The Nature of Social Structure

Denise initially felt somewhat confused and awkward at Brady’s because she was not attuned to its distinctive social routine and relationships. Soon she found much that was repetitious and predictable and acclimated herself to the bar’s underlying order. In sociological terms, Denise had become incorporated into Brady’s social structure. Social structure refers to the recurrent and patterned relationships that exist among the components of a social system. Because of social structure, human life gives the impression of organization and regularity. We find the notion of structure throughout the sciences: molecular structure, atomic structure, cellular structure, anatomical structure, and personality structure.

A good deal of what sociologists call social structure consists of subtle understandings and agreements – networks of invisible rules and institutional arrangements – that guide our behavior. Many issues are never raised and many institutional arrangements are never challenged because we take them for granted. Indeed, like Denise, we are rarely able to verbalize many of the rules that guide our behavior. And in practice, it is not necessary that we do so. Nor is it even necessary that we have a mental map of the entire social structure. Typically all we need to do is manage a fairly limited routine in certain physical places – primarily the home and workplace – and with the specific people we usually encounter there. We remember past situations and follow routines that worked for us. Certainly this approach is simpler than constantly devising new ones.

One way we structure our everyday lives is by linking certain experiences together and labeling them “Brady’s,” “the family,” “the church,” “government,” “the neighborhood,” and “the United States.” However, strictly speaking, there are no such things: there are only collections of individual people acting in certain ways that we perceive as patterned and that we label with this kind of shorthand. In a somewhat similar manner, we perceive physical aspects of our experience as structures – parts organized into wholes – and not as isolated elements. For instance, when we look at a building, we do not simply see lumber, shingles, bricks, and glass, but a house. In brief, we mentally relate an experience to other experiences to make up a larger, more inclusive whole. Viewed in this fashion, social structure finds expression in a grouping of social positions and the distribution of people in them.

As we have said, social structure gives us the feeling that much of social life is routine and repetitive. Consider the social structure of your school. Each quarter or semester you enter new classes, yet you have little difficulty attuning yourself to new classmates and professors. Courses in sociology, philosophy, computer science, English literature, business management, and physical education are offered, year after year. A new class enters college each fall and another class graduates each spring. Football games are scheduled for Saturday afternoons in the autumn and basketball games for evenings and weekends during the winter months. Deans prepare budgets, allocate funds, and manage their academic domains. Students, professors, deans, secretaries, academic counselors, coaches, and players pass through the system and in due course make their exits. Yet even though the actual people that compose a college change over time, the college endures. In the same way, a clique a family, a rock band, an army, a corporation, a religious denomination, and a nation endure – they are social structures.

Many sociologists view social structure as a social fact of the sort described by Emile Durkheim.

We experience a social fact as external to ourselves – as an independent reality that forms a part of our objective environment. It is there, something that we cannot deny and that we must constantly deal with. Consequently, social structures constrain our behavior and channel our actions in certain directions: they provide the framework within which we make our choices. Our social structures even have consequences for our IQ, a matter discussed in the box. Beyond our characteristics as individuals, then, are the characteristics of groups of which we are a part.

Although we use “motionless” terms as a convenient way to describe and analyze social life, we need to remember the dynamic and changing qualities of social structure. A college is not a fixed entity that, once created, continues to operate perpetually in the same manner. All social ordering must be continually created and re-created through the interweaving and stabilizing of social relationships. If social life seems to have a continuous reality to it, the reason lies in people repeating their individual behaviors many times. And if the “structures” change, it is because the people who create them change their behaviors. Structure, then, is in a constant state of becoming something new; but the new can never be divorced from what already is. In sum, organized social life is always undergoing modification and change.

Roles

A status carries with it a set of culturally defined rights and duties, what sociologists term a role. Expectations or norms specify what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior for the occupant of a status. The difference between a status and a role is that we occupy a status and play a role. One of the best ways to begin the study of social life is to examine people’s roles. Few other concepts in the social sciences have commanded greater interest, not only in sociological work, but in psychology, social psychology, and anthropology as well.