Social framework analysis is a

sociological Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociology was coined in ...

methodology In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bri ...

that was a key component of a 2011

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...

case regarding

employment discrimination Employment discrimination is a form of illegal discrimination in the workplace based on legally protected characteristics. In the U.S., federal anti-discrimination law prohibits discrimination by employers against employees based on age, race, ...

Wal-Mart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other ...

. Professor William T. Bielby has used the social framework analysis methodology to conclude that two aspects of Wal-Mart's culture, centralized personnel policy and managerial subjective decision making in the field, led to “decisions about compensation and promotion" to be vulnerable to

gender bias Gender bias is the tendency to prefer one gender over another. It is a form of unconscious bias, or implicit bias, which occurs when one individual unconsciously attributes certain attitudes and stereotypes to another person or group of people ...

. Bielby's contribution to this matter has been controversial. The

American Sociological Association The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fi ...

has commented that his work “is well within our discipline’s accepted methods;” however, Laurens Walker, one of the two professors who coined the term, has contested the validity of Bielby's work. Experts in many disciplines, for example, would contest statements like that made by Professor Bielby when he told the trial court that he had collected general “scientific evidence about gender bias, stereotypes and the structure and dynamics of gender inequality in organizations.” As pure social facts (or socially constructed categories), ideas like gender bias, stereotypes, and gender inequality cannot have "scientific" evidence collected about them, because what needs to be a fact to make knowledge "scientific" is contingent on the participant's view of the situation. In addition to the law, misunderstandings about the nature of social versus natural facts also have had a deep impact on disciplines like intelligence analysis, where similarly contested social categories are treated as natural facts independent of the observer. At least one scholar has linked this misapprehension to the problem to strategic surprise, and the June 20th, 2011 Supreme Court decision is likely to have such an impact on this theory's application the Law more generally.

References

* https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/us/28scotus.html * Crosby, F. J., Stockdale, M. S., & Ropp, S. A. 2007. Sex discrimination in the workplace: multidisciplinary perspectives. Wiley-Blackwell. * https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=32+Law+%26+Psychol.+Rev.+1&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=bb863bb2a6a824207fd1a59e48fee8be * http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_20/b3984081.htm * https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/business/21bizcourt.html?_r=1&hp * https://catalogue.kent.ac.uk/Record/764718 Methods in sociology {{socio-stub