dominant group

Examples of dominant group in the following topics:

• The Conflict Perspective

  • Conflict theory suggests that men, as the dominant gender, subordinate women in order to maintain power and privilege in society.
  • According to conflict theory, society is defined by a struggle for dominance among social groups that compete for scarce resources.
  • Therefore, men can be seen as the dominant group and women as the subordinate group.
  • While certain gender roles may have been appropriate in a hunter-gatherer society, conflict theorists argue that the only reason these roles persist is because the dominant group naturally works to maintain their power and status.
  • According to conflict theory, social problems are created when dominant groups exploit or oppress subordinate groups.

• Minorities

  • The definition of a minority group can vary, depending on specific context, but generally refers to either a sub-group that does not form either a majority or a plurality of the total population, or a group that, while not necessarily a numerical minority, is disadvantaged or otherwise has less power (whether political or economic) than a dominant group.
  • A majority is that segment of the population that outnumbers all others combined or one that is dominant.
  • The assimilation of minority groups into majority groups can be seen as a form of racism.
  • In this process, the minority group sheds its distinctive traits and is absorbed into the dominant group.
  • Voluntary assimilation is usually the case with immigrants, who often adopt the dominant culture established earlier.

• The Social Reproduction of Inequality

  • According to conflict theorists, this is a predictable result of capitalism and other forces of domination and inequality.
  • Inequality is continually socially reproduced because the whole education system is overlain with a dominant group's ideology.
  • The premise that education fosters equal opportunity is regarded as a myth, perpetuated to serve the interests of the dominant classes.
  • Conflict theorists argue that schools, like society in general, are based on exploitation, oppression, domination, and subordination.

• Panic

  • Panic is a sudden terror which dominates thinking and often affects groups of people.
  • Panics typically occur in disaster situations, such as during a fire, and may endanger the overall health of the affected group.
  • A moral panic is a mass movement based on the perception that some individual or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, poses a menace to society.
  • These panics are generally fuelled by media coverage of social issues (although semi-spontaneous moral panics do occur and some moral panics have historically been fueled by religious missions, governmental campaigns, and scientific mobilizing against minority groups that used media outlets to further their claims), and often include a large element of mass hysteria.

• Discrimination Against Individuals

  • A common example of discrimination is the exclusion or restriction of members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group, such as access to public facilities like bathrooms and water fountains.
  • Reverse discrimination is a term referring to discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group, including the city or state, or in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group.
  • Groups may be defined in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, or other factors.
  • This discrimination may seek to redress social inequalities where minority groups have been denied access to the same privileges of the majority group.
  • In such cases it is intended to remove discrimination that minority groups may already face.

• Minority Groups

  • The term "minority" is applied to various groups who hold few or no positions of power in a given society.
  • Minority group status is also categorical in nature: an individual who exhibits the physical or behavioral characteristics of a given minority group will be accorded the status of that group and be subject to the same treatment as other members of that minority group.
  • Recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as a minority group or groups has gained prominence in the Western world since the nineteenth century.
  • The abbreviation "LGBT" is currently used to group these identities together.
  • Rather, they are disadvantaged by technologies and social institutions that are designed to cater to the dominant, hearing-unimpaired group.

• Functions of the State

  • For example, in debates over education, the National Education Association, a union of teachers, might be considered one special interest group, while a group of parents could band together to form another interest group.
  • He believed that the state mirrored societal class relations, that it regulated and repressed class struggle, and that it was a tool of political power and domination for the ruling class.
  • Anarchists believe that the state is inherently an instrument of domination and repression, no matter who is in control of it.
  • They then view the state as a neutral body that simply enacts the will of whichever group dominates the electoral process.
  • He also viewed governmental agencies as simply another set of competing interest groups.

• Authority

  • Authority is the legitimate or socially approved use of power that a person or a group holds over another.
  • Authority, by contrast, depends on subordinate groups consenting to the use of power wielded by superior groups.
  • Max Weber, in his sociological and philosophical work, identified and distinguished three types of legitimate domination (Herrschaft in German, which generally means 'domination' or 'rule').
  • These have sometimes been translated to English as types of authority, because domination is not seen as a political concept.
  • Weber defined domination (authority) as the chance of commands being obeyed by a specifiable group of people.

• Widespread Belief

  • It is common for many societies to be dominated by a single widespread belief.
  • Today, most Christian denominations in the United States are divided into three large groups: Evangelicalism, Mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.
  • Christian denominations that do not fall within either of these groups are mostly associated with ethnic minorities, i.e. the various denominations of Eastern Orthodoxy.
  • Islam, for example, dominates the Middle East, with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, and Niger having 90% or more of their population identifying as Muslim.
  • As the map shows, certain regions are dominated by widespread beliefs.

• The Interactionist Perspective

  • Evolving out of the mid-20th century "Chicago School" of urban sociology, Park created the term human ecology, which borrowed the concepts of symbiosis, invasion, succession, and dominance from the science of natural ecology.
  • Competition was created by groups fighting for urban resources, like land, which led to a division of urban space into ecological niches.
  • Then, after some time, a hierarchical arrangement can prevail—one of accommodation—in which one race is dominant and others dominated.