SOCIETY: humanly created organization or system of interrelationships that connects
individuals in a common culture. All the products of human interaction, the
experience of living with others around us. Humans create their interactions, and
once created the products of those interactions have the ability or power to act
back upon humans to determine or constrain action. Often, we experience society
(humanly created organization) as something apart from the individuals and
interactions that create it.
PRODUCTS OF HUMAN INTERACTION - COMPONENTS OF SOCIETY
CULTURE: sets of traditions, rules, symbols that shape and are enacted as feelings, thoughts,
and behaviors of groups of people. Referring primarily to learned behavior as
distinct from that which is given by nature, or biology, culture has been used to
designate everything that is humanly produced (habits, beliefs, arts, and artifacts)
and passed from one generation to another. In this formulation, culture is
distinguished from nature, and distinguishes one society from another.
LANGUAGE: a system of verbal symbols through which humans communicate
ideas, feelings, experiences. Through language these can be accumulated and
transmitted across generations. Language is not only a tool, or a means of
expression, but it also structures and shapes our experiences of the world and
what we see around us.
VALUES: ideas people share about what is good, bad, desirable, undesirable.
These are usually very general, abstract, cut across variations in situations.
NORMS: behavioral rules or standards for social interaction. These often derive
from values but also contradict values, and serve as both guides and criticisms for
individual behavior. Norms establish expectations that shape interaction.
“Culture. Those patterns of meaning that any group or society uses to interpret
and evaluate itself and its situation.” Bellah et. al. Habits of the Heart 1985:333.
“Culture. A system of durably acquired schemes of perception, thought and
action, engendered by objective conditions but tending to persist even after an
alteration of those conditions.” Bourdieu, The Inheritors. 1979.
“Habitus. A set of historical relations ‘deposited’ within individual bodies in the
form of mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation, and action.”
Bourdieu.
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“Culture. What it means to act according to one’s culture is, loosely speaking, to
follow one’s inclinations as they have been developed by learning from other
members of one’s community.” Hannerz, Soulside, 1969:177.
“Culture. Refers to the learned repertoire of thoughts and actions exhibited by
members of social groups - repertoires [transmitted] independently of geneetic
heredity from one generation to the next.” Harris. Cultural Materialism, 1979:47.
“Culture. Symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art
forms, ceremonies, as well as informal ... practices such as language, gossip,
stories and rituals of daily life.” Swidler, “Culture in Action” 1986:273.
“Culture. The cultural is the creative, varied, potentially transformative working
out ... of some of the fundamental social/structural relationships of society.”
Willis, Learning to Labor. 1977:137.
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION: the arrangement of the parts that constitute society, the
organization of social positions and distribution of people within those positions.
STATUS: socially defined niches, positions (student, professor, administrator).
ROLE: every status carries a cluster of expected behaviors, how a person in that
status is expected to think, feel, as well as expectations about how they should be
treated by others. The cluster of expected duties and behaviors that has become
fixed in a consistent and reiterated pattern of conduct.
GROUP: two or more people regularly interacting on the basis of shared
expectations of others’ behavior; interrelated statuses and roles.
INSTITUTIONS: patterns of activity reproduced across time and space.
Practices that are regularly and continuously repeated. Institutions often concern
basic living arrangements that human beings work out in the interactions with one
another and by means of which continuity is achieved across generations. The
basic building blocks of societies. Social institutions are like buildings that are at
every moment constantly being reconstructed by the very bricks that compose
them.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE: Structure refers to the pattern within culture and organization
through which social action takes place; arrangements of roles, organizations,
institutions, and cultural symbols that are stable over time, often unnoticed, anda
changing almost invisibly. Structure both enables and constrains what is possible
in social life. If a building were a society, the foundation, supporting columns,
and beams would be the structure which both constrains and enables the various
kinds and arrangements of spaces and rooms (roles, organizations, and
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institutions). Schemata and resources (material and human) through which social
action takes place, becomes patterned, and institutionalized. Incorporates both
culture and the resources of social organization.
Social structure. The organized set of social relationships in which members of
the society or group are variously implicated. Patterned behavior and
relationships. “The patterned arrangements of role-sets, status-sets, and statussequences
can be held to comprise the social structure.” Merton, Social Theory
and Social Structure. p. 370.
“Social Structure. Patterned arrangements of role-sets, status-sets, and status
sequences consciously recognized and regularly operative in a given society and
closely bound up with legal and political norms and sanctions.” Turner. Drama,
Fields, and Metaphors, 237.
Social Structure. Relatively stable systems of social relationships and
opportunities in which individuals find themselves and by which they are vitally
affected, but over which most of them have no control and of the exact nature of
which they are usually unaware.” Greenfield. Nationalism, p. 2.
INEQUALITY:
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION: the division of people socioeconomically into
layers or strata. When we talk of social stratification, we draw attention into the
unequal positions occupied by individuals in society. In the larger traditional
societies and in industrialized countries today there is stratification in terms of
wealth, property, and access to material goods and cultural products.
RACE: a human group that defines itself and/or is defined by other groups as
different…by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics. It is a group
that is socially defined on the bases of physical criteria.
ETHNICITY: cultural practices and outlooks of a given community of people
that set them apart from others. Members of ethnic groups see themselves as
culturally distinct from other groups in a society, and are seen by those others to
be so in return. Many different characteristics may distinguish ethnic groups from
one another but the most usual are language, history or ancestry - real or
imagined, religion
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