The Significance Of Social Structure And Its Components
In his unfinished 1858 manuscript entitled “Grundrisse, ” Karl Marx wrote that “Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand”. While Marx’s theories on the value of individualism may be debated, his larger point about society is well taken. In societies, the individual surrenders some measure of his or her “uniqueness” in order to fit into a broader structure.
“Social structure” refers to the general and customary order of group dynamics that has evolved over an extended period. Social structure guides individuals when interacting with society at large and provides direction to and limits on behavior. As classic examples, the textbook cites to the hierarchy of roles between men and women or teacher and students as demonstrative of the concept (Henslin 103). Social structure provides the default rules and expectations that order our daily lives and our interaction with other people. It functions to moderate our personal feelings or thoughts at any given moment and governs the way we live and work with other individuals. The components of social structure are culture, social class, social status, roles, groups, and social institutions.
Culture refers to “the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next”. Culture provides a framework for us to process and evaluate the things we experience in our day to day lives. Our individual cultural experiences also provide a context or a sense of what behavior is normal or expected. Social class refers to our assignment or placement within the broader social structure. This assignment is based on functional criteria, like income, education, and occupational prestige.
People are grouped into social class with others of similar income and education or with people who work in jobs of similar prestige. This prestige is a reflection of social status, or “the position that someone occupies in a social group”. In turn, social status provides a framework for how we are to act and feel within our social group and society at large, and often acts to establish expectations for what we can (or cannot) do. Social status can be either ascribed or achieved. The former is involuntary and involves things you’re given at birth such as race, gender or familial status. The later is voluntary and depends on individual choice (whether to marry or not) or effort (whether to pursue higher education or stop at high school graduation). Within a social class, individuals fill roles which provide “behaviors, obligations, and privilege attached to a status”. “The sociological significant of roles is that they lay out what is expected of people. Social class is readily visible in everyday society. Working class city-dwellers on busses or subways, suburban commuters in sport-utility vehicles on roadways, bankers and businesspeople assembled for a chamber of commerce luncheon, stay-at-home moms at a PTA meeting or play date, ticket holders for a sporting event or people attending the ballet all share commonalities of class that reinforce the concept.
Symbols of social class include housing (projects versus mansions), cars (old, beaten down junkers versus luxury sedans), clothing (hand-me-downs versus designer brand clothing), jobs (blue collar factory versus white collar corporate) and travel destinations (camping at a state park versus exotic island getaways). Older inner-city public schools and welfare offices are symbols of lower social classes, just as boarding schools and Wall Street are symbols of the upper social class. There is a relationship between social class and culture. Within a given social class, there is usually a common language and experience shared by class members. Children who grow up in higher socio-economic classes understand languages of wealth and privilege that are foreign to middle- or lower-class children. These children grow among similarly situated peers as members of a common group, which “consists of people who interact with one another and who feel that the values, interests, and norms they have in common are important”.
Life experiences are similarly different based on social class. For example, upper-class kids may spend summers at yacht clubs or country club pools, while inner-city or lower-income kids may spend summers at community pools and centers. While these classes share language and rules unique to themselves, culture can form another basis upon which social class further divides itself. Within a given business or industry, people of similar faith, ethnicity or heritage may form subclasses. Thus, organizations like the Jewish Business Network for business professionals, the National Bar Association for African American lawyers, or the Asian American Pacific Islander Nurse Association for Asian American and Pacific Islander nurses provide means for people in a similar social class by virtue of their education or experience to further group themselves based on culture.
There are a number of “unwritten” rules of social class. Dressing nicely for a job interview or for church isn’t necessarily a rule, but it’s certainly expected. The definition of what constitutes dressing nicely, however, may be influenced by social class. In upper-class circles, it may be “tacky” to wear white pants after Labor Day, or inappropriate to drive last years’ model car, where in lower-classes the decision of what to wear and what to drive is more a function of necessity and available options. While cashing a check may be as easy as going to the bank for the middle- or upper-class, lower-class people will likely have the knowledge and resources to get a check cashed even without having a bank account. This is because for the lower-classes money is to be spend, for the middle-class money is to be managed, and for the upper-class money is to be invested.
Outside of formal sociology classes where greater empirical focus is devoted to the subject, lessons about social class are learned experientially. Some elements of social class identification are reinforced through media and popular culture. Fashion magazines and celebrity tabloids publish details about what movie stars wear or drive, and the houses they live in. Social class is usually learned at an early age and within family and school experiences. Children who grow up in an inner-city and attend public schools and children raised in the suburbs and educated in private schools will each form impressions about social class based on their life experiences. Thanks to the availability of social media and pop culture, children learn the differences and distinctions between themselves and other social classes. The impact of social class is pervasive and mutually reinforcing. For example, children born into poverty never have an opportunity to learn lessons about saving money. Because of their unwritten rule that money is to be spent, a sudden windfall of money such as a lottery winning or an inheritance is likely to be immediately spent. By contrast, an upper-class person coming into the same good fortune would be likely to invest or to save that money.
Thus, based upon the impact of social class assignment, poverty and wealth can each be seen as self-perpetuating. Although I disagree with Marx’s dismissal of the value of individuals and individualism, I have to concede his point that the concepts of social structure and social class are important to any meaningful study of society and sociology. To be sure, society is the sum of its parts. But a study of the rules which order the norms and behaviors of the collective is helpful to understanding the psychology of the individual members that make up society.
