INTRODUCTION

• The earlier book Introducing Sociology, Class XI began with the relationship between personal problems and social issues.

• Individuals are located within collectivities such as groups, classes, gender, castes, and tribes.

• Each individual is a member of multiple overlapping collectivities: e.g., peer group, family, class, gender, country, and region.

• Every individual has a specific location in the social structure and social stratification system.

• This location determines different levels and types of access to social resources.

• Individual choices (e.g., schooling, clothing, food, leisure, health access) depend on the social stratum they belong to.

• Social structure and social stratification constrain individual action.

• A central concern of sociology is the dialectical relationship between individual and society.

• C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination highlights the interplay between an individual’s biography and society’s history.

• The chapter focuses on structure, stratification, and social processes.

• Later chapters explore differences in rural and urban social structure, environment-society relationships, and thoughts of Western and Indian sociologists.

• The key question: to what extent is the individual constrained or free from social structure?

• Investigates how social position or stratification location governs individual choice.

• Explores how social structure and stratification influence behavior, cooperation, competition, and conflict.

• The chapter briefly defines social structure and social stratification.

• Focuses on three social processes: cooperation, competition, and conflict.

• Examines how individuals and groups interact within social structure and stratification system.

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND STRATIFICATION

• Social structure refers to the fact that society is organised in particular ways, with underlying regularities or patterns in behavior and relationships.

• Social environments are not random; they have patterned human actions and relationships that are repeated across time and space.

• Social structures are closely related to social reproduction.

• Examples:

  • Schools: admission procedures, codes of conduct, annual functions, daily assemblies, anthems.

  • Families: marriage practices, relationships, duties, and expectations.

• Institutions persist even as members enter and leave, but changes occur simultaneously.

• Humans cooperate and compete within social structures; cooperation can conceal conflict.

• Emile Durkheim emphasized that societies exert social constraint over individual actions.

  • Society is primacy over the individual and more than the sum of individual acts.

  • Society has solidity and constrains activities externally, similar to walls of a room.

• Karl Marx highlighted that while social structure constrains, human beings have creativity/agency to reproduce and change it.

• Social stratification refers to structured inequalities between groups in terms of material or symbolic rewards.

• Modern societies often show wide differences in wealth and power; stratification can be based on class, race, caste, region, community, tribe, and gender.

• Inequality is systematic, linked to membership in social groups, and often passed across generations.

• Stratification implies a patterned structure of unequal groups.

• Three main forms of advantage in stratification:

  1. Life Chances: material benefits improving quality of life (wealth, income, health, job security, recreation).

  2. Social Status: prestige or high standing in society.

  3. Political Influence: ability to dominate others, influence decisions, or gain advantages from decisions.

• Social processes like competition, cooperation, and conflict are constrained by social structure and stratification.

• Humans can also act to modify the structure and stratification system.