Social Interactions: Role Strain & Role Conflict

Social Interactions - Status: A status is a social position in society (each individuals has many different ones) Sometimes you interact with individuals who are on the same level as you (friend), who are above you (professor), or who are below you (your son) Ascribed status is a status given to you at birth and they don’t really change throughout your life (i.e. born into a royal family) Achieved status is a status earned over your lifetime (i.e. someone going into the NFL or becoming a doctor) Role Strain & Role Conflict: Role strain is the tension generated between multiple obligations for one particular role (i.e. writing papers, finishing your presentation for tomorrow, etc. are for a student) Role conflict is the tension generated between multiple roles/statuses (i.e. being a father, husband, student which all compete for his time) Primary & Secondary Groups: Primary groups are those that provide anchor points where one exchanges implicit items, such as love, caring, concern, support, etc (know a lot about their personal lives) Secondary groups are more formal, impersonal, and business liked relationships that are often temporary and based on a purpose or goal (“means to an end”) → forms many different kinds of relationships - Dramaturgical Approach: Dramaturgy is the idea that people act differently in social settings than when they are alone Front stage occurs in a social setting (i.e. going to a baseball game to become friends with people who like baseball even though you don’t) Back stage occurs when you are alone and not many people know about it (maybe some but definitely not a lot) Impression Management: Impression management is our attempt to control how others may see us Can be multiple front stages where you play a different role every time but only really one backstage - Discrimination Individual vs. Institutional: Discrimination is differential treatment and harmful action towards minorities (a whole bunch of different levels) Individual discrimination refers to one person acting/discriminating against a whole group of individuals (i.e. a professor not letting girls learn physics) Institutional discrimination refers to a whole organization acting/discriminating against a whole group (i.e. banks, schools, etc.) Unintentional discrimination can occur and there’s a couple examples: Side-effect discrimination refers to practices in one institutional or organizational area which have a negative impact because they are linked to discriminatory practices in another institutional sphere (i.e. a man who got discriminated against - in the court and went to jail is now unable to obtain a job → the employer unintentially discriminated against this man) Past-in-present discrimination refers to how things done in the past can have effects on individuals in the future Prejudice vs. Discrimination: Prejudice are attitudes that prejudge a whole group (typically negative) and not really based on facts (assumes everyone is the same) Discrimination is differential treatment and harmful actions against minorities Organizations & Bureaucratization: - - 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Organizations are institutions designed for specific purposes (play an increasing role in our lives) Utilitarian organizations are those that pay their members for their efforts (monetary and other sorts of payments, i.e. going to school for a diploma) Normative organizations are those where members come together through shared goals (i.e. religious groups) → positive sense of units and purpose Coercive organizations are organizations where members don’t have much of a choice in membership (i.e. prison or the military) and are highly structured and typically have very strict rules One of the main goals of an organization is to try and achieve maximum efficiency and is done through bureaucracy (which describes the rules, structures, and ranking that guides organizations) Bureaucratization refers to process by which an organization becomes increasingly governed by law and policy Iron rule of Oligarchy describes how even the most democratic of organizations tend to become more bureaucratic over time until they are governed by basically a select few McDonaldization describes how the policies of fast food organizations have come to dominate other organizations within American society (principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control) All these have both positives and negatives within society Characteristics of an Ideal Bureaucracy: Max Weber studied the structure of organizations and theorized that there are 5 main characteristics of an ideal bureaucracy: Division of labor refers to people specializing in the specific areas that they work in which increases overall efficiency of the organization (can also lead to increase levels of alienation within workers according to conflict theory) Hierarchy of organization is the idea that there are people of different ranks, some people have more authority and are in charge of others (forms a chain of command) which helps establish who is in charge but also deprives people of having a voice in decision making and not taking responsibility Written rules & regulations which lets workers know clear expectations, uniform performance, equal treatment, and unity/continuity. It can also stifle creativity, decrease initiative, and lead to goal displacement (where commitment to following rules is more important than the goals) Impersonality describes how individuals are supposed to carry out their duties in an unbiased manner to ensure equal treatment but can also lead to alienation and lower loyalty to the group Employment based on technical qualifications is the fact that hiring should not be based on outside factors (like feelings or competitiveness) but rather actual qualifications that the person has (leads to decreased discrimination but also decrease ambition because it leads individuals to only do what is necessary to secure a job position and nothing more, and also the peter principle which is where people will keep getting promoted until reaching a level of incompetence) Extra Notes: Reference groups are used to set guidelines for how to behave and make decisions (we use it to compare to ourselves). We rely on reference groups to understand social norms, which then shape our values, ideas, behavior, and appearance. Conflict Theory, first purported by Karl Marx, is a theory that society is in a state of perpetual conflict because of competition for limited resources. Conflict theory holds that social order is maintained by domination and power, rather than by consensus and conformity