Gender, Interaction, and Inequality

Gender, Interaction, and Inequality

Author: Cecilia L. Ridgeway

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780387975788

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Causal explanations are essential for theory building. In focusing on causal mechanisms rather than descriptive effects, the goal of this volume is to increase our theoretical understanding of the way gender operates in interaction. Theoretical analyses of gender's effects in interaction, in turn, are necessary to understand how such effects might be implicated with individual-level and social structural-level processes in the larger system of gender inequality. Despite other differences, the contributors to this book all take what might be loosely called a "microstructural" approach to gender and interaction. All agree that individuals come to interaction with certain common, socially created beliefs, cultural meanings, experiences, and social rules. These include stereotypes about gendered activities and skills, beliefs about the status value of gender, rules for interacting in certain settings, and so on. However, as individuals apply these beliefs and rules to the specific contingent events of interaction, they combine and reshape their implications in distinctive ways that are particular to the encounter. As a result, individuals actively construct their social relations in the encounter through their interaction. The patterns of relations that develop are not completely determined or scripted in advance by the beliefs and rules of the larger society. Consequently, there is a reciprocal causal relationship between constructed patterns of interaction and larger social structural forms. The constructed patterns of social relations among a set of interactants can be thought of as micro-level social structures or, more simply, "microstructures.


Framed by Gender

Framed by Gender

Author: Cecilia L. Ridgeway

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-02-09

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0199755779

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In an advanced society like the U.S., where an array of processes work against gender inequality, how does this inequality persist? Integrating research from sociology, social cognition and psychology, and organizational behavior, Framed by Gender identifies the general processes through which gender as a principle of inequality rewrites itself into new forms of social and economic organization. Cecilia Ridgeway argues that people confront uncertain circumstances with gender beliefs that are more traditional than those circumstances. They implicitly draw on the too-convenient cultural frame of gender to help organize new ways of doing things, thereby re-inscribing trailing gender stereotypes into the new activities, procedures, and forms of organization. This dynamic does not make equality unattainable, but suggests a constant struggle with uneven results. Demonstrating how personal interactions translate into larger structures of inequality, Framed by Gender is a powerful and original take on the troubling endurance of gender inequality.


Degrees of Inequality

Degrees of Inequality

Author: Ann L. Mullen

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-01-03

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0801899125

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2011 Educator's Award. Delta Kappa Gamma Society International2011 Outstanding Publication in Postsecondary Education, American Educational Research Association, Division J Degrees of Inequality reveals the powerful patterns of social inequality in American higher education by analyzing how the social background of students shapes nearly every facet of the college experience. Even as the most prestigious institutions claim to open their doors to students from diverse backgrounds, class disparities remain. Just two miles apart stand two institutions that represent the stark class contrast in American higher education. Yale, an elite Ivy League university, boasts accomplished alumni, including national and world leaders in business and politics. Southern Connecticut State University graduates mostly commuter students seeking credential degrees in fields with good job prospects. Ann L. Mullen interviewed students from both universities and found that their college choices and experiences were strongly linked to social background and gender. Yale students, most having generations of family members with college degrees, are encouraged to approach their college years as an opportunity for intellectual and personal enrichment. Southern students, however, perceive a college degree as a path to a better career, and many work full- or part-time jobs to help fund their education. Moving interviews with 100 students at the two institutions highlight how American higher education reinforces the same inequities it has been aiming to transcend.


Doing Gender, Doing Difference

Doing Gender, Doing Difference

Author: Sarah Fenstermaker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1136059784

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For the first time the anthologized works of Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West have been collected along with new essays to provide a complete understanding of this topic of tremendous importance to scholars in social science.


Childhood Socialization

Childhood Socialization

Author: Gerald Handel

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 2011-12-31

Total Pages: 824

ISBN-13: 0202364704

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This collection of authoritative studies portrays how the A basic agencies of socialization transform the newborn human organism into a social person capable of interacting with others. Socialization differs from one society to another and within any society from one segment to another. Childhood Socialization samples some of that variation, giving the reader a glimpse of socialization in contexts other than those with which he or she is likely to be familiar. In the years since publication of the first edition of this book in 1988, childhood has become a territory open to broader sociological investigation. In this revised edition, Gerald Handel has selected and gathered new contributions that analyze the agents of socialization, including family, school, and peer group,, and explore the influences of television and gender. The balance of classical studies and more recent work reflecting changes in the family structure renews the centrality of this anthology for courses in the social psychology of children up to adolescence. The book is divided into nine parts: "Socialization, Indi-viduation, and the Self; "Historical Changes in Attitudes Toward Children"; "Families as Socialization Agents"; "Daycare and Nursery School as Socialization Agents"; "Schools as Socialization Agents"; "Peer Groups as Socialization Agents"; "Television and its Influence"; "Gender Socialization"; and "Social Stratification and Inequality in Socialization." While socialization continues on into the adolescent and adult years, childhood socialization is primary, essential in creating the human person and in shaping the identity, outlook, skills, and resources of the evolving person. Childhood Socialization is a dynamic volume that will be of continuing interest to students and scholars of family studies, sociology, psychology, and modern culture.


Undoing Gender

Undoing Gender

Author: Judith Butler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-10-22

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 113588076X

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Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.


Handbook of the Sociology of Gender

Handbook of the Sociology of Gender

Author: Janet Saltzman Chafetz

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-11-22

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 0387362185

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During the past three decades, feminist scholars have successfully demonstrated the ubiq uity and omnirelevance of gender as a sociocultural construction in virtually all human collectivities, past and present. Intrapsychic, interactional, and collective social processes are gendered, as are micro, meso, and macro social structures. Gender shapes, and is shaped, in all arenas of social life, from the most mundane practices of everyday life to those of the most powerful corporate actors. Contemporary understandings of gender emanate from a large community of primarily feminist scholars that spans the gamut of learned disciplines and also includes non-academic activist thinkers. However, while in corporating some cross-disciplinary material, this volume focuses specifically on socio logical theories and research concerning gender, which are discussed across the full array of social processes, structures, and institutions. As editor, I have explicitly tried to shape the contributions to this volume along several lines that reflect my long-standing views about sociology in general, and gender sociology in particular. First, I asked authors to include cross-national and historical material as much as possible. This request reflects my belief that understanding and evaluating the here-and-now and working realistically for a better future can only be accomplished from a comparative perspective. Too often, American sociology has been both tempero- and ethnocentric. Second, I have asked authors to be sensitive to within-gender differences along class, racial/ethnic, sexual preference, and age cohort lines.


The Sociology of Gender

The Sociology of Gender

Author: Amy S. Wharton

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-02-04

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1405143436

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Gender is one of the most important topics in the field ofsociology, and as a system of social practices it inspires amultitude of theoretical approaches. The Sociology of Genderoffers an introductory overview of gender theory and research,offering a unique and compelling approach. Treats gender as a multilevel system operating at theindividual, interactional, and institutional levels. Stresses conceptual and theoretical issues in the sociology ofgender. Offers an accessible yet intellectually sophisticated approachto current gender theory and research. Includes pedagogical features designed to encourage criticalthinking and debate. Closer Look readings at the end of each chapter give aunique perspective on chapter topics by presenting relevantarticles by leading scholars.


Emerging Intersections

Emerging Intersections

Author: Bonnie Thornton Dill

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0813546516

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The United States is known as a "melting pot" yet this mix tends to be volatile and contributes to a long history of oppression, racism, and bigotry. Emerging Intersections, an anthology of ten previously unpublished essays, looks at the problems of inequality and oppression from new angles and promotes intersectionality as an interpretive tool that can be utilized to better understand the ways in which race, class, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference shape our lives today. The book showcases innovative contributions that expand our understanding of how inequality affects people of color, demonstrates the ways public policies reinforce existing systems of inequality, and shows how research and teaching using an intersectional perspective compels scholars to become agents of change within institutions. By offering practical applications for using intersectional knowledge, Emerging Intersections will help bring us one step closer to achieving positive institutional change and social justice.