Sociology for Optimists

Mary Holmes, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781446268681, 9781446268674
• eBook ISBN: 9781473934269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Breaking away from the idea that sociology only ever elaborates the negative, Sociology for Optimists shows that sociology can provide hope in dealing with social issues through critical approaches that acknowledge the positive.

From politics and inequality to nature and faith, Mary Holmes shows how a critical and optimistic sociology can help us think about and understand human experience not just in terms of social problems, but in terms of a human capacity to respond to those problems and strive for social change. 

With contemporary case studies throughout grounding the theory in the real world, this is the perfect companion/antidote to studying sociology.  

1 Change

When I started high school in 1979, my fairly average state-run New Zealand school had one computer. It was nothing now recognisable as a computer, it was an old, heavy TV set which one of the maths teachers would rig up to something called a card-reader. We learned to write simple computer programmes, marked them on special cards with a black felt-tip pen and fed them into the card reader and watched the fuzzy numbers and letters on the screen to see if the programme worked. By the time I left high school five years later, the school had a whole room full of ‘personal computers’ much more like the ones around now. Primitive forms of email allowing communication between some machines emerged and less than ten years later I was looking at one of the first browsers and learning to surf the internet. Now I can type this paragraph on my phone or tablet and send it to anyone, upload it to a social network site or to the cloud. Then I can make a video phone call to almost anywhere in the world using the same device. These quite rapid technological changes have had a huge impact on how we live our lives, how we interact and communicate, how we learn, and how we spend our time. These changes are just one example of change in the social world that has taken place over the last one to two hundred years. Part of what sociology is about is trying to make sense of these changes and how they relate to other aspects of social life that do not seem to change so much, but instead are reproduced from one generation to the next.

If optimism is about expectation of a better future, then a sociology for optimists needs to understand how change occurs. There is a tension in sociology between understanding how society is reproduced much as it is and how it changes, although the two intersect. This entails questions about whether reproduction describes the continuance of inequalities and whether change is allied to progress or improvement. Social institutions are regarded as central in social reproduction, although they also experience change. Institutions are patterned sets of practices that continue over time; with families being considered especially important, I discuss these changes in detail in the chapter on relationships (Chapter 6). Other major institutions are education and the media. Peers or friends are not institutions but also play key roles in maintaining the social world and yet can also allow for change. Institutions also often pass on privilege, so that the groups who are wealthy and have status continue to benefit from the way that society is organised. However, change does occur, including within these institutions as people instigate, participate in and resist change. This chapter charts some of the key social changes of the last century or so in order to assess whether change is something to be (critically) optimistic about.

Changing Education

An optimistic view of change needs to think critically about what socialisation processes teach us. These processes contain the first learning experiences people have as children learn the rules and norms of their society, learning not only how to walk and talk but how to walk, talk, eat, sleep, go to the toilet, and so on, ‘properly’. Elias (1991) argues that this means learning to regulate their behaviour by controlling their bodies to fit with social norms. He points out that as societies become more complex, the time it takes to prepare children for adulthood lengthens (Elias 1991: 29–30). Children learn initially from their parents, who are significant others, as George Mead (1962) would call them, but they also learn as they start to make sense of themselves and their parents in terms of the wider society in which they live. It is a highly classed, gendered and culturally specific process (Bourdieu 1987; Oakley 1972). Children and young adults go on being socialised ‘in specialised institutes, schools and universities’ (Elias 1991: 29).

As they grow older, children learn about social expectations and are able to take the perspective not only of significant others but of the generalised other (Mead 1962). They learn what people in general, what the wider society, expects of them. Parents socialise children in keeping with a range of social expectations. Within Functionalism – a sociological approach that emphasises what useful purpose our social arrangements serve, these socialisation processes have been understood as contributing to social stability or the reproduction of society in a similar form to the past. For example, Parsons and Bales (1956) argued that women and men were socialised into supposedly complimentary expressive and instrumental roles within families. They claimed that men learnt to be goal oriented and competitive, while women learnt to be nurturing and emotionally expressive, at least in mid-twentieth century America. This, they claimed, usefully divided labour within a complex society. The asymmetrical power relations and related disadvantages attached to women’s expressive role were not considered (Hochschild 1973).

Socialisation theories, even less Functionalist ones, were heavily focused on mothers, blaming them and assuming children passively take on norms and expectations. Yet, such norms and expectations are often unclear and even contradictory, and critical thinking is not well served by simply dismissing those who are different as somehow having failed to be socialised properly (Stanley and Wise 1983). Families are not total institutions (Goffman 1968), they do not control every aspect of their members’ lives like in a prison, and thus important as the role of parents may be in socialising children, mothers and fathers and children exist in a social world, where children learn how to be from a variety of sources and have to make some decisions in navigating their way through the world (Stanley and Wise 1983; Thorne 1993). This means exercising some agency.

To appreciate how positive change, not just the reproduction of inequalities, can be enabled by learning, some appreciation of reflexive agency is required. Reflexivity describes how people reflect on their lives and use that knowledge to shape their lives; agency refers to any kind of capacity to do that shaping. By inadequately accounting for reflexivity, much sociology is pessimistic about how difference and inequalities are reproduced by socialisation of children within families (see, for example, Bourdieu 1987; Oakley 1972). Pierre Bourdieu (1987) for instance, argues that class inequalities are reproduced via processes of distinction; an idea very similar to socialisation theories about the social ‘training’ of children by their parents or carers. For Bourdieu, the habitus – the embodied practices that are learned within the family – are powerful in sedimenting inequalities. He proposes that ‘taste classifies and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu 1987: 6). His argument is that people use their learned, class-based likes and dislikes for cultural and material products to mark themselves out as different from those in other classes. It is, however, the tastes of the middle classes that are dominant in these processes and their higher social status allows them to reinforce the idea that their taste is good, and those of classes below inferior. Distinction as a reproducer of hierarchies fosters disrespect of those without the ‘proper’ habitus, which is not just classed but gendered and ‘raced’ (Bourdieu 1987; Skeggs 1997). The way that habitus operates at a fundamental embodied level and is, as the word indicates, deeply habitual rather than conscious, makes it very hard to change. Thus, although this framework recognises that people can learn a new habitus, as with socialisation theory it cannot easily explain how or why someone may come to escape the ingrained habitus of their early years. Bourdieu’s view of structure is that it is relatively unchanging and that social positions produce dispositions and those dispositions reproduce social positions. Margaret Archer (2007; 1993), however, believes that habitus has limited value as a concept in the early twenty-first century because we cannot rely on intergenerational socialisation. Rather a more calculating form of reflexivity is needed, requiring knowledge that previous generations cannot pass on, for example digital competency. Bourdieu fundamentally under-estimates the degree to which people must now deal with new situations, although routine action still has a place and habit may play more of a part in reflexivity than Archer suggests (Elder-Vass 2007). At the very least, reflexivity is not always highly conscious or cognitive, but involves emotions, bodies and relating to others (Holmes 2010). Thus, despite the emotional stickiness of structural inequalities (Ahmed 2004), people move and are moved towards change.

Change certainly seems evident within education as an institution, as it has ‘improved’ in the sense of schooling becoming less elitist and more inclusive, especially for women. In the past formal education was reserved for the more privileged members of society, and mostly for the men. As Virginia Woolf (1986/1938) explains in the 1930s about education in England:

All educated families from the thirteenth century to the present moment have paid money into that account [for the education of their sons]. It is a voracious receptacle. Where there were many sons to educate it required a great effort on the part of the family to keep it full. … And to this your sisters, as Mary Kingsley¹ indicates, made their contribution. Not only did their own education, save for such small sums as paid the German teacher, go into it; but many of those luxuries and trimmings which are, after all, an essential part of education – travel, society, solitude, a lodging apart from the family house – they were paid into it too. (p. 7)

Access to further education has slowly improved. From the late nineteenth century onwards, compulsory primary school education was introduced in Britain, most American states, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and expansion of some kind of schooling occurred in many other countries. In countries still largely based around agriculture or manufacturing goods, governments did not feel the need to encourage more than fairly basic learning which would not upset current divisions of labour, but enable workers to better fulfil their tasks, which as technology became more complex might require some degree of literacy and numeracy (Benavot and Riddle 1988). More extensive education has remained limited to a small, if increasing minority. By the mid-twentieth century only a tiny proportion of people, even in the wealthiest countries only about 3 per cent of adults, are estimated to have completed tertiary education. However, by 2010 around 8 per cent of those over 15 had completed university in ‘advanced’ countries and almost 6 per cent in developing nations (compared to 0.5 per cent in 1950). Although a significant increase, it hardly seems radical, but it indicates that improvements have occurred that do extend more education to more people.

One improvement is the reduction of the disparity that existed between average years of schooling for girls and boys, especially in developing countries. In 1950 girls in those countries were at school around 62 per cent of the years boys were at school, but by 2010 they had 86 per cent of the amount of schooling boys had. By 2006 there was gender parity in primary and secondary school enrolments in 59 of 176 of the countries reporting, up from only 39 countries in 1999 (Charles 2011: 358). Globally, the proportion of women enrolled in secondary education has continued to increase, reaching around 60 per cent in 2007, only just behind men. This reflects the improvement in the percentage of women enrolled in secondary education in less developed countries, where just over 50 per cent of women as well as of men were enrolled by 2007 (United Nations Statistics Division 2010). However, girls are likely to have, on average, one year less schooling than boys in developing nations and half a year less in ‘advanced’ nations (Barro and Lee 2013). Yet, almost equal proportions of girls and boys are now receiving the highest A-level grades in England. This may be due to changes in the subjects girls are taking, but they remain under-represented in science and maths (Department of Education 2014: 7–8). Across subjects, however, in 2012/13 around 56 per cent of university undergraduate students in the UK were women, and women undergraduates in the UK are equally likely as men to obtain a first class degree (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2014). Both women’s enrolment rates and university level achievements have shown a substantial increase across the world, with only 27 per cent of tertiary students being women in 1965, whereas women have been making up 50 per cent or more of the world’s undergraduates since 1990 (Charles 2011: 358). In America, women at university level have outnumbered men since the late 1980s and since the beginning of this century have usually obtained around 57 per cent of bachelors’ degrees, while the percentage of masters and doctoral degrees they earned also increased, albeit this percentage is much lower, 20 per cent or less, in Maths and Engineering, showing the uneven nature of improvements for women (England 2010: 160; US Department of Education 2013). Other relatively wealthy countries, such as Japan, have seen massive increases in women going to university, although they still form a slightly lower percentage of students than men. Meanwhile there is some variance in the majority world. Gender differences are fairly small in Latin America. India, however, has a somewhat smaller proportion (40 per cent) of women than men in tertiary education, but has seen an impressive rise in their enrolment since the 1950s. By contrast, Mongolia has had more women than men in higher education since the 1970s, a relatively common situation in East Asia (Charles 2011: 358; Nozaki et al. 2009). While there may be problems measuring women’s educational participation and success relative to men, all these measures do indicate that many more women than in the past are able to get an education and to achieve within the education system up to the highest levels.

Meanwhile, there has also been a significant, if less dramatic, widening participation of working class people in higher education since the 1990s. Around one quarter of students accepted to university in the UK in 2005 came from the four lowest socio-economic groups, although this proportion has not always continued to rise since then and is lower at more elite universities. Similar class inequalities persist in the USA (Reay et al. 2010: 107–8). However, a shift from 5 per cent of young people enrolling in UK higher education in 1950 to 35 per cent in 2007, is not trivial, and this expansion is similar in other wealthy nations (Boliver 2011: 231). It is significant enough to warrant new forms of sociological explanation that can better explain such positive change.

A critically optimistic lens must renew sociological debates around education in order to account for changes, as the reproduction of inequalities seems less complete than in the past. Education no longer simply operates to reproduce class by making workers’ children into workers and managers’ children into managers. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Passeron (1977) outlined in detail how this did happen in the twentieth century as the school system privileged and rewarded the kinds of knowledge – the cultural capital – that middle class children already had and working class children often did not. Despite Bourdieu’s (see also 1987) radical criticisms of class privilege, his model makes changes in the system seem unlikely, only occurring if a working class individual can somehow learn the ‘right’ kind of knowledge to allow them to join the middle classes. This does not suggest how class as a system of privilege might be challenged or alter, nor how working class children may reject the middle class nature of schools. Those like Paul Willis (1977), who did explore such rejection amongst working class boys in England, concluded that it ensured failure and did not encourage change. Middle class children (although he focused on boys) learned the skills they needed to manage others, while working class children were taught to be obedient and disciplined; they were ‘learning to labour’. By misbehaving and not valuing school work, the boys were asserting a stereotype of working class masculinity and contributing to the reproduction of their lower place in the class hierarchy (see Connell et al. 1982 for a similar argument about Australian education). Sue Sharpe (1976) similarly saw schools as reproducing gender inequalities by promoting ideologies of women as naturally suited to caring roles and men to ‘important’ paid work, and by reinforcing economic and historical forces shaping gender. Like Willis, Sharpe sought to understand how even if children resisted what they were being taught, they tended to accept some of these ideas in ways that actually reproduced inequalities. How, then, was the opening up of education described above able to happen?

Accounts of education have become more optimistic in seeing the possibility of diverse kinds of resistance less linked to class and gender (Furlong et al. 2011: 363), partly by understanding reproduction and change as linked. For example, Barrie Thorne’s (1993) study of elementary school children in America credits them with some agency in navigating the different, sometimes conflicting, gender expectations coming from the school and their peers. They have to do gender differently as they move between the spaces of the classroom and the playground. Nevertheless, Thorne does not see this as meaning that children are free to choose how to be girls or boys, but she highlights the way in which children may police gender in the playground in ways that reinforce hierarchies in which boys reign (see also Prendergast and Forrest, 1998). Reproduction is not the opposite of change, as although gender hierarchies may continue, Thorne can help in seeing how they also are more open and shifting as children interpret and enact gender divisions in a variety of ways and in ways which alter in different contexts and are different from the past. Such approaches can appreciate how, from the 1980s, partly as a result of deliberate changes in schools, girls caught up with and overtook boys in terms of academic success. This sparked concern over the ‘failure’ of boys (Cortis and Newmarch, 2000; Mac an Ghaill, 1994), but change is also possible for boys, especially if educators pay attention to boys’ own ways of constructing academically successful forms of masculinity (Skelton and Francis 2011). Also to say that girls were more likely to achieve better results, did not necessarily mean that boys were ‘failing’. These measures of girls’ versus boys’ success are part of the neoliberal emphasis on school and teacher effectiveness that can mask the more complex intersection of gender with class, ethnic and other forms of inequality in school life. Such auditing may also fail to appreciate less easily measured forms of learning that may be valuable to young people (Connell 2011: 58–72; Ringrose 2007). Overall, a focus on problematic measures of success at school is at best useful because it may help challenge prejudices about the intellectual inferiority of girls and because exam success is key in securing entry to tertiary education. However, people’s experiences of tertiary education and its outcomes have altered.

The concept of social generations may also be useful in forging critically optimistic explanations of how what it means to go to university has changed and di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• 1 Change
• 2 Enjoyment
• 3 Freedom
• 4 Goodness
• 5 Equality
• 6 Relationships
• 7 Nature
• 8 Enchantment
• 9 Optimism
• References
• Index