What is Society?

7 Key excerpts on "What is Society?"

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  eBook - ePub

  Relational Sociology

  A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences

  • Pierpaolo Donati(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Society as a relation

  Introduction: What is Society?? What is a ‘social fact’?

  Sociology is the science of society. But What is Society? and how can we make sociology a science? These two questions are tied to one another because the definition we give of society depends upon the way we observe, describe and interpret it.

  We must begin by stating why and how the notion of society is complex and polyvalent. It is complex insofar as it seems to encompass a little of everything; so, what is it that remains outside society? Of course, physical phenomena are outside human confines, even when they are owned or affected by human beings, and transcendental phenomena (related to religion) cannot be completely explained by reference to society. Furthermore, most share the conviction that psychic facts (such as feelings, emotions, the ‘I’) cannot be fully reduced to society. With the exception of these phenomena (natural, religious and psychic), all else occurs within society or, at least, entities change according to how they are described and according to the type of historical society in which they are observed and, therefore, are not immune from the society in which they manifest themselves. In other words, society is a complex notion because it comprises all that touches upon the existence of human beings and their daily lives and vice versa.

  It follows that ‘a society’ is then understood as a

  collectivity settled (although in some cases nomadic) on a delimited territory from which the settlement and mass migration of other populations is excluded, through force or right; the majority of whose component members were biologically produced within it; who share the same culture, are aware of their collective identity and continuity; maintain their own distinct political and economic relations that are instrumental, expressive and complex, which even if not strongly affective, are more dense and intense than the relations that they (eventually) have with other collectives. Distinctive structures, of the family, of economics, politics and the military, through which the population provides for its principal needs of subsistence are specialized expressions of these relations – biological, material and cultural – without implying complete self-subsistence or autarchy.

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  The Science of Society (RLE Social Theory)

  An Introduction to Sociology

  • Stephen Frederick Cotgrove(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Attempts to arrive at a holistic view of society have borrowed a number of models, including the analogy between society and organisms. The concept of society as a system whose parts are functionally related appears to provide the most promising starting point. Among the major sub-systems of society, we can focus attention on the relation between the various structural elements, which provide the organized framework for social action, and include the family, economic, political and cultural organizations. The cultural sub-system constitutes the shared values and norms which play an important part in the integration of individual action into co-ordinated systems, while the personality sub-system directs our attention to the fact that in the last analysis, social systems are made up of social actors, individuals who occupy roles and who possess characteristics moulded by the socialization process.

  Cognate disciplines such as economics, anthropology, history, and psychology differ in the perspectives which they bring to bear on the study of human society. Intellectual study involves specific ways of interpreting phenomena, according to distinct frames of reference. These have grown up by a consensual process as a result of the interaction between professional members who identify with a particular discipline, and who in this way help to hammer out its distinctive approach. The historian, for example, may take the view that human behaviour cannot be reduced to generalized laws. All we can do is to immerse ourselves in the complex web of events and attempt some intuitive grasp of their interrelations, especially the connexion between contiguous periods. There are signs, however, of a convergence of perspectives and a breaking down of barriers between traditional disciplines.

  The attempts to apply the perspectives of science to the study of society have resulted in a variety of approaches. At the one extreme, accurate observation and recording with a minimum of theoretical analysis can be contrasted at the other extreme with theory building which presents major difficulties of empirical verification. There appears to be a growing recognition of the need to bring these approaches closer together, and to integrate theory and research. The effort to develop a more rigorous science of society is not without its special difficulties, including the problem of objectivity and detachment, but such difficulties do not by themselves constitute fatal objections to the claim of sociology to be a science. Such a claim can only be refuted in the last analysis by sociology’s failure to develop a body of theory. And all the evidence suggests that the time is now ripe to pursue such an objective with increased effort and resources.

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  Invitation to the Sociology of Religion

  • Phil Zuckerman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Schools. The military. Corporations. Police departments. City hall. The government. Hospitals. Prisons. The family. Courts. Marriage. Industries. The media. Sports. The economy. Political systems. The workplace. The welfare system. And a whole lot more. Sociologists look at the ways certain social structures and institutions frame and shape our lives, greatly affecting where we live, how we live, who we live with—even how long we live.

  4.  Sociologists study social patterns .

  Social patterns refer to everything from divorce rates to fashion trends, crime rates to how people kiss, rates of drug usage to what people eat. Personally, I like to ponder the social patterns (those primarily concerning race and gender) that can be observed at Los Angeles International Airport: the people who check bags on the curbside are almost always middle-aged black men. The flight attendants are almost always white women. The people working by the luggage x-ray machines are almost always young black women. The pilots are almost always white men. Why? Understanding and explaining such social patterns—how it is that certain jobs become gender and/or racially segregated, for instance—is a typical sociological concern.

  5.  Sociologists understand that an individual can be truly understood only within his or her sociohistorical context .

  From reading assertions 1 to 4, one might get the impression that sociologists don’t concern themselves with individuals. This is simply not so. Sociologists are very much concerned with individuals. But we do approach our study of the individual in a special, sociological way. To put it simply, we believe that the individual only “makes sense” when his or her social environment is taken into account. Though we are all individuals, we are individuals existing in specific points in history, in specific countries, in specific neighborhoods, in specific economies, in specific families. Where, when, and with whom we as individuals find ourselves living are all incredibly important factors in shaping our personal lives and identities. The way every individual dresses, the food she or he eats, the music she or he likes, his or her political opinions, the way she or he experiences love, the way she or he communicates, and so on, are all directly linked to specific sociohistorical circumstances beyond any one individual’s control, or even consciousness.

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  Invitation to Sociology

  A Humanistic Perspective

  • Peter L. Berger(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  Society, as objective and external fact, confronts us especially in the form of coercion. Its institutions pattern our actions and even shape our expectations. They reward us to the extent that we stay within our assigned performances. If we step out of these assignments, society has at its disposal an almost infinite variety of controlling and coercing agencies. The sanctions of society are able, at each moment of existence, to isolate us among our fellow men, to subject us to ridicule, to deprive us of our sustenance and our liberty, and in the last resort to deprive us of life itself. The law and the morality of society can produce elaborate justifications for each one of these sanctions, and most of our fellow men will approve if they are used against us in punishment for our deviance. Finally, we are located in society not only in space but in time. Our society is a historical entity that extends temporally beyond any individual biography. Society antedates us and it will survive us. It was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through time. In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history.

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  Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Human Learning

  • Peter Jarvis(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In this sense, education is ‘from above’ since the dominant forces in the older generation decide what should be included in the curriculum – one way of viewing curriculum is that it is a selection from culture. Culture is all the knowledge, skills, attitudes, beliefs, values and emotions that we, as human beings, have added to our biological base. Culture is a social phenomenon; it is what we as a society, or a people, share and which enables us to live as society. In order for humanity to survive, it is necessary that we should learn our culture. Learning, then, becomes necessary for the survival of societies and in the process we, as human beings, learn to be. This learning occurs, as we have already pointed out, through personal interaction (I-Thou) with significant others (Mead: see Strauss 1964) in the first instance, and then within the wider life-world. However, it is clear that globalisation and rapid social change have affected the nature of society and that our life-world is now multi-cultural. Perhaps we should now to recognise that all of us live in multi-cultural life-worlds which are gradually reflecting the locality. Consequently, we learn a diversity of interpretations of reality from the outset, especially through the mass media

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  Turning Psychology into a Social Science

  • Bernard Guerin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  focused more on the strangers who were distributing necessary resources for money and less on the family, who were no longer involved in this.

  What are these systems that shape our behaviours now?

  All the different forms of life and relationships have different social properties (see Table 3.1 ). Social anthropologists trace how behaviour is shaped for smaller, isolated communities. But these all began to change as the population increased and the new societal systems arose. This does not just affect the society as a whole but all the individuals within those societies and shapes how they act, talk, and think. These societal changes affect all of our ‘personal’ behaviours.

  In other words, these new societal systems that shape us are our ‘psychology’ . Our ‘psychology’ is our social and economic context.

  To recap, the earlier forms of human life and behaviour were shaped by:

  • having to maintain smaller, extended family groups or communities (rather than a ‘society’);

  • being able to work together to get resources directly by cooperation;

  • being able to trade with other family-community groups for resources you could not produce (intermarriage was one way of helping this).

  By contrast, our Western life goals and behaviour are now:

  • working for or with strangers to get money to get resources, your work no longer directly produces your own resources (Marx);

  • learning how to maintain good relationships with strangers to keep that job and to buy your resources;

  • dealing with the societal systems that have been constructed in order to manage a large population of strangers all interacting, since this produces more conflict.

  (Note that family and non-work-related friends are still present in modern life but they generally no longer link directly to resources, so they have become less important in economic terms and less time is spent with them compared to in kin-based communities. The research question is: what do we still get from family and non-work-related friends now in modernity?)

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  Social and Community Development

  An Introduction

  • John Eversley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Community is usually used for personal or face-to-face relationships, often between people who live in the same neighbourhood or have a common activity – be it work, leisure or worship. Society is more often used to refer to a unit of social organisation in which people do not necessarily know each other or see each other face-to-face but they may be aware of each other or have transactions with each other. This ‘commonsense’ understanding has a long heritage. It follows a distinction made by the German writer Ferdinand Tönnies in the 1880s. Tönnies’ distinction is in a tradition of political philosophy derived from the much earlier work of Thomas Hobbes. Tönnies is explicitly concerned with the distinction between communism and socialism. As Raymond Plant points out, he was writing in the German tradition which saw the idea of community as a political entity – the Greek polis. Community and society were contrasted by Tönnies and his followers as traditional versus modern; rural versus urban; stable and immobile versus ever-changing and mobile; integrated versus fragmented; one based on personal relationships and collectivists, the other anonymous, transactional or contractual and individualistic. Although Tönnies was an opponent of the Nazis and sacked from his job by them, his enthusiasm for community and regrets about society replacing community were shared and reinforced by the Nazis; they even used a slogan Community instead of Society. 2 Often the contrast has been between communities being religious and society being secular. Often, implicitly, communities are described in terms of who does not belong. 3 The literature on development (discussed in the next chapter) treats ‘social development’ and ‘community development’ differently, broadly following the society/community division. Language The words society and community in English are not always translatable into other languages

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