Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 16)

I have an economics degree with a minor in sociology. The reason I have that is because I want to do a ministry in urban areas and help with underprivileged kids.

Jeremy Lin

Interaction in Groups

(Part B)

 by

 Charles Lamson

Formal Organizations and Bureaucracy

Informal organizations are groups whose norms and statuses are generally agreed upon but are not set down in writing. Usually such groups have leaders who help create and enforce the group's norms but have no formal leadership position.

Formal organizations have explicit (often written) set of norms, statuses, and roles that specify each member's relationships to the others and the conditions under which those relationships hold. Organization charts and job descriptions are typical of such organizations. Formal organizations take a wide variety of forms. For example, the New England town meeting is composed of residents of a town who gather to debate and discuss any issues the members wish to raise. If the tenants association of an urban apartment building is also composed of people who reside in a specific place, but its scope of action is usually limited to housing issues both of these are formal organizations because there are rules defining who may participate and the scope and manner of that participation. As is true in many formal organizations, the members of town meetings and tenants associations try to arrive at decisions through some form of democratic process---that is, by adhering to norms that allow the majority to run the organization but not to infringe on the rights of the minority.

A familiar type of formal organization is the voluntary association. People join groups like the PTA or the Rotary Club to pursue interests they share with other members of the group. Voluntary associations are usually democratically run, at least in principle, and have rules and regulations and an administrative staff. Churches, fraternal organizations, political clubs, and neighborhood improvement groups are examples of voluntary associations often found in American communities. Sociologists study these associations in order to understand how well or poorly people are integrated into their society.

Bureaucracies are another common type of formal organization. A bureaucracy is a specific structure of statuses and roles in which the power to influence the actions of others increases as one nears the top of the organization; this is in marked contrast to the democratic procedures used in other kinds of organizations. Voluntary associations, for example, usually have some of the elements of bureaucracies, but they are run as democratic structures in which power is based on majority rule rather than on executive orders as is the case in pure bureaucracies like General Motors or the U. S. Army (Image 1 - shown below). 

IMAGE 1  U. S. Army

We owe much of our understanding of bureaucracies to the work of Max Weber, who identified the following typical aspects of most bureaucratic organizations:

1. Positions with clearly defined responsibilities: "The regular activities required for the purposes of the organization are distributed in a fixed way as official duties."
2. Positions ordered in a hierarchy: The organization of offices "follows the principle of hierarchy; that is, each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one."
3. Rules and precedents: The functioning of the bureaucracy is governed "by a consistent system of abstract rules and the application of these rules to specific cases."
4. Impersonality and impartiality: "The ideal official conducts his office . . . in a spirit of formalistic impersonality . . . without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm."
5. A career ladder: Work in a bureaucracy "constitutes a career. There is a system of 'promotions' according to seniority, or to achievement, or both."
6. The norm of efficiency: "The purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization . . . is from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency" (Weber, (1958/1922). Economy and Society. In H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Trans. & Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology).

Weber believed that bureaucracy made human social life more "rational" than it had ever been in the past. Rules, impersonality, and the norm of efficiency are some of the ways in which bureaucracies "rationalize" human societies. By this Weber meant that society becomes dominated by groups organized so that the interactions of their members will maximize the group's efficiency. Once the group's goals have been set, the officials in a bureaucracy can seek the most efficient means of reaching those goals. All the less rational behaviors of human groups, such as magic and ritual, are avoided by groups organized as bureaucracies. But the people in a bureaucracy may not take full responsibility for their actions. For this and other reasons, therefore, Weber had some misgivings about the consequences of the increasing dominance of bureaucratic groups in modern societies.

Bureaucracy and Obedience to Authority

Which leads us to a study of group pressure that raised serious questions about most people's ability to resist such pressure, a study of conformity, very powerful in its implication and disturbing in its methods, a series of experiments on obedience to authority conducted by Stanley Milgram.

IMAGE 2  Stanley Milgram’s Electric Shock Experiment

Milgram's study was designed to "take a close look at the act of obeying." As Milgram described it:

Two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated as a "teacher" and the other as a "learner."

The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted into a room, seated in a chair, his arms strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he is to learn a list of word pairs; whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.

The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the learner being strapped into place, he is taken into the main experimental room and seated before an impressive shock generator. Its main feature is a horizontal line of 3D switches, ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. There are also verbal designations which range from SLIGHT SHOCK to DANGER---SEVERE SHOCK. The teacher is told that he is to administer the learning test to the man in the other room. When the learner responds correctly, the teacher moves on to the next item; when the other man gives an incorrect answer, the teacher is to give him an electric shock. He is to start at the lowest shock level (15 volts) and to increase the level each time the man makes an error, going through 30 volts, 45, and so on. ((1974). Obediance to Authority: An Experimental View, pp. 3-4)

The "learner" is an actor who pretends to suffer pain but receives no actual shock. The subject ("teacher") is a business person or an industrial worker or a student, someone who has been recruited by a classified ad offering payment for spare-time work in a university laboratory.

IMAGE 3  An Actor Portrays Milgram's "Learner"

Milgram was dismayed to discover that many of his subjects were willing to obey any order given by the experimenter. In the basic version of the experiment, in which the "learner" is in one room and the "teacher" in another from which the "learner" is visible but cannot be heard, 65% of the subjects administered the highest levels of shock, while the other 35% were obedient well into the intense shock levels. 

Milgram used a functionalist argument to explain the high levels of obedience revealed in his experiment: In bureaucratic organizations people seek approval by adhering to the rules, which often absolve them of moral responsibility for their actions. But he also explored the conditions under which conflict will take place---that is, the conditions under which the subject will rebel against the experimenter. In situations in which subjects are forced to confront the consequences of their behavior, their ability to rely on "duty" to justify that behavior seems to be diminished.

Commitment to Bureaucratic Groups

Another question related to the impact of bureaucracy on individuals is how bureaucratic groups---which are based on unemotional and rational systems of recruitment, decision making, and reward---can sometimes attract strong commitment from their members. One possible answer is ideology: People believe in the goals and methods of the bureaucracy. Another explanation is that people within a bureaucracy form primary groups that maintain their commitment to the larger organization. There is considerable research evidence showing that both explanations are valid---both ideology and primary-group ties may operate to reinforce people's commitment to the organization. Several studies have addressed this question.

Primary Groups in Bureaucracies In one of those studies, Morris Janowitz and Edward Shils were assigned by the U. S. Army to study the attitudes of German soldiers captured during World War II. They were attempting to discover what had made the German army so effective and committed that isolated units continued to fight even in the face of certain defeat. As Shils explained it, he and Janowitz "discovered the influence of small, close-knit roofs on the conduct of their members in the performance of tasks set them from the outside" (Janowitz & Shils, 1948, The Cohesion and Disintegration of the Wehrmacht in World War II. Public Opinion Quarterly, 12, 280-315).

IMAGE 4  World War II German army

The soldiers of the German army behaved in this way not because of their ideological commitment to the Nazi cause but because of their loyalty to small combat units whose members that had become so devoted to each other that to continue to fight even in the face of defeat, so as not to be dishonored as a group, seemed the only possible course of action. The close primary-group (small social group whose members share close, personal, enduring relationships with one another) structure of the German army was one of the secrets of its success. The other was an extremely efficient organization. Ideology figured very little in its effectiveness.

Ideological Primary Groups Primary groups would seem to have no place in a "pure" bureaucracy, yet the study just cited and other empirical studies, shows that no bureaucracy completely eliminates primary groups. In the case of the German army, it appears that the development of primary groups among combat troops increased the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. Another important study of this subject was Philip Selznick's (1952) The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics, which was an analysis of what made the Bolsheviks so effective that they won out in the fierce competition for political dominance in Russia. Selznick's data show that the ideological based primary group was the key element in the Bolsheviks' organization. Small, secret "cells" of devoted communists were organized in neighborhoods, factories, army units, farms, and universities. Through years of tense and often dangerous political activity, the members became extremely devoted to each other and to their revolutionary cause. According to Selznick, the doubling of ideological and primary group cohesion made the Bolsheviks themselves an "organizational weapon."

In the contemporary world we see many examples of ideological groups with extremely high levels of cohesion. These groups are often devoted to the leadership and teachings of a forceful and highly attractive leader whose ideas exert a powerful influence over the behavior of the group's members. We often focus on the extremes of such behavior, such as suicide bombings or mass suicide by members of various "doomsday" cults, such as in Jonestown (shown below). But many ideological groups can have beneficial effects on their members. This is especially true of groups devoted to personal or spiritual growth and positive behavior change. Indeed, the ability of people to form groups freely and to leave them if they so desire is one of the distinguishing features of societies in which the rule of law protects the individual's right or association. a problem of some idiot logical groups, however, is that they may not grant their members this freedom. 

IMAGE 5 Jonestown Massacre

*MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, 164-167*

end

Daily life in North Korea - “My Brothers and Sisters in the North” (Full...

Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 15)

 

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

Robert Anton Wilson

Interaction in Groups

 by

 Charles Lamson

The Fairness Principle

We see ample evidence that people tend to expect certain kinds of treatment from others and that they tend to become angry when they do not receive it, especially when they feel that they have done what is expected of them in the situation. We want the rules to apply equally to everyone in the game, be it a friendly game of pool or the more complex game of corporate strategy. When we are not rewarded in the same ways as others, we say that we are being treated unfairly.

The unfair condition in which a person or group has come to expect certain rewards for certain efforts, yet does not get them while others do, is called relative deprivation. In times of economic depression, for example, all groups in society must make do with less, and all feel deprived in comparison to their previous condition. If the economy begins to improve and some groups begin to get higher wages or more profits while others experience only limited Improvement, members of the less successful group will feel deprived relative to others and will likely become angry even though their own plight has actually improved somewhat (Merton & Kitt, (1950). Contributions to the Theory of Reference Group Behavior. In R. K. Merton & P. Lazarsfeld (Eds.), Continuities in Social Research).

People's ideas about what is fair in their interactions with others often conflict with simple calculations of gain and loss. The fact that they might come out ahead in an interaction does not guarantee that they will feel good about it and continue the interaction. This was demonstrated in a series of studies by Daniel Kahneman and his associates ((1986). Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics. Journal of Business). A large number of respondents were asked to judge the fairness of this situation:

A landlord rents out a small house. When the lease is due for renewal, the landlord learns that the tenant has taken a job very close to the house and is therefore unlikely to move. The landlord raises the rent $40 more than he was planning to.

An economist might argue that the tenant should think of the situation in terms of whether the rent increase is offset by the savings in the cost of travel to work (in terms of money, time, convenience, etc.). If the tenant still comes out ahead, it will make sense to sign the new lease (the rationality principle). But more than 90% of the respondents in Kahneman's survey said that the landlord was being unfair. In real life, when people feel that a transaction like this is unfair they often end the interaction, even at some cost to themselves. In this case people intuitively felt that the landlord was unfairly taking advantage of a gain made by the tenant (the new job) without adding anything to the property to earn the right to raise the rent.

The pure-rationality model of behavior predicts that people will act in their own interests in order to maximize their profits. If we were simple profit takers, however, our feelings about fairness would not play such a strong part in explaining group interaction (R. H. Frank, (1988) Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions). But in fact these feelings are very powerful. Kahneman and his associates examined the strength of these findings in an experiment in which they asked subjects to divide $20 with another player whom they could not see but were told was in the room. Only two choices were given: to give $10 to each player, or to keep $18 and give the other player $2. Out of 161 subjects, 122---76%---offered the even split. From this the experimenters concluded that most people are motivated by their own ideas of fairness, presumably as a result of socialization over many years.

In real life there are many examples of situations in which notions of fairness outweigh the principle of rationality. Barbers and beauticians do not charge more for haircuts on Saturday, nor do ski resorts usually charge more for lift tickets on holidays. Although they might like to profit from the higher demand at those times, they are afraid that people would regard the higher prices as unfair (R. H. Frank, 1988. Passions within Reason). However, services are often offered at higher rates during peak seasons, or bargain offers such as early bird specials or off-peak pairs are used to encourage people to accept services at times other than those they might prefer.

Applications of the fairness principle can be seen many group situations. In the classic study conducted by Elton Mayo and his associates at Western Electric Hawthorne plant, the observers often noticed that workers used various forms of joking and sarcastic teasing to enforce the group's norms. They had a strong sense of how much work they should turn out, both individually and as a group, in order to merit their pay: a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. It was common to see the members of a workgroup gang up on and in a joking way hit a fellow worker on the shoulder when he produced more than the other members of the group.

The culture of this work group had evolved over many years. Its norms functioned to control the workers responses to the demands of the company's managers.

The workers shared a common body of sentiments. A person should not try to do too much work. If he did, he was a "rate buster." The theory was that if an excessive amount of work was turned out, the management would lower the piecework rate so that the employees would be in the position of doing more work for approximately the same pay. On the other hand, a person should not turn out too little work. If he did he was a "chiseler"---that is, he was getting paid for work he did not do. 

*MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED. WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 159-160*

end

SECRET NORTH KOREA | YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT IT'S LIKE

North Korea / The Lies and Truth of Kim Jong Un / How People Live (2019)

Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 14)

I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.

Quincy Jones

Socialization

(Part D)

 by

 Charles Lamson

 Role Playing and "Face Work"

Why do Americans and Asians often have so much difficulty understanding each other even when they are playing the same role? Why are adolescents so hung up about their dealings with other kids? And why is it that in some communities seemingly small insults are treated as major signs of disrespect? These are examples of the kinds of problems that arise when people actually play the roles for which they have been socialized. They can be analyzed according to the rules of interaction known as face work.

In his book Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1965) Erving Goffman defines it, face is the positive social value a person claims for herself or himself by acting out a specific set of socially approved attributes (e.g., politeness, humor, strength, cuteness, sensitivity). Through his close observations of seemingly routine greetings, formulas of politeness, and the give-and-take of small talk. Goffman identified the rules of interaction whereby people seek to present a positive image of themselves, their "face." Once they have established a specific image, they seek to defend it against any possible threat that might cause them to "lose face." The concept of saving or losing face is found in cultures throughout the world. Indeed, in most Asian cultures the rules of face-work are even more elaborate than in the West. The importance of such unwritten rules of interaction is explored more fully in later posts. Most of us take it for granted that we want to maintain our self-respect and not lose face in social situations, but we do not give much thought to the actual interactions that serve to maintain face. Goffman explains: Just as the member of any group is expected to have self-respect, so also he is expected to sustain a standard of considerateness; he is expected to go to certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of others present, and he is expected to do this willingly and spontaneously because of emotional identification with the others and with their feelings. . . . The person who can witness another's humiliation and retain a cool countenance himself is said in our society to be "heartless," just as he who can unfeelingly participate in his own defacement is thought to be "shameless." (1965. p. 31) The way we apply these rules of face work in performing our roles differs according to the prestige of the people involved. When firing a junior clerk, for example, the boss does not go to nearly the same links to take into account the employee's feelings as he does when firing a vice president. Recent studies of role-playing among adolescents in inner-city communities draw on these insights. Where there is very little prestige of any kind for people to share, "fronting"---or pretending to play roles that one cannot really perform (e.g., great ballplayer, ladies' man) is extremely common. So, therefore, are potential threats to one's face. Face work in such communities---among gang members, for example, can become a deadly business, especially in situations where one senses disrespect (i.e., feels that one is being "dissed") (T. Williams and W. Kornblum, 1994. The Uptown Kids: Struggle and Hope in the Projects). emotions play a strong part in these interactions. When people believe that they have seriously lost face, their feelings can run extremely high, especially if their peers do not hurry in to defend them. Rapid social change it tends to heighten the difficulties people have in playing the rules they have been socialized to perform. As Goffman points out: A person's performance of face work, extended by his tacit agreement to help others perform theirs, represents his willingness to abide by the ground rules of social interaction. Here is the hallmark of his socialization as an interactant. If he and the others were not socialized in this way, interaction in most societies and most situations would be a much more hazardous thing for feelings and faces. (1965. p. 31) As populations become more diverse through the process of social change (e.g. immigration and migration), the possibilities for cultural confusion over the rules of successful role playing in school or on the street can multiply dramatically. The interactionist perspective on socialization emphasizes how people become social actors and how they intuitively adopt the rules and rituals of interaction, such as face-work, that exist in their cultures. But it does not address how people acquire their notions of morality. We know that people generally learn their values and ideas of morality as young children in the family, but research on child development shows that the acquisition of morality is not a simple matter. Theories of Moral Development Throughout life we face a wide variety of moral dilemmas, which have a significant effect on our personalities. In consequence, social scientist have devoted considerable study to the processes through which people develop concepts of morality. Among the best known students of moral development are the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget under the American Social psychologists Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. Piaget stands with Freud as one of the most important and original researchers and writers on Child Development. In the 1920s he became concerned with how children understand their environment, how they view their world, and how they develop their own personal philosophies. To discover the mental processes unique to children, he used what was then an equally unique method: He spent long hours with a small number of children, simply having conversations with them. These open-ended discussions were devoted to getting at how children think. In this way Piaget discovered evidence for the existence of ideas that are foreign to the adult mind (Berman, 1997. Children's Social Consciousness and the Development of Social Responsiblity; D Elkind, 1970. Children and Adolescents: Interpretive Essays on Jean Piaget). For example, the child gives inanimate objects human motives and tends to see everything as existing for human purposes. In this phase of his research, Piaget also described the egocentric aspect of the child's mental world, which is illustrated by the tendency to invent words and expect others to understand them. In the later of phases of his research and writing. Piaget devoted his efforts to questions about children's moral reasoning---the way our children interpret the rules of games and judge the consequences of their actions. He observed that children form absolute notions of right and wrong very early in life, but they often cannot understand the ambiguities of adult roles until they approach adolescence. This line of investigation was continued by the American social psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, whose theory incorporates Piaget's views on the development of children's notions of morality. Kohlberg's theory of moral development emphasizes the cognitive aspects of moral behavior. (By cognitive we mean aspects of behavior that one thinks about and makes conscious choices about, rather than those that one engages in as a result of feelings or purely intuitive reactions. In a study of 57 Chicago children that began in 1957 and continued until the children wear young adults, Kohlberg presented the children with moral dilemmas such as the following: A husband is told that his wife needs a special kind of medicine if she is to survive a severe form of cancer. The medication is extremely expensive, and the husband can raise only half the needed funds. When he begs the inventor of the drug for a reduced price, he is rebuffed because the inventor wants to make a lot of money on his invention. The husband then considers stealing the medicine, and the child is asked whether the man should steal in order to save his wife. (Kohlberg & Gilligan, 1971. The Adolescent as a Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Post Conventional World. Daedalus) On the basis of children's answers to such dilemmas at different ages, Kohlberg proposed a theory of moral development consisting of three stages: (1) preconventional, in which the child acts out of desire for reward and fear of punishment; (2) conventional, in which the child's decisions are based on an understanding of right and wrong as embodied in the social rules or laws; and (3) postconventional, in which the individual develops a sense of relativity and can distinguish between social laws and moral principles. Subjects in the preconventional and conventional stages often immediately assume that stealing is wrong in the dilemma Kohlberg has posed, but postconventional thinking in older children causes them to debate the fairness of rules against stealing in view of the larger moral dilemma involved.  Gender and Moral Reasoning  Kohlberg's studies have been criticized for focusing too heavily on the behavior of boys and men from secure American families and not exploring possible alternative lines of moral reasoning that may prevail among females or people from different cultural and racial backgrounds. Pioneering work by social psychologist Carol Gilligan, an early collaborator of Kohlberg's has produced an impressive body of evidence that demonstrates the propensity of females to make moral choices on the basis of a somewhat different line of reasoning from that generally followed by males. Gilligan's research, and that of others who have followed her lead, shows that females are more likely than males to base moral judgments on considerations of caring as well as justice or law. More than their male counterparts, females tend to look for solutions to moral dilemmas that also serve to maintain relationships. Caring solutions that consider the needs of both sides are therefore more often invoked by females (A. Garcia, 1996 Moral Reasoning in Interactional Context: Strategic Uses of Care and Justice Arguments in Mediation Hearings. Sociological Inquiry, 66, 197-214: Gilligan, et al, (Eds.) 1998. Mapping the Moral Domain; D.J. Wren, 1997. Adolescent Females' "Voice" Changes Can Signal Difficulties for Teachers and Administrators. Adolescence, 32, 463-470). A good example of this difference appears in the work of D. Kay Johnston (1988), in which adolescent boys and girls were presented with dilemmas taken from Aesop's Fables. The young people were read a fable that presents a moral dilemma and then asked what they understood the problem to be and how they would solve it. In the fable of the dog in the manger (see Figure 1), the problem is clearly that the dog has taken sleeping space from the deserving ox. Some adolescents judge the situation purely in terms of which animal had the right to the space, and made statements like "It's [the ox's] ownership and nobody else had the right to it." Others sought a caring solution that would take into consideration both animals' needs, and made statements like "If there's enough hay, well, this is one way, split it. Like, if they could cooperate" (Adolescents' Solution to Dilemmas in Fables: Two Moral Orientations---Two Problem-Solving Strategies. C. Gilligan, et al (Eds.), Mapping the Moral Domain). FIGURE 1 The Dog in the Manger A dog, looking for a comfortable place to nap, came upon the empty stall of an ox. There it was quiet and cool, and the hay was soft. The dog, it was very tired, curled up on the hay and was soon fast asleep. A few hours later the ox lumbered in from the fields. He had worked hard and was looking forward to his dinner of hay. His heavy steps woke the dog, who jumped up in a great temper. As the ox came near the stall the dog snapped angrily, as if to bite him. Again and again the ox tried to reach his food, but each time he tried the dog stopped him. Moral Orientation of spontaneous Solution for the Dog in the Manger Fable, by Gender Orientation                                               Female                                            Male --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rights (justice)                                            12                                                  22 Response (caring)                                      15                                                    5 Both                                                              3                                                     1 The table in Figure 1 shows that boys were more likely than girls to give solutions based on rights, whereas girls were more likely than boys to choose solutions that emphasized caring. Some chose solutions that combined the two approaches. As Gilligan notes, "An innovative aspect of Johnston's design lay in the fact that after the children had stated and solved the fable problems, she asked, 'Is there another way to think about this problem?' About half of the children spontaneously switched orientation and solved the problem in the other mode (from Gilligan et al., 1988. p. xxi). On the basis of this and much subsequent research, Gilligan concludes that by age 11 most children can solve moral problems both in terms of rights (a justice approach) and in terms of response (a caring approach). The fact that a person adopts one approach in solving a problem does not mean that he or she does not know or appreciate others. Gilligan and others who studied moral development and gender point out that adolescence is a critical time in the development of morality and identity. However, in schools and elsewhere in society the message that comes across is that norms, values, and the most highly esteemed roles require that there be a "right way" to feel and think. Most often this right way is associated with the justice focus and the caring focus is silenced, along with the voices of girls and others to whom it appears to be a valuable alternative mode of moral reasoning (Wren, 1997). In adolescent girls and many minority students, this form of silencing can be detrimental to the development of the self in social situations. *MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 126-129* end In his book Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1965) Erving Goffman defines it, face is the positive social value a person claims for herself or himself by acting out a specific set of socially approved attributes (e.g., politeness, humor, strength, cuteness, sensitivity). Through his close observations of seemingly routine greetings, formulas of politeness, and the give-and-take of small talk. Goffman identified the rules of interaction whereby people seek to present a positive image of themselves, their "face." Once they have established a specific image, they seek to defend it against any possible threat that might cause them to "lose face." The concept of saving or losing face is found in cultures throughout the world. Indeed, in most Asian cultures the rules of face-work are even more elaborate than in the West. The importance of such unwritten rules of interaction is explored more fully in later posts. Most of us take it for granted that we want to maintain our self-respect and not lose face in social situations, but we do not give much thought to the actual interactions that serve to maintain face. Goffman explains: Just as the member of any group is expected to have self-respect, so also he is expected to sustain a standard of considerateness; he is expected to go to certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of others present, and he is expected to do this willingly and spontaneously because of emotional identification with the others and with their feelings. . . . The person who can witness another's humiliation and retain a cool countenance himself is said in our society to be "heartless," just as he who can unfeelingly participate in his own defacement is thought to be "shameless." (1965. p. 31) The way we apply these rules of face work in performing our roles differs according to the prestige of the people involved. When firing a junior clerk, for example, the boss does not go to nearly the same links to take into account the employee's feelings as he does when firing a vice president. Recent studies of role-playing among adolescents in inner-city communities draw on these insights. Where there is very little prestige of any kind for people to share, "fronting"---or pretending to play roles that one cannot really perform (e.g., great ballplayer, ladies' man) is extremely common. So, therefore, are potential threats to one's face. Face work in such communities---among gang members, for example, can become a deadly business, especially in situations where one senses disrespect (i.e., feels that one is being "dissed") (T. Williams and W. Kornblum, 1994. The Uptown Kids: Struggle and Hope in the Projects). emotions play a strong part in these interactions. When people believe that they have seriously lost face, their feelings can run extremely high, especially if their peers do not hurry in to defend them. Rapid social change it tends to heighten the difficulties people have in playing the rules they have been socialized to perform. As Goffman points out: A person's performance of face work, extended by his tacit agreement to help others perform theirs, represents his willingness to abide by the ground rules of social interaction. Here is the hallmark of his socialization as an interactant. If he and the others were not socialized in this way, interaction in most societies and most situations would be a much more hazardous thing for feelings and faces. (1965. p. 31) As populations become more diverse through the process of social change (e.g. immigration and migration), the possibilities for cultural confusion over the rules of successful role playing in school or on the street can multiply dramatically. The interactionist perspective on socialization emphasizes how people become social actors and how they intuitively adopt the rules and rituals of interaction, such as face-work, that exist in their cultures. But it does not address how people acquire their notions of morality. We know that people generally learn their values and ideas of morality as young children in the family, but research on child development shows that the acquisition of morality is not a simple matter. Theories of Moral Development Throughout life we face a wide variety of moral dilemmas, which have a significant effect on our personalities. In consequence, social scientist have devoted considerable study to the processes through which people develop concepts of morality. Among the best known students of moral development are the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget under the American Social psychologists Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. Piaget stands with Freud as one of the most important and original researchers and writers on Child Development. In the 1920s he became concerned with how children understand their environment, how they view their world, and how they develop their own personal philosophies. To discover the mental processes unique to children, he used what was then an equally unique method: He spent long hours with a small number of children, simply having conversations with them. These open-ended discussions were devoted to getting at how children think. In this way Piaget discovered evidence for the existence of ideas that are foreign to the adult mind (Berman, 1997. Children's Social Consciousness and the Development of Social Responsiblity; D Elkind, 1970. Children and Adolescents: Interpretive Essays on Jean Piaget). For example, the child gives inanimate objects human motives and tends to see everything as existing for human purposes. In this phase of his research, Piaget also described the egocentric aspect of the child's mental world, which is illustrated by the tendency to invent words and expect others to understand them. In the later of phases of his research and writing. Piaget devoted his efforts to questions about children's moral reasoning---the way our children interpret the rules of games and judge the consequences of their actions. He observed that children form absolute notions of right and wrong very early in life, but they often cannot understand the ambiguities of adult roles until they approach adolescence. This line of investigation was continued by the American social psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, whose theory incorporates Piaget's views on the development of children's notions of morality. Kohlberg's theory of moral development emphasizes the cognitive aspects of moral behavior. (By cognitive we mean aspects of behavior that one thinks about and makes conscious choices about, rather than those that one engages in as a result of feelings or purely intuitive reactions. In a study of 57 Chicago children that began in 1957 and continued until the children wear young adults, Kohlberg presented the children with moral dilemmas such as the following: A husband is told that his wife needs a special kind of medicine if she is to survive a severe form of cancer. The medication is extremely expensive, and the husband can raise only half the needed funds. When he begs the inventor of the drug for a reduced price, he is rebuffed because the inventor wants to make a lot of money on his invention. The husband then considers stealing the medicine, and the child is asked whether the man should steal in order to save his wife. (Kohlberg & Gilligan, 1971. The Adolescent as a Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Post Conventional World. Daedalus) On the basis of children's answers to such dilemmas at different ages, Kohlberg proposed a theory of moral development consisting of three stages: (1) preconventional, in which the child acts out of desire for reward and fear of punishment; (2) conventional, in which the child's decisions are based on an understanding of right and wrong as embodied in the social rules or laws; and (3) postconventional, in which the individual develops a sense of relativity and can distinguish between social laws and moral principles. Subjects in the preconventional and conventional stages often immediately assume that stealing is wrong in the dilemma Kohlberg has posed, but postconventional thinking in older children causes them to debate the fairness of rules against stealing in view of the larger moral dilemma involved.  Gender and Moral Reasoning  Kohlberg's studies have been criticized for focusing too heavily on the behavior of boys and men from secure American families and not exploring possible alternative lines of moral reasoning that may prevail among females or people from different cultural and racial backgrounds. Pioneering work by social psychologist Carol Gilligan, an early collaborator of Kohlberg's has produced an impressive body of evidence that demonstrates the propensity of females to make moral choices on the basis of a somewhat different line of reasoning from that generally followed by males. Gilligan's research, and that of others who have followed her lead, shows that females are more likely than males to base moral judgments on considerations of caring as well as justice or law. More than their male counterparts, females tend to look for solutions to moral dilemmas that also serve to maintain relationships. Caring solutions that consider the needs of both sides are therefore more often invoked by females (A. Garcia, 1996 Moral Reasoning in Interactional Context: Strategic Uses of Care and Justice Arguments in Mediation Hearings. Sociological Inquiry, 66, 197-214: Gilligan, et al, (Eds.) 1998. Mapping the Moral Domain; D.J. Wren, 1997. Adolescent Females' "Voice" Changes Can Signal Difficulties for Teachers and Administrators. Adolescence, 32, 463-470). A good example of this difference appears in the work of D. Kay Johnston (1988), in which adolescent boys and girls were presented with dilemmas taken from Aesop's Fables. The young people were read a fable that presents a moral dilemma and then asked what they understood the problem to be and how they would solve it. In the fable of the dog in the manger (see Figure 1), the problem is clearly that the dog has taken sleeping space from the deserving ox. Some adolescents judge the situation purely in terms of which animal had the right to the space, and made statements like "It's [the ox's] ownership and nobody else had the right to it." Others sought a caring solution that would take into consideration both animals' needs, and made statements like "If there's enough hay, well, this is one way, split it. Like, if they could cooperate" (Adolescents' Solution to Dilemmas in Fables: Two Moral Orientations---Two Problem-Solving Strategies. C. Gilligan, et al (Eds.), Mapping the Moral Domain). FIGURE 1 The Dog in the Manger A dog, looking for a comfortable place to nap, came upon the empty stall of an ox. There it was quiet and cool, and the hay was soft. The dog, it was very tired, curled up on the hay and was soon fast asleep. A few hours later the ox lumbered in from the fields. He had worked hard and was looking forward to his dinner of hay. His heavy steps woke the dog, who jumped up in a great temper. As the ox came near the stall the dog snapped angrily, as if to bite him. Again and again the ox tried to reach his food, but each time he tried the dog stopped him. Moral Orientation of spontaneous Solution for the Dog in the Manger Fable, by Gender Orientation                                               Female                                            Male --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rights (justice)                                            12                                                  22 Response (caring)                                      15                                                    5 Both                                                              3                                                     1 The table in Figure 1 shows that boys were more likely than girls to give solutions based on rights, whereas girls were more likely than boys to choose solutions that emphasized caring. Some chose solutions that combined the two approaches. As Gilligan notes, "An innovative aspect of Johnston's design lay in the fact that after the children had stated and solved the fable problems, she asked, 'Is there another way to think about this problem?' About half of the children spontaneously switched orientation and solved the problem in the other mode (from Gilligan et al., 1988. p. xxi). On the basis of this and much subsequent research, Gilligan concludes that by age 11 most children can solve moral problems both in terms of rights (a justice approach) and in terms of response (a caring approach). The fact that a person adopts one approach in solving a problem does not mean that he or she does not know or appreciate others. Gilligan and others who studied moral development and gender point out that adolescence is a critical time in the development of morality and identity. However, in schools and elsewhere in society the message that comes across is that norms, values, and the most highly esteemed roles require that there be a "right way" to feel and think. Most often this right way is associated with the justice focus and the caring focus is silenced, along with the voices of girls and others to whom it appears to be a valuable alternative mode of moral reasoning (Wren, 1997). In adolescent girls and many minority students, this form of silencing can be detrimental to the development of the self in social situations. *MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 126-129* end The Dog in the Manger A dog, looking for a comfortable place to nap, came upon the empty stall of an ox. There it was quiet and cool, and the hay was soft. The dog, it was very tired, curled up on the hay and was soon fast asleep. A few hours later the ox lumbered in from the fields. He had worked hard and was looking forward to his dinner of hay. His heavy steps woke the dog, who jumped up in a great temper. As the ox came near the stall the dog snapped angrily, as if to bite him. Again and again the ox tried to reach his food, but each time he tried the dog stopped him. Moral Orientation of spontaneous Solution for the Dog in the Manger Fable, by Gender Orientation                                               Female                                            Male --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rights (justice)                                            12                                                  22 Response (caring)                                      15                                                    5 Both                                                              3                                                     1