Yvonne Huynh

SOC 1
07/07/16
Project 1: Video/DVD Analysis
In the Conan Show short entitled Conan Busts His Employees Eating Cake (link),
Conan explains how the show often gets gifts of free food from other companies. However, there
is never enough food to go around for everyone working in the company, so it is first come first
serve at the conference room where the food is left at. Conan discovers that there is an e-mail list
that lets people on it know there is food available, allowing them the opportunity to get the food
first before everyone else. The e-mail list, called The Foodies, only contains a select number of
people on staff. Conan sends the e-mail list a message saying that there is ice cream cake in the
conference room and watches the hidden camera they have placed in there. He goes over to the
room to confront the people who have entered for the free cake. Almost all the people he talks to
do not feel guilty for the list nor for their opportunity to being notified of food before the others.
Comte was interested in finding cultural universals, the practices and beliefs that all
societies share. Because of this, perhaps he would see this video as an indicator or the beginning
point of examining what societies do when there is limited food and a select few are given the
opportunity to get it before everyone else. Comte also considered social statics, the principles a
society has to have to keep its members content. He might look at the reaction Conan has (not
liking the e-mail list) and consider that society should try to keep things fair among all people to
maintain order in society. He would also consider the video in terms of social dynamics,
factors needed in a society to bring change, and would probably suggest a different approach to

confronting the e-mail staffers because Conan did not really guilt them into thinking the list was
a bad thing to have (and thus did not change their opinions).
Marx would view this video as a clear indicator of the inequalities formed by power and
limited resources. The people on the foodies list would be similar to the bourgeois, the small
and elite group, that has most of the control and power over the limited resource of free food in
the conference room. It is assumed that the foodies list is small and only reserved for certain
people, as even Conan was not on the list. The small group that is able to obtain the resources
leaves little for the rest of the staffers, who are not given the opportunities to get the food
because of the foodies lists actions of excluding people. To an extent, you can consider the
foodies list as the in-group to the people who are on the list (since one of the employees
describes it as a list of those who really appreciate food) and as the out-group to the people who
are not included, since they are not a part of this exclusive list.
Since Emile Durkheim viewed society in the functionalist perspective, society is
supposed to be stable and well-integrated. He also argued that that deviance is a natural part of
society, which would fit in perfectly with this video. The foodies list arguably deviated from
norms because of how they cheated their way (through the e-mails) to be able to get food first.
This then ties in to his term of anomie, where there is a lack of harmony within the society
because it does not have rules everyone agreed on to properly guide behavior. Only a select
number of staff members were put in the foodies list, meaning the rest of the staffers were left
out which shows the lack of harmony amongst everyone. The functionalist theory also suggests
that social order is maintained through consensus, and clearly a consensus of how all the staffers
should get or be notified of food was not there. The only way to resolve this issue in Durkheims
eyes would be to set rules against informing certain people about food ahead of everyone else,

allowing the fight for limited food to be fair to everyone. This would then create stableness in the
work environment.
The paradigm that is most represented in this video is the conflict theory because of how
it reflects the idea that limited resources create inequalities and differences in power, as
explained in a previous paragraph addressing how Karl Marx would view this video. The limited
resource is the free food. The inequality is shown by the foodies list and how select people are
given the knowledge that there is food before everyone else, leaving an unfair advantage. One
staff member says that the e-mail is reserved for the people who appreciate food the most,
bringing up the idea of a privileged and exclusive elitist group, and another says "I thought
[Conan] had enough things so I wanted something for my own" which reflects the power that the
staffer felt there was being in the e-mail list. There is also the aspect of mores, norms that invoke
a societys moral views and principles. In this video, the more is having equal opportunity for
everybody. It can be argued that another more is the idea of first come first serve which should
allow this e-mail list to exist, but the e-mail list would only be fair if it was sent out to all staffers
instead of a select few. The video shows how the more of equal opportunity is abandoned by
having a secret e-mail list reserved for only specific staff members when the food should be for
everyone. This abandonment of the more is also proof of the lack of equality amongst the staffers
for free food.