Applying the Sociological Imagination

  1. According to Pierre Bourdieu, elites create a distinction between themselves and the masses of people by defining “good taste.” For this exercise, examine how taste works in the United States by taking a look at items in an industry of your choice (fashion, food, art, clothing, cars, homes) that supposedly reflect “good taste.”

    If necessary, use the Internet to research tasteful items in the industry you choose (search words like luxury, designer, gour­met). Go to different websites and pay attention to how the items are marketed and the language used to describe them. In what ways are differences created around these products? How do lower-cost versions mimic these items? Do you think that globalization and the Internet are changing how taste dif­ferentiates people? Why or why not?
     

  2. By examining various forms of global inequality, this chapter provides a glimpse of how life is experienced in different parts of the world. For this exercise, imagine that you had been born in a different part of the world (Global South versus Global North, or as one of the bottom billion) and think about how life would have been different for you. Select a few different locations (e.g., West Africa, China, the United Kingdom, Peru, Haiti, the United States) and reflect on how global stratification would have shaped your life outcomes in those locations.

    You might consider some of the following questions: How would your life expectancy differ across locations? How would the likelihood that you would be attending college change across locations? Would you have been more likely to experi­ence hunger in some of these locations than in others? How would your possibilities of moving up in society differ across locations? What would it be like to be born a girl in Mexico, as compared with a boy in the United Kingdom? You might use the Internet to identify further differences in areas such as housing, poverty, schooling, and access to clean water and flushing toilets.