SOC102H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Social Inequality, Christopher Jencks, Inheritance
Document Summary
Max weber: people have different life chances. People have different opportunities to become wealthy, powerful, respected. Sociologists interested in: how natural inequalities (gender) become social inequalities, how social inequalities are constructed (income hierarchy), and their social consequences. Our life chances are intersectional and conditional: disadvantages interact and multiply (conditionality conditions under which particular traits combine to produce social disadvantage) Once heroes" subdue their historic villains, new villains inevitably arise. 1: people who enjoy advantages are not all villains. Focuses on how people move around, how things flow from person to person (jobs, ideas, gossip) Concerned with traffic" in social life, not backcloth" (underlying infrastructure that enables and constrains traffic) Justifications developed by advantaged groups to maintain advantages. Ideologies are the consequence of inequality, not the cause of inequality. Societies like sweden, finland, norway prove that people can be different but remain equal.
