Critical reflection essay

Assessment 1 Critical Reflection Essay (Marked out of 100, 40% of total subject mark, 1200 words)

Instructions:

• Write two separate reflections (600 words each) on each topic covered in Tutorial 3 and 4. Your reflection should include:a critical reflection on social issues discussed in the two tutorials using relevant sociological perspectives covered in lectures and readings;a critical reflection on how you may be complicit in contributing to the social issue and how you may consider your responsibilities in addressing the social problems. Use appropriate examples.
• Academic references MUST be cited in the text using the Harvard Style of referencing (NO FOOTNOTES). References list MUST be included at the end of your reflection.

All rest details have been attached in the attachments. Thank you

SOC103 Introduction to Sociology

Globalisation in everyday life

Globalisation in everyday life

• Everything is connected to everything
• The world is becoming increasingly unified or interconnected
• Far flung individuals bound together
• Thought experiment: your savings in the bank, brand names you use

Babel

• Movie: Babel
  multiple stories across 4 countries (US, Morocco, Mexico and Japan)
  interconnectedness of people’s lives in a globalised world

Features of Globalisation

Features of globalisation

• Compression of the world – Roland Robertson 1968, Anthony Giddens 1990, David Harvey 1990

– Complex interrelationships – Increase in interconnectedness – Time-space compression

• Network society – Manuel Castells 2000, Anthony Giddens
  David Harvey 1990

– information and communications technologies – Virtual culture, post-industrial

• Privatisation and deregulation – Anthony Giddens 1990, Manuel Castells 2000

– Disembeddedness – Reflexivity –

Neoliberalism

Global capitalism

• World systems theory by Immanuel Wallerstein 1979
• Transnational companies, MNCs, international companies
• Rely on foreign labour and foreign production
• Sell in world markets (e.g. China and India)
• Autonomous from national governments
• Flexible with regards to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption

‘McDonaldisation’, ‘Starbuckisation’

• George Ritzer 1996
• Spread of American business values and culture – rationality, efficiency, profitability, calculability
• Homogenisation effect of globalisation
• Unidirectional from the west
• Cultural imperialism

Global capitalism: fantasy vs reality

• Fantasy: the world is your marketplace?
• Reality: international divisions of wealth and labour (Naomi Klein 2000, No Logo), regionalism
• Fantasy: autonomy and freedoms from nation-state constraints, borderless world? Kenichi Ohmae’s The Borderless World 1991 and The End of the Nation State 1995
• Reality: Governments still regulate transnational corporate activity. Hirst and Thompson 1999, Globalisation in Question

Neoliberalism

• Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
• Reduce government economic regulation
• Privatise state’s activities
• Cut down on expenditure on public services
• High priority on market-based principles not just in business world but different aspects of social life
• Commodification – turning social interaction into objects that can be transacted in the marketplace
• Intense emphasis on profitisation
• Sky is the limit – neoliberalism is globalising, globalisation provides economic impetus for neoliberal pursuits

Americanisation

• Americanisation, American hegemony (Noam Chomsky 1999)
• Take over international economy – impose tariffs, subsidise American industries, spread neoliberalism
• Politics, economics, culture, social life
• Islamphobia

Consumption

Sociology of consumption

• Material perspective
  who consumes what?
  structures and institutions
  expansion of capitalist production
  colonial empires
  modernity
  socio-economic developments
  class differences; unequal access to goods

Sociology of consumption

• Material perspective

‘American shoppers snap up about 5 times more clothing now than they did in 1980. In 2018, that averaged 68 garments a year …. As a whole, the

world’s citizens acquire some 80 billion apparel items annually …’

– The Wall Street Journal, The High Price of Fast Fashion, 29 August 2019

each. ‘Britons Most buy of 3 it billion end up items being of clothing thrown away’ every year – an average of 50 pieces – Jessica Williams (2004) 50 facts that should change the world. USA: Icon Books Ltd

Sweat shops

• Nike, Adidas, Puma, Bonds, Just Jeans – wear any of these brands?

Source:

http://www.oxfam.org.au/explore/workers-rights/are-your-clothes-made-in-sweatshops

• In India, there are 10.1 million child labourers (UNICEF India)
• One child labourer said, “I used to work for 12 to 14 hours in a day.. I was not paid a single penny for a year. A week after joining, I was hung upside down for a minor fault. Whenever I sustained injuries while using a sharp knife to turn the carpet knots, I was denied medical care. Instead my employer used to fill the wound with matchstick powder and burn. My flesh and skin used to burn.”
  Jessica Williams (2004) 50 facts that should change the world. USA: Icon Books Ltd

Source:

http://www.childjustice.org/html/issue605_pr.htm

Culture as meaning-making

• As a process of meaning-making
• Operating in different contexts
• Evident in their social practices and social products
• Account for different meanings
• Examine effects in social life

Sociology of consumption

• Cultural perspective

– ‘doing

coffee

’

– construction of identities

– social meanings of consuming

coffee

Consumption as ideological manipulation

• Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (1972)
• ‘Culture industry’, production of consumption
• Industralisation and commercialisation of culture
• Produces mass culture, threatening individuality and creativity
• Consumers are perceived as passive and easily manipulated
• Irony: we turn to consumerism to define ourselves but consumer goods are mass produced

[Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit.

Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?

Andy: No, no, nothing. Y’know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same

to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about all this stuff

Miranda: This… ‘stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with

you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002,

Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets?…And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

‘Consumer culture’

• Mike Featherstone (1991)
• Instrumental calculation of all aspects of life is possible
• Everything has a calculable logic
• Cultural traditions are quantifiable
• Non-culture? Post-culture?
• Exchange-value triumphs over use-value of goods

Consumption as emulation

• Thorstein Veblen (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class
• Leisure class relies on ‘conspicuous consumption’ to demonstrate wealth
• Fashion as a mark of ‘taste’ and social differentiation
• “our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance” (Veblen 1899, p19)
• Irony: fashion is an intriguing mix of mimesis and individualism (Cameron 2000)

Consumption as social

distinction

• Pierre Bourdieu (1979) Distinction: A social critique of the

judgment of taste

• Social class determines ‘good taste’
• But…“it must never be forgotten that the working class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated ‘aesthetic’ which is constantly
  bliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics…”(Bourdieu 1979, p 41)
• Social distinction marked in everyday things such as food,
  furniture etc.

Consumption as self-expression

• Consumption, like traffic, is a system of meaning (Jean Baudrillard)
• Focus on the mode of consumption, not as end product of economic production but as practice
• Meanings are actively produced through manipulation of signs
• Identities are actively formed and performed through consumption
• Consumers not cultural dupes, but active and reflexive

Consumption as social

• Arjun Appadurai (1988) The Social Life of Things Commodities
• Commodities are inherently social
• Commodities have their own biography
• Commodified, recommodified, decommodified
• Enters and re-enters the commodity sphere

Consumption as social

• The shopping centre

Le Bon Marche, Paris 1838

See you next week for lecture on Class, Race and Inequalities

Dr Quah Ee Ling Sharon sharonq@uow.edu.au

SOC103 Introduction to Sociology

Class, Race and Inequality

Sociology and Social Inequality

Theories on inequality

Global inequality

Race, Class and Inequality

Racism

s

Social mobility and reproduction

Sociology and social inequality

• What kind of questions do sociologists ask about social inequality?
• Why are sociologists interested in understanding social inequality?

Sociology and social inequality

• What is social inequality?

– Social inequality refers to the unequal distribution of

social, political and economic resources within a social collective (van Krieken et al 2016)

– Not just economic resources

– Social honour

Theories on inequality

• Karl Marx and class
• Max Weber and status
• Durkheim and solidarity

Source: International Movement for Monetary Reforms

Marx and Class

Source: gloomyfaerie

Marx and Class

• Historical materialism
• ‘material’ reality of the human experience
• ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life’ (Marx 1859)
• Free will constrained by economic arrangements

Class privileges

Did you do these six activities today?

Class consciousness

• Surplus value

– ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for

managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx & Engels 1967, p. 82)

• False consciousness
• Class consciousness – a class in itself to a class for itself

Source: ABC

Criticisms and legacy of Marx’s class theory

• Overemphasis on material conditions
• No emphasis on other social categories such as race, gender, sexuality, nationality
• Overemphasis on ultimate goal of communism
• Relevance in the current context

Source: takepart.com

Weber and Status

• Class – wealth and income
• Status – social honour
• Party – political organisation and influence
• 4 social classes

– Bourgeoisie – petty bourgeoisie – salaried non-manual workers – manual workers

Source: World Wide Weber

Weber and Status

Source: Time Magazine

Durkheim and Solidarity

• Solidarity refers to the way a society manages conflict
• Tangible and intangible things that enable ‘mutual dependence’ that in turn holds or binds a society together ‘What is needed if social order is to reign is that the mass of men be contented with their lot. But what is needed for them to be content is not that they have more or less, but that they be convinced that they have no right to more.’

(cited in Aron 1977, p. 91)

What is missing in all three DWM’s conceptualisations on class?

• Historical context – colonialism
• Interconnected link between race and capitalism
• Genders and sexualities

Source: Guardian

Source: Oxfam 2020

Global inequality

Sociologists explain with two main theories:

1. Modernisation theory (Max Weber, Talcott Parsons)
   dominant paradigm in 1950s and 1960s
   poor societies lack capital to invest in western methods
   poor countries are dysfunctional
   need to transfer western culture and capital to these dysfunctional countries

1. Dependency theory (Karl Marx, Immanuel Wallerstein)
2. modernisation theory is flawed
3. Industrial revolution and wealth accumulation occurred in the west
4. neocolonialism
5. exploitation continues and takes the form of substantial foreign investment
6. don’t blame the victim, focus on addressing the exploitation

Race, Class and Inequality

Source: The Yorker

Race and racism

Hickey (2016)

• Race understood as a socio-political construct using
  bservable traits to classify and stratify people (Smedley & Smedley 2005)
• Race understood as being racialised for the purpose
  f exclusion and discrimination (Meekosha & Pettman 1991)
• White as invisible race
• Whiteness as dominance

Race and racism

Hickey (2016)

• Racialisation – process which others are ‘raced’ (Ibrahim 2004)
• Power of dominant group maintained through institutional power and everyday social habits (Bourdieu 1979)
• Racism – discrimination and mistreatment of a group
  r individual based on ascribed racialised identity (Modood et al 2002)

Racism

Everyday racism

‘systematic, recurrent, familiar practices’ where ‘socialised racist notions are integrated into everyday practices and thereby actualise and reinforce underlying racial and ethnic relations’ (Essed 1991: 145)

white innocence (Wekker 2016)

white fragility (DiAngelo 2019)

two-fold violence (van Diik 1992)

Everyday racism

Source: ABC The Drum’s Twitter page

Institutional racism

‘those patterns, procedures, practices, and policies that operate within social institutions so as to consistently penalise, disadvantage, and exploit individuals who are members of non-white racial/ ethnic groups’ (Better 2008:11)

Institutional racism

• When unequal and unjust racial relations manifest at multiple sites such as the politics, public service, law enforcement, healthcare, education and workplace
• when there are mechanisms and systems in place to ensure that the majority remains powerful and minority stays subordinate
• when there is a lack of political will, deliberate affirmative decisions and meaningful policies to disrupt dominance of majority representation in positions of power
• when there is a constant need for the minority to explain themselves, prove they are good enough and display model minority characteristics
• when there is the expectation for the minority to adopt majority culture and conceal their own cultures
• when there is no anti-racism, anti-discrimination framework to police different forms of racial violence
• when there is no avenue for the minority to seek redress when the minority are finally outraged enough to resist, they are expected to be the face of diversity and labour over the fight for a more even playing field

Institutional racism

Institutional Racism

Source:Jan Fran’s Twitter page

Social mobility and reproduction

• Bourdieu and capital
• Economic capital – material wealth
• Social capital – social networks, source of support
• Cultural capital – cultural values associated with consumption patterns, lifestyle choices, social attributes and formal qualifications
• Symbolic capital – legitimation, respect

Social mobility and reproduction

• Social mobility – movement of individuals up or down the hierarchy of inequality
• Intragenerational mobility – within a generation
• Intergenerational mobility – across two or more generations
• Ascribed and achieved social mobility

Race, Class and Inequality in Australian society

Source: SBS The Feed

Next week: Watch recorded lecture on Migration and Forced Displacement

Dr Quah Ee Ling Sharon sharonq@uow.edu.au