Chapter 5: Social Structure and Interaction in Everyday Life

Table of Contents

1. Social Structure: The Macrolevel Perspective
2. Components Of Social Structure
3. Societies: Changes In Social Structure
4. Social Interaction: The Microlevel Perspective
5. Changing Social Structure And Interaction In The Twenty-First Century

I. Social Structure: The Macrolevel Perspective

1. Social structure-the stable pattern of social relationships that exist within a particular group or society-provides the framework within which we interact with others.
   
   
2. According to functionalists, social structure creates order and predictability in a society, and it also gives us the ability to interpret the social situations we encounter.
   
   
3. Conflict theorists suggest, however, that we must explore the deeper, underlying structures that determine social relations in a society.
   1. Marx suggested that the way economic production is organized is the most important structural aspect of any society.
      
      
   2. In capitalistic societies where a few people control the labour of many, social structure is a system of relationships of domination (for example, owner-worker and employer-employee).

4. Social structure creates boundaries that define which persons or groups will be the "insiders" and which will be the "outsiders."
   1. Social marginality is the state of being part insider and part outsider in the social structure. Social marginality results in stigmatization.
      
      
   2. A stigma is any physical or social attribute or sign that so devalues a person's social identity that it disqualifies that person from full social acceptance (e.g., convicted criminal wearing a prison uniform).

II. Components Of Social Structure

1. A status is a socially defined position in a group or society characterized by certain expectations, rights, and duties.
   1. Statuses exist independently of the specific people occupying them (e.g., professional athlete, student, and homeless person all exist exclusive of the specific individuals who occupy these social positions).
      
      
   2. Sociologists use the term status to refer to all socially defined positions, whether they are high or low in rank. A status set is made up of all the statuses that a person occupies at a given time.
      
      
   3. An ascribed status is a social position conferred at birth or received involuntarily later in life (e.g., race/ethnicity, age, and gender). An achieved status is a social position a person assumes voluntarily as a result of personal choice, merit, or direct effort (e.g., occupation, education, and income). Ascribed statuses have a significant influence on the achieved statuses we occupy.
      
      
   4. A master status is the most important status a person occupies; it dominates all of the individual's other statuses and is the overriding ingredient in determining a person's general social position (e.g., being poor or rich is a master status).

5. Status symbols are material signs that inform others of a person's specific status (e.g., a wedding ring or a Rolls-Royce automobile).
   
   
2. A role is a set of behavioural expectations associated with a given status.
   1. Role expectation (a group's or society's definition of the way a specific role ought to be played) may sharply contrast with role performance (how a person actually plays the role).
      
      
   2. Role ambiguity occurs when the expectations associated with a role are unclear or when a status is relatively new or is unacknowledged by a society (e.g., statuses such as single parent, domestic partner, and homeless person).
      
      
   3. Role conflict occurs when incompatible role demands are placed on a person by two or more statuses held at the same time (e.g., a woman whose roles include full-time employee, mother, wife, caregiver for an elderly parent, and community volunteer).
      
      
   4. Role strain occurs when incompatible demands are built into a single status that a person occupies (e.g., a doctor in a public clinic who is responsible for keeping expenditures down and providing high quality patient care simultaneously). Sexual orientation, age, and occupation frequently are associated with role strain.

5. Individuals frequently engage in role distancing when they find that a particular role is extremely stressful or otherwise problematic.
   
   
6. Role exit occurs when people disengage from social roles that have been central to their self-identity (e.g., ex-convicts, ex-nuns, retirees, and divorced women and men). Role exit occurs in four stages: (1) doubt, (2) search for alternatives, (3) the action stage or departure, and (4) creation of a new identity.
   
   
3. A social group consists of two or more people who interact frequently and share a common identity and a feeling of interdependence.
   1. A primary group is a small, less specialized group in which members engage in face-to-face, emotion-based interactions over an extended period of time (e.g., one's family, close friends, and school or work-related peer groups).
      
      
   2. A secondary group is a larger, more specialized group in which the members engage in more impersonal, goal-oriented relationships for a limited period of time (e.g., schools, churches, the military, and corporations).
      
      
   3. Social solidarity, or cohesion, is a group's ability to have permanence in the face of obstacles. A social network is a series of social relationships that link an individual to others.
      
      
   4. A formal organization is a highly structured group formed for the purpose of completing certain tasks or achieving specific goals (e.g., universities, corporations, and the government).
      
      
4. A social institution is a set of organized beliefs and rules that establish how a society will attempt to meet its basic social needs (e.g., the family, religion, education, the economy, the government, mass media, sports, science and medicine, and the military).
   1. According to functionalists, social institutions exist because they perform these essential functional prerequisites: (a) replacing members; (b) teaching new members; (c) producing, distributing, and consuming goods and services; (d) preserving order; and (e) providing and maintaining a sense of purpose.

2. Conflict theorists point out that social institutions may not work for the common good of everyone in society (e.g., homeless persons).

4. Freud acknowledged the importance of socialization when he pointed out that people's biological drives may be controlled by the values and moral demands of society that are learned primarily during childhood; however, his theory has been heavily criticized for its unprovable assertions.

III. Societies: Changes In Social Structure

1. Sociologists Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tonnies developed typologies-classification schemes that are used to compare different kinds of behaviour or types of societies-to explain how stability and change occur in the social structure of societies.

2. Mechanical and Organic Solidarity
   1. From Durkheim's perspective, social solidarity is reliant on a society's social structure, which, in turn, is based on the society's division of labour-how the various tasks of a society are divided up and performed.
      
      
   2. Mechanical solidarity refers to the social cohesion in preindustrial societies, in which there is minimal division of labour and people feel united by shared values and common social bonds. Social interaction in such societies is characterized by face-to-face, intimate, primary-group relationships.

3. Organic solidarity refers to the social cohesion found in industrial societies, in which people perform very specialized tasks and feel united by their mutual dependence. Social interaction in these societies is less personal, more status-oriented, and focuses on specific goals and objectives.

3. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
   1. According to Ferdinand Tonnies, the Gemeinschaft (Guh-MINE-shoft) is a traditional society in which social relationships are based on personal bonds of friendship and kinship and on intergenerational stability. Relationships are based on ascribed rather than achieved status.

2. The Gesellschaft (Guh-ZELL-shoft) is a large, urban society, in which social bonds are based on impersonal and specialized relationships, with little long-term commitment to the group or consensus on values. Relationships are based on achieved statuses, and interactions among people are both rational and calculated.
   
   
4. Social Structure and Homelessness
   1. In Gesellschaft societies, prevailing core values are based on the belief that people should be able to take care of themselves. As a result of this belief, many people view the homeless as "throwaways"-that they are beyond help or society already has done enough for them.
      
      
   2. Alternative explanations for homelessness might include structural poverty; a steady, across-the-board lowering of the standard of living of the working class and lower class; substandard wages for many jobs; and a lack of employment opportunities.

IV. Social Interaction: The Microlevel Perspective

1. Social Interaction and Meaning
   1. Social interaction within a given society has certain shared meanings across situations (e.g., riding an elevator).
      
      
   2. However, everyone does not interpret social interaction rituals in the same way; race/ethnicity, gender, and social class play a part in the meanings we give to our interactions with others.
      
      
2. The social construction of reality is the process by which our perception of reality is shaped largely by the subjective meaning that we give to an experience.
   1. Our perceptions and behaviour are influenced by our initial definition of the situation: we act upon reality as we see it.
      
      
   2. Our definition of the situation can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy-a false belief or prediction that produces behaviour that makes the original false belief come true.
      
      
   3. Dominant group members with prestigious master statuses may have the ability to establish how other people define "reality" because they are able to reinforce core values, determine the society's priorities, and mandate how its resources will be used.
      
      
3. Ethnomethodology is the study of the commonsense knowledge that people use to understand the situations in which they find themselves.
   
   1. Being critical of mainstream sociology for not recognizing the ongoing ways in which people create reality and produce their world, Harold Garfinkel initiated ethnomethodology to challenge existing patterns of conventional behaviour in order to uncover people's background expectancies, that is, their shared interpretation of objects and events, as well as the actions they take as a result.
      
      
   2. To uncover people's background expectancies, ethnomethodologists frequently conduct breaching experiments in which they break "rules" or act as though they do not understand some basic rule of social life so that they can observe other people's responses.

4. Dramaturgical analysis is the study of social interaction that compares everyday life to a theatrical presentation.
   1. According to Erving Goffman, day-to-day interactions have much in common with being on stage or in a dramatic production.
      1. Since members of the audience judge our performance and are aware that we may slip and reveal our true character, most of us engage in impression management, or presentation of self-people's efforts to present themselves to others in ways that are most favourable to their own interests or image.
         
         
      2. Face-saving behaviour (strategies we use to rescue our performance when we experience a potential or actual loss of face) includes studied nonobservance (a technique in which one role player ignores the flaws in another's performance because embarrassment is uncomfortable for everyone, not just the player who gave a bad performance).

2. Social interaction, like a theatre, has a front stage (the area where a player performs a specific role before an audience) and a back stage (the area where a player is not required to perform a specific role because it is out of view of a given audience).
   
   
5. The Sociology of Emotions
   1. Arlie Hochschild suggests that we acquire a set of feeling rules, which shape the appropriate emotions for a given role or specific situation. These rules include how, where, when, and with whom an emotion should be expressed (e.g., a funeral).
      
      
   2. Emotional labour occurs when employees are required by their employers to feel and display only certain carefully selected emotions.
      1. Jobs with a high degree of emotional labour usually involve employees with face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public, and require employees to produce an emotional state (such as gratitude or fear) in other persons (e.g., flight attendants and bill collectors).
         
         
      2. Emotional labour at work (the "commercialization of feeling") may produce estrangement from a person's "true" self.
         
         
   3. Gender, class, and race are related to the expression of emotions.
      1. The generalization that women express emotions more readily than men has been so widely accepted that very little research has been conducted to determine its accuracy; however, men and women may differ more in how they express their emotions than in their actual feelings.
         
         
      2. Middle- and upper-class parents (who often work with people) are more likely to teach their children the importance of emotional work than are working-class parents (who tend to work primarily with objects).
         
         
      3. People of colour spend much of their life engaged in emotional labour. Racist attitudes and discrimination make it continually necessary to manage one's feelings.
         
         
6. Nonverbal communication is the transfer of information between persons without the use of speech (e.g. facial expressions, head movements, body positions, and other gestures).
   1. Functions of Nonverbal Communication
      1. Head and facial movements provide information about other people's emotional states and vice versa.
      2. First impressions are made by clothing and body positions.
      3. Nonverbal communication helps us reinforce verbal messages (e.g., nodding and pointing in the direction we are telling someone to go).
      4. Nonverbal communication establishes the relationship between people in terms of their responsiveness toward, liking of, and power over one another.
      5. Power, or control, can be shown through nonverbal communication. Goffman suggested that demeanour (how we behave or conduct ourselves) is relative to social power. People in positions of dominance are allowed a wider range of permissible actions than are their subordinates, who are expected to show deference-the symbolic means by which subordinates give a required permissive response to those in power.
         
         
   2. Facial expression, eye contact, and touching are important forms of nonverbal communication and tend to reflect gendered patterns of dominance and subordination in society.
      
      
   3. Personal space is the immediate area surrounding a person that the person claims as private. Our personal space is contained within an invisible boundary surrounding our body, much like a snail's shell.
      1. Edward Hall observed that people have different "distance zones": (1) intimate distance (contact to about 18 inches); (2) personal distance (18 inches to 4 feet); (3) social distance (4 to 12 feet); and (4) public distance (beyond 12 feet), which makes interpersonal communication nearly impossible.

2. Age, gender, kind of relationship, and social class are important factors in allocation of personal space. Power differentials between people are reflected in personal space and privacy.

V. Changing Social Structure And Interaction In The Twenty-First Century

1. The social structure in Canada has been changing rapidly in the past decades (e.g., more possible statuses for persons to occupy and roles to play than at any other time in history).
   
   
2. Ironically, at a time when we have more technological capability, more leisure activities and types of entertainment, and vast quantities of material goods available for consumption, many people experience high levels of stress, fear for their lives because of crime, and face problems such as homelessness.
   
   
3. While some individuals and groups continue to show initiative in trying to solve some of our pressing problems, the future of this country rests on our collective ability to deal with major social problems at both the macrolevel (structural) and the microlevel of society.

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