports Straus’s conclusions (Borgeson, 2001; de Paul & Domenech, 2000). For example, one study concluded that corporal punishment, and even some lesser forms of parental punishment, could have a strong effect on a child’s ability to cope later in life (Welsh, 1998). Similarly, the authors of a study of Israeli high school students found that adolescents whose parents routinely resorted to physical punishment were more likely than others to have psychiatric symptoms and lower levels of well-being in general (Bachar, Canetti, Bonne, DeNour, & Shalev, 1997). On the other hand, research by psychologist Marjorie Lindner Gunnoe (1997), which tracked more than 1,100 children over a 5-year period, found that while some 8- to 11-year-old boys, but not girls, who had been spanked regularly got into more fights at school, children of both sexes ages 4 to 7 who had been spanked regularly got into fewer fights than children who were not spanked. Most research, however, confirms the negative effects of spanking.
Although not all the research findings on the effects of physical punishment are in agreement, the evidence does suggest that spanking—an aggressive form of punishment—may result in aggressive behavior on the part of children. The parents’ “private” decision to use corporal punishment becomes a “public issue,” since children who are physically punished at home are more likely to become physically aggressive outside the home.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageUsing the knowledge you have gained through the study of socialization, and knowing the results of research on the effects of physical punishment on children’s behavior, could you design a social policy or program to reduce the use of physical punishment in the home?
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Schools are an important agent of socialization. Students learn academic skills and knowledge, but they also gain social skills, acquire dominant values of citizenship, and practice obedience to authority. image
Child-rearing practices within families can vary by ethnicity or religious affiliation. Because U.S. culture is ethnically diverse, it is difficult to describe a “typical” American family (Glazer, 1997; Stokes & Chevan, 1996). Among Latinos, for example, the family often includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws, who share child-rearing responsibilities. Among African Americans as well, child rearing may be shared among a broader range of family members than in White families (Lubeck, 1985). Extended family patterns also occur among Afro-Caribbean immigrants and the Amish religious community of Pennsylvania (Forsythe-Brown, 2007; Ho, 1993; Stokes & Chevan, 1996).
Child-rearing practices may vary by social class as well. Parents whose jobs require them to be subservient to authority and to follow orders without raising questions typically stress obedience and respect for authority at home, while parents whose work gives them freedom to make their own decisions and be creative are likely to socialize their children into norms of creativity and spontaneity. Since many working-class jobs demand conformity while middle- and upper-middle-class jobs are more likely to offer independence, social class may be a key factor in explaining differences in child rearing (Kohn, 1989; Lareau, 2002).
Family patterns are changing rapidly in the United States, partly because of declining marriage rates and high rates of divorce. Such changes affect socialization. For example, children raised by a single parent may lack role models for the parent who is missing or experience economic hardship that in turn determines where they go to school or with whom they socialize. Children raised in blended families (the result of remarriage) may have stepparents and stepsiblings whose norms, values, and behavior are unfamiliar. Same-sex couple families may both challenge and, as noted earlier, reinforce conventional modes of socialization, particularly with respect to gender socialization. Although families are changing, the influence of agents of socialization remains powerful.
TEACHERS AND SCHOOL
Children in the United States often begin “schooling” when they enter day care or preschool as infants or toddlers, and they spend more hours each day and more days each year in school than was the case a hundred years ago (although they spend less time in school than their peers in Europe and Asia). Indeed, education has taken on a large role in helping young people prepare for adult society. In addition to reading, writing, math, and other academic subjects, schools are expected to teach values and norms like patriotism, competitiveness, morality, and respect for authority, as well as basic social skills. Some sociologists call this the hidden curriculum, that is, the unspoken classroom socialization into the norms, values, and roles of a society that schools provide along with the “official” curriculum.The hidden curriculum may include “lessons” in gender roles taught through teachers’ differing expectations of boys and girls, with, for instance, boys pushed to pursue higher math while girls are encouraged to embrace language and literature (Sadker, Zittleman, & Sadker, 2003). It may also entail “lessons” that reinforce class status, with middle- and upper-class children having access to classes and schools with advanced subjects and high technology and poor children provided a smaller selection of less academically challenging or vocational classes and limited access to advanced teaching technologies (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Kozol, 2005).
PEERS
Peersare people of the same age and, often, the same social standing. Peer socialization begins when a child starts to play with other children outside the family, usually during the first year of life, and grows more intense in school. Conformity to the norms and values of friends is especially compelling during adolescence and continues into adulthood (Harris, 2009; Ponton, 2000; Sebald, 2000). In U.S. society, most adolescents spend more time with their peers than with their families due to school, athletic activities, and other social and academic commitments. Sociological theories thus often focus on young people’s peer groups to account for a wide variety of adult behavioral patterns, including the development of self-esteem and self-image, career choices, ambition, and deviant behavior (Cohen, 1955; Hine, 2000; Sebald, 2000).

Socialization and Education
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Teen Shaming
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Since the passage of Title IX in 1972, millions of girls have had the opportunity to participate in organized sports. Do social messages conveyed by male-dominated sports differ from those in female-dominated sports? image
Judith Rich Harris (2009) argues that after the first few years of life, a child’s friends’ opinions outweigh the opinions of parents. To manage these predominant peer group influences, she suggests, parents must try to ensure that their children have the “right” friends. But this is an increasingly complex problem when “friends” may be Internet acquaintances who are difficult to monitor and of whom parents may be unaware.
The adolescent subculture plays an extremely important part in the socialization of adolescents in the modern world. Researchers have described the following characteristics of this subculture (Hine, 2000; Sebald, 2000):
1. A set of norms not shared with the adult or childhood cultures and governing interaction, statuses, and roles.
2. An argot(the special vocabulary of a particular group) that is not shared with nonadolescents and is often frowned upon by adults and school officials. Think about the jargon used by young people who text—many adults can read it only with difficulty!
3. Various underground media and preferred media programs, music, and Internet sites.
4. Unique fads and fashions in dress and hairstyles that often lead to conflict with parents and other adult authorities over their “appropriateness.”
5. A set of “heroes, villains, and fools.” Sometimes adults are the “villains and fools,” while the adults’ “villains and fools” are heroes in the adolescent subculture.
6. A more open attitude than that found in the general culture toward experimentation with drugs and at times violence (fighting, for example).
Teenagers differ in the degree to which they are caught up in, and therefore socialized by, the adolescent subculture. Harris’s (2009) claim that parents are largely irrelevant is no doubt an overstatement, yet in Western cultures peer socialization does play a crucial part in shaping many of the ideas, self-images, and attitudes that will persist throughout individuals’ lives.
Sociologists use the term anticipatory socializationto describe the process of adopting the behaviors or standards of a group one emulates or hope to join.For example, teens who seek membership into a tough, streetwise gang will abandon mainstream norms for the dress and talk of the tougher youth they seek to emulate. Similarly, young people who aspire to be part of a respected group of athletes may adopt forms of dress and training practices that may lead to acceptance by the group. Anticipatory socialization looks to future expectations rather than just present experience.
ORGANIZED SPORTS
Organized sports are a fundamental part of the lives of millions of children in the United States: By one estimate, 21.5 million children and teens ages 6 to 17 participate in at least one organized sport (Kelley & Carchia, 2013). If it is the case, as psychologist Erik Erikson (1950) posited, that in middle childhood children develop a sense of “industry or inferiority,” then it is surely the case that in a sports-obsessed country like the United States, one avenue for generating this sense of self is through participation in sports.
Being part of a sports team and mastering skills associated with sports are activities that are widely recognized in U.S. society as valuable; they are presumed to “build character” and to contribute to hard work, competitiveness, and the ability to perform in stressful situations and under the gaze of others (Friedman, 2013), all of which are positively evaluated. In fact, research suggests that there are particular benefits of sports for girls, including lower rates of teen sexual activity and pregnancy (Sabo, Miller, Farrell, Melnick, & Barnes, 1999) and higher rates of college attendance, labor force participation, and entry into male-dominated occupations (Stevenson, 2010). Some studies have also found improved academic performance relative to nonparticipants for all athletes, though they have shown some variation in this effect by race and gender (Eccles & Barber, 1999; Miller, Melnick, Barnes, Farrell, & Sabo, 2005).

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Television offers a variety of female images ranging from independent working women to “fashionistas.” From the Mary Tyler Moore Show(1970–1977) to Sex and the City(1998-2004) to Pretty Little Liars(2010–Present), images can both reflect and construct ideas about femininity. image

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At the same time, sports participation has been associated in some research literature with socialization into negative attitudes, including homophobia. In a study of more than 1,400 teenagers, Osborne and Wagner (2007) found that boys who participated in “core” sports (football, basketball, baseball, and/or soccer) were three times more likely than their nonparticipant peers to express homophobic attitudes. In a country in which sports and sports figures are widely venerated and participation, particularly for boys, is labeled as “masculine,” there may also be negative effects for boys who are not athletic or who do not enjoy sports.
RELIGION
Religion is a central part of the lives of many people around the world. While the United States has a notable proportion of inhabitants who identify as atheists, about 80% of U.S. adults indicate they are members of a religion, and nearly 40% attend religious services once a week. Even among the one-fifth of the population who declare themselves unaffiliated with any particular religion, 68% believe in God, and more than 20% say that they pray every day (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2012b). Beginning with Émile Durkheim, sociologists have noted the role of religion in fostering social solidarity. Talcott Parsons (1970) pointed out that religion also acts as an agent of socialization, teaching fundamental values and beliefs that contribute to a shared normative culture.
Different religions function in similar ways, giving their followers a sense of what is right and wrong, how to conduct themselves in society, and how to organize their lives. Some socialize their followers with abstract teachings about morality, service, or self-discipline, directing believers to, for example, serve their fellow human beings or to avoid the sin of vanity. Others contain abstract teachings but specific rules about dress and hairstyles. The Amish faith entreats young men to remain clean-shaven prior to marriage, but married men must grow beards. Sikh men of India wear turbans that cover their hair, which they do not cut.
Like other agents of socialization and social control, religion directs its followers to choose certain paths and behaviors and not others. This is not to say that we are compelled to behave a certain way but rather that socialization often leads us to control our own behavior because we fear social ostracism or other negative consequences.
MASS MEDIA, THE INTERNET, AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Among the most influential agents of socialization in modern societies are technology and the mass media.Newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, and television are all forms of mass media. Television may be a particularly influential agent of socialization: In the United States, the average child aged 2 to 11 spends more than 26 hours a week in front of the TV (Nielsen, 2011; see also Figure 4.4), and by age 5 to 8, nearly half have televisions in their bedrooms (Lewin, 2011b). By the time the typical American child reaches 18, he or she will have viewed nearly 18,000 hours of television. While television remains a staple in the daily lives of most children and young people, an increasing proportion of screen time is spent surfing Internet sites, watching online videos, texting, or interacting through sites like Facebook, all of which also contribute to socialization.
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imageFIGURE 4.4 Average Weekly Television Viewing by Age Group in the United States, 2011
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SOURCE: Data from Nielsen (2011) State of the Media: The Cross Platform Report.New York City: Nielsen Media Research.

Child psychologists, sociologists, and parents’ groups pay special attention to the impact of TV and other media violence on children and young adults. Media studies during the past 20 years have largely come to a common conclusion: Media violence has the clear potential to socialize children, teenagers, and even adults into a greater acceptance of real-life violence. This is true for males and females, Whites and non-Whites. Much media violence is directed against women, and a large body of research supports the conclusion that media violence promotes tolerance among men for sexual violence, including rape (Anderson et al., 2003; Greene & Krcmar, 2005). The argument is not that viewing violent shows is a direct cause of violence; rather, viewers may become immunized to the sight of violence. Still, given that most people who are exposed to violence in the media do not become violent, the part played by the media as an agent of socialization is probably less important than the contribution made by other agents, such as family and peers.
The media play a role in socialization by creating fads and fashions for how people should look, what they should wear, and what kinds of friendships they should have. These influences, and accompanying gender stereotypes, are particularly strong during adolescence. Children’s cartoons, prime-time television, TV advertisements, and popular networks like MTV, TLC, and VH-1 often depict males and females, as well as people of particular races and ethnicities, in stereotyped ways. Teenage girls, for example, are likely to be depicted as boy-crazy and obsessed with their looks; teenage boys are shown as active, independent, and sexually and physically aggressive (Kahlenberg & Hein, 2010; Maher, Herbst, Childs, & Finn, 2008). Females’ roles also portray mostly familial or romantic ideals, whereas males fulfill work-related roles (Lauzen, Dozier, & Horan, 2008). These stereotypes have been found to influence children’s gender perceptions (Aubrey & Harrison, 2004; Gerding & Signorielli, 2014). Additionally, gender stereotypes influence beliefs across the spectrum of sexual orientation, with gay teens embracing stereotypes in ways comparable to their heterosexual peers (Bishop, Kiss, Morrison, Rushe, & Specht, 2014).
By some estimates, people in the United States now spend more than a billion hours per month using social networking sites, 407 million hours participating in online gaming, and 329 million hours e-mailing (Nielsen, 2010, 2011). While the long-term impacts of this massive level of use have yet to be determined, one clear way the Internet affects socialization is by changing social interaction. To name just one effect that was impossible 20 years ago, large groups of semianonymous individuals, often separated by great distances, can interact with one another in virtual communities, even forming close ties and friendships.
On the positive side, especially when online interactions are mixed with off-line face-to-face interactions, Internet use can foster new personal relationships and build stronger communities (Rule, 1999; Valentine, 2006; Wellman & Hampton, 1999). The types of friendships adolescents create and maintain through social media reflect the friendships they have off-line (Mazur & Richards, 2011). Since online interaction is often anonymous and occurs from the safety of familiar places, people with characteristics society tends to stigmatize, such as obesity or a stutter, can enter virtual communities where differences are not perceived or punished (McKenna & Bargh, 1998) and interests such as chess or movies can be shared. Finally, the moderate use of e-mail and the Internet can help children and teens maintain and strengthen interpersonal relationships (Subrahmanyam & Lin, 2007).
The Internet can have negative social consequences, too. Researchers have linked high levels of use with declines in communication within households, shrinking social circles, and increased depression and loneliness (Dokoupil, 2012a, 2012b; Kraut et al., 1998; Yen, Yen, & Ko, 2010). Extreme cases can develop into Internet addiction, a relatively recent phenomenon characterized by a search for social stimulation and escape from real-life problems (Armstrong, Phillips, & Saling, 2000; Block, 2008). Although the Internet can be a valuable learning tool for children, it can also damage their development by decreasing the time they spend in face-to-face interactions and exposing them to inappropriate information and images (Bremer & Rauch, 1998; Lewin, 2011b; Livingstone & Brake, 2010).

Media Socialization, Kids and Food
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Advertising Invades the Classroom
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Another form of negative socialization is cyberbullying—taunting, teasing, or verbal attacks through e-mail, text, or social networking sites with the intent to hurt the victim (Van DeBosch & Van Cleemput, 2008). Cyberbullying is a growing problem of acute concern to social workers, child psychologists, and school administrators (Slovak & Singer, 2011). Children and adolescents who are bullied in real life are sometimes both cyberbullies and victims of cyberbullying (Dilmac, 2009; Smith et al., 2008; Tyman, Saylor, Taylor, & Comeaux, 2010). Victims take to the Internet to get revenge, often through anonymous attacks, but this perpetuates the bullying cycle online and in real life. One study found that hurtful cyberteasing between adolescents in romantic relationships can escalate into real-life shouting, throwing of objects, or hitting (Madlock & Westerman, 2011).
Modern technology may foster positive socialization, but it also has the potential to be detrimental on both the micro level of individual and small-group interactions and the macro level of communities and countries. Consider the role played today by social media in turning interest groups, and even ethnic groups, against one another. The Internet can be a powerful source of information, but it can also be a source of profound disinformation and hatred, as we discuss in the Global Issuesbox on page 95.
WORK
For most adults in the United States, postadolescent socialization begins with entry into the workforce. While workplace norms calling for conformity or individuality are frequently taught by parents in the home, expectations at work can differ from those we experience in primary groups such as the family and peer groups.
Arguably, workplace socialization has had a particular influence on women, dramatically changing gender roles in many countries, including the United States. Beginning in the 1960s, paid work afforded women increased financial independence, allowing them to marry later—or not at all—and bringing them new opportunities for social interaction and new social roles.

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Meyrowitz (1985) writes that “old people are respected [in media portrayals] to the extent that they can behave like young people.” Betty White is a highly recognized actress, whose roles are often humorous and appealing to younger crowds. Think about portrayals of the elderly you have seen recently in movies or on television. Do you agree with this assessment? image
Employment also often socializes us into both the job role and our broader role as a “member” of a collective sharing the same employer. Becoming a teacher, chef, factory worker, lawyer, or retail salesperson, for instance, requires learning specific skills and the norms, values, and practices associated with that position. In that role, the employee may also internalize the values and norms of the employer and may even come to identify with the employer: Notice that employees who are speaking about their workplaces will often refer to them rather intimately, saying, for instance, not that “Company X is hiring a new sales manager” but rather that “weare hiring a new sales manager.”
Even “occupations” outside the bounds of legality are governed by rules and roles learned through socialization. Harry King, a professional thief studied by one of the authors, learned not only how to break into buildings and open safes but also how to conform to the culture of the professional thief. A professional thief never “rats” on a partner, for example, or steals from mom-and-pop stores. In addition, King acquired a unique language that enabled him to talk to other thieves while in the company of nonthieves (“Square Johns”), police officers, and prison guards (King & Chambliss, 1984).
SOCIALIZATION AND AGING
Most theories of socialization focus on infancy, childhood, and adolescence, but people do not stop changing once they become adults. Work, relationships, and the media, for example, shape socialization over the life course.
As people near the end of their working lives, anticipatory socialization again kicks in to help them envision their futures. Seniors may pay more attention to how friends react to retirement, whether they are treated differently as they age, and how the elderly are portrayed in the media. In U.S. media programming and advertisements, seniors are seriously underrepresented relative to their numbers in the nation’s population. Older characters that are present are often gender stereotyped and wealthier than in the real world, but portrayals are usually positive, perhaps reflecting an attempt to appeal to this growing group (Kessler, Racoczy, & Staudinger, 2004; Lee, Carpenter, & Meyers, 2007).
There is a perception that seniors are more likely than younger adults to disengage from society, moving away from relationships, activities, and institutions that previously played key roles in their lives. While this is the case for some seniors, research suggests that most remain active as long as they are healthy (Rubin, 2006). In fact, the notion that seniors are disengaged is belied by the fact that many seniors are politically active (they have the highest rates of voting of any age group). As well, recent data published by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project shows that the strongest growth in Facebook use in 2013 was among users 65 years of age or older. About 45% of seniors who use the Internet are, the study shows, Facebook users (Pew Research Center, 2014b).

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As people age, health and dying also become increasingly important and influential in structuring their perceptions and interactions. Married couples face the prospect of losing a spouse, and all seniors may begin to lose close friends. The question of what it might be like to live alone is more urgent for women than for men, since men, on average, die several years younger than women do. Very old people in particular are likely to spend time in the hospital, which requires being socialized into a total institution (discussed below). Growing older is thus influenced by socialization as significant and challenging as in earlier life stages.
Clearly, socialization is a lifelong process. Our early primary socialization lays a foundation for our social selves, which continue to develop through processes of secondary socialization, including our interactions with technology, media, education, and work. But can we be “resocialized”? That is, can our social selves be torn down and reconstituted in new forms that conform to the norms, roles, and rules of entirely different social settings? We explore this question in the following section.
TOTAL INSTITUTIONS AND RESOCIALIZATION
Although individuals typically play an active role in their own socialization, in one setting—the total institution—they experience little choice. Total institutionsare institutions that isolate individuals from the rest of society in order to achieve administrative control over most aspects of their lives.Examples include prisons, the military, hospitals—especially mental hospitals—and live-in drug and alcohol treatment centers. Administrative control is achieved through rules that govern all aspects of daily life, from dress to schedules to interpersonal interactions. The residents of total institutions are subject to inflexible routines rigidly enforced by staff supervision (Goffman, 1961; Malacrida, 2005).
A major purpose of total institutions is resocialization, the process of altering an individual’s behavior through total control of his or her environment.The first step is to break down the sense of self. In a total institution, every aspect of life is managed and monitored. The individual is stripped of identification with the outside world. Institutional haircuts, uniforms, round-the-clock inspections, and abuse, such as the harassment of new recruits to a military school, contribute to breaking down the individual’s sense of self. In extreme situations, such as in concentration camps, psychological and even physical torture may also be used.
Once the institutionalized person is “broken,” the institution begins rebuilding the personality. Desirable behaviors are rewarded with small privileges, such as choice of work duty in prisons. Undesirable behaviors are severely punished, as by the assignment of humiliating or painful work chores. Since the goal of the total institution is to change attitudes as well as behaviors, even a hint that the resident continues to harbor undesirable ideas may provoke disciplinary action.
How effective are total institutions in resocializing individuals? The answer depends partly on the methods used, partly on the individual, and partly on peer pressure. In the most extreme total institutions imaginable, Nazi concentration camps, some inmates came to identify with their guards and torturers, even helping them keep other prisoners under control. Most, however, resisted resocialization until their death or release (Bettelheim, 1979).
Prisons often fail at resocialization because inmates identify more with their fellow prisoners than with the administration’s agenda. Inmates in U.S. prisons may well be resocialized, but it is not likely to be to the norms of prison officials or the wider society. Rather, prisoners learn the norms of other prisoners, and, as a result, many come out of prison more hardened in their criminal behavior than before.
Even when an institution is initially successful at resocialization, individuals who return to their original social environments often revert to earlier behavior. This reversal confirms that socialization is an ongoing process, continuing throughout a person’s lifetime as a result of changing patterns of social interaction.
SOCIAL INTERACTION
Socialization at every stage of life occurs primarily through social interaction—interaction guided by the ordinary, taken-for-granted rules that enable people to live, work, and socialize together (Ridgeway & Smith-Lovin, 1999). Spoken words, gestures, body language, and other symbols and cues come together in complex ways to enable human communication. The sociologist must look behind the everyday aspects of social interaction to identify how it unfolds and how social norms and language make it possible.

Total Institutions
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Social Roles in Total Institutions
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GLOBAL ISSUES
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SOCIALIZING HATRED IN A REGION OF CONFLICT

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A woman walks past a wall decorated with the national colors in a street of Stepanakert, the capital of the self-proclaimed Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian-populated enclave claimed by Azerbaijan. The final status of the republic has yet to be resolved, and it is recognized only by Armenia. image
Throughout history, human beings everywhere have engaged in conflicts pitting one ethnic group against another. In the South Caucasus, conflict between ethnic groups has a long and bloody history. Nagorno-Karabakh, for example, is a sliver of land to which both Armenia and Azerbaijan lay historical claim. From 1988 to 1994, the two countries fought a deeply destructive war over the territory that killed 30,000 people and displaced more than a million others. While armed conflict is now limited to border skirmishes, formal and informal media in both countries exacerbate tensions—and perhaps increase the risk of future conflict—by socializing Armenians and Azeris to hate one another.
In 2011, the London-based nongovernmental organization International Alert (www.international-alert.org) used document analysis to study the way Armenians and Azeris perceive one another. Examining sources from school texts to online news sites and blogs to political speeches, the researchers hoped “to identify key words, narratives, and other innuendos that reference the concept of ‘us vs. them’ or ‘friend vs. enemy’” (Geybullayeva, 2012). They found some alarming trends, particularly in the blogosphere.
Armenians and Armenia were common topics in the Azeri blogosphere, and many posts offered deeply negative and dehumanizing characterizations. Geybullayeva (2012) writes that in one post, “the author compared Armenia to a disease that should be eradicated.” Other posts celebrated the killing of a civilian Armenian shepherd living near the border, lauding his death as “happy news” because there was one fewer Armenian. Geybullayeva suggests that youth, who are the most active users of the Internet, are the most likely to be affected by such messages, which both reflect and reproduce hatred for their ethnic neighbors.
Azeris are hardly alone in the blogosphere of hate. The Internet can bring people together through social networking and other means, but it can also tear them apart, functioning as a platform for socializing groups, and even generations, into hostility and hatred.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageShould national laws or international agreements seek to restrict the use of the Internet as a platform for expressing or disseminating hatred of social groups? Would such laws violate the democratic value of “free speech”?
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Social interaction usually requires conformity to social conventions. According to Scheff (1966), violation of the norms of interaction is generally interpreted as a sign that the person is “abnormal,” perhaps even dangerous. A person in a crowded elevator who persists in engaging strangers in loud conversations, for example, and disheveled homeless people who shuffle down the street muttering to themselves evoke anxiety if not repugnance.
Norms govern a wide range of interactive behaviors. For example, making eye contact when speaking to someone is valued in mainstream U.S. culture; people who don’t make eye contact are considered dishonest and shifty. By contrast, among the Navajo and the Australian Aborigines, as well as in many East Asian cultures, direct eye contact is considered disrespectful, especially with a person of greater authority. Norms also govern how close we stand to friends and strangers in making conversation. In North American and Northern European cultures, people avoid standing closer than a couple of feet from one another unless they are on intimate terms (Hall, 1973). Men in the United States are socialized to avoid displays of intimacy with other men, such as walking arm in arm. In Nigeria, however, men who are close friends or relatives hold hands when walking together, while in Italy, Spain, Greece, and some Middle Eastern countries, men commonly throw their arms around each other’s shoulders, hug, and even kiss.
Two different approaches to studying social interaction are Erving Goffman’s metaphor of interaction as theater and conversation analysts’ efforts to study the way people manage routine talk. We discuss these approaches later, but first we look briefly at some sociologists’ studies of social interaction.
STUDIES OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
Studies of social interaction have frequently drawn on the symbolic interactionist perspective. They illuminate nearly every form and aspect of social interaction. For example, research on battered women shows how victims of domestic violence redefine their situations to come to grips with abusive relationships (Hattery, 2001). One strategy is to deny the partner’s violent behavior altogether, whereas another is to minimize the partner’s responsibility, attributing it to external factors like unemployment, alcoholism, or mental illness. Or the victim will define her own role as caretaker and assume responsibility for “saving” the abusive partner. A woman who eventually decides to leave an abusive relationship must, some research suggests, redefine her situation so as to change her self-image. She must come to see herself as a victim of abuse who is capable of ending the abusive relationship, rather than as someone responsible for “solving” her mate’s “problem” (Johnson & Ferraro, 1984).
Recent studies of social interaction have covered many topics, including the following:

• The way online gamers coordinate their individual actions with one another and through the user interface in order to succeed at games such as World of Warcraft(Williams & Kirschner, 2012)
• The strategies homeless youth use to manage and alleviate stigma, including creating friendships or attempting to pass as nonhomeless, as well as acting aggressive and fighting back (Roschelle & Kaufman, 2004)
• The ways in which a sense of “corporate social responsibility” is promoted and learned by corporate executives in the work environment (Shamir, 2011)
THE DRAMATURGICAL APPROACH: ERVING GOFFMAN
Erving Goffman (1959, 1961, 1963a, 1967, 1972), a major figure in the study of social interaction, developed a set of theoretical ideas that make it possible to observe and describe social interaction. Goffman used what he termed the dramaturgical approach, the study of social interaction as if it were governed by the practices of theatrical performance.
According to Goffman, people in their everyday lives are concerned, much like actors on a stage, with the presentation of self, that is, the creation of impressions in the minds of others in order to define and control social situations.For instance, to serve many customers simultaneously, a waiter must take charge with a “presentation of self” that is polite but firm and does not allow customers to usurp control by taking too much time ordering. After only a short time, the waiter asserts control by saying, “I’ll give you a few minutes to decide what you want” and walks away.
As people interact, they monitor themselves and each other, looking for clues that reveal the impressions they are making on others. This ongoing effort at impression managementresults in a continual realignment of the individuals’ “performances,” as the “actors” refit their roles using dress, objects, voice, and gestures in a joint enterprise.
Continuing the metaphor of a theatrical performance, Goffman divides spheres of interaction into two stages. In the front stage,we are social actors engaged in a process of impression management through the use of props, costumes, gestures, and language. A professor lecturing to her class, a young couple on their first date, and a job applicant in an interview all are governed by existing social norms, so the professor will not arrive in her nightgown, nor will the prospective employee greet his interviewer with a high-five rather than a handshake. Just as actors in a play must stick to their scripts, so too, suggests Goffman, do we as social actors risk consequences (like failed interactions) if we diverge from the normative script.

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The film The Wizard of Ozoffers a good example of mystification. Though the wizard is really, in his own words, “just a man,” he maintains his status in Oz by hiding behind a curtain and using a booming voice and fiery mask to convey the impression of awesome power. image
Goffman offers insights into the techniques we as social actors have in our repertoire. Among them are the following:

• Dramatic realizationis the actor’s effort to mobilize his or her behavior to draw attention to a particular characteristic of the role he or she is assuming. What impression does a baseball umpire strive to leave on his audience (the teams and fans)? Arguably, he would like to embody authority, so he makes his calls loudly and with bold gestures.
• Idealizationis an actor’s effort to embody in his or her behaviors the officially accredited norms and values of a community or society. Those with fewer economic resources might purchase faux designer bags or watches in order to conform to perceived societal expectations of material wealth.
• Misrepresentationis part of every actor’s repertoire, ranging from kind deception (telling a friend she looks great when she doesn’t) to self-interested untruth (telling a professor a paper was lost in a computer crash when it was never written) to bald-faced prevarication (lying to conceal an affair). The actor wants to maintain a desired impression in the eyes of the audience: The friend would like to be perceived as kind and supportive, the student as conscientious and hardworking, and the spouse as loyal and loving.
• Mystificationis largely reserved for those with status and power and serves to maintain distance from the audience in order to keep people in awe. Corporate leaders keep their offices on a separate floor and don’t mix with employees, while celebrities may avoid interviews and allow their on-screen roles to define them as savvy and smart.
We may also engage in impression management as a team. A team consists of two or more actors cooperating to create a definition of the situation favorable to them. For example, members of a sports team work together, though some may be more skilled than others, to convey a definition of themselves as a highly competent and competitive group. Or the members of a family may work together to convey to their dinner guests that they are content and happy by acting cooperatively and smiling at one another during the group interaction.
The example of the family gives us an opportunity to explore Goffman’s concept of the back stage,where actors let down their masks and relax or even practice their impression management. Before the dinner party, the home is a back stage. One parent is angry at the other for getting cheap rather than expensive wine, one sibling refuses to speak to the parent who grounded her, and the other won’t stop texting long enough to set the table. Then the doorbell rings. Like magic, the home becomes the front stage as the adults smilingly welcome their guests and the kids begin to carry out trays of snacks and drinks. The guests may or may not sense some tension in the home, but they play along with the scenario so as not to create discomfort. When the party ends, the home reverts to the back stage, and each actor can relax his or her performance.
Goffman’s work, like Mead’s and the work of other sociologists focusing on socialization, sees the social self as an outcome of society and social interactions. Goffman, however, characterizes the social self not as a possession—a dynamic but still essentially real self—but rather as a productof a given social interaction, which can change as we seek to manage impressions for different audiences. Would you say that Mead or Goffman offers a better characterization of us as social actors?
ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Routine, day-to-day social interactions are the building blocks of social institutions and ultimately of society itself. Ethnomethodologyis used to study the body of commonsense knowledge and procedures by which ordinary members of a society make sense of their social circumstances and interactions. Ethnorefers to “folk,” or ordinary people; methodologyrefers to the methods they use to govern interaction—which are as distinct as the methods used by sociologists to study them. Ethnomethodology was created through Harold Garfinkel’s work in the early 1960s. Garfinkel (1963, 1985) sought to understand exactly what goes on in social interactions after observing that our interpretation of social interaction depends on the context. For example, if a child on a playground grabs another child’s ball and runs with it, the teacher may see this as a sign of the child’s aggressiveness, while fellow students see it as a display of courage. Social interaction and communication are not possible unless most people have learned to assign similar meanings to the same interactions. By studying the specific contexts of concrete social interactions, Garfinkel sought to understand how people come to share the same interpretations of social interactions.

Gender and Self-Talk
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INEQUALITY MATTERS
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GENDER AND CONVERSATION

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David R. Frazier / Photo Researchers, Inc.
Do you think that men and women communicate differently? How would you articulate differences you observe? Would you attribute them to nature or nurture? image
Men often claim they “cannot get a word in edgewise” when talking to women. However, conversation analysis research challenges this claim: In hundreds of recorded conversations between men and women, researchers found that men more frequently interrupted women than women interrupted men and that men used the interruptions to dominate the conversation. Men tended to speak more loudly and to be less polite than women, using loudness and rudeness (such as sarcastic remarks about what a woman had said) to control the conversation (Campbell, Klein, & Olson, 1992; Fishman, 1978; West, 1979; West & Zimmerman, 1977, 1983; Zimmerman & West, 1975, 1980). While men set the agenda and otherwise dominated the conversation, women often did the “work” of maintaining conversations by nodding their heads, saying “a-hah,” and asking questions (DeFrancisco, 1991; Fishman, 1978; Leaper & Robnett, 2011; Tannen, 2001; West & Zimmerman, 1977, 1983).
This research shows that the rules and conventions governing ordinary talk are grounded in the larger society—society’s gender roles, in which men generally assume a dominant position in interaction with women without even realizing it. In fact, not only do men not realize they are dominating the conversation; they think women dominate and “talk too much.”
The apparently private conversations between men and women thus reflect a fundamental issue in contemporary society: inequality between the sexes, including how inequality gets reproduced in subtle ways. The cultural stereotype of women as talkative and emotional and men as quiet and rational affects women even though its basis in reality is weak. No matter that men talk more and dominate conversations—women are made to feel unequal by the reproduction of the stereotype, and inequality between the sexes is reinforced. The private lives of people in conversations thus cannot be divorced from the way the larger social norms and stereotypes shape relationships between men and women.
THINK IT THROUGH
imageThe above discussion demonstrates how sociological research can shed light on “commonsense” assumptions—such as the assumption that women dominate conversations more than do men—by empirically testing them. Can you identify other stereotypical ideas about social interactions between different groups or individuals? How could you go about testing these ideas empirically?
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Garfinkel also believed that in all cultures people expect others to talk in a way that is coherent and understandable and become anxious and upset when this does not happen. Making sense of one another’s conversations is even more fundamental to social life than cultural norms, Garfinkel argued, since without ways of arriving at meaningful understandings, communication, and hence culture, is not possible. Because the procedures that determine how we make sense of conversations are so important to social interaction, another field developed from ethnomethodology that focuses on talk itself: conversation analysis.
Conversation analysisinvestigates the way participants in social interaction recognize and produce coherent conversation(Schegloff, 1990, 1991). In this context, conversationincludes virtually any form of verbal communication, from routine small talk to emergency phone calls to congressional hearings and court proceedings (Heritage & Greatbatch, 1991; Hopper, 1991, Whalen & Zimmerman, 1987, 1990; Zimmerman, 1984, 1992).
Conversation analysis research suggests that social interaction is not simply a random succession of events. Rather, people construct conversations through a reciprocal process that makes the interaction coherent. One way in which we sequentially organize conversations is turn taking,a strategy that allows us to understand an utterance as a response to an earlier one and a cue to take our turn in the conversation. A person’s turn ends once the other conversants indicate they have understood the message. For example, by answering “Fine” to the question “How are you?” you show that you have understood the question and are ready to move ahead.
On the other hand, answering “What do you mean?” or “Green” to the question “How are you?” is likely to lead to conversational breakdown. Conversational analysts have identified a number of techniques commonly used to repair such breakdowns. For example, if you begin speaking but realize midsentence that the other person is already speaking, you can “repair” this awkward situation by pausing until the original speaker finishes his or her turn and then restarting your turn.
Later research emphasized the impact of the larger social structure on conversations (Wilson, 1991). Sociologists looked at the use of power in conversations, including the power of the dispatcher over the caller in emergency phone calls (Whalen, Zimmerman, & Whalen, 1990; Zimmerman, 1984, 1992), of the questioner over the testifier in governmental hearings (Molotch & Boden, 1985), and of men over women in male–female interactions (Campbell et al., 1992; Fishman, 1978; West, 1979; West & Zimmerman, 1977, 1983; Zimmerman & West, 1975, 1980). The last instance, in particular, illustrates how the larger social structure—in this case, gender structure—affects conversation. Even at the most basic and personal level—a private conversation between two people—social structures exercise a potentially powerful influence.
WHY STUDY SOCIALIZATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION?
Have you ever wondered why you and some of your classmates or neighbors differ in worldviews, coping strategies for stress, or values concerning right and wrong? Understanding socialization and social interaction sheds light on such differences and what they mean to us in everyday life. For example, if you travel abroad, you will have a sense of how cultural differences come to be and appreciate that no culture is more “normal” than another—each has its own norms, values, and roles taught from earliest childhood.
By studying socialization, you also come to understand the critical socializing roles that peers, schools, and work environments play in the lives of children, adolescents, and young adults. The growing influence of the mass media, including the Internet and other technological innovations in communication, means we must pay close attention to these sources of socialization and social interaction as well. As people spend more time on the Internet talking to friends and strangers, experimenting with new identities, and seeking new forms of and forums for social interaction, sociologists may need to rethink some of their ideas about the influence of agents like parents and schools; perhaps these may recede in importance—or grow. Sociologists also ask how our presentation of self is transformed when we create social selves in the anonymous space of social media. What kinds of research could you imagine conducting to learn more about the digital world as an agent of socialization and a site of modern social interaction?
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WHAT CAN I DO WITH A
SOCIOLOGY DEGREE?
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CAREER DEVELOPMENT: CREATING A JOB SEARCH PLAN AND PUTTING IT INTO ACTION
Your job search action planshould build on your career goals and focus on short- and medium-term activities. Break your goals into specific and manageable tasks to create action items. Strive to be as specific as possible with your action items by including details about who and what is involved in completing each task, identifying measurable outcomes, and noting time-based deadlines for when activities will be completed. Include in your job search action plan job search strategies that are likely to produce results.
We briefly discuss each of these strategies below. Additional resources for each can be found on the book’s student study site, www.sagepub.com/chamblissintro.
Target Employers
Based on your research, develop a list of 10 to 15 potential employers that align with your career and job search goals. Track the employers regularly to update your organizational knowledge and learn about new opportunities. Utilize LinkedIn and other social media sites to identify individuals and groups with whom you might connect in the organizations for information, introductions, and leads.
Network
Networking is about building relationships for the purpose of making connections to enhance your career and/or job search. People build their networks online, at their places of employment, through internships, and in their communities, as well as through professors, friends, friends of friends, family members, former employers, and fellow alumni. Consider conducting informational interviews such as those you previously used for career exploration to network and to learn about particular employers, industries, and individuals.
Market Yourself: Résumés
A résumé reviews your education, academic awards, employment and volunteer experiences, college and leadership activities, and language and technical skills. Start your experience descriptions with action verbs and omit all personal pronouns. Use qualifiers and quantifiers to describe the breadth and depth of your involvement in activities. Your résumé should be a single page in a standard 10- to 12-point font, printed on bond paper, and error-free.
Market Yourself: Cover Letters
Cover letters are a form of business writing and should follow a business letter format. The first paragraph of your cover letter should start with information about the reason for writing, identify how you learned of the position, and succinctly state how your skills, degree, and experience match the requirements of the position. The second paragraph should expand on information about your fit for the position, discuss your accomplishments, and use specific examples that parallel the experience and skills that the employer seeks. The third paragraph should identify career-related characteristics that will support your success in the position, such as resourcefulness, time management, and persistence. The final paragraph should restate your interest in the position, your availability to discuss the opportunity, and a reference to your contact information.
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Market Yourself: Utilizing the Online Advantage
Utilize resources online to brand and market yourself, connect with individuals and groups, access job listings, link to employer and job listing sites, research employer information and occupational trends, and/or create a website or blog to highlight your career and professional activities and accomplishments. Expand your network by connecting with individuals and groups via social media and job listing sites.
Interview Strategies
An interview is your opportunity to articulate to the employer your skills, abilities, and accomplishments that best match the attributes that he or she is seeking in an ideal candidate. Be sure that you have researched the employer so that you can ask informed questions. Plan ahead so that you are able to arrive early for the interview. When you greet the interviewer, make eye contact, smile, and shake his or her hand firmly. As the interview begins, be professional, but be yourself. Listen to the interviewer’s questions without interruption and allow yourself time to form responses before answering questions. Speak clearly and enthusiastically about your experiences and skills and offer detailed responses to questions that emphasize your experience, skills, and knowledge.
Within 24 hours after an interview, e-mail or mail a thank-you letter to each person with whom you met. Learn more about interviewing strategies, as well as questions frequently asked by employers and interviewees, on the book’s online student site.
Evaluate and Negotiate Offers
When you receive a job offer, consider it carefully by reviewing the entire compensation package, which includes both salary and benefits. In addition to the compensation package, review the related pros or cons of accepting the position. To negotiate a change in the package, start with the salary by stating your preferred salary range. Restate your selling points, including why you believe that your skills, knowledge, and experience are the best fit for the position and how you will add value to the organization. Always frame your argument in relation to the employer’s hiring needs and the goals of the organization rather than your preferences.
Reflect and Pursue Lifelong Career Development
Even when you have completed a specific job search, your career development is continuous. Practice lifelong learning and actively engage in professional development. Build your network, develop connections to colleagues, and demonstrate ethical behaviors in your professional activities. Continue to explore new opportunities and review and update your career goals. Seek to know and remain true to your career identity—the values, aspirations, interests, talents, skills, and preferences related to careers that are fundamental to your career satisfaction and success.

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SUMMARY

• Socializationis a lifelong, active process by which people learn the cultures of their societies and construct a sense of who they are.
• What we often think of as “human nature” is in fact learned through socialization. Sociologists argue that human behavior is not determined biologically, though biology plays some role; rather, human behavior develops primarily through social interaction.
• Although some theories emphasize the early years, sociologists generally argue that socialization takes place throughout the life course. The theories of Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget emphasize the early years, while those of George Herbert Mead (although his role-takingtheory focuses on the earlier stages of the life course), Lawrence Kohlberg, and Judith Harris give more consideration to the whole life course. According to Mead, children acquire a sense of self through symbolic interaction, including the role-taking that eventually enables the adult to take the standpoint of society as a whole.
• Kohlberg built on Piaget’s ideas to argue that a person’s sense of morality develops through different stages, from that in which people strictly seek personal gain or seek to avoid punishment to the stage in which they base moral decisions on abstract principles.
• The immediate family provides the earliest and typically foremost source of socialization, but school, work, peers, religion, sports, and mass media, including the Internet, all play a significant role.
• Socialization may differ by social class. Middle-class families place a somewhat greater emphasis on creativity and independence, while working-class families often stress obedience to authority. These differences, in turn, reflect the corresponding workplace differences associated with social class.
• In total institutions, such as prisons, the military, and hospitals, individuals are isolated so that society can achieve administrative control over their lives. By enforcing rules that govern all aspects of daily life, from dress to schedules to interpersonal interactions, total institutions can open the way to resocialization, which is the breaking down of the person’s sense of self and the rebuilding of the personality.
• According to Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, we are all actors concerned with the presentation of selfin social interaction. People perform their social roles on the “front stage” and are able to avoid performing on the “back stage.”
• Ethnomethodologyis a method of analysis that examines the body of commonsense knowledge and procedures by which ordinary members of a society make sense of their social circumstances and interaction.
• Conversation analysis, which builds on ethnomethodology, is the study of the way participants in social interaction recognize and produce coherent conversation.
KEY TERMS
socialization, 81
behaviorism, 83
social learning, 83
looking-glass self, 83
primary groups, 84
secondary groups, 84
reference groups, 84
I, 84
me, 84
role-taking, 84
significant others, 84
generalized other, 85
cognitive development, 85
egocentric, 85
psychoanalysis, 86
id, 86
ego, 86
superego, 86
hidden curriculum, 89
anticipatory socialization, 90
total institutions, 94
resocialization, 94
dramaturgical approach, 96
presentation of self, 96
ethnomethodology, 97
conversation analysis, 99
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What are agents of socialization? What agents of socialization do sociologists identify as particularly important? Which of these would you say have the most profound effects on the construction of our social selves? Make a case to support your choices.
2. The United States is a country where sports are an important part of many people’s lives—many Americans enjoy playing sports, while others follow their favorite sports teams closely in the media. How are sports an agent of socialization? What roles, norms, or values are conveyed through this agent of socialization?
3. What role does the way people react to you play in the development of your personality and your self-image? How can the reactions of others influence whether or not you develop skills as an athlete or a student or a musician, for example?
4. Recall Goffman’s ideas about social interaction and the presentation of self. How have social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram affected the presentation of self? Have there been changes to what Goffman saw as our front and back stages?
5. What are the characteristics of total institutions such as prisons and mental institutions? How does socialization in a total institution differ from “ordinary” socialization?

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5 GROUPS,
ORGANIZATIONS, AND
BUREAUCRACIES

AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti
Media Library
CHAPTER 5 Media Library
AUDIO
Stanley Milgram’s Work
Bureaucracy
VIDEO
Groupthink and Cognitive Perceptions
Social Capital
Protests
CQ RESEARCHER
Types of Indigenous Groups
Social Media Explosion
PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE
Groupthink Among Rwanda’s Youth
Authority & Conformity
JOURNAL
Conflict, power and status in groups
Leadership Characteristics
Leadership in Temporary Organizations

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IN THIS CHAPTER
The Nature of Groups
The Power of Groups
Economic, Cultural, and Social Capital
Organizations
Bureaucracies
Why Study Groups and Organizations?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
1. Do most people conform to the expectations of the groups to which they belong? What explains conformity? What explains dissent?
2. Why do many people think of bureaucracies as inefficient and annoying? What would be the alternative?
3. Could a group of college students working together on a societal issue such as rising student debt, child hunger, or veteran homelessness bring about significant social change?
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WHEN GROUPS THINK… GROUPTHINK
Patrick Smith/Stringer/Getty Images

In June 2012, former Pennsylvania State University football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted by a Pennsylvania court of sexually abusing children who were under his care and supervision. Sandusky had contact with many boys through his respected position at Penn State and his Second Mile charity, a service organization with a mission to help disadvantaged young people through sports. The charges, witness testimony, and some of Sandusky’s own admissions about, for instance, showering with boys in the Penn State locker room were shocking to most who heard them.
But they may not have been a shock to a number of Sandusky’s colleagues at Penn State. According to an investigative report prepared by former FBI director Louis Freeh at the behest of the Penn State Board of Regents, many people were already aware of Sandusky’s abusive activities. Some, like head football coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier, had been aware of allegations against Sandusky for years. So why did no one act to halt the abuse? Why were allegations and evidence of Sandusky’s actions covered up by colleagues in the football program and the university administration?
The case is complex, and a spectrum of answers to these questions may be offered. One possibility, however, is that groupthink played a role. Groupthink is a phenomenon characterized by the members of a group choosing to elevate consensus and conformity—and preservation of the group—above other values. In an opinion piece published by Time magazine on groupthink at Penn State, two authors, a psychologist and a physician, argue that Penn State’s athletic and administrative leaders chose to protect Sandusky, who was one of their elite group, rather than the victimized children, nearly all of whom were poor. They wanted to shield Sandusky—and the Penn State image and program—from damaging scrutiny. Their logic, deduced from e-mail traffic uncovered by Freeh, is characterized by the article’s authors as follows: “This particular insider group managed to twist logic to the point where they thought it was more ‘humane’ to cover up the repeated allegations of Sandusky’s abuse than to report them to police” (Cohen & DeBenedet, 2012).
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© Jim Mahoney/Dallas Morning News/Corbis
Secondary groups may evolve into primary groups for some members. For example, when students taking the same course begin to socialize outside of class, they may create bonds of friendship that come to constitute a primary group.
When decisions are based primarily on how group members will react, rather than on ethical, professional, or legal considerations, groupthink can, as this case shows, lead to devastating outcomes. The influence of the group can foster deviance—but at the same time, group bonds are fundamental to our lives and a key part of socialization and social integration. The roles that groups play in society are clearly complex, and they are a key focus of sociological study.
We begin this chapter with an overview of the nature of social groups, looking at primary and secondary groups and their effects on our lives. We also examine the power of groups in fostering integration and enforcing conformity, among other key functions. We then turn to a discussion of the importance of capital in social group formation and action, followed by an exploration of the place of organizations in society. Next we address a topic about which Max Weber wrote extensively and with which we all have some experience—bureaucracies. We end the chapter with a consideration of the modern roles of governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the pursuit of social change.
THE NATURE OF GROUPS
The male elephant is a solitary creature, spending much of its life wandering alone, interacting with other elephants only when it is time to mate or if another male intrudes on its territory. Female elephants, by contrast, live their lives in groups. Both male and female human beings are like the female elephant: We are social animals who live our entire lives in the company of others. Our lives are social, and we can better understand them by looking at the types of groups with which we are associated. Each of us is born into an emotionally and biologically connected group we know as “the family.” As we mature, we become increasingly interconnected with other people, some our own age and others not, at school, on sports teams, and through various other social interactions and increasingly via the Internet and social media. We consolidate and accumulate friends, teammates, and classmates—different groups with whom we interact on a regular basis. Eventually we get jobs and engage with coworkers and other people we encounter in the course of our work. Along the way we may form and maintain friendship groups, either in person or virtually, that share our interests in particular activities or lifestyles, such as poker, model airplanes, or music. Sometimes we are part of groups that gather for special events, like watching a college football game or attending a presidential inauguration or political demonstration.
A moment’s reflection on these types of groups reveals that they differ in many important ways, particularly in the degree of intimacy and social support their members experience. Sociologists find this difference so fundamental that they use it to distinguish between primary and secondary groups. Primary groups are characterized by intense emotional ties, intimacy, and identification with membership in the group. Secondary groups are large, impersonal groups with minimal emotional and intimate ties (Cooley, 1909). Today, social networking sites and virtual, online groups that people are part of can include primary or secondary groups. Moreover, the Internet is increasingly blurring the boundary distinctions between primary and secondary groups—very large, ostensibly impersonal groups can take on a very intimate feeling thanks to the power of virtual communication and information sharing. As we will discuss later in this chapter, technology and the Internet have changed quite a lot about how we think of social relations and social groups.
Primary groups are of great significance because they exert a long-lasting influence on the development of our social selves (Cooley, 1902/1964). Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), who first introduced the distinction between primary and secondary groups, argued that people belong to primary groups mainly because these groups satisfy personal needs of belonging and fulfillment. People join secondary groups such as business organizations, schools, work groups, athletic clubs, and governmental bodies to achieve specific goals: to earn a living, to get a college degree, to compete in sports, and so on. (For a summary of the characteristics of primary and secondary groups, see Table 5.1.)
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TABLE 5.1 The Characteristics of Primary and Secondary Groups

THE POWER OF GROUPS
As you learned in Chapter 4, we often judge ourselves by how we think we appear to others, which Cooley termed the “looking-glass self.” Groups as well as individuals provide the standards by which we make these self-evaluations. Robert K. Merton (1968), following Herbert Hyman (1942), elaborated on the concept of the reference group as a measure by which we evaluate ourselves. Importantly, a reference group provides a standard for judging our own attitudes or behaviors.
For most of us, the family is the reference group with the greatest impact in shaping our early view of ourselves. As we mature, and particularly during adolescence, peers replace or at least compete with the family as the reference group through which we define ourselves. Today, thanks to the growth of social media, many people establish “virtual” reference groups and intimate primary groups with people they have never seen face-to-face.
Reference groups may be primary, such as the family, or secondary, such as a group of soldiers in the same branch of service in the military. They may even be fictional. One of the chief functions of advertising, for example, is to create sets of imaginary reference groups that will influence consumers’ buying habits. We are invited to purchase a particular vehicle or fragrance, for instance, in order to join an ostensibly exclusive group of sophisticated, sexy owners of that item. Reference groups can have powerful effects on our consumer choices, as well as on our other social actions.
THE EFFECTS OF SIZE
Another significant way in which groups differ has to do with their size. The German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was one of the first to call attention to the influence of group size on people’s behavior. Since Simmel’s time, small-group researchers have conducted a number of laboratory experiments to discover how group size affects both the quality of interaction in the group and the group’s effectiveness in accomplishing certain tasks (Levine & Crowther, 2008; Lucas & Lovaglia, 1998).
The simplest group, which Simmel (1955) called a dyad, consists of two persons. Simmel reasoned that dyads, which offer both intimacy and conflict, are likely to be simultaneously intense and unstable. To survive, they require the full attention and cooperation of both parties. Dyads are typically the sources of our most elementary social bonds, often constituting the groups in which we are most likely to share our deepest secrets. The commitment two people make through marriage is one way to form a dyadic group. But dyads can also be very fragile. If one person withdraws from the dyad, it vanishes. That is why, as Simmel believed, a variety of cultural and legal norms arise to support dyadic groups, including marriage, in societies where such groups are regarded as an important source of social stability.
Adding one other person to a dyad changes the group relationship considerably, making what Simmel termed a triad. Triads are apt to be more stable than dyads, since the presence of a third person relieves some of the pressure on the other two members to always get along and maintain the energy of the relationship. One person can temporarily withdraw his or her attention from the relationship without necessarily threatening it. In addition, if two members have a disagreement, the third can play the role of mediator, as when you try to patch up a falling-out between two friends or coworkers (see Figure 5.1).
On the other hand, however, an alliance (or coalition) may form between two members of a triad, enabling them to “gang up” on the third member, thereby destabilizing the group. Alliances are most likely to form when no member is clearly dominant and all three are competing for the same thing—for example, when three friends are given a pair of tickets to a concert and have to decide which two will go. Larger groups share some of the characteristics of triads. For instance, on the TV series Survivor, alliances form within the group of castaways as individuals forge special relationships with one another to avoid being eliminated by a group vote.
Types of Indigenous Groups
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TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY

SOCIAL INTERACTIONS IN A NEW AGE OF
COMMUNICATION

© Jon Hicks/Corbis
The dissemination of technology has resulted in nearly one third of the global population having access to the Internet. Many children today are growing up in a truly digital society, where technology is deeply entwined with their upbringing and socialization.
The technologies of social media can strengthen ties among members of primary and secondary groups, aid social change, and disseminate unfiltered news immediately as events unfold. At the same time, they allow anyone to disseminate information about anyone else with relative anonymity and no fact-checking, provide an avenue through which those with dangerous causes or desires may unite, and present opportunities for new forms of exploitation, bullying, and harassment. Whether human social interaction today is better or worse than in the past is irrelevant; it is simply significantly different.
Estimates place the number of individuals with access to the Internet around the world at roughly 2.3 billion and climbing—so the Internet is already accessible to some degree to about 33% of the world’s population (Internet World Stats, 2012). Facebook, the world’s dominant social networking site, has 552 million daily users and more than 1 billion monthly users, the majority of them outside the United States (Facebook, 2012). Even so, recent data show that 3.3 million teens have left Facebook since 2011, along with 3.4 million 18- to 24-year-olds (Neal, 2014). They may be migrating toward social networks like Twitter and Instagram, which are popular among younger adults (Duggan & Smith, 2014). Additionally, the app Snapchat attracts 26% of cell phone users ages 18 to 29 (MarketingCharts, 2013). Nearly one in five people in the United States has gone out with someone he or she met online. Since its creation in 2003, LinkedIn has drawn more than 150 million members in more than 200 countries (LinkedIn, 2012). Pinterest allows users to create virtual pinboards to save and share links, recipes, photos, fashions, and countless other preferences (Pinterest, 2012). Increasingly, digital communications are becoming integrated and “intelligent,” letting users link their Pinterest boards to their Facebook accounts and access them from their smartphones.
Not only does technology provide a means of increasing social interactions among individuals and groups, but it also presents opportunities for interactions that might otherwise never have taken place. The wife of a Washington State corrections officer received a “People You May Know” update on her Facebook page suggesting she might want to be friends with another woman. When she clicked on the other woman’s profile, she found wedding photos of her husband and the other woman. Not only had her husband never told her he had been married before, but he was still married to the woman in the pictures. He was subsequently arrested and charged with bigamy (Rabiner, 2012).
There is a very good chance that the theorizing sociologists did about social groups and interactions in the 20th century will look quite different in the 21st century as our means of forming groups, feeling integrated, and interacting with others change.
THINK IT THROUGH
How do virtual groups differ from in-person primary and secondary groups? What qualities do virtual and in-person groups share?

Social Media Explosion
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FIGURE 5.1 A Dyad and a Triad

Theoretically, in forming an alliance a triad member is most likely to choose the weaker of the two other members, if there is one. But why would this be the case if picking a stronger member would strengthen the alliance? Choosing a weaker member enables the member seeking to form the alliance to exercise more power and control within the alliance. However, in some “revolutionary” coalitions, the two weaker members form an alliance to overthrow the stronger one (Goldstone, 2001; Grusky, Bonacich, & Webster, 1995).
Going from a dyad to a triad illustrates an important sociological principle first identified by Simmel: As group size increases, the intensity of relationships within the group decreases while overall group stability increases. There are exceptions to every principle, however. Intensity of interaction among individuals within a group decreases as the size of the group increases because, for instance, a larger number of outlets or alternative arenas for interaction exist for individuals who are not getting along (Figure 5.2). In a dyad, only a single relationship is possible; however, in a triad, three different two-person relationships can occur. Adding a fourth person leads to six possible two-person relationships, not counting subgroups that may form. In a 10-person group, the number of possible two-person relationships increases to 45! When one relationship doesn’t work out to your liking, you can easily move on to another, as you sometimes may do at large parties.
Larger groups tend to be more stable than smaller ones because the withdrawal of some members does not threaten the survival of the entire group. For example, sports teams do not cease to exist simply because of the loss of one player, even though that player might have been important to the team’s overall success. Beyond a certain size, perhaps a dozen people, groups may also develop a formal structure. Formal leadership roles may arise, such as president or secretary, and official rules may develop to govern what the group does. We discuss formal organizations later in this chapter.
Larger groups can sometimes be exclusive, since it is easier for their members to limit their social relationships to the group itself, avoiding relationships with nonmembers. This sense of being part of an in-group or clique is often what unites the members of fraternities, sororities, and other campus organizations. Cliquishness is especially likely to occur when a group consists of members who are similar to one another in such social characteristics as age, gender, class, race, or ethnicity. Members of rich families, for example, may sometimes be reluctant to fraternize with people from the working class, men may prefer to play basketball only with other men, and students who belong to a particular ethnic group may seek out each other’s company in the dormitory or cafeteria. The concept of social closure, originally developed by Max Weber, is especially relevant here, insofar as it speaks to the ability of a group to strategically and consciously exclude outsiders or those deemed “undesirable” from participating in the group or enjoying the group’s resources (Murphy, 1988; Parkin, 1979).

FIGURE 5.2 A Complex Network of Relationships

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© Peter Turnley/Corbis
Nelson Mandela played an influential role in leading South Africa out of apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Prior to assuming the presidency of the post-apartheid South African government, Mandela, writing from a prison cell, inspired many South Africans, as well as people in other parts of the world, to form antiapartheid coalitions and groups.
Groups don’t always exclude outsiders, however (Blau, 1977; Stolle, 1998). For example, if your social group or club is made up of members from different social classes or ethnic groups, you are more likely to appreciate diversity thanks to your firsthand experience. This experience with difference may perhaps lead you to be more inclusive of others not like yourself in other aspects of your life, for example, in bringing together a group to work on a project. This, of course, is an optimistic outlook and one that we embrace and hope holds true in practice.
At the same time, researchers have found that exposure to differences of race, ethnicity, religion, social class, and other characteristics may in fact lead to negative consequences and exclusion—thus highlighting that there are two sides to every coin. The idea here is that exposure to “different” people or things may heighten the “threat” level that people feel and associate with differences, causing them to want to exclude those people or things from their lives (Blalock, 1967; Markert, 2010).
TYPES OF GROUP LEADERSHIP
A leader is a person able to influence the behavior of other members of a group. All groups tend to have leaders, even if the leaders do not have formal titles. Leaders come in a variety of forms: autocratic, charismatic, democratic, laissez-faire, bureaucratic, and so on. Some leaders are especially effective in motivating members of their groups or organizations, inspiring them to achievements they might not ordinarily accomplish. Such a transformational leader goes beyond the merely routine, instilling in group members a sense of mission or higher purpose and thereby changing (transforming) the nature of the group itself (Burns, 1978; Kanter, 1983; Mehra, Dixon, Brass, & Robertson, 2006).
Transformational leaders leave their marks on their organizations and can also be vital inspirations for social change in the world. Nelson Mandela, the first Black African president of postapartheid South Africa, had spent 27 years in prison, having been convicted of treason against the White-dominated government. Nonetheless, his moral and political position was so strong that upon his release he immediately assumed leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), leading that political group to the pinnacle of power in South Africa and then assuming the office of president of the entire nation.
Most leaders are not as visionary as Mandela, however. A leader who simply “gets the job done” is a transactional leader, concerned with accomplishing the group’s tasks, getting group members to do their jobs, and making certain the group achieves its goals. Transactional leadership is routine leadership. For example, the teacher who effectively gets through the lesson plan each day but does not necessarily transform the classroom into a place where students explore new ways of thinking and behaving that change their educational lives is exercising transactional leadership.
For leaders to be effective, they must somehow get others to follow them. How do they do that? At one end of the spectrum, a leader might coerce people into compliance and subordination; at the other end, people may willingly comply with and subordinate themselves to a leader. The basic sociological notion of power, the ability to mobilize resources and achieve a goal despite the resistance of others, captures the first point (Emerson, 1962; Hall, 2003; Weber, 1921/2012). The related notion of legitimate authority, power exercised over those who recognize it as deserved or earned, captures the second (Blau, 1964). For example, prison guards often rely on the use of force to ensure compliance with their orders, whereas professors must depend on their legitimate authority if they hope to keep their students attentive and orderly.
Sociologists have typically found authority to be more interesting than the exercise of raw force. After all, it is not surprising that people will follow orders when someone holds a gun to their heads. But why do they go along with authority when they are not overtly compelled to do so?
Leadership Characteristics
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Part of the answer is that people often regard authority as legitimate when it seems to accompany the leadership position. A teacher, for example, would appear to possess the right to expect students to listen attentively and behave respectfully. Power stemming from an official leadership position is termed positional power; it depends on the leader’s role in the group (Chiang, 2009; Hersey, Blanchard, & Natemeyer, 1987; Raven & Kruglianski, 1975). At the same time, some leaders derive their power from their unique ability to inspire others. Power that derives from the leader’s personality is termed personal power; it depends on the ability to persuade rather than the ability to command (van Dijke & Poppe, 2006).
In most situations, the effective exercise of personal power, rather than positional power, is more likely to result in highly motivated and satisfied group members. When group members are confused or ill prepared to undertake a particular task, however, they seem to prefer the more command-oriented style associated with positional leadership (Hersey et al., 1987; Mizruchi & Potts, 1998; Patterson, 1989; Podsakoff & Schriesheim, 1985; Schaefer, 2011).
CONFORMITY TO GROUPS
Following group norms such as getting tattoos or piercings, or wearing the trendiest brand of jeans, seems relatively harmless. At the same time, conformity to group pressure can lead to destructive behavior such as drug abuse or serious crimes against others. For this reason, sociologists and social psychologists have long sought to understand why most people tend to go along with others—and under what circumstances they do not.
Some of the earliest studies of conformity to group pressures were conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch more than 60 years ago. In one of his classic experiments, Asch (1952) asked subjects to decide which of three lines of different length most closely matched a fourth (Figure 5.3). The differences between the line lengths were obvious; subjects had no difficulty making the correct match. Asch then arranged a version of the experiment in which the lines to be matched were presented in a group setting, with each person calling out the answer one at a time.
In this second version of the experiment, all but one of the subjects were secret accomplices of Asch’s, who intentionally attempted to deceive the outsider in the group by saying that two lines that were clearly unequal in length were identical. The unwitting subject, always one of the last to call out an answer, was placed under group pressure to conform, even though the other answers given were wrong. Amazingly, in the experimental groups one third of the subjects gave the same wrong answer as that put forth by Asch’s accomplices. In the experiments where no intentionally misleading answers were given, the subjects offered incorrect responses less than 1% of the time. Although the duped subjects sometimes stammered and fidgeted, they still yielded to the unspoken pressure to conform to the group’s decision. Asch’s experiments demonstrated that many people are willing to discount their own perceptions rather than contradict group consensus. How do you think you would respond if you were the subject in such an experiment (and had not read this account first)? Would you conform or dissent?

FIGURE 5.3 The Asch Experiments: A Study in Conformity

OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY Another classic study of conformity was conducted by Stanley Milgram (1963). One of his specific research questions concerned what allowed ordinary German citizens to go along with and even participate in the mass killing of Jews, Romani (also known as Gypsies), homosexuals, the disabled, and others who were judged socially undesirable by the Nazis during World War II. Obedience is a kind of conformity. Milgram thus desired to find the boundaries of obedience, to identify how far a person would be willing to go if an authority figure encouraged him or her to complete a given task. His study produced some chilling answers.
In Milgram’s experiment male volunteers were told by an actor dressed in a white lab coat (an authoritative prop) to read aloud pairs of words from a list someone in another room was to memorize and repeat. Whenever the “learner” (an accomplice in the research) made a mistake, the subject was instructed to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch on an official-looking machine (which was actually fake). With each mistake, the voltage (intensity) of the purported shock was to be increased, until it eventually reached the highest levels, visibly labeled on the machine “450 volts—danger, severe shock.”
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Alexandra Milgram
Most people would say that they are not capable of committing horrendous acts, yet Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment illustrated how obedience to authority can lead people to commit actions that result in harm to others.
In reality the learner never received any electric shocks, but he reacted audibly and physically as if he had, emitting cries that grew louder and more pained, pounding on the table, and moving about in his chair (the cries were prerecorded and played back). Meanwhile, the “scientist” ordered the subject to proceed with the experiment and continue administering shocks, saying things like “The experiment requires that you continue” even when the learner expressed concern about his “bad heart.”
More than half the participants in the study obeyed the commands to keep going, administering what they believed to be electric shocks up to the maximum voltage until nothing but an eerie silence came from the other room. What happened here? How could ordinary, basically good people so easily conform to orders that turned them into potential accomplices to injury or death?
The answer, Milgram found, was deceptively simple: Ordinary people will conform to orders given by someone in a position of power or authority. They will do so even when those orders result in harm to other human beings. Many ordinary Germans who participated in the mass execution of Jews in Nazi concentration camps allegedly did so on the ground that they were “just following orders.” Milgram’s research, though ethically questionable, produced sobering findings for those who believe that only “other people” would bow to authority.
The 2012 film Compliance, which is based on real-life incidents, depicts the events that unfold when a prank phone caller, an unidentified male, calls a fast-food establishment and, pretending to be a police officer, enlists the aid of the store manager to help him crack an ostensibly important case. Once the manager agrees to help the “officer,” the prankster tells the manager to perform increasingly invasive acts against a female employee. Obeying a figure believed to be a legitimate (though unseen) authority, in several of the incidents on which the movie is based, restaurant managers actually strip-searched female employees (Kavner, 2012; Wolfson, 2005).
Another example of obedience to authority even in the face of dangerous consequences took place at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, the site of top-secret military experiments involving more than 7,000 U.S. soldiers from the 1950s through the 1970s. Many soldiers volunteered for duty at Edgewood unaware of, or even deceived about, exactly what would be asked of them. Once at Edgewood, they were informed that if they refused to participate in any “required” duties they could face jail time for insubordination or receive an unsatisfactory review in their personnel files, and during the Vietnam era some were reportedly threatened with being sent to war. The soldiers were experimented on repeatedly, often exposed to a variety of dangerous chemical and biological toxins, including sarin gas, VX gas, LSD, tranquilizers, and barbiturates, some of which produced extended and untreated hallucinations (Martin, 2012; Young & Martin, 2012). The Edgewood Arsenal experiments highlight the point that individuals are likely to comply with any demands made by persons in positions of authority out of fear of the repercussions associated with failure to comply, even if what they are asked to do seems dangerous or even potentially lethal to others—or to themselves.
GROUPTHINK Common sense tells us that “two minds are better than one.” But, as our opening story on the sex abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University suggests, pressures to go along with the crowd sometimes result in poor decisions rather than creative new solutions to problems. You have probably had the experience of feeling uneasy about voicing your opinion while in a group struggling with a difficult decision. Irving L. Janis (1972, 1989; Janis & Mann, 1977) coined the term groupthink to describe what happens when members of a group ignore information that goes against the group consensus. Not only does groupthink frequently embarrass potential dissenters into conforming, but it can also produce a shift in perceptions so that group members rule out alternative possibilities without seriously considering them. Groupthink may facilitate a group’s reaching a quick consensus, but the consensus may also be ill chosen.
Janis undertook historical research to see whether groupthink had characterized U.S. foreign policy decisions, including the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Newly elected president John F. Kennedy inherited from the preceding administration a plan to provide U.S. supplies and air cover while an invasion force of exiled Cubans parachuted into Cuba’s Bay of Pigs to liberate the country from Fidel Castro’s communist government. A number of Kennedy’s top advisers were certain the plan was fatally flawed but refrained from countering the emerging consensus. As it happened, the invasion was a disaster. The ill-prepared exiles were immediately defeated, Kennedy suffered public embarrassment, and the Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States deepened.
Stanley Milgram’s Work
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© CORBIS
We often hear the phrase “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” Indeed, history shows that social networks are important. The Kennedy family is one group that has had a disproportionate impact on American political life. Members of the Kennedy family have been elected to the presidency and Congress and have held other prestigious appointments in the federal government and private sector.
How could Kennedy’s advisers, people of strong will and independent judgment educated at elite universities, have failed to voice their concerns adequately? Janis identified a number of possible reasons. For one, they were hesitant to disagree with the president lest they lose his favor. Nor did they want to diminish group harmony in a crisis situation where teamwork was all important. In addition, there was little time for them to consult outside experts who might have offered radically different perspectives. All these circumstances contributed to a single-minded pursuit of the president’s initial ideas rather than an effort to generate effective alternatives.
Think about your own experiences working with groups, whether at work, on a class project, or in a campus organization. Have you ever “gone along to get along” or felt pressured to choose a particular path of action in spite of your own reservations? Or, conversely, have you ever chosen to refuse to conform in spite of the pressure? What factors affected your decision in either case?
ECONOMIC, CULTURAL, AND SOCIAL CAPITAL
One of the most important additions to the sociological study of groups is the contribution of the French school of thought known as structuralism, or the idea that an overarching structure exists within which culture and other aspects of society must be understood. A leading proponent, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, provides an analytical framework that extends our understanding of the way group relationships and membership shape our lives. Bourdieu argues that several forms of capital—that is, social currency—stem from our association with different groups. These forms of capital are of importance in the reproduction of socioeconomic status in society.
Economic capital, the most basic form, consists of money and material that can be used to access valued goods and services. Depending on the social class you are born into and the progress of your education and career, you will have more or less access to economic capital and ability to take advantage of this form of capital. Another form is cultural capital, or your interpersonal skills, habits, manners, linguistic styles, tastes, and lifestyles. For instance, in some social circles, having refined table manners and speaking with a distinctive accent place a person in a social class that enhances his or her access to jobs, social activities, and friendship groups.
Friendship groups and other social contacts also provide social capital, the personal connections and networks that enable people to accomplish their goals and extend their influence (Bourdieu, 1984; Coleman, 1990; Putnam, 2000). College students who join fraternities and sororities expect that their “brothers” or “sisters” will help them get through the often challenging social and academic experiences of college. Other political, cultural, or social groups on campus offer comparable connections and opportunities. Many new—as well as more seasoned—employees (and prospective employees) join LinkedIn, a social media site that offers possibilities for people to expand their professional social networks, a key part of nurturing social capital.
While social capital is strongly influenced by socioeconomic class status, it may also be related to gender, to race, and intersectionally to both gender and race (McDonald & Day, 2010; McDonald, Lin, & Ao, 2009). In a study of social networks and their relationship to people’s information about job leads, sociologists Matt Huffman and Lisa Torres (2002) found that women benefited from being part of networks that included more men than women; those who had more women in their social networks had a diminished probability of hearing about good job leads. Interestingly, the predominance of men or women in a man’s social network made no discernible difference. The researchers suggested that perhaps the women were less likely to learn about job leads, and, notably, when they knew of leads, they were more likely to pass them along to men than to other women. Similarly, McDonald and Mair (2010) and Trimble and Kmec (2011) explored issues of networking in relation to women’s career opportunities over their lifetimes and also the extent to which networks aid women in attaining jobs. Both teams of researchers found that social capital in the form of networks of relations has very distinct and important effects for women. The advent of professional networking sites online offers sociologists the opportunity to expand this research to see if and how gender affects social networks and their professional benefits, as research from the field of psychology suggests that job networking sites, including LinkedIn, play an important role in the job acquisition process (Bohnert & Ross, 2010).
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Economic, cultural, and social capital confer benefits on individuals at least in part through membership in particular social groups. Characteristics such as class, race, ethnicity, and gender, among others, can have effects on the capital one has. Membership in organizations such as fraternities, exclusive golf clubs, or college alumni associations can offer important network access. These are some examples of the kinds of organizations that shape our lives and society, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes to our disadvantage. Below we look at organizations and their societal functions through the sociological lens.
ORGANIZATIONS
People frequently band together to pursue activities they could not readily accomplish by themselves. A principal means for accomplishing such cooperative actions is the organization, a group with an identifiable membership that engages in concerted collective actions to achieve a common purpose (Aldrich & Marsden, 1988). An organization can be a small primary group, but it is more likely to be a larger, secondary one: Universities, churches, armies, and business corporations are all examples of organizations. Organizations are a central feature of all societies, and their study is a core concern of sociology today.
Organizations tend to be highly formal in modern industrial and postindustrial societies. A formal organization is rationally designed to achieve particular objectives, often by means of explicit rules, regulations, and procedures. Examples include a state or county’s department of motor vehicles or the federal Internal Revenue Service. As Max Weber (1919/1946) first recognized almost 100 years ago, modern societies are increasingly dependent on formal organizations. One reason is that formality is often a requirement for legal standing. For a college or university to be legally accredited, for example, it must satisfy explicit written standards governing everything from faculty hiring to fire safety. Today, formal organizations are the dominant form of organization across the globe.
TYPES OF FORMAL ORGANIZATIONS
Thousands of different kinds of formal organizations serve every imaginable purpose. Sociology seeks to simplify this diversity by identifying the principal types. Amitai Etzioni (1975) grouped organizations into three main types based on the reasons people join them: utilitarian, coercive, and normative. In practice, of course, many organizations, especially utilitarian and normative organizations, include elements of more than one type.
Utilitarian organizations are those that people join primarily because of some material benefit they expect to receive in return for membership. For example, you probably enrolled in college not only because you want to expand your knowledge and skills but also because you know that a college degree will help you get a better job and earn more money later in life. In exchange, you have paid tuition and fees, devoted countless hours to studying, and agreed to submit to the rules that govern your school, your major, and your courses. Many of the organizations people join are utilitarian, particularly those in which they earn a living, such as corporations, factories, and banks.
Coercive organizations are those in which members are forced to give unquestioned obedience to authority. People are often forced to join coercive organizations because they have been either sentenced to punishment (prisons) or remanded for mandatory treatment (mental hospitals or drug treatment centers). Coercive organizations may use force or the threat of force, and sometimes confinement, to ensure compliance with rules and regulations. Guards, locked doors, barred windows, and monitoring are all features of jails, prisons, and mental hospitals. Sometimes people join coercive organizations voluntarily, but once they are members they may not have the option of leaving as they desire. An example of such an organization is the military: While enlisting is voluntary in the United States, once a person joins he or she is subject to close discipline and the demand for submission to authority in a rigidly hierarchical structure. Coercive organizations are examples of total institutions, which you read about in Chapter 4. By encompassing all aspects of people’s lives, total institutions can radically alter people’s thinking and behavior.
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PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ISSUES

INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT
How did you do on your last exam or assignment in school? Certainly, all of us want to perform well and earn good grades. If your grade was outstanding, you probably credited the time you devoted to studying and preparing for class. If your grade was mediocre or poor, perhaps you attributed that to a lack of adequate time or effort on your part. Clearly, our own educational decisions and actions are of consequence in explaining our academic performance. Some research suggests, however, that academic ability grouping—that is, inclusion in a stronger, intermediate, or weaker group of learners—has a discernible effect on academic achievement. Consider the study described below, which was performed at the U.S. Air Force Academy (Carrell, Sacerdote, & West, 2011).
In an effort to improve academic performance and address the problem of dropouts, U.S. Air Force Academy leaders made a conscious effort to group cadets with weaker records together with those who had grade point averages above the mean. Their hypothesis was that the more academically able cadets would exercise a positive influence on their weaker peers, who were at greater risk of dropping out of the challenging program. In some instances, however, only stronger and weaker students were grouped, while in other experimental squadrons, stronger and weaker students were also mixed with those whose work was categorized as being in the middle. How would you hypothesize the effect of the conscious integration of academically weaker cadets with stronger students?
Perhaps predictably, the study found that weaker students did perform better in squadrons with stronger peers. Other research has also documented a positive effect for weaker learners in an environment with stronger students (Schofield, 2010). However, in the Air Force Academy study, that effect was present only when the weaker students were grouped with high performers and middle-level students. When the middle-level students were removed, leaving the strongest and weakest students in a group, the low-performing students did worse than their prior results would have predicted. Why would this be the case?
The researchers suggest that when only the strongest and weakest students were grouped together, they splintered into academically homogeneous groups—that is, the stronger students hung together and the weaker students hung together, muting the effect of mixing the cadets. When middle-level students were also part of a group, they functioned as a “glue,” binding the group together, hindering the splitting of the ability groups, and thus bringing up the performance of the weakest students.
Notably, the researchers also found that the middle-level performers did best when they had their own group. The presence of the stronger and weaker students appeared, then, to lead to lower test scores than the middle-level students achieved when working in a homogeneous group.
Clearly, groups matter: Academic achievement is the outcome of individual effort and, as the research suggests, is subject to group effects. The findings of this research present a challenge that may not be easy for academic leaders to resolve: What can they do when some students benefit from being in groups with mixed levels of ability while others see greater results in single-level groups? What do you think?
THINK IT THROUGH
What are we to conclude from this research? Who benefits and who loses from academic ability grouping? If the better performance of one group comes at a cost to the performance of another group, how should school leaders proceed in grouping by ability?
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Scott Olson/Getty Images
The individuals here are part of a total institution, in which they are subject to regimentation and control of their daily activities by an authoritative body. They are expected to exhibit obedience to authority and to elevate the collective over the individual good.
Normative organizations, or voluntary associations, are those that people join of their own will to pursue morally worthwhile goals without expectation of material reward. Belonging to such organizations may offer social prestige or moral or personal satisfaction. (Of course, such organizations may also serve utilitarian purposes, such as a charitable group you join partly to hand out your business card and boost your chances for monetary gain.)
The United States is a nation of normative organization joiners. Individuals affiliate with volunteer faith-related groups such as the YMCA, Hillel, and the Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; charitable organizations such as the Red Cross; social clubs and professional organizations; politically oriented groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics (2009), there are more than 110,000 civic leagues and social welfare organizations, 77,000 fraternal societies, and 57,000 social and recreational clubs nationwide. They provide their members with a sense of connectedness while enabling them to accomplish personal and moral goals.
Normative organizations may also erect barriers based on social class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Those traditionally excluded from such organizations, including women, Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans, and other people of color, have, in response, formed their own voluntary associations. Although it may seem that these, too, are exclusionary, such groups have a different basis for their creation—the effort to remedy social inequality. Social justice, as a result, is often their primary concern.
Below we shift our gaze from voluntary and coercive organizations to a phenomenon that is familiar to most of us—the bureaucracy. While we have some control over our membership in many organizations, we are all—as U.S. residents, taxpayers, students, or recipients of mortgage or college loans, among others—subject to the reach of modern bureaucracy.
BUREAUCRACIES
The authority structure of most large organizations today is bureaucratic. In this section we will look at the modern bureaucracy—the way it operates and some of its shortcomings. We will also see how bureaucratic structures have been modified or reformed to offer an alternative type of organization.
Max Weber (1919/1946) was the first sociologist to examine the characteristics of bureaucracy in detail. As noted in Chapter 1, Weber defined a bureaucracy as a type of formal organization based on written procedural rules, arranged into a clear hierarchy of authority, and staffed by full-time paid officials. Although Weber showed that bureaucracies could be found in many different societies throughout history, he argued that they became a dominant form of social organization only in modern society, where they came to touch key aspects of our daily lives. In particular, Weber suggested that bureaucracies are a highly rational form of organization because they were devised to achieve organizational goals with the greatest degree of efficiency—that is, to optimize the achievement of a task.
Note that when Weber characterized bureaucracies as rational he did not assume that they would always be reasonable. By rational, he meant that they were organized based on knowable rules and regulations that laid out a particular path to a goal rather than on general or abstract principles or ideologies. As we know from our own contacts with bureaucratic structures—whether they involve long waits on the phone to speak to a human being rather than a computer or the confusing pursuit of the correct person to whom one must turn in a critical student loan application—they are not, in fact, always reasonable.
To better understand the modern bureaucracy, Weber (1919/1946) identified what he referred to as the ideal type of this form of organization, describing the characteristics that would be found if the quintessential bureaucracy existed (Figure 5.4). While Weber recognized that no actual bureaucracy necessarily possesses all of the characteristics he identifies, he argued that, by clearly articulating them, he was describing a standard against which actual bureaucracies could be judged and understood.
Bureaucracy
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AP Photo/ANDY MANIS
Today, a great deal of bureaucratic paperwork is done online. If we wish to apply for a passport, open a bank account, or renew a license, many of these tasks can be accomplished in front of a computer screen. What are some of the positive functions of this development? What are some dysfunctions?
WRITTEN RULES AND REGULATIONS
The routine operation of the bureaucracy is governed by written rules and regulations, the purpose of which is to ensure that universal standards govern all aspects of bureaucratic behavior. Typically, rules govern everything from the hiring of employees to the reporting of an absence due to illness. They are usually spelled out in an organizational manual or handbook, now often available to employees on a human resources website, that describes in detail the requirements of each organizational position. While these rules and regulations can be lengthy and complex, they are, in theory, knowable, and the expectation is that those who work in and seek the services of a given organization will adhere to them—sometimes even if they don’t seem to make sense!
• Specialized offices: Positions in a bureaucracy are organized into “offices” that create a division of labor within the organization. The duties of each office, such as bookkeeping or paying invoices, are described in the organizational manual. Each office specializes in one particular bureaucratic function to the exclusion of all others. Such specialization is one of the reasons that bureaucratic organization is said to be efficient; bureaucratic officials are supposed to become experts at their particular tasks, efficient cogs in a vast machine. The efficiency is, ideally, beneficial for the organization and its clients. If you are seeking to clear up a problem with your tuition bill, you will not visit the admissions office because you know the expert advice you seek is to be found in the student accounts office.
• Hierarchy: A bureaucracy is organized according to the vertical principle of hierarchy, so that each office has authority over one or more lower-level offices, and each in turn is responsible to a higher-level office. At the top, the leader of the organization stands alone; in the well-known words of then U.S. president Harry S. Truman, “The buck stops here.” The organizational chart of a bureaucracy therefore generally looks like a pyramid. Again, efficiency is achieved through the knowable hierarchy of power that governs the organization.
• Impersonality in record keeping: Within a bureaucracy, communications are likely to be formal and impersonal. Written forms—“paperwork” or the electronic equivalent—substitute for more personalized human contact, because bureaucracies must maintain written records or databases of all important actions. Modern computer technology has vastly increased the ability of organizations to maintain and access records. In some ways, this is an advantage—for example, when it allows you to register for classes via smartphone instead of standing in line for hours waiting to fill out forms. On the other hand, you may regret the loss of human contact and the inflexibility of the process, however efficient it may be. This “impersonality” also, ideally, has the effect of ensuring that all clients are treated equally and efficiently rather than capriciously; in reality, however, people with substantial economic, social, or cultural capital often have the easiest time navigating bureaucracies.

FIGURE 5.4 The Ideal Typical Bureaucracy

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• Technically competent administrative staff: A bureaucracy generally seeks to employ a qualified professional staff. Anyone who by training and expertise is able to perform the duties of a particular position in an office of the organization is deemed eligible to fill the position. Work in the bureaucracy is a full-time job, ideally providing a career path for the bureaucrat, who must demonstrate the training and expertise necessary to fill each successive position. In its “ideal” form, the system is a meritocracy—that is, positions are filled on the basis of merit or qualifications, typically demonstrated by performance on competitive exams, rather than based on applicants’ knowing the “right” people. In practice, however—as is true of the other characteristics listed above—an actual bureaucracy is unlikely to meet this standard fully. In fact, getting hired into the organization and advancing in it are likely to be influenced not strictly by objective criteria such as education and experience but also by such social variables as age, gender, race, and social connections.
BUREAUCRACIES: A CRITICAL EVALUATION
Bureaucracies popularly evoke images of “paper pushers” and annoying red tape. In their studies of bureaucracy, sociologists, too, have had much to say about this form of organization, with mixed conclusions. Max Weber recognized that bureaucracies can, indeed, provide organizational efficiency in getting the job done. In contrast to earlier organizational forms, many of which filled positions through nepotism, bribes, or other non–merit-based forms of promotion and were founded to serve the needs of their leaders or small elite groups, modern bureaucracies have many redeeming qualities in spite of the frustrations they cause.
At the same time, Weber argued that a bureaucracy may create what he termed an iron cage—a prison of rules and regulations from which there is little escape (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Weber, 1904–1905/2002). The iron cage, which Weber memorably described as having the potential to be a “polar night of icy darkness,” is a metaphor. We become “caged” in bureaucratic structures when we build them to serve us (as rules and regulations would ideally do) but they ultimately come to trap us by denying our humanity, creativity, and autonomy.
As you think about this metaphor of the iron cage, consider encounters with bureaucratic structures that you have had: If you’ve ever had the feeling that solving a personal or family problem with something like tuition, taxes, or immigration would require speaking to a human being with the power to make a decision or to see that your case is an exception in some way—but no such human was available!—then you can see what Weber meant. We make rules and regulations to keep order and to have a set of knowable guidelines for action and decisions, but what happens when the rules and regulations and their enforcement become the ends of an organization rather than a means to an end? Then we are in the iron cage.
Sociologists have identified a number of specific problems that plague bureaucracies, many of which may be familiar and could be thought of as representing irrationalities of rationality:
• Waste and incompetence: As long as administrators appear to be doing their jobs—filing forms, keeping records, responding to memos, and otherwise keeping busy—nobody really wants to question whether the organization as a whole is performing effectively or efficiently. Secure in their positions, bureaucrats may become inefficient, incompetent, and often indifferent to the clients they are supposed to serve.
• Trained incapacity: We have all seen bureaucrats who “go by the book” even when a situation clearly calls for fresh thinking. Thorstein Veblen (1899), a U.S. sociologist and contemporary of Weber’s, termed this tendency trained incapacity, a learned inability to exercise independent thought. However intelligent they may otherwise be, such bureaucrats make poor judgments when it comes to decisions not covered by the rule book. They become so obsessed with following the rules and regulations that they lose the ability and flexibility to respond to new situations.
• Goal displacement: Bureaucracies may lose sight of the original goals they were created to accomplish. Large corporations such as General Motors and Hewlett-Packard and government organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security employ thousands of “middle managers” whose job it is to handle the paperwork required in manufacturing automobiles or computers, or in protecting the country. Perhaps understandably, such people may over time become preoccupied with getting their own jobs done and, driven by the need to ensure the continuation of particular practices or programs linked to their positions, eventually lose touch with the larger goals of the organization. The organization then becomes a sanctuary for bureaucrats who know and care little about making high-quality cars or computers or about keeping the country secure. This process adds to costs, lowers efficiency, and may prove detrimental to corporations that compete in a global economy and governments seeking to accomplish goals and stay within tight budgets.
Although Weber presented a sometimes chilling picture of bureaucracies operating as vast, inhuman machines, we all recognize that, in practice, there is often a human face behind the counter. In fact, much important work done in bureaucratic organizations is achieved through informal channels and personal ties and connections rather than through official channels, as sociologist Peter Blau showed in his research (Blau & Meyer, 1987). For example, a student who wishes to register late for a class may avoid having to get half a dozen signatures if he or she knows the professor or a staff person in the registrar’s office. However, because of the shortcomings of bureaucratic forms of organization, some theorists have argued for the development of alternative organizational forms. We discuss some of these after looking at the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy.
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BUREAUCRACY AND DEMOCRACY
Max Weber argued that bureaucracies were an inevitable outgrowth of modern society, with its large-scale organizations, complex institutional structure, and concern with rationality and efficiency. Yet many observers have viewed bureaucracy as a stifling, irrational force that dominates our lives and threatens representative government. In Les Employés (1841/1985), French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who popularized the term bureaucracy, called it “the giant power wielded by pigmies” and a “fussy and meddlesome” government. Do bureaucracies inevitably lead to a loss of freedom and erosion of democracy? Are there more humanistic alternatives to bureaucracies that allow freer, more fulfilling participation in the organization? Let’s look briefly at the views of sociologist Robert Michels on the incompatibility between democracy and bureaucracy, then see what some people have done to try to reform this organizational structure.
Michels (1876–1936), another contemporary of Weber’s, argued that bureaucracy and democracy are fundamentally at odds. He observed that the Socialist Party in Germany, originally created to democratically represent the interests of workers, had become an oligarchy, a form of organization in which a small number of people exert great power. For him this was an example of what he termed the iron law of oligarchy, an inevitable tendency for a large-scale bureaucratic organization to become ruled undemocratically by a handful of people. (Oligarchy means the rule of a small group over many people.)
Following Weber, Michels argued that in a large-scale bureaucratic organization, the closer you are to the top, the greater the concentration of power. People typically get to the top because they are ambitious, hard-driving, and effective in managing the people below, or because they have economic and social capital to trade for proximity to power. Once there, leaders increase their social capital through specialized access to information, resources, and influential people, access that reinforces their power. They also often appoint subordinates who are loyal supporters and thus further enhance their position. Such leaders may come to regard the bureaucracy as a means to meet their own needs or those of their social group. The democratic purposes of an organization may become subordinate to the needs of the dominating group.
Since all modern societies require large-scale organizations to survive, Michels believed that democracies—or, in some cases, organizations—may sow the seeds of their own destruction by breeding bureaucracies that eventually grow into undemocratic oligarchies. While there are few signs that, for instance, the United States, which has many large-scale bureaucracies, is drifting from democracy, one could make a case that institutions like the U.S. Congress show some tendencies to act in the interests of political parties or powerful members rather than the interests of constituents. For example, a bill on disaster relief or unemployment insurance may be held up when a party leader feels that stalling the bill might confer political advantage on his or her party.
In response to what they feel is the stifling effect of bureaucratic organizations, some people have sought alternative forms of organizations designed to allow greater freedom and more fulfilling participation. For example, as part of the sweeping countercultural spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s, many youthful activists joined collectives, small organizations that operate by cooperation and consensus. Food cooperatives, employee-run newspapers and health clinics, and “free schools” sprang up as organizations that sought to operate by consensus rather than by bureaucracy. Members of these organizations shunned hierarchy, avoided a division of labor based on expertise, and happily sacrificed efficiency in favor of more humanistic relationships.
The founders of these organizations believed they were reviving more personal organizational arrangements that could better enable society to reach certain goals. Although these organizations initially met with some success and left a legacy, they also confronted a larger society in which more conventional forms of organization effectively shut them out.
Members of such organizations as the food cooperatives and employee-run newspapers and health clinics of the 1960s and 1970s favored the values of cooperation and service over the more competitive and materialistic values of the larger society. In the exuberance of that period, members of collectives believed they were forging a radically new kind of antibureaucratic organization.
In her examination of early collectives, sociologist Joyce Rothschild-Whitt (1979) studied several that self-consciously rejected bureaucracy in favor of more cooperative forms. In one health clinic, for example, all jobs were shared (to the extent legally possible) by all members: Doctors would periodically answer telephones and clean the facility, while nurses and paramedical staff would conduct examinations and interview patients. While the doctors were paid somewhat more than the other staff members, the differences were not large and were the subject of negotiation by everyone who worked at the clinic.
As long as the collectives remained small, they were able to maintain their founders’ values. On the other hand, vastly reduced pay differentials between professional and nonprofessional staff, job sharing, and collective decision making often made it difficult for the collectives to compete for employees with organizations that shared none of these values (Rothschild-Whitt, 1979). Doctors, for example, could make much more money in conventional medical practice, without being expected to answer telephones or sweep the floor. Over time the original cooperative values tended to erode, and many of the new organizations came to resemble conventional organizations in the larger society. Still, more than three decades after Rothschild-Whitt studied them, a number of these original groups still exist. Although they may have lost some of their collective zeal, they still operate more cooperatively than most traditional organizations.
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A more recent foray away from hierarchically and bureaucratically organized entities has been made by the online retailer Zappos. In early 2014, the company announced that it planned to introduce a “holacracy,” replacing traditional management structures with “self-governing ‘circles.’” The goal of holacracy, according to a media account of the practice, is to “organize a company around the work that needs to be done instead of around the people who do it.” Hence, a holacracy is devoid of job titles; instead, employees are integrated into multiple circles of cooperative workers. A few other companies are experimenting with holacracy as well (McGregor, 2014). Do workers perform well in contexts of dispersed or ambiguous authority? Can these self-governing circles exceed the productivity—and perhaps work satisfaction—of more traditionally organized companies? These questions remain to be answered.
THE GLOBAL ORGANIZATION
Organizations from multinational corporations to charitable foundations span the globe and increasingly contribute to what some sociologists believe is a “homogenization” of the world’s countries (McNeely, 1995; Neyazi, 2010; Scott & Meyer, 1994; Thomas, Meyer, Ramirez, & Boli, 1987). You can listen to the same music, employ the same Internet search engine, see the same films, and eat the same meals (if you wish) in Bangalore and Baku as you do in Berlin and Boston.
Global organizations are not new. The Hanseatic League, a business alliance between German merchants and cities, dominated trade in the North and Baltic Seas from the mid-12th to the mid-18th centuries. The British East India Company virtually owned India and controlled the vast bulk of trade throughout the Far East for several centuries. In 1919, following World War I, the League of Nations was formed, uniting the most economically and militarily powerful nations of the world in an effort to ensure peace and put an end to war. When Germany withdrew and began expanding its borders throughout Europe, however, the League dissolved.
After World War II, a new effort at international governance was made in the form of the United Nations, begun in 1945. The United Nations is still important and active today: Its power is limited, but its influence has grown. It not only mediates disputes between nations, but it is also ever present in international activities ranging from fighting hunger and HIV/AIDS to mobilizing peacekeeping troops and intervening to address conflicts and their consequences.
International organizations exist in two major forms: those established by national governments and those established by private organizations. We consider each separately below.
INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
The first type of global organization is the international governmental organization (IGO) established by treaties between governments. Most IGOs exist to facilitate and regulate trade between the member countries, promote national security (both the League of Nations and the United Nations were created after highly destructive world wars), protect social welfare or human rights, or, increasingly, ensure environmental protection.
Some of the most powerful IGOs today were created to unify national economies into large trading blocs. One of the most complex IGOs is the European Union, whose rules now govern 28 countries in Europe; 5 additional countries have applied for EU entry. The European Union was formed to create a single European economy in which businesses could operate freely across borders in search of markets and labor and workers could move freely in search of jobs without having to go through customs or show passports at border crossings. EU member states have common economic policies, and 18 of them share a single currency (the euro). Not all Europeans welcome economic unity, however, since it means their countries must surrender some of their economic power to the EU as a whole. Being economically united by a single currency also means the economic problems felt by one country are distributed among all the other countries to some degree. Thus, when economic crisis hit Europe in 2008, the severe economic woes of Greece, Portugal, and Spain, among others, caused serious problems for stronger EU economies, like that of Germany.
IGOs can also wield considerable military power, provided their member countries are willing to do so. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations, for example, have sent troops from some of their participating nations into war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years. Yet because nations ultimately control the use of their own military forces, there are limits to the authority of even the most powerful military IGOs, whose strength derives from the voluntary participation of their member nations.
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IGOs often reflect inequalities in power among their members. For example, the UN Security Council is responsible for maintaining international peace and security and is therefore the most powerful organization within the United Nations. Its five permanent members include the United Kingdom, the United States, China, France, and Russia, which gives these countries significant clout over the Security Council’s actions. The remaining 10 Security Council member countries are elected by the UN General Assembly for 2-year terms and therefore have less lasting power than the permanent members.

FIGURE 5.5 Increase in Number of IGOs, 1909–2011

SOURCE: Union of International Associations. (2011). Historical overview of number of international organizations by type, 1909–2011. In Yearbook of international organizations, 2011/2012 edition. Herndon, VA: Brill.

FIGURE 5.6 Increase in Number of INGOs, 1909–2011

SOURCE: Union of International Associations. (2011). Historical overview of number of international organizations by type, 1909–2011. In Yearbook of international organizations, 2011/2012 edition. Herndon, VA: Brill.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only about three dozen IGOs in the world, although data for that time are incomplete. By 1981, when consistent reporting criteria were adopted, there were 1,039; by 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 7,608 (Union of International Associations, 2011; see also Figures 5.5 and 5.6).
INTERNATIONAL NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
The second type of global organization is the international nongovernmental organization (INGO), established by agreements between the individuals or private organizations making up the membership and existing to fulfill an explicit mission. Examples include the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the International Sociological Association, the International Council of Women, and the environmental group Greenpeace. Global business organizations (GBOs) represent a subtype within the broader category of INGOs. The concept of the GBO captures the fluid and highly interconnected nature of our modern, globalized labor market in which employees often interact and communicate with people from other nations and cultures, facilitated by technology and online networks. Like the number of IGOs, the number of INGOs, including GBOs, has increased exponentially in recent years—from fewer than 200 near the beginning of the 20th century to more than 20,000 by 1985 and up to 56,834 in 2011 (Union of International Associations, 2011).
INGOs are primarily concerned with promoting the global interests of their members, largely through influencing the United Nations, other IGOs, or individual governments. They also engage in research, education, and the spread of information by means of international conferences, meetings, and journals. INGOs have succeeded in shaping the policies of powerful nations. One prominent (and highly successful) INGO is the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). The organization, along with its founder, Jody Williams, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its success in getting a majority of the world’s countries to agree to a treaty banning the devastating use of land mines. The Nobel Committee commended the ICBL for changing “a vision to a feasible reality,” adding that “this work has grown into a convincing example of an effective policy for peace that could prove decisive in the international effort for disarmament” (quoted in ICBL, 2012).
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GLOBAL ISSUES

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND THE GLOBAL CAMPAIGN
FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

AP XHJ102
Arrested in Bahrain for organizing peaceful protests against conditions for teachers and public school children, the woman pictured here, Jalila al-Salman, was arrested for “inciting hatred of the regime.” Amnesty International engaged in a human rights campaign to help al-Salman escape injustice.
In 2011, Jalila al-Salman, vice president of the Bahrain Teachers’ Association (BTA), was arrested, held in solitary confinement for a week, and beaten. Both she and Mahdi Abu Dheeb, president of the BTA, were charged with using their positions “to call for a strike by teachers, halting the educational process, ‘inciting hatred of the regime’ and ‘attempting to overthrow the ruling system by force’” (Amnesty International, 2012). Although al-Salman was released on bail, Abu Dheeb has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. In April 2012, he testified that he was being tortured, but his request to be released on bail was denied. Amnesty International (2012), a normative organization pursuing global human rights, believes al-Salman and Abu Dheeb are prisoners of conscience, arrested for no crime greater than being leaders of the BTA and “peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly.” The organization also believes their status as civilians makes their prosecution in a military court inappropriate and illegal.
According to Amnesty International (2012), governments in more than 20 countries executed 676 prisoners in 2011—but the actual total is likely much higher. A record number of protests occurred worldwide that year, leading to widespread brutality, arrests, and torture perpetrated by governments, since 91 countries uphold laws that restrict freedom of expression. Amnesty International also reports that tens of thousands of people throughout the world are imprisoned without having been charged with any crime.
Amnesty International has more than 5,000 affiliated local groups and 2.8 million members across more than 150 countries and territories, including 250,000 in the United States. One of its goals is to help secure the freedom of people imprisoned because of their political beliefs or actions, especially those in immediate danger of torture or execution. Amnesty International has helped thousands of individual prisoners since it was founded in Britain in 1961. It functions as a global pressure group made up of ordinary citizens. Anyone can join, pay nominal annual dues, and become part of a global “urgent action network” that is regularly mobilized to send government officials faxes, express mail, and e-mail requests on behalf of prisoners. Amnesty International also sends delegations to countries where government abuses are rampant. The reports these delegations write draw worldwide media attention to the world’s prisons and political prisoners.
THINK IT THROUGH
In cases of groups like Amnesty International, does size matter? Is a larger group more effective than a smaller collective of activists? Does the use of Internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in social action campaigns make the size of the group of supporters more or less important?

Protests
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The ICBL is affiliated with more than a thousand other INGOs in some 60 countries. Together they have focused public attention on the dangers posed to civilians of the more than 100 million antipersonnel mines that are a deadly legacy of past wars fought in Europe, Asia, and Africa. These mines are unlike other weapons. They can remain active for decades after a war, terrorizing and trapping whole populations. In Cambodia, for example, fertile croplands have been mined, threatening starvation to farmers who are not willing to risk a misstep that would reduce them or their family to a shower of scraps. The campaign’s efforts resulted in a treaty banning the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel land mines. The treaty, which became international law in March 2012, has been signed and ratified by 160 countries (ICBL, 2012).
Although they are far more numerous than IGOs and have achieved some successes, INGOs have far less power over state actions and policies, since legal power (including enforcement) ultimately lies with governmental organizations and treaties. In the effort to ban land mines, for instance, although most of the major powers in the world have signed the treaty, the United States, citing security concerns in Korea, has refused, as has Russia. Some INGOs, such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, nonetheless wield considerable influence.
WHY STUDY GROUPS AND ORGANIZATIONS?
You now have a good idea of how the groups and organizations to which you belong exert influence over your life. They help to determine who you know and, in many ways, who you are. The primary groups of your earliest years were crucial in shaping your sense of self—a sense that will change only very slowly over the rest of your life. Throughout your life, groups are the wellspring of the norms and values that enable and enrich your social life. At the same time, they are the source of nonconforming behavior; the rebel is shaped by group membership as much as the more mainstream and conventional citizen.
Although groups remain central in our lives, group affiliation in the United States is rapidly changing. To some degree, long-standing conventional groups appear to be losing ground. For example, today’s typical college students are less likely to join civic groups and organizations—or even to vote—than were their parents. At the same time, many are active “netizens,” joining and creating groups for both amusement and civic or political causes through such vehicles as Facebook and Twitter.
The global economy and information technology are also redefining group life in ways we can already perceive. For instance, workers in earlier generations spent much of their careers in a relatively small number of long-lasting, bureaucratic organizations; younger workers today are much more likely to be part of a succession of networked, “flexible,” and even virtual organizations.
How will these trends affect the quality of our social relationships? Will the blurring between primary and secondary groups continue and expand? Will our growing reliance on social media as a key forum for interaction foster integration or alienation? In our changing social environment, these questions pose important frontiers for sociological analysis.
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WHAT CAN I DO WITH A
SOCIOLOGY DEGREE?

SKILLS AND CAREERS: UNDERSTANDING AND FOSTERING SOCIAL CHANGE
Social change comes about as a result of shifts in the social order of society. While the changes may be evolutionary or revolutionary in pace, change is inevitable. Understanding social change and the factors that underlie its dynamics is key to bringing about positive change, whether at the micro or the macro level. Sociologists study factors that bring about large-scale social change—for instance, shifts in population growth or health, technological progress, economic changes, the mobilization of civil society, or the rise of a charismatic leader—and seek to understand barriers to normative or structural change. They are also interested in factors that affect change or resistance to change in smaller groups and communities. Skills in the areas of leadership, communications, strategic thinking, motivation and mobilization, and advocacy can evolve from knowledge gained in the study of social change. Students interested in social change may also take advantage of internships or practicums in community or political organizations involved in fostering positive change. Supervised practice and the opportunity for reflection on your work nurture skills in the area of social change.
In Chapter 5, we examined the phenomenon of groupthink—a form of decision making that elevates consensus and conformity over a critical, multidimensional approach to a problem. Groupthink may be a powerful obstacle to social action and social change. Consider the chapter’s opening story, which focused on the decision of a small group of administrators and coaches at Pennsylvania State University to keep silent about the pedophilia of a colleague in order to maintain his and the athletic program’s respectability. Could a trained leader have overcome the obstacles to action and challenged the consensus of resistance to altering the status quo? Could a skilled advocate have spoken out in favor of interests—such as those of the victimized children—that diverged from the perceived interests of the Penn State leaders? Sociologists are deeply interested in social change, which comes in many forms—it can range from normative changes in a small group to massive national political revolutions. Sociology is a discipline dedicated to understanding how change comes about, knowledge that is at the foundation of transformation.
Careers in social change may focus on specific areas, including the environment, labor, human rights, free speech, legal reform, social justice, conflict resolution, poverty, health care, gender equity, economic justice, and corporate ethics. They may be careers in public service (such as in federal, state, or local government) or in the private sector (with advocacy organizations or in research-focused organizations, for instance). An understanding of social change and the development of skills associated with fostering positive social change are important in occupational fields that include government, social services, nonprofit management and advocacy, education, health care, entrepreneurship, politics and lobbying, community service and volunteerism, and the law, among others. Some specific job titles associated with these fields are community outreach and education specialist, policy analyst, advocacy and public policy coordinator, community organizer, labor union organizer, human rights advocate, social worker, lobbyist, social policy analyst, program evaluator, and researcher.
THINK ABOUT CAREERS
What kinds of social, political, economic, ecological, or other issues are of interest to you?
What kinds of career paths might you envision emerging from your interests?

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SUMMARY
• The importance of social groups in our lives is one of the salient features of the modern world. Social groups are collections of people who share a sense of common identity and regularly interact with one another based on shared expectations. There are many conceptual ways to distinguish social groups sociologically in order to better understand them.
• Among the most important characteristics of a group is whether or not it serves as a reference group—that is, a group that provides standards by which we judge ourselves in terms of how we think we appear to others, what sociologist Charles Horton Cooley termed the “looking-glass self.”
• Group size is another variable that is an important factor in group dynamics. Although their intensity may diminish, larger groups tend to be more stable than smaller groups of two (dyads) or three (triads) people. While even small groups can develop a formal group structure, larger groups develop a formal structure.
• Formal structures include some people in leadership roles—that is, those group members who are able to influence the behavior of the other members. The most common form of leadership is transactional—that is, routine leadership concerned with getting the job done. Less common is transformational leadership, which is concerned with changing the very nature of the group itself.
• Leadership roles imply that the role occupant is accorded some power, the ability to mobilize resources and get things done despite resistance. Power derives from two principal sources: the personality of the leader (personal power) and the position that the leader occupies (positional power). Max Webe r highlighted the importance of charisma as a source of leadership as well as leadership deriving from traditional authority (a queen inherits a throne, for example).
• In general people are highly susceptible to group pressure. Many people will conform to group norms or obey orders from an authority figure, even when there are potentially negative consequences for others or even for themselves.
• Important aspects of groups are the networks that are formed between groups and among the people in them. Networks constitute broad sources of relationships, direct and indirect, including connections that may be extremely important in business and politics. Women, people of color, and lower-income people typically have less access to the most influential economic and political networks than do upper-class White males in U.S. society.
• As a consequence of unequal access to powerful social networks, there is an unequal division of social capital in society. Social capital is the knowledge and connections that enable people to cooperate with one another for mutual benefit and to extend their influence. Some social scientists have argued that social capital has declined in the United States during the last quarter century—a process they worry indicates a decline in Americans’ commitment to civic engagement.
• Formal organizations are organizations that are rationally designed to achieve their objectives by means of rules, regulations, and procedures. They may be utilitarian, coercive, or normative, depending on the reasons for joining. One of the most common types of formal organizations in modern society is the bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are characterized by written rules and regulations, specialized offices, a hierarchical structure, impersonality in record keeping, and professional administrative staff.
• The iron law of oligarchy holds that large-scale organizations tend to concentrate power in the hands of a few people. As a result, even supposedly democratic organizations tend to become undemocratic when they become large.
• A number of organizational alternatives to bureaucracies exist. These include collectives, which emphasize cooperation, consensus, and humanistic relations. Networked organizations, which increase flexibility by reducing hierarchy, are like collectives in their organization.
• Two important forms of global organizations are international governmental organizations (IGOs) and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). Both kinds of organizations play increasingly important roles in the world today, and IGOs—particularly the United Nations—may become key organizational actors as the pace of globalization increases.
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KEY TERMS
dyad, 108
triad, 108
alliance (or coalition), 108
social closure, 110
transformational leader, 111
transactional leader, 111
legitimate authority, 111
positional power, 112
personal power, 112
groupthink, 113
structuralism, 114
economic capital, 114
social capital, 114
organization, 115
formal organization, 115
utilitarian organizations, 115
coercive organizations, 115
normative organizations, 117
iron law of oligarchy, 120
international governmental organization (IGO), 121
international nongovernmental organization (INGO), 122
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. This chapter began with a look at the Penn State child sex abuse scandal through the conceptual lens of groupthink. Can you think of a time when a group to which you belonged was making a decision you thought was wrong—ethically, legally, or otherwise—but you went along anyway? How do your experiences confirm or refute Janis’s characterization of groupthink and its effects?
2. List the primary and secondary groups of which you are a member, then make another list of the primary and secondary groups to which you belonged 5 years ago. Which groups in these two periods were most important for shaping (a) your view of yourself, (b) your political beliefs, (c) your goals in life, and (d) your friendships?
3. Think of a time when you chose to “go along to get along” with a group decision even when you were inclined to think or behave differently. Think of a time when you opted to dissent, choosing a path different from that pursued by your group or organization. How would you account for the different decisions? How might sociologists explain them?
4. What did Stanley Milgram seek to test in his human experiments at Yale University? What did he find? Do you think that a similar study today would find the same results? Why or why not?
5. Max Weber suggested that bureaucracy, while intended to maximize efficiency in tasks and organizations, could also be highly irrational. He coined the term the iron cage to talk about the web of rules and regulations he feared would ensnare modern societies and individuals. On one hand, societies create organizations that impose rules and regulations to maintain social order and foster the smooth working of institutions such as the state and the economy. On the other hand, members of society may often feel trapped and dehumanized by these organizations. Explain this paradox using an example of your own encounters with the “iron cage” of bureaucracy.

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6 DEVIANCE AND
SOCIAL CONTROL

REUTERS/Tomas Bravo
Media Library
CHAPTER 6 Media Library
AUDIO
Deviance in the Mining Industry
VIDEO
Organized Crime and Transnational Crime
Sex Trafficking in the United States
Hip Hop and the LA Riots
Crack Babies
Critique of the U.S. Correctional System
Martha Stewart Interview
CQ RESEARCHER
Wildlife Smuggling
Police Misconduct in the United States
PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE
Man Up!
JOURNAL
Deviance in Technology
Social Construction of Sex Trafficking
Trafficking of Human Body Parts
White Collar Crime
REFERENCE
Self-Identity and Deviance
WEB
Crime in America infographic

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IN THIS CHAPTER
What Is Deviant Behavior?
How Do Sociologists Explain Deviance?
Types of Deviance
Social Control of Deviance
Why Study Deviance?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
1. Is everyone deviant at least some of the time? Does this make deviance normal?
2. Why did the rate of imprisonment rise dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1980s? Why is the rate of imprisonment in the United States much higher than the rates in nearly all other modern states?
3. What methods of controlling deviance are available to countries and communities? What methods could be more or less effective?
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SNAKE SALVATION
© Loulou d’Aki/Demotix/Corbis

In Appalachia—a region of the United States stretching from southwestern New York to northern Alabama—a Pentecostal religious ritual that would make many people cringe thrives: serpent handling.
Several deaths in recent years have drawn public, media, and law enforcement attention to the practice of serpent handling and to the Pentecostal religious communities where it takes place. On May 27, 2012, Pastor Randy “Mack” Wolford died after a rattlesnake bit him during a service at the House of the Lord Jesus Church in West Virginia (Duin, 2012; Pond, 2012). Pastor Wolford’s father died of snakebite in 1983, highlighting the fact that serpent handling is a practice passed down through generations of Pentecostal families. Photojournalist Lauren Pond (2012) was on assignment for the Washington Post and photographed Mack Wolford’s last hours, during which he refused any life saving medical treatments.
In January 2014, Jamie Coots, a third-generation snake handler and pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name Church in Kentucky, was also killed by a rattlesnake bite he received during a religious service. Prior to his death, Coots and his family were featured on a reality show on the National Geographic channel called Snake Salvation that focused on their belief in the spiritual power and importance of snake handling (Fantz, 2014). Cody, Pastor Coots’s son and himself a snake handler, was stunned by his father’s death, telling a news reporter afterward that he believed “we’re going to go home, he’s going to lay on the couch, he’s going to hurt, he’s going to pray for a while and he’s going to get better” (Johnson, 2014). One reason his father’s death stunned Cody was that he had long accepted the Pentecostal belief, derived from Mark 16:17–18, that those individuals “anointed by God” will not be harmed by the bites of poisonous snakes (Fantz, 2014).
Mainstream society characterizes serpent handling as a deviant activity. By extension, the veil of deviance has also been cast over the Pentecostal religious congregations practicing it. In an episode of the FX television network series Justified that first aired in 2013, a snake-handling preacher visits the town of Harlan, Kentucky, and begins attempting to convert members of the town’s population to his faith. The pastor is depicted in the program as deranged, and his intentions are portrayed as suspicious. The pastor is eventually killed during a confrontation with one of the show’s main protagonists after being challenged to prove his faith and anointment by God by handling a poisonous rattlesnake.
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The state of Tennessee criminalized snake handling in the 1940s in order to reduce the prevalence of what were considered “radical” Pentecostal churches. Kentucky continues to impose criminal misdemeanor fines on anyone caught using snakes for religious practices at public gatherings (Pond, 2012).
The phenomenon of serpent handling illuminates a key sociological point. The fact that serpent handling is condemned by some and embraced by others highlights the argument that many forms of societal deviance are not defined through consensus but instead are defined in relation to who has the power to label acts as deviant. The practices of less powerful societal groups, like serpent-handling Pentecostals, are more likely to be labeled deviant than the practices of dominant groups. The labeling of deviance almost always relies on a judgment by one individual or a group about the behavior or condition of another.
For the Pentecostal faithful, coming face-to-face with venomous snakes is far from deviant; rather, it is a sign of faith and therefore acceptable and meaningful. Meanwhile, to outsiders the practice may seem foolish, dangerous, and even criminal. Should it be criminalized and controlled, or should it be tolerated as a form of religious expression? More generally, should people be legally restricted from engaging in risky behaviors, like serpent handling or recreational drug use, if they know the consequences and accept them?
Deviance comes in many forms and raises many interesting questions, but you should be forewarned: Many of these questions do not have clear-cut answers. As this chapter shows, deviance is a broad concept, encompassing a diverse array of attitudes, behaviors, and conditions, of which only a small part fall under the category of “crime.” Explanations of deviance are no less expansive and diverse.
We begin this chapter by looking at how deviant behavior is defined. This is followed by an examination of different perspectives that sociologists take to understand and explain such behavior. We then briefly consider the distinction between deviance and crime and conclude with a look at how societies exercise control over those people and behaviors they define as deviant.
WHAT IS DEVIANT BEHAVIOR?
Deviance is any attitude, behavior, or condition that violates cultural norms or societal laws and results in disapproval, hostility, or sanction if it becomes known. By contrast, a crime is an act, usually considered deviant, that is punishable by fines, imprisonment, or both.
Several important aspects of our definition of deviance deserve greater elaboration. First, deviance is a broad term that may encompass crimes but often refers to noncriminal attitudes, behaviors, and conditions. Second, deviance is not restricted to specific groups, genders, or age ranges; both adults and youth can engage in deviance. Third, what is considered deviant can include things that are not consciously chosen, such as medical conditions, mental or physical illnesses, and physical defects and abnormalities. Fourth, deviance is a relative, subjective concept. Definitions of deviance vary from place to place, across time, and among groups within society. Finally, our definition of deviance suggests that it is primarily a reaction against something. Therefore, deviance is best seen as a label applied by people or groups within society to the attitudes, behaviors, or conditions of other people or groups. As such, moral, social, and legal judgments play a role in decisions regarding what is or is not deviant.
You may be wondering, Is all deviance criminal? In fact, most of the attitudes, behaviors, and conditions considered “deviant” by society are not criminal. For example, while having extensive tattoos or piercings may be considered deviant, it is not criminal. The follow-up question—Are all crimes deviant?—has a more complicated answer.
While the label crime applies to acts that are widely agreed to be deviant in nature (for example, murder, robbery, rape, the sexual exploitation of children, arson), such consensus is lacking regarding other kinds of crimes. Use of illicit drugs, gambling, vagrancy, and adult prostitution are just a few examples of crimes that lack societal consensus about their deviance, but these are defined as crimes nonetheless. Once an act is labeled criminal, formal sanctions can be applied in order to control it and the people who engage in it. One should be extremely cautious not to make the erroneous assumption that every crime is considered deviant by all of society’s members, or that every form of deviance is, or should be, criminalized.
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© 2/Lianne Milton/Ocean/Corbis/REUTERS/Tomas Bravo
Sociologists suggest that what is labeled deviant depends on cultural norms and is subject to change. Tattoos, once limited to a few subcultures, are widely accepted in U.S. society, though individuals who change their appearance very dramatically are still subject to this label.

The diversity of opinion surrounding the concepts of deviance and criminality stems from the fact that most societies in the modern world are pluralistic. Pluralistic societies are made up of many different groups with different norms and values, which may or may not change over time. In a pluralistic society, what is deviant for one group may be acceptable or normal in another, and even long-held beliefs and practices are sometimes subject to radical transformation over time. For example, in the 1800s, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) practiced polygamy—specifically, men could have multiple wives—but by the end of the 19th century the church officially condemned that practice. Similarly, in 2005, after centuries of supporting the execution of juveniles for capital offenses, crimes considered so heinous they are punishable by death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute anyone for a crime he or she committed before the age of 18. Prior to this ruling, 22 individuals had been executed for crimes they committed while under the age of 18 (Death Penalty Information Center, 2010). In each case, norms pertaining to practices or punishment shifted over time, creating a “new normal.” And, of course, the shifting legal status of marijuana, which is now legal to purchase and consume for medical purposes in a number of states and is legal for recreational use in Colorado and Washington State, is illustrative of shifting definitions of deviance.
Because there is so much disagreement about what constitutes deviant behavior, we should not be surprised to find that most people deviate from some of society’s established norms a good deal of the time. As the data in Table 6.1 show, deviance is not limited solely to violating norms like not spitting on the sidewalk—even behaviors defined as criminal are committed much more often than most people might think.
Self-Identity and Deviance
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Topical Press Agency / Stringer/Getty Images
When was the last time a law enforcement officer arrested you because of what you were wearing to the pool or beach? In this old photo, a woman in Chicago is arrested for wearing a one-piece bathing suit without the “required” leg coverings. What are other examples of how definitions of deviance have evolved over time?
HOW DO SOCIOLOGISTS EXPLAIN DEVIANCE?
What explains deviance? Below we look at a spectrum of theoretical perspectives that seek to explain why people engage in deviance. We can divide these theories broadly into explanatory and interactionist categories. Theories that try to explain why deviance does (or does not) occur, including biological, functional, and conflict perspectives, differ from interactionist theories, which seek to understand how deviance is defined, constructed, and enacted through social processes like labeling.
BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Early social scientists were convinced that deviance—from alcoholism to theft to murder—was caused by biological or anatomical abnormalities (Hooton, 1939). For example, some early researchers claimed that skull configurations of deviant individuals differed from those of nondeviants, a theory known as phrenology. Other theorists claimed that deviants were atavisms, or throwbacks to primitive early humans (Lombroso, 1896), and that they also had body types that differed from those of noncriminals (Sheldon, 1949). These early biological theories have been disproven, but the search for biological causes of deviance continues, with some success in individual cases (Wright, Tibbetts, & Daigle, 2008). Advances in medical technology, especially increased use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI and fMRI, or functional MRI), are proving fruitful in enabling researchers to uncover patterns of brain function, physiology, and response unique to some deviant or criminal individuals (Giedd, 2004). However, most modern biological theories do not attribute deviance to biology alone. Instead, they argue that deviance may be the product of an interaction between biological and environmental factors (Denno, 1990; Kanazawa & Still, 2000; Mednick, Moffitt, & Stack, 1987).
One method for testing biological theories is to compare children with their parents to see whether children of parents with deviant lifestyles are more likely to re-create those lifestyles than are children whose parents are not deviant. Research has found that people who suffer from alcoholism and some forms of mental illness (particularly schizophrenia, chronic depression, and bipolar personality disorder) are indeed more likely to have parents with similar problems than are people who do not have these conditions (Dunner, Gershon, & Barrett, 1988; Scheff, 1988).
However, studies comparing the frequency of deviance between generations do not always control for the possibility that children of alcoholic, schizophrenic, depressed, or bipolar parents may have learned coping strategies that show up as symptoms of these problems, rather than having inherited a biological predisposition. Children of farmers are more likely to be farmers than are children of urban office workers, but we would not therefore argue that farming is a biologically determined trait. Furthermore, many children of parents who are deviant are not deviant themselves, and many people with deviant lifestyles come from mainstream families (Chambliss & Hass, 2011; Katz & Chambliss, 1995; Scheff, 1988).

TABLE 6.1 Self-Reported Deviant Behavior Among High School Seniors in the United States, 2012–2013

SOURCES: Johnston, L. D., Bachman, J. G., O’Malley, P. M., & Schulenberg, J. E. (2012). Monitoring the Future: A continuing study of 12th grade youth. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Johnston, L. D., O’Malley, P. M., Miech, R. A., Bachman, J. G., & Schulenberg, J. E. (2014). Monitoring the Future national results on drug use: 1975–2013: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

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SPL / Science Source
Cesare Lombroso, an early criminologist, theorized that criminals were throwbacks to primitive humans. Although his theory has been disproved by research, the search for biological causes of criminality continues.
Studies that have found similarities in patterns of deviant behavior between twins are often cited as evidence in support of biological theories of deviance and crime. The Danish sociologist Karl Christiansen (1977) examined the life histories of 7,172 twins. Among these, 926 had been convicted of a crime. Christiansen found that 35% of the identical male twins who had been convicted of a crime had twin brothers who had also been convicted of a crime. Among male fraternal twins, 21% who had committed a crime had brothers who also had committed a crime (Christiansen, 1977; Mednick, Gabrielli, & Hutchings, 1987). Biological theorists interpret these findings as support for the theory that biological factors contribute to deviant and criminal behavior (Mednick, Gabrielli, & Hutchings, 1987).
Interestingly, critics of biological theories see this evidence as disproving the influence of biology. Among both men and women, in the vast majority of cases where one twin has committed a crime, the other twin has not. Moreover, if criminal behavior were genetically determined, we should expect that nearly all twin brothers or sisters of identical twins who are criminals should also be criminals (Katz & Chambliss, 1995). To the extent that identical twins do show similar patterns of deviance as adults, we can attribute these patterns to their common socialization: Identical twins are more likely than other siblings to be treated the same, dressed alike, and sometimes even confused with one another by acquaintances, teachers, and friends.
A more nuanced approach to biological explanations of deviance attempts to incorporate both sets of factors. The nature versus nurture paradigm is essentially converted to nature and nurture. Criminologist Kevin Beaver and a team of researchers took a more critical approach to this question by examining a general theory of crime posited by Gottfredson and Hirschi. A major tenet of this theory is that low self-control is largely a result of parental management influences and not biogenetic factors. Beaver’s study, which analyzed twin data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, estimated that genetic factors accounted for 52% to 64% of the variance in low self-control, with twins’ nonshared environments accounting for the remaining variance (Beaver, Wright, DeLisi, & Vaughn, 2008). As rigorous and valid genetic and biological data become increasingly accessible, a school of thought within criminology is pursuing the question of how biological factors may play a part in crime and deviance.
FUNCTIONALIST PERSPECTIVES
Functionalist theories embrace the assumption that we must examine culture, especially shared norms and values, to understand why people behave the way they do. Recall that functionalist theory assumes society is characterized by a high degree of consensus on norms and values. It regards deviance as an abnormality that society seeks to eliminate, much as an organism seeks to rid itself of a parasite. At the same time, functionalist theory sees a certain amount of deviant behavior as useful—or functional—for society. It suggests that deviance—or the labeling of some behaviors as deviant—contributes to social solidarity by enhancing members’ sense of the boundary between right and wrong (Durkheim, 1893/1997).
DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the father of functionalist theories of deviance, hypothesized that deviant behavior serves a useful purpose (a function) in society by drawing “moral boundaries,” delineating what behavior is acceptable and what is not within a community. Durkheim argued that we can describe a society lacking consensus on what is right and wrong as being in a condition of anomie, a state of confusion that occurs when people lose sight of the shared rules and values that give order and meaning to their lives. In one of his most famous studies, Durkheim sought to show that anomie is a principal cause of suicide, itself a deviant act.
Durkheim (1897/1951) gathered extensive data on suicide in France and Italy and found that these data supported the theory that societies characterized by high levels of anomie also have high levels of suicide. Moreover, he argued that his research demonstrated that suicide rates vary depending on the level of social solidarity, or the social bonds that unite members of a group. Durkheim discovered, for example, that single men had higher rates of suicide than married men, Protestants a higher rate than Catholics, and men higher rates than women. Durkheim suggested that the higher rates were correlated with lower levels of social solidarity in the groups to which people were attached.
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AP Photo/The Daily Sentinel, Andrew D. Brosig
If you were to hypothesize that higher levels of social solidarity, or meaningful connections to others, are associated with lower levels of suicide, Émile Durkheim would agree. Volunteering for a cause that is meaningful to you is one of many channels that can strengthen social bonds.
Durkheim’s research methods—the statistics as well as the sampling procedures—were primitive compared to modern-day methods. Since he first published his research, however, hundreds of studies have looked at suicide differences between men and women, between industrialized and developing countries, and even among the homeless. Most of these empirical studies have found considerable support for Durkheim’s anomie theory (Cutright & Fernquist, 2000; Diaz, 1999; Kubrin, 2005; Lester, 2000; Simpson & Conklin, 1989; Wasserman, 1999). Durkheim’s theory has spawned some of the most influential contemporary theories of deviance, including those of Robert Merton, Richard Cloward, and Lloyd Ohlin, which we discuss below.
STRUCTURAL STRAIN THEORY In the 1930s, American sociologist Robert K. Merton (1968) adapted Durkheim’s concept of anomie into a general theory of deviance. According to Merton’s theory, structural strain is a form of anomie that occurs when a gap exists between the culturally defined goals of a society and the means available in society to achieve those goals.
Merton argued that most people in a given society share a common understanding of the goals they should pursue as well as the legitimate means for achieving those goals. For example, success, as measured in terms of wealth, consumption, and prestige, is widely regarded as an important goal in U.S. society. Moreover, there appears to be widespread consensus on the legitimate means for achieving success—education, an enterprising spirit, and hard work, among others.
Most people pursue the goal of “success” by following established social norms. Merton referred to such behavior as conformity. However, success is not always attainable through conventional means, or conformity. When this occurs, Merton argued, the resulting contradiction between societal goals and the means of achieving them creates strain, which may result in four different types of deviant behavior. His strain theory suggests that when there is a discrepancy between the cultural goals for success and the means available to achieve those goals, rates of deviance will be high. Reactions to the discrepancy will lead to the types of deviance depicted in the first column in Table 6.2. It is important to note that since Merton’s original formulation of strain theory, other researchers have expanded on his work. For example, Kaufman (2009) explored the relation between general strains and gender, finding that serious strains may affect men and women differently and influence their inclination to engage in deviance. Women, Kaufman found, are especially likely to engage in deviance in response to depression.
OPPORTUNITY THEORY Although Merton’s theory helps us understand the structural conditions leading to high rates of deviance, it neglects the fact that not everyone has the same access to deviant solutions. This is the point made by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), who developed opportunity theory as an extension of Merton’s strain theory. According to Cloward and Ohlin, people differ not only in their motivations to engage in deviant acts but also in their opportunities to do so. For instance, only the presence of a demand for illicit drugs, plus access to supplies of those drugs through producers, offers opportunities for individuals to be dealers. Similarly, unless you have access to funds you can secretly convert to your own use, you are unlikely ever to consider embezzlement as an option, much less carry it out. Deviance is widespread in a community only when the opportunities for it exist.

TABLE 6.2 Merton’s Typology of Deviance

SOURCE: Data from Merton, Robert K. (1968, orig. 1938). Social theory and social structure. NY: Free Press. pp. 230–246

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TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY

DEVIANCE, CRIME, AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN AN AGE OF HIGH TECHNOLOGY

AP Photo/Jonathan Miano
Shot-spotter technology enables law enforcement authorities to identify gunfire and to rapidly locate the site of the gunfire.
If a gun is fired in Washington, D.C., 300 “shot-spotter” microphones stand ready to pinpoint the gunshot’s exact location and to alert police (Pethos, Fallis, & Keating, 2013). More than 120 cameras and a mobile surveillance platform nicknamed “Sky Patrol” watch over the city of Camden, New Jersey, where police cruisers are also outfitted with digital license plate scanners (Taibbi, 2013). These are just two examples of how technology is affecting the social control of deviance and crime. However, technology has also altered the types of crime and deviance occurring in society.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2013), one third of the world’s population has Internet access; by 2017, nearly 70% of people worldwide will have mobile broadband of the sort used by Internet-enabled smartphones. The Internet, smartphones, and new social media have given rise to new forms of crime and deviance while also enabling new manifestations of long-existing forms.
Cyberbullying is a new manifestation of an old problem. Cyberbullying expands “traditional” bullying beyond the boundaries of face-to-face interaction. The recent Miami Dolphins bullying scandal that involved player Richie Incognito sending demeaning and threatening text messages to teammate Jonathan Martin is an example of how technology has shifted the context within which bullying can take place (Wells, Karp, Birenboim, & Brown, 2014). The problems of child pornography and related forms of exploitation of unwilling subjects have also expanded as they have moved onto new technologically enabled platforms of distribution.
At the same time, Internet-based technologies have led to new forms of crime and deviance. One example is the “419” scam, a form of “advance fee fraud.” This and similar scams target unsuspecting Internet users, promising them financial rewards, real estate deals, or other goods and services in exchange for wiring small advance fees or providing their personal banking information to initiate electronic funds transfers, ostensibly so they can receive payments. In reality, once a victim has wired the money or provided the information, he or she is left with nothing; the scammers disappear with the wired funds or use the banking information to take money from the target. Another example of a new form of crime and deviance enabled by the advent of the Internet is the creation of online illegal marketplaces that model themselves on legitimate online commerce sites such as Craigslist, eBay, and Amazon. Those sites, like Silk Road, whose founder was arrested by the FBI in October 2013, allow people to purchase illegal drugs, weapons, fake identity documents, and computer hacking tools, and even hire assassins; typically, they are accessible only through special Internet routers (Barratt, Ferris, & Winstock, 2014; Kushner, 2014).
The rise of cyberspace and related technologies has enabled greater communication and collaboration among individuals and groups, including members of deviant and criminal subcultures. Pedophiles who manufacture and trade child pornography are one extreme example of a deviant subculture whose existence has been strengthened by the Internet. New technologies, however, also have improved law enforcement agencies’ surveillance of criminal activities globally and have enabled authorities to track down perpetrators by following their digital footprints. These cases reveal an interesting paradox of our contemporary digital age: Technological advances—often the very same ones—contribute to and sustain a multitude of deviant and criminal behaviors while also contributing to efforts to control and counteract those behaviors.
THINK IT THROUGH
How do technologies like the Internet and smartphones enable authorities to exercise greater control over deviance and crime? How do they simultaneously have the potential to undermine authority and social control?

Deviance in Technology
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CONTROL THEORY Agreeing with the functionalist claim that a society’s norms and values are the starting point for understanding deviance, Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990/2004) control theory explains that the cause of delinquency or deviance among children and teenagers lies in the arena of social control. Gottfredson and Hirschi differ from Durkheim and Merton, however, regarding the importance of a general state of anomie in creating deviance, arguing instead that a person’s acceptance or rejection of societal norms depends on that individual’s life experiences.
Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990/2004; also Hirschi, 2004) assert that deviance arises from social bonds, or individuals’ connections to others, especially institutions, rather than from anomie. Forming strong social bonds with people and institutions that disapprove of deviance, they argue, keeps people from engaging in deviant behaviors. Conversely, people who do not form strong social bonds will engage in deviant acts because they have nothing to lose by acting on their impulses and do not fear the consequences of their actions.
Furthermore, control theorists argue that most deviant acts are spontaneous. For example, a group of teenagers see a drunken homeless man walking down the street and decide to rob him, or a man learns of a house whose owners are on vacation and decides to burglarize it. Some people will succumb to such temptations. Those who do not, according to Gottfredson and Hirschi, have a greater willingness to conform. This willingness, in turn, comes from associating with people who are committed to conventional roles and morality.
Some evidence supports control theory. For example, delinquency is somewhat less common among youth who have strong family attachments, perform well in school, and feel they have something to lose by appearing deviant in the eyes of others (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990/2004; Hirschi, 1969). On the other hand, we could scarcely argue that white-collar criminals such as Bernie Madoff, who pleaded guilty to massive financial fraud in 2009, do not have strong social bonds to society. The success of many white-collar criminals in business suggests that they have spent their lives conforming to societal norms, yet they also commit criminal acts that cost U.S. taxpayers, investors, and pension holders billions of dollars (McLean & Elkind, 2003). Thus, while control theory explanations of deviance and crime may prove useful in certain instances, they have limitations.
CONFLICT PERSPECTIVES
Recall that the conflict perspective makes the assumption that groups in society have different interests and differential access to resources with which to realize those interests. In contrast to the functionalist perspective, the conflict perspective does not assume shared norms and values. Rather, it presumes that groups with power will use that power to maintain control in society and keep other groups at a disadvantage. As we will see below, conflict theory can be fruitfully used in the study of deviance.
SUBCULTURES AND DEVIANCE More than three quarters of a century ago, Thorsten Sellin (1938) pointed out that the cultural diversity of modern societies results in conflicts between social groups over what kinds of behavior are right and wrong. Sellin argued that deviance is best explained through subcultural theories, which identify the conflicting interests of certain segments of the population, whether it be over culture (as in Sellin’s case) or more generally over certain rituals or behaviors. For example, immigrants to the United States bring norms and values with them from their original cultures and, to the extent that these conflict with the norms and values of the adopted country, they may be perceived as deviant by the dominant culture.
Such deviance might create only minor breaches of U.S. conventions. For instance, an Indian woman wears a traditional sari, or a Middle Eastern man wears a head scarf. Other customary practices, however, might be serious violations of criminal laws. The practice of female circumcision by some immigrants to France from North Africa is a violation of French law. Domestic violence may be customary in some countries, but immigrants to the United States who practice domestic violence are in violation of U.S. law.
It is not only cultural differences between immigrants and the host country that create subcultures of deviance. Sociologists also analyze juvenile gangs, professional thieves, White racist groups, and a host of other deviant groups as subcultures in which criminality is the norm, despite the fact that these values contradict the norms of the wider society (Chambliss & King, 1984; Cohen, 1955; Etter, 1998; Hamm, 2002).
CLASS-DOMINANT THEORY Class-dominant theories propose that what is labeled deviant or criminal—and therefore who gets punished—is determined by the interests of the dominant class (Quinney, 1970). For example, since labor is central to the functioning of capitalism, those who do not work will be labeled deviant in capitalist societies (Spitzer, 1975). In a similar vein, since private property is a key foundation of capitalism, those who engage in acts against property, such as stealing or vandalism, will be defined as deviant and likely as criminal. And, because profits are realized through buying and selling things in the capitalist marketplace, uncontrolled market activities (like selling drugs on the street or making alcohol without a license) will also be defined as deviant and criminal.
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Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos
Girls sometimes form gangs in neighborhoods where male street gangs are prevalent. These girl gangs are often “auxiliaries” of male gangs engaged in selling drugs and committing petty crimes. Joining a gang may require an initiation ritual that includes violence and even rape.
Critics of class-dominant theory point out that laws against the interests of the ruling class do get passed. Laws prohibiting insider trading on the stock market, governing the labor practices of corporations, and giving workers the right to strike and form trade unions were all signed over the strident opposition of capitalists (Chambliss, 2001). To incorporate these facts, William J. Chambliss (1988a) proposed a structural contradiction theory that takes into account the limitations, as well as the ultimate power, of capitalists in a capitalist society.
STRUCTURAL CONTRADICTION THEORY Rather than seeing the ruling class as all-powerful in determining what is deviant or criminal, structural contradiction theory argues that conflicts generated by fundamental contradictions in the structure of society produce laws defining certain acts as deviant or criminal (Chambliss, 1988a; Chambliss & Hass, 2011; Chambliss & Zatz, 1994). For instance, there is a fundamental structural contradiction in capitalist economies between the need to maximize profits (which keeps wages down) and the need to maximize consumption (which requires high wages). Consider a U.S. business that, to maximize profits, keeps wages and salaries down, perhaps by moving its factories to a part of the world where labor is cheap. As jobs are transferred to low-wage countries, the availability of jobs to unskilled and semiskilled workers in the United States declines. The loss of jobs produces downward pressure on wages and a loss of purchasing power. Yet capitalism depends on people buying the things that are produced—corporations cannot profit unless they sell their products.
Trapped in the contradiction between norms valuing consumerism and an economic system that can make consumption of desired material goods and services difficult or even impossible for many, some, but not all, people will resolve the conflict by resorting to deviant and criminal acts such as cheating on income taxes, writing bad checks, or profiting from illegal markets, such as by selling drugs or committing theft. Of course, it is not just lower-income people who deviate in order to increase their consumption of material goods. Everyone who wants to enjoy a higher standard of living is a candidate for deviant or criminal behavior, according to structural contradiction theory. The head of a giant corporation may be as tempted to violate criminal laws in order to increase company profits (and personal income) as is the 13-year-old from a poor family who snatches a pair of sunglasses from the drugstore.
Structural contradiction theory holds that societies with the greatest gaps between what people earn and what they are normatively enticed to buy will have the highest levels of deviance. Since industrial societies differ substantially in this regard, we can compare them to test this theory. Societies such as Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, for instance, provide a “social safety net” that guarantees all citizens a decent standard of living. Therefore, the lower classes in Scandinavian countries are able to come much closer to what their societies have established as a “normal” level of consumption. The fact that rates of assault, robbery, and homicide are anywhere from 3 to 35 times higher in the United States than in these countries (depending on which country is compared) is exactly what structural contradiction theory would predict (Archer & Gartner, 1984).
Globalization is another example of the way structural contradictions lead to changes in deviant behavior. The ability to trade worldwide increases the wealth of the nations that are able to take advantage of global markets. However, it also increases opportunities for criminal activities such as money laundering, stealing patents and copyrights, and smuggling people, arms, and drugs.
FEMINIST THEORY The sociological study of deviance—like most areas of academic study—has for centuries been dominated by men. As a result, most theories and research have reflected a male point of view. Recent years, however, have witnessed a sea change in the sociological perspective, as women have become better represented in sociology.
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GLOBAL ISSUES

GLOBALIZATION AND CRIMINAL OPPORTUNITIES

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Globalization vastly increases the potential for crime networks to gain wealth and political power (Block & Weaver, 2004; Naylor, 2002). At the top of the list of crimes facilitated by processes linked to globalization are (1) money laundering; (2) smuggling, including the smuggling of human beings, military equipment, drugs, and stolen merchandise; and (3) terrorism.
Nearly every major bank in Europe and the United States has been found guilty of laundering money at one time or another. In December 2012, the British bank HSBC was fined $1.9 billion for laundering billions of dollars in drug profits and for allowing terrorist groups to launder money through its Mexican affiliate (Douglas, 2013). In 2011 and 2014, the Swiss bank UBS, the British bank Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland were found guilty of international rigging of interest rates by fraudulently setting the rates established through the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), a benchmark for interest rates covering everything from home mortgages to student loans (BBC, 2014a; Douglas, 2013). There are no reliable data on how many of these crimes occur annually, in part because sociological and political awareness of such activities is only now coming to the fore. It is clear, however, that hundreds of billions of dollars are illegally laundered annually (Block & Weaver, 2004; Naylor, 2002).
The economies of entire nations depend at least in part on their supporting criminal enterprises through money laundering: Switzerland and Lichtenstein’s bank secrecy laws as well as banking policies in numerous Caribbean nations enable money launderers from international criminal syndicates and terrorist organizations, as well as individuals evading taxes, to enjoy massive profits through criminal enterprises (Block & Weaver, 2004; Naylor, 2002).
The international drug trade in cocaine, opium, heroin, methamphetamines, and marijuana is estimated to be between $300 billion and $400 billion a year—a sum larger than the wealth of most nations (Glenny, 2009; Woodiwiss, 2005). The production of opium, coca, methamphetamines, and marijuana is a major contributor to the economies of Afghanistan, Malaysia, Laos, Thailand, Pakistan, Turkey, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico (Global Commission on Drug Policy, 2011; Woodiwiss, 2005). Some of these countries—Afghanistan and Bolivia, for example—have a disproportionately high value of illicit drug revenue as a percentage of their gross domestic product (Naylor, 2002).
Trafficking in exotic and endangered plants and animals has always been a lucrative business, but in recent years smuggling of these products has increased in part due to the emergence of consumer markets for plant and animal products in rising economies such as China and Vietnam (Bremer, 2012). Goods ranging from traditional Asian medicines to carved ivory to high-priced furs to exotic pets are smuggled from their places of origin and sold clandestinely in backroom operations or on Internet websites and messaging boards. The stunning value of the trade explains its growth and persistence: It is estimated to generate more than $10 billion per year (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, 2003).
The smuggling of people has also become a major international criminal enterprise. People pay large sums of money to be smuggled from poorer countries into wealthier ones where they imagine an opportunity for a better life. Women and girls are smuggled across borders for prostitution, sometimes under false pretenses, such as promises of jobs as waitresses or as nannies. The extent of trafficking in women and girls for prostitution can only be estimated, but law enforcement and international task forces point to an alarming increase in the smuggling of human beings (Polaris Project, 2013).
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Globalization has brought many benefits to countries and communities, but it has also, as we have seen, contributed to the expansion of criminal enterprises.
THINK IT THROUGH
Who is responsible for addressing the problem of globalized crime in the contemporary world? What sociological factors make the prevention and prosecution of globalized crime particularly challenging?

In the 1980s, a feminist perspective on deviance emerged within the sociological tradition (Campbell, 1984; Chesney-Lind, 1989, 2004; Messerschmidt, 1986). The starting point of feminist explanations of deviance is the observation that studies of deviance have been biased because almost all the research has been done by, and about, males, largely ignoring female perspectives on deviant behavior as well as analyses of differences in the types and causes of female deviance (Messerschmidt, 1993). By ignoring the female population, deviance theory has avoided one of the most challenging issues in the field: Why do rates of deviance—and especially criminal deviance—vary by gender?
Early feminist theory argued that gender-specific cultural norms partly account for the different rates of deviance between men and women (Adler, 1975; Steffensmeier & Allen, 1998). For example, women traditionally have been socialized into the roles of wife and mother, where behavior is more tightly prescribed than it is for men. Moreover, women’s deviant behavior is more likely to be subject to stigmatization—that is, to be branded as highly disgraceful—than is comparable male behavior. For example, a woman who has multiple sexual partners is shamed as a “slut,” while a sexually promiscuous man is not disdained and might even be praised for being a “stud.”
Feminists have argued that an adequate theory of deviance must take into account the particular ways in which women are victimized by virtue of their gender (Chesney-Lind, 2004; Mann & Zatz, 1998; Sokoloff & Raffel, 1995). For example, studies show that before becoming involved in the juvenile justice system, many girls labeled delinquent were runaways escaping sexual and physical abuse. In a study of girls in the Wisconsin juvenile justice system, Phelps et al. (1982) found that 79% had been victims of physical abuse, while fully half had been subjected to sexual abuse, a third of them at the hands of parents or relatives. This research supports the hypothesis that many girls labeled delinquent have been driven out of their homes by abusive parents or relatives. Their behavior in their lives on the streets, marked by petty crime, results from their efforts to survive.
Women also continue to be disproportionately represented in cases of inmate sexual assault and victimization. While women constitute only 7% of the total inmate population in the United States, they make up one third of all prisoner sexual victimization cases (Guerino & Beck, 2011).
INTERACTIONIST PERSPECTIVES
Interactionist perspectives provide a language and framework for looking at how deviance is constructed, including how individuals are connected to the social structure. Interactionist approaches also explain why some people are labeled deviant and behave in deviant ways while others do not. A central tenet of many interactionist approaches is that we see ourselves through the eyes of others, and our resulting sense of ourselves conditions how we behave. This idea has been applied to the study of deviant behavior in the development of both labeling theory and differential association theory.
LABELING THEORY Labeling theory holds that deviant behavior is a product of the labels people attach to certain types of behavior (Asencio & Burke, 2011; Lemert, 1951; Tannenbaum, 1938). From this perspective, deviance is seen as socially constructed. That is, labeling theory holds that deviance is the product of interactions wherein the response of some people to certain types of behaviors produces a label of deviant or not deviant. In turn, these labels, which also end up being applied to people engaging in certain types of behavior, can influence how people conduct themselves. Thus, labeling theory is sometimes referred to as societal reaction theory.
Wildlife Smuggling
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Social Construction of Sex Trafficking
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© PETER DEJONG/AP/Corbis
In the Netherlands (pictured), where marijuana can legally be sold in licensed cafés, the incidence of lifetime use is lower than in the United States, where criminal penalties for possession and use are still common in most states. How would you explain this unexpected difference?
One of the founders of labeling theory, Edwin Lemert (1951), argued that the labeling process has two steps: primary deviance and secondary deviance. Primary deviance occurs at the moment an activity is labeled as deviant by others. Secondary deviance occurs when a person labeled deviant accepts the label as part of his or her identity and, as a result, begins to act in conformity with the label. To illustrate his theory, Lemert reported on a group of people in the U.S. Northwest with an unusually high incidence of stuttering. Observing the interactions among people in this group, he concluded that stuttering was common in the group partly because the members were stigmatized and labeled as “stutterers” (primary deviance). These “stutterers” then began to view themselves through this label and increasingly acted in accordance with it—which included a greater amount of stuttering than otherwise would have been the case (secondary deviance).
Chambliss’s (2001) observations of the Saints and the Roughnecks, discussed in the Inequality Matters box on page 142, also support labeling theory. The working-class boys he studied were labeled deviant while the middle-class boys he observed were not, despite the fact that both groups of boys engaged in delinquent behavior. Eventually, the adult careers of the two groups of boys evolved to be largely consistent with the labels attached to them and their behaviors during adolescence.
DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION THEORY Another interactionist approach to the study of deviance looks at how deviance is transmitted culturally and argues that we learn deviant behaviors through our social interactions. Differential association theory holds that deviant and criminal behavior results from regular exposure to attitudes favorable to acting in ways that are deviant or criminal (Burgess & Akers, 1966; Church, Jaggers, & Taylor, 2012; Sutherland, 1929). For example, the corporate executive who embezzles company funds may have learned the norms and values appropriate to this type of criminal activity by associating with others already engaged in it. Similarly, kids and teenagers living in areas where selling and using drugs are common practices will be more likely than their peers not exposed to that subculture to develop attitudes favorable toward using and selling drugs. Conversely, populations with different subcultures or attitudes toward particular forms of deviance (such as illicit drug usage) may not experience the same rates of crime.
According to Sutherland’s (1929) differential association theory, the more we associate with people whose behavior is deviant, the greater the likelihood that our behavior will also be deviant. Sutherland, therefore, linked deviance with such factors as the frequency and intensity of our associations with other people, how long they last, and how early in our lives they occur. Much has changed since Sutherland developed his theory, and today many of our interactions take place through technologies such as the Internet and smartphones. A modern adaptation of Sutherland’s theory would certainly have to take into account the importance of the unique methods of interacting today in promoting both deviant and conforming behavior.
Symbolic interactionist theories, like functionalist and conflict theories, provide us with considerable insight into the social processes that lead to deviance and crime in society. We might come to the conclusion that each of the competing theories “makes sense” and has some empirical support yet also fails to explain all the behaviors we classify as deviant or criminal. This debate and interaction between theories is essential to the development of scientific knowledge (Popper, 1959). Thus, while there are many unique ways to examine the same topic without necessarily reaching one perfect answer with any of them, we should be reassured that each theoretical orientation presented in this chapter can be useful in explaining certain facets of deviance and crime. It is up to the researcher to decide which theory to use and why, and for others to determine whether the use of the theory was a success or failure.
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INEQUALITY MATTERS

THE SAINTS AND THE ROUGHNECKS
Using detached observation and interviewing as his research methods, William Chambliss (2001) studied two gangs of teenage boys for 2 years. With the permission and cooperation of the boys, Chambliss was able to follow them, talk to them, and watch them during and after school hours. He named the two gangs “the Saints” and “the Roughnecks.”
Eight young men—children of good, stable, white upper-middle-class families, active in school affairs and destined for college—were some of the most delinquent boys at Hannibal High School. The Saints were frequently truant from school and drunk on the weekends. They drove their cars wildly and committed numerous acts of petty theft… and vandalism. Yet in school, among parents, and in the rest of the community they had the reputation of being “good kids, headed in the right direction.” Not one was arrested for any misdeed during the two years of observation….
Six working-class white boys [Chambliss] called the Roughnecks hung out at the local drug store, where their harassment of passersby, public drinking, boisterous antics and fighting often got them into trouble with the community and with the police. To the school, the police, and the rest of the community the upper-middle-class boys were good, upstanding youths with bright futures. They were like Saints. But this same community treated the Roughnecks, whose delinquencies were comparable to those of the Saints, as though they were tough young criminals headed for even more serious trouble.
Years later, Chambliss followed the after-high-school careers of the members of the two gangs…. All but one of the Saints had gone on to college and graduated, while several of the Roughnecks had become involved in criminal activities as adults: one was sentenced to prison for murder, another for manslaughter, and one became a member of an organized crime network.
Why did the Roughnecks and the Saints have such different careers after high school—careers that, by and large, lived up to the community’s expectations?
First, the delinquencies of the Roughnecks were far more visible than those of the Saints. With their access to automobiles, the Saints were able to remove themselves from the sight of the community. But the Roughnecks congregated in a crowded area that everyone in the community passed frequently, including teachers and law enforcement officers. Second, the demeanors of the two sets of gang members differed. While the Saints showed remorse and respect, the Roughnecks offered a barely veiled contempt for authority. This resulted in different responses to their misdeeds. Third, adults in the community showed bias in favor of the Saints, who were presumed to be “good boys sowing wild oats” rather than “bad boys.”
Labels matter. Those who were labeled as “bad” did, in fact, largely live up (or down) to this standard. Those whose youthful transgressions were not transformed into labels lived up to more positive expectations and became successful adults. These self-fulfilling prophecies suggest that the ways in which we opt to label individuals and groups can have important effects on actions and outcomes.
THINK IT THROUGH
W. I. Thomas observed that if people define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences even if objectively it may not be true. Using Thomas’s theory, how would you explain the different responses of the teachers, the police, and the community to the Saints and the Roughnecks?
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TYPES OF DEVIANCE
As noted in the opening to this chapter, deviance comes in many varieties, from the relatively benign to the extremely harmful. In this section, we explore some of the ways in which deviance can manifest in society.
EVERYDAY DEVIANCE
A broad spectrum of acts could fall under the label of “everyday deviance,” from plagiarism among high school or college students to shoplifting, underage alcohol consumption, spitting, using pornography, smoking, binge eating, eating meat, or calling in sick to work or school when you actually feel fine. All of these are considered deviant behaviors, actions, or conditions by some individuals and/or groups. Many of you reading this text engage in at least some types of deviance on a fairly regular basis.
In the commission of everyday deviance, we clearly recognize the pluralistic nature of U.S. society. Taking a subcultural perspective, we see that smoking is more acceptable among some specific societal subgroups (for instance, truck drivers) than it is among others (such as fitness instructors). So too with eating meat: The owner of a barbecue restaurant and a vegan are likely to hold starkly different views regarding the deviance of eating meat or subsisting on a vegan diet. In turn, these views are representative of the broader societal subcultures and groups to which these individuals belong.
Everyday deviance can be explained in a multitude of ways. For instance, we might utilize labeling theory. Pornography represents an interesting example in which both the behavior (using pornography) and the physical object (the pornographic movie or magazine) have been labeled as deviant. We could therefore easily make the argument that pornography is deviant simply because people have chosen to label it as such. Yet this explanation, as you might have sensed, is pretty basic. We could strengthen our understanding of what makes pornography deviant by including a conflict perspective. Thus, we could look at who in society has had the power to define pornography as deviant and what goals such a definition might have served for that particular group. The point is that deviance in its various forms has many potential explanations, which can be strengthened through the combination of different theoretical perspectives.
SEXUAL DEVIANCE

Photo/Naples Daily News, Scott McIntyre
Deviance is not restricted to any particular class or social group. The powerful and elite commit deviance as well. In 2013, Congressman Trey Radel pleaded guilty to a charge of possessing cocaine. He resigned his office and was sentenced to a year of probation.
Sex, sexual orientations, and sexual practices are diverse, as are the responses to them. We are currently witnessing a process of redefinition of what deviance means within the context of intimate relationships. Look no further than the wildly popular novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which made headlines for its depiction of kinky sex and for being on the nightstands of many “ordinary” men and women. As the success of the book and its sequels indicates, we might even argue that some traditional notions regarding sex, sexual orientations, and sexual activities are themselves increasingly becoming viewed as deviant, because they simply do not reflect the realities of modern social life.
Definitions of sexual deviance can include many things—from the choices we make in terms of those with whom we begin intimate relationships to how and where those relationships are carried out. While we could utilize many explanations to examine sexual deviance, looking at the current debate over same-sex marriage from a conflict perspective, we see an ongoing struggle between those groups that have long determined what passes for acceptable sexual behavior (for instance, religious groups) and those that seek to redefine sexual behavior to include things other than heterosexual sex and marriage.
DEVIANCE OF THE POWERFUL
The crimes of the powerful are ubiquitous and wide-ranging, from the fraudulent reporting of corporate profits to the misleading of investors to bribery, corruption, misuse of public trust, and violence against ordinary citizens. The most powerful people in public life engage in many of the same types of deviance as ordinary men and women (McLean & Elkind, 2003; McLean & Nocera, 2010; Reiman & Leighton, 2012).
The mass media have a heyday when deviance committed by political leaders, celebrities, or athletes becomes public. When it was revealed that golfer Tiger Woods was having sexual relations with a multitude of women while he was married, the press spent weeks following the story in detail. Recently, the champion cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped of his multiple Tour de France wins and banned from competitive cycling for life for his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Famed Major League Baseball player Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees was suspended for the entire 2014 season for using banned substances and then lying about it. Sociologically, what must be taken into account is that deviance knows no class bounds.
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The response of the public to the deviance of political leaders is often particularly pointed given the immense trust, responsibility, and power vested in those individuals. For example, in 2012, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Petraeus, previously the commanding general of coalition forces in Afghanistan, was engaged in an affair with his biographer while both were married. As a result of the affair becoming public, Petraeus had to resign as CIA director. The public response to deviance committed by powerful individuals often reflects not only dismay at the fact of deviance but also disdain for the hypocrisy, such as in the case of lawyer and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who prosecuted prostitution in New York with a vengeance only to be caught hiring a high-priced call girl to accompany him on a trip from New York to Washington, D.C. Late in 2013, New Jersey governor Chris Christie was caught up in a scandal when it was alleged that members of his staff had several lanes of the highway leading into New York City from the town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, shut down for “repairs” as retribution against Fort Lee’s mayor for not supporting Christie’s reelection.
On one hand, empirical data show that the powerful are more likely than those without power to escape punishment for deviance. On the other hand, those powerful figures who are caught in acts of deviance are often subject to acute media attention and public disdain. Should public figures be subject to particular scrutiny for their behavior, or should they be treated like everyone else?
CRIME
Our discussion thus far has been concerned primarily with deviance in a general sense—those attitudes, behaviors, and conditions that are widespread but generally not condemned by all or seen as especially serious. In this section, we discuss crime—acts that are sometimes considered deviant and are defined under the law as punishable by fines, imprisonment, or both. Law enforcement agencies across the United States take rigorous steps to record formally how much crime occurs, to prosecute criminal offenders, and to control and prevent crime.
VIOLENT AND PROPERTY CRIMES A great deal of effort is expended on the measurement of crime in U.S. society. This is accomplished through official, limited records like the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the collection of survey data from individuals and households across the country via the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). These measures of crime, especially the UCR, focus predominantly on violent and property crimes, serious forms of deviance that nearly every person in society agrees should be made illegal.

FIGURE 6.1 Violent Crime Rate in the United States, 1993–2013

SOURCES: Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2010). “National Crime Victimization Survey Violent Crime Trends, 1973–2008.” Key Facts at a Glance; FBI UCR. 2012a. “Table 1: Crime in the United States by Volume and Rate”. U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

FIGURE 6.2 Property Crime Rate in the United States, 1993–2013

SOURCES: Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2010). “National Crime Victimization Survey Violent Crime Trends, 1973–2008.” Key Facts at a Glance; FBI UCR. 2012a. “Table 1: Crime in the United States by Volume and Rate”. U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

Violent crimes include robbery (taking something from someone by physical force), murder, assault, and rape. Property crimes include burglary (taking something from a person’s home), arson, larceny/theft, and motor vehicle theft. Property crimes are much more common in the United States than violent crimes, although their number, like the number of violent crimes (Figure 6.1), has been steadily declining (see Figure 6.2). Variations of serious deviance, including violent and property crimes, can be analyzed from a variety of perspectives. For instance, violent crimes might be viewed from an opportunity theory perspective and property crimes in terms of societal strain. How might such analyses look?
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Trafficking of Human Body Parts
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Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom
In June of 2014, executives from General Motors Company were called in front of Congress to testify on the delayed ignition switch recall. Critics accuse the company of failing to recall cars with a serious defect that led to numerous deaths and injuries on the road.
ORGANIZED CRIME Sociologists define organized crime as crime committed by criminal groups that provide illegal goods and services. Gambling, prostitution, selling and trafficking in illegal drugs, black marketeering, loan sharking, and money laundering are some of the most prominent activities of organized crime (Block & Chambliss, 1981; Glenny, 2009; McCoy, 1991; Paoli, 2003).
To meet the demand for illegal goods and services, criminal organizations have flourished in U.S. urban areas since the 1800s (Woodiwiss, 2000). Over the years, they have recruited members and leadership from more impoverished groups in society, such as new immigrants in big cities, who may have great aspirations but limited means of achieving them (Block & Weaver, 2004). Consequently, organized crime has been dominated by the most recent arrivals to urban areas: Irish, Jewish, and Italian “mobs” in the past, and Asian, African, South American, and Russian “mobs” today (Albanese, 1989; Finckenauer & Waring, 1996; Hess, 1973).
Depictions of organized crime in movies and television shows such as The Sopranos, The Godfather, Scarface, and Goodfellas have popularized the erroneous impression that there is an international organization of criminals (the “Mafia”) dominated by Italian Americans. The reality is that organized crime consists of thousands of different groups throughout the United States and the world. No single ethnic group or organization has control over most or even a major share of these activities, which include human trafficking and weapons and drug smuggling (Block & Weaver, 2004; Chambliss, 1988a).
CRIMES OF THE POWERFUL When most people think of crime, they think of the violent and property crimes discussed above—and they think of crimes committed by those in lower socioeconomic groups. But the forms of crime perpetrated by individuals and groups who possess great power, authority, and influence are also often deeply harmful to society.
White-collar crime is crime committed by people of high social status in connection with their work (Sutherland, 1949/1983). There are two principal types: crimes committed for the benefit of the individual who commits them, and crimes committed for the benefit of the organization for which the individual works.
Among the many white-collar crimes that benefit the individual are the theft of money by accountants who alter their employers’ or clients’ books and the overcharging of clients by lawyers. More costly types of white-collar crime occur when corporations and their employees engage in criminal conduct either through commission, that is, by doing something criminal, or omission, by failing to prevent something criminal or harmful from occurring.
White-collar crimes of all sorts receive considerable media attention. The following constitute just a small sample of white-collar criminal cases publicized over the past few years:
• In 2008, at the height of the U.S. recession, Bernard “Bernie” Madoff, a former Wall Street executive, was arrested and charged with managing an intricate criminal scheme that stole at least $50 billion from corporate and individual investors. Madoff pled guilty to 11 criminal counts in Manhattan’s federal district courthouse and was sentenced to 150 years in prison (Rosoff, Pontell, & Tillman, 2010).
• In 2010, financial giant JPMorgan Chase was fined $48.6 million by British financial regulators for “failing to keep clients’ funds separate from those of the firm.” The error went undetected for more than 7 years and placed billions of dollars of client funds at risk of being lost (Werdigier, 2010).
• In 2012, Barclays and UBS (United Bank of Switzerland) were collectively fined more than $1.9 billion for intentionally manipulating interest rates (BBC, 2014a).
• General Motors Corporation, which received close to $50 billion in “bailout” funds from American taxpayers in order to stay financially solvent, was implicated in a scandal in early 2014 for failing to fix a defective ignition switch in its Chevrolet Cobalt line of vehicles (Isidore, 2012; Wald, 2014). The company allegedly chose not to make the fix, which caused vehicles to lose power while running and may have resulted in more than a dozen deaths, because doing so would have added to the cost of each car (Lienert & Thompson, 2014). The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, which is charged with regulating and investigating complaints about motor vehicle safety, knew of the deaths linked to the vehicles with defective switches as early as 2007 but did not act (Wald, 2014).
Organized Crime and Transnational Crime
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Sex Trafficking in the United States
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• In 2014, JPMorgan was fined again, this time more than $461 million, by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury for violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to report the suspicious activities of Bernie Madoff (FinCEN, 2014).
POLICE CORRUPTION AND POLICE BRUTALITY Policing is a job vested with trust, responsibility, and authority. Police officers are the frontline enforcers of laws that are expected to limit the amount of crime that occurs in society. When violent or property crimes are committed, we rely on the police for protection and investigation. Thus, when instances of corruption—whether it be accepting bribes or engaging in criminal activities—and other forms of deviance on the part of police come to light, the public is often shocked and outraged.
Such was the case in 2010 when a video surfaced that showed a University of Maryland student being beaten by several Prince George’s County, Maryland, police officers following a collegiate basketball game. Prior to publication of a video corroborating the student’s story that he did nothing wrong, the officers claimed he had assaulted them and resisted arrest. In 2013, 18 deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were charged in an FBI indictment alleging they engaged in corruption and violations of civil rights—including the beating of inmates at the L.A. County Jail (Wilson & Duke, 2013).
Police brutality has a long history in the United States. The responses of southern police officers and sheriffs, such as Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama, to the 1960s civil rights marches provide well-documented examples. Police brutality continues to occur, though it often escapes detection and sanction. The videotaped beating of Rodney King in the 1990s by four White members of the Los Angeles Police Department served as one vivid example of the treatment many minority city residents suffered at the hands, and batons, of the police. More recently, a drunken off-duty Chicago policeman named Anthony Abbate was caught on tape viciously beating and stomping a female bartender after she refused to serve him any more drinks (Walberg, 2009). Had the video not surfaced, it is possible the 250-pound Abbate’s claim that he acted in self-defense in pummeling the 125-pound bartender would have been accepted.
Police corruption is no less serious than police brutality, and in fact it may be more so if we consider that entrenched corruption may significantly undermine the ability of the police to enforce laws effectively and can also lead to acts of targeted violence in some cases. Both corruption and brutality represent important forms of criminal deviance committed by official representatives of state authority. But how can we make sense of these forms of deviance?
In the case of both police corruption and the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers, Sutherland’s differential association theory may provide valuable insights. Some studies and first-person accounts demonstrate that police officers are often exposed to various forms of deviance once they become members of the force (Kappeler, Sluder, & Alpert, 1998; Maas, 1997). Exposure to attitudes favorable to the commission of deviance and crime, especially in light of the intensity and duration of the relationships police officers form with one another, may lead some to engage in those same types of deviant or criminal behaviors. We can also view the police as having a distinct culture, and thus see police brutality and corruption in terms of the subcultural expectations that accompany police work. Members of the police subculture may see certain behaviors, actions, and perspectives, especially regarding the use of force and engaging in corrupt practices, as both necessary and normal parts of accomplishing the demands of police work.
STATE CRIMES Finally, we turn to perhaps the most harmful form of crime among the powerful: state crime. While police brutality and corruption are especially egregious examples of crimes occurring among those with power, state crimes rank above even them in terms of the seriousness and potential harm that may result from their commission.
State crimes consist of criminal or other harmful acts of commission or omission perpetrated by state officials in the pursuit of their jobs as representatives of the government. Needless to say, governments do not normally keep statistics on their own criminal behavior. Nonetheless, we do know from various contemporary and historical examples that such crimes are not uncommon (Chambliss, Michalowski, & Kramer, 2010; Green & Ward, 2004; Moloney & Chambliss, 2014; Rothe, 2009). Contemporary examples of state crime involving the U.S. government include the torture of detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; the secret transportation and torture of battlefield detainees in foreign prisons; and even the violation of international laws leading up to the 2004 invasion of Iraq (Grey, 2006; Kramer & Michalowksi, 2005; Paglen & Thompson, 2006; Ratner & Ray, 2004). Globally, many studies have drawn attention to state crimes, including the Chinese government’s role in the trafficking of human body parts. In the latter study, the author found that the organs of executed prisoners were harvested by government-approved doctors and were sold to corporations and other entities for use in organ transplantation and cosmetic surgery, often at substantial profits, without the consent of the prisoners’ families (Lenning, 2007).
Deviance in the Mining Industry
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SOCIAL CONTROL OF DEVIANCE
The persistence of deviant behavior in society leads inevitably to a variety of measures designed to control it. Social control is defined as the attempts by certain people or groups in society to control the behaviors of other individuals and groups in order to increase the likelihood that they will conform to established norms or laws. Thus, deviance, the definition of which tends to require some sort of moral judgment, also attracts attempts at social control, usually exercised by those people or groups who possess social power, or the ability to exercise social control.
INFORMAL SOCIAL CONTROL
Informal social control is the unofficial means through which deviance is discouraged in everyday interactions. It ranges from frowning at someone’s sexist assertion to threatening to take away a child’s cell phone in order to coerce conformity to the parent’s wishes. Informal social control mechanisms explain why people don’t spit on the floor in a restaurant, do choose to pay back a friend who lent them $5, or say “thank you” in response to a favor. These behaviors and responses are governed not by formal laws but by informal expectations of which we are all aware and that lead us to make certain choices. Much of the time these informal social controls lead us into conformity with societal or group norms and away from deviance. Informal controls are thus responsible for keeping most forms of noncriminal deviance in check.
Socialization, which we have discussed in earlier chapters, thus plays a significant role in the success of informal social control. When parents seek to get their children to conform to the values and norms of their society, they teach them to do one thing and not another. Peer groups of workers, students, and friends also implement informal social control through means, such as embarrassment and criticism, that work to control behavior and thus deviance. Bonds to institutions and people enact various informal social controls on our behavior. Such bonds have been shown to be crucial in explaining why some people engage in deviance and others do not (Laub & Sampson, 2003; Sampson & Laub, 1990).
FORMAL SOCIAL CONTROL AND CRIMINAL DEVIANCE
The street-corner drug dealer who gets chased by the police, cornered, and forced violently to the ground is then handcuffed, packed into the back of a squad car, and hauled to jail. This is the experience of formal social control, official attempts to discourage certain behaviors and visibly punish others. In the modern world, formal social control is most often exercised by societal institutions associated with the state, including the police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons. The goal of all these institutions is to suppress, reduce, and punish those individuals or groups who engage in criminal forms of deviance. Theft, assault, vandalism, cheating on income taxes, fraudulent reporting of corporate earnings, and insider trading on the stock market—all have been deemed crimes and represent forms of criminal deviance. As such, they are subject to formal social control.
For an act to be criminal, several elements must be present. First, a specific law must prohibit the act, and a punishment of either prison or a fine, or both, must be specified for violation of the law. Most important, the act must be intended, and the person committing the act must be capable of having the necessary intent. Someone judged to be mentally ill, which U.S. criminal law defines as the person “not knowing right from wrong” at the time of the act, cannot have the required legal intent and therefore cannot be held criminally liable for committing an illegal act. However, the insanity defense is not accepted in all states: Idaho, Montana, Kansas, and Utah do not recognize insanity as a defense. In other state courts and federal courts, the burden of proof regarding a defendant’s mental state is on the defendant. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case from Idaho in which a defendant claimed he had a constitutional right to claim insanity as a defense (Barnes, 2012).
RISING PRISON POPULATIONS Controlling serious, criminal forms of deviance typically includes the arrest and prosecution of individuals who have committed violent crimes or property crimes and, to a lesser extent, individuals engaged in police brutality or corruption, white-collar crime, organized crime, or state crime. Common sense would seem to indicate that most of the people subject to various formal social controls would be those implicated in some type of violent criminal deviance, such as rape, robbery, or murder. Interestingly, however, of the roughly 12 million arrests in the United States in 2012, fewer than 1 in 20 were for violent crimes; most arrests resulted from suspected violations of various drug laws (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2012b).
Another indication of the importance of formal social control in the modern world is the unprecedented increase in the number of people imprisoned (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). The 2012 imprisonment rate in the United States was 480 per 100,000 residents (Carson & Golinelli, 2013). Indeed, while the U.S. prison population has declined slightly in recent years, the United States still imprisons a vastly higher percentage of its population than does any other industrial society. In total, about 1 in 35 U.S. adults today is under some form of correctional system supervision, either in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole (Glaze & Herberman, 2013).
The large and sudden increase in the number of people in prison or under some form of correctional supervision is particularly intriguing to sociologists, since it occurred during a period when both violent and property crime rates had been declining. What then accounts for the unprecedented rise in imprisonment in the United States? The following are three key explanations:
Hip Hop and the LA Riots
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Crack Babies
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1. Mandatory minimum sentences: Federal and state legislators in the 1980s passed legislation stipulating that a person found guilty of a particular crime had to be sentenced to a minimum number of years in prison. This reduced judges’ ability to use their discretion in sentencing and led to a substantial increase in the average prison term.

FIGURE 6.3 Incarceration Rates in Selected Countries, 2011

SOURCE: Adapted from Chambliss, William J. and Aida Hass (2011). Criminology: Theory, Research and Practice, New York: McGraw-Hill.

2. “Three strikes” laws: Many U.S. states and the federal government have passed laws that automatically impose a sentence of life in prison on anyone who is found guilty of committing three felonies, or serious crimes punishable by a minimum of one year in jail. (In November 2012, California passed a ballot initiative that slightly reduced the impact of the application of the state’s three-strikes law.)
3. The “war on drugs”: Efforts to reduce the trafficking of illegal drugs are responsible for a significant increase in the number of people in prison. For example, in 2012 there were just over 12 million arrests in the United States, of which 1.5 million were for minor drug law violations—not for serious trafficking or distribution offenses (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2012b). As a result of increased arrest rates and longer sentences for minor drug-related offenses, about 60% of federal prison inmates and more than 30% of state prison inmates are serving time for the sale or possession of illegal drugs (Boncar & Beck, 1997).
Over the past several decades, changes in criminal laws and criminal sentencing have resulted in much stricter forms of social control in relationship to certain types of crime. In turn, this has led to a huge increase in the U.S. prison population. At the same time, these formal mechanisms of social control have not been applied equally, or proportionally, to all groups in society.

FIGURE 6.4 U.S. State and Federal Prison Population, 1925–2012

SOURCE: Reprinted with permission from The Sentencing Project.

RACE, ETHNICITY, GENDER, AND CRIMINAL DEVIANCE Three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and the “war on drugs” have all contributed to increases in U.S. prison populations. However, those most likely to be imprisoned and punished for engaging in criminal deviance are disproportionately people of color. Blacks and Hispanics are arrested and imprisoned at much higher rates than Whites, despite the fact that Whites make up a much larger proportion of the total U.S. population (Chambliss, 2001; Glaze & Herberman, 2013).
Statistics show that 1 in 3 Black men will enter state or federal prison during his lifetime, compared to 1 in 6 Hispanic males and 1 in 17 White males (Sentencing Project, 2012). Black men are currently incarcerated at a rate of more than 2,800 per 100,000; for Hispanic men the rate is more than 1,100 per 100,000. White men, by contrast, have an incarceration rate of 463 per 100,000 (Carson & Golinelli, 2013). If current trends continue, Black males between the ages of 19 and 34 will experience an even greater overrepresentation in the prison population (Figure 6.5). Incarceration rates for women, while lower overall than those for men, exhibit a similar disproportionate racial trend, with Black women twice as likely as Hispanic women and three times more likely than White women to end up in jail or prison (Carson & Golinelli, 2013; Sipes, 2012).
Critique of the U.S. Correctional System
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AP Photo/Paul Schirald
The television series Orange is the New Black tells the story of Piper Kerman, a young woman imprisoned for 15 months for a decade-old drug crime. The popular program is based on Kerman’s best-selling book of the same name and shows both the extraordinary and banal experiences of life in a women’s prison.
People of color are more likely than Whites to be arrested and imprisoned for a number of reasons, all of which relate to the extension of formal social control over criminal deviance (Mann & Zatz, 1998). First, impoverished inner-city residents are disproportionately non-White, and the inner city is where the “war on drugs” has been most avidly waged (Anderson, 1999; Chambliss, 2001). As a consequence, drug-related arrests disproportionately affect people of color, who, despite constituting only 13% of the total U.S. population, represent more than 30% of people arrested for drug violations.
Second, the work of policing generally focuses on poor neighborhoods, where crowded living conditions force many activities onto the streets. Illegal activities are therefore much more likely to attract police attention in poor neighborhoods than in dispersed suburban neighborhoods.
Finally, racism in practices of prosecution and sentencing may also account for greater arrest and imprisonment rates of people of color. Even though many more Whites than non-Whites are arrested for crimes, people of color are more likely to be imprisoned for their offenses (Austin, Dimas, & Steinhart, 1992).
WHY STUDY DEVIANCE?
The sociological perspective focuses the lens through which we view deviant behavior. It highlights the fact that the line between “deviant” and “normal” behavior is often arbitrary: What is deviant to one group is normal and even expected behavior to another.

FIGURE 6.5 Incarceration Rates by Race and Gender in the United States, 2012

SOURCE: Carson, E. A., & Golinelli, D. (2013). Prisoners in 2012: Trends in admissions and releases, 1991–2012. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Mainstream media and “official” depictions of deviance often overlook or ignore some of the more serious manifestations of deviance in the culture. So toso do local communities. For example, in his research on “the Saints” and “the Roughnecks,” Chambliss (2001) found that middle-class boys were much more likely to have their deviant behavior written off as simply “sowing their wild oats,” even though the behavior was dangerous and costly to society. On the other hand, the community was quick to judge, and apply deviant labels to, a lower-income group of boys. Such findings suggests a need for sociologists to delve more deeply into stereotypes of “gangs” and “delinquency” as phenomena associated almost exclusively with poor urban youth.
Similarly, sociological research and theory remind us that focusing on the deviance of the poor and minorities blinds us to an understanding of deviance among the rich and powerful. Criminal deviance, as discussed earlier in this chapter, is widespread throughout modern societies. Some of the most dangerous and costly patterns of deviant behavior are systematically practiced by corporate executives, politicians, and government officials. The sociological perspective demands that in such cases we ask questions about power and who has the power to define deviance and to enforce their definitions.
The findings of sociologists who study deviant behavior generally and criminal deviance in particular suggest that social control policies such as imprisonment have limited effects. Instead, these findings point to the need to change the social conditions that lead to criminality in the first place. The implications of most sociological studies of deviance are that street crime and gang activity in poor urban neighborhoods can best be controlled through the creation of jobs and other opportunities for those who otherwise cannot hope to succeed. In the case of white-collar, political, and governmental crimes, the organizational structures that make it rewarding to violate laws and social norms will have to change for there to be any hope of reducing deviance among the elite.
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WHAT CAN I DO WITH A
SOCIOLOGY DEGREE?

SKILLS AND CAREERS: PROBLEM SOLVING
Problem solving is a fundamental skill in social scientific disciplines such as sociology—and in a wide variety of contemporary occupational fields. Managing and addressing complex problems by identifying their dimensions, researching their roots, and using the knowledge gained rigorously and thoughtfully to craft well-reasoned responses is a skill set that is developed through careful study, research training, and practice. Problem solving is, in many respects, composed of other key skills we will discuss in the Skills and Careers features in this book, including data and information literacy, critical thinking, quantitative and qualitative research competency, understanding of conflict dynamics, understanding of diversity and global perspectives, and written communication. At the same time, it is a skill that has its own characteristics as a product of sociological training. Sociological research data, which form the centerpiece of much of what sociologists do and teach, cannot solve problems; rather, research data contribute to the informed understanding of the dimensions of a problem. Data are also used to hypothesize the roots of a problem. Once the roots of a problem are identified, they can be addressed through, for instance, policy or community interventions. Research can be used to follow up on whether and how solutions worked and to rework hypotheses based on new information.
In Chapter 6, we learned about a variety of theories that seek to explain deviant or criminal activities. Consider the problem of illegal drugs as a community concern. Drugs can be a problem for a community when, for instance, illicit drug markets contribute to a rise in neighborhood violence. How might a sociologist approach this problem? First, it is important to ascertain the dimensions of the problem. How will the problem at issue be defined, operationalized, and measured? Second, having established the dimensions of the problem, the sociologist must look for the roots of the problem. The sociologist may choose to study a particular neighborhood closely and to draw conclusions and perhaps make generalizations from data gathered through interviews, observations, examination of police records, or surveys, for instance. Or the sociologist might begin from an existing theory of deviance, such as opportunity theory or structural contradiction theory, and opt to test the theory through the collection of empirical evidence. Researching the roots of a problem can involve a spectrum of different approaches, and a sociologist often needs to try more than one to generate a comprehensive picture of the problem. Third, the sociologist can use the knowledge developed through research to craft possible approaches to the problem that get at the roots of the issue, and then use further research to test the effects of these approaches and to refine the analysis of the community drug problem. Social life is complex, and most serious social problems are not amenable to simple solutions. At the same time, the probability of successfully addressing a problem is appreciably greater when one has used careful research to understand its causes.
The problems encountered in different occupational fields vary, but the need for people who are skilled in breaking down a problem, defining it, analyzing it, crafting solutions based on good data, and effectively communicating identified paths of action is common across many areas. Among the occupational fields where problem-solving skills are very important are business and management, nonprofit and volunteer management, nongovernmental organization management, education and training, criminal justice, politics, law, mediation and negotiation, health administration, marketing, public relations, and research. Among the job titles that are associated with these fields are the following: social worker or youth counselor, caseworker, psychologist, educator or education administrator, policy director or analyst, researcher, business manager or executive, social media manager, advertising manager or executive, Peace Corps volunteer, labor relations manager, criminologist, detective, corporate trainer, and organizational development consultant.
THINK ABOUT CAREERS
Think about career fields that might be of interest to you. What kinds of problems do people who work in this career field confront and address?

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SUMMARY
• Notions of what constitutes deviance vary considerably and are relative to the norms and values of particular cultures as well as the labels applied by certain groups or individuals to specific behaviors, actions, practices, and conditions. Even crimes, which are particular forms of especially serious deviance, are defined differently from place to place and over time, and they depend on social and political processes.
• In pluralistic societies such as the United States, it is difficult to establish universally accepted notions of deviance.
• Most sociologists do not believe there is a direct causal link between biology and deviance. Whatever the role of biology, deviant behaviors are culturally defined and socially learned.
• Functionalist theorists explain deviance in terms of the functions it performs for society. Émile Durkheim argued that some degree of deviance serves to reaffirm society’s normative boundaries. Robert K. Merton argued that deviance reflects structural strain between the culturally defined goals of a society and the means society provides for achieving those goals. Opportunity theory emphasizes access to deviance as a major source of deviance. Control theory focuses on the presence of interpersonal bonds as a means of keeping deviance in check.
• Conflict theories explain deviance in terms of the conflicts between different groups, classes, or subcultures in society. Class-dominant theories of deviance emphasize how wealthy and powerful groups are able to define as deviant any behavior that runs counter to their interests. Structural contradiction theory argues that conflicts are inherent in social structure; it sees the sorts of structural strains identified by Merton as being built into society itself. The feminist perspective on deviance reminds us that, until relatively recently, research on deviance was conducted almost exclusively on males. Recent feminist theories argue that many women labeled as deviant are themselves victims of deviant behavior, such as “delinquent” girls who are, in fact, runaways escaping sexual and physical abuse.
• Symbolic interactionist theorists argue that deviance, like all forms of human behavior, results from the ways in which we come to see ourselves through the eyes of others. One version of symbolic interactionism is labeling theory, which argues that deviance results mainly from the labels others attach to our behavior.
• Although crime is often depicted as concentrated among poor racial minorities, crimes are committed by people from all walks of life. White-collar crime and state crime are two examples of crime committed by people in positions of wealth and power. They exact enormous financial and personal costs from society.
• Deviance and criminal deviance are both controlled socially through mechanisms of informal social control, such as socialization, and formal social control, such as arrests and imprisonment.
• Criminal deviance is controlled formally, and in modern societies, including the United States, this most often means incapacitating criminals by imprisoning them. Among industrialized nations, the United States currently has the highest proportion of its population in prison, a situation that has given rise to a large and powerful crime control industry.
• Although there is a public perception in the United States that crime is increasing, crime has steadily decreased over the 35 years the federal government has been collecting systematic data on it. Violent crimes are the most heavily publicized, but the most common are property crimes and victimless crimes.
• A disproportionate number of people of color are arrested and incarcerated in the United States. In addition, the “war on drugs” is focused on urban areas, where poor people of color are concentrated.
KEY TERMS
deviance, 131
crime, 131
pluralistic societies, 132
capital offenses, 132
phrenology, 133
atavisms, 133
structural strain, 135
strain theory, 135
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opportunity theory, 135
control theory, 137
social bonds, 137
subcultural theories, 137
class-dominant theories, 137
structural contradiction theory, 138
stigmatization, 140
labeling theory, 140
feminist perspective on deviance, 140
primary deviance, 141
secondary deviance, 141
differential association theory, 141
violent crimes, 144
property crimes, 144
organized crime, 145
white-collar crime, 145
state crimes, 146
social control, 147
social power, 147
informal social control, 147
formal social control, 147
mandatory minimum sentences, 148
“three strikes” laws, 148
“war on drugs,” 148
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Measuring crime, including property crimes and violent crimes, can be challenging. Often, a single source is not enough to provide a comprehensive picture. What kinds of factors could affect the accuracy of statistics on the incidence of crime? How can a researcher overcome such problems to gain an accurate picture?
2. Labeling theories in the area of criminology suggest that labeling particular groups as deviant can set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, people may become that which is expected of them—including becoming deviant or even criminally deviant. Can you think of other social settings where labeling theory might be applied?
3. Think about some theoretical explanations for why people commit crime—differential association, social control, labeling, and so on. You might conclude that they all make sense on an intuitive level. Yet there is contradictory evidence for each of these theories; that is, some data support each theory, and some data contradict it. What is the difference between seeing intuitive sense in a theory and testing it empirically?
4. Why, according to the chapter, has the rate of imprisonment risen in the United States since the 1980s? Why are a disproportionate number of prison inmates people of color?
5. Why, according to sociologists, are the “crimes of the powerful” (politicians, businesspeople, and other elites) less likely to be severely punished than those of the poor, even when those crimes have mortal consequences?

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(Chambliss 128-153)
Chambliss, William J., Daina Eglitis. CUSTOM: APUS: Discover Sociology 2E Custom Interactive E-book Edition, 2nd Edition. SAGE Publications, Inc, 03/2015. VitalBook file.
The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.

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7 SOCIAL CLASS AND
INEQUALITY IN THE
UNITED STATES

© Lisa Wiltse/Corbis
Media Library
CHAPTER 7 Media Library
AUDIO
Inequality and the Economic Crisis
Hollywood’s American Dream
VIDEO
John Oliver on Income Inequality & Wealth
Perceptions of Wealth Inequality
Income Mobility
Economic Inequality
CQ RESEARCHER
Income Inequality
PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE
Structural inequality and parental income
JOURNAL
Racial Stratification and Inequality
Higher Education and Income
Race and Desserts
Typology of American Poverty

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IN THIS CHAPTER
Stratification in Traditional and Modern Societies
Sociological Building Blocks of Stratification and Social Class
Class and Inequality in the United States: Dimensions and Trends
The Problem of Neighborhood Poverty
Why Do Stratification and Poverty Exist and Persist in Class Societies?
Why Study Inequality?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
1. How equal or unequal is the distribution of income in the United States? What factors help explain income inequality?
2. What explains the existence and persistence of widespread poverty in the United States, one of the richest countries on earth?
3. Should the minimum wage be raised? What would be the costs of such an increase? What would be the benefits?
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POVERTY AND PROSPERITY IN THE UNITED STATES
Melanie Stetson Freeman / Contributor/Getty Images
An article in a recent issue of Bloomberg Markets that reported on a growing demand among investors for trailer park properties in the United States profiled one such investor:

When Dan Weissman worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and, later, at a hedge fund, he didn’t have to worry about methamphetamine addicts chasing his employees with metal pipes. Or SWAT teams barging into his workplace looking for arsonists.
Both things have happened since he left Wall Street and bought five mobile home parks: four in Texas and one in Indiana. Yet he says he’s never been so relaxed in his life….
[He] attributes his newfound calm to the supply-demand equation in the trailer park industry. With more of the U.S. middle class sliding into poverty and many towns banning new trailer parks, enterprising owners are getting rich renting the concrete pads and surrounding dirt on which residents park their homes.
“The greatest part of the business is that we go to sleep at night not ever worrying about demand for our product…. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.” (Effinger & Burton, 2014)
The decline of the U.S. middle class has wrought substantial consequences for millions of families. It has also, as the Bloomberg article suggests, opened new opportunities for others, including members of the upper class. The economic position of the middle class, particularly its less educated fraction, has been slowly declining since the 1970s, a process accelerated by the economic recession of 2007–2010, the effects of which are still felt in many families and communities. At the top of the economic ladder, however, incomes have risen and fortunes expanded. These important changes in the U.S. class structure are of great interest to sociologists. Helping you to understand them is a key goal of this chapter.
Inequality and the Economic Crisis
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AP Photo/Ben Margot
In a protest against affirmative action in college admissions, a “diversity bake sale” held at a California college by the College Republicans set pastry prices by racial and gender group. The action provoked anger among those who argue that affirmative action is a means of ensuring equal access to educational opportunities. Interest has grown recently in focusing affirmative action policies on class rather than on race or gender. Is this likely to provoke controversy as well?
We begin this chapter with an examination of forms of stratification in traditional and modern societies, followed by a discussion of the characteristics of caste, social class, and stratification. Next, we look at important quantitative and qualitative dimensions of inequality and both household and neighborhood poverty in the United States. Finally, we discuss theoretical perspectives that consider the analytical question of why these economic phenomena exist and persist.
STRATIFICATION IN TRADITIONAL AND MODERN SOCIETIES
In the United States today, there is substantial social inequality—a high degree of disparity in income, wealth, power, prestige, and other resources. Sociologists capture the disparities between social groups conceptually with an image from geology: They suggest that society, like the earth’s surface, is made up of different layers. Social stratification is thus the systematic ranking of different groups of people in a hierarchy of inequality. Sociologists seek to outline the quantitative dimensions and the qualitative manifestations of social stratification in the United States and around the globe, but—even more important—they endeavor to identify the social roots of stratification.
Stratification systems are considered “closed” or “open,” depending on how much mobility between layers is available to groups and individuals within a society. Caste societies (closed) and class societies (open) represent two important examples of systems of stratification.
CASTE SOCIETIES
In a caste society the social levels are closed, so that all individuals remain at the social level of their birth throughout life. Social status is based on personal characteristics—such as race or ethnicity, parental religion, or parental caste—that are present at birth, and social mobility is virtually impossible. Social status, then, is the outcome of ascribed rather than achieved characteristics.
Historically, castes have been present in some agricultural societies, such as rural India and South Africa prior to the end of White rule in 1992. In the United States before the end of the Civil War in 1865, slavery imposed a racial caste system because enslavement was usually a permanent condition (except for those slaves who escaped or were freed by their owners). In the eyes of the law, the slave was a form of property without personal rights. Some argue that institutionalized racial inequality and limits on social mobility for African Americans remained fixtures of the U.S. landscape even after the end of slavery (Alexander, 2010; Dollard, 1957; Immerwahr, 2007). Indeed, enforced separation of Blacks and Whites was supported by federal, state, and local laws on education, family formation, public spaces, and housing as late as the 1960s.
Caste systems are far less common in countries and communities today than they were in centuries past. For example, India is now home to a rising middle class (see Chapter 8 for a fuller discussion of caste and class in India), but it has long been described as a caste-based society because of its historical categorization of the population into four basic castes (or varnas): priests, warriors, traders, and workmen. These categories, which can be further divided, are based on the country’s majority religion, Hinduism. At the bottom of this caste hierarchy one finds the Dalits or “untouchables,” the lowest caste.
Hollywood’s American Dream
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© Bettmann/CORBIS
In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a law forbidding interracial marriage was unconstitutional. Richard and Mildred Loving, shown here, were married in the District of Columbia in 1958. Their arrest in Virginia, where they resided, prompted the case.
Since the 1950s, India has passed laws to integrate the lowest caste members into positions of greater economic and political power. Some norms have also changed, permitting members of different castes to intermarry. While members of the lowest castes still lag in educational attainment compared to higher-caste groups, India today is moving closer to a class system.
CLASS SOCIETIES
In a class society social mobility allows an individual to change his or her socioeconomic position. Class societies exist in modern economic systems and are defined by several characteristics. First, they are economically based, at least in theory—that is, class position is determined largely by economic status (whether earned or inherited) rather than by religion or tradition. Second, class systems are relatively fluid: Boundaries between classes are violable and can be crossed. In fact, in contrast to caste systems, in class systems social mobility is looked at favorably. Finally, class status is understood to be achieved rather than ascribed: Status is, ideally, not related to a person’s position at birth or religion or race or other inherited categories, but to the individual’s merit or achievement in areas like education and occupation.
As we will see in this chapter, these ideal-typical characteristics of class societies do not necessarily describe historical or contemporary reality, and class status can be profoundly affected by factors like race, gender, and class of birth.
SOCIOLOGICAL BUILDING BLOCKS OF STRATIFICATION AND SOCIAL CLASS
Nearly all socially stratified systems share three characteristics. First, rankings apply to social categories of people—that is, to people who share common characteristics without necessarily interacting or identifying with one another. In many societies, women may be ranked differently than men, wealthy people differently than the poor, and highly educated people differently than those with little schooling. Individuals may be able to change their rank (through education, for instance), but the categories themselves continue to exist as part of the social hierarchy.
Second, people’s life experiences and opportunities are powerfully influenced by how their social categories are ranked. Ranking may be linked to achieved status, which is social position linked to a person’s acquisition of socially valued credentials or skills, or ascribed status, which is social position linked to characteristics that are socially significant but cannot generally be altered (such as race or gender). While anyone can exercise individual agency, membership in a social category may influence whether an individual’s path forward (and upward) is characterized by obstacles or opportunities.
The third characteristic of a socially stratified system is that the hierarchical positions of social categories tend to change slowly over time. Members of those groups that enjoy prestigious and preferential rankings in the social order tend to remain at the top, though the expansion of opportunities may change the composition of groups over time.
Societal stratification has evolved through different stages. The earliest human societies, based on hunting and gathering, had little social stratification; there were few resources to divide, so differences within communities were not very pronounced, at least materially. The development of agriculture produced considerably more wealth and a consequent rise in social stratification. The hierarchy in agricultural societies increasingly came to resemble a pyramid, with a large number of poor people at the bottom and successively smaller numbers in the upper tiers of more economically advantaged members.
Racial Stratification and Inequality
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FIGURE 7.1 Class in the United States (Gilbert-Kahl Model)

SOURCE: Gilbert, D. L. (2011). The American class structure in an age of growing inequality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.

Modern capitalist societies are, predictably, even more complex: Some sociologists suggest that the shape of class stratification resembles a teardrop (Figure 7.1), with a large number of people in the middle ranks, a slightly smaller number of people at the bottom, and very few people at the top.

© Bob Rowan/Progressive Image/Corbis
How would you define the U.S. middle class? Is the definition used by the White House Task Force on the Middle Class too broad or not broad enough? Should aspirations or achievements be the foundation of a definition of a socioeconomic class?
Before we continue, let’s look at what sociologists mean when they use the term class. Class refers to a person’s economic position in society, which is associated with income, wealth, and occupation. Class position at birth strongly influences a person’s life chances, the opportunities and obstacles the person encounters in education, social life, work, and other areas critical to social mobility. Social mobility is the upward or downward status movement of individuals or groups over time. Many middle-class Americans have experienced downward mobility in recent decades. Upward social mobility may be experienced by those who earn educational credentials or have social networks they can tap. A college degree is one important step toward upward mobility for many people.
The class system in the United States is complex, as class is composed of multiple variables. We may, however, identify some general descriptive categories. Our descriptions follow the class categories used by Gilbert and Kahl, as shown in Figure 7.1 (Gilbert, 2011). At the bottom of the economic ladder, one finds what economist Gunnar Myrdal (1963), writing in the 1960s, called the underclass: “a class of unemployed, unemployables, and underemployed who are more and more hopelessly set apart from the nation at large” (p. 10). The term has also been used by sociologists like Erik Olin Wright (1994) and William Julius Wilson (1978), whose work on the “black underclass” described that group as “a massive population at the very bottom of the social ladder plagued by poor education and low-paying, unstable jobs” (p. 1).
People who perform manual labor or work in low-wage sectors like food service and retail jobs are generally understood to be working class, though some sociologists distinguish those in the working class from the working poor. Households in both categories cluster below the median household income in the United States and are characterized by breadwinners whose education beyond high school is limited or nonexistent. People in both categories depend largely on hourly wages, though the working poor have lower incomes and little or no wealth; while they are employed, their wages fail to lift them above the poverty line, and many struggle to meet even basic needs. Author David Shipler (2005) suggests that they are “invisible,” as U.S. mainstream culture does not equate work with poverty.
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Those who provide skilled services of some kind (whether legal advice, electrical wiring, nursing, or accounting services) and work for someone else are considered—and usually consider themselves—middle-class. Lawyers, teachers, social workers, plumbers, auto sales representatives, and store managers are all widely considered to be middle class, though there may be significant income, wealth, and educational differences among them, leading some observers to distinguish between the (middle) middle class and the upper-middle class. As most Americans describe themselves in surveys as “middle class,” establishing quantitative categories is challenging. In fact, in 2010, the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, led by Vice President Joe Biden, opted for a descriptive rather than statistical definition of the middle class, suggesting that its members are “defined by their aspirations more than their income. [It is assumed that] middle class families aspire to homeownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security and occasional family vacations” (U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, 2010).

FIGURE 7.2 U.S. Real Median Household Income by Racial and Ethnic Group, 1967–2013

SOURCE: U.S. DeNavas-Walt, C., & Proctor, B. D. (2014). Income and poverty in the United States: 2013 (Current Population Reports P60-249). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.

Those who own or exercise substantial financial control over large businesses, financial institutions, or factories are generally considered to be part of the upper class, a category Gilbert and Kahl term the capitalist class (Gilbert, 2011). This is the smallest of the categories and consists of those whose wealth and income, whether gained through work, investment, or inheritance, are dramatically greater than those of the rest of the population.
Below we look more closely at some key components of social class position: income, wealth, occupation, and political voice.
INCOME
Income is the amount of money a person or household earns in a given period of time. Income is earned most commonly at a job and less commonly through investments. Household income also includes government transfers such as Social Security payments or disability checks. Income typically goes to pay for food, clothing, shelter, health care, and other costs of daily living. It has a fluid quality in that it flows into a household in the form of pay-period checks and then flows out again as the mortgage or rent is paid, groceries are purchased, and other daily expenses are met.
U.S. household incomes have largely stagnated over the past decades, a topic we cover in detail later in the chapter. Effects of the recent economic crisis have not been felt evenly, but they have been experienced by all U.S. ethnic and racial groups (Figure 7.2). Income gains in the United States, however, have been disproportionately concentrated among top earners. In May 2014, the Associated Press reported that the median pay of chief executive officers (CEOs) in the United States had passed the $10 million mark the previous year, noting, “A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker’s salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009” (Sweet, 2014).
WEALTH
Wealth (or net worth) differs from income in that it is the value of everything a person owns minus the value of everything he or she owes. Wealth becomes a more important source of status as people rise on the income ladder.
For most people in the United States who possess any measurable wealth, the key source of wealth is home equity, which is essentially the difference between the market value of a home and what is owed on the mortgage. This form of wealth is illiquid (as opposed to liquid); illiquid assets are those that are logistically difficult to transform into cash because the process is lengthy and complicated. So a family needing money to finance car repairs, meet educational expenses, or even ride out a period of unemployment cannot readily transform its illiquid wealth into cash.
Structural inequality and parental income
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John Oliver on Income Inequality & Wealth
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Economists and sociologists treat net financial assets as a measure of wealth that excludes illiquid personal assets such as home and car. Examples of net financial assets are stocks, bonds, cash, and other forms of investment assets. These are the principal sources of wealth used by the rich to secure their position in the economic hierarchy and, through reinvestment and other financial vehicles, to accumulate still more wealth.
Wealth, unlike income, is built up over a lifetime and passed down to the next generation. It is used to create new opportunities rather than merely to cover routine expenditures. Income buys shoes, coffee, and car repairs; wealth buys a high-quality education, business ventures, and access to travel and leisure that are out of reach of most, as well as financial security and the creation of new wealth. Those who possess wealth have a decided edge at getting ahead in the stratification system. In the United States, wealth is largely concentrated at the very top of the economic ladder.
OCCUPATION
An occupation is a person’s main vocation. In the modern world, this generally refers to paid employment. Occupation is an important determinant of social class because it is the main source of income in modern societies. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks 840 detailed occupational categories in the United States. Sociologists have used various classifications to reduce these to a far smaller number of categories. For example, jobs are described as blue-collar if they are based primarily on manual labor (factory workers, agricultural laborers, truck drivers, and miners) and white-collar if they require mainly analytical skills or formal education (doctors, lawyers, and business managers). The term pink-collar is sometimes used to describe semiskilled, low-paid service jobs that are primarily held by women (waitresses, salesclerks, and receptionists).
In the 1990s, some writers adopted the term gold-collar to categorize the jobs of young professionals who commanded huge salaries and high occupational positions very early in their professional careers thanks to the technology bubble and economic boom of the 1990s (Wonacott, 2002). After the bubble burst, gold-collar workers were more often found in the financial sector, earning very substantial salaries and benefits. The economic recession that commenced in 2007 put a damper on growth in salaries and benefits of gold-collar workers, but they have risen again in recent years.
STATUS
Status refers to the prestige associated with social position. It varies based on factors such as family background and occupation. A considerable amount of social science research has gone into classifying occupations according to the degrees of status or prestige they hold in public opinion.
We might expect white-collar jobs to rank more highly in prestige than blue-collar jobs, but do they? Doctors and scientists are indeed at the top of the prestige scale—but so are less highly paid professionals such as nurses and firefighters (who top the poll results discussed in this section, with 62% of respondents indicating that firefighters have “very great prestige”). Also in the top ranks are teachers and military officers (both with 51% conferring “very great prestige” on them). At the bottom are actors, stockbrokers, accountants, and real estate agents (just 5% of respondents indicated “very great prestige” for real estate agents). It seems occupations that require working with ideas (scientist, engineer) or providing professional services that contribute to the public welfare (teacher, doctor, firefighter) have the highest prestige, and, perhaps surprisingly, the U.S. public does not always relate prestige to income (Harris Interactive, 2009).
Prestige rankings of specific occupations have been relatively stable over time, though changes do occur. For instance, since 1977 both scientists and lawyers have lost ground, falling 9 points to 57% and 10 points to 26%, respectively. What factors might explain these drops? Have societal changes taken place that might contribute to our understanding of why occupations like these rise and fall on the prestige scale?
POLITICAL VOICE
Political power is the ability to exercise influence on political institutions and/or actors in order to realize personal or group interests. It involves the mobilization of resources (such as money or technology or political support of a desired constituency) and the successful achievement of political goals (such as the passage of legislation favorable to a particular group).
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Sociological analyses of power have revealed a pyramid-shaped stratification system in the United States—as well as in most advanced industrial societies, including those of Western Europe. At the top are a handful of political figures, businesspeople, and other leaders with substantial power over political decision making and the national economy. Moving down the pyramid, we encounter more people—and less power (Domhoff, 2009).
Sociologist C. Wright Mills began to write as early as the 1950s about the existence of a “power elite,” which he defined as a group comprising elites from the executive branch of government, the military, and the corporate community who share social ties, a common “worldview” born of socialization in prestigious schools and clubs, and professional links that create revolving doors between positions in these three areas (Mills, 1956/2000a).
In contrast to the pluralist perspective on U.S. democracy, which suggests that political power is fluid and passes, over time, among a spectrum of groups and interests who compete in the political arena, Mills offered a critical perspective. He described a concentration of political power in the hands of a small elite. According to Mills, while some power over local issues remains in the hands of elected legislatures and interest groups, decision-making power over issues of war and peace, global economic interests, and other matters of international and national consequence remain with the power elite. The power of the masses is little more than an illusion in Mills’s view; the masses are composed of “entirely private” individuals wrapped up in personal concerns and largely disconnected from the political process. (We discuss the power elite and pluralism more fully in Chapter 14.)
Today, the middle class is at the center of electoral discourse, but are decision makers addressing the fundamental economic concerns, including stagnating wages, of the middle class? Or do the interests of the wealthy guide policy making? Are the voices of the poor present in politics? What do you think? In the following we look more closely at trends in inequality in the United States.
CLASS AND INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES: DIMENSIONS AND TRENDS
The United States prides itself on being a nation of equals. Indeed, except for the period of the Great Depression of the 1930s, inequality declined throughout much of the 20th century, reaching its lowest levels during the 1960s and early 1970s. But during the past three decades, inequality has been on the rise again. The rich have gotten much richer, middle-class incomes have stagnated, and a growing number of poor are struggling to make ends meet.
INCOME INEQUALITY
Sociologist Richard Sennett (1998) writes that “Europeans from [Alexis de] Tocqueville on have tended to take the face value for reality; some have deduced we Americans are indeed a classless society, at least in our manners and beliefs—a democracy of consumers; others, like Simone de Beauvoir, have maintained we are hopelessly confused about our real differences” (p. 64). Was Tocqueville right, or Beauvoir? Are we classless or confused? What are the dimensions of our differences? Let us look at what statistics tell us.
Every year the U.S. Census Bureau calculates how income is distributed across the population of earners. All households are ranked by annual income and then categorized into quintiles, or fifths. The Census Bureau calculates how much of the aggregate income, or total income, generated in the United States each quintile gets. In other words, imagine all legally earned and reported income thrown into a big pot—that is the aggregate income. The Census Bureau wants to know (and we do too!) how much of this income goes to each quintile of earners. In a society with equal distribution across quintiles, each fifth of earners would get about one-fifth of the income in the pot. Conversely, in a society with complete inequality across quintiles, the top would get everything, and the bottom quintiles would be left empty-handed. The United States, like all other countries, falls between these two hypothetical extremes.
In Figure 7.3, we see how aggregate income in the United States is divided among quintiles of earners. When we look at the pie, we see that income earners at different levels take in disparate proportions of the income total. Those in the bottom quintile take in just over 3% of the aggregate income, while those in the top quintile get more than half; that means the top 20% of earners bring in as much as all in the bottom 80% combined. No less significant is the fact that the top 5% take in more than 22% of the total income—more than the bottom 40% combined (DeNavas-Walt & Proctor, 2014).

FIGURE 7.3 Shares of Aggregate U.S. Income by Quintile, 2013

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau. (2013). Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2012. Current Population Reports. Washington, DC: C. DeNavas-Walt, B. D. Proctor, & J. C. Smith.

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Data compiled by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, with a formula that uses pretax income (as do the census figures) but includes capital gains, suggest an even more stratified picture. According to Saez and Piketty’s calculations, about 50% of pretax income goes to the top 10% of earners. Within this well-off decile (or tenth) of earners, there is a still more dramatic division of income, because the top 1% of earners takes about a fifth of the aggregate income (Saez, 2010). Clearly, gains have been concentrated at the top of the income ladder. As economist Joseph Stiglitz (2012) points out, the fraction of the aggregate income taken by the upper 1% has doubled since 1980, while the fraction that goes to the upper 0.1% has nearly tripled over that period.
When we study issues like income inequality, we benefit from understanding the data we gather in their historical context. Figure 7.3 presents a snapshot of one moment in time, but what about decades past? The economic prosperity of the middle to late 1990s brought some benefit to most American workers: The median U.S. income rose faster at the end of the 1990s than it had since the period from the late 1940s to the middle 1950s. Saez (2010) calculates that the real annual growth of income among the bottom 99% of earners grew 2.7% in the period he terms the “Clinton Expansion” (1993–2000), but it dropped during the 2000–2002 recession (by 3.3%) and again during the 2007–2008 period (by 6.9%). On the whole, the period from 1993 to 2008 saw a real annual growth of just 0.75% for the incomes of the bottom 99%. Over the same period, the top 1% of earners experienced a real annual growth of almost 4% (though this group too experienced significant losses in the recessionary periods).

FIGURE 7.4 Changes in Income Inequality in the United States, 1967–2013

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau. (2012). Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2011. Current Population Reports. Washington, DC: C. DeNavas-Walt, B. D. Proctor, & J. C. Smith.

FIGURE 7.5 Average Hourly Wages of U.S. College Graduates Ages 21–24, 1989–2012

SOURCE: Shierholz, H. (2013). Wages of young college graduates have failed to grow over the last decade. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.

From about World War II until the middle 1970s, the top 10% earned less than a third of the national income pool (Pearlstein, 2010). In the years since, however, the incomes of people at or near the top have risen far faster than those of earners at the bottom or middle of the income scale (Figure 7.4). The stagnation of wages is illustrated by the poor growth (and even decline) of average wages of new college graduates. As we see in Figure 7.5, in the period between 2000 and 2012 the wages of new college graduates fell by 8.5% (Shierholz, 2013).
WEALTH INEQUALITY
We see the growth of inequality in the distribution of income, but what about the wealth gap? What are its dimensions? Is it growing or shrinking? Recall that while income has a fluid quality—flowing into the household with a weekly or monthly check and flowing out again as bills are paid and other goods of daily life are purchased—wealth has a more solid quality. Wealth represents possessions that do not flow into and out of the household regularly but instead provide a set of assets that can buy security, educational opportunity, and comfortable retirement years. The distribution of wealth gives us another important gauge of how U.S. families are doing relative to one another in terms of security, opportunity, and prospects.
Income Inequality
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PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ISSUES

POVERTY AND WORK IN THE UNITED STATES: THE
MINIMUM WAGE DEBATE
In the United States, we do not normally associate work with poverty. Work, after all, is widely understood to be a foundation of prosperity. At the same time, in 2012, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014c), the incomes of 10.6 million American workers fell below the poverty line. Among these are more than 4% of workers who are employed full-time and more than 15% of those who work part-time. A key factor explaining their poverty, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is “low earnings.” Poverty, our sociological imagination may suggest, can be linked to structural factors, including a minimum wage that leaves even many full-time workers struggling. Below we examine some key arguments in the national debate over the minimum wage.
In July 2009, the federal minimum wage rose to $7.25 an hour, the third and final increase mandated by the amended Fair Labor Standards Act. A full-time employee earning the federal minimum wage today makes a yearly pretax income of about $15,000. An effort by Democrats in Congress in early 2014 to mandate an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 was blocked by Republican opponents.
Clearly, no one gets rich on the minimum wage—it is a minimum wage level legally mandated for U.S. workers (though exceptions exist in the law, such as one that applies to full-time students under the age of 20). But is it enough to ensure a minimum standard of living? Should the minimum wage be raised? Or should it be lowered or even abolished altogether?

FIGURE 7.6 Minimum Wage Rates in the United States, 2014

SOURCE: Minimum Wage Laws in the United States, January 1, 2014. United States Department of Labor.

Proponents of minimum wage laws and increases argue that the current minimum wage does not support the idea that “work pays.” Many minimum wage workers earn below or just barely above the U.S. official poverty line. A single parent with one child working full-time at a minimum wage job is below the 2013 poverty threshold of $16,057 for one adult under age 65 supporting one child (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013c). An increased minimum wage, proponents argue, would have the potential to increase the standard of living of the neediest U.S. workers and their children.
From a macroeconomic perspective, higher wages also push up consumption because the poor spend all or most of their wages. This is beneficial for the economy, which is highly dependent on consumption; the government may also collect increased tax revenue as workers earn more income. Other benefits that proponents cite include greater employee motivation and retention, which lower the cost of training new employees, and less need for government support of poor workers in the form of food stamps and housing subsidies.
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Opponents of minimum wage laws suggest that a federally mandated minimum wage hurts both low-wage workers and private businesses. They argue that mandated increases may reduce hiring as businesses seek to cut labor costs—the result is fewer jobs for those in the low-wage sector. Further, a rising minimum wage, say opponents, can discourage high school students from completing their education by enticing them to join the job market prematurely. Consumers may also be harmed as higher labor costs are passed on in the form of higher prices for goods and services. Finally, profit margins for small businesses, already slim, may be further reduced by mandated wage increases. Opponents of minimum wage laws assert that if such laws were abolished, markets would set the minimum wage by balancing what employers will pay with what employees will accept.
THINK IT THROUGH
What is the answer to the minimum wage conundrum? Should the minimum wage be raised at the federal level? (Currently, 22 states and the District of Columbia have higher minimum wages than federal law requires.) How strong are the competing arguments on the two sides of the debate? Can you locate credible research supporting or challenging these arguments?

Today more Americans than ever have money invested in the stock market—many through 401(k) and other retirement accounts. Does that mean wealth is more evenly spread across the population than before? No, it does not—in fact, the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the income gap and, like that gap, is growing. If we exclude the ownership of cars and homes—which, as we noted, are not normally sources of wealth that people can use to pay regular bills or get richer—the difference in wealth between high-income families and everyone else is particularly pronounced. Figure 7.7 shows the expanding ratio of the average wealth of the top 1% and the national median wealth.
Minority groups hold far fewer net financial assets than Whites. The wealth held by minority households has historically lagged dramatically; for instance, in 1990, Black households held about 1% of total U.S. wealth (Conley, 1999). This percentage rose markedly in the economic boom years of the 1990s and continued to expand into the 2000s. Black household wealth reached an average of just over $12,000 in 2005. This climb, however, has been reversed by the housing crisis and the Great Recession, which saw a 53% fall in household wealth among Blacks to just $5,677. Among Hispanics, the fall was even more stark, with household wealth dropping 66% from a high of $18,359 in 2005. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, the median household wealth of Whites is fully 20 times that of Black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households (Kochhar, Fry, & Taylor, 2011).
Many U.S. families have zero or negative net worth, a condition worsened by the recent recession. Consider a Pew Research Center finding that while the median wealth of Latino households in 2009 was just over $6,000, nearly one third had zero or negative net worth, a figure that put them between White households (15% had zero or negative net worth) and Black households (35% had zero or negative net worth; Kochhar et al., 2011).

FIGURE 7.7 Wealth of Top 1%, 1962–2010

SOURCE: Wolff. (2012). “Ratio of average top 1% household wealth to median wealth, 1962–2010.” The State of Working America. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Reprinted with permission.
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© Jeremy Horner/Corbis
Many city neighborhoods lack access to large, well-stocked supermarkets with competitive prices. Residents must often choose between overpriced and often poor-quality goods, and a long trip to a suburban market. The low rates of private vehicle ownership among the urban poor can make shopping for healthy food a burden.
OTHER GAPS: INEQUALITIES IN HEALTH CARE, HEALTH, AND ACCESS TO CONSUMER GOODS
Along with the gap in income and wealth, there is a critical gap in employer benefits, including health insurance. From the 1980s to the 1990s, health care coverage for workers in the bottom quintile of earners fell more dramatically than for any other segment of workers: From a rate of 41% coverage it dropped to just 32% in the late 1990s (Reich, 2001). In 2011, about 25% of those living in households earning less than $25,000 a year were uninsured, along with more than 21% of those in households earning $25,000–$49,999 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012c). Altogether, more than 15% (48.6 million) of the U.S. population was without health insurance, including 7 million children under age 18 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012c).
Many of the jobs created in the 1980s and 1990s were positions in the service sector, which includes retail sales and food service. While the quantity of jobs created in this period helped push down the unemployment rate, the quality of jobs created for those with less education was not on par with the quality of many of the jobs lost as U.S. manufacturing became automated or moved overseas. Many service sector jobs pay wages at or just above minimum wage and have been increasingly unlikely to offer employer benefits.
One goal of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known simply as the Affordable Care Act or ACA), signed into law in 2010, is to expand insurance coverage for the working poor. In the first year the law was in effect, more than 8 million people signed up for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, and 57% of those people had been uninsured before enrolling in ACA-compliant plans. Moreover, those who enrolled in ACA-compliant plans reported slightly worse health than nonenrollers, and most said that they would not have sought insurance if the law had not taken effect (Hamel et al., 2014).
Perhaps predictably, data show a powerful relationship between health and class status. Empirical data show that those with greater income and education are less likely than their less well-off peers to have and die of heart disease, diabetes, and many types of cancer. Just as income is distributed unevenly in the population, so is good health. Notably, modern medical advances have disproportionately provided benefits for those at the top of the income spectrum (Scott, 2005).
Children in disadvantaged families are more likely than their better-off peers to have poor physical and mental health. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (2008), the rate of hospitalization for asthma for Black children is four to five times higher than that for White children. The problem is not only the lack of health insurance in families—though this factor is important—but also the lack of physical activity that may result when children don’t have safe places to play and exercise, and when their families are unable to provide healthy foods because both money and access to such foods are limited.
The problem of poor health related to a lack of good food is linked to another disadvantage experienced by those on the lower economic rungs: lack of access to high-quality goods at competitive prices. Most middle-class shoppers purchase food at large chain grocery stores that stock items like fresh fruit and vegetables and meat at competitive prices. In contrast, inhabitants of poor neighborhoods are likely to shop at small stores that have less stock and higher prices, because large grocery chains choose not to locate in poor areas. If they want to shop at big grocery stores, poor residents may need to travel great distances, a substantial challenge for those who do not own cars.
Some writers have referred to areas that lack sources of competitively priced healthy and fresh food as food deserts. A USA Today article quotes Louisville retiree Jessie Caldwell, who regularly makes an hour-long bus trip to get fresh vegetables or meat: “For her and many others, it’s often tempting to go to a more convenient mini-market or grab some fast food. ‘The corner stores just sell a lot of potato chips, pop and ice cream,’ she said. ‘But people are going to eat what’s available’” (Kenning & Halladay, 2008).
While we do not always think of access to stores with competitive prices and fresh goods as an issue of class inequality, lack of such access affects people’s quality of life, conferring advantage on the already advantaged and disadvantage on those who struggle to make ends meet. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) highlights this point:
There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food and hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. (p. 27)
Economic Inequality
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WHY HAS INEQUALITY GROWN?
There is a significant split between the fortunes of those who are well educated and those who do not or cannot attend college. The demand for labor over the past several decades has been differentiated on the basis of education and skills—workers with more education are more highly valued, while those with little education are becoming less valuable. These effects are among the results of the transition to a postindustrial economy in the United States.
The nation’s earlier industrial economy was founded heavily on manufacturing. U.S. factories produced a substantial proportion of the goods Americans used—cars, washing machines, textiles, and the like—and a big part of the economy depended on this production for its prosperity. This is no longer the case. In the postindustrial economy of today, the United States manufactures a smaller proportion of the goods Americans consume and fewer goods overall. Many manufacturing jobs have either been mechanized or gone abroad, drawn to the low-cost labor in developing countries. New manufacturing jobs created in the United States offer lower wages overall than did their predecessors in the unionized factories of the industrial Midwest (we discuss this issue in greater detail in Chapter 15). The modern U.S. economy has produced larger numbers of jobs in the production of knowledge and information and the provision of services.
One group that has grown is made up of professionals who engage in what former secretary of labor Robert Reich (1991) has called “symbolic analysis,” or “problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic-brokering activities” (p. 111). These occupational categories—law, engineering, business, technology, and the like—typically pay well and offer some job security, but they also require a high level of skill and at least a college education. Even well-educated middle-class workers, however, have been touched by automation and outsourcing. As well, a rising proportion of middle-level jobs have converted from relatively stable and secure long-term positions to contractual work. We examine these issues in greater detail in Chapter 15.
The fastest-growing sector of the postindustrial economy beginning in the 1980s was the service sector, which includes jobs in food service, retail sales, health care (for instance, home health aides and nurse’s aides), janitorial and housecleaning services, and security. These jobs do not require advanced education or technical skills, but they typically pay poorly and offer weak job security and few benefits.

FIGURE 7.8 Job Losses and Gains in the U.S. Economy, 2008–2012

SOURCE: Adapted from National Employment Law Project, “The Low-Wage Recovery and Growing Inequality.” Data Brief, August, 2012, p.2.

In the period following the official end of the Great Recession, the bulk of new jobs were low-wage positions, many of them service sector positions in areas like hospitality, tourism, and retail. While middle-wage, middle-skill jobs have failed to recover in the years after the economic crisis, jobs on the low end of the pay scale have multiplied (Figure 7.8). According to one estimate, fully 43% of jobs created since 2010 can be categorized as “low wage,” paying $16 or less per hour. This may help explain the fact that while the unemployment rate has dipped in recent years, there have been meager gains in household income: In the period 2011–2012, the median U.S. household income grew by just 1.1% (Foroohar, 2014).
By providing jobs to those with less education, the service sector has, in a sense, moved into the void left by the manufacturing sector of the industrial economy over the past few decades. The service sector, which offers lower pay scales and fewer benefits, does not typically provide the kinds of jobs that offer a solid road to the middle class. Another difference is that manufacturing, especially in the automaking and steel industries, was overwhelmingly a male bastion, while service jobs favor women. The “advantage” enjoyed by less educated women over their male counterparts does not, however, translate into substantial economic gains for women or their families. Wage gains for women overall have been more fully driven by gains made by college-educated women.
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The stratification of the U.S. labor force into a low-wage service sector and a better-paid knowledge and technology sector appears to be continuing unabated. The narrative of a “disappearing middle class” has become a common theme in both social science and mainstream political discourse. Do you see such a trend in your own community? How does this narrative coexist with Americans’ long-existing tendency to self-identify as middle-class, almost regardless of income?

FIGURE 7.9 Poverty Levels in the United States, 1959–2013

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau. (2012). Historical Poverty Tables—People. Poverty; Bishaw, A. (2013). Poverty: 2000 to 2012. American Community Survey Briefs. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LADDER: POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
There is a familiar America. It is celebrated in speeches and advertised on television and in the magazines. It has the highest mass standard of living the world has ever known.
In the 1950s this America worried about itself, yet even its anxieties were products of abundance…. There was introspection about Madison Avenue and tail fins; there was discussion of the emotional suffering taking place in the suburbs. In all this, there was an implicit assumption that the basic grinding economic problems had been solved in the United States….
While this discussion was being carried on, there existed another America. In it dwelt between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000 citizens of this land. They were poor. They still are.
To be sure, the other America is not impoverished in the same sense as those poor nations where millions cling to hunger as a defense against starvation. This country has escaped such extremes. That does not change the fact that tens of millions of Americans are, at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes fat with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care. (Harrington, 1963, pp. 1–2)
These words, first published in 1963, helped to open the eyes of many to the plight of the U.S. poor, who were virtually invisible to a postwar middle class comfortably ensconced in suburbia. Michael Harrington’s classic book The Other America: Poverty in the United States also caught the interest of President John F. Kennedy’s administration and later the Johnson administration, which inaugurated the War on Poverty in 1964.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson began his War on Poverty, around 36 million U.S. citizens lived in poverty. Within a decade, the number had dropped sharply, to around 23 million. But then, beginning in the early 1970s, poverty again began to climb, reaching a high of 39 million people in 1993 before receding. It has climbed once more, and since 2008 poverty has surpassed the peak set in 1993 (Figure 7.9). In 2013, the number of officially poor stood at nearly 45.3 million people—or about 14.5% of the population, a small drop from the prior year (DeNavas-Walt & Proctor, 2014).
We pause on the topic of “official poverty” because it is important for us to be critical consumers of information. We are surrounded by statistics, subject to a barrage of information about the proportion of the population who support the president or reject the health care initiatives of a political party, about the numbers of teen pregnancies and births, about the percentages who are unemployed or in poverty. These statistics illuminate the social world around us and offer us a sense of what we as a nation are thinking or earning or debating. On the other hand, statistics—including social indicators like the poverty numbers (Table 7.1)—may also obscure some important issues. To use indicators such as the poverty numbers wisely, we should know where they come from and what their limitations are.
What is poverty from the perspective of the U.S. government? How were these numbers generated? The official poverty line is the dollar amount set by the government as the minimum necessary to meet the basic needs of a family. In 2013, the U.S. government used the following thresholds:
• One person, under age 65: $12,119
• One person, 65 or older: $11,173
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TABLE 7.1 Poverty Rates of Selected U.S. Subgroups, 2013

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau. (2013). Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2012. Current Population Reports. Washington, DC: C. DeNavas-Walt, B. D. Proctor, & J. C. Smith.

• Three persons (one adult, two children): $18,769
• Four persons (two adults, two children): $23,624
• Five persons (two adults, three children): $27,801

From the federal government’s perspective, those whose pretax income falls beneath the threshold are officially poor; those whose pretax income is above the line (whether by $10 or $10 million) are “nonpoor.” How are these thresholds generated? The Behind the Numbers box on page 170 explains.

© Nathan Benn/CORBIS
Living in an impoverished neighborhood has significant consequences for both poor and non poor households. Diminished opportunities for work, education, consumption, and recreation affect entire neighborhoods.
Notably, official poverty numbers and the data we see in Table 7.1 offer us a picture of what the Census Bureau calls the “annual poverty rate.” This figure captures the number of households whose total income over the 12 months of the year fell below the poverty threshold, but it does not illuminate how many families may have dropped into or climbed out of poverty and how many dwell there over a longer period. A recent Census Bureau report points out that while the official poverty figure is around 14.5%, in the period 2009 to 2011 about one third of U.S. households fell below the poverty threshold for at least 2 months. At the same time, just 3.5% remained poor for the full 3-year period under study (Edwards, 2014). While few households languish at the very bottom of the economic ladder for years, it is significant that nearly 10 times more households experienced periods of poverty.
Inequality and poverty in the United States are serious issues that demand both analysis and attention. While inequality is part of any modern capitalist state, the steep rise of inequality in recent decades presents a challenge to societal mobility and perhaps, ultimately, stability.
THE PROBLEM OF NEIGHBORHOOD POVERTY
In this section, we discuss the issue of concentrated poverty, looking specifically at measures, causes, and consequences of high levels of neighborhood (or area) poverty. We thus distinguish between household poverty, which an individual or family may experience while living in a mixed-income neighborhood, and neighborhood-level poverty. Notably, research suggests that being poor in a poor neighborhood has more negative social, economic, and educational effects than household poverty in a more economically heterogeneous context (Wilson, 2010). Neighborhood poverty affects those households that are poor, but it also affects those in the neighborhood who are not officially poor.
A recent Census Bureau report shows that a growing proportion of Americans reside in “poverty areas,” defined in the report as census tracts featuring 20% or more households in poverty (Bishaw, 2014). (Census tracts are areas with between 1,200 and 8,000 residents; most tracts fall in the 4,000 range.) In 2000, just over 18% of U.S. inhabitants lived in poverty areas; by 2010, nearly a quarter did. Poverty areas can be rural, suburban, or urban: Just over half are in central cities, another 28% are in the suburbs, and about 20% are outside metropolitan areas (see Figure 7.10). Female-headed households are more likely than other family types to live in poverty areas: In 2010, more than 38% of female-headed households resided in areas with more than 20% poverty.
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BEHIND THE NUMBERS

CALCULATING U.S. POVERTY
How does the U.S. government measure poverty? In the early 1960s, an economist at the Social Security Administration, Mollie Orshansky, used a 1955 U.S. Department of Agriculture study to establish a poverty line. She learned from the study that about one third of household income went to food, so she calculated the cost of a “thrifty food basket” and tripled it to take into account other family needs such as transportation and housing. Then she adjusted the figure again to take into account the size and composition of the family and the age of the head of household. The result was the poverty threshold, which is illustrated in Figure 7.10.
Orshansky’s formula represented the first systematic federal attempt to count the poor, and it has been in use for more than half a century. But its age makes it a problematic indicator for the 21st century. Some critics argue that it may underestimate the number of those struggling with material deprivation. Consider the following points:
• The multiplier of three was used because food was estimated to constitute one third of a family budget in the 1960s. Food is a smaller part of budgets today (about one fifth), and housing and transport are much bigger ones. Using a higher multiplier would raise the official poverty line and, consequently, increase the number of households classified as poor.
• The formula makes no adjustment for where people live, though costs of living vary tremendously by region. While a family of four may be able to make basic ends meet on a pretax income of $15,000 in South Dakota or Nebraska, it is doubtful that the housing costs of such areas as Boston, San Francisco, New York City and Washington, D.C., would permit our hypothetical family to survive in basic decency.
On the other hand, some critics have suggested that the poverty rate overestimates the problem, because it does not account for noncash benefits that some poor families receive, including food stamps and public housing vouchers. Adding the value of those (though they cannot be converted into cash) would increase the income of some families, possibly raising them above the poverty line.

FIGURE 7.10 The Poverty Threshold Calculation

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). Poverty: 2008 and 2009. American community survey briefs. Washington, DC: A. Bishaw & S. Macartney.

We might thus conclude that while the official poverty statistics give us some sense of the problem of poverty and poverty trends over time, they must be read with a critical eye.
THINK IT THROUGH
Taking into consideration forms of inequality and issues of poverty discussed in this chapter, how would you create an instrument to measure poverty in the United States? The current measurement focuses on a “crisis food basket.” What variables would you include?
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Sociologists study the development of poverty areas, particularly in urban neighborhoods (Wilson, 1996, 2010). The rise of the suburbs in the post–World War II period fostered the out-migration of many city residents, particularly members of the white middle class, and was accompanied by a shift of public resources to new neighborhoods outside cities. Public housing built in U.S. cities around the same period was intended to offer affordable domiciles for the poor, but it also contributed to the development of concentrated poverty, as policies foresaw income limitations that foreclosed the possibility of maintaining mixed-income neighborhoods. Racially discriminatory policies and practices, including limitations on Black access to mortgages or to homes in White neighborhoods, made Blacks far more vulnerable than their White counterparts to becoming trapped in poor neighborhoods. Even today, Black and Hispanic households are more likely to reside in poverty areas (Bishaw, 2014).
As many families moved to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, jobs eventually followed, contributing to a “spatial mismatch” between jobs in the suburbs and potential workers in urban areas (Wilson, 2010). The decline of manufacturing in the 1970s and the decades following also had a profound effect on some urban areas, such as Chicago and Detroit, which were deeply reliant on heavy industry for employment.

FIGURE 7.11 Percentages of Americans Living in Poor Neighborhoods, 2010

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, 2008–2012 5-year American Community Survey.

As noted earlier, area poverty compounds the negative effects of household poverty and presents challenges to all residents of economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Research has shown, for instance, that nonpoor Black children are more likely than their White counterparts to reside in poor neighborhoods and to experience limitations to social mobility; even those in the top three income quintiles are vulnerable to downward economic mobility (Sharkey, 2009). Poor areas are more likely than better-off or even mixed-income neighborhoods to experience high levels of crime, to have low-quality housing and education, and to offer few job opportunities to residents (Federal Reserve System & Brookings Institution, 2008). Among the challenges to poor neighborhoods is that individual households that have enough resources to leave may choose to do so, contributing to even less circulating capital and an increasing withdrawal of businesses, fewer employed residents, weaker social and economic networks, and more empty buildings (Wilson, 1996). Cities like Detroit and Cleveland have, in fact, lost thousands of residents in recent decades.
The revival of economically devastated neighborhoods is an important public policy challenge. How can the fortunes of poor—particularly very poor—neighborhoods be reversed? How does such a process begin and what does it entail? What do you think?
In the following section we examine the issues of stratification and poverty from the functionalist and conflict perspectives. As you read, consider how these perspectives can be used as lenses for understanding phenomena like income and wealth inequality, household and neighborhood poverty, and other issues discussed above.
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SARAH LEEN/National Geographic Creative
Herbert Gans suggests that poverty ensures a pool of workers “unable to be unwilling” to do difficult and dirty jobs for low pay. Such jobs could also be filled in the absence of poverty—through better pay and benefits. But, says Gans, this would be costly, and thus dysfunctional, to the nonpoor.
WHY DO STRATIFICATION AND POVERTY EXIST AND PERSIST IN CLASS SOCIETIES?
We find stratification in virtually all societies, a fact that the functionalist and social conflict perspectives seek to explain. The functionalist perspective highlights the ways in which stratification is functional for society as a whole. Social conflict theorists, in contrast, argue that inequality weakens society as a whole and exists because it benefits those in the upper economic, social, and political spheres. We take a closer look at each of these theoretical perspectives next.
THE FUNCTIONALIST EXPLANATION
Functionalism is rooted in part in the writings of sociologist Émile Durkheim (1893/1997), who suggested that we can best understand economic positions as performing interdependent functions for society as a whole. Using this perspective, we can think of social classes as equivalent to the different organs in the human body: Just as the heart, lungs, and kidneys serve different yet indispensable functions for human survival, so do the different positions in the class hierarchy.
In the middle of the 20th century, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) built on these foundations to offer a detailed functionalist analysis of social stratification. They argued that in all societies some positions—the most “functionally important” positions—require more skill, talent, and training than others. These positions are thus difficult to fill—that is, they may suffer a “scarcity of personnel.” To ensure they get filled, societies may offer valued rewards like money, prestige, and leisure to induce the best and brightest to make “sacrifices,” such as getting a higher education, and to do these important jobs conscientiously and competently. According to Davis and Moore, social inequality is an “unconsciously evolved device by which societies ensure that the most important positions are conscientiously filled by the most qualified persons” (p. 243).
An implication of this perspective is that U.S. society is a meritocracy, a society in which personal success is based on talent and individual effort. That means your position in the system of stratification depends primarily on your talents and efforts: Each person gets more or less what he or she deserves or has earned, and society benefits because the most functionally important positions are occupied by the most qualified individuals. Stratification is then ultimately functional for society, because the differential distribution of rewards ensures that highly valued positions are filled by well-prepared and motivated people. After all, Davis and Moore might say, we all benefit when we get economic information from good economists, drive across bridges designed by well-trained engineers, and cure our ills with pharmaceuticals developed by capable medical scientists.
Clearly the idea that the promise of higher pay and prestige motivates people to work hard has some truth. Yet it is difficult to argue that the actual differences in rewards across positions are necessarily suitable ways of measuring the positions’ relative worth to society (Tumin, 1953, 1963, 1985; Wrong, 1959). Is an NBA point guard really worth more than a teacher or a nurse, for instance? Is a hedge fund manager that much more important than a scientist (particularly given that both positions require extensive education)?
Moreover, when people acquire socially important, higher-status positions by virtue of their skills and efforts, they are then often able to pass along their economic privilege, and the educational opportunities and social connections that go with it, to their children, even if their children are not particularly bright, motivated, or qualified. As Melvin Tumin (1953) points out in his critique of Davis and Moore, stratification may limit the discovery of talent in society rather than ensuring it, by creating a situation in which those who are born to privilege are given fuller opportunities and avenues to realize occupational success while others are limited by poor schooling, little money, and lack of networks upon which to call. Such a result would surely be dysfunctional for society rather than positively functional.
How would functionalism account for the fact that people are often discriminated against because of their skin color, sex, and other characteristics determined at birth that have nothing to do with their talents or motivations, resulting in an enormous waste of society’s human skills and talents? Can you see other strengths or weaknesses to Davis and Moore’s perspective on stratification?
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Dimas Ardian / Stringer/Getty Images
The poor often face limited choices in terms of housing, employment, and transportation due to financial constraints. Their options are restricted by affordability with little room for personal preference. They may find themselves forced to purchase low-quality products, such as the decrepit vehicles pictured above.
In a twist on the functionalist perspective, sociologist Herbert Gans (1972) poses this provocative question: How is poverty positively functional in U.S. society? Gans begins with a bit of functionalist logic, namely, that if a social phenomenon exists and persists, it must serve a function or else it would evolve out of existence. But he does not assume that poverty is functional for everyone. So for whom is it functional? Gans suggests that eliminating poverty would be costly to the better-off. Thus, poverty is functional for the nonpoor, but not functional for the poor—or even for society as a whole.
Among the “benefits” to the nonpoor of the existence of a stratum of poor people, Gans includes the following:
• Poverty ensures there will be low-wage laborers prepared—or driven by circumstances—to do society’s “dirty work.” These are the jobs no one else wants because they are demeaning, dirty, and sometimes dangerous. A large pool of laborers desperate for jobs also pushes down wages, a benefit to employers.
• Poverty creates a spectrum of jobs for people who help the poor (social welfare workers), protect society from those poor people who transgress the boundaries of the law (prison guards), or profit from the poor (owners of welfare motels and cheap grocery shops). Even esteemed sociologist Herbert Gans has built an academic career on analyzing poverty.
• Poverty provides a market for goods and services that would otherwise go unused. Day-old bread, wilting fruits and vegetables, and old automobiles are not generally purchased by the better-off. The services of second-rate doctors and lawyers, among others, are also peddled to the poor when no one else wants them.
• Beyond economics, the poor also serve cultural functions. They provide scapegoats for society’s problems and help guarantee some status for those who are not poor. They also give the upper crust of society a socially valued reason for holding and attending lavish charity events.
Gans’s (1972) point is stark. He notes that the “functions” served by the poor have functional alternatives—that is, they could be fulfilled by means other than poverty. However, he suggests, those who are better-off in society are not motivated to fight poverty comprehensively because its existence is demonstrably functional for them. While he is not arguing that anyone is in favor of poverty (which is difficult to imagine), he is suggesting that “phenomena like poverty can be eliminated only when they become dysfunctional for the affluent or powerful, or when the powerless can obtain enough power to change society” (p. 288). Do you agree with his argument? Why or why not?
THE SOCIAL CONFLICT EXPLANATION
Social conflict theory draws heavily from the work of Karl Marx. As we saw in the opening chapter, Marx divided society into two broad classes: workers and capitalists, or proletarians and bourgeoisie. The workers do not own the factories and machinery needed to produce wealth in capitalist societies—they possess nothing of real value except their labor power. The capitalists own the necessary equipment—the means of production—but require the labor power of the workers to run it.
These economic classes are unequal in their access to resources and power, and their interests are opposed. Capitalists seek to keep labor costs as low as possible in order to produce goods cheaply and make a profit. Workers seek to be paid adequate wages and to secure safe, decent working conditions and hours. At the same time, the two groups are interdependent: The capitalists need the labor of the workers, and the workers depend on the wages they earn (regardless of how meager) to survive.
Although more than a century has passed since Marx formulated his theory, a struggle between workers and owners (or, in our time, between workers and owners, managers, and even stockholders, who all depend on a company’s profits) still exists. Conflict is often based on the irreconcilability of these competing interests. A recent study found that collective action lawsuits alleging wage and hour violations have skyrocketed, increasing 400% in the past 11 years. Among companies such as Bank of America, Walmart, and Starbucks, Taco Bell has been one of the latest to be sued for allegedly forcing employees to work overtime without pay (Eichler, 2012).
The source of inequality, from this perspective, lies in the fact that the bourgeoisie own the means of production and can use their assets to make more money and secure their position in society. Most workers do not own substantial economic assets aside from their own labor power, which they use to earn a living. While successful lawsuits for lost wages show that workers have avenues for asserting their rights against employers, the conflict perspective contrasts these small victories with the far more significant power and control exercised by large economic actors in modern society.
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INEQUALITY MATTERS

CHILD LABOR IN THE 21ST CENTURY

© age fotostock Spain, S.L. / Alamy
In early industrial America, some poor families sent children to work to support their households. Many employers welcomed young laborers, who were perceived to be more passive and less expensive than adult workers. Children worked in a variety of settings, including in canneries and the meatpacking industry, in the manufacture of textiles, and in agriculture; some peddled goods or shined shoes. Early in the 20th century, Congress passed two separate laws (in 1918 and 1922) seeking to regulate child labor, but the U.S. Supreme Court declared both unconstitutional. With the support of unions and other activists, however, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set minimum ages and maximum hours for young workers. These standards remain in effect today: 16 is the minimum age for work during school hours, and 14 is the minimum for certain jobs that can be done after school hours. For designated “dangerous” jobs, 18 is the minimum age.
A report released by the nonprofit advocacy group Human Rights Watch in 2014, however, raises the question of whether child labor in the United States is only a thing of the past. The introduction to the report, which focuses on child labor in the farming of tobacco, states:
Ninety percent of tobacco grown in the US is cultivated in four states: North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Between May and October 2013, Human Rights Watch interviewed 141 child tobacco workers, ages 7 to 17, who worked in these states in 2012 or 2013. Nearly three-quarters of the children interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported the sudden onset of serious symptoms—including nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, headaches, dizziness, skin rashes, difficulty breathing, and irritation to their eyes and mouths—while working in fields of tobacco plants and in barns with dried tobacco leaves and tobacco dust. Many of these symptoms are consistent with acute nicotine poisoning. (pp. 3–4)
The report also notes that “child tobacco workers often labor 50 or 60 hours a week in extreme heat, use dangerous tools and machinery, lift heavy loads, and climb into the rafters of barns several stories tall, risking serious injuries and falls” (p. 3), and describes their exposure to the agricultural pesticides used in tobacco farming.
Why is it the case that more than 70 years after the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act young workers are toiling in American tobacco fields? One important reason is that the laws pertaining to child labor are far more lax regarding agricultural labor than they are concerning other forms of work. For example, from age 12, children can be hired for unlimited hours outside school hours with parental permission; on small farms, there is no minimum age. Of course, children have worked on family farms for centuries, helping to sow and reap crops and tend farm animals. Government interference in rural traditions surrounding the family farm has not been welcomed. According to Human Rights Watch, however, most of the child workers interviewed in its study are not supporting their own family farms; most are, according to a Washington Post editorial on the subject, “day laborers, migrants or the children of migrants; some have U.S. citizenship, others don’t” (“Obama Administration,” 2014).
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The editorial also points to a second reason that child agricultural labor is lightly regulated in spite of its consequences for young people and potential for exploitation: Rural agricultural interests have lobbied the U.S. Department of Labor in an effort to prevent passage of more restrictive laws. In 2012, for instance, they succeeded in derailing a department proposal to tighten rules on child labor. Notably, prior to the passage of child labor laws in the early 20th century, industrial and agricultural interests did not support the prohibition or regulation of child labor, which was cheap and beneficial to their production. In the early 21st century, the effort to protect children from dangerous labor is being waged—as it was a hundred years ago—by outside advocacy organizations, including Human Rights Watch and some immigrants’ rights groups.
THINK IT THROUGH
If parents permit their children to work in order to supplement household income, should child labor in the tobacco fields (or other agricultural or even industrial settings) be permitted? What is the government’s appropriate role in regulating child labor? Who benefits from permissive laws on child labor? Who loses?

In short, the conflict perspective suggests that significant and persistent stratification exists because those who have power use it to create economic, political, and social conditions that favor them and their children, even if these conditions are detrimental to the lower classes. Inequality thus is not functional, as Davis and Moore argued. Rather, it is dysfunctional, because it keeps power concentrated in the hands of the few rather than creating conditions of meritocracy that would give equal opportunity to all.
Like the functionalist perspective, the conflict perspective has analytical weaknesses. It overlooks cooperative aspects of modern capitalist businesses, some of which have begun to take a more democratic approach to management, offering workers the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes in the workplace. Modern workplaces in the technology sector, for instance, thrive when decision making and the production of ideas come from various levels rather than just from the top down.
WHY STUDY INEQUALITY?
Many people today struggle to make ends meet on wages that have stagnated in recent decades. As we saw in this chapter’s opening story, the downward mobility of many in the U.S. middle class is spawning new investor interest in market sectors like low-cost trailer parks. We have looked at the dimensions of both class and inequality in the United States and asked why inequality exists and persists.
The questions raised by the theoretical perspectives we have studied are not just academic: They are critical to our understanding of the world in which we live and in which (if we so choose) we will raise our children. Is it the case, as functionalists Davis and Moore asserted, that inequality is positively functional for society, and that we collectively benefit from it because it ensures that the best and brightest take the most important jobs? Or, as Tumin argues, does inequality ensure just the opposite, limiting the discovery of the full range of talent in society? How much should we worry about inequality and its growth? The answer may depend on whether we subscribe to the functionalist or the conflict view of socioeconomic stratification.
What about poverty? Poverty in individual cases may be the result of bad luck or poor choices, but the sheer magnitude of the problem of poverty suggests that it has structural roots as well, and a full explanation cannot be found at the individual level. Neighborhood poverty, as we have seen, is also a key public issue, though it is certainly experienced as a personal trouble, even by residents of poor neighborhoods who are not poor. Why does poverty exist and persist in a country that is arguably the wealthiest in the world? This is a question that asks us to fire up our sociological imaginations.
The topics of class and inequality are among sociology’s most fundamental concerns. Recall that some of sociology’s important theoretical roots are in analyses of early industrial capitalism and its effects on society and the economy. Today, challenges include understanding the roots of growing income inequality, the effects of postindustrialism on different social groups, and the causes and consequences of contemporary household and neighborhood poverty. What are the questions about class and inequality that you find most compelling, and how would you go about studying them?
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WHAT CAN I DO WITH A
SOCIOLOGY DEGREE?

SKILLS AND CAREERS: QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH SKILLS
Sociologists use quantitative research skills to conduct systematic empirical investigations of social phenomena using statistical methods. Quantitative research comprises those studies in which data are expressed in terms of numbers. The objective of quantitative research in sociology is to gather rigorous data and to use those numerical data to characterize the dimensions of an issue or the extent of a problem (this could include, for instance, the collection of statistical data on rates of obesity and poverty in neighborhoods or states and the calculation of the correlation of the two phenomena) and, often, to use those data to develop or test hypotheses about the roots of the problem at hand.
In Chapter 7, we saw a broad spectrum of quantitative data; such a spectrum is key to both academic studies and policy making on issues such as poverty, wealth and income inequality, and postindustrial changes in the labor market. We cited data collected by the U.S. government to measure household incomes and to establish the dimensions of the division of aggregate income across quintiles of earners. We also looked at data collected by the Pew Research Center on the gaps in net worth between Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. As you advance in your sociological studies, you will have the opportunity to become familiar with quantitative data on important sociological issues and to see how these data are used in analyses—and you will have the opportunity to learn how to do quantitative sociology. For example, you might learn to measure and compare trends in income differences by race, ethnicity, and gender or to assess the significance of variables such as neighborhood unemployment, educational attainment, and median income as predictors of neighborhood street crime.
Knowledge of quantitative methods is a valuable skill in today’s job market. Learning quantitative methods of research, which is an important part of a sociological education, prepares you to do a wide variety of job tasks, including survey development, questionnaire design, market research, brand health tracking, and financial quantitative modeling and analysis. These kinds of tasks are commonly part of the job descriptions of, among others, market research analysts, marketing specialists, social science research assistants, clinical research coordinators, criminal justice and law enforcement teachers, financial quantitative analysts, markets quantitative analysts, and statistical research analysts. These are jobs that can be found in a variety of occupational fields, including education, marketing, criminal justice, health and medicine, business and management, finance, and social science research.
THINK ABOUT CAREERS
Social statistics are used in a broad variety of analyses of the social world, and researchers often use quantitative methods to study relationships between different sociological variables. How do you think the job tasks of people who use quantitative data in occupational fields such as marketing, health, criminal justice, and business might be similar to and different from what quantitative sociologists do?

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SUMMARY
• Class societies are more open than caste societies. In a caste society, a person’s position in the hierarchy is determined by ascribed characteristics such as race or birth status. In a class society, a person’s position is determined by what he or she achieves, and mobility is looked upon favorably. However, barriers to mobility similar to those in caste societies still exist in class societies.
• Class refers to a person’s economic role in society, associated with income, wealth, and the type of work he or she does. Class position strongly influences an individual’s life chances—the opportunities and obstacles he or she encounters in areas such as education, social life, and work. Important components of class position are occupation, income, and wealth.
• We can measure inequality in the United States by looking at disparities in income, wealth, health, and access to credit and goods. All these indicators show that inequality in the United States is substantial and growing.
• Since the early 1970s, the gap between the rich and the poor has grown, as has the gap between the rich and everyone else. Some of this growth is attributable to the transformation of the U.S. economy from industrial to postindustrial, which has helped the best educated and hurt the least educated.
• Poverty is a significant problem in the United States: In 2013, 14.5% of the population was officially poor. The formula used to measure poverty gives us a sense of the problem, but it has limitations of which we should be aware.
• Researchers distinguish between household (or individual) poverty and neighborhood poverty. Studies suggest that living in a poor neighborhood amplifies the effects of poverty and also poses challenges, including limited mobility, for nonpoor residents.
• Functionalist theorists argue that inequality exists and persists because it is positively functional for society. According to this perspective, inequality is necessary to motivate the best people to assume the most important occupational positions.
• Conflict theorists argue that the privileged classes benefit from inequality and that inequality inhibits the discovery of talented people rather than fostering it. This perspective suggests that classes with differential access to power and resources are in conflict and that the interests of the well-off are most likely to be realized.
KEY TERMS
social inequality, 157
social stratification, 157
caste society, 157
class society, 158
social categories, 158
achieved status, 158
ascribed status, 158
class, 159
life chances, 159
social mobility, 159
income, 160
wealth (or net worth), 160
net financial assets, 161
occupation, 161
status, 161
political power, 161
food deserts, 166
official poverty line, 169
meritocracy, 172
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What is the difference between wealth and income? Why is it sociologically important to make a distinction between the two? Which is greater in the United States today, the income gap or the wealth gap?
2. What are the key dimensions and trends related to income inequality in the United States today? What about wealth inequality? How would you expect these trends to evolve or change in the coming decade? Explain your reasoning.
3. Herbert Gans talks about the “uses of poverty” for the nonpoor. Recall some of his points presented in the chapter and then add some of your own. Would you agree with the argument Gans makes about the existence and persistence of poverty? Why or why not?
4. How is the poverty rate determined in the United States? What is the origin of this formula, and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
5. What is the difference between individual or household poverty and neighborhood poverty? Why is the distinction important? How does being poor in a poor neighborhood amplify the effects of economic disadvantage?

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(Chambliss 154-179)
Chambliss, William J., Daina Eglitis. CUSTOM: APUS: Discover Sociology 2E Custom Interactive E-book Edition, 2nd Edition. SAGE Publications, Inc, 03/2015. VitalBook file.
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