Unemployment in United States

Sociology constantly examines how societal norms function and shape society, despite the fact that American culture is still very diverse due to the presence of several racial groups. Indeed, there will inevitably be a variety of societal issues in such a society, including racism, discrimination, and prejudice against the minority race. Although American culture has made great progress in these areas over the past 20 years, there are still certain unresolved situations where racism, prejudice, and discrimination could be prevented. The purpose of resolving these social issues is hampered by various underlying social and political hurdles, which are the cause of the missing cases. The role of this paper, therefore, is to highlight culture, societal norms such as prejudices, discrimination, and racism and how a society can overcome such social problems. Further, the paper will include statistics about unemployment and how it has changed through the United States of America history.

Culture and Societal norms

From a sociological perspective, social norms refer to those informal understandings which, govern the behaviour of the members of the society. According to Pager & Shepherd (2008), social norms are important as they enable the individuals to agree on certain social situations, and prevent the occurrence of harmful social interactions such as prejudices, racism, and discrimination. Prejudice and discrimination can have far-reaching effects on those people that believe that they are being judged negatively as such hindering their overall performance. The failure by the society to address these societal problems can have detrimental effects on the individuals as the possible consequences of discrimination can be: the unequal distribution of employment, and other social, economic resources (Pager & Shepherd, 2008).

Indeed, this is particularly severe in those cases where instances of prejudice occur as a result of the intrinsic characteristic of the individual. In most cases, prejudice and discrimination stem from stereotypes about the particular group of people. The stereotypes are due to an individuals' gender, race, age, disability, and their sexual orientation. According to Pager & Shepherd (2008), specific policies and laws emanating from these social problems can and must be changed as when law makers pass or amend anti-discrimination laws, then the society can respond in ways that indicate compliance.

Unemployment

Across the world, unemployment rates always act as indicators of the overall economy and in judging the success of a presidency. Indeed, in the United States of America, President Johnson had the lowest average unemployment rates throughout his presidency at about 4.2% with Ford recording the highest average unemployment rates at above 7.8% followed by Reagan at about 7.5% ("U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics Data", 2017). The overall unemployment rates during President Truman presidency were low with the year 1949 having the highest unemployment rates at 7.9%, and falling steadily to about 3% when he left office. According to ("U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics Data", 2017), the unemployment rates in the United States of America increased by 4.4% in the month of June from 4.3% in the month of May. Although there exist remarkable gains in the labour force of the racial minorities for the past few decades in the United States of America, there is significant disparity among the races.

Research conducted indicate that the African Americans are more likely to be unemployed as compared to whites with the wages of Hispanics and blacks lagging behind those of the majority white (Pager & Shepherd, 2008). Indeed, tremendous research conducted to examine the degree to which, discrimination plays a part in affecting the contemporary labour force in the United States of America indicates there exists substantial evidence of racial discrimination with white preference ranging from 50% to about 240% across the years (Pager & Shepherd, 2008).

Conclusion

Evidently, social norms are important in the governing of societies as they enable individuals to agree on some shared interpretation, and prevent the occurrence of harmful social interactions. However, when some people contravene certain social norms, they engage in norm violation and the necessary authorities such as the police should take the necessary actions as stipulated in the anti-discrimination laws in place.



References

Pager, D., & Shepherd, H. (2008). The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets. Annual Review of Sociology, 34(1), 181-209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131740

U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics Data. (2017). Bls.gov. Retrieved 30 July 2017, from https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet