Week 3 — Culture

Why this matters

A nurse explaining a care plan to a family with different customs and a manager writing a dress code for a mixed team both run into the unwritten rules a group shares.

In plain language

Every group you belong to runs on rules that nobody wrote down for you, from how fast to answer a text to when it is polite to start eating. This week is about culture, the shared way of life a group passes on: what it values, what it believes, the rules it expects people to follow, and the objects and words it uses. You will learn to sort those rules by how much they matter to people and by how they are enforced. You will also learn two opposite ways of meeting an unfamiliar custom: judging it by your own group's standards, or trying to understand it on its own terms.

• Already covered: Week 1, The Sociological Imagination & Doing Sociology, gave you the three perspectives and the macro and micro levels of analysis. Week 2, Sociological Research Methods, taught you to ask how evidence was gathered and to read a figure four ways.
• This week: culture, the shared values, beliefs, norms, symbols, language, and objects of a group, and the two ways of meeting another group's customs.
• How they connect: Week 1's three perspectives get their first full workout on a cultural norm, and Week 2's four questions help you read a real figure about cultural lag.
• Where we're going next: Week 4, Socialization & the Self, asks how each of us learns a culture in the first place and becomes a self along the way.

Focus

What rules does a group share, how much do they weigh, and how do we study them fairly?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] tell culture from society, and a value from a belief
• [ ] sort a norm as a folkway, mos, or taboo, and its sanction two ways
• [ ] tell ethnocentrism from relativism, and a subculture from a counterculture
• [ ] read one norm through the three perspectives

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 3 (about 40 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: sort the uniform-shirt rule by moral weight and by sanction.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early.

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