Wslee_6's List: Sociology

• new middle class
• squeezed
• failing infrastructure
• corruption
• office workers staging flashmobs in their neat, pressed shirts
• these too
• what does middle class mean in the developing world
• ess than two dollars
• workforce
• more stratified
• developing middle class
• $4 and $13 a day.
• But in world terms they're not really middle class at all
• key markers were
• insurance
• have a TV
• savings
• 2% of their income on
• entertainment
• better access to water, sanitation and electricity
• mainly factory workers
• but they're not.
• service sector
• "great doubling" of the world's workforce
• would recreate a "proletariat" at the periphery of capitalism
• they are moving steadily towards stratification and more service-oriented work
• "comfortable" does not spring to mind
• just as its rich-world counterpart did in the 1960s and 70s
• What was unthinkable 20 years ago is now becoming tangible: that the real incomes of skilled workers, knowledge workers and managers in "developing countries" are overlapping with those at the bottom of the heap in western society.
• Go to the reality of being "new middle class" in Brazil, Morocco or Indonesia and the word
• seeing your income leach away into the pockets of all kinds of corrupt officials, middlemen and grey market people.
• "non-Marxian world"
• in which class struggle becomes less useful
• logical thing to do is migrate
• signal issues

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• inequality with race and ethnicity
• Human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability.
• caring about human dignity
• improve the species generally
• Why do we not blame the super-rich with their tax loopholes and offshore banking accounts?
• What happened to the proud idea that it is the duty of all to sacrifice comfort for the common good? 
• Enlightenment humanism.

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• homosexuality is a “sexual addiction and dependency,” not a condition to be socially accepted and celebrated.
• vehemently insist that this journey I've taken is harmful.
• lifetime
• and not a harmful one.
• Society should not be expected to make any accommodations for those who therefore refuse to take this journey, and remain trapped in the self-serving cycle of their own dysfunctional sexual behaviors
• why would the gay activists be trying to outlaw professional means of therapy and counseling for the pursuit of freedom from unwanted homosexual behaviors, if they truly embrace the “tolerance” that they preach?
• What is it that they are actually so afraid of?
• fear the most
• breakdown and destruction of the inward lies that form the foundation of their own “gay” identity
• everything that the “gay rights” movement has been built upon
• That is why
• dysfunctional sexual behavior is “who” they are
• only way
• remain secure
• makes
• different
• this particular
• world around them as the real problem
• will often see the
• “Wonderful Counselor”
• where avoiding offense is given a higher standard than the concept we have of love itself
• play upon it well to further advance their movement
• gay activists know all of this, of course
• To be honest, I believe that every homosexual already inwardly knows that what they are doing is inherently contradictory to “who” God created them to be.

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• does not justify
• pride and an honor
• Republic
• familial stability
• types of couples
• but serve the well-being of children and families. 
• not discriminations
• not the recognition of love between two people
• an institution which protects the dignity of parents and children
• regulates parentage
• harm endured by the child
•  Adoption is meant to give a family to a child, not to give a child to adults, whether they be heterosexuals or homosexuals! 
• superiority of "gender"
• social construct freely accepted or refused by the subjects,
• Gender theory was born in the US at the end of the 80s.
• over sex, fruit of an always arbitrary biology
• true system, where reality must become asexual,
• freedom
• recombining gender.
• choosing
• so-called liberation.
• for children, being raised by a different-sex couple is not the same as being raised by a same-sex couple. 

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• ideas and behaviour
• decline
• medieval society
• three
• production of goods
• capitalist
• profit
• wage labour
• bureaucratic
• centralised nation state
• extension
• technical
• scientific
• traditional
• challenge
• thought by rationality
• product
• cultural aspect
• origin
• enlightenment
• discover objective knowledge
• evidence
• scientific method
• describe and explain,
• for the better the human condition
• purpose
• progress
• Giddens,
• project of modernity
• should
• valid or invalid knowledge
• no such thing
• knowledge
• control
• liberation
• inadmissible
• knowledge
• capable of proof
• positivism
• evidence
• social analysi
• relativist positio
• An aspect
• deconstruction
• reveal
• contradictions and assumptions
• affirm the impossibility of producing any demonstrably valid knowledge at all.
• places human beings at the centre of the production and application of knowledge
• subject-centeredness
• no objective truth
• multiple
• reality
• none of which
• privilege
• knowledge produces people
• multiple realities
• controls who we are, what we think and what we do
• narratives
• not the authors of our own stories
• socialisation
• can be used in social planning
• incredulity toward metanarrative
• decline of meta-narratives
• two main reasons
• don't even try to be scientific

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• structural functionalism
• functional imperatives
• AGIL syste
• adaptive
• achieves
• goal-attainmen
• defines
• integrative
• Latency
• behavioral
• personality
• social
• cultural
• starting with the behavioral organism and building to the cultural system
• creation
• social order
• interdependent
• equilibrium
• Actors
• relatively devoid of thought
• collection of statuses and roles
• role of norms and values
• socialization
• instills within
• individuals
• society
• pursue their own self-interest while still serving the interests of the system as a whole
• Much as
• latent and manifest functions
• latent and manifest interests
• unconscious and conscious interests

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• psychiatrist Nathaniel S. Lehrman
• Task Force on Religion and Mental Health
• still unable to find the 'gay gene

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• higher standard of living than the lower-middle class
• high degree of autonomy
• upper-middle
• lower-middle
• differences
• While
• groups overlap
• defined
• modern
• upper-middle
• income
• occupation
• over what
• some debate
• education
• highly educated, salaried professionals
• whose work is largely self-directed
• white-collar
• most common professions
• high degree of autonomy
• instruction
• conceptualizing
• consulting
• Educational attainment
• household incomes
• influential in setting trends and shaping public opinion
• powerful
• more economically secure
• high status in corporations
• Holding advanced degrees
• top 20%
• from economic downturns
• insulate

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• like to blame the one-percenters
• trickle-down financial boosts
• cannot
• physically buy and use enough goods and services
• middle class has a big role in the problem and helps perpetuate it in a number of ways
• demand
• People are cost conscious
• yet, that push for lower prices is a major driver of income inequality
• and labor is one of the easiest areas in which to do this
• people must live in poverty
• to keep the burgers low enough so the price-sensitive consumers won’t go elsewhere to buy their burgers.
• wages overseas are miniscule
• because
• because companies aren’t forced to meet safety and environmental standards
• put people in the U.S. out of jobs
• price
• poverty
• misery
• death
• We want stocks to keep rising
• Those ordinary middle class people want their 401(k)s or pension funds to keep improving, even when things get tight
• That translates into jobs that get cut
• Patronize companies that value employees and pay enough money so people can live

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• belief
• people and/or phenomenon
• underlying and   unchanging 'essence'
• three
• netic,
• causes as explanations for human social   behaviour.
• biological,   physiological and, increasingly, ge
• biology
• inevitable due to hormonal differences.
• generalised statements
• that make no reference to cross-cultural   differences or
• previous historical variation.
• universalism
• unified   concepts
• white   disabled wome
• experiences
• highly problematic
• ghly mixed or variable
• experiences of white, disabled, women is   not unified but h
• used   as a political strategy
• allegation of the worst crim
• may be
• charge of
• very adversarial way
• used in
• within academic   writing
• do not always delve into the reasons why a particular essentialist
• critiques of essentialism
• assertion   is made
• but also to sociological overdeterminism
• Sociological overdeterminism
• discursive essentialism

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• but rather
• not of the ambition of personal individualis
• esponsibilities of cohesive communal structures
• sets up communities
• greater good,
• nationalistic societ
• inherent rights a government owes to an individua
• nherent responsibilities an individual owes to their community.
• ocio-political structure, rather than an e
• conomic theory
• not Communism
• national interest" amongst the splintered cultures
• national hegemony
• pragmatic
• ideological communitarian veil over Singaporean democracy
• redirect cultural and political development towards traditional values.
• 'communitarianist hegemony.

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• perpetuated through social institutions
• shaped and structured by the powerful
• does not just happen
• as used by the power elite
• through institutional practice, accepted by the subordinate categories
• who then operate within the field
• vying for less subordinate positio
• within a frame they have not created and that maintains and reproduces their subordinate status
• It does not threaten Miller’s authority and it reinforces her status as dominant

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• within

• Wenzhou
• yet still see religion and its symbols as affronts to the party’s atheism.
• Under Mao Zedong, freedom of belief was enshrined in the new Communist constitution
• Yet perhaps as many as half a million Christians were harried to death,
• allowed more religious freedom
• 57,000
• “Three Self” churches
• self-supporting, self-governed and self-propagating
• profess loyalty to China
• egistered with the governmen
• unregistered “house churches”
• Christianity is hard to control in China,
• spreading rapidly
• infiltrating the party’s own rank
• e world’s largest explicitly atheist organisation, might follow its sister parties in Vietnam and Cuba and allow members to embrace a dogma other than—even higher than—that of Marx
• Any shift in official thinking
• big ramifications
• worries many official
• “opium of the people”
• dangerous perverter of loyalty
• Christianity, in particular, is associated with 19th-century Western imperial encroachment;
• thus the party’s treatment of Christians offers a sharp insight into the way its attitudes are changing
• 10% a year
• 250m Christians by around 2030
• similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire
• grew most quickly
• countryside
• belief that Christianity could heal instead
• now that belief in Marxism is declining
• it offers a complete moral system with a transcendental source
• in an age of convulsive change
• see it as the force behind
• civil society
• the development of social justice
• rule of law
• Association of Human Rights Attorneys for Chinese Christians
• probably half are Christians
• toughness
• “persecution is clearly no longer the norm”,
• That is largely because many officials see advantages in Christianity’s growth.
• wealthy business folk in Wenzhou have become believers
• Rare is the official anywhere in China who would want to scare away investors from his area
• find that
• turn a blind eye
• Christians are good citizens
• precious stability
• party’s monopoly of power
• maintenance of stability
• even though it still frets about encouraging an alternative source of authority
• religion would probably still be around when concepts of class and state had vanished.
• , selfless activism
• age of hedonism and corruption
• t has persuaded the regime that Christians are not out to overthrow it.
• increasing religiosity of ordinary Chinese
• Communist Party of Vietnam in 1990 to allow its members to be religious believers.
• 3m-4m party members had become Christians.
• growth of house churches may also provide more room for the growth of quasi-Christian cults
• such cults
• Both pastors came of age during—and took part in the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the crushing of which led to their disillusionment with the party and the spiritual search that led to their conversion.
• drafting a document that he hopes will become the country’s first law on religion
• At present religion is governed only by administrative regulation
• party should allow its members to be believers
• age of toleration
• “religious free market”.
• acts of defiance are increasing
• politely
• her freedom of belief was protected by the Chinese constitution
• more socially (and sometimes politically) engaged
• New Left
• etain some of the egalitarian parts of Maoism
• Oxford
• New Confucians
• classic economic and political liberals
• New Liberals
• Christian intellectuals
• not the state
• centre of the Chinese nation is the people
• culture should be pluralistic
• might harm the Christian church in two ways
• religious freedom
• institutionalised
• wealthy and hence corrup
• may become a feebler part of society in a climate of toleration
• If we get full religious freedom, then the church is finished.”

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• all had deviance
• must be useful
• for the survival
• did this mean it was somehow needed for the society’s survival?
• implications were startling
• with nothing more serious to compare to, minor deviations would suddenly seem more troubling
• “society of saints thesis.”
• where crimes, such as murder, rape, robbery, and theft no longer occurred, minor deviations such as rudeness or lying or calling in sick to work when you’re not really sick would start to seem way more serious to people.
• Did they too need mutations (or deviants) to help them adapt to changing conditions so that they could survive?
• experiment with new ways of living, thinking, and behaving
• attitudes toward such things as women, racial minorities, tattoos, divorce, etc., would be frozen in time, unable to evolve or change because there would be no one willing to push the boundaries and point the way toward other, better ways of living
• new morality and faith in reason
• racial equality
• women’s rights
• beliefs about science
• their deviant behaviors ushered in much needed reform
• arguably worse place
• , we can no longer view deviance as an unwanted, parasitic, destructive force in society.
• According to Durkheim, a zero or near-zero rate of deviance would be a sure sign of trouble to come
• would also mean less innovation and social change
• f a society managed to eliminate all deviance, it would also eliminate all innovation
• The more we try to rid ourselves of unwanted deviance (e.g., crime) by reducing people’s freedoms and controlling and punishing their behavior the more we may also be suppressing the positive, innovative deviance that society needs to adapt and survive in the long run.

  • This is a very dangerous idea! It downplays the consequence and inherent evilness of sin! I think in our society we should look to allow only deviance that brings us closer to morality, such as being anti-racism in a racist society.

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• base determines the superstructure in a one-way relationship
• totality
• economic structure of society
• on which
• arises
• egal and political superstructure,
• relations of production
• real foundation
• to whic
• correspond definite forms of consciousnes
• It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
• material
• productive forces of society
• come into conflict
• existing relations of production

  • both productive FORCES and RELATIONS fall under Base.
• changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure
• these relations turn into their fetters
• ideological forms
• whole
• productive relationships
• varies and develops unevenly
• prefers a form of structuralism over a base and superstructure model of society
• eciprocal in causality
• neither economic rationality nor normative ideas rule
• civil society
• political society
• still informed by the values of the base
• consensus-creating elements
• contribute to hegemony
• establish these values
• enforce

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• prostitutes for the capitalists
• slaving away on an hourly wage
• commodity
• designated economic value
• merely renting our bodies and abilities
• commodity value
• urther alienated
• new forms of wage slavery
• being valued in terms of productivity, output, and all the other economic equations of degradation,
• bounty of being the ‘affluent society’
• scared the mind
• left us
• further alienate and mediate our existence

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• Since religion is an important component of the social actors' world-view, religious beliefs can direct social action, and hence bring about social change

  • Why direct social action straightaway leads to social change?? Then does it lead to social conflict before leading to social change?
• conducive
• capitalist development
• no absolute answer to the question of the role of religion in preventing or furthering change in society.
• depends on the circumstances
• often is one of the main (and sometimes the only) available channels to bring about a social revolution.
• Gramsci's proletarian intellectuals

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• one must belong to a “race”.

  • The Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) model has outlived its usefulness
    Why does Singapore still insist on categorising people by race into these four buckets?
    Some have suggested that the most important reason is for HDB ethnic quotas. But in a global city it makes little sense to maintain ethnic quotas in HDB housing estates, when little ethnic enclaves have formed all over the country, for instance with rich North Indians in Tanjong Rhu and the East Coast.
    Others suggest that social welfare and self-help groups, like Mendaki and Sinda, were founded on ethnic lines and must continue this way. Without ethnic classifications, so the argument goes, who would help the poor Malays and Indians?
    
    I have two critiques of this argument. First, there are many more civil society organisations operating in Singapore today without an ethnic mandate. Why doesn’t Singapore, as a global city, start to channel charity money towards them rather than race-based groups?
    
    Second, immigration has dented the analytical underpinnings of these groupings. In particular, let’s consider “Indians”. A little-known fact in Singapore is that Indians are now the richest ethnic group here in terms of resident household incomes. Many people assume the Chinese are. But from 2000 to 2010 the Indians’ average monthly household income recorded nominal average annual growth of 5.2% to reach $7,664, overtaking the Chinese (3.4% and S$7,326 respectively). 4
    
    Using a traditional CMIO lens, one might conclude that the Indians in Singapore have been developing very rapidly. However, although the data is not readily available, I suspect that much of this growth is due to high-income Indian immigrants who have taken Singapore citizenship, rather than any marked organic improvement in the fortunes of Singaporean Indians.
    
    These two groups—new Indian immigrants and older Singaporean Indians—are infinitely different. The fact that they are clobbered together and analysed is a reductionist move that can only lead to poor policy-formulation.
    
    The CMIO model then has become a drag on Singapore’s efforts to create a global city. It immediately limits the identities of locals while occasionally enforcing parochial notions of what a Singaporean should be. Perhaps it is better then to dispense with the CMIO model for one that acknowledges the demographics of a global city, with all its cultural and linguistic diversity.
• comes with a caveat
• Singaporean identity
• ethnicity
• unrealistic if ethnic identity already commonly precedes a Singaporean one
• should move beyond identifying Singaporeans according to their ethnic group first,
• adopt and conform to a central common identity in a homogenous society.
• Assimilation
• boundaries among various ethnic groups are preserved
• differs from integration
• to bring them together
• integration of the “races”
• impediment in assimilating
• if being Singaporean
• necessitates the categorisation into a racial group in the first place.

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