Week 7 — Readings & Resources

Your primary reading is Chapter 7 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 80–97 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (16–20 min total)

• Politics: Crash Course Sociology #30 — CrashCourse
• What mediation is and how it can help — Acas

① Why people follow: power, authority, and legitimacy

Chapter 7, Section “Tell power from authority: why people follow” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Power, authority, and legitimacy” · Remember: power makes others act, authority is power people accept as rightful, and legitimacy is the acceptance between them.

• Politics: Crash Course Sociology #30 — CrashCourse — an animated sociology episode on power, the kinds of authority, and political systems; as you watch, pause each time the host names a kind of authority and say where its legitimacy comes from. This builds on Week 6's work on exchange: there you asked how goods move, and here you ask who has the right to direct them. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)
• What are Max Weber’s Types of Authority? — Sociology Vibes — a short sociology explainer on three sources of authority, with everyday examples; after it, sort the hiking club's elected president and the kitchen's long-serving dishwasher by the source of their legitimacy. Use it while completing the Week-7 module overview. (video, 8 min) (captions: creator)
• Political Legitimacy, Descriptive and Normative Concepts — online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (reference entry) — a reference-work entry; read only its first section, which separates legitimacy as people's beliefs about authority from legitimacy as a standard for judging it. The course uses the first sense: legitimacy is the acceptance that turns power into authority. (reading, 10–15 min)

② Unequal access: prestige and basic resources

Chapter 7, Section “Compare access to prestige: egalitarian, rank, and stratified” · Session 1, Segment 3, “Egalitarian, rank, and stratified societies” · Remember: Fried's scheme asks whether access to prestige and to basic resources is equal, and it is a model, not a ladder.

• Social Stratification: Crash Course Sociology #21 — CrashCourse — an animated sociology episode on how societies rank people and the open and closed systems that result; as you watch, notice that it uses stratification for ranked inequality in general, while Fried's scheme keeps the word for unequal access to basic resources such as land. (video, 11 min) (captions: creator)

③ Keeping order: gossip, ridicule, shunning, and law

Chapter 7, Section “Keep order without a referee: social control and law” · Session 2, Segment 4, “Social control and law” · Remember: law is one form of social control, and gossip, ridicule, and shunning keep order in every group.

• What is Social Control? — Sociology Vibes — a sociology explainer on formal and informal social control, with rewards and penalties from everyday life; list each example it gives and mark it informal or law, as the chapter did for the pickup game. (video, 6 min) (captions: creator)
• The Social Currency — Knowing Better — an essay video on why people gossip and what it does for a group; as you watch, ask which of the reasons it gives for gossip would also keep people within a group's unwritten rules, as the market vendor's warning that people talk does. (video, 9 min) (captions: creator)

④ Settling a dispute: who makes the final call

Chapter 7, Section “Settle a dispute: negotiation, mediation, adjudication” · Session 2, Segment 5, “Settling disputes” · Remember: negotiation, mediation, and adjudication differ in who decides, the parties, the parties with help, or a third party.

• Pro Se Court at the Daley Center: Mediation — Illinois Legal Aid Online — a legal-aid explainer on court mediation for people without a lawyer; as you watch, notice who decides at each step: the two sides with a mediator's help, or a judge. (video, 4 min) (captions: creator)
• What mediation is and how it can help — Acas — a public workplace-relations service's plain guide to mediation at work; read the opening and the section headed A voluntary and confidential process, then name the step that would turn the same dispute into adjudication. (reading, 6–10 min)
• Iglulik Inuit Drum Dance, Dance Song Competitions — Indigenous Dance — a scholar's essay on Inuit drum-dance songs from a project made with Indigenous cultural partners; read the section headed Dance Song Competitions, which separates friendly song contests from contests that settled serious disputes before an audience. The passage on disputes draws on an early twentieth-century account, so restate each point in the past tense. (reading, 8–12 min)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

• Authority, Three Concepts of Political Authority — online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (reference entry) — a reference-work entry on political authority; read only section 1.1, which sets out three ways of understanding authority, and skip the theories of consent that follow. (reading, 8–12 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

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