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American Dream

Introduction

The idea of American dream presents a concept of a wide range of opportunities for all the members of the society on an equitable basis. America is considered to be land of opportunities. It is assumed that even the man with little or no knowledge and skills can come and become part of this country.

The concept of land and property ownership stems from the way in which society has sorted its citizens from positions of importance, influence, prestige and varied. There are lands and properties that are perceived to be more popular and important, while others are classified as one representing lower social class, or are monotonous and unimpressive by nature.

A person may fall under a certain social class by way of land or property ownership. For instance, if you own greater land and properties by being part of new money, you are then by this very way falling into a high ranked class.

This paper discusses the issues relating to land and property ownership in the context of the American dreams and takes reflection upon different literary works to draw conclusions, on the present state of the situation.

Discussion

The importance of the social institutions of the polity, the family, and education for providing social control over behavior and, specifically, for taming the intense anomic pressures to pursue economic imperatives are part and parcel to the American cultural structure. In theory, when these social institutions are strong and coordinated, they can play critical roles in regulating behavior both by contributing to and reinforcing the prevailing normative, cultural structure and by providing roles that expose people to social controls and social supports (Hansberry, pp.23).

The long-standing reality in America is that the dominance of the economy in the institutional structure not only provides an everlasting fuel for the American Dream, but also serves to handcuff the ability of other social institutions to tame the dark side of this cultural prescription. American culture places significant value on material success goals while not emphasizing strongly normative limits on how such goals should be pursued. The American Dream refers to “a commitment to the goal of material success, to be pursued by everyone in society, under conditions of open, individual competition.” They argue that the highly universal cultural orientation that accompanies the American Dream defines personal worth largely in terms of achievement and success in the accumulation of money and wealth, places a high degree of esteem on individual (especially economic) accomplishments, and places relatively little emphasis on the importance of how such accomplishments are realized (Miller, pp.56). The American Dream, which is a universal achievement orientation in which individual success is defined largely in terms of the accumulation of money, has yielded a variety of innovations in society. Although the American Dream proposes a functionalist point of view in sociology and economics, which simply attribute social balances as essential to the survival of complex, American society. The institutional arrangement, which has accompanied the cultural structure of the American Dream, is one in which the ...