This document discusses the concepts of culture and society. It aims to analyze the definition of culture and society, determine their key aspects and changes over time, and reflect on the importance of culture. The document examines different perspectives on defining society, including views of methodological individualism versus sociological realism. It also explores how societies persist and reproduce over time through institutions, as well as the four functional prerequisites of social reproduction: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency. While reproduction theory explains how societies maintain continuity, it fails to fully account for human agency and how social conditions can change.

1. THE
CONCEPT OF SOCIETY
and
CULTURE

2. Learning Objectives
At the end of this topic the students should be able to
analyze the concept, aspects and changes in/of culture
and society:
Specifically this discussions aims to:
 Analyze the concept of culture and society
 Determine the aspects and changes of culture and
society
 Reflect on the importance of culture and its impact to
the society

3. Let’s Analyze This!
•You need to create a CONCEPT MAP
with the following main words
CULTURE and SOCIETY.
•Write your answer on a ½ crosswise.

18. According to John Holmwood (2006),
The term “society” is used to describe a level of
organization of groups that is relatively self-
contained. However, the boundedness of groups is
always relative and so sociologists may refer to
human society, where the reference is to the
interdependencies among all social groups, or to
subgroups such as family society, where the
reference is to the typical interactions among the
individuals making up a grouping of close kin (p.
592).

19. methodological individualism
A view that states collective concepts
such as groups, associations and
societies do not exist but only individual
members
Emile Durkheim, the founding father of
French sociology, argued strongly against
this position. His theory is called
sociological realism.

20. Durkheim on the objective existence of society:
The case of purely moral maxims; the public
conscience exercises a check on every act
which offends it by means of the
surveillance it exercises over the conduct of
citizens, and the appropriate penalties at its
disposal. In many cases the constraint is less
violent, but nevertheless it always exists.

21. The argument of Durkheim that society is an objective
reality is echoed in contemporary sociology by Peter L.
Berger:
The objectivity of society extends to all
its constituent elements. Institutions,
roles, and identities exist as objectively
real phenomena in the social world,
though they and this world are at the
same time nothing but human
productions.

22. Social Reproduction, or How Societies Persist
If one defines society as “organization of groups that is relatively self-
contained”, then the next question is how societies manage to exist and
persist across time and space? The problem of explaining how societies
manage to exist over a long period of time is called
reproduction by the French philosopher and sociologist, Louis
Althusser. No society can endure over time if it does not support
its very own reproduction. To do this, all societies require the creation
of institutions to perpetuate the existence of society.
There are two types of institutions that reproduce the condition of
social life, namely, the ideological state apparatuses and repressive
state apparatuses.

23. From structural functionalist perspective, social
reproduction is carried through four
functional prerequisites elaborated by one of the
major American sociologists, Talcott Parsons.

24. ♦ Adaptation is the capacity of society to take
resources from society and distribute
them accordingly.
♦ Goal Attainment is the capability to set goals
and mobilize the resources and
energies necessary to achieve the goals set
forth by society.
♦ Integration, or the harmonization of the
entire society to achieve consensus. It is a
demand that the values and norms of society
are solid and sufficiently convergent.
♦ Latency, or latent pattern maintenance,
requires that society is able to constantly
produce and socialize actors who will follow
the norms and roles given to them
by society.

25. For Parsons, any entity that was relatively
self-subsistent with respect to an
environment qualified as a social system.
The most important of these
functions is system
integration. When social integration
and the continuous production of
motivated actors are disrupted society
experiences breakdown.

26. Manifest functions are the
unintended effects of people’s
actions. And in most cases, these
manifest functions become
dysfunctional to the system.
The strength of reproduction theory is also its
weakness. It fails to explain how people
do not simply reproduce the very social
conditions that they are born with but they also
possess the power of agency.

27. This criticism is echoed in the
famous statement of Marx:
Men [sic] make their own history, but they do
not make it just as they please; they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly
found, given and transmitted from the past
(Marx, 1937).