Let's start to more firmly establish our understanding of "society," then, by focusing on the elements that make up a society. As the last sentence in the previous section pointed out, each of these elements is also socially structured.

Social Status:

The smallest element of social structure is social status. Don't confuse the word "status" with high status, because it's possible to have a low social status, as well. A social status, or, more simply "status" can be defined as a social position, i.e., a location in a larger, patterned network of social relationships (a social structure, in other words). Thus, your status at UNCW is that of "student"; mine is "professor"; the person in charge of the Watson School of Education (or the College of Arts and Sciences, or the Cameron Business School, etc.) is the "dean" of that college or school, etc. In the same vein, if you go on to become teachers, then you will occupy that status in the school in which you are employed. Furthermore, the school - and your classroom - constitutes a system of interaction between and among people occupying various statuses: principal, assistant principal, fellow teachers, students, parents, school boards, etc.

None of us holds only one status. I am a professor, but I am also a brother, a husband, a father, a son, a friend, a cousin, an uncle, and so forth; the same is true for you, and for the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences or the Chancellor of UNCW: we all have, and are powerfully shaped by, a number of statuses. This array of social positions (notice the bold, italicized print: this is a definition) is called a status set, and every person's life is organized around and by her status set.

That we occupy a diversity of social positions comprising a status set is an obvious, but extremely important point, not least because it helps us to understand a good deal about our own and others' behaviors.⁽¹⁾ Do we behave the same - and do others expect us to behave the same - in every social situation? Obviously not. You and I behave quite differently depending upon which status we are occupying, or "doing," at any given moment. A student talking with a professor constitutes a different form of social interaction than two students or two professors talking with one another. Certainly, there is some consistency in what we do in our varying statuses (and that consistency relates with the concept of the self, which we will discuss below), but the fact remains that we act a bit differently with our friends than we do not only with strangers (which is also a social status, by the way), but also with parents, co-workers, sweethearts, or spouses. Why? Is it because people are dishonest? That we don't really know 'who we are'? No, we act differently with different people and in different social situations because different social statuses involve, and are defined by, different sets of expectations. Each social status contains an accompanying role, which - very much like what the term means to film and theater actors - can be defined as a pattern of behavior expected, and required, of the occupants of a specific social position. Think about the status of the student, again. Do you do things as a student that you do not otherwise do? Unless you, just in the course of your normal non-student life, read an enormous amount; take extensive notes about what you read; do research on and write papers about, say, the history of school reform, or the portrayal of women characters in 18^th century English novels; study furiously for and take exams covering these same types of topics, and so on, then it seems safe to say the student status entails a set of obligations and expectations that you must meet simply by virtue of the social position in which you find yourselves.

Just as each of us occupies a number of social statuses, so too, we must meet a variety of different behavioral expectations corresponding to those statuses. These expectations constitute a role-set, which can be defined as the array of behaviors expected of us as a result of our varying statuses. This is an important concept for making sense not only of the material we will cover in this course the rest of the semester but also for making sense of your own lives. In fact, one of the most important personal issues (and these are invariably socially structured issues) you will confront repeatedly in your lives is how to organize your life in ways that minimize the conflicts between and among the different roles in your role-set. College students, to take an immediately relevant example, often experience conflict between school and work. Why? Because the status of student and the status of employee contain conflicting roles. As a student, you are expected to perform all of the tasks (and more) mentioned in the previous paragraph; as an employee, you are expected to show up on time, as scheduled, and to do your assigned tasks reliably. The expectations of the employee do not generally change to fit the expectations of the student. Thus, "crunch times" in the semester (when a number of exams, papers, etc. all come due simultaneously in several courses) conflict with work schedules and requirements.

This phenomenon of conflicting statuses is known as role strain, and that strain is built into the type of social world we all now inhabit. Role strain is another concept that seems quite obvious, but its implications for all of our lives are quite profound. Indeed, in extreme forms, role strain can be a pretty serious matter: if it persists for any length of time, role strain can begin to threaten the ability to maintain a stable sense of oneself and one's own identity; it can create serious psychological problems and crises.
 

Ascribed and Achieved Status:

A key question regarding the statuses we occupy and the corresponding social roles we "perform" is "How do we come to hold these social positions?" Here, too, the answer is both obvious and no less significant for being obvious. Although social statuses, as we have seen, comprise a wide range of positions, we come to hold those positions in either of two ways: we earn them or, colloquially, we are stuck with them. A social position we are "stuck with" is called an ascribed status, the more formal definition of which is a social position based on some inherited characteristic or some characteristic over which we have no personal control. Obvious examples of an ascribed status include one's sex, and our racial or ethnic background. A social position that we earn, conversely, is called an achieved status, the formal definition of which is a social position based on some acquired characteristic. Should you decide to become a teacher, for example, you will need to satisfy a set of requirements (passing certain courses with specific grades, doing specific assignments, learning particular skills, and so on). The skills and knowledge base of "the teacher" - again, as a social status - represent characteristics you must acquire.

Although we will discuss this in greater detail when we cover the concept of stratification (below), it should be mentioned at this point that the concepts of achieved and ascribed status enable us to make even finer distinctions, and to arrive at sharper and more sophisticated understandings, regarding the way that societies are structured as well as how people perceive themselves and others. Remember that I cautioned you a bit earlier not to confuse the term status simply with "high" status. Well, a variation on that point is that people's perceptions about how people come to occupy particular social positions (again, statuses) play a very important role. If you, for example, are wealthy, other people will almost always react to you differently if your status as a wealthy person has been earned or given to you by accident of birth. (Not at all incidentally, you will almost certainly view yourself differently, as well, depending on your circumstances in this situation.) If your wealthy person status is a "rags to riches" story, people will and do hold you in higher regard than if you were "born with a silver spoon in your mouth." (Notice that I have chosen two very old and still widely used phrases in American culture to describe these situations: they are old and widely used because they capture and express key values in American culture - which we will discuss in more detail in the section on culture, below.)
 

To this point, we have said that a society - again, the largest and most inclusive form of social structure - is composed of a variety of smaller "elements," and that the best way to understand what the term society really means is to closely examine those elements, such as status, role, and status and role sets. We have said that status is a socially structured position: that is, it is a repeated and predictable pattern of behavior (and the role is that pattern acted out). But why is a status-role⁽²⁾ "structured"? How does it happen that social positions elicit pretty much the same kinds of actions from otherwise quite different people?

This repeated and (more or less) predictable patterning of people's behavior is largely the result of norms - another term that is familiar to almost everyone (a familiarity that derives from social science having called our attention to this particular phenomenon). A norm is defined, quite simply, as a rule for the way things ought to be done. As rules for how people should behave in given social situations, norms "shape" our behavior, creating tendencies to act in particular ways at particular times. For example, people do not laugh or joke around during serious occasions, such as a funeral, because they have learned not to do so; it is the norm to behave seriously in that situation.

There are two features of norms that warrant special mention. First of all, they are informal rules for behavior. They are not "laws"; they are not written down somewhere or kept in a code book that people can consult when they are unsure how to behave in a particular situation. Secondly, norms are "invisible," both in the sense that - as just mentioned - they are not written down anywhere, and that they usually are not even explicitly discussed. We cannot see or hear norms at work, except in the patterns of behavior that we all follow and create, usually without giving our behavior a second thought.

The work of Harold Garfinkel - a social theorist who was trained as a sociologist and went on to develop a form of social theory called "ethnomethodology" - helps to clarify the informal and invisible nature of social norms. Early in his intellectual career, Garfinkel explored the ways that norms operate in social situations. Because we cannot "see" norms, he reasoned, the only way to make them visible is by violating them. When people reacted to the norm violations, Garfinkel contended, we would be able to identify the informal, unspoken rule that had been broken. Garfinkel called these deliberate norm violations "breaching experiments." We will discuss these point in more depth in class, but if you look for it you can also see norms at work: the person who cuts into line and is corrected by others; the person who talks too much in a setting calling for quiet; the person with bad table manners with whom fewer and fewer people will share a meal; etc.

Just as norms are informal rules, so too, are the mechanisms for enforcing those rules. When a law is broken, there is a special group of people whose job it is to capture and punish the offender: the police, and the court system. There are no "norm police." When someone violates a norm, you and I take on this enforcement task - asking the "offender" to go to the end of the line like everyone else; to please not talk during the movie or in the library; to stop chewing their food like a caveman, and so on. These little acts of enforcement are called sanctions, which can be defined as punishments designed to bring behavior back into line with how things ought to be. Most of us, for example, share an unspoken understanding that the movie theater (to pick one of the examples we've already used) is not our living room, but a place that charges admission: all of us have had to pay a pretty fair chunk of change to be at the movie, and - other than collective amusement, shock, or surprise - it would be nice if we did not have to listen to one person's running commentary. This is a norm, and it is important to notice that one key aspect of a norm is that there is collective agreement that this (whatever this might be) is "how we do things around here." Sure, we are willing to abide some degree of violation, but when the lout's behavior begins to interfere with others' enjoyment, some one will impose a sanction, usually - in this case - by "hushing" the offender. The hushing is the sanction, the 'punishment' for violating the norm that we should respect others in public places. When you do your school visits in your labs for this course, notice the way teachers use norms to help them with classroom management.

Sanctions also possess a positive side; i.e., they can and do reward what people consider 'good' behavior - in this case, a sanction is a reward designed to keep behavior in line with how things ought to be. Thus, when teachers give elementary school kids praise, smiley faces, stickers, what have you, when they have done a good job on school work, this is an example of a positive sanction.

A Key Issue Related to Norms and Sanctions:

It has become fashionable over the last thirty-plus years to be critical of sanctions - and, for that matter, norms altogether - as "simply" attempts to "control" behavior. The logic, such as it is, of this critical stance is that societal control of the individual is unnecessary and damaging: 'unnecessary,' because, according to the critics of social control, people are by nature cooperative, constructive, positive creatures and, as such, do not need to learn collective standards for morally acceptable behavior; 'damaging' because - again according to those who espouse these views - collective control over the individual prevents the self from developing naturally.

These views are widespread in contemporary American life, and are part of what has been called the "therapeuticization of American culture." They also play a large role in a variety of social institutions (which we will discuss below), including education. Although widespread, there are good reasons to be cautious about simply taking these ideas at face value. First of all, it is certainly the case that we humans have the capacity to be very positive and constructive creatures. But, as the entirety of the historical record shows us quite clearly, we also and simultaneously have the capacity for unspeakable evil: the story of our species, as a whole (i.e., not just one civilization, but pretty much all of them), is burdened with innumerable instances of human sacrifice, torture, slavery, genocide and general inhumanity towards one's fellow humans. Those who assert that humans are only and/or always "good" tend to either be ignorant of history or to simply ignore it altogether. Moreover, they also reveal fundamental misunderstandings about culture (also to be discussed below): although they are multi-faceted entities, cultures are humanity's ongoing attempt to control our destructive, aggressive, selfish, and self-serving tendencies and to encourage the development and cultivation of, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, those "better angels" of our nature.

As to the notion that the imposition of collective expectations on the individual is "damaging," again, there is a grain of truth, here. Certainly an excess of constraint can negatively effect - and at the extremes perhaps even destroy - the individual's spirit or character. But the operative word, here, is "excess": every civilization, society, culture, in the history of the species has exercised control over the individual. This is one of the principal mechanisms by which any civilization comes into existence and survives across time; without shaping individuals into a collection of like-minded souls, civilizations - societies - would not be possible. Equally important, however, is that without societies individual identity - as a coherent, stable, and enduring sense of oneself - also cannot survive.

Let us approach this second point from a slightly different angle, just to be sure that the point is sufficiently clear. Those who argue that social control damages the self, although they seldom state this explicitly (and may not even be fully aware of the point), assume that humans are born with a self, in the sense that we come into the world possessed of something that we might recognize as an identity. Sure, we humans are all endowed with certain physiological inheritances - a capacity to manipulate symbols, use language, create elaborate symbolic systems such as language and mathematics, etc., as well as the usual, if we are fortunate, endowments for sensate experience (sight, taste, hearing, touch). Moreover, in recent years there has been considerable speculation regarding the impact of the specific package of DNA we inherit from our biological parents. No one disputes the genetic coding of, say, eye color, or hair color. But, as any responsible genetic researcher will readily tell you, there is little, contradictory, or, at minimum, ambiguous evidence indicating that we have no control over many of the qualities we might like to think are genetically predetermined. For example, the media are fond of asserting - and public opinion tends to follow suit - that the gene for alcoholism has been found and we now know that alcoholism is genetic. This is simply untrue. Our physiological endowments as a species are powerful - even miraculous, in some sense, perhaps - but they are general and diffuse endowments shared by the species as a whole. Our physiological capacities are shaped by the culture into which we are born and according to whose standards we are taught. Thus, as the eminent cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed,
 
 

Our capacity to speak is surely innate; our capacity to speak English is surely cultural. Smiling at pleasing stimuli and frowning at unpleasing ones are surely in some degree genetically determined ... but sardonic smiling and burlesque frowning are equally surely predominantly cultural .... Between the basic ground plans for our life that our genes lay down ... and the precise behavior that we in fact execute ... lies a complex of significant symbols under whose direction we transform the first into the second, the ground plans into the activity ("The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man [sic]," in The Interpretation of Cultures 1973, p. 50).

Groups and Organizations:

Statuses, as we have seen, are the smallest element of social structure. But statuses - simply as a logical matter - do not exist outside of a more encompassing system of social interaction of which they are a key component and by which they are defined. The next "largest" - i.e., more complex and more inclusive - element of social structure is a Group, the definition of which is two or more status-roles related by specific norms, oriented to a general purpose. Aside from being sure that you understand it, there are a couple of other things that you need to notice about this definition. The first thing to notice is the way that the definition builds on and is logically consistent with what we've been saying throughout this course packet. Again, a status is a form of social structure, embodied in a repeated and predictable pattern of behavior - a role - which occurs regardless of the person holding that status. As I just mentioned, statuses do not exist independently of larger social structures: indeed, they are defined and determined by those larger structures, of which the group is the next largest.

Take, for example, our class. As we have already discussed, you are all students (a status) and I am the teacher (also a status). We interact with one another according to specific norms; the norms, in turn, manifest themselves in specific roles. Because my status is "teacher," it is my role to talk, to know what I am talking about (ideally); because your status is "student," you listen and believe (again, ideally) that I do know what I am talking about. I give tests, you take them; I grade them, you react to the grade, etc., etc.

Groups, then, are collections of statuses, united by shared - or at least accepted - norms; those norms, in turn, organize individual behavior in ways that produce the social structure known as a group. There are other features that distinguish a group: (1) at some level at least, a group has a conscious sense of identity as a group. "At some level," is a key qualifier because there are, of course, variations in how strong the collective identity is, and how much it really matters to us or shapes our behavior. It is possible, for example, to do what is expected of us as members of our EDN 200 class, to do quite well in that class, and still not experience a strong sense of "group-ness," as it were. Certainly, I experienced a camaraderie with my fellow students when I was an undergraduate (and the strength of that camaraderie increased sharply if the teacher was a jerk - a finding that is basic sociology). (2) Another feature that distinguishes a group is its endurance over time. It is possible - and really quite common - for groups to come together on a short-term basis. Again, the university class is a classic example: the number of people in this class with whom you will maintain long-standing ties is likely to be quite small. This does not mean that you do not genuinely like or care about one another to at least some degree; rather, it simply means that you have come together as a group for short-term and very instrumental purposes, and the relationships may not - and usually do not - survive the fulfillment of those purposes. (These points are somewhat less applicable in a professional school such as this. More of you may well maintain friendships started in this course than in other parts of the university. The reasons for this are simple: you have a shared purpose that transcends this one occasion.)

The distinctions we have just discussed underlie why it is customary to differentiate groups into two main types. Primary Groups are collections of statuses characterized by intimate, long-lasting relationships, among a relatively small number of people, whereas Secondary Groups are larger and are composed of members with disparate goals and short-term shared interests. The basis for their coming together is instrumental and purposive.

Again, notice what definitions do for us in terms of achieving clarity of understanding and communication. Groups, as per our definition, are distinguishable - and must be distinguished - from their component parts (statuses), as well as from other forms of social life: crowds, for example, are not really groups, chiefly because they generally do not share a sense of collective identity.

Groups are also distinct from a more complex form of social life. Organizations are defined as two or more groups, related by specific norms, oriented to one or more purposes. This definition, to reiterate, depends and draws upon the previous definitions we have discussed - each of the terms we have covered refers to a slightly more complex form of social organization; the overall effect is of a series of "nested" definitions. Organizations are made up of groups, and groups are made up of statuses; and in all of them - statuses, groups, and organizations - human behavior is structured by norms which enable us to be able to recognize social situations and to know how to behave in that situation. This is not to say that people always do follow the norms - in fact, they often do not - but only that what we call a society hinges to a significant degree upon collectively-understood rules for how we ought to behave⁽³⁾. Those rules are available as reference points that all of us can use: thus, when we do use them, we need not spend a great deal of time explaining to everyone else what we are doing and why. (This may seem trivial, but stop for a moment and imagine a world in which there were no unspoken, largely unquestioned, and generally agreed-upon principles for action and interaction.)

Throughout this discussion of the elements of social structure, we have used our own experiences with education to illustrate the concepts we are considering. The same example can help to illustrate the concept of the organization. The university, as an organization, embodies our definition of an organization. We have already seen that classes are groups. There are shared norms shaping interaction and behavior in a classroom. And, there are a number of reasons for our coming together as a group/class: some of you are here, for example, just to get some sense of whether education is a viable career option for you; some of you have already decided to become teachers, and you have to have this class to be admitted to the school of education; some of you are just satisfying an elective. My reasons for being here and teaching this class are also varied: I love teaching; I was hired, in part, to teach this class (and some others); I have been assigned this class as part of my responsibilities as an employee of UNCW, etc.

But our class - our group - is only one section of this course; there are 5 or 6 other sections. In addition, there are quite a few other groups/classes meeting throughout the week, day and night. Each of them shares certain norms and has a range of purposes. They are all linked together as the course offerings of our "Department" - called Specialty Studies - which is a larger group. Combined with the various groups/classes offered by the Curricular Studies Department, we have the Watson School of Education. The WSOE is itself an organization, but it is also part of a much larger organization - the university - which has several "colleges" (fine arts, arts and sciences, nursing, hper, business, etc.). The university, then, is an organization in precisely the sense that we have defined it: it is two or more groups, related by specific norms, and oriented to one or more purposes.

 

1. It is worth emphasizing that one of the reasons why this is now an "obvious" point is that our colleagues in the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, experimental and behavioral psychology) have been documenting and describing the elements of human social life for the past two-plus centuries. Prior to that time, these things were not "obvious," at all.

2. Although it has become customary to separate the two terms, and talk about status and role as distinct entities, they were originally expressed by a single, hyphenated term, "status-role." For purposes of understanding, it is helpful to separate these two elements in order to see what is distinctive about each - e.g., to be able to see that a status is a "location" whereas a role is about behavior - but it is also important to remember that a status always implies and is defined by a role, and the reverse.

3. When people do not abide by norms, as we have already discussed sanctions kick in. When the violation becomes "too" deviant - too far outside the norm, or too frequent -- it becomes subject to more formal control, such as legal punishment or forced 'treatment' of some kind (e.g. clinical social control, or, as is increasingly the case, pharmaceutical control.