Sociological Imagination vs. Common Sense Essay -- Sociology

Sociological Imagination vs. Common Sense This essay will aim to explain differences between the sociological imagination and common sense. What the sociological imagination and common sense are and how they are at work in our society today. Using the area of educational achievement I will bring into this essay examples through research and findings from sociologists such as; Pierre Bourdieu, Culture Capital (1977), Bernstein-(1961)speech patterns’ and Paul Willis (1977)learning to labour, and use these examples as evidence to show how these would explain educational achievement in relation to the sociological imagination and common sense assumptions. I shall begin this essay by discussing where the sociological imagination arose from and what this is in comparison to common sense. American sociologist C.Wright Mills (1959) published a sociological text called ‘The sociological Imagination (1959), C.Wright Mills wrote in his book about ‘the troubles of milieu’ the word milieu means (environment) this was looked at as being where an individual will find themselves in a situation that is of a personal social setting to them and therefore could indeed affect them personally and in some extent the situation be this persons making. Mills(1959), also wrote about public issues of social structure, referring to matters that go beyond the individual and look at society as a whole. How society is organised and how society works. This goes far beyond ‘the troubles of milieu, as it doesn’t look at the person and there individual experiences in society but looks at the wider social structure e.g social institutions†¦ education, religion, family, law and how they have developed and interact with each other examples of the differenc... ...ion, Sociology making sense of society, 4th ed, Harlow, Pearson Longman, pp. 604-605. Mills C.Wright (1959) The Sociological imagination , Harmondsworth, England, Oxford University Press. Office of National Statistics (2004), Education, Ethnicity and Identity, Available from: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=461 [accessed 28 September 2010], Cite as (office of National Statistics 28 September 2010) Pierre B (1961) Culture Capital Cited, Taylor P ; Richardson Jr John; Yeo, A, (1995), The class structure and educational attainment, Sociology in Focus, pp.297, Ormskirk, Causeway Press. Scanlan J Stephen; Guest-editor; Grauerjolz Liz (2009) 50 Years of C.Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination, Teaching Sociology 37, (1), pp1-7 Willis Paul (1977) Learning to labour, Westmead, hants, England, Saxon House, Teakfield Limited.

Discursive Written Analysis of Wherever I Hang by Grace Nichols and Reflections by Mario Petrucci

Reflections. Mario Petrucci. On first looking at the two pieces I have chosen, the preference of dialect fluctuate to a great extent, giving each poem a dissimilar insight to the dialect to each author. In Wherever I Hang, the idiom is of a native tongue to the Caribbean, with its seemingly imperfect sentences. ‘Had big rats in de floorboards' V1 Line 5 Where as Mario Petrucci has used Received Pronunciation, giving the reader more complete sentences. ‘Bees will sting like a razor' V1 Line 1 The vocabulary in Petrucci's Reflection is uncomplicated to read although every line is a metaphor, proficiently put together to make the reader observe each line in detail. While also generating a number of connotations in each line, giving the reader room for thought. A good paradigm could be gained from almost every line, but the fourth line is most apt. ‘Hills as old as hats' V1 Line 4 It isn't until one hears this that the thought of hats sat on top of a wardrobe or on shelves in hatboxes, comes into realization of the accuracy that this one sentence becomes clear, giving the line a conceit of its own. On the other side of the scale is Grace Nichols Wherever I Hang, which although clear in its context, can be hard to read if the accent is not known. In the first line there are repetitive determiners with the word use of ‘me' three times. ‘I leave me people, me land, me home' V1 Line 1 Also in this line the writer uses a repetition of nouns with no pre or post modifiers. This could be because the writer is generalising her whole life, and the world she knows rather than saying her family and friends. Also it must be taken into account of the fact this is a Caribbean poem and family and friends could be more thought to come from a European writer and would distort the poem, bringing to much plain English into the first verse, rather than it all being in the second, when she is changing from one culture to another. ‘And is so I sending home photos of myself' V2 Line 1 Within the first line of this rhyme, Nichols has used a repetition of nouns and reiteration determiners to emphasise just what she has given up to come to a new land. Possibly giving the reader the vehicle of travel and a new country and the tenor of a lack of feeling of belongingness. ‘Divided to de bone' V3 Line 2 This poem shows a big distinction in the cultures that Nichols has become in contact with, ‘de sun' along side ‘De misty greyness'. Although one must note that this is a connotation of how the writer sees the two different countries and may not be how a visitor to the Caribbean or a born English person may see the variation. Nichols has used antonyms to empathise the difference in each place. The vast array of bright colours of the ‘Humming-bird' and ‘de sun' compared to the dull grey ‘pigeons', ‘snow' and ‘cold' of this new wonder land. Also Nichols has given the reader a possible alliteration to show how that Nelson's Column is higher than most things she has encountered before. ‘I see Lord Nelson high-too high to lie' V1 Line15 This is also ambiguous sentence as the word lie can be taken to mean that Nelson is to high to lie down or to high to lie to anyone. Nichols gives us a representation of the life she is leaving, with ‘de sun' and ‘de humming-bird spendour' giving the reader a image of hot happy days, where as Petrucci's verse is more a reminder of things that are responsibilities to most people. ‘A nut, tough as a tax form'. The two poems contrast each other with the life they portray, until fifth line in verse two of Wherever I Hang. ‘I begin to change my calypso ways' V 2 Line 5 Here is the change in the poem, from the leaving of a home to come to what the writer has considered a dream country. This is the point that the author starts to become like the people in the land she now lives and take on their lifestyle. But this is also where the writer looses a lot of her homeland traditions and the divide starts. Nichols gives the reader different time spans but has written the whole piece in present tense. The effect this gives is the reader embarking on a journey through the poem with the writer. With her use of a metaphor ‘They solid to de seam', an alliteration on the ‘p', ‘people pouring' and a simile ‘Like beans', Nichols is pushing the reader to realize how different this feels to someone who has never felt or seen things like this. This poem has a non- repetitive rhythm that is filled with personal nouns with the use of ‘me' and ‘I'; it also has no punctuation. Petrucci's Reflections on the other hand, is a blank verse pentameter, with use of copular verse and all written in future tense. The writer has used words like ‘will' rather than ‘is' to give the reader the hint that the poem is about something that will happen in the future, almost saying its impossible to avoid. ‘The air will be clear as glass' V1 Line 2 The whole poem could be considered to have a connotation meaning, in which it is the view of how the author sees things in life, even though it has no narrative. In the second verse, line one there is a possible alliteration within the metaphor. ‘Trees will be sturdy as girders' V 2 Line 1 One could pick out of this poem the subject, verb and object of every line, with a few added fillers to make the whole piece make sense, right up to the last but one line. Here the pattern is broken and the fourth line in verse three is not a metaphor. This could be to express what the possible tenor is. The Internal rhyme differs in this line also, unlike the rest of the poem, which has iambic pentameters in every line. ‘And the button, that big red button' V3 Line 4 This could be taken in two ways, which is what the writer could want from the reader. One could be the threat of nuclear war and the fear of the Red Button that hangs over our heads, giving it an elegy. But another meaning could be linking the final but one, line with the final line of the poem. Petrucci could be using the old metaphor bright as a button, but replacing it with child to express the cycle of things, as in the whole world starts again, and so do the metaphors within the last line. ‘as bright as a child.' V4 Line 1 This is not the first time Petrucci mentions people in his poem. ‘Clockwork regular as citizens' V2 Line3 This line gives the reader the picture of people rushing to work or where ever in the rat race, which could be joined with the same line, giving it an ambiguous meaning. The rat race could be also taken as mice, as they are from the rat family. The mice could be also meaning from the nursery rhyme hickory dickory dock, and the mouse that ran up the clock. In the second verse of Nichols ‘Wherever I Hang', we are given a high level of co- ordination with ‘And is so' used in three lines, almost to show the reader that the change in the writers ways in inevitable. The dialect that is used in this second verse has changed to some extent to what is considered more English with the word ‘I' instead of ‘me', which is continually used in the first verse. Although the Caribbean word use is still present with the occasional use of ‘me' and ‘de'. ‘And waiting me turn in queue' V2 Line 8 The sentences are more complete in this verse, rather than ‘At first I feeling like I in dream', (V1 Line 8) the writer is using more English dialect than her native dialect, ‘I begin to change my calypso ways' (V2 Line 5). The whole of Nichols poem has many personal pronouns, unlike Petrucci's, which has no personal pronouns at all.

High school graduates should take a year off before entering college Essay

A woman takes a selfie from a high angle A selfie is a type of self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. Selfies are often associated withsocial networking, like Instagram. They are often casual, are typically taken either with a camera held at arm’s length or in a mirror, and typically include either only the photographer or the photographer and as many people as can be in focus, which is more commonly known as a ‘group selfie’ Contents History The first known selfie, taken by Robert Cornelius in 1839 Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, produced a daguerreotype of himself in 1839 which is also one of the first photographs of a person. Because the process was slow he was able to uncover the lens, run into shot for a minute or more, and then replace the lens cap. He recorded on the back â€Å"The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.† Early Edwardian woman taking her picture in a mirror roughly 1900 Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia taking one of the first teenage self-portraits The debut of the portable Kodak Brownie box camera in 1900 led to photographic self-portraiture becoming a more widespread technique. The method was usually by mirror and stabilizing the camera either on a nearby object or on a tripod while framing via a viewfinder at the top of the box. Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna at the age of 13 was one of the first teenagers to take her own picture using a mirror to send to a friend in 1914. In the letter that accompanied the photograph, she wrote, â€Å"I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling.† The concept of uploading group self-taken photographs (now known as super selfies) to the internet, although with a  disposable camera not a smartphone, dates to a webpage created by Australians in September 2001, including photos taken in the late 1990s (captured by the Internet Archi ve in April 2004). The earliest usage of the word selfie can be traced as far back as 2002. It first appeared in an Australian internet forum (ABC Online) on 13 September 2002. Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie. Popularity The term â€Å"selfie† was discussed by photographer Jim Krause in 2005, although photos in the selfie genre predate the widespread use of the term. In the early 2000s, before Facebook became the dominant online social network, self-taken photographs were particularly common on MySpace. However, writer Kate Losse recounts that between 2006 and 2009 (when Facebook became more popular than MySpace), the â€Å"MySpace pic† (typically â€Å"an amateurish, flash-blinded self-portrait, often taken in front of a bathroom mirror†) became an indication of bad taste for users of the newer Facebook social network. Early Facebook portraits, in contrast, were usually well-focused and more formal, taken by others from distance. In 2009 in the image hosting and video hosting website Flickr, Flickr users used ‘selfies’ to describe seemingly endless self-portraits posted by teenage girls. According to Losse, improvements in design—especially the front-facing c amera copied by the iPhone 4 (2010) from Korean and Japanese mobile phones, mobile photo apps such as Instagram, and selfie sites such as ItisMee—led to the resurgence of selfies in the early 2010s.

Decision Making and Investment Decisions Essay

Chuck Jones aimed to have a new design decision process supported by data and surveys instead of a return or payoff on the investment approach. At first when he presented his idea, authorities requested poof and Mr. Jones was unable to show them proof. Then M. Jones started his process. 1.As a first step, he surveyed 15 â€Å"design-centric† companies, including BMW, Nike, and Nokia. To his surprise, few had a system for forecasting return on design 2. Mr. Jones needed to provide a new plan to focus on Customers preferences. 3.Good feedback from the public would equal possible future return on the investment that was requested by the research team. 4.Do not focus on Bottom-line returns 5.Puts Design prototypes in front of customer focus groups 6.Get detailed measurements of their preferences about Aesthetics, Craftsmanship, technical performance, ergonomics and usability 7.Chart the results against competing products and the company’s own product 8.This approach gives the Decision makers a base-line of objective evidence from which to make investment decisions Evaluation: The Duet washing machine, launched five years ago, was the first big win for the common platform approach. By redesigning an existing product, using the same underlying technology but with modifications to the appearance and user interface, the design team created a product that could be sold at three times the price of its predecessor and competitor products. Design investment decisions are now based on facts not opinion. The new decision making approach has transformed the company’s culture. It had led to bolder designs because the designers can now make a strong case for making those investments. By following this approach the company can do innovation in their products. The shift has enabled Whirlpool’s designers to make the business case for investments and give financial folks greater confidence to ante up–resulting in bolder designs. What criteria does Whirlpool’s design team use in design decisions? What do you think each of these criteria involves? Whirlpool’s design team used their customer’s preferences as the basis of the company’s criteria. After significant considerable investigation of the, what Chuck discovered was that many of the organizations, including those the ones that operate on a global scale, many faced the same or similar situation as he did; they were all in need of a system that could forecast profitability based on design. They used a â€Å"metric-based approach† design, to capture â€Å"objective evidence† that would support and provide insight into future investment decisions for the company. Chuck and his design team â€Å"created a standardized company-wide process that puts s design prototypes in front of customer focus groups and then get detailed measurements of their preferences about aesthetics, craftsmanship, technical performance, ergonomics, and usability. This approach I think provided Whirlpool with a â€Å"baseline of objective evidence from which to make investment decisions† because with this innovative approach, the company could now make â€Å"design investment decisions† that are based on fact and not opinion

Data Desgin Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Data Desgin - Essay Example Then I would calculate the percentage of change of these expenses over a long enough period to smooth seasonal fluctuations and display them on a line graph, which is easy to interpret. The slope of the line of the office supplies compared to similar items consumed in the department would show whether my boss' assertion was true or not. 3. I would display the data in the form of a standard bell curve. This would reveal the average reading level of the students, which would be an appropriate target for a curriculum if all other things were equal. However, this type of distribution display would also show if there other factors to take into account, such as a significant number of "outlier" scores, or skewness, or large standard deviations. 4. Though the city council asked for the average, averages can be severely influenced by unusually low or high scores, so I would also give them the mode, because by knowing the most frequent score, they would know at what income level the largest number of people would be affected by any social program with income qualifications or cut-off points that the city council might consider. 6. I would compile minimum funding level requests/requirements for all the agencies the organization supports, then compare those levels to the funding granted by the organization.

Criminal Research, Final Exam Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Criminal , Final Exam - Research Paper Example The author says that the problems will persist in the younger generation if not addressed immediately. 9. The author can use the results from this case study and compare them to results after a youth treatment program; he will be able to see the extent to which the treatment program has helped the youth. 10. The effect due to the involvement of the national institute of justice will have; some of the youths have spent time in jail for crimes committed and may not feel free to attend any function that is promoted by the institute. 15. Qualitative data example is the information that the analysts of the case study attained from the study that is what causes the high rates of violence; Qualitative data can be used to show the extent of a problem. Two results from survey can be compared by looking the intensity and the effect of the problem. 20. Snowball sampling is a technique for developing research samples where the existing subjects recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances. It can be used to analyze for crime causes in dangerous areas where a victim of an attack names a friend or person who has undergone the same and can be interviewed. 21. A focus group is a qualitative method of research, here the group is asked questions on believes, opinions and perceptions towards a product, concept, service or an idea. A focus group is a good method of research when if comes to matters that affect the society at large e.g. in the study of drug abuse. 22. A researcher may have the problem of time constraints for open ended questions and will finally not get the best answer and results from the interview. It may be difficult for a researcher to get the respondents full attention. 23. Going native refers to case where the researcher stops acting as a researcher and becomes a full member of the group, participating fully in the group events. The problem with this approach is that

Polarization as a Barrier to Effective Crisis Negotiation Essay

Polarization as a Barrier to Effective Crisis Negotiation - Essay Example ellow participant in an argument as â€Å"the other† or as something of an antagonist rather than an equal shareholder in the process and something that is quite actually neutral. Similarly, when dealing with a given situation, it is common for me to assume that the self-interested motives of others will be the sole determinant in helping to determine the way that the engagement plays out. Thirdly, rather than being able to see the situation in shades of nuance and shades of gray, or even shades of right or wrong, I am oftentimes tempted to view it from a perspective of fulfilling my own needs; regardless of whether it is able to do the same for the fellow shareholder. Although fulfilling my own needs within the given circumstance is not bad in and of itself, it is a selfish motive that helps to drive the integration apart. Fourthly, with regards to a polarizing situation regarding communication, it is often my weakness to seek to link to the speaker and the message. This is a n oversight due to the fact that it assumes that these two are necessarily the same (Medvec 389). Moreover, a better approach would be to seek to focus upon the message without polarizing it and seeking to have it intimately related to the original speaker or his/her own vantage point. Lastly, and perhaps most specifically, I oftentimes attempt to polarize situations into firmly determinant shades of good/bad/right/wrong etc. These levels of polarization serve to lessen my ability to analyze and draw inference from a number of situations; it ultimately weakens my skill in interpreting the world around me. As a function of these 5 polarizations that have been listed, the most effective way to engage them is to seek to lessen the effect that they play on my everyday life and as a means of understanding them, seek to work to overcome them. Furthermore, by approaching the above situations with an open mind and thoroughly focusing upon not developing preconceived perceptions of the