In sociology, it is essential to understand the social context in which human behaviour takes place – and this involves understanding the culture in which social action occurs.
Culture is a very broad concept which encompasses the norms, values, customs, traditions, habits, skills, knowledge, beliefs and the whole way of life of a group of people.
To give two specific, and classic definitions of the term culture:
Ralph Linton (1945) defined the culture of a society as ‘the way of life of its members: the collection of ideas and habits which they learn, share and transmit from generation to generation’.
Clyde Kluckhohn (1951) described culture as a ‘design for living’ held by the members of a particular society.
To a large degree, culture determines how members of society think and feel: it directs their actions and defines their outlook on life. Culture defines accepted ways of behaving for members of society.
In order to survive, any newborn infant must learn the accepted ways of behaving in a society, it must learn that society’s culture, a process known as socialisation, which sociologists tend to split into two ‘phases’ – primary and secondary.
Primary socialisation takes place in the family: the child learns many social rules simply by copying its parents, and responding to their approval or disapproval of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, which is taught through a variety of rewards and punishments, such as simple praise, treats, smacking and the naughty step.
Secondary socialisation takes place outside of the family in other social institutions including the education system, the peer group, the media, religion and the work place.
Many (though not all) sociologists argue that the norms and values we pick up through these institutions encourage us to act in certain ways, and discourage us from acting in others, and, just as importantly, they ‘frame’ our worldviews in subtle ways – encouraging us value certain things that other cultures might think have no value, or discouraging us to ask certain ‘critical questions’.
Just some of the ways these institutions might subtly shape our behaviour include:
Religion – reinforces basic moral codes such as ‘not killing’, ‘not stealing’, and the value of monogamous relationships, sanctioned by marriage.
Education – teaches us the value of tolerating people with different views from ourselves, the value of teamwork and the idea of the individual work ethic – ‘if I work hard I can achieve’.
The Media – through advertising, it teaches us that high levels of consumption of products are normal, and through the over-representation of skinny, beautiful, young people, it encourages to spend time and money to look good.
Socialisation is not simply a process in which individuals just passively accept the values of a society – children and adults actively reflect on whether they should accept them, and some choose to actively engage in ‘mainstream’ culture, others just go along with it, and still other reject these values, but those who reject mainstream culture are very much in a minority, while most of us go along with mainstream norms and values most of the time.
Socialisation and the process of learning social norms
Part of the socialisation process involves learning the specific norms, or informal rules which govern behaviour in particular situations.
There are literally hundreds (and probably thousands) of social norms which govern how people act in specific places and at specific times – the most obvious ones being dress codes, ways of speaking, ways of interacting with others, body language, and the general demeanor appropriate to specific situations.
Social norms are most obvious at key events in the life course such as weddings and funerals, with their obvious rituals (which would be out of place in most other situations) and codes of dress, but they also exist in day to day life – there is a ‘general norm’ that we should wear clothes in public, we are generally expected to turn up to school and work on time, to not push in if there’s a queue in a shop, and we are also generally expected to politely ignore strangers in public places and on public transport (1) (2)
Norms also vary depending on the characteristics of the person – for example, whether you are male or female, or young or old, but more of that later.
Cross cultural differences in social norms
One of the best ways of illustrating just how many social norms we have in Britain is to look at examples of other cultures which are far removed from our own – such as traditional tribes who still exist in parts of South America, Oceania, Asia, and Africa. By reflecting on how different the norms are in these other cultures, we get a good idea of just how many aspects of our day to day lives we take for granted.
For example the San Bushmen of Southern Africa have very different norms surrounding material culture – because they are hunter gatherers, they own very few items, and traditionally their economy was a gift economy, rather than a money economy. Thus, in this culture, money has no value, and ‘stuff’ is simply a burden.
The San Bushmen (although their traditional culture is much changed from 100 years ago)
The Sanema, who live in the rain forests of Brazil and Venezuela, have a radically different belief system in which dreams are as important as ‘waking reality’:
The Sanema believe in a dream world inhabited by the spirits of everything around them. The trees, the animals, the rocks, the water all have a spirit. Some can be used to heal, others to bring disaster and death.
Four out of five Sanema men are practicing shamans and it is in their dreams that the spirits visit them. The main work of the shamen is to dispel the evil spirits they believe cause illnesses, and to do this they induce a trance by taking powerful hallucinogenic drug, sakona, made from the dried sap of the virola tree.
In Sanema culture, it is perfectly usual for these shamans to be off their faces on hallucinogenic drugs, ‘warding off evil spirits’ in the middle of the day, while other people go about their more ‘ordinary’ (by our standards) business of cooking, washing, cleaning, or just chillaxing (typically in hammocks).
Bruce Parry and a Sanema shaman off their faces on hallucinogens – it’s normal there!
There are many other examples that could be used to illustrate the extreme variations in social norms across cultures – such as differences in how cultures treat children, or differences in gender norms, the point is that none of these behaviours are determined by biology or physical environment – we’re all pretty much the same as a biological species – these cultural differences are simply to do with social traditions, passed down by socialisation.
Historical differences in social norms
Social norms also change over time – the most obvious being how norms surrounding childhood and gender have changed, as well as norms surrounding expenditure and consumption.
The fact that social norms change over time again shows that biological differences cannot explain historical variations in human behaviour, and also raises the important point that individuals have the freedom to change the norms they are born into.
Signposting and Related Posts
(1) To illustrate just now many social norms govern our lives, you might like to read this post: how social norms structure your day (forthcoming post)
(2) Some sociologists (and sociologicalish commentators) are very critical of many of our social norms – suggesting variously that they are just not necessary, too restrictive of individual freedom, or even downright harmful – for more on this – see this post: Social Norms – the unnecessary and the harmful (forthcoming post).
individuals are active and social theory needs to develop an empathetic understanding of people’s actions.
Unlike structural consensus and conflict theorists social action theorists do not try to explain human behaviour in terms of an objective social structure that passes down norms, values, or disadvantage. Instead, they try to understand human action by looking at how people interpret their world and the actions of others.
This post covers five of the key ideas of social action theory:
Individuals are active
We need to understand how people see themselves (their self-concepts)
Verstehen – the importance of empathetic understanding
Labelling theory – social interaction is important in shaping people’s identities
Criticisms social action theories make of structural theories.
Individuals are Active
According to Social Action Theory, individuals are active, complex and react to the social structures around them in very different ways. People don’t just passively respond to social norms and institutions and go along with them, rather, we examine them and decide whether to accept or reject certain norms and values.
Self-concept
Interactionists argue that we can’t understand individuals without understanding how they see themselves (their identity). A considerable amount of our time in modern society is devoted to constructing and expressing ‘my’ identity, which involves communicating something about myself to others through the use of shared symbols (symbolic action). Unraveling the complexities of how people construct their identities is one of the main things symbolic interactionists contributed to modern sociology, and the main man that looked at this was Erving Goffman in his classic text The presentation of the Self in everyday life
Goffman demonstrated how complex symbolic interaction is in modern life. Goffman argued that when we are out and about ‘in society’, it is like we are on stage, acting for the benefit of others. The ‘self’ that we present others requires careful behind the scenes management of the smallest detail. This is carried out at home, the equivalent of back stage. Such careful management of the self is required because of the dense array of meanings associated with such mundane things as dress, speech and body language. We need to understand these meanings to understand people.
Verstehen
Because individuals are active, Social Action theorists aim for empathetic understanding – trying to see the world through the eyes of the people acting and they believe that individual action can only be understood by understanding the how people define their ‘realities’ and uncovering the meanings humans give to their actions.
Max Weber, the founding father of social action theory used a German word ’Verstehen’ to describe this type of understanding, which loosely translated means ‘empathetic understanding’.
There are several different reasons why someone might wear something to college on one particular day, and there are several different ways other people might interpret that action. According to Interactionists, there isn’t simply one correct interpretation of human action – someone’s decision to wear a mini-skirt can’t be reduced to the influence of the patriarchal media making that woman think she needs to wear a particular item to impress men (like Radical Feminists might argue), there are lots of possible reasons.
Individuals make hundreds of thousands of ‘choices’ throughout the course of their lives, and so social life is full of hundreds of thousands of decisions, interpretations and mis-interpretations, and if we want to understand people, we need to understand their own personal motives, and how they see themselves in relation to others.
This means research is a complex, and very involved business, it won’t result in nice neat theories of why people act like they do, like you get with Functionalism, Marxism and Feminism, you end up with lots of stories about how people shape their identities.
(Also, you may have noticed that if you want to know why someone acts in the way they do, you need more details in the question – How warm? How short? Did they go out the night before and not go home?)
Labelling Theory
Labelling Theory is an important part of Interactionism. It argues that there are existing power-structures that constrain people, and that these power structures are kept going by people in power labelling themselves as superior and people not-like them as inferior. Power inequalities are maintained by the powerless accepting their inferior labels.
Labelling theory was developed by Howard Becker in the 1960s. Becker argued that agents of social control often work in narrow stereotypes and label people like them as being ‘good’ and people not like them as being ‘bad’. He argued, for example, that white middle class teachers had an idea of the ‘ideal pupil’ as being middle class, well spoken, quite, respectful of authority, polite and well dressed, and often gave these middle class children positive labels, irrespective of their intelligence. Similarly, working class or underclass children, who tended to be scruffier and more energetic than middle class children, were seen as inferior.
According to Rosenthal and Jacobsen, this could result in a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy which is the process where an individual accepts the label given to them and acts accordingly. If middle class children are labelled positively and working class children negatively we end up with a social pattern: Middle class children do better than working class children. According to labelling theory this structural trend emerges not because of structural disadvantages working class children face as a result of their background, but because they are labelled negatively by middle class teachers. Thus the social structure emerges out of social interaction.
Criticisms of Structuralist Social Theory
Sociologists such as Goffman argue that Social Norms don’t have as much power over us as Functionalists suggest. Rather, most people learn what norms are appropriate and ‘act them out’ when they are in particular social roles (at school, at work, with parents etc), returning to their more complex ‘true selves’ when by themselves or with their friends and family.
This is why societies can change unpredictably – what appears to be mass conformity with social norms isn’t, it’s just masses of people going along with existing norms in a kind of illusory mass performance. If we want to get to the truth of who people really are, we need to dig deeper.
A brief summary of, and elaboration on Anthony Giddens’ take on what the sociological imagination involves…
Learning to think sociologically means cultivating the sociological imagination. Studying sociology cannot be just a routine process of acquiring knowledge. A sociologist is someone who is able to break free from the immediacy of personal circumstances and put things in a wider context. Sociological work depends on what the American author C. Wright Mills, in a famous phrase, called the sociological imagination (Mills 1970).
The sociological imagination requires us, above all, to ‘think ourselves away’ from the familiar routines of our daily lives in order to look at them anew. The best way to illustrate what this involves is take a simple act which millions of people do every day, such as drinking a cup of coffee. A sociological investigation of coffee reveals that there are many social processes associated with the act.
First, coffee is not just a refreshing drink but it has symbolic value as part of our day to day social activities. Often the rituals associated with coffee drinking are more important than consuming the drink itself. For example, the morning cup of coffee is, for many people, the central part of their morning routine, an essential part of starting the day, while ‘meeting someone for coffee’ is typically not just about drinking coffee, but forms the basis for socialising and social interaction, which offer a rich vein of subject matter for sociologists to investigate.
Second, coffee contains caffeine, a drug which stimulates certain parts of the brain. As such, people drink coffee to aid concentration, or simply ‘give them a lift’. Coffee is a habit-forming substance, and such many people feel as if they cannot get through a typical day without their daily coffee injections. Coffee, like alcohol in the United Kingdom, is a legal drug, and yet other mind-altering drugs such as cannabis and cocaine are illegal. Other societies have different rules pertaining to mind altering, addictive drugs – and the question of why such rules come about and why they differ from culture to culture is of interest to sociologists.
Third, when we drink a cup of coffee, we are caught up in a complex set of global social and economic interactions which link us to millions of other people in other countries. There is a huge global production chain associated with coffee – it is grown in Asia, Africa and Latin America, typically by quite poor farmers, then bought in bulk by local distributors, and then typically shipped to Europe where it is roasted and ground, and also packaged and branded. If you add on the processes which go in a coffee shop, there are 6 chains from coffee farmer to consumer.
Fourth – historically, the production and consumption of coffee is tied up with the history of colonialism – a period in which European powers invaded Asia, Africa and Latin America and set up colonies which specialised in particular crops (such as tea, coffee, sugar and bananas) for export back to the ‘mother countries’ – the fact that coffee is grown in huge quantities in countries such as Colombia and Indonesia is a legacy of the colonial era.
Fifth – drinking coffee ties us into relations with some of the world’s largest Corporations – such as Nestle and Starbucks – many of these corporations have been accused of exploiting coffee pickers by paying very little for the coffee they buy in order to maximise their profits, thus ‘coffee as usual’ perpetuates global capitalism. Of course, there is now ‘fair trade coffee’, so purchasing coffee involves making ethical choices about whether you go for the cheapest cup or pay extra to give the farmers a chance of a decent wage.
Sixth – there have been recent concerns about the environmental impact of growing coffee – when any product is ‘factory farmed’, it depletes the soil and reduces biodiversity in a local area – not to mention to pollution associated with shipping the product several thousand miles around the globe.
Try cultivating your own sociological imagination:
Take any product and ask yourself the following in relation to it:
What social rituals are associated with consuming the product?
What norms and rules exist which limit the use of the product or similar product?
How does the product connect you to global economic and social processes?
What is the history of the product?
What Corporations are typically involved in the manufacture and distribution of the product. Are there any ethical concerns about the companies involved, are there any ethical alternatives?
A summary of Giddens’ ‘Sociology’ (2017): The Introduction
‘The world we live in today can feel liberating and exciting but, at the same time confusing and worrying. Global communications and friendships across national boundaries are in many ways easier to sustain than in previous times, yet we also see violent crime, international terrorism, emerging wars and persistent economic and social inequality.
Giddens: the global world is full opportunities, but also high consequence risks
The modern world presents us with many opportunities and possibilities, but it is also fraught with high-consequence risks, most notably the damaging impact of our high-consumption lifestyle on the environment.
Most people within the relatively rich countries are materially better off than ever before, but in other parts of the world many millions live in situations of poverty where children die for the lack of fundamental things such as food, safe water supplies and basic healthcare. How can this be, when humanity as a whole has the capability to control its own destiny that would have been unimaginable to previous generations’?
Why is there so much inequality in the world?
How did this world come about?
Why are the conditions of life today so different from those of the past?
Why is there so much inequality in the world?
Where are today’s societies heading in the future?
These ‘big questions’, among many others, are the prime concerns of sociology, and if you have ever asked yourself any of the above big questions, then you can consider yourself a novice sociologist.
Sociology can be simply defined as ‘the scientific study of human life, social groups, whole societies and the human world as such… Its subject matter is our own behaviour as social beings in relationship with many other people. ‘
The scope of sociology is extremely wide, ranging from the analysis of passing encounters between individuals on the street to the investigation of crime, international relations and global forms of terrorism.
Most of us see the world in terms of familiar features, through our friends, families and working-lives, but sociology insists that we take a broader view in order to understand why we act in the way that we do.
Sociology teaches us that much of what we regard as natural, inevitable, good and true may not be so, and that the basic worldview we have is simply a result of the historical context in which we live and the social processes which frame our daily lives.
Understanding the subtle yet complex and profound ways in which our individual lives reflect the contexts of our social experience is basic to the sociologist’s outlook.
The rest of Giddens’ introductory chapter covers the following:
An introduction to sociology as a way of thinking – ‘the sociological imagination’.
How sociology came into existence – introducing some of the ideas of the founders of sociology – Auguste Comte, Emile Durkhiem, Karl Marx and Max Weber , and the ‘neglected founders’ of sociology.
The three basic sociological traditions – Functionalism, conflict perspectives, and symbolic interactionism.
What sociology might be used for – should it public (political) or private?
A few thoughts on this introduction
What isn’t clear from this section (although Giddens does make it clear later on) is that There are some sociologists who would reject aspects of his definition of sociology – there are those who do not think sociology should be a science, for example and there are those who think sociology should be much more focused on micro processes – Giddens has a very global (verging on futuristic IMO) approach to sociology.
For those studying A-level sociology, this isn’t an A-level text book, and YES, the restraints of the A-level syllabus means you won’t be spending much time focusing on interesting issues such as global warming or terrorism, you’re much more likely to be focusing on turgid sociology from the 1970s and 80s, because that’s what’s on the spec, and so you could be assessed on it, and your teachers can’t risk not teaching it!
Related Posts
You might like to read my summary of Bauman and May’s take on the same question: ‘what is sociology’?
If you want to check out one of Giddens’ major contributions to sociology – have a look at my summary of his 1991 classic ‘Modernity and Self-identity’ – a great read, but it helps if you’ve already studied both sociology and psychology.
Where the highest incomes are concerned, there is an enormous disparity between the highest earning male and the highest earning female: Chris Evans is the top-paid male, earning between £2.2m and £2.25m, while Claudia Winkleman is the highest-paid female celebrity, earning between £450,000 and £500,000.
A recent edition of Radio 4’s Moral Maze explored some of the moral arguments for and against this pay gap, focusing on the following questions:
Do these pay inequalities, between elite men and women at the BBC, actually tell us anything about gender pay differentials in wider society? Or is this sample of very high earning celebrities just so unique that it tells us nothing at all?
Why do women earn less than men? To what extent is the biological fact that women are the child-bearers explain the differences? To what extent is it sexism in wider culture?
What more could or should companies, government and society reasonably do about gender disparities?
Finally, is viewing society through the prism of gender an unhealthy obsession and an unhelpful distraction from the job of tackling wider inequalities in wealth, health and education?
In case you’ve never listened to it, the format of the moral maze consists of a panel who e start off by briefly presenting their views on topic under discussion, and then listening to evidence from a number of witnesses and critically questioning them, before summing up their views at the end of the show.
Michael Buerk – old, white, male, privately educated and host of the BBC’s Moral Maze
I thought it was useful to provide a detailed account of this episode of the moral maze because it includes summary of views of some of Britain’s best known contemporary Feminists and their critics on the issue of the pay-gap in the UK, an issue which is obviously highly relevant across the A level sociology syllabus.
It’s also probably quicker to read this rather than listen to the pod cast, and I thought it’d be useful to link it up too.
A summary of the views of the four person panel
Priest and Guardian pundit Giles Fraser – thinks that the fact that BBC appears to value men more than women is a moral outrage
Claire Fox, from the Institute of Ideas – describes Giles Fraser’s moral position as ‘tone deaf’ arguing that it’s ludicrous for a very high income earning women to see themselves as victims of Patriarchy, even if men in similar positions earn more them. She also says she finds it insulting to the memory of what fighting for women’s rights was all about.
Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at Edinburgh University – disagrees argues that we should be comparing ‘like for like’ – if men and women are in a similar environment, they should be receiving the same pay and those women are right to fight for it.
Historian and Blogger Tim Stanley – elite celebrity presenters are all grotesquely overpaid and this issue is a distraction from the e world and serious violence women face in other parts of the world and the UK, and also some of the systemic problems facing young men today.
The Four Witnesses
The Witnesses are Emily Hill, Nikki Van De Gaag, Sophie Walker and Dr Joanna Williams – below I summarise their views on the gender pay gap at the BBC and more widely in the UK, along with their responses to the various questions asked of them by the panelists.
She argues that the pay of 96 elite people tells us very little about the issues of pay and inequality in wider society, because these 96 people are not doing jobs in which the pay is determined by standardised promotion and pay-scale procedures
She also points out that they are doing jobs which are not comparable – even where presenters co-present on the same show, one of them might well be doing additional presenting work elsewhere which could explain their higher pay.
The moral outrage over the gender pay gap at the BBC misses the point because the gender pay gap overall in the UK is at an all time low.
Giles Fraser responds to the above by suggesting that, irrespective of what’s going on in the wider society, where women are paid less for men in comparable jobs, this is a basic moral outrage. In response Williams says:
The real moral outrage is that other workers at the BBC (male and female alike) such as cleaners, editors, even producers, are earning so much less than these 96 ultra high-income earners.
These wealthy women have more in common with their wealthy male colleague and the focus on the ‘elite gender pay-gap’ is a distraction from the wider issue of social class.
She finds it nauseating that these elite women are calling for equal pay at the BBC, and claiming to do this for ‘all women – a campaign to equalize elite pay is going to nothing to help women lower down the pay scale – because at minimum wage level, there is no gender pay-gap.
Giles Fraser criticizes this view because it sounds like it’s blaming the victims of unequal pay.
Mona Siddiqui tries to make the point that what is going on at the top of the BBC does in fact reflect a problem found in workplaces across Britain – which is that if women don’t kick up a fuss about it, they will be paid less than men. In response to this Williams says:
The average pay gap at the BBC is 10% compared to 18% in the country as a whole, suggesting the BBC is actually a relatively good on equal pay where gender is concerned.
Where you look at men and women in comparable ‘ordinary’ jobs, the gender pay gap is practically zero.
Women in their 20s earn more than men in their 20s.
Mona Siddiqui wonders what we’re aiming for in all of this – do we want equal pay by gender, or a world of work in which women race ahead of men, in which case we just end up with another pay-gap issue. In response Williams says:
the real issue is social class – people at the bottom need to be paid more
by focusing on the gender pay gap, we distract attention away from the real problem in society which is pay inequality more broadly – and to get better pay, women in lower paid jobs need to work alongside their male colleagues.
Sophie Walker
Sophie Walker is leader of the Women’s Equality Party and argues that:
What’s interesting about the BBC Explodes the myth that if women try harder they can have equal pay. This list demonstrates that even the wealthiest, white, privileged women are still paid less men, and if they’re being paid less
One of the main aspects of the pay gap is occupational segregation which starts with boys and girls in school making gendered subject choices -because we teach boys that they are good at science and engineering and we value and pay those jobs highly; while we teach girls that they are good at caring and teaching and we value and pay those jobs lesson.
The ‘care burden’ within family life falls disproportionately on women – women in their 20s may well earn more than men, but later on in their working lives, women pay a ‘motherhood penalty’ – within 12 years of having children women’s pay is about 30% lower than the men they work with.
Tim Stanley rejects Sophie Walker’s analysis arguing that the pay gap is generational and is disappearing for the young. He cites a recent report by the Resolution Foundation found that the gender pay gap baby boomers is 16%, among women born between 1981 and 2005, it is 5%, and for women in their early 20s, the pay gap doesn’t exist, in fact women in this age bracket earn more than men. He also points out that women outperforming men in education, especially at university.
Ultimately, the two talk at cross purposes – they disagree about how we should be comparing men and women – Tim Stanley wants to take generations as the base for comparison and measure the pay gap by comparing what the same aged men and women earn doing the same jobs, while Sophie Walker wants to make a broader comparison, factoring in use the ‘typical jobs’ men and women do and the even how the social roles men and women fill influence the amount they earn.
Another reason they talk at cross purposes is that Stanley just sticks to the stats on pay for men and women in their 20s, Walker is imagining what’s likely to happen to the pay gap in later life, based on past evidence.
Claire Fox – asks if focusing on 96 elite women isn’t a distraction away from the the more significant problem of social class inequalities. Sophie Walker responds by saying that:
The advantage of looking at inequalities through the lens of gender shows that all women, of all classes, are underpaid compared to men.
She also argues that exploring class through the lens of gender is an effective way of analyzing pay injustice in society.
She also points out that there are different reasons for the pay gap at different class levels – for example at the top end, it’s maybe something to do with how men and women are treated differently by their agents; while at the bottom end, the fact that we have nurses (a female dominated profession) reliant on food banks is more to do with us not valuing women’s caring roles highly enough.
Claire Fox now turns to the question of why women earn less than men. She asks whether Sophie Walker thinks women are deliberately treated like second class citizens in today’s labour market. Walker suggests there isn’t conscious bias, but the following things might explain the pay gap:
Unconscious bias by white men who, when looking for the best candidate for a job, end up choosing not the best candidate.
Structural barriers, particularly lack of access to decent child care.
Ultimately Walker argues that such gender stereotypes and structural barriers harm men just as much as women, by effectively denying men the opportunity to spend quality time with their children – so closing the gender pay gap should benefit both men and women.
Emily Hill
Emily Hill is the commissioning editor of the spectator and responsible for an article entitled ‘The end of Feminism‘.
She starts off by pointing out that she may have wrote that article, but someone else was responsible for the title, and that she does actually regard herself as a feminist.
Emily Hill subscribes to kind of Feminism developed by Germaine Greer and Camille Paglia
She has however have a problem with some younger, trendy columnists who have changed the agenda of feminism.
She suggests that what used to fight for equality and freedom has now become a fight for censorship and special treatment.
Women have won key battles such as they are doing better in school and university, and when they grow up she believes they will earn equal to men.
She does not believe that women today are victims of Patriarchy, which is thanks to previous Feminists having fought to overcome this.
Mona Siddiqui thinks the above view only applies to middle class white women, and women lower down the social class ladder are still victims of Patriarchy.
Giles Fraser backs up the idea that women are still disadvantaged through ‘everyday sexism’ – such as waiters handing the bill to men rather than women as default, and such things as harassment on the street, and especially social media abuse.
Emily Hill’s response to this is that women just need to get over these things, and she seems to be suggesting that these aren’t really systematic structural barriers to women’s progress.
Women need to stand up to men harassing them, and tell them to ‘F off’, knee them in the balls or just simply tell them their not taking it.
She suggests young women read Feminism and recommends looking at Germaine Greer putting down Norman Mailler.
In response to the view that women are more likely to get abused on social media, she cites research which suggests men are just as likely to suffer abuse, and stands against censorship, suggesting that satirizing offensive comments is the best way to deal with them.
Van der Gaag starts off by arguing that even in the UK structural discrimination against women still exists.
Claire Fox asks Van der Gaag what she thinks of the view that contemporary Feminism is ‘victim feminism’ – casting women as hapless, hopeless and in need of protection. Fox has a problem with the kind of Feminism that suggests that women in particular can’t cope with offensive words and ideas and demands that women have ‘safe spaces’ from offensive ideas and which no platforms (or censors) ideas they find offensive – she argues this kind of Feminism constructs women as people who simply can’t cope.
Fox suggests that when women in the west say they need protecting from offensive words in order to protect their mental health, this trivialises the much more serious problems some women in the west face, and which many women in developing countries face – such as being victims of violence and being treated like second class citizens.
In response Van der Gaag suggests that Claire Fox is the one trivialising mental illness, pointing out that women suffer severe abuse online, such as death threats (Even female MPs) and the effects on mental health are very real.
Giles Fraser now simply asks whether Van der Gaag thinks the disparity between men and women is a product of nature or nurture.
Van der Gaag responds by pointing him in the direction of two books – one by Cordelia Fine – Delusions of Gender and the other by Lise Elliot – Pink Brain Blue Brain
Together these two books suggest that about 95% of gender differences are explained by nurture, the other 5% by nature.
Reflecting on the 5% of natural differences Giles Fraser asks to what extent the biological fact of women being the child bearers explains gender disparities. Van Der Gaag responds by basically saying it’s got very little to do with it.
The problem women are still expected all over the world to do unpaid work on top of their paid work, and this is an issue all over the world including in the UK.
The solution is to value unpaid work as much as paid work, to redistribute it so that men do more unpaid work (which is happening with the younger generation), and to reduce the unpaid care, which machines can help with.
In Summary
Either the gender pay gap at the BBC is symptomatic of wider gender disparities in British society, or it’s a nauseating distraction.
For Mona Siddiqui the real issue is how do we see women in terms of what value they bring to the work place?
Claire Fox finds the whole issue distasteful because the BBC gender pay gap took over some of the more socially relevant issues that we should be discussion – we should really be thinking about social class inequalities, not pay inequality between men and women at the BBC.
Giles Fraser thinks that The BBC gender pay gap touches a nerve because firstly we don’t think that people should earn that much, and secondly, we also find the idea of gender inequality unfair – the two things together – class and gender inequality offend our British idea of justice, and we can care about both at the same time (it is not a binary issue).
Tim Stanley reiterates his point that the gender pay gap in wider society is no longer really an issue – he argues that our whole take on it is 40 years old: male bosses no longer deliberately discriminate against women and technology has changed the nature of work, giving women more opportunities which they are taking.
Claire Fox points out that what no longer happens is that patriarchal bosses say ‘you’re going to have a baby, see you later’, but was does happen is that women take time off work when they have babies and go back to work part-time and lose income because of this. The problem is that there is not enough child care provision for working people, and given that women are the primary child carers this disadvantages them more than men where pay is concerned.
She also argues that overstating the gender pay gap is not helpful, what we should be doing is focusing on positive solutions to overcoming it.
Mona Siddiqui points out that prejudice may play a role – in that male bosses are reluctant to hire women in their early 30s because of the increased possibility of them having children in the near future, and the ‘hassle’ this will cause.
Giles Fraser suggests that the stereotypical representations of men and women in higher and lower paid jobs remains a problem for parents bringing up children.
There’s general support for Emily Hill’s view that thanks to Feminism, there have been huge gains in gender equality, and for the fact that contemporary Feminists blackballing people like Germaine Greer is a problem.
The last word goes to Giles Fraser who suggests that ‘power looks after itself’ and so we cannot be complacent.
In this TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson argues that our current educational systems are still based on a industrial paradigm of education – education is increasingly standardised and about conformity, and kids, who are living in the most stimulating age in history, fail to see the point of going to school, which is about ‘finding the right answers to pass the tests’ rather than about stimulating divergent thinking.
One of our major solutions to the plague of distracted kids (alienated by a system the don’t identify with) is to medicate them to get them through school, whereas what really needs to change is the system itself – we need a paradigm shift, rather than mere reform.
Current Education systems are not fit for the future
Every country on earth is in the process of reforming its education system. There are two reasons for this:
The first is economic – countries are trying to figure out how to prepare children for work when we simply don’t know what work will look like in the future.
The second is cultural – countries are trying to figure out how to pass on their ‘cultural genes’ while at the same time having to respond to globalisation.
The problem with current processes of educational reform is that we are trying to tackle the future by doing what we did in the past and we are alienating millions of kids in the process, who simply can’t see the point of going to school.
When generation X when to school, we were motivated by a particular story: that if we worked hard and got good grades, we could get to college, get a degree and get a good job. Today’s children do not believe this, and they are right not to: getting a degree means you will probably get a better job, but is no longer guaranteed to get you a decent job!
The education system is rooted in an industrial paradigm
The problem with the current education system is that it was conceived in the cultural context of the Enlightenment and the economic context of the industrial revolution. It emerged in the nineteenth century, which was the first time which compulsory public education, freely available to all and paid for by taxes was established.
The Modern education system was originally founded on an ‘us and them’ mentality as many thinkers in the 19th century seriously believed that ordinary street kids could not cope with it, and it is also founded on an Enlightenment concept of the mind – which favours a knowledge of the classics and deductive reasoning, what we might call ‘academic knowledge’.
The system thus divides people into ‘smart people’ (academics) and ‘non-smart people’ (non-academics) and while this has been great for some, most people have not benefited from this system, in fact Ken Robinson argues that the main effect is that it has caused chaos.
We medicate our kids to get them through education
Statistics on prescriptions for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) suggest that America is suffering from an ADHD epidemic – we are drugging our kids with Ritalin as a matter of routine. However, Robinson suggests that this cannot be an epidemic as the rates of prescription vary from West to East – they are much higher in the East of America, which suggests that this is a fictitious epidemic – it’s the system that’s choosing to medicate a ‘problem’ which is only a problem because the system has labelled it thus.
What’s really happening is that our kids are living through the most information rich age in history – they are bombarded with information from many sources through T.V. and the Internet – they are in a way, hyper-stimulated, and yet our response is to punish them for getting distracted from ‘boring stuff’ in school.
Robinson suggests that it is no coincidence that the incidents of prescriptions for ADHD corresponds closely to the rise in standardised testing.
The increasing use of drugs such as Ritalin to medicate kids means that we are effectively getting our kids through school by anaesthetising them.
The school system is run for the benefit of industry, and in many senses along industrial lines, mirroring a factory system of production in at least the following ways:
Ringing bells
Separate facilities
Specialised subjects
We still educate children by batches (‘as if the most important thing about them is the date of their manufacture’).
Increasingly education is about conformity, and you see is in the growth of standardised curricula and standardised testing. The current paradigm is mainly to do with standardisation, and we need to shift the paradigm and go in the other direction.
The factory model of education
The education system kills creativity
There was a great study done recently on divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creative thinking – it is the ability to see lots of possible ways of interpreting and answering a question; to think laterally and to see many possible answers, not just one.
An example of this simply to give someone a paper clip and to get them to think of as many different uses for the paper clip as possible – someone whose good at this will be able to think of hundreds of uses for the paper clip by imagining that it can be all sorts of sizes and made out of all sorts of different materials.
Cites a Longitudinal study (taken from a book called ‘Break Point and Beyond) in which Kindergarten children were tested on their ability to think divergently, and 98% of them scored at ‘genius level’; the same children were retested at ages 8-10, but only 50% of them scored at genius level, and again at 13-15, where hardly any of them scored at genius level.
This study shows two things: firstly, we all have the inherent capacity for divergent thinking and secondly it deteriorates as children get older.
Now lots of things happen to these kids as they grow up, but the most important thing is that they have become educated – they’ve spent 10 years being told ‘that there’s one answer and it’s at the back, and don’t look and don’t copy’.
The problem we have is that the industrial-capitalist mode of education is deep in the gene-pool of the education system, it is an educational paradigm which will be hard to shift.
Shifting the Education Paradigm
We need to do the following to shift the industrial-capitalist education paradigm:
Firstly, destroy the myth that there is a divide between academic and non academic subjects, and between the abstract and the theoretical.
Secondly, recognize that most great learning takes place in groups – collaboration is the stuff of growth, rather than individualising people which separates them from their natural learning environment.
Finally, we need to change the habitual ways of thinking of those within the education system and the habitats which they occupy.
Relevance to A-Level Sociology
This can be used to criticise New Right approaches to education, as well as New Labour, The Coalition and the present Tory government – because all of them have kept in place the basic regime of testing introduced in 1988.
There’s also something of a link here to Bowles and Gintis’ Correspondence Principle – in which the Hidden Curriculum mirrors the work place, because the system is still based an industrial model.
Robinson seems to be suggesting we have a more post-modern approach to education – freeing schools and teachers up so they can encourage more creativity in the classroom rather than being constrained by the tyranny of standardised testing.
This classic example of a laboratory experiment suggests that children learn aggressive behaviour through observation – it is relevant to the Crime and Deviance module, and lends support to the idea that exposure to violence at home (or in the media) can increase aggressive and possibly violent behaviour in real life.
Bandura, Ross and Ross (1961) aimed to find out if children learnt aggressive behaviour by observing adults acting in an aggressive manner.
Their sample consisted of 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School aged between 3 to 6 years old.
Stage one – making some of the children watch violence
In this stage of the experiment, children were divided into three groups of 24 (12 boys and 12 girls in each group), and then individually put through one of the following three processes.
The first group of children watched an adult actor behaving aggressively towards a toy called a ‘Bobo doll’. The adults attacked the Bobo doll in a distinctive manner – they used a hammer in some cases, and in others threw the doll in the air and shouted “Pow, Boom”.
The second group were exposed to a non-aggressive adult actor who played in a quiet and subdued manner for 10 minutes (playing with a tinker toy set and ignoring the bobo-doll).
The final group were used as a control group and not exposed to any model at all.
Stage two – frustrating the children and observing their reactions
The children were then taken to a room full of nice of toys, but told that they were not allowed to play with them, in order to ‘frustrate them’, and then taken onto another room full of toys which consisted of a number of ‘ordinary toys’, as well as a ‘bobo doll’ and a hammer. Children were given a period of time to play with these toys while being observed through a two way mirror.
The idea here was to see if those children who had witnessed the aggressive behaviour towards the doll were more likely to behave aggressively towards it themselves.
Findings
To cut a long story short, the children who had previously seen the adults acting aggressively towards the bobo doll were more likely to behave aggressively towards to the bobo doll in stage two of the experiment.
A further interesting finding is that boys were more likely to act aggressively than girls.
The findings support Bandura’s ‘social learning theory’ – that is, children learn social behaviour such as aggression through the process of observation – through watching the behaviour of another person.
Evaluation
Strengths of the bobo-doll experiment
Variables were well controlled, so it effectively established cause and effect relationships (see the link below for more details)
It has good reliability – standardised procedures mean it is easy to repeat.
Limitations of this laboratory experiment
This study has very low ecological validity – this is a very artificial form of ‘violence’ – an adult using a hammer on a doll (rather than a human) is nothing like the kind of real life aggressive behaviour a child might be exposed to, thus can we generalise these findings to wider social life?
Cumberbatch (1990) found that children who had not played with a Bobo Doll before were five times as likely to imitate the aggressive behaviour than those who were familiar with it; he claims that the novelty value of the doll makes it more likely that children will imitate the behaviour.
The effects of exposure to aggression were measured immediately, this experiment tells us nothing about the long-term effects of a single exposure to aggressive behaviour.
There are ethical problems with the study – exposing the children to aggressive behaviour and ‘frustrating them’ may have resulted in long term harm to their well-being.
Marxist sociologists Bowles and Gintis argue that capitalist societies are not meritocratic. Against Functionalists, they argue that it is not the amount of ability and effort an individual puts into their education that determines how well they do, but rather their class background.
The simple reality is that being born into a middle class family means that middle class children benefit from material and cultural capital which give them an advantage in both school, and in the job application process, which gives them an unfair advantage compared to working class children.
However, the education system disguises this fact by spreading the ‘myth of meritocracy‘ – the idea that it is solely the ability and effort of the individual which determines the qualifications and the job they get, rather than their class background, and thus individuals end up blaming themselves for their failures rather than inequality of opportunity in the education system.
Intelligence, Educational Attainment and Meritocracy
Bowles and Gintis base their argument on an analysis of the relationship between intelligence (measured by IQ), educational attainment and occupational reward. They argue that IQ accounts for only a small part of educational attainment.
They examined a sample of individuals with a wide range of IQs and within this sample, they found a wide variation of educational attainment within that sample and concluded that there was hardly any relationship between the two variables.
Bowles and Gintis found a direct relationship between class background and educational achievement – the higher and individual’s class background, the higher their level of educational achievement.
So how do we explain the fact that individuals with higher IQs tend to have higher qualifications? they explain this as a by-product of length of stay in education – the longer an individual stays in education, they more their IQ develops. However, it is still family background which mainly determines educational attainment.
Bowles and Gintis also apply a similar analysis to the relationship between occupational reward and IQ – again, in their sample of average IQ individuals, there was a wide variety of incomes, which suggested there was no significant relationship between IQ and income.
As with educational success, what explains high income is family background – the combination of an individual’s class, gender and ethnicity are much better predictors of someone’s income rather than their IQ – educational qualifications are of much more value to the white, middle class male, than to the black, working class female.
Bowles and Gintis conclude that ‘education reproduces inequality by justifying privilege and attributing poverty to personal failure’. The education system effectively disguises the fact that economic success runs in the family, and that privilege breeds privilege. Bowles and Gintis thus reject the functionalist view that education is a meritocracy.
In December 2016 Dame Louise Carey published a study into social integration and found that ‘high levels of social and economic isolation in some places, and cultural and religious practices in communities…. run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws’. Casey also found that, by faith, the Muslim population has the highest number and proportion of people aged 16 and over who cannot speak English.
Safraz spends some time with Imran, who runs a general store in Goldwick, part of Oldham that has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the country. He finds that every single on of the customers in Imran’s store is Asian, and Imran himself says that ”we are not mixed in – we don’t integrate. We don’t do it and it’s wrong’, and he also says that “if a white person were to walk down the street in the local area, I swear nine out of ten people would crane their neck to at them.”
The Muslim community in Goldwick has its origins in Pakistan and Bangladesh and some of the outdated attitudes and traditions from over there have been imported into this country – some women are expected to walk yards behind their husbands and some men only take their wive’s out twice a year, on their birthdays and anniversaries.
Many members of the Pakistani community actually view Pakistan as ‘their country’, because that’s where their parents came from, a sense of identity reinforced by visits back to Pakistan, which is often the only other country in the world they’ve been to besides Britain.
The Fatima Women’s Association is about a four minute walk from Imran’s store where Manzoor meets with a dozen Pakistani and Bangladeshi women who are learning English. They are among 100 such women who attend thrice weekly English language lessons funded by BBC children in need.
The Fatima Women’s Association
The problem with this initiative is that some of the women interviewed only want to learn English so that they don’t have to use an interpreter when, for example they go to the doctor, they don’t actually want their children to fully integrate with British society because there is deep apprehension, bordering on fear, of what English culture is and how it may damage their families – they think English culture is drinking, partying, boyfriends, sex and tolerating things that are not allowed in Islam.
Not one of the women has a white friend and they limit their children’s freedom in similar ways, encouraging them to stick to Asian friends only so that they do not lose their culture.
Reasons to Be Hopeful
While the above appears to paint a bleak picture of a high degree of ethnic segregation, there are reasons to be hopeful…
Firstly, even amongst the people Manzoor spoke to, stereotypes about white culture were being challenged, chiefly by those who worked with white people, suggesting barriers can be broken down.
Secondly, the degree of segregation found in Oldham is rare. Professor Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics and Birkbeck College, notes that 80% of the wards of Britain are 90% white, and what appears to be happening is that Asians are increasingly moving out of Asian only enclaves and moving to super-diverse areas. It appears that multicultural Hackney is more our future than segregated Goldwick.
Finally, there is the case study of Manzoor himself – who recognised a lot of Goldwick in his own upbringing, but himself ended up marrying a white woman and bringing up mixed race kids.
Initiatives to Increase Ethnic Integration
A number of things are suggested which might promote integration
Providing more opportunities for minority women, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds
Providing cross-cultural activities – such as shared cooking events.
Setting up a buddy-system for women learning English as a second language
Making schools more ethnically mixed, even establishing quotas
Doing the same through the National Citizen Service.
Manzoor concludes the article by suggesting that the key to greater integration is to build a society in which everyone feels like it is their home, which in turn will require white culture to stop blaming all Muslims when there are fundamentalist terror attacks, and Muslims need to stop retreating into victimhood when anyone suggests there may be issues within their culture which need confronting.
Useful sources of quantitative and qualitative data for teaching and learning about the sociology of education… with a focus on the United Kingdom. The point of this post is to provide a range of links to resources and ‘hub sites’ which are updated on a regular basis.
This page will be gradually populated with more links as I get the time to update it! Last update April 2018!
Best Hub Sites (IMO)
The Institute for Education (IOE) – 25% of research into the UK education system takes place through the IOE. The link just above takes you to their research page where you can access details of a range of research on pretty much every aspect of education within in the UK.
The Sutton Trust – established in 1997 the Sutton Trust’s main aim is to improve social mobility through evidence based research, programmes and advocacy. Most of its thorough, mixed-methods research is focused on the causes, consequences and experience of inequality of education opportunity.
Quantitative Sources of Data on Education
Official Statistics
Education and Training Statistics for the UK, Department for Education (link to 2016 Publication) – this document provides ‘the basic’ information on the UK education system – the number of schools, teachers, qualifications, basic info about levels of attainment and education expenditure. Published annually in November.
School Workforce in England – covers teacher numbers and pupil-teacher ratios in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales. Published annually in June.
Special Education Needs in England – details of children with special education needs, by type of need, and broken down by school type and gender (statistics derived from the ‘schools census’).
Other statistical sources of information about education
Education Datalabs – In their own words they are ‘a group of expert analysts who produce independent research on education policy and practice’. The main pages (and thus the main topics under investigation) are devoted to school accountability, exams and assessment, pupil demographics, admissions, post-16 education and teacher careers.
Education Datalabs provides a number of excellent infographics on many of the above topics, and seems to be committed to open source research – they make their data and code available so that others can develop their research. BIG THUMBS UP for this site!
Education Infographics – A hub site for lots of useful infographics summarising stats on numerous aspects of education, especially the future of elearning.
Some of the sources below also draw on and generate quantitative data, but to mind they mainly focus on using and generating qualitative data.
TED Talks on Education – There seems to be something of a consensus within the TED community that education systems around the world are broken, and that the concepts of education and school need re-imagining somehow. The link just above takes you to ten talks from different speakers which all re-imagine school in some way… there’s lots to think about here, and plenty to criticise too.
Youth Employment UK – An organisation set up to help tackle youth unemployment in the UK. They work mainly with 14-24 year olds and aim to give every young person a voice. They produce their own research on what young people think about how well education is preparing them for work, and link to the latest research on youth employment produced by other, similar agencies.
She argues that the pay of 96 elite people tells us very little about the issues of pay and inequality in wider society, because these 96 people are not doing jobs in which the pay is determined by standardised promotion and pay-scale procedures
She starts off by pointing out that she may have wrote that article, but someone else was responsible for the title, and that she does actually regard herself as a feminist.
