In some ways, a kind of ethnocentrism operates not only among societies but often within them as well. In complex societies, dominant groups often act as though the cultural ideas they use to construct reality apply to everyone. Heterosexuals, for example, act as though they can assume everyone they encounter is also heterosexual and carry on conversations as though that assumption were true. In similar ways, whites, Christians, men, and the middle class often act as though their outlooks and ways of life are at the center of the social universe and represent human experience in general.
Most businesses in the United States, for example, routinely make little or no allowance for holidays not associated with being white, Christian, and of northern European background.24 This pattern occurs in the larger public world as well. The routine use of the phrase “Have a Merry Christmas” in casual public talk, for example, reflects an assumption that everyone celebrates or values Christmas. Is a Jew, Buddhist, or atheist supposed to smile in return and say, “Thanks! Merry Christmas to you, too”?
In this sense, every complex society includes a wide range of socially constructed realities, but some dominate and come to stand for the whole. The result is a kind of internal ethnocentrism in which diversity and difference are treated as invisible or, when acknowledged at all, as inferior.
The concept of ethnocentrism reveals how every culture limits the view of people who participate in it. But it also points to a basic paradox of culture and how we live and use it. ‘Ethnocentrism’ is, after all, just a word and as such is a part of culture, the very thing it helps us see more clearly. In this sense, culture can take us in two directions at once. It can take us inward, into the limited space of our particular cultural box. But as tools for sociological practice, such concepts as culture and ethnocentrism also point to the box itself and toward the powerful experience of imagining ourselves inside and outside at the same time.
3
The Structures of Social Life
I was in my second year of graduate school when I made my first trip to San Miguel de Allende, a small town nestled on a mountainside in central Mexico. The trip was the closest I’d come to a real vacation in a long time—weeks with no responsibilities, day after day of long walks, good books to read, sleep whenever I wanted it, and freely taking in the smells, tastes, sights, and sounds of open-air markets, sunbaked adobe, and beautiful gardens.
After several weeks of this, I had a strange experience. For some reason that I no longer recall, I wanted to know what time it was and realized that I had stopped wearing my watch. I knew it was afternoon and not evening, but beyond that, I had no clue. Since I hadn’t been doing anything that required me to know the time, I had lost my sense of it. At first, I was fascinated by this experience of being timeless, but then I realized that I also didn’t know what day of the week it was, even after I sat for a while trying to figure it out. This was a bit disturbing, as if I were lost, like taking a subway to the usual stop and coming up into a neighborhood I’d never seen before.
In a social sense, ‘lost’ is what I was. Certain rhythms and cycles in life seem natural and built into our experience as human beings. The passing of the seasons is one, as is the difference between night and day and the circadian rhythms that regulate when we feel drawn to sleep or wakefulness. But knowing the time of day by the clock is not one of them.
Clock time matters primarily because we use it to orient ourselves to what other people expect of us. It is a human creation and a purely arbitrary one at that. Nothing in nature corresponds to seconds, minutes, or hours. They are nothing more than a made-up set of categories. Nor does anything in nature correspond to weeks or the need to distinguish between a Monday and a Thursday or a Sunday. Time is useful because it contributes to a sense of structure as we participate in social life.1 I became ‘time lost’ in the mountains of Mexico because I was no longer in a social situation where my daily rhythms depended on knowing the day or anything more than the roughest sense of the hour (and certainly not the minute). I was disconnected from time as part of a larger disconnection from my old social environment back at school in Michigan. I felt lost and disconnected because I had not yet adjusted to a new sense of structure in which time and day hardly mattered.
The concept of structure is a key to sociological practice, because it points to a great deal of what gives social life its familiar and predictable shape.2 Social structure organizes human life around relationships that connect people to one another and to systems as well as connecting entire systems to one another. When we go through a dramatic change in our lives—such as starting college or our first job, ending a long-term relationship, or experiencing the death of someone close to us—we often feel lost. This feeling of being lost occurs in part because we’ve changed our structural position in relation to one or more social systems and changed our connection to all the patterns of social life that go with that position.
When I was a high school senior, for example, I knew what it meant to be who I was in that system, but when I went off to college, I didn’t know for sure where I was socially or who I was in relation to things. The same is true of long-term relationships. ‘Partner’ or ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ is a position that anchors us, but with a breakup, we lose our hold on it and experience not only having a loss but also being lost because, in a very real sense, we are.
Social structure has two meanings. In the first, it is about how relationships are organized at all levels of social life. We can look, for example, at how individuals are connected to one another as they participate in families and work. The relationships among members of a basketball team are part of the team’s structure. Structural relationships can also connect whole systems to other systems, as between two competing teams or two nations in the world economy. The relationships have different kinds of structural characteristics that produce different kinds of consequences, which is why we’re interested in them as part of sociological practice.
In the second sense, social structure refers to various kinds of distributions in social systems. Every system includes valued resources and rewards that are distributed in one way or another. In the United States, for example, most of the wealth is owned by a small elite, and the gap between them and everyone else is growing. The structural distribution of political power is also very unequal, even though the political system is considered democratic.
Another kind of structural distribution focuses on the number of people in various positions found in systems. Most working people, for example, do not belong to labor unions and have jobs with relatively low levels of authority, autonomy, prestige, security, and income. Most tenured college professors are white and male. And only one person can be a national president or prime minister at a time. These are all structural distributions found in various systems.
In both of its meanings, the concept of structure can tell us a lot about how systems work, the consequences that result, and how we are connected to them.
Us and It: Statuses and Roles
We are always participating in one social system or another, often two or more at the same time. To see how that works, we begin with what connects us to them, which is an element of social structure known as a ‘status.’ A status is a position in a system’s structure, and we participate in a system by occupying one or more statuses in it. *
I participate in my family, for example, through the statuses of husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, and son, among others. Note the difference between statuses as positions and the people who occupy them: we are not they, and they are not we. All kinds of people can and do occupy the same statuses that I occupy—I am not the only father or husband in the world. And the statuses exist whether anyone occupies them or not. It is true that statuses would not amount to much if no one ever occupied them, but it is also true that they exist independently of being occupied by particular people at any given time. The game of Monopoly, for example, exists regardless of whether anyone plays it at the moment. In the sam
e way, the U.S. Supreme Court exists as a system over and above the nine people who currently occupy the status of justice. If the justices all died in a plane crash, the Court would still exist, even though its key statuses were currently unoccupied.
The distinction between statuses and the people who occupy them is crucial for understanding how social life works. If we confuse the two, it is easy to make the mistake of trying to explain social phenomena solely in terms of individuals. Every time a U.S. president appoints a new Supreme Court justice, for example, there is speculation about how the candidate will vote on controversial issues, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, or affirmative action. Legal scholars remind us, however, that people’s opinions before going on the Court often don’t tell us much about how they will vote in their new role. This is because the status of Supreme Court justice places powerful limits on anyone who occupies it, which new justices may not realize until they actually get there. There is a huge burden of responsibility that comes with being one of the nine most powerful judges in the entire country, whose decisions can shape the course of history. This is why the Court places a high value on precedents set by past decisions and strongly discourages overturning them. Technically, justices can vote however they want, but in practice, they rarely feel free to do so, because they feel limited by the responsibilities that go with occupying the status of Supreme Court justice.
This suggests that if we want to know how people will behave, we are in many ways better off knowing the statuses they occupy than their personal characteristics and intentions. When U.S. voters elect a new president, for example, they often look for candidates who can change the direction of government policy, solve social problems, and transform the landscape of social life. Newly elected presidents often take office determined to change how things are done, but they soon realize that although their status is the most powerful in the entire political system, it is just one of many that make that system work the way it does. While the electorate is quick to blame politicians for not delivering on their promises, they forget how much easier it is to put new people into systems than it is to change systems themselves.
When the Bill Clinton administration tried to overhaul the nation’s health-insurance system in 1993, for example, it ran into opposition from every side as the complexity of that system and the implications of changing it became apparent. Providing affordable health care for everyone was not simply a matter of what was good for people’s health or what the president wanted. It also had to accommodate a complex web of competing interests, including insurance and drug companies, physicians, businesses, labor unions, the elderly, the wealthy, the middle class, and those living in poverty. In the end, it became an exercise in frustration that satisfied no one except, perhaps, those who wanted things to stay as they were. When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he encountered similar problems enacting a reform program of his own.
Heads of state may be among the most powerful officeholders in the world, but officeholders are what they are. As such, when people are elected to high office, they do not simply occupy a status. More importantly, the status they occupy is connected to a vast network of statuses within and outside the government, and those relationships limit what they can accomplish. The power of leaders to affect so many people is also what limits them, for every move they make produces a complex range of consequences that shape and limit the options from which they choose. No status simply empowers—it also constrains, in some ways more than it empowers.
What makes things still more complicated is that we participate in a variety of systems, which means we occupy many different statuses. Some statuses are ascribed to us at birth, such as race, gender, ethnicity, and family statuses, such as daughter. Others we achieve and occupy as we move through our lives, such as student, clerk, plumber, lawyer, manager, teacher, soldier, wife, husband, life partner, mother, father, stepparent. Notice that with ascribed and achieved statuses, we occupy the status regardless of whether we’re actually doing anything related to it. My father, for example, died some years ago, and yet I am still his son. In this sense, we occupy such statuses no matter where we are or whom we’re with, and we may be known by them to ourselves and to other people.
There are other statuses that we do not occupy all the time because they exist only in a particular situation. When I step onto a sidewalk, for example, I occupy the status of pedestrian. As soon as I step off the sidewalk and onto a bus, I exit ‘pedestrian’ and enter ‘bus passenger.’ With situational statuses, we have to be actively doing something to occupy it. Many statuses, then, have to do with who and where we are in social terms, while others have to do simply with where we are and what we’re doing at the moment.
The point of occupying a status is that it connects us to social systems and provides us with paths of least resistance that shape how we experience and participate in those systems. It does this with a set of cultural ideas known as a role.3 A role is a collection of beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms that apply to whoever occupies a particular status in relation to whoever occupies another status in the system. The role of teacher, for example, includes beliefs that describe the kind of person a teacher is supposed to be, such as the knowledge and credentials that people can assume teachers will have. It also includes values that shape a teacher’s choices, such as the importance of learning and growth, and norms that regulate how they behave, such as those requiring them to attend faculty meetings or barring them from sexually harassing students. There are also attitudes such as respect for students and taking them seriously.
Notice that the status of teacher comes with several different roles, one for each of the other statuses in the system that are related to it. The teacher’s role in relation to students is quite different from the role in relation to other teachers or to the dean or students’ parents. In each case, the status remains constant, but the content of the role varies from one relationship to another.
Roles lay out paths of least resistance that shape how we appear and behave in countless ways. In schools and workplaces, for example, there is a lot of pressure to have the answer to every question, which makes always coming up with an answer (whether or not you know what you’re talking about) a path of least resistance for people in many different statuses. You could, of course, choose otherwise, by saying, “I don’t know,” when someone asks a question. But, as an employee of a large corporation once told me, “In this place, it’s not okay to say you don’t know.” The “not okay” points to a form of social resistance—a social consequence—that is built into the system itself through its statuses and roles and discourages people from choosing alternative paths.
Given how many statuses we occupy and all the roles that go with them, social life can get complicated when we’re presented with more than one path at once. Such choices create the problem of role conflict, when the ideas of one role conflict with those of another. When male teachers, for example, try to initiate sexual relationships with female students, the result is a role conflict that can severely compromise both roles.4 For the teacher, it becomes impossible to treat her as he would any other student. For the student, the conflict threatens not only her success within the narrow confines of school but also, especially for graduate students, the course of her entire career and life. If she refuses him, he can use his power to exclude or punish her academically. If she consents, she may benefit from some sort of favoritism for a while but will always be vulnerable to being undone by it. If others find out, she may be denigrated for ‘sleeping her way to the top.’ Or, he may decide to use the power of his position against her if she displeases him or if he grows tired of her.5
From a structural perspective, sexual relationships between teachers and students cannot be equal, because the roles that define their positions in the system are inherently unequal and therefore cannot be made equal. His control over grades and other valued rewards is there for him to use whether he wants to or not, because it is built i
nto the system and the position he occupies in it. Given this, the two people involved may think the relationship is based on equality, but they have to pretend that they are somehow above the power of systemically defined relationships to shape the people who participate in them. It may be possible for a healthy relationship to happen in spite of the profound conflict it can generate, but the odds are hugely against it, which is why many organizations and professions discourage or forbid such relationships. It is also why professional norms discourage doctors and therapists from having sexual relationships with patients, or lawyers with clients.
As part of sociological practice, this microlevel view of social structure shows how paths of least resistance shape how we appear and behave. It also points to the difference between what a system looks like and how people choose to participate in it. A role is just a collection of ideas, and there is no way to know exactly how people will behave in relation to them. Therapists and teachers are not supposed to have sex with patients and students, but it has become increasingly apparent that many do anyway. Why?
One reason is that we occupy many different statuses at once. The role of teacher, for example, isn’t the only thing that determines whether a professor will initiate a sexual relationship with a student. The fact that the vast majority of sexual harassment and exploitation is perpetrated by men against women suggests something larger going on, especially when we see how prevalent this pattern is in all kinds of systems, from the workplace to the family. Whatever it is that explains why men—and so few women—violate such norms governing the role of teacher won’t be found simply by studying the teacher role and how schools are organized as systems. We also have to look at gender as a status and the paths of least resistance that draw men to harass and exploit women in spite of what is expected of them as teachers.
The Forest and the Trees Page 9
