Australian and Global Societies - Assignment Example

Australian and Global Societies Name: College: Course: Lecturer: Date: Question 1 Social integration is the progress of minority categories such as refugees, ethnic minorities, and disadvantaged segments of a society into the conventional society. Members of the marginal groups thus achieve full admission to the services, rights and opportunities accessible to the elements of the mainstream (Winthrop, 1991). Social integration is a complicated idea, which implies diverse things to different persons (United Nations, 1994). To many, it is a constructive goal, meaning equal rights and opportunities for every human being. In this instance, becoming integrated means improving life opportunities. To others, nonetheless, enhancing integration may juggle the picture of an unwished imposition of conventionality. And to others, the term social integration does not essentially mean an undesirable or a desirable state at all. It is just a way of characterizing the established sequences of human relationships in any particular society. Therefore, in the later definition, one sequence of social integration may offer a more promising, human or humane environment for humans than another. However, it is probable for one sequence of social integration to be noticeably diverse from anther without being either worse or better. Emile Durkheim helped to explain the differences in integration between modern and pre-modern societies. His major concept was social solidarity, as he explained social evolution as advancing from mechanical to organic solidarity. In pre-modern societies, people are independent, there is modest integration and therefore there is the need to employ repression and force to keep people together. In modern societies, individuals are much more interdependent and integrated and cooperation specialization and cooperation is widespread. Progress from pre-modern to modern is based first on population enlargement and rising population density, second on improving morality density (growth of more multifaceted social interactions) and thirdly, on the increasing specialization in workplace. Durkheim believed that the most significant factor in the social development is the division of labor. Question 2 The term affective individualism refers the creation of marriage ties on the basis of individual attraction, guided by standards of romantic attachment. Individualism refers to the bubble of concepts that stress this autonomy of individuals in contrast to the previous view of every human being as belonging to the overlying social entities of locale, craft, church, and family (Adams, 1998). Initially perceived as a big threat to an appropriately ordered society, individualism acquired acceptance with the emergence of commercialized economies and participatory politics. Autonomy underwent a transformation as well. Originally people thought of autonomy in terms of the category’s authority of self-government. However, autonomy became associated with individual free choice, competitive opportunity and liberty. Affective individualism is significant in the development of the modern family. This is because most contemporary western families, which feature emotional ties, internal privacy and an obsession with child upbringing, are characterized by affective individualism implying that even today; marriages spouses are normally chosen on the basis of quixotic love (Green, 1991). This is presently the standard, but it was not most of times so. Presently, there are numerous types of families around the globe, but there is an increasing trend toward the standard of the nuclear family. Some rationales for this pattern include: the western model of romantic love, the development of urban areas and centralized governments, as well as employment in places outside of conventional family influence. Family life is in no way at all times a picture of concord and cheerfulness. The dark side of the household is found in the sequences of family violence and abuse and that frequently occur within it. Even though no societal class is resistant to spousal abuse, researches do point out that it is more pervasive among low-income couples. Homosexuality and cohabitation have become more widespread in recent times. It is certain that substitute forms of sexual and social relationships to those common in the past will thrive still further. Yet family and marriage remain resolutely established institutions. Question 3 The efforts to re-conceptualize adulthood are filled with challenges, not the least since it offers an important contrast of society understanding of old age and adulthood. There is a single focal phase in the life span of a person which is to some degree stressed in many societies, namely the attainment of adulthood or complete membership in the social order. In western communities, such position is signified through the notions of choice, self-determination and autonomy. However adulthood is being re-conceptualized in recent times. Supporters of prolonged adolescence claim that some young individuals are rejecting or even differing adulthood. However, this is not the actual case. Research and reflection have proven that adulthood in contemporary times is being re-conceptualized; right her before people’s eyes while individual turn away from this procedure to look backwards for an elaboration of the inscrutabilities of modern existence. Studies suggest that today signs of transition to adulthood have increasingly become individualized in terms of person’s own placing of their transition into adulthood (Blatterer, 2001). For some people, adulthood is acquiring driver’s license and thus getting wheels as allegory of adult independence. For other people, it may be their appropriate dealing with an experience of weighty trauma. Any figure of firsts may be interpreted as markers of changeover into adulthood. In other terms, these individually significant experiences become deinstitutionalized changeover points and thus to do not comprise signifiers of adulthood in the classic, narrow sense (Korotayev, 2004). The ideal replica is being challenged, and in such situations it might well be, as it has previously been proposed, that individuals are anticipated to carve out main features of their adulthoods by means of self-managed maturation procedures and that as a consequence, adulthood is now more of a psychological state rather than a social standing. Question 4 Religious fundamentalism refers to a conviction in stringent adherence to basic principles which are frequently religious in nature as a response to apparent doctrinal concessions with political and modern social life (Sommerville, 1998). The term also means the processes through which religious institutions, practice and thinking lose their religious or social importance. The notion is based on the hypothesis, postulated by some sociologists, that as communities become modernized their religious values, institutions and morals give way to worldly ones and some religious characters become widespread secular practices. Secularization is used to refer to the conversion of a community from proximate identification with religious institutions and values toward irreligious or non-religious values and worldly institutions. Secularization has numerous levels of meaning, both as a historical process and a theory. Social theorists such as Émile Durkheim postulated that the industrialization of community would include a fall in degrees of religiosity. Analysis of this practice seeks to determine the mode in which, or amount to which religious institutions, practices and creeds are losing social meaning. The argument that Australia is a secular state is based on two facts. Firstly, in technical terms, the section 116 of Australia’s Constitution states that parliament can by no means discriminate against citizens or show favoritism because of their religion. It also states that religion cannot be a precondition for office, nor can the country promote or establish any particular religion (Innes, 2009). The second fact is ground on what could be characterized as rather relaxed regulations toward organized religion and cynicism towards its more severe expressions. Australian survey data over the previous century suggests that Australians are decreasingly abandoning Christianity. Church turnouts across every denomination are by and large falling, and people increasingly maintain to have no religion. Question 5 The concept of social integration and differentiation tend to center on the premise of Durkheim on social change. These are the fundamental factors that seem to shape the society’s capability to devolve or improve as it is subject to specific developments in the societal facts present. Durkheim asserts that the occurrence of social differentiation is as offshoot of the labor division in the community. Turner pushed the claim further asserting that the occurrence of division of labor in a particular society tends to generate the idea of social differentiation. His research indicated that social differentiation is instigated by an enhanced moral density that ensues from spiraled material density (Blau, 1967). This implies that the concept of social differentiation is instigated by an increase in worldly components in the present in community. Then this comprises a chain reaction where the ethical or moral component in a society takes the shape of variation to kowtow with the held alterations in the material elements. Social integration is a procedure or process of building institutions, values and relations for a community where all persons, irrespective of sex, ethnicity, language and age can completely exercise their responsibilities and rights on an equivalent basis with others (United Nations 2001). Every individual should be permitted to age with dignity and be capable to contribute to community in the most useful way. Su an atmosphere is the foundation of safe, just and stable communities, where all individuals enjoy opportunities. Both concepts of social differentiation and integration contribute to the discussion of ‘work societies’. Social; integration is closely connected to the idea of social cohesion, an important component of a healthy community. It refers to the capacity of a community to guarantee the welfare of its affiliates, reducing disparities and averting conflict and polarization. On the other hand, social differentiation shows the problems that may emerge in societies as a result of unequal division of labor that leaves some members of the society vulnerable. Question 6 Globalization in one form or shape continues to draw engagement and interest among scholars and citizens alike. Amongst citizens there is both support for and hostility towards various features of the numerous processes that make up globalization including migration, free trade, exchange of practices and cultural ideas (Moran, 2004). Globalization can be distinguished as both a personal and public issue. As a public matter, Australians my experience globalization through exposure to mass media and politics discourse concerning the relation between different countries and Australia (Holton and Philips, 2008). However, as a personal issue, people may encounter globalization through daily routines of sharing public spaces and via travel and work abroad, with diverse ways of life and different kind of people. A central characteristic of globalization is increasing interconnectedness beyond national boundaries. A fundamental concept at work here is that globalization tends to speed, interrelationships between people and nations tend to intensify and extend. This is likely to make Australians mix time and again with peoples and countries through relations that occur outside of web of national bonds. Besides increasing national interrelationship, improving mobility is a chief quality linked to globalization. A major argument here is that as globalization becomes pervasive, the tempo of personal movements breeds. From an Australian standpoint, the thesis of globalization is alerting people about the possibility of seeing more and more Australians moving to other states and relocating abroad and non-Australians coming and living in the country as the 21st century deepens. What the increasing mobility indicates then is spiraling of the probability of the prospects of Australians mixing with diverse ways of life and types of people. References Adams, G. (1998). Placing Friendship in Context. NY: Cambridge University Press. Blau, P. M. (1967). Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Blatterer, H. (2001). New adulthood: Personal or social transition. Retrieved February 20, 2010 from http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:bwxBgVpjD_gJ:eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003485/01/3485.pdf+the+concept+of+%E2%80%98adulthood%E2%80%99+been+re- +in+contemporary+times&hl=en&gl=ke&pid=bl&srcid= Green, K. S. (1991). The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Holton, R. and Philips, T. (2008). What Australians think about globalization? Public and personal dimensions. Retrieved February 20, 2010 from http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:XvSRonPMQawJ:ccs.research.yale.edu/documents/public/philHolt_austGlobal.pdf+some+of+the+changes+that+globalization+is+ Innes, G. (2009). Are we really the secular nation we think we are? Retrieved February 20, 2010 from http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about/media/media_releases/op_ed/20091120_secular_nation.html Korotayev, A. (2004). World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-cultural Perspective. New York: Edwin Mellen Press Moran, A. (2004). Australia: Nation, Belonging, and Globalization (Globalizing Regions Series). New York: Rutledge. Sommerville, C. (1998). Secular society religious population: our tacit rules for using the term secularization. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (2):249–53. United Nations. (2001). Integration and participation of older persons in society. Retrieved February 20, 2010 from http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UZ6BhLC63_0J:www.unece.org/pau/_docs/age/2009/Policy_briefs/4-Policybrief_Participation_Eng.pdf+the+concepts+of+social+differentiation+and+ United Nations. (1994). Social integration: Approaches and issues. Retrieved February 20, 2010 from http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:2hgv0mqXvlMJ:www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/%28httpAuxPages%29/510920DA18B35A6880256B65004C6A7B/%24file/bp1.pdf+What+is+social+integration&hl=en&gl=ke&pid=bl& -AdePZIdp&sig=AHIEtbR0A0KTUMeZw9bWltn4V6ZDO2RprQ Winthrop, R. (1991). Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Greenwood Press. Read More