SOCI 3401 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: No Alternative, Extortion, Skill
Document Summary
These questions are best answered through the rubric of ideology . Sociologists define ideologies as belief systems that function to justify inequality. Imagination matters because without it, nobody would question inequality. Much of what people take to be true about the world is built on individual, agreed-upon definitions of reality. When it comes to the reproduction of inequality, some definitions of reality matter more than others. These definitions underlie the beliefs that lead people to perpetuate inequality, most of the time unintentionally. The kind of definition that all inequality is founded on relies on the idea that there are different kinds of people, some deserving and others not deserving rights based on nothing but ideas. For any exploitation to occur, one group has to be powerful enough to dominate another. The point is that creating inequality requires defining groups of people as different in some significant way.