SOC 104 Elements of Sociology
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SOC 104 Elements of Sociology |
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By the end of this lesson, you should be able to
Henslin, chapter 4, pp. 94–123
Henslin begins the chapter on “Social Structure and Social Interaction” by distinguishing between the levels of analysis used by sociologists. One level, macrosociology focuses on the broad features of society, such as social class and how groups are related to one another. Conflict theory and functionalism are examples of this macrosociological approach. The second level, microsociology, focuses on social interaction, what people do when they come together. Symbolic interactionism, with its emphasis on face-to-face interactions, is an example of microsociology. Although each level of analysis has a different focus, sociologists argue that both are needed to gain a full understanding of social life.
Sociologists who use the macrosociological approach often refer to the social structure. The social structure refers to the framework that surrounds us, the relationships of people and groups to one another, these interactions that give directions to and set limits on behavior. You may also think of the social structure in terms of patterned relationships. For example, relationships between people in a college classroom are not random but rather structured. Within a classroom, a set of spoken and unspoken rules define the relationship between instructors and students. The different statuses that exist within a college classroom and the different roles associated with those statuses are part of the social structure, the framework that governs behavior in different social situations. This very social structure gives social life a routine and repetitive quality.
Henslin distinguishes between six major components of the social structure: culture, social class, social status, roles, groups, and social institutions. As we discussed in the last lesson, the term culture refers to a group’s language, beliefs, values, behaviors, and the material objects it uses. As lesson 1 showed, culture exerts a far-reaching effect on a group’s way of thinking and patterns of behavior. Social class refers to large groups of people who have similar levels of income, education, and occupational prestige. Like culture, social class influences not only our behaviors but also ideas and attitudes, topics we explore in greater detail in lesson 5. Social status refers to the position or rank that someone occupies within a group. All of us occupy several positions or statuses at the same time. Many of these statuses exert a strong effect on our actions and on those of the people around us. An ascribed status is a position an individual either inherits at birth or receives involuntarily later in life, such as race, sex, and senior citizen. An achieved status is a position that is earned, accomplished, or involves at least some effort or activity on the individual’s part, such as student or spouse. Role refers to the behaviors, obligations, and privileges attached to a status. There is a difference between role and status: you may occupy a status, but you play a role. Roles define the behavior that is appropriate for a given status, and as such roles greatly constrain behavior within various social situations. A group consists of people who share similar values, norms, and expectations. If we belong to a group, then we generally assume an obligation to act according to the expectations of other members of that group. Finally, a social institution refers to the standard ways by which society meets its basic needs. Social institutions include the family, religion, education, the economy, medicine, law, politics, and the mass media, all of which we examine in more detail in later lessons. Each of these institutions has its own values, roles, and norm, and each of them has far-reaching effects on our lives. Social institutions establish the context in which we live, shape our behavior, and color our thoughts. The mass media, for example, significantly shape public opinion, while economic institutions define the amount of time people can devote to work and leisure.
Functionalists tend to argue that social institutions have come into being because they perform vital functions for society. Economic institutions, for example, produce and distribute basic resources, while legal and military institutions preserve order. Conflict theorists agree that social institutions were originally designed to meet basic needs, but they argue that powerful groups have gained control over many institutions and have manipulated them in order to maintain their own privileged position. They argue, for example, that a relatively small number of people have gained control over large economic corporations in the United States.
The roles, statuses, groups, and institutions that are part of the social structure are often in conflict with one another. This has led sociologists to pose the question: what exactly holds society together? French sociologist Emile Durkheim proposed two answers to this question. Durkheim argued that people who perform similar tasks develop a shared consciousness and a sense of similarity which he referred to as mechanical solidarity. Agricultural societies exhibit this type of mechanical solidarity. Nearly everyone in such societies is involved in planting, cultivating, and harvesting. As a result, members of agricultural societies exhibit a high degree of shared consciousness and in fact tolerate little diversity in thinking and attitudes. As societies get larger, however, their division of labor becomes more specialized, resulting in a form of solidarity based, not on similarity, but rather interdependence. Durkheim referred to this form of solidarity as organic solidarity, the solidarity that results from the division of labor. Because this new form of solidarity is based on the performance of separate and distinct activities, societies that exhibit organic solidarity are more tolerant of differences among people than are societies that exhibit mechanical solidarity.
Up to now, we have been discussing macrosociology, the study of large-scale social systems. In addition to examining large-scale social structures, sociologists also investigate everyday behavior in situations of face-to-face interactions, an area of study which is known as microsociology. Sociologists who study face-to-face interactions are especially interested in the symbols that people use. Virtually all interactions between individuals involve an exchange of symbols. Given the importance of symbols in face-to-face interaction, a school of thought called symbolic interactionism has emerged which focuses on the way in which humans use symbols to structure their interactions. For example, suppose two people are out on a date for the first time. Each is likely to be careful about his or her own behavior and to try to present himself or herself in a favorable light. Knowing this, however, each is also likely to be looking for aspects of the other’s behavior that would reveal true character. A complex process of symbolic interpretation thus shapes the interaction between the two. In chapter 4, the chapter assigned for this lesson, Henslin examines the way stereotypes, personal space, touching, and eye contact involve a complex exchange of symbols and can therefore be analyzed along the lines that symbolic interactionists propose.
Erving Goffman added a new twist to microsociology when he developed dramaturgy, or dramaturgical analysis. As the word “dramaturgical” suggests, this approach interprets social interaction as though the participants were on a stage. Using this metaphor of drama, Goffman’s approach focuses on the way we all play out various roles and scenes, we follow an unwritten script where we can and improve where such an unwritten script is unavailable. Goffman’s basic argument was that orderly social life is made possible by these unwritten scripts.
One example of this type of unwritten script is what Goffman calls civil inattention toward strangers. In public we behave in a way that shows we are aware of the presence of others, but we avoid eye contact with them at close quarters. In effect, we politely ignore them. Think of two people approaching each other on the street: often they eye each other up to a certain point, but, once they reach a certain distance, both avert their eyes. No one has ever written this rule down, but it is something all of us tend to do.
Goffman also argued that people are sensitive to how they are seen by others. As a result, they use many forms of impression management in an effort to control the impressions that others have of them. Goffman also introduced the terms front stage and back stage to microsociological analysis. Front stage refers to social occasions or encounters in which individuals act out formal roles. Back stage refers to places where people rest from their performances, discuss their presentations, and plan future performances. Sociologists who have adopted Goffman’s dramaturgical approach have pointed out that we often experience role conflict and role strain. Role conflict refers to the conflict that someone feels between roles because the expectations attached to one role are incompatible with the expectations of another role. Role strain occurs when conflicts exist within the same role.
One thing that allows society to function smoothly is the shared understanding of the world, taken-for-granted assumptions. These taken-for-granted assumptions serve as the basis for routine social interaction. Even when we deal with people we have never met before, we can negotiate interactions with them because we all share understandings of how social life is conducted. But where do these shared understandings come from? This is a question that we rarely think about. In fact, people are often unable to explain the genesis of these shared assumptions. Background assumptions, deeply embedded common understandings concerning our view of the world and of how people ought to act, are so easily overlooked that they have also been ignored by sociologists, people who are supposed to be concerned about social interaction. During the past twenty-five years or so, sociologists have developed a new approach to this aspect of social interaction. This approach is ethnomethodology.
Ethnomethodologists are interested in the way people construct and share their definitions of reality in their everyday interactions. Ethnos is a Greek word meaning folk or people, so the term refers to a method for studying folk understandings of the social world. It is concerned with studying everyday understandings, how they are sustained and enforced. What ethnomethodologists have discovered is that, even if we do not realize it, we all play a role in perpetuating these everyday understandings, these everyday rules. One way we help sustain these rules is by subtly punishing people who do not respect them.
In other words, rules become known or visible precisely when they are violated. If a rule were always followed, then people might not be aware of it, for there would be nothing to indicate its existence. Many background assumptions are obeyed so widely that we are not conscious of them. The principal technique of ethnomethodology is to expose the rules by breaking them. In experiments designed to do this, an ethnomethodologist named Howard Garfinkel had his students act as though they did not understand certain unspoken assumptions that regulate social interaction. For example, they might try to bargain for items in a supermarket, break the rules in a game of tic-tac-toe, or move closer and closer to someone in a conversation until they were standing nose-to-nose. In each case, the reactions of the subjects—surprise, anger, embarrassment—showed that their understandings of social reality had been breached. Thus, these experiments were called “breaching experiments.” Garfinkel wanted to not only expose the shared understandings that we hardly even realize we live by but also show that we all enforce these background assumptions. The breaching experiments demonstrated that, when someone breaks these unspoken rules, others react, often in a hostile manner.
In sum, both microsociology and macrosociology make vital contributions to our understanding of human behavior. In subsequent chapters we examine how sociologists have used both levels of analysis to explain such phenomena as crime, inequality, economic processes, the family, education, and religion.
Lesson 2 