Social structure of the society

Sociologists differentiate between social and personal statuses:

· social status identifies the person’s position in the society which he occupies as a representative of a large social group (occupation, class, nationality, gender, age or religion);

· personal status is the person’s position in a small group identified by how the members of the group estimate and percieve him due to his

personal qualities. Being a leader or outsider, winner or loser means to occupy a certain position in the system of interpersonal, not social relations.

Statuses are also distinguished as ascribed and achieved ones. Ascribed status is a social status a person is given from birth or assumes involuntarily later in life. For example, a person born into a wealthy family has a high ascribed status.

Achieved status is a sociological term denoting a social position that a person assumes voluntarily which reflects personal skills, abilities, and efforts. Examples of achieved status are being an Olympic athelete, a criminal, or a teacher.

Achieved statuses are distinguished from ascribed statuses by virtue of being earned. Most positions are a mixture of achievement and ascribment; for instance, a person who has achieved the status of being a doctor or lawyer in Western societies is more likely to have the ascribed status of being born into a wealthy family.

The mentioned statuses are considered basic statuses which include kinship, demographic, economic, political and occupational statuses. There are also a number of non-basic statuses such as those of a passer-by, driver, reader, TV-watcher, witness of a road casualty etc. They are temporal positions and their rights and obligations are not registered as they are hardly fixed. No doubt, the status of a professor determines much in life of a certain person; as for his status of a patient, it does not.

If a social status identifies a particular position of an individual in a given social system, a social role represents the way that he is expected to behave in a particular social situation. Each individual plays many roles in the society; in one situation he is a boss, in another – a friend, in the third – father etc. All roles that a person plays are called a role set.

Roles are identified as ascribed if we are forced to play and as achieved if we choose to play them. The first is a role of a son or daughter in relations with a parent, the second – a subordinate with a boss.

Roles have two further dimensions: the prescribed aspect of a role, or role expectations, and role performance. The prescribed element in any role provides a norm-based framework governing the way people are generally supposed to interact. People expect one conduct from a banker and quite another – from an unemployed person. Role performance is what a person really performs within this framework. Each time a person who performs a certain role builds his behaviour according to the expectations of the social milieu. If his actual behaviour differs from what is expected, it means that conformity to culturally appropriate roles and socially supported norms is not created. Behaviour, which doesn’t correspond to the status, is not considered an appropriate role. For instance, if somebody came into the classroom, introduced himself as a teacher but then started painting the wall or washing the windows, his behaviour is a role but not that of a teacher.

In the society various social control mechanisms exist to restore conformity or to segregate the nonconforming individuals from the rest of society. These social control mechanisms range from sanctions imposed informally – for example, sneering and gossip – to the activities of certain formal organizations, like schools, prisons, and mental institutions.

Social institutions

Another structural element of the society is social institutions. These are not buildings, but organizations, or mechanisms of social structure, governing the behaviour of two or more people. Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions. For example, the institution of the family and marriage, of religion etc.

American sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) asserts that an institution is a place, like a building, in which activity of a particular kind regularly goes on. He uses this term for somewhere that embraces everything that its inhabitants do – where they live, work, play, sleep, day in day out. Members of the society have a similar mental concept of right and wrong, order and relationships, and patterns of good (positive values).

As the broadest organizers of individuals’ beliefs, drives and behaviours, social institutions evolved to address separate needs of the society, for instance, the military institution evolved out of the need for defense. Each society has a number of needs but those of fundamental character are only five. Consequently, there are five fundamental social institutions ensuring social needs in:

· procreation of the population (that of the family and marriage);

· social order and defense (the state, political institutions);

· getting means for existence (the production, economic institutions);

· translating knowledge, socialization of the growing-up generations, training personnel (education in its broad meaning including science and culture);

· solving spiritual problems, looking for sense of life (religion).

So social institutions can be defined as organized patterns of beliefs and behaviours centered on basic social needs, adapting to specific segment of the society in question.

American sociologist T. Veblen is the founding father of institutionalization as he was a first to give a detailed description of social institutions in his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). He showed that evolution of the society is a process of natural selection of social institutions which by their nature present habitual ways to react to stimuli created by external changes.

Early mankind is known for promiscuity or non-regulated sex relations that could result in genetic degeneration. Gradually such relations began to be limited by bans. The first ban was that of incest, forbidding sex between kinship relatives, such as mother and son, brother and sister etc. The given ban is the first social norm, considered the most important in history. Later, other norms regulating sex relations appeared. People learnt to survive and adapt to life by organizing their relations with norms. Norms of family and marriage behaviour translated from generation to generation became collective habits, customs, traditions that regulated people’s way of life and their thinking. Those who broke such traditions (deviants) were punished (sanctioned). This is the way how the most ancient social institution of the family and marriage might have emerged. And this is the way why norms and values have become structural units of the society.

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