4 Inequality, Agency, and Changing Identities Free Online FlashCards

What is socialization?

Socialization is the lifelong process through which people learn cultural meanings, norms, values, and social roles.

How can schools and workplaces help reproduce class inequality?

When institutions reward practices associated with advantaged groups, their standards can make inequality seem to result from individual ability alone.

How can gender norms vary or conflict?

Gender messages vary across cultures and historical periods, and expectations can conflict across settings.

What does intersectionality examine?

Intersectionality examines how social positions, such as race, class, and gender, interact to shape experiences and opportunities.

What is agency?

Agency is people’s capacity to make choices and act.

What is resocialization?

Resocialization involves unlearning familiar practices and adopting new ones, sometimes when entering a highly structured institution.

What can help norms change, and what can keep them in place?

Questioning a norm, modeling alternatives, and gaining support can shift shared ideas and practices, but change is not automatic when institutions continue rewarding the norm.

Name several agents of socialization.

Families, peers, schools, workplaces, religious communities, governments, and media all participate in socialization.

How can socially created racial categories have real effects?

Racial categories and their meanings are socially created and change over time, yet they have real consequences when people and institutions attach unequal treatment to them.

Why should racial or ethnic groups not be treated as culturally uniform?

No racial or ethnic group has a single shared identity or culture; people’s experiences differ within groups.

What are social structures?

Social structures are established patterns, institutions, and distributions of resources that enable some actions and constrain others.

Why is agency not the same as unlimited freedom?

Agency is real but not unlimited: institutions and resources shape the choices available to people.