notes for week five on religion

Why study the sociology of religion?
- Because religion has played a role in all societies throughout history, uniting the private sphere with the public sphere through:
- Symbol: Something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible.
- Values: collection of guiding, usually positive principles; what one deems to be correct and desirable in life, especially regarding personal conduct. Norms: an established standard of behaviour shared by members of a social group to which each member is expected to conform
The study of religion in sociology
- Religious truth cannot be tested by empiricist science. It is a matter of faith.
- Began with Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations
- Max Weber emphasized the relationship between religious belief and the economic foundations of society.
- Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses”
 
Peter Berger
- Published The Social Construction of Reality (1966) with Thomas Luckmann, “social construction”
- born in 1929 in Vienna - emigrated to USA
- earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in New York
- believes in “epistemological modesty” ( held by a believer who is not sure)
- As an intellectual he is willing to change his mind, limit his statements, and look at both sides of the argument
Secularization
- In the 1960’s Berger and others said that secularization = modernity
- but in the 1990’s he questioned that theory and said that most people are religious
o though western Europe and “a thin layer of humanistically educated people” are exceptions
- postulates that increased religiosity is a response to secular humanism
o But Christianity has changed due to “loss of religious substance” (real faith, related to God and Christ and redemption and resurrection and sin and forgiveness),
 The church has become a therapeutic agency
 The church has been politicized

Questions for small groups:

- Is Canada moving toward:
o A government that doesn’t favour any religion?
o “a government that is antiseptically free of religious symbols”?
- Is humor one of the “signals of transcendence”? If so, in what way?
- Are various religious institutions now therapeutic or politicized?
- Do we need religion in order to live with uncertainty?

week four notes on deviance

Deviant Actions

• involve defying socially constructed rules
• actions are defined as deviant within a particular setting or culture
• sometimes deviant behavior is regarded as acceptable and normal within subcultures
• deviant behavior may signal an individual’s master status
o when a deviant label is applied to a person, it overrides other characteristics
o a label can produce a self-fulfilling prophesy. E.g. “juvenile delinquents” begin to act in a rebellious manner
• examples of “deviance”; nudity, stealing, fighting, mental illness, homosexuality, drug addiction, alcohol addiction



this definition of deviance
o is based on a view of the world which emphasizes nurture over nature (i.e. based on social constructionism)
o applies to interaction in small groups of people
o emphasizes meanings (unfixed and sometimes unclear) that people bring to their own behavior and that of others
• Cooley: “the looking glass self”
o We build our identity according to what we see in others (as if looking in a mirror they provide)
 

Stages in the development of deviance
1. Public labeling of an individual as deviant
2. Rejection from social groups and negative official treatment (e.g. imprisonment)
3. Rejection may encourage further deviance
4. Acceptance of deviant identity, often as a positive character trait
5. Publicly joining “deviant” group
6. Development of a deviant sub-culture
7. Dialogue between subculture and mainstream culture
8. Removal of deviant label.
 
The veil of ignorance (a thought experiment)
- introduced by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice.
- method of determining the morality of a certain issue (e.g. slavery, mental illness, addiction, public nudity, racism, homophobia, theft)
- imagine that social roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue.
- you don't get to keep any aspects of your current role, even aspects that are an integral part of yourself.
- ..."no one knows his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like" (Rawls, A Theory of Justice).
Social Role: a set of expectations for people who occupy a given social position or status
Role strain: difficulties that result from differing demands and expectations associated with the same social role
Role conflict: when incompatible expectations arise from 2 or more social roles
 
The experiment:
A Imagine that you don’t know whether you will be (choose one):
1. a slave or free
2. addicted or not addicted,
3. White, Asian, Black or Aboriginal
4. Heterosexual or homosexual
5. a juvenile delinquent or one who abides by the law
B Assume that you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Don’t keep any aspects of your current role
C consider the morality of
1. slavery
2. treatment of addicts
3. racism
4. homophobia
5. treatment of kids who violate the law

notes from june 4th lecture on class, race and gender

Nature: human genetics
Nurture: influences on human development arising from prenatal, parental, extended family, and peer experiences, and extending to education, media, marketing, race, gender and socio-economic status.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sibling-correlation-422.png

Trait A shows a high sibling correlation, but little heritability (e.g. language acquisition)

Trait B shows a high heritability since correlation of trait rises sharply with degree of genetic similarity. (e.g. height)

Trait C shows low heritability, but also low correlations generally; this means Trait C has a high nonshared environmental variance e2. (E.g. interest in sports)


Montreal study of immigrant women
What is deskilling?
Deskilling of jobs: skills required to perform a task are eliminated by the introduction of technologies
Deskilling of workers (de-professionalization): ignoring abilities and qualifications of workers and employing them to do tasks that require little or no skill

The study participants and methods:
• qualitative methodology based on a survey of 44 women and many resource persons.
o Women in relationship with men
o The women had to have obtained a university degree from their country of origin,
 two-thirds of the participants had degrees in the pure and applied or health sciences
 one-third had degrees in the social sciences, literature, administration, etc.
o had been in Canada for several years,
o had held at least one job in Montreal
o spoke French well.
o Two-thirds were visible minorities from Africa, West Asia, Latin America and Haiti
o One third was from Eastern Europe


Results
• Group 1 (43% of participants): immigrant women with a job that did not require a post-secondary diploma and, in some cases, not even a high school diploma.
o Experienced stable or declining career paths
o Worked in precarious jobs at poverty level


• Group 2 (25% of participants): immigrant women with qualified jobs requiring a lower level of post-secondary education than the education received prior to immigration.
o stable or ascending path, during which time
o most women had redirected their careers to moderately well-qualified well-paid jobs


• Group 3 (32% of participants): immigrant women with a job that corresponded to the education they received prior to immigrating
o quickly left precarious jobs
o in the medium term, they will probably reach a level comparable to non-immigrant women.

Explanation of Results• Career priorities of spouses
o Group 1, the husband's career is given priority; in Group 3 spouses emphasized careers equally

• the presence and age of any children
o The immigrant women in Group 1 had more children aged five years old or younger; Group 3 mostly included women who had no children.

• access to child care services
o Problems obtaining child care in many ways hampers the career path of immigrants in Group 1.

• sharing of domestic duties
o Sharing of domestic duties between spouses is still very unequal in all three groups.

• Obstacles which prevent immigrants from landing professional jobs:
o the lack of a Quebec professional network
o Foreign diplomas are ignored by or seen as counterproductive
o Not having Quebec career experience

What causes de-professionalization – nature or nurture?

notes from may 28th lecture on Goffman

Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982)
- Born in Manville Alberta
- Grew up in Dauphin Manitoba with his sister, actress Frances Bay
- B Sc in chemistry from University of Manitoba
- Worked at National Film Board in Winnipeg and became interested in sociology.
- BA in sociology from U of Toronto in 1945
- MA (1949) and Ph D (1953) in sociology from University of Chicago
- 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life introduced dramaturgical analysis - one way of studying “symbolic interaction”

- "So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact."

Dramaturgical analysis

Front region behavior
- occurs when there is an audience.
- Some activities accentuated; others suppressed
Back stage behavior
- Privacy is important. There is no audience
- Can contradict front region behavior
- Illusions and impressions are openly constructed while performers are “out of character”
- “ceremonial equipment” might be hidden
- Costumes are adjusted and inspected for flaws
- Actors adjudicate their performance and improve it
- can differ among genders, races and social classes

Front region behavior or “Standards of decorum”
in a workplace involve:
- Maintaining an appearance: “make- work projects”
- Engaging in acceptable amount and style of talk
- Appropriate pace of work
- The display of personal interest in work
- Economy of movement and energy
- Accuracy of work
- How the work is done (instrumental aspects of work)
- Morality
- Style of dress
- Sound level
- What a worker shouldn’t do (“proscribed diversions”)
- Affective (emotional) expressions
- Indulgences (giving oneself treats)
- Other?
Goffman elaborated concepts of symbolic interactionism (human life is lived in the symbolic domain)
o people act toward other people and things based on the meaning those things have for them; and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation.

Symbolic interactionism
Symbols
- are social objects having shared meanings
- are created and maintained in social interaction
- provide the means by which reality is constructed through language and communication

Reality
- is primarily a social product,
- self, mind, society, culture—emerge from and are dependent on symbolic interactions.
- physical environment is also interpreted through symbolic systems.




Questions arising from Goffman
What are the “rules of decorum” for this classroom?
What is a “make-work project”? When does it happen? Have you engaged in any “make work projects”?
Have you ever pretended to “make-no-work”?
Where does your backstage behavior take place?
What are the benefits of backstage behavior? The drawbacks?
1. Consider a time when you were a service worker (e.g a retail sales clerk or a waiter). What was your front region presentation? What was your backstage presentation? Present these two scenarios to the class. (You may work in pairs on this)

2. Consider a time when you got your car fixed. What was your front region presentation? What was your backstage presentation? Present these two scenarios to the class. (You may work in pairs on this)

3. Consider your relations with family members. What is your front region presentation? What is your backstage presentation? Present these two scenarios to the class. (You may work in pairs on this)