Society, Social Interaction, and Social Structure Quiz

Society and Social Interaction

• A society is a system of social interaction that includes culture and social organization.
• Members of a society share a culture and a territory.
• Social interaction is the process by which people act toward or respond to each other and is the foundation for all relationships and groups in society.

Social Structure

• Social structure is a complex framework of societal institutions and the social practices that make up a society and that organize and establish limits on people's behavior.
• It includes status, role, groups, social institutions, and technology.

Theories of Society

Emile Durkheim

• Observed that people with weak social bonds are prone to self-destructive behavior.
• Introduced the concept of collective conscience, which refers to the communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society.
• Argued that social integration is the strength of the ties that people have to their social groups.
• Proposed the concept of division of labor, where various tasks of a society are divided up and performed.
• Identified two types of solidarity: mechanical solidarity (preindustrial societies) and organic solidarity (industrial societies).

Mechanical Solidarity

• Characterized by minimal division of labor and people feeling united by shared values and common social bonds.
• Found in traditional societies, where people dress the same and everyone does much the same work.

Organic Solidarity

• Characterized by social cohesion found in industrial societies, where people perform very specialized tasks and feel united by their mutual dependence.
• People rely on one another for all the things they cannot do for themselves.

Karl Marx

• Held a materialist view that the system of economic production shapes the entire society.
• Argued that capitalism, economic inequality, and class conflicts are the root causes of alienation.
• Identified the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (laborers) as two classes that consistently appear in history during times of social revolution.

Alienation

• Refers to where the individual is isolated and divorced from their society, work, or sense of self.
• Can occur in four ways: alienation from the product of one's labor, alienation from the process of one's labor, alienation from others, and alienation from one's self.

Max Weber

• Focused on the way people think about the world, proposing that modern societies are characterized by rationality as the main type of human thought.
• Argued that technology is a strong indicator of the degree of rationalization.
• Agreed with Marx that modern society is alienating to the individual, but identified different causes of the problem, such as bureaucracy and science.
• Identified the problem of bureaucracy as isolating and dehumanizing, leading to alienation.