Social Conformity Case Study

Growing up educators have beaten into the heads of their students that everyone is unique. While being an individual is great in a context of growing up at what point do people stop being their own individual and begin to bind on to the similar ideas of one another. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell use institutional isomorphism to explain why businesses, that evolve in different ways, end up with such similar organizational structures (Conley, 2015, p 179); however, what if that context applies to high school students? Being raised in an area where everyone seems to eat, sleep and breathe the same its clear why during sophomore and junior year Daniel Hand High School in Madison Connecticut forced the message of diversity upon its twelve hundred …show more content…
The new student did not receive a handbook on what to wear to this high school, yet within a matter of weeks they too would wind up dressing and acting like those around them. This activity focuses on the idea that social conformity plays a major role in how students are told to be their own person yet crave being a part of the same group. It does not matter where they grew up, once they come to a new place in order to fit in and survive and become just as successful as those before them, they must conform to the …show more content…
Yet, the children in an impoverished area may all be striving to the same standards of working hard so they can achieve their own measure of success. As a society, high schools have morphed from setting kids on the track for the real world, to setting them up for college. While, college is a good choice for most kids, not every child is meant to strive to that level of higher education; they simply will not find success in that way. Daniel Hand in particular has a pressure for students to over extend themselves, just because they are influenced to be the best they can be, it is not always beneficial. The United States has grown into a culture that thrives on scholarly success, so when students do not do well, they become the odd man out and feel as though they do not belong. Even worse is that universities have fallen into the same category of adapting to remain relevant. Universities consider imitating the business world as a s safe approach and thus introduce criteria of competiveness, marketability, and profitability, (Stromquist, 2007, 101). With the competition of undergraduate degrees, many high school students feel pressured to go to the best school, and with the universities trying adapting like one another it makes finding the college that is going to give a student a leg up over everyone else