Social Structure

1. SOCIAL STRUCTURE

3. Several conditions to be met before people can be said to be
living as one:
 They must occupy a common territory.
 They must share the same government or other political authority.
 They must to some extent have a common culture and a sense of
membership in, and commitment to the same group.
 The people have something in common, a set of loyalties, and
sentiments , an esprit de corps.
 The people are organized in the sense that everyone has a function
or role to perform in an orderly manner.
 The group recruits its members by sexual reproduction and in
addition by migration.
 A member of the social group may sacrifice himself for the welfare
of the group, as for instance, he may die in defense of his group.

4. SOCIETY
• is a population that occupies the same territory, is
subject to the same political authority, and participates
in a common culture
• is a group of organized individuals who think of
themselves as a distinct group who have something in
common that binds them to unite as one
• consists of all the people who share a distinct and
continuous way of life and think of themselves as one
united people.
• is not only a group of people living together in a
definite territory but is a social system of long
established relationships with a certain way of life
which people in it recognize and follow

5. • is a position in a group or society
• ex: labor leader, dean of a college, choir
member, senator, broadcaster, bank manager
• determines where that individual “fits” in a
society and how he or she should relate to
other people

6. Ascribed statuses
 in-born statuses
 ex: gender and race
 Achieved statuses
 earned statuses
 are those that result from our actions

7. Statuses are sometimes ranked with a social
structure; namely,
 Vertical Social Structures
 one is considered higher than the other
 ex: in countries like Philippines, America &
Britain
 Horizontal Social Structures
 In these, the various statuses are merely
different from each other, not higher or
lower.

8. Despite our many statuses, we are usually
influenced by only one status at a time when
we relate to another person.
Master status
 could be determined by the nature of a
society or physical appearance
Subordinate status/statuses

9. Status Inconsistency
• a situation in which aspects of an
individual’s status or statuses appear
contradictory
Social Class
• is a category of people of roughly
equivalent status in an unequal society

10. Its sociological concept is derived directly from
the theater, and refers to the parts a person
plays in society.
Specifically, a role is a set of expected
behavior patterns, obligations and privileges
attached to a particular social status.
Thus, the distinction between status and role
is simple:
“You occupy a status, but you
play a role.”

11. • Role Expectations
– is the basis of the actual content of our role
behavior
– the generally accepted social norms that
prescribes how a role is ought to be played
– these expectations may be at odds to our
role performance.
• Role Performance
– the actual behavior of a person playing a
role

12. • Role strain
– a situation in which contradictory
expectations are built into a single role
• Role conflict
– a situation in which two or more of a
person’s roles have contradictory
requirements

13. • is a unit of interacting personalities with an
interdependence of roles and status existing
between the members
• is a collection of people interacting together
in an orderly way in the basis of shared
expectations about each other’s behavior
Most social behavior takes place within
and among groups that are constantly being
formed and reformed.

14. 2 Main Types of Groups:
1. Primary Group
o consists of a small number of people who interact over a
relatively long period on a direct, intimate basis
o ex: families, cliques of friends and peers, and close
neighbors
o These groups are important building blocks of social
structure.
2. Secondary Group
o consists of people who interact on a relatively
temporary, anonymous, and impersonal basis
o ex: formal organizations, political parties, government
bureaucracies
o They are increasingly important in large modern
societies.

15. • is stable cluster of values, norms, statuses,
roles, and groups that develops around a basic
social need. ( See figure 3.1)
Every society must meet certain basic
social needs if it is to survive and provide a
satisfying life for its members.

16. Characteristics of Institutions:
1. Institutions tend to be resistant to
change.
2. Institutions tend to be independent.
3. Institutions tend to change together.
4. Institutions tend to be the site of major
social problems.

17. Interaction is the basic “stuff” of
social behavior. Society cannot survive
without it. Given the enormous diversity
of social interaction, sociologists have
classified it into major types. They also
discovered certain patterns of behavior
in virtually all kinds of social interaction.

18. Forms of Interactions:
1. Exchange
– is a transaction between two individuals, groups,
or societies in which one takes an action in order
to obtain a reward in return
2. Competition
– In a competitive interaction, each tries to achieve
that goal before the other does.
– Competition is not the exact opposite of
cooperation, though.

19. 3. Cooperation
– is an interaction in which two or more individuals
work together to achieve a common goal
a. Spontaneous cooperation
 is the oldest type of cooperation
b. Traditional cooperation
 brings down added stability to the social
structure
c. Directed cooperation
 is based not on custom but on the directions of
someone in authority
d. Contractual cooperation
 originates from voluntary action

20. 4. Conflict
— exists in all forms of social structure
In competition, the contestants try to achieve
the same goal in accordance with commonly
accepted rules. The most important of these rules
is usually that competing parties should
concentrate on winning the game and not on
hurting each other. When competing parties no
longer play by these rules, competition has
become conflict. In conflict, then, defeating the
opponent by hook or by crook, has become the
goal.