SOCI 210: Sociological perspectives

Agenda

  1. Administrative
  2. Course roadmap
  3. Inequality & mobility
  4. Social divisions & class

Administrative

Worksheet deadlines

  • 11:59pm deadline is strict
  • Peer evalutation tool cannot allow late submissions
  • Submit your worksheets first to FeedbackFruits

Turn in worksheets in two places

  • First: under Content
    (Content > Discussion worksheets)
  • Second: under Assignments
    (Assignments > Work sheet X)

Course roadmap

  • Foundations
    Methods overview
    Classical (European) social theory

Last few weeks

  • The individual in society (bottom-up)
    Ethnicity, race, and nationality
    Disability
    Gender and sexuality
    Class and culture
  • Populations and publics (top-down)
    Inequality and stratification
    Demography
    Politics and economy
    Social movements
  • Social systems (middle-out)
    Interaction
    Institutional change
    Organizations and groups
    Media and technology

Course roadmap

  • Foundations
    Methods overview
    Classical (European) social theory
  • The individual in society (bottom-up)
    Ethnicity, race, and nationality
    Disability
    Gender and sexuality
    Class and culture

Next few weeks

  • Populations and publics (top-down)
    Inequality and stratification
    Demography
    Politics and economy
    Social movements
  • Social systems (middle-out)
    Interaction
    Institutional change
    Organizations and groups
    Media and technology

Inequality
& mobility

Old black and white photo of a child wearing fancy dress (incuding a top hat) beting looked at by some other children wearing school clothes.

What is inequality?

Unequal distribution of resources

  • Some people have more than others
  • Predictable patterns of inequality

Types of resources

  • 💰Money💰
  • But also: power, opportunity, geographic mobility, social capital, legal protections, …

Ubiquitous

  • Empirically, high levels of inequality are present in virtually every human society

Measures

  • Absolute measures: poverty defined against universal 'baseline'
  • Relative measure: poverty defined relative to what is 'normal' in a society
Cartoon duck (Scrooge McDuck) wearing a top hat smiling and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it with coins and bills spilling out. Cartoon duck (Donald Duck) holding an empty plate and looking into an empty upturned cup.

Inequality

Gini index (or Gini coefficient)

  • Common measure of inequality
  • Ranges from 0–100 (or 0.0–1.0)
    From absolute equality to absolute inequality
  • Relative, not absolute
    Could have a population with low inequality but widespread poverty, or a population with high inequality and no poverty
Line chart showing the gini index in the United States and Canada between about 1980 and 2015. Canada's index wavers between 31 and 34, with maybe a slight upward trend. The United states starts and about 34 and ends at about 41, with a strong upward trend

Mobility

Cartoon duck (Scrooge McDuck) wearing a top hat smiling and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it with coins and bills spilling out.

+

Cartoon duck (Scrooge McDuck) wearing a top hat smiling and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it with coins and bills spilling out.

➔

?

Patterns of inequality

  • Wealth is not a random lottery
  • Predictable structure to who has more and who has less

Inheritance of opportunity

  • Empirically, income and wealth are largely predicted by family
  • Wealthy people are much more likely to come from wealthy families than poor families, and vice versa

Mobility refers to these patterns

  • ‘Stickiness’ of who is where in the unequal income distribution
  • How hard is it to move up or down in a society’s income distribution?

Mobility

Cartoon duck (Scrooge McDuck) wearing a top hat smiling and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it with coins and bills spilling out.

+

Cartoon duck (Scrooge McDuck) wearing a top hat smiling and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it with coins and bills spilling out.

➔

Cartoon duck (Scrooge McDuck) wearing a top hat smiling and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it with coins and bills spilling out. Cartoon drawing of a duck (Scrooge McDuck) joyously playing in giant piles of gold coins. Behind him three other ducks (Donald and his three nephews) help pile the gold in using bulldozers, cranes, and other tools.

Stratification

Stratification

  • Term to describe patterns of inequality
  • Geological metaphor
    Differences appear categorical
    Vertical dimension

Stratification and Mobility

  • People are born into particular strata
  • How easy is it to get to a different stratum?
  • Direction matters
    Upward mobility versus downward mobility
photo of a rock cliff showing obvious horizontal stripes indicating geological strata

Barriers to mobility

Structural barriers
(external)

  • Material
    Family wealth, area of residence, …
  • Institutional
    Access to schools and clubs, social relationships, …

Socialized barriers
(internalized)

  • Socialized traits
    Habits, language, skills, aesthetic, …
  • Internalized expectations
    Access to schools and clubs, social relationships, …
Aerial photo of an urban area with a clear division down the middle. On the left there are many small buildings and houses, many in run-down condition. On the right there is a large, luxurious condo complex or hotel, including very big tennis courts ands a swimming pool on each individual balcony.

Social divisions
& class

A cop leans over to talk to a person inside a yellow tent under a highway overpass.

Social class

Previously:

  • Discussed social class from a micro-sociological perspective
  • Interactionist lens on class boundaries
  • Michelle Lamont

Today:

  • Broader perspective
  • Social class from a macro-sociological perspective
19th-century cartoon of three nobles in a fancy room. There are signs of a debaucherous party such as turned over chairs and hung-over expressions on faces

Social class, revisited

What is social class?
Some theoretical perspectives:

Karl Marx

  • A person's class is based on their relation to the means of production
  • Bourgeoisie,
    petite bourgeoisie,
    proletariat,
    lumpenproletariat

Max weber

  • A person's class is based on the interplay of three components
  • Wealth,
    prestige, &
    power

Pierre Bourdieu

  • There are three interchangeable forms of class
  • Economic: money, income, wealth
  • Social: relationships, social circles
  • Cultural: knowledge of art, cuisine, taste

Multidimensionality of class

  • Contemporary sociologists tend to engage with all of these frames
  • Focus on class as multi-faceted
    Class is defined by a bundle of differentiated resources, behaviors, and cultural attributes

Social class

Institutionalization of class

  • Class can become formally institutionalized and codified
    E.g. Feudal Japan and Europe, India under British colonial rule
  • Modern ethos: class boundaries should be permeable
  • Class is still institutionalized through norms, barriers to mobility, etc.

Hierarchy alignment

  • Social hierarchies tend to "line up"
  • Whenever a social division has a power dimension, it will likely align with class
    Canadian MPs over 85% white and over 70% men
    Over 90% of Fortune-500 CEOs are white men
  • Barriers to mobility become tied to categories
    Relation to ethnicity, gender, race, etc. complicates strictly economic interpretation of class
High-angle photograph of a large group of people. They are all dressed in business attire. Almost all of them are white men, but there are a few women and people of color in the group. They are all posing for the camera

Canadian House of Commons
December, 2018

Image credit

Old black and white photo of a child wearing fancy dress (incuding a top hat) beting looked at by some other children wearing school clothes.

Photo from Hulton Archive,
via ft.com

Cartoon duck (Scrooge McDuck) wearing a top hat smiling and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it with coins and bills spilling out.

Scrooge McDuck © The Walt
Disney Company

Cartoon duck (Donald Duck) holding an empty plate and looking into an empty upturned cup.

Donald Duck © The Walt
Disney Company

Cartoon drawing of a duck (Scrooge McDuck) joyously playing in giant piles of gold coins. Behind him three other ducks (Donald and his three nephews) help pile the gold in using bulldozers, cranes, and other tools.

Characters © The Walt Disney Company

photo of a rock cliff showing obvious horizontal stripes indicating geological strata

Image by rodoluka via Wikimedia

Aerial photo of an urban area with a clear division down the middle. On the left there are many small buildings and houses, many in run-down condition. On the right there is a large, luxurious condo complex or hotel, including very big tennis courts ands a swimming pool on each individual balcony.

Photo by Tuca Vieira

A cop leans over to talk to a person inside a yellow tent under a highway overpass.

Elaine Thompson / AP Photo via The Nation

19th-century cartoon of three nobles in a fancy room. There are signs of a debaucherous party such as turned over chairs and hung-over expressions on faces

Painting by William Hogarth via The Wellcome Collection

High-angle photograph of a large group of people. They are all dressed in business attire. Almost all of them are white men, but there are a few women and people of color in the group. They are all posing for the camera

Adrian Wyld via CTV News