Social Structure
The capacity to think systematically about how many things we experience as personal problems are really social issues that are widely shared by others born in a similar time and social location as us.
What is the sociological imagination?
_______ refers to the receipt of money or goods over a particular accounting period while _______ is the net value of all of an individual's assets (minus their debts).
What are income and wealth?
The act of ignoring other people to an appropriate degree even while noticing that other people are present.
What is civil inattention?
The view that social categories such as race or gender are social creations, not biological facts.
What is constructivism?
This theory argues that as individuals are denied a legitimate means to achieve social goals, they must use alternative, deviant, illegal approaches to achieve those goals. Rather than being a function of individual bodily characteristics, criminality is a direct result of one’s position within a social structure.
What is strain theory?
The rules and norms of everyday life that become enduring patterns that shape and govern social interactions; the external forces that organize society.
What are social structures?
This term refers to a group of people who occupy a similar social and economic position and who have roughly analogous opportunities in life.
What is class?
The process by which someone is defined in a particular way and then comes to fulfill the expectations of that definition.
What is labeling theory?
The view that members of a group share a fundamental, inherited, innate, and fixed quality or characteristic. This outlook presumes that races are natural groupings whose boundaries are determined by deep-seated and unchangeable traits that are found within each individual.
What is essentialism?
This term refers to the fact that currently about 2.5 million people are incarcerated in prisons and jails, and the United States is home to the largest prison population in the world; the United States incarcerates vastly more people per capita than almost any other country in the world today.
What is mass incarceration?
Organizations that regulate practices that provide the framework for daily life.
What are institutions?
The phenomenon of people with less than a college degree seeing their earnings decline or having increasing trouble finding good jobs.
What is the college wage premium?
A term coined by sociologist Charles Horton Cooley to emphasize the extent to which our own self-understandings are dependent on how others view us.
What is the looking glass self?
Explaining racial inequality by referring to non-racial dynamics.
When attitudes or stereotypes affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.
What is implicit bias?
A position within an institution or organization that comes with specific social expectations for how to behave and be treated; some are ascribed, and some are achieved.
What are roles?
This term refers to the pattern of intergenerational inheritance in a society; it measures the degree to which parents’ socioeconomic position impacts the position of their children once the latter reach adulthood.
What is social mobility?
The risk of confirming a stereotype about a group to which you belong leads to stress and under-performance.
What is stereotype threat?
This occurs when the actions or policies of organizations or social institutions exclude, disadvantage, or harm members of particular groups. Such discrimination need not be intentional.
What is institutional discrimination?
Victor Rios' term for when boys "acted stupid," such as stealing potato chips they could afford.
What are deviant politics?
The ability or right to have special access to opportunities or claims on rewards.
What is privilege?
(1) More women working in the paid labor force
(2) People working longer hours
(3) People going into debt
What are 3 ways that the middle class survived while wages decreased/stagnated?
Witnessing harm and doing nothing because you assume someone else will help.
What is the bystander effect?
A concept that refers to the advantages of being White versus non-White.
What is white privilege?
Term for the reality that mass incarceration in the U.S. serves as a system of racialized social control, which confers second-class citizenship on felons.
What is the New Jim Crow?