Social Structure

Introduction

• The concept of social structure is broader and more general than other concepts discussed in the block.

• Anything, whether an object or idea, has a structure; understanding its enduring aspects helps comprehend its existence.

• Every society has a social structure, which consists of its permanent and enduring aspects.

• Through these aspects, we can understand society.

• Though the concept seems broad and simple, sociologists have differed widely in their interpretations and use of it.

• These differing perspectives have made the discussion on social structure conceptually complex and confusing.

• At a simple level, social structure describes the permanent and enduring aspects of social relationships.

• It is a useful tool to understand social reality.

• The structural-functionalist school defines social structure as a network of permanent and enduring social relationships, distinct from individual relationships.

• When two individuals have relationships with mutual expectations, their behaviour is predictable and social.

• Social behaviour is expected, organised, and defined by social norms, sanctioned by society.

• Different sociologists and social anthropologists have varied definitions of social structure.

• The concept’s use and applicability differ across regions:

  • In North America, more emphasis is given to the “culture” aspect of social structure.

  • British sociologists like Radcliffe-Brown emphasize the relational aspect.

  • In France, the concept is understood through models discussed by Levi Strauss.

The Concept of Social Structure

• The word structure originally meant the construction of a building.

• Gradually, it came to imply inter-relations between the parts of any whole.

• The term was also used in anatomical studies.

• The concept of social structure became popular among sociologists and social anthropologists after World War II.

• During that period, the term was used so widely that it was applied to “almost any ordered arrangement of social phenomenon” (Leach 1968: 482).

• It is important to study the different applications of this concept by sociologists and social anthropologists.

• The concept of social structure is understood differently by the structural-functionalists, structuralists, and Marxists — the three main sociological schools of thought.

• Before examining these views, it is necessary to distinguish between social structure and social organisation.

• Some scholars also use the notion of social structure in terms of social groups and roles.

Social Structure and Social Organisation

• The term “social organisation” is often used interchangeably with “social structure”.

• Raymond Firth distinguished between the two in his book Elements of Social Organisation (1956).

• Firth viewed both as heuristic devices or tools, not precise concepts.

• Social organisation concerns the choices and decisions involved in actual social relations.

• Social structure deals with fundamental social relations that give society its basic form and limit the range of possible organisational actions.

• The structure aspect reflects the continuity principle of society.

• The organisation aspect reflects the variation or change principle, allowing for individual choice.

• Firth studied small communities like the Tikopians of Solomon Islands.

• He defined a human community as “a body of people sharing common activities and bound by multiple relationships, so that individual aims are achieved only through participation with others.”

• This definition includes the spatial aspect where members usually share a common territory and are in direct contact.

• Relationships in small communities are more emotional and intimate compared to those in complex societies.

• According to Firth, the structure and organisation of community life have essential constituents: social alignment, social controls, social media, and social standards.

Social Structure and Social Groups

• Some scholars use social structure to refer only to persistent social groups like nation, tribe, clan, etc.

• E.E. Evans-Pritchard is one such scholar.

• His theory of social structure was a reaction to Radcliffe-Brown’s understanding of social structure.

• Evans-Pritchard shifted focus from pure structure-functionalism to structuralism in social anthropology.

• In his book The Nuer (1940), he studied persistent and permanent groups whose membership changes, but whose structural form remains stable over time.

• His definition of social structure differs from Radcliffe-Brown’s by not focusing on person-to-person social behaviour.

• He focused on the relationship between the homestead and the wider village group.

• He studied social groups hierarchically:

  • Village related to tertiary group (few villages)

  • Tertiary group related to secondary group (several tertiary groups)

  • Secondary group related to primary group (several secondary groups)

  • This continues up to the whole tribe.

• This hierarchical system is called segmentary social structure.

• Major components include clans, lineages, consanguineal and affinal kin.

• Evans-Pritchard’s basic unit of social structure is the family or homestead, not the individual.

Social Structure and the Concept of Social Roles

• Fred Eggan, an American anthropologist, describes the components or units of social structure as interpersonal relations that become part of the social structure in the form of status positions occupied by individuals.

• He is not the only scholar defining social structure in terms of social status and positions held by individuals in society.

• A major theory of social structure is outlined by Nadel in his book The Theory of Social Structure (1969).

• Nadel defines social structure based on the roles played by individual actors in society and their consequent social status.

• According to Nadel (1969:5), social structure is understood by abstracting from the population and behavior the pattern or network (system) of relationships between actors in their capacity of playing roles relative to one another.

• Nadel’s definition of roles is more specific than that of most other sociologists.

Three Major Views of Social Structure

The Structural Functionalist Point of View

• Social structure is a core concept in the structural-functionalist approach to studying society, based on the analogy between society and an organism modeled on natural science methods, especially biology.

• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was one of the initiators of this approach and among the first to use the term social structure.

• Spencer was fascinated by the analogy between society and organism, and social evolution and biological evolution, but did not clearly define structure of society.

• For Spencer, society consists of different parts (social arrangements) that must work together to keep society healthy, meet environmental demands, and survive.

• Unlike biological parts like eyes or ears, these parts are social arrangements that perform vital functions in society.

• Spencer introduced the concept of social structure but did not develop it much further; however, his ideas on structure and function remain influential.

• Émile Durkheim did not explicitly use the term social structure, but the concept is implicit in his writings.

• Durkheim applied natural science methods, especially biology, to study society, emphasizing social facts that are external to individuals and exert constraint over behavior.

• Examples of social facts include laws and coinage, which are external and regulate individual conduct.

• Durkheim viewed social order as a moral order and society as a reality sui generis (an emergent reality beyond just the sum of individuals).

• Social relationships create expectations for conduct and common ways of perceiving reality, leading to shared values and norms.

• This common social behavior results in a collective consciousness, which can be seen as akin to the study of social structure.

• Like Spencer, Durkheim did not clearly define the concept of social structure.

• Radcliffe-Brown defined social structure more precisely, borrowing the organic analogy from Spencer and many ideas from Durkheim.

• Radcliffe-Brown defined social structure as “an arrangement of parts or components related to one another in a larger unity.”

• He described social structure as “an arrangement of persons in relationships institutionally defined and regulated,” such as between king and subject or husband and wife.

• Relationships within society are ordered by mores and norms, which regulate social interactions.

Social Morphology and Social Physiology

• The concept of social structure is related to the concept of social function.

• Function is defined as the contribution a partial activity makes to the total activity of which it is a part.

• The concept involves a structure made up of a set of relations among unit entities.

• The continuity of this structure is maintained by a life-process composed of the activities of its constituent units.

• Radcliffe-Brown termed the structural aspect of society as Social Morphology.

• The functional aspect of society is called Social Physiology.

• According to Radcliffe-Brown, social structure consists of a network of person-to-person relations.

• Studying social structure involves examining the set of actually existing relations at a specific point of time.

Dyadic Relations and Social Structure

• Radcliffe-Brown’s definition includes all social relations of person to person, termed dyadic relations, such as between a father and son or a mother’s brother and sister’s son.

• In an Australian tribe, the entire social structure is based on a network of person-to-person relations established through genealogical connections.

• Social structure includes the differentiation of individuals and classes by their social roles, for example, the differential social positions of master and servant, ruler and ruled, etc.

• Radcliffe-Brown distinguished between structure as an actually existing concrete reality (empirically given) and structural form.

• Just like cells of an organism die and are renewed, individual members of society die and are replaced by new people born.

• Despite this renewal, the form of the body and the form of the social structure remain the same.

• Even during wars and revolutions, the framework of society is not completely destroyed.

• The family institution is found universally and persists in all societies despite all changes.

Spatial Aspect of Social Structure

• Society as an object of study is difficult to conceive.

• According to Radcliffe-Brown, societies or communities that are absolutely isolated with no contact with the outside world are rarely found.

• In the contemporary period, the network of social relations extends throughout the world without clear-cut boundaries.

• For example, in India, it is unclear whether India as a whole is a single society or whether the various religious, linguistic, tribal groups are distinct societies.

• It is necessary to first define the unit of study.

• This unit should then be compared with other units of suitable size to study the structural system in and around that region.

• This is the spatial aspect of social structure.

• The spatial aspect can vary from a village or family to a whole nation or the world, depending on the unit of study.

Social Structure and Social Laws

• Law, economic institution, education, moral ideas, and values are complex mechanisms through which a social structure exists and persists.

• Many primitive institutions, values, and beliefs appear differently when seen in relation to the social structure.

• For example, the Potlatch system of the Indians of north-west America seemed wasteful and foolish to Canadian politicians.

• However, for social anthropologists, it was a mechanism for maintaining social structure of lineages, clans, and moieties, combined with an arrangement of rank defined by privileges.

• Many customs may appear ridiculous but they perform tension-removing functions in simple societies.

• Law is the mechanism by which the social structure is maintained.

• Law defines, restores, and maintains social relations between persons and social groups.

• The system of law can only be fully understood in relation to the social structure, and vice versa.

Interests and Values in Society

• The study of social structure leads directly to the study of interests or values that define social relations.

• According to Radcliffe-Brown, a social relation exists between two or more individuals when there is some adjustment of their respective interests by either convergence of interests or limitation of conflicts arising from divergence of interests.

• A social relation is not merely similarity of interests, but also based on mutual interests of persons in one another.

• Social solidarity results when two or more people share the same goals and cooperate to achieve those goals.

Social Structure and Social Institutions

• The study of social structure leads to understanding the network of social roles and social behaviour.

• Society reacts to social behaviour through sanctions, which can be positive or negative.

• Sanctions maintain a given standard of social life, including social laws, norms, values, and customs.

• Norms function through the social institutions of society.

• Radcliffe-Brown defined a social institution as a social group that observes certain norms of conduct.

• Social institutions provide social ordering to interactions between persons in social relationships.

• There are two aspects of institutions:

  • In terms of social structure, providing norms to relationships, e.g., behaviour of a father in a family or a doctor in a clinic.

  • In terms of group or class where persons interact briefly or casually, e.g., behaviour of a neighbour or a friend.

• According to Radcliffe-Brown, institutions as standardised modes of behaviour constitute the machinery by which social structure maintains its existence and continuity.

• Radcliffe-Brown has been criticized for being too general:

  • Raymond Firth criticized him for not distinguishing between ephemeral (short-lived) and enduring elements in social activity.

  • Firth also argued it makes it impossible to distinguish social structure from the totality of society itself.

• Other major contributions in the structural-functionalist school to social structure theory come from P.G. Murdock, Talcott Parsons, and Robert K. Merton.

• P.G. Murdock used the term social structure as the title of his book studying the institution of family in several tribes using Human Relations Area Files from Yale University.

• Murdock was the first to collect these files, which remained his principal research tool.

• Talcott Parsons defined social structure as a natural persistent system that maintains continuity despite internal changes, similar to an organism.

• For Parsons, social system is a broader concept, including both functional and structural aspects, beyond just social structure.

• Robert K. Merton viewed social structure as the interrelation of social positions and roles, aligning with structural-functionalist ideas.

The Structuralist Point of View

• Claude Levi-Strauss of France is a major structuralist who gave a distinct meaning to the concept of social structure.

• According to him, social structure has nothing to do with empirical reality but deals with models built from it.

• Levi-Strauss states social structure “can by no means be reduced to the ensemble of social relations to be described in a given society.”

• The model building based on existing social relations helps clarify the difference between social structure and social relations.

• Social relations are the raw materials from which models making up the social structure are built.

• Levi-Strauss believes social structure does not have a separate field in the study of societies but is rather a method applicable across social studies.

• This method is similar to structural analysis used in other disciplines like linguistics, literature, political science, etc.

• Louis Dumont (1970), applying the structuralist method, studied the caste system in India, showing it is based on the fundamental social principle of hierarchy.

• The principle of hierarchy is the core of the caste system and is opposed to the principle of equality.

• In the caste system, the member of society (man) is given more importance than the individual.

• Concepts of individualism, freedom, and equality are relatively less important in this system.

• These ideals are negated by the three basic features of the caste system: heredity, hierarchy, and endogamy.

• Like Levi-Strauss, Louis Dumont also used the kinship system to explain many of his views in the structuralist approach.

The Marxist Point of View

• Marxist theories on social structure reject the organic analogy used by structural-functionalist approaches.

• Karl Marx (1877) described relations of production as constituting the economic structure, the real basis on which a judicial and political superstructure is built, corresponding to forms of social conscience.

• Marx used the term structure in the sense of a building or construction, not biologically.

• However, Marx’s notion of structure is not clearly distinct from related concepts like system, superstructure, and form.

• Edmund Leach noted that Marx’s work refers to political, juridical, religious, and philosophical systems, with overlapping uses of terms like structure and superstructure.

• Sociologists have introduced variants such as infrastructure, macrostructure, and microstructure in both Marxist and non-Marxist literature.

• Marx viewed historical development of societies in stages: primitive, ancient, feudal, capitalist, and communist, based on distinct modes of production.

• This historical development follows the law of dialectical materialism.

• At each stage, society is divided into social classes based on ownership or non-ownership of property.

• The owners form a dominant minority class exploiting the majority non-owners by extracting surplus value from their labour.

• Exploitation continues until the masses unite, and the ‘seeds of revolution’ mature, leading to a change in the mode of production.

• Marx predicted societies would develop to communism, a classless society based on equality, which is an ideal not yet realized in reality.

• Even so-called socialist societies like Russia and China have not achieved this ideal.

• Most Marxist sociologists in India and abroad use the concept of class to study the structure and process of society.