soci pharagraph

SOCI201-012

Thursday, October 3, 2019

Organizations and Social Institutions

Leadership

· Leadership styles

· Authoritarian- leads by giving orders

· group members become dependent on and hostile towards leader

· Democratic- leads by trying to reach a consensus amongst the group members

· groups continue to function without direct contact with the leader

· Laissez-faire- leads by letting the group do what it wants

· often does not result in an efficient group

Groupthink

· When the thoughts of a group’s members narrow into one collective thought, and any variation from that thought is considered disloyalty to the group

· The degree to which a group suffers from groupthink depends on the leadership style and the susceptibility of the group members

Mean Girls

· How did Regina George become the leader of the Plastics?

· Which leadership style does Regina use to control the Plastics/the school?

· What are some examples of groupthink from the movie?

Stanley Milgram - The Effect of Authority

· Conducted an obedience experiment in the 1960s

· Recruited 40 men aged 20-50 to participate in an experiment about learning and the effect that punishment has on learning

· The participants were assigned to be the “teachers,” and his colleagues pose as “students” in the experiment

· The “teachers” were instructed to deliver an electric shock when the “student” got an answer wrong on the memory recall test; the shock got increasingly worse for every mistake

Stanley Milgram - The Effect of Authority

· None of the participants stopped before 300V

· When the learner did not give verbal feedback; 65% pushed the levers all the way to 450V

· When the teachers could see the learners, 40% pushed it all the way to 450V

· When a second “teacher” was planted, who refused to continue with the experiment, only 5% of the participants administered the 450V

· What effect did “responsibility” have on the process?

· What effect did “authority” have on the experiment?

Bureaucracies

· A formal organization whose members have highly specialized tasks arranged in a hierarchy of authority

· The defining structure of the modern organization

· The most efficient type of formal organization

Bureaucracies

· Five Characteristics of bureaucracies (according to Weber)

· Separate levels; task assignments flow down the levels, accountability flows up the levels

· A division of labor

· Formalized rules

· Written communication and records

· Impersonality and replaceability

Bureaucracies

· Dysfunctions of Bureaucracies

· Red tape: formalized rules within organizations that often seem unnecessary and can prohibit decision-making

· Alienation: repetitive tasks, being disconnected from the work, office workers filling out endless forms

· How do we resist alienation?

The McDonaldization of Society (George Ritzer)

· Standardization of everyday life

· Uses the metaphor of the assembly-line production of the fast food industry

· Efficiency, calculability, predictability/standardization, and control

· Originally referred to shopping malls, travel agencies, mass produced news (1993)

· Now, much of our standardization comes from Amazon (shopping), Social Media (information), big Tech companies (entertainment)