Socio-economic Status and Perceived Social Responsibility

This paper examines the concept of social responsibility, and how social economic status effects how different groups both perceive social responsi-bility and act on social responsibility. There are many ways in which groups and group identity develop and many interacting levels of systems and social conventions; however for the purpose of this paper the group’s focus will be based on socio-economic status as an indicator of social responsibility and social action. A brief overview of group dynamics and altruism will be dis-cussed because these concepts are embedded in the idea of social responsi-bility and social action. Garfinkel’s theory of Social Interaction will be pre-sented, and then applied to the topic of this paper along with a brief analysis including references to activism as a category of social action. The intent of this paper is to show that people of a lower economic scale and social status will in general be moved to greater social action from the interaction along the many different levels of social systems, constructs, social status and their feelings of social responsibility is greater, than those of higher socio-economic status. The idea of social re-sponsibility has been surprisingly touched upon only lightly in the area so-ciology (Cole & Stewart, 1996). Social responsibility has been seen as a paradigm and as such has been re-searched through the separate concepts of solidarity, altruism and social action. The area of social responsibility research phased out as the era of protest phased out, however in connection and equally important to social responsibility is the concept of group dynamics, and altruis-tic behavior. Theorists such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Erving Goffman have made tremen-dous insights into how and why groups form, work and interact with the world around the individual. Garfinkel’s con-tribution is his theory of social interac-tion and Goffman takes social interac-tion one step further employing ethno-graphic methodology to explain person to person interaction and social interac