ANALYSIS OF "THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE" (part 23)

Patterns Within Patterns

by

Charles Lamson

Sometimes larger patterns encompass smaller ones. Consider, for example, the problem of sexual harassment at work. The typical harasser is a man. In fact, almost all harassers are men, and almost all victims are women, so there is a clear pattern of men sexually harassing women. Does this mean that women never harass men? No. In a tiny percentage of cases, women are the perpetrators.

Perhaps you think if women can be harassers and men the victims, that means you cannot generalize about men being the villains all the time. That is true; men are not the villains all the time, but the pattern still exists: Most perpetrators are men (and even when men are the victims, the perpetrators are still usually other men). But if women can sometimes be perpetrators, then we need to look for a larger pattern. If we study actual cases, we find that women who harass are like men in one important way: They have power over others at work.

The larger pattern thus has to do with power. If we look only at the most obvious pattern (men harassing women), we might fail to see the importance of power. But if we also look at rare cases (women harassing men), we are forced to think about what else might be going on. What we would see - the commonality that reveals a larger pattern - is that harassment of all kinds is most likely to occur when one person has control over another person's fate. 

To see a pattern is not to know why it exists. Why do some people repeatedly trap themselves in bad situations? Why are rates of disease higher among some groups than others? Why do some people abuse their power and exploit others? Such patterns might be easy to see but hard to explain. Often we must dig deeper to find out why things happen as they do.

To see patterns in how stars work, we must study them in the ways that physicists and astronomers do. To see patterns in how organisms work, we must study them in the ways that biologists do. To make sense of the social world - to see and explain the patterns that make the world what it is - we must study how people do things together, the meanings and arrangements they create, the ideas they embrace, and the cultural habits they form. Only by paying attention to these things, can we see the patterns that matter in people's lives.

There is more to this than looking for typical cases. To identify a typical case of something is to discern one kind of pattern. Other kinds of patterns can be seen if we pay attention to the social world in different ways. Being sociologically mindful, we may discover that the world is patterned in many ways.

*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, MICHAEL SCHWALBE, PGS. 102-103* 

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