Today is her father's (1910 -1993 ce.) Memorial Day.
She has been curious about how a man becomes a father (biologically) and then a dad (economic-culturally) since she was a little girl. Coincidentally, on the top of the book bank along her bed was Richardson's William James, 1842-1910 ce. (including his equally renowned and respectable brother, accomplished so much like him), colorfully embellished with fascinating and endless, first of all, life chances, then, followed by the numerous opportunities and choices - compared to majority of his contemporaries, even those of today, to develop every bit of human potentials.
Her father was born in the same year when James passed away - an interesting sociological phenomenon to see the individual, societal, national, and global gaps separating these two men.
Her father, without education (so as his wife, the writer's mother, of this article, who was purely a so-called, illiterate), but fortunately, a cooking skill he learned from a Japanese (Japan occupied/colonized Taiwan from 1895 to 1945) restaurant sustained his survival and attracted her mother, an eldest daughter who needed food sources to support her adoptive parents and their seven children - her mother's siblings. Yes, coincidentally, but not accidentally, both her parents were orphans. You have to be pulled back to a time to imagine how the gender ideology powerfully ingrained into various socio-economic conditions of different walks of lives to grasp the behaviors in inducing or forcing a woman to put one leg into her casket for a pregnancy, not to mention, enduring the multiple births (often time, demanded to give birth a male offspring). Then, men, most of time and most of them were part of the victims of politic-economic ideology, who could not afford to do anything to mitigate the suffering, if not reinforcing it.
As she grew up, she realized her father had a good brain even though her mother (who also owned a good brain, if not better than her father's) denied every bit of his merits. The couple struggled through a miserable marriage with ten children, which, unexpectedly, made some of their offspring stronger.
Fortunately, born as a middle child among many siblings, she cherishes the birth-order (yes, her best life chance that she has ever gotten from her parents) that provided her much more advantages than the siblings older and younger than she. Her mother gave birth of her when she was in her prime of 35, while her youngest sister was born when mother was very ill at age of 45. One of her siblings, once sourly joked about, "Ar-may-a (the writer's nickname) is the luckiest child in the world. She got the best birth condition among all!" when mom was in the good shape of health. And this event became the most unfair privilege happening in this family. But, things always have, at least, two sides of stories. No one could argue that mother almost lost her life through this child-birth ordeal during the hottest day of the year without fans, any cooling devices, or any medical assistance available. In other words, her coming to this world was not so much welcomed, because she almost took away her dear mother's life - an unconscious un-filial pious scar hidden inside her mind. This is the main reason why the root beer is the only pop that she could accept in the US that her mother advised not to drink any soda when she left for the US for a study via a national scholarship. In fact, she likes root beer very much. The reason was that mother told her, during the difficulty of giving birth of her, a bottle of root beer (黑松沙士) resuscitating her diminishing energy to push her out to the world! Root beer saved the lives of her mother and her!
Then she grew up with a minor autism. But that was O.K. to her life chances except one thing. She does not bear any resemblance to her beautiful mother, but duplicated with every bit of unattractive facial features from her father - a wrong combination of eyes, notes, mouth, teeth, and the shape of the whole face (how wrong? It takes another article to write about why the facial canvas becomes the best practice of her drawing and painting. So, stay tuned :D).
As a little girl, the neighbors knew that there was an ugly child in her family. How could this family secret spread out through the neighborhood? Then you had to know a son of her mother's adoptive parents (a strange type of adoption you could have ever heard about. Another book needs to be written about it). He is uncle Yoshi whom her mother supported the most during the hardest time of all folks. Since she could understand the human language (yes, she was still unable to talk until about 3 years of age), she was repeatedly instilled with the notion, "Ar-may-a is the ugliest girl in the world. She is so ugly that she scares away the train that she hopes to have opportunity to board on," uncle Yoshi proclaimed inside and outside the family all the time. This statement was well disseminated among her relatives. She was a fun, laughing stock of uncle Yoshi, while mother could not say anything about her adoptive brother's indulgence. Mother could not deny the "FACT" she brought her to this world. From these trivial events, you might also be able to empathize how caring, loving, and responsible as an adoptive (eldest) sister/daughter her mother was! What the hack in the world does any mother allow people to criticize, not to mention- make fun or ridicule her lovely, adorable, and beautiful babies??
The conditions depicted above have never had effects on her appreciation of her life chances that her parents gave to her. The older siblings suffered "legacies" passed down from her parents, that had tremendous impact on their life conditions, while the younger ones, her parents were old enough, and older siblings had their own life engagements, attention and care were not much available to them. (For these, there could be a couple of books needed to be written out). The "just-make" adversities, challenges, and joy facilitating her life opportunities are so precious to her. She appreciates everything happening in her life. Thanks, dear mom, dad, brothers, and sisters!!! She is the luckiest child among the ten! This appreciation triggered her to write about events that she has the first-hand experience (and fortunately, being a sociologist) to probe into the fascinating human phenomena of Life Chances and Life Opportunities.
After the above fluffy trivia, now let's gear toward the serious things.
Some of the great or not-so-great biographies or autobiographies written till today, tend to interest socially conscious audience and readers, such as, like her, to view from the sociological perspective of Life Chances (comprising Life Opportunities/Choices) to get into the vicissitude of the protagonist's life journey. A positive effect of this approach may reduce a potentially biased perception on the disparity between the notion of success vs. non-success, and re-defines the idea of merit-talent vs. fault-mediocrity. It may also redeem the value of the Genteel or the Leisure class (i.e., the aristocrats/intellectuals/elitists) in human society if so called the "refined advancement" or the "progress of civilization" is destined or desirable. In this sense, sociology shares some of the philosophical beauty in seeing patterns and chaos through the human kaleidoscope, but sociology also would have had more limitations in explaining (engineering, or fixing) the fundamental questions and problems, such as, the most obvious one, what determines human beings to be born with different skin colors "at the first place"; why faiths, religions are so deeply ingrained in human psyche, if not assisted by the interpretations of the bio-psych-evolutionary (and once in a while, via "Buddhism") theories.
So, what is "chance"? At the factual value, it is the opposite of determinism. It refers to the possibility of something to happen - accidentally or fortuitously, or it refers to probabilities of an event occurring or taking place in future. For example, the writer of this article was born in Taipei, Taiwan, female (yes, a type of ugly baby with a minor autism by uncle Yoshi's standards :)!), in a family depicted above. It was is on chance, not opportunity, unless certain type of "enlightenment", technology, social-engineering, and the rest of man-made mechanisms intervene.
It is lucky or lacks luck. It can be a state of randomness which lacks patterns or predictability. The sociological jargon, it calls "ascribed statuses", which individuals are born with or involuntarily pick up in the later life. Thus, people are born with ascribed conditions that they have no control over, whether positively and/or negatively. They have significant impact in the later "achieved statuses", accomplished positively and/or negatively as well - with various life opportunities ascribed into.
Generally speaking, a universally popular saying, "Gods help those who help themselves" has positive effects to help people with power, privileges, and authority in guiding the mass to believe in themselves, for the ascribed statuses (both positive and negatives) tend to be invisible, or intentionally neglected and ignored by both the aware, keen, unaware, and the uninformed people. The Horatio Alger syndrome flourishing in the early stage of a capitalistic society will be discussed later in this article.
Though, individual random events are unpredictable, through the law of large numbers, the cumulative frequencies of different outcomes over a large number of events (or "trials") is predictable. This interesting phenomenon provides sociology with convincing power in explaining structures, patterns, dynamics, and entropy in social role, status (ascribed vs. achieved), institutions, social stratification, social mobility, intra/inter-generational mobility, and social reforms/revolutions. For example, a person to be born into poor, rich, black, white, male, female, healthy, congenitally diseased and so on bio-attributes, if without the intervention of technological or social engineering, it is based on chance as mentioned in the previous section with a real example of the writer's. At the individual level, it is an effect of randomness. Majority of people may take the personal choices as their freedom or "free will" to decide their destiny, such as believing in the choice to decide whom they want to marry, job chosen for living, place selected to live, the type of moral compass they carry... and so on. A typical example frequently happening in the sociological classroom at a two-year tech college setting with a student body of a majority working-class would look like this:
John shared his idea about social mobility covered on that day of stratification topic, " I have the absolute freedom to choose joining the military to climb up my social ladder. Why, because it is I making such a choice. No one else could influence me about such a decision." Then, as an instructor under such a political climate (particularly when students know that she is a retired female Captain who served 8 years in the military, and she is a minority, in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, age, language/accent..), she nodded with her head, and positively appreciated the student's courage and patriotism to serve this country with so much confidence in believing in oneself. Then the instructor shared an event happening yesterday, " A news reporter visited a university of the Ivy Leagues. S/he participated in a student government meeting with sizzling energy filled up the Auditorium. A student leader harangued at the end of a topic related to the current issue, " ... our nation is facing unprecedented crisis. The enemy determines to destroy our life style, our democracy, and the rest.... Support our troop!!!" The rest of audience boisterously shouted it loud "Hurray!! Support our troop..." After a short while, the reporter got the student speaker for a brief interview,
" In this case, would you like to enlist the military to serve our country when so much needed? " The student speaker, paused, and then reluctantly answered, "Oh, well, my parents encourage me to go for an MBA degree..." The instructor asked students to comment on this event, including John. Not surprisingly, most students would say, "Here is America. You absolutely have freedom to make your choice to be whatever you want to be. That's!" The pattern of these recurrent comments throughout years from most of the students, make her re-think of the power of myth to keep the Horatio Alger's "optimism" alive - what a mixed blessing!! Do you blame the always on the rise of Individualism being a Nemesis of Sociology? Why does sociology have to go through these "Much ado about nothing...in your teaching which even cannot compete with a myth...", the instructor scratched the head with doubt of the "authentic" effect of sociology learning, for most of them would earn the passing or better grades through a type of necessary shallow learning. What is so called authentic assessment of the learning outcome? Does she expect too much from these one-shot-of sociology students? This course is not required by many degree programs. Furthermore, this could be the only opportunity that students get to taste the flavor of sociology. She constantly rolls up all her sleeves, wipes out the last drop of the sweat to get them to like, appreciate, embrace, even, take sociology as a major or minor if they plan to transfer to a 4-year college, and hopefully, remember the motto from day One of the course, " Sociology is not just a mirror reflecting reality, but with hammer to re-shape it"!
SOS!! Help her! Are there better pedagogic approaches to debunk all sorts of myths (in jargon, false consciousness, or ingrained ideologies) at this level of teaching and learning? She cannot afford any dislike or misunderstanding toward sociology from students! Even though she developed variety of teaching strategies and learning activities, including a daily ritual to make students connecting to the bigger society, writing letters to a personified Society in an intimate manner, and expect that connection could exist after they complete this course. But a 3-credit, 48- hour course (equivalent to 2 days' official learning), how much can she get and expect?
Here is her personal note: "Indeed, the ultimate and the most challenging task for being a sociology instructor at a 2-year tech college setting, from my humble bias, is not debating and discussing those tons of sociological jargon, theories and practices. It is making that thin, fine, ephemeral line invisibly connecting individuals and the larger society/institutions tangible or palpable that brands sociology with exciting and perplexing flavors. What a daunting task!!! Mills' sociological imagination may be cultivable among some of the determined sociologist students, but it might not be a nice or necessary thing to have among students from certain social classes - and because this, it makes sociology teaching and learning complicated and fascinating".
Returning to the main topic, nevertheless, at the institutional level, the interlocking of the pivotal social structures, such as family, government, education, religion, health care institutes, media, economic systems, imposes circumscriptions on individuals with certain amount of opportunities depending on different social strata (class) they are born into. For example, a function of the law of large numbers expresses the predictability of pattern of those who are "randomly" born into wealthy, powerful, and prestigious family tend to possess higher probability to live healthier, longer with higher socioeconomic success than those who are not. This strand of research is popularized in the sociological field and other relevant disciplines.
On the other hand, opportunity, by a general definition, is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something. Opportunity in this sense refers to the extent to which one has access to resources, both tangible ones such as materials to sustain life, and intangible ones such as education and aesthetic values. Circumscribed by chances, opportunities operate within the boundary of the chance which provides. Individuals put efforts to grab the available opportunities to achieve their goals. Thus, opportunities to be fruited require actions to make them happen. Nevertheless, to take actions, the opportunities have to exist (whether created or blocked) at the first place. There are many types of gatekeepers gingerly guard all sorts of opportunities. For example, there are higher pay with specific hard and/or soft skills required job opportunities available if one gets a college or professional degree to meet with the requirement to apply to.
This means that the opportunity is opened to those who are qualified to participate in the job competition. In this case, educational opportunity has to exist prior to the job opportunity, similar to the notion that equality needs to be ready before the equity to be worked out. There is less likely to leave merely for chance or probability, unless the human intervention happens, such as nepotism, favoritism, and the rest of unfairness hindering the equal opportunity idealism, such as sexism, racism, ableism, classism and the rest of exclusivism.
Opportunity, in sociology, is an essential goal of "socio-teleology". To beat the odds (circumscribed chances), individual's effort has limitation. Government's policy making and collective movements in social reforms/revolution are to aim at broadening or equalizing the opportunity to each individual.
Now juxtaposing chances and opportunities, here is a brief review about these two terms. A life has a chance to be born as a black, white, brown, or mixed race, but saying that one has an opportunity to be born into rich or poor family makes no sense, because chances happen in the future (most of time, randomly), while opportunities require actions to generate consequences both in beneficial and/or disadvantaged ways. Thus, one has opportunities to climb up or slide down from the social ladder, due to one's effort/talent, or laziness/lack of education/motivation...etc., which, again, are not independent events, but correlated to one's generational SES conditions - an institutional phenomenon.
So now you might understand there is a sociological base for this idiom: Some people are born to destine for success, others, struggling on the road of less traveled, while the rest of 95%, have the "privilege" to watch both the success and struggle of the previous two categories. This is what she mentioned above that meritocracy, talent, failure, and fault might not be so clear cut without discrediting some individuals' glorious achievements. Furthermore, this phenomenon might also help decode a myth puzzling her for a while, which the Buddha proclaims in the 5th century BCE. He says, All Lives Are Equal (I think, including both sentient and non-sentient beings) in a society where the Caste system was the norm.
In short, it is enhancing the availability and accessibility of opportunities that drives humanity going and thriving. But in order to increase life opportunities to ensure equity, the conditions (in particular, the disadvantages) embedded in the life chances have to be examined and reduced.
Max Weber coined the term - "Life chances" (Lebenschancen in German) which is a social science theory of the opportunities each individual has to improve their quality of life. According to this theory, life chances are significantly correlated with one's socioeconomic status (SES). Since the 100 % self-made man (rarely speaking, woman) does not exactly exist in the human society, SES tends to be accumulative through generational built-up or built-down. Factors of race/ethnicity, gender, ancestry, nationality, religion, language, physicality, and sexual orientation comprise the possibility of upward, downward, and horizontal social mobility, which in terms contribute to the inter-generational social mobility. Both Weber and Marx emphasized that economic factors were important in determining one's life opportunities. Inspired by Marx, Weber's concepts of life chances are more complex than Marx's views on the dichotomy of social class (Bourgeoisie vs. Proletarians). Weber stressed the link between life chances and the "non-random" factors of the tripartite – wealth, power, and prestige affecting each individual's life chances, and in terms, life opportunities. Individuals' group membership and in the specific social institutions have in common for enhancing their life chances as well life opportunities, for example, practicing endogomy/homogomy with exceptional demands on exogomy, either for politic-economic alliance, or bio-genetic concerns; to re-create better life "chances" for the offspring, and later, life opportunities; inner networking for career opportunities; and keeping outsiders at bay, to name a few.
In life chances, cultural capitals are the invisible resources (both positive and negative: wealth, power, prestige, stigma, poverty, marginalized status and so on) passed down in family through generations. Most sociologists argue that education (the authentic type) is the major mechanism to enhance upward social mobility. In her classroom, she tends to differentiate cultural capitals into (1) social capitals, (2) financial capitals, (3) and emotional capitals (can be more). These invisible capitals run behind the door of a family through generations, positively, negatively, and often time, both. That explains how different social classes comprehend parental styles, consumption pattern, health conditions, social/economic issues (and the intertwining of both), political ideologies, voting patterns, and the rest of socioeconomic behaviors.
Regarding agency and structure, life chances represent the structure (stratified) of people's ascribed statuses that individuals have no control over; whereas one's achieved statuses are the agency based on one's values and beliefs, risk taking, social skills, and choices (which, correlated to one's/family's SES conditions) comprising one's behavior which one has control over. According to Weberian theories, together ascribed and achieved social statuses of life chances and life opportunities are responsible for one's lifestyle.
Enhancing life chances (social engineering) involves in systemic and systematic changes, such as ameliorating poverty, ensuring a leveled playing field for individuals, and reducing the inequality of the ascribed statuses that one has no control over, such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and the rest of stratified or socially constructed conditions hindering a personal life opportunities. In short, a person's achieved statuses are hinged on the ascribed conditions. Therefore, reducing the various disparity at the birth (the gaps among class, race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability, national origins, religion and so on) through social policies is a government's fundamental responsibility. This is also the ultimate meaning of sociology.
Thus, early intervention is necessary in improving life chances. “No child should endure poverty and no child’s life chances should be shaped by the accident of birth" is not an idealistic notion but a reality necessarily to reduce inequality in the early stage of a child's life. Early intervention, particularly in health care and education is a practical measure to ensure equity.
The following video and picture illustrate the above phenomena based on race and gender (surely, intertwine and intersect with class) two factors:
The whole politic-economic system correlated to people's life chances and opportunities, such as from James' to her father's, are part of the universal phenomena of social stratification. Just like in the sinking Titanic, some people were on the top deck, near the life boats; others, in the middle deck, struggling for surviving took efforts; and the rest, at the bottom of the ocean liner, death was much closer to reality. Facing life and death, social class mattered, and no one was to blame for why, what, and how it happened to an unsinkable boat equipped with 700 life boats for 2400 passengers boarded on the 3 levels of deck!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSIwUaDOl3A
In this case, Class and Race (most of time, they intertwine, though. Gender is another big factor, plus the rest of variables), which one you think has more impact on an individual's life chances?
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(See all the information you and I generously give away to feed these Cloud, Big Data businesses).
We co-re-create the 1984!!
See what I got !