Institutions

Step 1: Create a page in your E-Portfolio where you list out the different courses that you took that dealt specifically with different institutions. For each of those courses, write down some key concepts that you learned from that class.

  1. Sociology 220
    • this concept Goffman delineates the key features of totalitarian social systems
  2. Sociology 233
    • the institutionalization of inequality refers to the collection of laws, customs, and patterns of interaction that combine to produce inequality based on class, color, and gender.

Step 2: From those classes find three papers that you wrote that reflect the learning that you did in those classes.  Discuss how you think your writing about institutions has changed over those three papers.  You can talk about how your writing has become more sociological, the structure of your writing, or your writing ability in general (250 words)

I have had many papers that I wrote about institutions, many where I have written really good papers and some that were not my best work. My not-so-good papers had the starting ideas of what I wanted to talk about but I did not get everything on the paper. My writing about institutions now has progressed and now I can also write more about them because I have more knowledge to help understand how to elaborate more on my ideas. Writing about things that I had just begun to learn was hard for me to retain information to understand what I was writing.

Step 3: Create a page in your E-Portfolio and discuss how the institutions structure your own behavior, attitudes, and beliefs. Utilize the concepts from those classes to help you explain that relationship. Focus on about 4-5 concepts (750 words or less)

First, there are institutions established to care for persons thought to be both incapable and harmless; these are the homes for the blind, the aged, the orphaned, and the indigent. Second, there are places established to care for persons thought to be at once incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one: TB sanitoriums, mental hospitals, and leprosariums. Third, another type of total institution is organized to protect the community against what are thought to be intentional dangers to it; here the welfare of the persons thus sequestered is not the immediate issue. Examples are jails, penitentiaries, POW camps, and concentration camps. Fourth, we find institutions purportedly established the better to pursue some technical task and justify themselves only on these instrumental grounds: Army barracks, ships, boarding schools, work camps, colonial compounds, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants’ quarters, and so forth. Finally, there are those establishments designed as retreats from the world or as training stations for the religious: Abbeys, monasteries, convents, and other cloisters.

Step 4: Utilizing your industry reflections, how could you use the skills and knowledge learned about different institutions to help you perform the duties of the job you are seeking? (250 words)

My better understanding of the topic can help to educate my peers.