Sociological Imagination and Social Issues Essay Example for Free

Sociological Imagination and Social Issues Essay People are more likely to use psychological arguments to explain why things are they way they are rather than look at the sociological aspect of them. They think that problems happening in their lives are personal and overlook that they may be caused by society (Ferris Stein 13). Sociological imagination challenges people to look at the â€Å"intersection between biography and history† and see the role we each play in society (Mills 1959 and Ferris Stein 13). We must look at how larger social issues are intertwined in with each individual’s life and how society shapes a person. There are many benefits with using the sociological perspective on life and one of the most important ones is obtaining a â€Å"world beyond our own immediate sphere† (Ferris Stein 13). By doing this, we can seek radically different ways to experience life and look at our reality differently then we ever thought possible. It forces us to see how we created our values, morals, beliefs, and at some point we may need to reevaluate why we had them to begin with. Thinking with a sociological imagination makes us see the errors of our thinking and how we can change that. Macrosociology looks at how society and its social structure determine individual’s lives and sometimes even beliefs and opinions. I believe that I view myself differently because of how society told me I must be. It is instilled in us to be successful and I push my own limits in order to achieve that and my thoughts constantly revolve around how successful I can be and the consequences if I am not (Jenkins. My â€Å"Me and Society† Journal. 10/05/12). Society tends to set up rules or general guidelines for how everyone should live their lives and how to act socially. When a person departs from the â€Å"norm† in any way they are considered deviant and when the violations of rules have been written into law they are considered crimes (Dreiling. 10/23/2012. Lecture). How deviance is perceived may be different depending on who is explaining it. Psychologists state that personality characteristics within the individual that drive them to stray from the norm  while sociologists believe that social relations outside the individual are the cause (Dreiling. 10/23/2012. Lecture). There are many things, however, that are not only considered an act of deviance but consequences or benefits from being deviant. There are two general divisions of deviant violations: folkways and mores. Violation of folkways are more common, frowned upon issues such as jaywalking or poor manners whereas violations of mores are illegal incidences such as murder or rape. When these act of deviances occur, there are those who bind groups together and this can reinforce the person to continue these acts. Majority of the people, however, disapprove of these acts and they are called a negative sanction (Dreiling. 10/23/2012. Lecture). They tend to look down upon the acts, gossip, and with the more serious violations, imprison individuals and receive capital punishment. While the United States uses capital punishment and imprisonment as punishment for deviance, other countries don’t have these resources if they even desired to use it. Therefore, there are other techniques they use such as the Amish who shun those who violate the strict norms of the group because guilt of immorality is the ultimate punishment. They believe that those in the religious community cannot associate with lawbreakers even if they are family members and while the shunning is temporary, it has an impact an prevents deviant behavior (Ferris Stein 154). In the 20th Century, Robert Merton created the Structural Strain Theory that provides a connection between functionalist and conflict theories (Ferris Stein). It states that there are goals within society that people strive to achieve, however, they are unable to reach these goals and this creates a stress when people realize they cannot achieve them (Dreiling. 10/25/2012. Lecture). Stanley Milgram states that obedience is deeply ingrained into our behavioral tendencies and impulse overriding ethics and moral conducts (Dreiling. 10/25/2012. Lecture). Rebels are people that reject the cultural definitions of success and therefore are not obedient to the social norm to be successful making them deviant. Since they â€Å"rebel† to the social norm it advocates radical alternatives to the social order that  society lives in today (Ferris Stein 158). Kerckhoff and Back stated that â€Å"the belief in a tangible threat makes it possible to explain and justify one’s sense of discomfort† and this is why imprisonment and capital punishment is created (Dreiling. 10/25/2012. Lecture). Between the years of 1980 and 2006, the amount of incarcerated Americans went up nearly five times accumulating over two million prisoners. With less the 5% of the world’s population, we have created social acts that should be punishable by prison and have 23.4% of the world’s prisoners (Dreiling. 10/25/2012. Lecture). Sociologists and other groups have studied so in depth to crime and punishment that there are many subcategories within society that reasons with why people are incarcerated such as gender, race, age, and class as well as specified crime groups for violent, property, and white collar crimes (Ferris Stein 172, 173). Sociological imagination forces us to look at how we are asked to act and society and how we actually act. Most of the things we do in our daily lives we may think is by choice, however, it is how society wants us to live. Anytime individual’s challenge or stray from the norm of how society thinks we must function, there are consequences that are sometimes so severe that they drastically change our societies views, morals, and attitudes. By expanding our thinking about deviance we can really look at why we do not accept certain things that people do such as body modification even though it is not harming us. It also gives people the opportunity to look at how we react and punish those who are deviant and decide whether we have been acting appropriately with punishments such as capital punishment. By doing this we are given the chance to look at what we truly believe, whether it is because of macrosociology or microsociology, and make strides to change things. With sociological perspective, we are being asked to question how we do things and why. Then we are being asked not if we can change it but how. What I think should be another question is if we want to change it. We can abandon or reevaluate our opinions, beliefs, morals, and attitudes but at  the end of the day we need to look at our society and decide if the course of action is effective and if we, as individuals and a whole, feel comfortable with the standards we set on each other and ourselves. I believe that there must be a sense of right and wrong and punishment and rewards in order to have a balance in society. That is why we have deviance and crime within our society and there is nothing wrong with having a balance in our world. Bibliography 1. Ferris, Kerry, and Jill Stein. The real world: an introduction to sociology. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton Co., 2010. Print. 2. Katherine Jenkins. October 05, 2012. â€Å"I-Me-Society Journal 1†. 3. Dreiling, Michael. October 23, 2012. Lecture. 4. Dreiling, Michael. October 25, 2012. Lecture.

Rizzi’s The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery and his Locality and t

In the two articles, Rizzi’s The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery and his Locality and the Left Periphery, there does not seem to be any incompatibility but instead a steady focus on fist elucidating the structure of the left and using the left to refine the Relativized Minimality principle. The major issue is that issues presented in the first are not necessarily addressed in the second, like details about the null constant. The second paper can be viewed as an additional paper that relies, to some degree, on the information presented in the first, like the overall structure and some of the adverbial analyses. To that extent, it builds off of 1997. One of the main aims of Rizzi 1997 is â€Å"to explore some aspects of the fine structure of the left periphery† and â€Å"to postulate an articulated array of X-bar projections which will be assumed to constitute the complimentizer system†(Rizzi 1997:281). He also addresses some of â€Å"the adjacency and anti-adjacency effects involving elements of the C system and different kinds of fillers of the subject position (overt DP, PRO, trace) which are that are amenable to an explanation in terms of the assumed structure of the C system†. Rizzi (1997) depends on a few features, that syntactic movement is â€Å"last resort† or that it must be a necessary â€Å"quasi-morphological† requirement, and that these requirements are Criteria requirements, â€Å"the presence of a head entering into the required Spec-head configuration with the preposed phrase†. Criteria requirements, unlike feature checking, will not disappear. Finally, Rizzi must also assume within the relativized minimality theory, Empty Category Principle (ECP), and the Head Movement Constraint (HMC) and therefore head government. The rele... ...new structure for the left periphery that looks like this: Force Top* Int Top* Focus Mod* Top* Fin IP This template helps account for all of the different effects. We see these in examples (25), (26), (32-41), and (63). Adverbs are normally modifiers and quantifiers, and trigger minimality effects in wh-chains. Some belong only to the modifiers, like attentivement, and therefore do not have an effect on quantificational chains (Rizzi 2004: 244). â€Å"Simple adverb preposing targets the Mod position†, but can also target â€Å"the ordinary Focus position† and â€Å"negation belongs to both the quantificational class and the modifier class†(Rizzi 2004:244). This is one of the main differences between the first and second paper, the further analysis of the overall structure of the left periphery and how adverbs both help make it clear and how it explains their placement.

Burger Machine

Burger Machine Holdings Corporation, more commonly known as Burger Machine , is one of the notable fastfood companies in the Philippines. It is a sub-company of the Gilmore Food Corporation. Unlike Jollibee and other burger chains, Burger Machine has always been retailing in outdoor stands instead of shops. History It was created in 1981 by Fe Esperanza S. Rodriguez and a sister who both planned to turn two old small buses into mobile stores, an idea they adapted from America. It was their fondness for hamburgers that inspired them to make a business that would serve for the masses. The stores were hen opened near two gas stations in Quezon City. They all began with a capital of P40,000 with nearly two dozen employees working continuously. This non-stop service earned Burger Machine the nickname of â€Å"the burger that never sleeps. † A year later, a third store was opened. The company was nationally recognized. In 1990, the Corporate Office in EDSA started and was called EDS A Business Unit. It was also in this year when the Food and Nutrition Research Institute of the Department of Science and Technology confirmed their burgers as â€Å"source of the most nutrients in terms of peso value compared to other eading hamburger chains. † Through the years, Burger Machine launched dozens of branches including stalls and full-scale fast food restaurants. But during the Asian Financial Crisis of the 90's, the company saw more struggles and was forced to close down several branches and restaurants. Burger Machine is now back to its roots operation which is 24/7 burger stands for the masses. Other information One distinctive character associated with the company is the dwarf which appears on every outlet. For a number of years it had been unnamed. Later in 1988, it was given one, Burger Bart through a name contest. 1] Graphic designer/visual communicator Zeus Paredes coined the name â€Å"BURGER MACHINE† and designed the original logo and graphics o n the mobile stores. The business was widely advertised on television in the mid-1990s. Among those who helped promote it include the Philippines' late master rapper Francis Magalona and iconic band Eraserheads. Permit controversy In 2007, it was revealed that a majority of Burger Machine's stores have been operating without business licenses . Because of this, the Market Development and Administration Department gave them 15 days to go with the demands lest Burger Machine s well as its parent Gilmore would undergo such consequences, specifically having those stores closed. Financial Aspects of Business by Brian Hill, Demand Media Finance is a business function that uses numbers and analytical tools to help managers make better decisions. Every business owner must learn at least basic finance principles to effectively run his company. Finance helps management gain a clear understanding of the company’s current financial position, particularly whether the business is profitabl e or not. Companies of all sizes benefit from thorough financial planning to guide the usiness steadily down the path to future growth. Forecasting And Planning During the planning process, management determines numerical goals for the upcoming 12 months, or in the case of a long-range plan, for three years or more. Company management then maps out the actions that need to be taken, and the timeframe, for the goals to be reached. Finance comes into play when the action steps are converted to forecast numbers for revenues and expenses. Managers with financial planning expertise are able to create forecasts that are attainable yet aggressive. They must also have sufficient nderstanding about company operations to build spreadsheet financial models based on assumptions that are realistic. Accounting And Measuring Results Accounting is the branch of finance responsible for recording financial data and generating financial statements that show the company’s operating results, as w ell as other critical functions such as tax compliance. Accounting has its own set of rules and standards for the recording of financial information and the presentation of results, called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP. Strict compliance with the standards allows ompany management to be assured the statements they receive are complete and accurate. Finance goes one step further and interprets the results. Variance analysis is done to compare actual results to forecast and uncover the reasons for negative or positive deviations. Finance staff members compare the company’s financial results to those of other companies in the industry to see whether the company is performing above or below average, compared with its peers. Monitoring Cash Position All businesses, particularly smaller ones that do not have large cash reserves or borrowing capacity, must always keep an ye on their cash position — the inflows and outflows of cash. The finance department i s charged with forecasting cash flow to prevent potentially disruptive shortages of cash. In a small company this can mean serious problems, such as not being able to pay employees at the end of the week. Investing surplus cash to achieve a maximum return is also part of the finance function. In larger companies these investment activities take place on a daily basis and involve constant monitoring of the financial markets to select the best investments for such things as the company’s employee retirement plan. Analysis for Decision MakingFinance can be likened to a toolbox for company management to use. The tools help answer questions that management must address when making small and large decisions. A small decision might be whether to lease or buy a new copy machine. A large decision for which finance provides guidance could be whether to acquire a competitor in order to grow the company more quickly. The goal of the data gathering and sometimes complex financial modeling utilized in finance is to ensure the company makes the most efficient use of its finite resources, including the capital, human resources and productive capacity.

Problems Associated With Poor Time Management For Students

Introduction Time management is an essential aspect that the students must learn in order to achieve their goals and build their career. The skills of time management initially provide a relief from the stress as well as later helps the students to be focused towards their targets as well as their performance for achieving the targets. Thus, if the students are not able to manage their time effectively, then there may arise various issues in their personal as well as academic life (Michael). In the same essence, the report is focused on exploring the problems associated with poor time management for students. In addition to this, the cause of poor time management regarding issues are also evaluated in the report. Furthermore, the†¦show more content†¦This ultimately results in poor quality outcomes that are not able to meet the academic requirements, and lower overall grades (Liu et al.). This increased workload has a severe impact on the physical as well as mental health of the students. The heavy workload leads to students spending extended time sitting in front of the computer screens to search for the necessary data and address the assignment requirements. This has implications for the health of the students, impacting the vital bodily functions due to longer sitting. High exposure to screens also influences the eyes of the students, influencing their vision quality and interfering with the natural sleep cycle (Thorp et al.; Hale, and Guan). In addition to this, the students can potentially suffer from mental health issues, such as stress. Therefore, poor time management can seriously impact the physical and mental health of the students. Causes of Poor Time Management Related Issues One of the biggest causes for the poor time management among students is the tendency to procrastinate until the last possible moment. 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