SOCI 1301 NOTES - SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Stages of Divorce	Inheriting Divorce	Housework within Lesbian & Gay Households	Market Exchange — The Wedding Reception
Goal Multiplication & Religious Organizations	The Halévy Thesis: Religion as a Stabilizer	The Ghost Dance of the Sioux	School Desegregation and the Hmong Community
Inequality in Education	Both Boys & Girls Have Reason to Feel Disadvantaged in School	Online Education	Work & Alienation: Marx’s View

Child-rearing practices differ among peoples of the world. The practices of one group in North America, the Hutterites, are at variance with those typically found in Canada and the US.

Although the Hutterites number about 30,000, few Americans know much about them. Today’s Hutterites are descended from Russian immigrants

who came to North America in 1874. They live together in some 250 communal villages, called bruderhofs, in western Canada, the Dakotas, Montana, Washington and Texas. Their religious faith is Anabaptism, they practice adult baptism and they are firmly pacifistic. Both economically and theoretically, the Hutterites practice communalism. The live and work together for the good of the community. When Hutterites use the pronoun we, they refer not to their own family but to the bruderhof. They do not knock before entering each other’s residences; they drop in unannounced at all hours. As they see it, seclusion by individual families is unnecessary and lessens group loyalty.

Accordingly, the goal of child rearing among the Hutterites is young adults’ voluntary decision to submit themselves to the community. The sense of community will is transmitted very early in life. Only for the first 13 weeks of an infant’s life is the mother relieved of her responsibilities to the bruderhof; after that, the mother returns to her previous responsibilities, such as helping in the community kitchen. The community essentially dictates a schedule for babies, specifying times for feeding, playing and sleeping. A child’s hands are held together in the position of prayer before each feeding. Children pray voluntarily before each meal by the time they are one year old, a procedure they will follow for the rest of their lives.

Children are believed to be completely innocent until they are observed to strike someone or try to comb their own hair. Either activity is believed to indicate a level of comprehension sufficiently high to understand discipline. Young children learn that they can avoid adult displeasure if, after hitting someone, they immediately hug and kiss. Infants and young children are watched over by all members of the bruderhof. At age three they enter kindergarten, where as one Hutterite minister put it, “they learn to obey, sing, sleep, memorize and pray together.” Punishment tends to emphasize that exclusion from the group is most unpleasant.

The most important birthday for a Hutterite is the 15th, since on that day the school child becomes an adult. Almost as a rite of passage, the child is moved from the children’s dining room to the adults’ dining room and from the play group into the adult work force. Since these changes involve a single individual whereas the Hutterites emphasize the colony as a whole, the movement into adulthood goes uncelebrated.

Gradually, the bruderhof awards the new adults various gifts that reflect their altered situation. Both boys and girls are given a wooden chest with a lock in which to keep their personal belongings. Boys are given tools; girls receive a scrubbing pail, a broom and knitting needles. The first years of adulthood are occupied in apprenticeships to older people, but soon young people enter jobs considered suitable to their sex. Despite being surrounded by the culture of Canada and the US, Hutterite youngsters grow up to accept the Hutterites’ philosophy of life, economic communalism and religious beliefs.

From 1938 through 1957, His Royal Highness Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, a trained anthropologist, carefully recorded his observations of

family life in mountainous Tibet. His work offers a glimpse at family life in a culture very different from our own.

The ideal Tibetan family was a polyandrous one in which all brothers had a common wife. Unrelated men might, in some cases, share a woman. However, the close association of brothers served to reduce the jealousy that might arise if a number of unrelated men were sharing the same wife.

The co-husbands of a particular woman would agree among themselves as to which one would have sexual relations with the wife on any given day. Apparently the women had little say in the matter. Birth control was nonexistent and restriction on sexual behavior prior to marriage was minimal. Nevertheless, in a very poor society that could not afford to feed many children, an unmarried woman bearing a child was expected to abandon the baby in the river.

The proportion of Tibetan marriages that were polyandrous varied from 90% in the rural areas to only 2% in the capital of Lhasa. Since polyandry was so common and more than one-fourth of Tibetan males were Buddhist monks, many women remained single throughout their lives. Some became nuns, some lived permanently in the households of their married brothers and others turned to prostitution.

As in most societies, Tibetan families did not all correspond to the ideal. Most families were monogamous, especially in the cities. Some affluent nobles and merchants practiced polygyny (one man having several wives). In rare cases, the co-husbands of a polyandrous family would collectively take on a second wife. Generally, this occurred when the first was unable to bear a p’horjag, or heir.

It should be noted that since Prince Peter recorded these observations, Tibet has become an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China. As a result, these patterns have undoubtedly undergone change.

Sociologist Robert Blood Jr and Donald Wolfe developed the concept of marital power to describe the manner in which decision making is distributed within families. They defined power by examining who makes the final decision in each of eight important areas that, the researchers argue, traditionally have been reserved entirely for the husband or for the wife. These areas include what job the husband should take, what house or apartment to live in, where to go on vacation and which doctor to use if there is an illness in the family.

Recent research suggests that money plays a central role in determining marital power. Money has different meanings for members of each sex: For men it typically represents identity and power; for women, security and autonomy. Apparently, money establishes the balance of power not only for married couples but also for unmarried heterosexual couples who are living together. Married women with paying work outside the home enjoy greater marital power than full-time homemakers do.

Labor not only enhances women’s self-esteem but also increases their marital power because some men have greater respect for women who work at paying jobs. Sociologist Isik Aytac studied a national sample of households in the US and found that husbands of women holding management positions share more of the domestic chores than do other husbands. In addition, as a wife’s proportional contribution to the family income increases, her husband’s share of meal preparation increases. Aytac’s research supports the contention that the traditional division of labor at home can change as women’s position in the labor force improves and women gain greater marital power.

Comparative studies have revealed the complexity of marital power issues in other cultures. For example, anthropologist David Gilmore examined decision making in two rural towns in southern Spain. These communities, one with 8,000 residents and the other with 4,000, have an agricultural economy based on olives, wheat, and sunflowers. Gilmore studied a variety of decision-making situations, including prenuptial decisions over household location, administration of domestic finances and major household purchases. He found that working-class women in these communities, often united with their mothers, are able to prevail in many decisions despite opposition from their husbands.

Interestingly, wives’ control over finances in these towns appears to lessen with affluence. Among the wealthier peasants, husbands retain more rights over the family purse strings, especially in terms of bank accounts and investments. In some cases, they make investments without their wives’ knowledge. By contrast, in the working-class, where surplus cash is uncommon and household finances are often based on borrowing and buying on credit because of the uncertainties of household employment, the wife rules the household economy and the husband accepts her rule.

“Ali Eski and Nuran Aydogmus were young and very much in love and wanted to get married, but their families could not agree on the bride price, so they committed suicide.” So began a story in the New York Times late in 1980.

The tradition of the bride price has persisted for many centuries in Turkish culture, particularly in certain rural areas in which age-old values remain dominant. In this case, the young woman’s father insisted on a price of 100,000 liras (about $1,100) before he would consent to the marriage. Ali Eski’s family offered 30,000 liras in advance and the rest in a promissory note, a common practice in the area, but their offer was rejected.

The tragic death of 22-year-old Ali Eski and 16-year-old Nuran Aydogmus led to a new debate over this cultural practice. Many urban young people and intellectuals attacked the bride price, arguing that it treats women as commodities to be bought and sold. But older rural people defended the custom as a guarantee of a prospective bride’s virginity; in addition, a special commission established by the Turkish government to study the issue filed a report generally favoring the bride price. As a result, this custom continues to be a part of Turkish culture.

The societal concern with unwed mothers is an excellent illustration of the labeling perspective at work. For example, is a woman in her thirties who chooses to become pregnant for the first time and have her child considered a part of a social problem? Is a married mother aged 17 part of a social problem? Is it a problem of age or marital status or both? The power of labeling can also be seen in terminology popularly used to refer to these issues: broken, disrupted, unfit, illegitimate, unadjusted, unsuitable or bastard as compared to. intact, nuclear or stable.

More specifically, this labeling is another example of the type of stereotyping that sociologist Erving Goffman has referred to as stigmatization. By

definition when we so stigmatize people, they are not quite so human. It allows us the luxury of planning for them and not with them, as in the debate over welfare policies. Goffman argues that in stigmatization, we construct stigma theory, an ideology to explain someone’s inferiority and account for the alleged danger it represents. Many speeches concerning unwed mothers and welfare emphasize this danger. In the context of the 1992 South Central Los Angeles riots, then–Vice President Dan Quayle condemned Murphy Brown, the central character in a popular television program, for having a baby outside of marriage. Her actions in this fictional story line represented to Quayle a violation of family values and reinforced the media’s endorsement of unmarried mothers who presumably were less equipped to raise and watch over children and thus unable to prevent the kind of lawlessness that concerned so many during the riots.

In colonial America, the social problem was defined as that of being a bastard. A child born out of wedlock became a public charge and for the small, rural communities of the early colonies this was a financial hardship aside from any moral concerns. Punishing women who bore such children by whipping was not unusual and often the punishments were administered in public. Many of the laws did apply to both men and women, but the latter were more likely to be convicted because their relationship to the child was, of course, more clear and they were less likely to have property that would allow them to pay fines and avoid being whipped.

While this may seem harsh, the early US was, in fact, more open-minded than Europe in these matters. In this country the concept of child protection (ie, not punishing the child for being born out of wedlock) took hold. Also, the US first recognized both common-law marriages and the possibility that illegitimate children could have some legal rights relevant to the property of their parents. In England, for example, the concept of filius nullius, a child of no one, legally prevailed for a longer time than in the US (Luker, 1996:19–20).

In the US during the late 19th century, immigration and urbanization made it increasingly difficult for a gemeinschaft community (where everyone knows one another) to assume responsibility for unwed mothers and their children. In 1883, the Florence Crittenton Homes were founded as refuges for fallen women or prostitutes. Within a few years their function was expanded and they also took in unwed mothers. It is not hard to see both the labeling and stigmatization taking place here. Sociologist WEB Du Bois in 1909 noted that there were seven homes for African-American women as well as one Crittenton home reserved for that purpose.

The discussions about poverty and single parents are almost always intertwined with questions of race. Many people immediately think of unwed mothers or babies having babies as African American. Although the image is not totally false — African Americans do account for a disproportionate share of births to teenagers and unmarried women — the majority of all babies born to unmarried teenage mothers are born to whites. Also, since 1985, birthrates among unmarried white teens have been increasing rapidly, while those among unmarried black teens have been largely stable.

Other myths concerning unwed mothers relate specifically to welfare. Sociologist Ruth Sidel notes that:

The Center on Social Welfare and Law in a 1996 report clarified some other frequently held notions concerning welfare. In their report they found the following:

Is there a direct relationship among low-income people between the number of babies and the size of welfare checks? The answer is presumably relevant to those who argue that maintaining or increasing subsidies to unmarried mothers only serves to increase illegitimacy. The pattern in the US and other industrial nations is that governments are cutting back on welfare provisions as a result of the tightening global economy, while out-of-wedlock births have actually increased. In the US, the real value of a welfare check has declined since 1973, even as women of all age groups have chosen more often to become single mothers. Worldwide, the industrial nation that has witnessed the sharpest increase in the proportion of babies born to unwed mothers has been Great Britain, which has also instituted conservative anti-welfare policies.

Much of the concern, as noted earlier, reflects labeling. Babies having babies is labeled as a problem in the US, but would it be better to have more abortions? Research suggests that young people in the US are about as likely to be sexually active as their counterparts in Great Britain, France, Germany and Scandinavia. Yet in other nations they are more likely to seek an abortion. So, from a labeling perspective, if one is concerned about abortion, the situation in the US is much less of a problem. Of course, the real question may be why people who are unprepared to be parents are having sex, or at least unprotected sex, in the first place.

Sociologist Kristin Luker (1996:11) in Dubious Conceptions, draws upon two decades of social science research to conclude: “The short answer to why teenagers get pregnant and especially why they continue those pregnancies is that a fairly substantial number of them just don’t believe what adults tell them, be it about sex, contraception, marriage or babies. They don’t believe in adult conventional wisdom — not because they are defiant or because they are developmentally too immature to process the information (although many are one or the other and some are both), but because the conventional wisdom does not accord with the world they see around them. When adults talk to teenagers, they draw on a lived reality that is now ten, twenty, thirty, forty or more years out of date. But today’s teenagers live in a world whose demographic, social, economic and sexual circumstances are almost unimaginable to older generations. Unless we can begin to understand that world, compete with its radically new circumstances, most of what adults tell teenagers will be just blather.”

Another way of viewing this difficulty in communicating across generations is to view it in what sociologist William S. Ogburn termed culture lag. Many elements in our society, including both people and social institutions, refuse to adjust to the profound social changes, such as family formation and pregnancy, that have occurred during the latter half of the 20th century.

From a feminist perspective the welfare debate certainly qualifies as blaming the victim. African-American sociologist Patricia Hill Collins notes that the tendency to view black women matriarchally, as the sole positive influence in otherwise dysfunctional households, also leads to blaming them for the failure of their children and for the continuance of poverty intergenerationally. Emphasizing the need to get welfare women jobs also seems to undermine the importance of parenting producing the irony of trying to strengthen the household economically while undermining the family’s integrity.

The discussion about single mothers and welfare has changed in the last 20 years. In the 1970s, conservatives wanted teens to be less active sexually, to have fewer abortions and to contribute less to the growing AFDC rolls. Liberals sought to have women regain control over their reproductive destinies and economic future. Increasingly, conservatives were joined by what has been termed the New Right, which saw the issue in moral terms. Today, according to Luker, the debate over early childbearing has become more heated due to the slowdown in economic growth and greater disparity between rich and poor. Liberals argue that society should make a greater investment in teenage mothers through training programs and education but this approach ignores the multiple problems (violence, poverty, racism, a history of sexual abuse or domestic violence, and underequipped schools) that so many bring with them. In this social context, training programs have very real limits. Luker defends the need for better public funding of contraception and improved sex education. But she cautions that if trends continue (the number of sexually active teenagers doubled between 1970 and 1990) there may be only modest improvement in delaying childbirth.

Divorce is a complex and difficult experience for all family members. Anthropologist Paul Bohannan has identified six overlapping experiences that arise from divorce and which vary in intensity depending on the couple. The six stations of divorce, as Bohannan calls them, are as follows.

As Bohannan has observed, undivorced people rarely appreciate the difficulties that the divorced person experiences in mastering these stations of divorce.

Are the children of divorced couples more likely to become divorced themselves? The answer appears to be in the affirmative but the reasons are complex. Sociologist Paul Amato analyzed longitudinal data to determine the extent of intergenerational transmission of divorce. Data came from the Study of Marriage Over the Life Course, which consisted of telephone interviews with a national sample of 2,033 married persons who were 55 years old and younger in 1980. They were then interviewed again, in keeping with a longitudinal analysis, in 1983, 1988 and 1992.

Based on these data, parental divorce is associated with increased risk of offspring divorce, especially when the wives or both spouses have experienced the dissolution of their parents’ marriage. This association is true in second marriages, as well as in the initial marriages. The age of offspring at marriage, cohabitation, socioeconomic attainment and pro-divorce attitudes have only modest impact on the estimated effect of parental divorce. In contrast, a series of interpersonal behaviors offers the largest share of explanation. Among interpersonal behaviors, Amato includes problems with anger, jealousy, hurt feelings, communication, infidelity and so forth. These findings suggest that parental divorce elevates the risk of offspring divorce by increasing the likelihood that children will exhibit behaviors that interfere with the maintenance of a mutually rewarding marriage relationship. Adult children from divorces are exposed to poor models of two-person behavior and may not learn the skills and attitudes that facilitate functioning in a dyadic social relationship. Similarly, children of divorce may be predisposed to develop traits, such as a lack of trust or an inability to commit, that lead to disharmony.

The recognition that family structures are variable has led social scientists to begin exploring some previously overlooked variations. Combining

interviews and observation research, sociologist Christopher Carrington conducted a study of the housework of 52 lesbigay households (26 lesbian households and 26 gay men’s households).

Carrington looked at couples who had been in relationships at least two years. The housework considered included cleaning, taking care of pets and plants, yard work, laundry and household paperwork. In general, housework is often taken for granted or designated as an unfortunate part of family life. Rarely in the US is daily housework viewed in a positive light. However, the research suggested that participating in housework helps lesbigays develop a stronger sense of themselves as families, “maintaining our yard and building.”

Lesbigay couples with more resources were able to invest more money and time into the housework. Carrington found such couples to have developed more of an identity as a family.

An exchange occurs when all participants recognize and take account of all the exchange opportunities in calculating their pricing strategies. We may all be aware of this at an auction, but we are less likely to see it in a wedding reception unless we use sociological imagination.

In the US, it is expected that the close relatives of the bride will provide a feast for members and friends of the bride’s and bridegroom’s families. This feast is generally held after the religious or state-sanctioned ceremony, which is considered the only absolutely indispensable part of the ritual legitimating marriage. Thus, the feast is not absolutely compulsory and some who are very poor or nonconformist dispense with it. Most families, however, expend a large percentage of that year’s income on a feast.

The exchange of goods involved is as follows. The bride’s family offers food and alcoholic drink in their home, at a hotel or in another grand setting for which they pay rent to the owners. In return, each of the guests brings a gift to the bride and groom. The food is offered in a special, ceremonial manner, and the gifts are brought in special, ceremonial wrapping, often with verses of well-wishing attached to the wrappings. That this situation is definitely not a market transaction may be seen in the fact that the guests would never overtly evaluate the food and drink in terms of money; nor would the bride and groom comment on the money value of the gifts in the presence of the givers. The participants are not aware of an obligation to expend equal amounts. Each giver sees his or her own giving as an act of friendship, without specific hope of return. A guest without a gift would never be stopped at the door though the omission might be negatively commented on in the privacy of the family circle.

The feast is paid for by the bride’s family as a kind of dowry for having the woman, traditionally considered a financial liability, taken off their hands. The feast also performs a function in the prestige system of the natives (that is, Americans). Each family will go to great lengths to put on the grandest display of wealth it possibly can. Much honor is reflected on the bride’s parents for their ability to provide such a lavish display. Feasts in each locality are described in local newspapers and give an indication of the family’s high position. The feat is therefore an exchange of goods for prestige. It should be noted, however, that there is no simple or automatic exchange of dollar value for prestige. Rather, the feast must be presented in a certain traditional style felt to be proper. Any other style would bring ridicule down on the heads of the givers even though they had spent many dollars. In this sense, as well, it can be seen that this is not simply a market transaction.

The feast also serves to strengthen the legitimacy of the union in the eyes of relatives, friends and the community in general. Parents feel that they express love for their daughter by giving a grand feast, even though, interestingly enough, the young couple is seldom as excited or pleased by the arrangements as the parents are.

Religious groups fulfill many of what Durkheim would term secular (rather than sacred) functions. In recent years (with the emphasis on government downsizing), churches and other religious organizations have started providing services previously assumed by government agencies. Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, want to roll back government-funded welfare programs and shift the social safety net to private organizations in general and to churches and religious charities in particular.

There appears to be public support for this role. Yet, the public rejects the notion that the nation’s religious organizations should be the main source of funds for the needy. In a 1995 national Gallup survey, respondents were asked: “Who do you think should be more responsible for providing assistance to the poor — government or religious organizations?” The results showed 55% selecting the government, 28% religious organizations, 10% both, 4% neither and 3% with no opinion. Among Republicans and Protestants, the government was still favored as a source for such funds, but by smaller margins. Only self-identified conservatives favored religious organizations over the government as the main source of support for assisting the poor.

Some clergy and other observers are concerned about religious groups playing more of a role. They feel it is unconstitutional and spiritually wrong to force the poor through a religious doorway to meet their basic needs.

Federal legislation has been proposed that would create a charity tax credit of $500 per taxpayer. It would allow taxpayers to designate money to a religious or charitable organization that devotes 70% of its efforts to poverty relief.

Max Weber is not the only scholar to contend that religion can exert an important influence on the process of social change. Elie Halévy (1870–1937), a Frenchman and noted historian who wrote at about the same time as Weber, was primarily interested in the stability of English society

during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Halévy thesis suggests that Methodism, under the influence of John Wesley (1703–1791) and his followers, provided a kind of escape valve - a stabilizing function - for the discontented English working class. This religious faith became a mechanism for dissent, an outlet for opposition to everything from labor practices to the monarchy itself. Yet this opposition was basically peaceful and was oriented to social reform rather than revolutionary change. From a Marxist point of view, Methodists were not part of the ruling bourgeoisie, yet they served the interests of the wealthy and powerful. For Halévy, the rise of Methodism explains why England, of all the nations of Europe, was most free from political disorders and revolutions during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Halévy’s thesis has been criticized; in fact, many of the objections are similar to those raised in response to Weber’s monumental work. Some critics have argued that Halévy exaggerates the influence of Methodism and fails to explain the lack of revolt in England before this religion arose. Nonetheless, Halévy’s work, like Weber’s, contains important insights regarding the relationship between religious beliefs and the process of social change.

An example of the integrative function of religion can be found in so-called millenarian movements. A millenarian movement is a religious group that believes in a prophecy that a cataclysmic upheaval will occur in the immediate future, followed by collective salvation. This shared world view offers its members a sense of belonging. During the late 19th century, a millenarian movement appeared among the Sioux Indians.

Life for the Sioux, or Dakota, Indians was especially oppressive in the middle to late 19th century. Spurred on by General George Custer’s exaggerated reports of gold in the Black Hills, many white settlers infiltrated Sioux territory in what is now South Dakota. Hostilities followed and in 1876 the Sioux won a great victory in the battle of the Little Big Horn. But the Sioux were eventually defeated by the US Army and forced to sell much of their land. Unable to continue hunting game as they traditionally had, members of the tribe found life on the reservation increasingly unbearable.

Many Sioux sought an escape through the supernatural and turned to the ghost dance religion, which included dances and songs that proclaimed the return of the buffalo and the resurrection of deceased Indians in a land free of whites. The ghost dance had originated among the Paiute Indians of Nevada and soon became a symbolic or millenarian movement. Ironically, it had spread northward to the Plains Indians through the schools — the institution that served as the cornerstone of forced assimilation of native Americans.

By 1890, according to sociologist Russell Thornton, about 65% of the Indian tribes in the west were involved in the ghost dance. From a functionalist perspective, this millenarian movement can be viewed as a means of coping with the domination of white intruders. While the ghost dance was essentially harmless, whites feared that the new Indian solidarity encouraged by the movement would lead to renewed warfare. As a result, more troops were summoned to areas where the ghost dance had become popular.

In late December of 1890, anticipating that a massive ghost dance would be staged, a cavalry division arrived at an encampment of Teton Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge reservation. When the soldiers began disarming the warriors, a random shot was fired at them touching off a close-range battle. The cavalry then turned its artillery on Indian men, women and children. Approximately 300 Sioux and 25 soldiers were killed in the ensuing fighting.

One Sioux eyewitness later recalled: “We tried to run, but they shot us like we were buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women.” The Wounded Knee massacre was not the worst defeat suffered by native Americans during the 19th century but it shattered the Sioux hope for a return, even a supernatural one, to the life they had known.

Wausau (population 30,060) is a community located in rural Wisconsin best known, perhaps, for the insurance company bearing its name that advertises on television. To sociologists, it is distinctive for its sizeable Hmong population. Wausau finds itself with the greatest percentage of Hmong of any city in Wisconsin. These Southeast Asians are 10% of the city’s population and 22% of its kindergarten pupils. But because the Hmong are concentrated in the more affordable downtown area, they constitute as much as 62% of the students in some schools. The Hmong immigrated to the US from Laos and Vietnam among the refugees who came following the April 1975 end of the US involvement in Vietnam.

In the view of school officials, progress in teaching the Hmong English in Wausau was stymied because the newcomers associated mainly with each other and spoke only their native tongue. The Wausau school board decided in the fall of 1993 to distribute the Hmong and other poor students more evenly by restructuring its elementary schools in a scheme that requires two-way busing.

The desegregation result has divided the city, with residents voting in a 1993 special recall election to decide whether to fire the five board members who backed the plan. “People feel this decision was just stuffed down their throats,” said Peter Beltz, director of Families Approve Neighborhood Schools (FANS), which fielded candidates and gathered the signatures for the recall.

Wausau school officials said their plan, which is not federally mandated, is aimed less at achieving a more equitable socioeconomic balance and learning environment. The busing, they say, was begun as a convenience for parents, whose children now travel an average of two miles farther than before.

Recalls are rare, but in December 1993, opponents of the busing plan that integrates Asian American youngsters into mostly white grade schools won a majority on the Wausau school board by ousting five incumbents in a recall election. “Busing and partner schools as envisioned is [sic] over,” Don Langlois, one of the winners, declared after the votes were counted on a Tuesday night. “We plan to have a neighborhood school plan for the fall 1994 school year,” Langlois said.

But board president Richard Allen, one of those defeated, said he expects supporters of the busing plan to take the matter to court with a lawsuit claiming that to remove busing would cause segregation. Christopher Ahmuty, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, said after the successful recall effort that his group was willing to file a lawsuit to stop the school board from overturning the changes. “Where a governmental body by law engages in an intentional act of resegregation, that would violate all kinds of constitutional standards.”

Educational achievements play a critical role in social mobility. Consequently, concern has been expressed that subordinate minorities in the US, such as blacks, Hispanics and native Americans, do not have positive experiences in schools that will assist them in later competition in the job market. This country’s minorities, however, are not alone in this experience.

The anthropologist John Ogbu looked at educational opportunities and achievements in six societies and found group inequality in

all of them. In Great Britain, for example, West Indian immigrants and their descendants (many of whom are born in Britain) perform poorly in school. By contrast, in New Zealand it is the native Maori people (the original islanders now outnumbered and dominated by white Europeans) who have the greatest difficulty in the educational system. Whites are 350 times more likely than Maori to attend college.

In these societies, race was the critical factor differentiating successful and unsuccessful educational performance. However, in studying other societies, Ogbu found that inequality was evident even when racial distinctions were absent. In India, people from lower-caste backgrounds are physically indistinguishable from other residents. Yet children from the lower castes are much less likely to attend the private schools that launch Indians toward better careers. While lower caste children account for more than 15% of India’s population, they constitute only about 5% of those attending college.

Ogbu found certain common themes in all the societies he studied (one of which was the US). The dominant groups in each society agree on the importance of education and the key role of educational attainment in shaping one’s position in adult life. At the same time, however, folk explanations in many societies contribute to prejudice and discrimination by ascribing failure in school to the alleged inferiority of subordinate minorities.

More recent studies have demonstrated that educational inequalities persist around the world.

Recent studies have focused on how schools work against young women, documenting such sexist practices as failing to involve women as much as men in classroom discussion, differential treatment in career guidance and even episodes of sexual harassment. However, University of Chicago educators Larry Hedges and Amy Howell point to systematic differences in reading and writing, with girls outperforming boys. The same analysis of six national data sets from 1960 through 1992 also showed that boys outperform girls in science, mathematics and auto mechanics.

Why these differences exist and persist is not clear. For example, closer analysis shows that larger sex differences occur even in areas not generally taught in schools, such as mechanical comprehension and other vocational aptitudes.

On writing tests, young men score significantly below women. Larry Hedges observes “The data imply that males are, on average, at a rather profound disadvantage in the performance of this basic skill.” Some of this difference may come from differences in reading between boys and girls: because reading may be linked to writing, girls write more fluently since they may also read books more frequently than boys. These results suggest that both men and women are harmed by these differences.

One of the most profound changes in college level education in recent years has been the development of online courses and online degree programs. An online course may consist of a Web site that contains a course syllabus, course notes, power point presentations, links to relevant sites on the Internet, e-mail capabilities between the instructor and students and between students, a real time or synchronous chat room and an asynchronous bulletin board for class discussions.

Online courses are just the latest manifestation of distance learning courses, which have been available since the mid-1800s. Distance learning permits students to take college courses without being on a college campus full-time. Correspondence courses; television-, radio-, and newspaper-based courses; and, interactive television courses are several types of distance learning courses. Schools may offer several types of distance learning courses in addition to traditional classroom or on-ground courses. At many colleges, students may now complete an entire undergraduate or graduate degree by taking only online courses.

Online education may be examined using each of the three major sociological perspectives. Functionalists might note that online courses are a very flexible form of education that enables working students, homebound students and housewives with child care responsibilities to take courses when their schedules might not otherwise permit. Conflict theorists, on the other hand, would suggest that not all students have access to online courses. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to own or have access to a computer that will permit them to take advantage of online courses. Interactionists would focus in on the surprising statement made by many online instructors that they get to know their students better and they have better class discussions online than they have ever had in a classroom because the level of interaction in an online class is more frequent and more personal than in a traditional course.

In addition, the advent of online courses has had a significant impact on the organizational structure of colleges and the administrative relationship of colleges to one another. For example, one of the leaders in the field of online education is the state of New Jersey. For the first time in state history, all 19 of the state's community colleges have banded together in an educational endeavor. Students may register for an online course at their local community college but, if their school does not offer the course that they want, they can take the course from any one of the other community colleges in the state that is offering the course. All 19 colleges have agreed to charge the same fee to students for online courses. When students have completed a course, the grade is sent to the student's home college and the letter grade, not a transfer grade, is added to the student's transcript. A system of this type has organizational implications for how each of the member schools does business, which is an interesting research base for future studies of formal organizations.

For millions of men and women, work is a central part of day-to-day life. Work may be satisfying or deadening and the workplace may be relatively democratic or totally authoritarian. Although the conditions and demands of people’s work lives vary, there can be little doubt of the importance of work and workplace interactions in our society and others.

All the pioneers of sociological thought were concerned that changes in the workplace resulting from the industrial revolution would have a negative impact on workers. Émile Durkheim argued that as labor becomes more and more differentiated, individual workers will experience anomie, or a loss of direction. Workers cannot feel the same fulfillment from performing one specialized task in a factory as they did when they were totally responsible for creating a product. Max Weber suggested that impersonality is a fundamental characteristic of bureaucratic organizations. One

result is the cold and uncaring feeling often associated with contemporary bureaucracies. But Karl Marx offered the most penetrating analysis of the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization.

Marx believed that as the process of industrialization advanced within capitalist societies, people’s lives became increasingly devoid of meaning. While Marx expressed concern about the damaging effects of many social institutions, he focused his attention on what he saw as a person’s most important activity: labor. For Marx, the emphasis of the industrial revolution on the specialization of factory tasks contributed to a growing sense of alienation among industrial workers.

The term alienation refers to the situation of being estranged or disassociated from the surrounding society. The division of labor increased alienation because workers were channeled into monotonous, meaningless repetition of the same tasks. However, in Marx’s view, an even deeper cause of alienation is the powerlessness of workers in a capitalist economic system. Workers have no control over their occupational duties, the products of their labor, or the distribution of profits. The very existence of private property within capitalism accelerates and intensifies the alienation of members of the working class since they are constantly producing property that is owned by others (members of the capitalist class).

The solution to the problem of workers’ alienation, according to Marx, is to give workers greater control over the workplace and the products of their labor. Of course, Marx did not focus on limited reforms of factory life within the general framework of capitalist economic systems. Rather, he envisioned a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist oppression and a transition to collective ownership of production (socialism) and eventually to the ideal of communism.