preview

Why You Are Performing Heart Surgery Or Scanning Grocery Items For A Living

Better Essays

Whether you are performing heart surgery or scanning grocery items for a living, you have a social location that pinpoints where you land on the social spectrum. A social location is the social position that an individual maintains within their society and is based on certain characteristics believed to be significant by American society. Income and position of employment is not the sole factor in determining a social location. These other factors include, but not limited to, education, job, gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and of course the time period in which you are in. For me, I am a Hispanic 21-year-old male college student. This, along with my place in history, identifies my social location. The crux of a person’s existence in the political and social world can be expressed through social location. I have found where I land in the social world by realizing my social location and I wish to further improve that position. Power and privilege that a person can have access to and utilize is decided by the social location they have. If you are a 25-year-old African American woman then you are more likely to have less power and privilege than a Caucasian male of the same age. This is just one example of the many inequalities that exist in societies of the past and of today. Structural Functionalism is a paradigm based on the assumption that society is a unified whole that functions because of the contributions of its separate structures (Ferris and Stein

Get Access