Examing the Norms Essay

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- Recipients

In order to account for the social rules governing the behaviors of the recipients, I will apply the concepts on class, power and culture and socialization.

As I have discussed above, there is this imbalance of power due the different classes of the donators and the recipients, with the recipient holding much less power. This essentially means that the recipient recognize that the donators can influence their lives in significant ways as their collective willingness to donate and amount donated will determine his livelihood. As such, he will bow down to express his gratitude for the donation received- much like how one would bow down to his boss when a pay is being handed over. Additionally, recipients use containers instead of wallets to collect the donation and are usually dressed down as they resort to this need to give this impression that they are poor and in desperate need for financial help. By setting up this impression, they are trying to receive an expected response- that the public would sympathize with them and hence donate. As opposed to this, the use of wallet and dressing up would only give off the impression that they are not that poor and certainly not in need for help. Consequentially, there will be a loss of donation for the recipients, constituting the control mechanism behind these social rules.

- Enforcement of Rules

With reference to Caplow’s article on “Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown”, the social norms that govern donation can be viewed as “language” or ”dialect” picked up since young and not forgotten over the years. So now the question turns to: how is this standardization of “language” being facilitated?

For the donators, they learn of the power imbalance from both mass media and in school. Since young, they are taught that they should help the ones in need and made aware about the different social classes. As such, they pick up the social rules as per mentioned in order to retain the power and pride they have.

The most powerful reinforcement of these social rules lies in the consequences of not abiding them. From the perspective of the donators, there is this loss of pride or reversal in power if they do not observe the norms. As for the recipients, the consequence will be even heavier. If they give off an undesirable impression, they will likely lose a huge amount of donations that could affect their livelihood.

- Conclusion

Similar to Christmas gift exchange in Middletown, these social rules constitute this “language” shared by the donators and the recipients and this “language” imposes itself by linguistic necessity once it is learned. Moreover, both parties enforce these social rules concerning donation unknowingly, without these social rules being written down or included in any guides.