Individual and Society

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Individual and Society

• September 2006

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Announcements I

• Email etiquette Read it. No yo or hey.
  Salutations and signatures. Subject lines start
  with soc055. Never ignore individual email. Read
  the content. Save if important.
• Deadlines matter.
• A-LaFave ? tchroman_at_mills.edu
• Lee-Z ? cwebb_at_mills.edu

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Announcements II

• Discussion Sections
• Wednesday 4-5 pm CPM 101 (10 people)
• Thursday 10-11am PSY 520 (6 people)
• Monday 4-5?
• 9/11 Syllabus Adjustment - SKIP

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Conceptual Background for Heatwave

• Heat as natural problem?
• Health problems as individual problem?
• Housing circumstances as individual problem?

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What does it mean to look at the world
sociologically?
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Science

• Letters
• A Focus on Bullying
• Published September 5, 2006
• To the Editor,
• I read your article Help for the Child Who Says
  No to School (Personal Health, Aug. 29) with
  much interest, particularly since it appeared on
  the same day as an article about Daniel Scruggs,
  the Connecticut boy who said no to school and
  ultimately committed suicide.
• Witnesses testified that Daniel was punched,
  kicked and spat on in school and regularly
  skipped classes and even defecated in his clothes
  so he could be sent home, it read.
• As a consequence of Daniels experience, and the
  current pervasiveness of unrecognized and
  unattended-to bullying in schools, an advocacy
  group in Connecticut worked to get legislation
  passed to hold schools accountable in such
  situations.
• Given these facts, I found it surprising that you
  glossed over the social conditions related to
  school refusal and focused instead on
  psychotropic and psychotherapeutic treatments for
  the victim.
• Wouldnt it be better and less costly to help
  schools to find ways to minimize the
  environmental factors leading to school refusal?
• Helen WintrobBrooklyn

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Three Answers Today

• Mills, channeling Marx
• Berger, channeling Weber
• FAE
• Todays Claim These are the same

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Fundamental Attribution Error

• DEF the tendency to over-emphasize
  dispositional, or personality-based, explanations
  for behaviors observed in others while
  under-emphasizing the role and power of
  situational, or structural influences

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Max Weber by way of Peter Berger

• Things are not as they seem, nothing is sacred.
• The excitement and justification for doing
  sociology are rooted in its capacity to provide a
  richer and more accurate sense of what's
  happening in the world around us, a view guided
  by methods that minimize the distortion caused by
  our own interests and those of others, and by the
  simple limitations of our position in the world.

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Marx by Way of C. W. Mills

• People misrecognize events in the life of
  individuals as personal problems rather than
  manifestations of historical forces.
• The sociological imagination is the capacity to
  see this intersection of personal biography with
  social history.

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Fundamental Attribution Error

• Attribution refers to our explanation of the
  behavior of others by attributing causes and
  motives.
• Attribution is thus how we understand what other
  people do.

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When you

• do something negative (hand in a paper late, for
  example)
• I attribute this to what you are really like (an
  irresponsible student)
• do something positive (like write a good paper)
• I attribute this to the conditions around you
  (such as you have a good teacher)

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Rosabeth Kanters Bitchy Supervisors

• F Rs say never want to have a F boss
• Why? Inflexible, worried about being shown up,
  freak out when you network, etc.
• FAE its because they are female
• SOC note that these F mgrs are in serious
  minority. No support networks, everything they
  do stands out, made to be representative of their
  group.
• Turns out that if you put men in this same
  structural position, they manage in a manner
  thats inflexible, worried about being shown up,
  etc.

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Lessons

• Avoid FAE
• Look to see who shares condition, context, or
  situation
• Understand what the situation offers as a cause
  of behavior
• Thought experiment put other kind of person in
  that situation do you get the same behavior?

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There but for the grace of God go I?

• Sort of
• The sociological take substitutes structural
  position for divine providence

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In Kanters Case

• Structural Position is created by PROPORTIONS
  the women managers are a distinct numerical
  minority. This gives rise to
• Visibility (everything you do sticks out)
• Performance pressures
• Polarization (differences are exaggerated)
• Heightened boundaries
• Representativeness (you stand for your group)
• Role entrapment

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The attribution error is to understand the
behavior as explained by sex of manager rather
than the structural position managers of that sex
are in.
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The Sociological Imagination

• C. Wright Mills1916-1962

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C. Wright Mills Model Lefty

• The Power Elite about interlocking corporate
  elites, the military industrial complex, etc.
• White Collar, published in 1951 about the
  emergence of the American middle class
• The Causes of World War Three
• Listen, Yankee  The Revolution in Cuba

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Sociological Imagination The Argument

• Private lives often experienced as series of
  traps, pitfalls, troubles.
• My "world" is limited by my experience
• Changes in the world are real changes in the
  lives of real people
• Most people do not see a connection between
  personal biographical facts and the wider social
  world.

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Some Personal Problems

• A high school girl loses interest in math.
• A teenage boy feels cut off from his peers.
• A Mills student is depressed and bored on the
  weekend.
• A faculty member is frustrated by her students'
  poor study skills.
• A young mom finds it less and less possible to
  live up to expectations, keep a job, take care of
  kids
• An elderly man is afraid to go out in his
  neighborhood.

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What is needed? Mills asks.

• More information?
• More reason?
• No, "a quality of mind" that helps us figure out
  "what is going on in the world."

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"personal troubles of milieu" vs. "public
issues of social structure"

• Troubles are private and can be dealt with by
  persons at personal level. Issues TRANSCEND the
  local and the personal.
• contradictions in institutional arrangements
• rules of the game, protocols of procedure,
  contain contradictory directives, catch-22s,
  double-binds, etc.

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"personal troubles of milieu" vs. "public
issues of social structure"

• Troubles are private and can be dealt with by
  persons at personal level. Issues TRANSCEND the
  local and the personal.
• contradictions in institutional arrangements
• rules of the game, protocols of procedure,
  contain contradictory directives, catch-22s,
  double-binds, etc.

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Peter Berger

• Somewhat more conservative sociologist later in
  life
• Mostly a sociologist of religion
• Two career making books
• Invitation to Sociology
• The Social Construction of Reality (with Thomas
  Luckmann)

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(No Transcript)
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For Next Time

• Social Facts
• Canary in coal mine.  Rates, age adjustment,
  etc.  Basic of demography.  Isolation as social
  fact.  Risk and disasters.
• Reading
• Durkheim, Emile.  1982. The Rules of the
  Sociological Method. New York Free Press, pp.
  50-59. http//www2.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/DSS/Durk
  heim/SOCFACT.HTML
• Klinenberg, E. 2002.  Heatwave.  Chicago
  University of Chicago Press.  Read through p.78.
  
• Suggested
• Pennsylvania Department of Health Health
  Statistics -Tools of the Trade "Age-Adjusted
  Rates http//www.health.state.pa.us/hpa/stats/tec
  hassist/ageadjusted.htm
• National Cancer Institute, Calculating
  Age-Adjusted Rates http//seer.cancer.gov/seerstat
  /tutorials/aarates/definition.html

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Bibliography

• Dawson, Michael. Saturday, December 10, 1960
  The Debate That Never Happened.http//mrzine.mon
  thlyreview.org/dawson101205.html