The Sociology of Elites Khan, Shamus Rahman
Annual review of sociology,
01/2012, Letnik:
38, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Elites are those with vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource. We can understand this as a position that a social actor occupies, or we can imagine such resources as a possession ...of an actor. The study of elites is the study of power and inequality, from above. It involves looking at the distribution of social resources, which can include economic, social, cultural, political, or knowledge capital. It also means exploring the role of institutions such as schools, families, and clubs in how such resources are organized and distributed. Over the past decade, particularly as social power and economic rewards have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, elite sociology has experienced a revival. Empirical observations of these phenomena point to the changing character of American inequality.
This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find ...support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency.
Privilege Khan, Shamus Rahman
2021, 2021-08-17, Letnik:
15
eBook
An inside look at how one of the country’s most elite private schools prepares its students for success
As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St. Paul's School in Concord, New ...Hampshire, has long been the exclusive domain of America's wealthiest sons. But times have changed. Today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul's, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality.
In Privilege , Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul's students continue to learn what they always have—how to embody privilege. Yet, while students once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family connections, and high culture, current St. Paul's students learn to succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from highbrow art to everyday life—from Beowulf to Jaws —and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.
Nonconsensual sexual experiences on college campuses represent a serious public health problem. The preponderance of existing research on students’ actual consent practices is quantitative, lab ...based, or focused on how single dimensions of social context shape consent practices. Filling those gaps and illustrating ethnography's potential to lay the groundwork for innovative prevention, this paper draws on research conducted with undergraduates on two interconnected campuses to examine multiple social dimensions of sexual consent practices.
Data include in-depth interviews with over 150 students, 16 months of participant observation, 17 focus groups, and key informant interviews. Research conducted for this study took place between September 2015 and January 2017 at Columbia University and Barnard College.
Although sexual consent is often approached as an individual or interpersonal practice, this research highlights potentially modifiable social dimensions of consent. These seven dimensions of sexual consent practices are as follows: (1) gendered heterosexual scripts; (2) sexual citizenship; (3) intersectionality; (4) men's fear of “doing” consent wrong; (5) “drunk sex”; (6) peer groups; and (7) spatial/temporal factors shaping when consent is assumed.
Effective promotion of consensual sex, as a strategy to prevent assault, will likely require understanding and modifying the social structures that shape consent practices, rather than just legislation that mandates the promotion of affirmative consent. We describe seven potential modifiable social contextual dimensions of consent practices, along with related strategies to promote consensual sex and prevent sexual assault.
As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St.
Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, has long been the
exclusive domain of America's wealthiest sons. But times have
changed. Today, ...a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at
St. Paul's, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the
persistence of inequality. In Privilege , Shamus Khan
returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an
institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the
past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul's students continue to learn
what they always have--how to embody privilege. Yet, while students
once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family
connections, and high culture, current St. Paul's students learn to
succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of
a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from
highbrow art to everyday life--from Beowulf to
Jaws --and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through
deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and
staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of
society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to
rule.
This response to Campbell et al. makes three points. First, the commitment to “know more” must examine the full ecology of relationship violence and sexual misconduct (RVSM); that knowledge is ...essential for creating multilevel prevention strategies. Second, a full realization of an intersectional perspective requires attention to a broader range of power-based harms, forging institutional links between RVSM prevention and work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Third, while support for survivors is certainly vital, most people who experience harm do not report it, and so an ambitious approach to prevention is vital to building communities in which everyone can thrive.
This article deploys ethnographic data to explain why some students do not label experiences as sexual assault or report those experiences. Using ideas of social risks and productive ambiguities, it ...argues that not labeling or reporting assault can help students (1) sustain their current identities and allow for several future ones, (2) retain their social relationships and group affiliations while maintaining the possibility of developing a wider range of future ones, or (3) avoid derailing their current or future goals within the higher educational setting, or what we call “college projects.” Conceptually, this work advances two areas of sociological research. First, it expands the framework of social risks, or culturally specific rationales for seemingly illogical behavior, by highlighting the interpersonal and institutional dimensions of such risks. Second, it urges researchers to be more attentive to contexts in which categorical ambiguity or denial is socially productive and to take categorical avoidance seriously as a subject of inquiry. Substantively, this work advances knowledge of why underreporting of campus sexual assault occurs, with implications for institutional policies to support students who have experienced unwanted nonconsensual sex regardless of how those students may label what happened.
Sexual assault on college campuses is a public health issue. However varying research methodologies (e.g., different sexual assault definitions, measures, assessment timeframes) and low response ...rates hamper efforts to define the scope of the problem. To illuminate the complexity of campus sexual assault, we collected survey data from a large population-based random sample of undergraduate students from Columbia University and Barnard College in New York City, using evidence based methods to maximize response rates and sample representativeness, and behaviorally specific measures of sexual assault to accurately capture victimization rates. This paper focuses on student experiences of different types of sexual assault victimization, as well as sociodemographic, social, and risk environment correlates. Descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and logistic regression were used to estimate prevalences and test associations. Since college entry, 22% of students reported experiencing at least one incident of sexual assault (defined as sexualized touching, attempted penetration oral, anal, vaginal, other, or completed penetration). Women and gender nonconforming students reported the highest rates (28% and 38%, respectively), although men also reported sexual assault (12.5%). Across types of assault and gender groups, incapacitation due to alcohol and drug use and/or other factors was the perpetration method reported most frequently (> 50%); physical force (particularly for completed penetration in women) and verbal coercion were also commonly reported. Factors associated with increased risk for sexual assault included non-heterosexual identity, difficulty paying for basic necessities, fraternity/sorority membership, participation in more casual sexual encounters ("hook ups") vs. exclusive/monogamous or no sexual relationships, binge drinking, and experiencing sexual assault before college. High rates of re-victimization during college were reported across gender groups. Our study is consistent with prevalence findings previously reported. Variation in types of assault and methods of perpetration experienced across gender groups highlight the need to develop prevention strategies tailored to specific risk groups.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Cet article décrit l’expérience de l’auteur, assigné à comparaître pour ses données ethnographiques. Il décrit les défis posés par les citations à comparaître dans le domaine de la recherche et ...propose quatre solutions : (1) demander et utiliser le certificat de confidentialité des National Institutes of Health en posant des questions relatives à la santé au cours de la recherche ; (2) créer un groupe de travail qui formule des directives éthiques claires pour la recherche ethnographique ; (3) exiger que les comités d’éthique soient tenues de défendre la confidentialité de la recherche ; (4) socialiser le coût des citations à comparaître, en permettant aux chercheurs de faire partie d’une assurance mutualiste qui les défendra.
Undergraduate binge drinking, a well-documented problem at U.S. institutions of higher education, has been associated with a host of negative behavioral health outcomes. Scholars have extensively ...examined individual- and institutional-level risk factors for college binge drinking. However, these data have not been effectively translated into binge-drinking interventions. To inform the development of additional evidence-based prevention programs, this article documents the varied social practices that constitute “binge drinking,” drawing on primarily ethnographic data. By disaggregating what survey research has largely examined as a unified outcome, we offer a descriptive account of the different reasons for and contexts in which students consume alcohol in amounts that constitute binge drinking. Our discussion points to modifiable social factors in university life as strategy for prevention. The implication of our argument is that acknowledging and responding to the varied motivations underlying students’ alcohol use is one strategy to enhance campus binge-drinking prevention.
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