It's up in the Air, or Is It?

Abstract

In his observations about the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills argues that people have difficulty seeing connections between individual outcomes and social structures. Inspired by Mills's observations, we developed a classroom exercise for stratification and organization courses that demonstrates how social structures can constrain individual actions and still produce outcomes that students often attribute to individual effort. Using the simple process of flipping coins, this exercise minimizes the importance of individual differences while producing an aggregate outcome that mirrors the skewed distributions of personal wealth, firm size, and corporate assets in the United States. Faced with this counterintuitive outcome, we engage students in a discussion that explores how changing the rules of the game or the equivalent social structures could change the overall outcome of the exercise or the distribution of valued goods and services in the United States. In this paper, we demonstrate our students' enjoyment of the game format; more importantly, we demonstrate how this exercise is an effective way to teach students about the importance of social structure.

The Sociological Imagination and Community-based Learning: Using an Asset-based Approach

“…Ironically, the social context of many of our students means they are typically from a culture (twenty-first–century United States) that praises individualism (Zipp 2002). As such, they are often tied to an individual perspective and struggle to understand the important role played by social forces (Renzulli 2003; Zipp 2002). This may be especially true for students from more privileged backgrounds and those with a less diverse range of experiences (Hoop 2010).…”

Fostering Scholarly Discussion and Critical Thinking in the Political Science Classroom

“…To counter this, sociology instructors have devised classroom techniques that emphasize experimental scenarios instead of real-world examples. For example, Renzulli, Aldrich, and Reynolds (2003) describe an exercise in which students engage in a series of coin-toss games designed to illustrate uneven statistical distributions. The purpose of the game is to show how results can be unequal despite best efforts to produce equality of outcomes.…”

Deconstructing Victim-Blaming, Dehumanization, and Othering: Using Empathy to Develop a Sociological Imagination

“…It is “perhaps our best expression of sociology as liberal learning” (Hoop 2009:48) as well as “a foundation to the discipline” (Scanlan and Grauerholz 2009:1). While centrally important, it can also be a challenging task as students tend toward individualistic explanations of social phenomena (Renzulli, Aldrich, and Reynolds 2003). This is particularly prevalent in the United States or other cultures, which are more individualistic (Zipp 2002) and where reasoned perspectives are “complicated by cultural constructions” (Woodall 2017:161).…”