5 essay questions | Sociology homework help

Each essay should be no more than a paragraph, but should CLEARLY include citations (in the form of page numbers) from the Macionis and Ferguson texts, as appropriate. That is, if you make an assertion that is not your own thinking but points to something you’ve read (the preferred way to answer a question in this course), you MUST provide CLEAR acknowledgment of where that idea came from. The correct form would be: (Author, p. xx) where “xx” is the particular page number for the idea (don’t name the authors of the individual articles—naming the editor is sufficient). On the first test, the vast majority of you were great at this, so keep it up. NO CREDIT, however, will be given to those answers without proper citations.

Quotations (actual words from the textbook) are not allowed, but any ideas you use from the text must be cited correctly with a page number. A correct citation looks like this: (p. 45). It contains two parentheses, a space between the abbreviation for page (“p.”) AND proper punctuation (there is no period before a citation if used at the end of a sentence). Citations such as “chapter 5”, “pages 100— 200”, or even “pp. 206—245” are incorrect. You must cite a specific page, and multiple times if you use different ideas from that page. The lone exception is two contiguous pages, but no others are allowed. In short:

YOU MAY NOT QUOTE FROM THE TEXT———————————————————————

YOU MAY NOT QUOTE FROM THE TEXT—

1. Explain various ways in which the behavior of people in groups changes as the groups get larger. Make use of the terms “primary group” and “secondary group” in your answer.

2. List the key characteristics of bureaucracy as explained by Max Weber. What was it about bureaucracy that Max Weber saw as positive? What did he see as negative?

3. How have formal organizations changed over the course of the twentieth century? Describe the ideal formal organization in the eyes of scientific management analyst Frederick Taylor, who wrote a century ago. How and why do today’s more flexible organizations try to be different from those described by Taylor?

4. Emily Kane’s essay stresses that many parents think much of their work with their children is to “accomplish” gender in them. However, this task on the part of parents fies in the face of much scientific work which finds that one’s sexual orientation is largely innate and heritable (that is, due to genes rather than environment). What, then, are we to make of Kane’s claim that masculinity itself is a social construct?

5. Ausdale and Feagin argue that their studies and observations of young children show that there are many problems with regard to race in traditional theories of child development. Specifically, the researchers fault child development theorists for assuming, based on tests of cognitive ability, that children do not yet have the mental complexity to grasp the concept of race; but Ausdale and Feagin show instead that even three year old children have “constant, well-defined, and negative biases toward racial and ethnic others,” in the words of Patricia Ramsey. What solutions can you think of to address this discrepancy in research?