Q25

[armine.badalyan]

Can you please explain the answer? Thanks

[noah]

When you face a question like this, first think "what does a social control theorist think?" Perhaps quickly look back and confirm that these folks think that philanthropists were using charity to create a more productive work force by instilling certain values.

Armed with that, the answers are pretty easy to evaluate:

(A) is unsupported - the passage doesn't compare the philanthropists interest in social status with that of economic gain. And social control theorists were interested in the latter specifically.

(B) is tempting if you're just matching words. But the philanthropists were looking to make better workers, not instill the same values that management had - and the values that were supposedly being instilled did not include acquisitiveness (they were in fact quite different than that).

(C) is unsupported by the discussion of social control theorists.

(D) is out of scope - nobody is talking about charity making the working class smarter.

(E) is correct though a bit confusing. According to the social control folks, charity was done to create workers - it was a means to an end. It was not done simply because it was the right thing to do - i.e. an end in itself.

When asked about X, make sure you have the "definition" of X clear before looking at the answer choices.

Does that clear it up?

[gplaya123]

I have a question.
The "social control" thesis is stated at line 27.
I may not have correctly interpreted that part
but as far as I understood, I thought it was saying that
the rich people were doing good stuff to the poor people as a way to make them more "productive;" thus, in the end, their purpose was to "serve the interests of their class" which was to retain their social power by helping them out in the names of philanthropy. After all, the last sentence of the second paragraph said "controlling the labor force (poor) and ensuring the continued dominance of the management class (rich)."

Thus I thought A was correct...
But now I read about it...
it's comparing economic gain vs retention of the social power, which is unsupported by the passage?

Please help!