Social Sciences
Types of Societies
Types of societies can be categorized based on their level of technological advancement and social complexity. Hunter-gatherer societies rely on foraging and hunting, while agrarian societies are centered around farming. Industrial societies are characterized by technological advancements and urbanization, while post-industrial societies are driven by information and service industries. These classifications help understand the organization and dynamics of human societies.
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6 Key excerpts on "Types of Societies"
eBook - PDFSociology
The Essentials
- Margaret Andersen, Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
In a single society, such as the United States, you can conceptu- alize the whole society as gesellschaft, with some internal groups marked by gemeinschaft. Types of Societies In addition to comparing how different societies are bound together, sociologists are interested in how social organization evolves in different societies. Simple things such as the size of a society can also shape its social organization, as do the different roles that men and women engage in as they produce goods, care for the old and young, and pass on societal traditions. Societies also differ according to their resource base—whether they are predominantly agricultural or industrial, for example, and whether they are sparsely or densely populated. Thousands of years ago, societies were small, sparsely populated, and technologically limited. In the competition for scarce resources, larger and more technologically advanced societies dominated smaller ones. Today, we have arrived at a global society with highly evolved degrees of social differentiation and inequality, notably along class, gender, racial, and ethnic lines. Sociologists distinguish six Types of Societies based on the complexity of their social structure, the amount of overall cultural accumulation, and the level of their technology. They are foraging, pastoral, horticultural, agricultural (these four are called preindustrial societies), and then industrial and postindus- trial societies (see ◆ Table 5-1). Each type of society can still be found on Earth, although all but the most isolated societies are rapidly moving toward the industrial and postindustrial stages of development. These different societies vary in the basis for their organization and the complexity of their divi- sion of labor. Some, such as foraging societies, are subsistence economies, where men and women hunt and gather food but accumulate very little.
- Betty Yorburg(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
T H R E E Types of Human Societies Human societies, and the major institutions within them—the family, religion, government, economy, education, and recrea-tion—can be seen to have varied in rather typical ways, when these societies are classified on the basis of the level of techno-logical development and the state of scientific knowledge that have characterized and distinguished them. In science, typologies are constructed for the purpose of clas-sifying observed facts according to some explanatory or in-terpretive principle. Scientific typologies, ideally, meet the stan-dards of all inclusiveness and mutual exclusiveness : all relevant facts can be classified, and the location of any particular fact or item, once the classifying principle is established, is logical and irrefutable. The Problem of Typologies When human beings, their activities, or their societies are being classified these standards are difficult to meet. Individual vari-ability and cultural complexity may defeat the most enthusias-tic typologists in the social sciences. In the United States, it is currently fashionable to attack typologies as sterile or oversim-plified. This is a symptom of the antiintellectualism that has always characterized American society and that has been en- 96 TYPES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES hanced recently by severe political and economic strains and a growing ethic of despair. Scientific typologies have, in fact, played an important role in the history of science and in the progressive accumulation of information and understanding about human beings and their material and nonmaterial worlds. When viewing human societies as falling into several major categories on the basis of the level of scientific information available to them and the primary means by which resources are produced and energy is obtained, it is important to bear in mind that the model and the concepts are abstractions.
eBook - PDF- Tonja R. Conerly, San Jacinto College, Kathleen Holmes, Northern Essex Community College, Asha Lal Tamang, North Hennepin Community College(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Openstax(Publisher)
Their appearance might be very similar, but the two countries are very different societies. Sociologist Gerhard Lenski Jr. (1924–2015) defined societies in terms of their technological sophistication. As a society advances, so does its use of technology. Societies with rudimentary technology depend on the fluctuations of their environments, while industrialized societies have more control over the impact of their surroundings and thus develop different cultural features. This distinction is so important that sociologists generally classify societies along a spectrum of their level of industrialization—from preindustrial to industrial to postindustrial. Preindustrial Societies Before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of machines, societies were small, rural, and dependent largely on local resources. Economic production was limited to the amount of labor a human being could provide, and there were few specialized occupations. The very first occupation was that of hunter- gatherer. Hunter-Gatherer Hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate the strongest dependence on the environment of the various types of preindustrial societies. As the basic structure of human society until about 10,000–12,000 years ago, these groups were based around kinship or tribes. Hunter-gatherers relied on their surroundings for survival—they hunted wild animals and foraged for uncultivated plants for food. When resources became scarce, the group moved to a new area to find sustenance, meaning they were nomadic. These societies were common until several hundred years ago, but today only a few hundred remain in existence, such as indigenous Australian tribes sometimes referred to as “aborigines,” or the Bambuti, a group of pygmy hunter-gatherers residing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hunter-gatherer groups are quickly disappearing as the world’s population explodes.
eBook - PDF- J. Offer(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
This second grouping refers to the kinds of social activities which have preponderance in a particular society at a particular time, and the resulting contrasts in the organization the society possesses. Compulsion or coercion into co-operation contrasts with voluntary co-operation. In this context Spencer’s meaning would have been clearer had he referred to ‘types of social relations’ rather than to ‘types of society’. It is important to note too that Spencer now points explic- itly to instances of ‘early’ societies that are ‘industrial’, giving as examples the Arafuras, the Todas, the ‘amiable Bodo and Dhimáls’, and the Mishmis (1893: pp. 552–3). In considering advanced societies of his own time, Spencer stresses that ‘multitudinous objects’ are already being achieved ‘by spontaneously- evolved combinations of citizens governed representatively’ (1893: p. 556). In other words, we have in our midst aspects of social organization which represents ‘industrial’ society. Of particular concern to Spencer is a contem- porary metamorphosis in Britain away from the industrial type and towards the militant type, associated first with perceived external threats to security, but which has also manifested itself in internal matters, at the expense of individual freedom and local autonomy. 2 Whatever are Spencer’s own normative preferences about the nature of social relations (they are not difficult to discern), he attempts to present a neutral evolutionary perspective on the types: ‘Social organization is to be considered high in proportion as it subserves individual welfare, because in a society the units are sentient and the aggregate insentient; and the indus- trial type is the higher because, in that state of permanent peace to which civilization is tending, it subserves individual welfare better than the mili- tant type’ (1893: pp. 587–8). 3 However, Spencer also briefly introduces the
- Mohamed Rabie(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
CHAPTER 5 Development of Human Societies H istorians and other social scientists, using various models and cri- teria, have defined several stages of societal development. Some have made the list lengthy; others have abbreviated it. However, each social scientist seems to acknowledge that the greatest revolutions in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, which gave birth to the agricultural and industrial civilizations, respectively. Historians also acknowledge that these two revolutions have had the greatest impact on human ways of living and states of living, or on their cultures and economic conditions. There is also agreement on at least three major stages of soci- etal development or civilization: the preagricultural, the agricultural, and the industrial stage. Nevertheless, a growing number of historians think that the information and communications revolutions represent another great revo- lution in human history that is destined to transform both the cultures and economic conditions of people everywhere. Changes that certain nations, particularly the United States, are experienc- ing today have led some thinkers to herald the arrival of a new age. This new, yet to be defined and agreed upon age is often referred to as the postindustrial age, the information age, or the globalization age. I call it the “knowledge age” because it is knowledge that includes unprecedented innovations, scien- tific discoveries, and information and telecommunications systems that are fundamentally changing people’s ways of living and states of living in the developed and developing countries, affecting the cultures of the rich as well as the poor. A careful analysis of these stages should make it possible to place all major sociocultural and economic transformations in their proper historical con- texts and thus enable us to track the course of societal development over time.
eBook - ePubHumans
An Introduction to Four-Field Anthropology
- Alice Beck Kehoe, Andrew J Petto(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 12 Regulating Societies Power and Types of SocietiesDOI: 10.4324/9781003226819-13Figure 12.1 The role of social institutions in cultural ecology.Human societies carry on patterned ways of organizing their members. Americans think of political structures, formal institutions, and job roles as means of organizing people. In addition, we have the roles we think of as “natural,” particularly those anthropologists term “kinship”: family relations. Cross-cultural comparisons reveal much variation in what societies believe to be “natural” relationships––in some, it seems natural to see a few children with women “fathers,” or all boys and girls in a large extended family as brothers and sisters. Analysis shows that kinship is a means of assigning roles to people, a form of regulation especially important because it gives a role to everyone, beginning at birth and continuing even after death. People may be given, or allowed to take, additional roles and these may be what we conventionally call occupations, political positions, or social statuses. Giving names to roles helps to regulate people in societies.Another way to think about regulating societies is to examine the distribution of power in a society. Who may act as they think best? Who must obey another? What are the laws, or rules that people acknowledge? How are they enforced? A focus on power must, in an anthropological perspective, take in the society’s worldview, the history they give of the origin of their political structure and their belief about the nature of humans and social relationships.Contemporary Western people are likely to grow up believing that laws are established by governments and that humans will not obey the laws unless coerced by police and the threat of punishment, whereas many other societies believe that humans naturally live cooperatively with others. The extreme of the Western worldview is “spare the rod and spoil the child,” a belief that humans are born full of sin and only beatings will keep them obedient to lawful authority; this belief horrifies many non-Westerners.
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