Society

File:Diversity of youth in Oslo Norway.jpg

Young people interacting within an ethnically diverse society.

A society is a grouping of individuals, which is characterized by common interest and may have distinctive culture and institutions. In a society members can be from a different ethnic group. A "Society" may refer to a particular people, such as the Nuer, to a nation state, such as Switzerland, or to a broader cultural group, such as Western society. Society can also be explained as an organized group of people associated together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes.

Origin and usage

Society emerged in the 15th century and is derived from the French société. The French word, in turn, had its origin in the Latin societas, a "friendly association with others," from socius meaning "companion, associate, comrade or business partner." Implicit in the meaning of society is that its members share some mutual concern or interest, a common objective or common characteristics.

Society and culture are similar concepts, but their scopes are different. A society is an interdependent community, while culture is an attribute of a community: the complex web of shifting patterns that link individuals together.

In political science, the term is often used to mean the totality of human relationships, generally in contrast to the State, i.e., the apparatus of rule or government within a territory:

I mean by it [the State] that summation of privileges and dominating positions which are brought into being by extra-economic power... I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man...

In the social sciences society has been used ^{[citation needed]}to mean a group of people that form a semi-closed social system, in which most interactions are with other individuals belonging to the group.

According sociologist Richard Jenkins, the term addresses a number of important existential issues facing people:

1. How humans think and exchange information – the sensory world makes up only a fraction of human experience. In order to understand the world, we have to conceive of human interaction in the abstract (i.e., society). 2. Many phenomena cannot be reduced to individual behavior – to explain certain conditions, a view of something "greater than the sum of its parts" is needed. 3. Collectives often endure beyond the lifespan of individual members. 4. The human condition has always meant going beyond the evidence of our senses; every aspect of our lives is tied to the collective.

Evolution of societies

Gerhard Lenski, a sociologist, differentiates societies based on their level of technology, communication and economy: (1) hunters and gatherers, (2) simple agricultural, (3) advanced agricultural, (4) industrial. This is somewhat similar to the system earlier developed by anthropologists Morton H. Fried, a conflict theorist, and Elman Service, an integration theorist, who have produced a system of classification for societies in all human cultures based on the evolution of social inequality and the role of the state. This system of classification contains four categories:

• Hunter-gatherer bands, which are generally egalitarian.
• Tribal societies in which there are some limited instances of social rank and prestige.
• Stratified structures led by chieftains.
• Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments.
• Humanity, mankind, that upon which rest all the elements of society, including society's beliefs.

Over time, some cultures have progressed toward more-complex forms of organization and control. This cultural evolution has a profound effect on patterns of community. Hunter-gatherer tribes settled around seasonal foodstocks to become agrarian villages. Villages grew to become towns and cities. Cities turned into city-states and nation-states.

Chiefdoms are characterized by pervasive inequality of peoples and centralization of authority. At least two inherited social classes (elite and commoner) are present, although social class can often be changed by extraordinary behavior during an individual's life. A single lineage/family of the elite class will be the ruling elite of the chiefdom, with the greatest influence, power, and prestige. Kinship is typically an organizing principle, while marriage, age, and gender can affect one's social status and role.

A single simple chiefdom is generally composed of a central community surrounded by or near a number of smaller subsidiary communities. All of these communities recognize the authority of a single kin group or individual with hereditary centralized power, dwelling in the primary community. Each community will have its own leaders, which are usually in a tributary and/or subservient relationship with the ruling elite of the primary community.

A complex chiefdom is a group of simple chiefdoms controlled by a single paramount center, and ruled by a paramount chief. Complex chiefdoms have two or even three tiers of political hierarchy. Nobles are clearly distinct from commoners and do not usually engage in any form of agricultural production. The higher members of society consume most of the goods that are passed up the hierarchy as a tribute. Reciprocal obligations are fulfilled by the nobles carrying out ritual that only they can perform. They may also make token, symbolic redistributions of food and other goods. In two or three tiered chiefdoms, higher ranking chiefs have control over a number or lesser ranking individuals, each of whom controls specific territory or social units. Political control rests on the chief's ability to maintain access to a sufficiently large body of tribute, passed up the line by lesser chiefs. These lesser chiefs in turn collect from those below them, from communities close to their own center. At the apex of the status hierarchy sits the paramount chief.

Characteristics of society

The following three components are common to all definitions of society:

• Social networks
• Criteria for membership, and
• Characteristic patterns of organization

Each of these will be explored further in the following sections.

Social networks

Social networks are maps of the relationships between people. Structural features such as proximity, frequency of contact and type of relationship (e.g., relative, friend, colleague) define various social networks.

Organization of society

Human societies are often organized according to their primary means of subsistence. As noted in the section on "Evolution of societies", above, social scientists identify hunter-gatherer societies, nomadic pastoral societies, horticulturalist or simple farming societies, and intensive agricultural societies, also called civilizations. Some consider industrial and post-industrial societies to be qualitatively different from traditional agricultural societies.

One common theme for societies in general is that they serve to aid individuals in a time of crisis. Traditionally, when an individual requires aid, for example at birth, death, sickness, or disaster, members of that society will rally others to render aid, in some form—symbolic, linguistic, physical, mental, emotional, financial, medical, or religious. Many societies will distribute largess, at the behest of some individual or some larger group of people. This type of generosity can be seen in all known cultures; typically, prestige accrues to the generous individual or group. Conversely, members of a society may also shun or scapegoat members of the society who violate its norms. Mechanisms such as gift-giving and scapegoating, which may be seen in various types of human groupings, tend to be institutionalized within a society.

Some societies will bestow status on an individual or group of people, when that individual or group performs an admired or desired action. This type of recognition is bestowed by members of that society on the individual or group in the form of a name, title, manner of dress, or monetary reward. Males, in many societies, are particularly susceptible to this type of action and subsequent reward, even at the risk of their lives. Action by an individual or larger group in behalf of some cultural ideal is seen in all societies. The phenomena of community action, shunning, scapegoating, generosity, and shared risk and reward occur in subsistence-based societies and in more technology-based civilizations.

Societies may also be organized according to their political structure. In order of increasing size and complexity, there are bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and state societies. These structures may have varying degrees of political power, depending on the cultural geographical, and historical environments that these societies must contend with. Thus, a more isolated society with the same level of technology and culture as other societies is more likely to survive than one in closer proximity to others that may encroach on their resources (see history for examples}. A society that is unable to offer an effective response to other societies it competes with will usually be subsumed into the culture of the competing society (see technology for examples).

Shared belief or common goal

Peoples of many nations united by common political and cultural traditions, beliefs, or values are sometimes also said to be a society (such as Judeo-Christian, Eastern, and Western). When used in this context, the term is employed as a means of contrasting two or more "societies" whose members represent alternative conflicting and competing worldviews (see Secret Societies).

Some academic, learned and scholarly associations describe themselves as societies (for example, the American Society of Mathematics. More commonly, professional organizations often refer to themselves as societies (e.g., the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Chemical Society). In the United Kingdom and the United States, learned societies are normally nonprofit and have charitable status. In science, they range in size to include national scientific societies (i.e., the Royal Society) to regional natural history societies. Academic societies may have interest in a wide range of subjects, including the arts, humanities and science.

In some countries (for example the United States and France), the term "society" is used in commerce to denote a partnership between investors or to start a business. In the United Kingdom, partnerships are not called societies, but cooperatives or mutuals are often known as societies (such as friendly societies and building societies). In Latin America, the term society may also be used in commerce denoting a partnership between investors, or anonymous investors; for example: "Proveedor Industrial Anahuac S.A." where S.A. stands for Anonymous Society (Sociedad Anónima); however in Mexico in other type of partnership it would be declared as S.A. de C.V.

Ontology

As a related note, there is still an ongoing debate in sociological and anthropological circles as to whether there exists an entity we could call society. Some Marxist theorists, like Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, have argued that society is nothing more than an effect of the ruling ideology of a certain class system, and shouldn't be used as a sociological notion. Marx's concept of society as the sum total of social relations among members of a community contrasts with interpretations from the perspective of methodological individualism where society is simply the sum total of individuals in a territory. Social security

Social relation

Social relation can refer to a multitude of social interactions, regulated by social norms, between two or more people, with each having a social position and performing a social role. In sociological hierarchy, social relation is more advanced then behavior, action, social behavior, social action, social contact and social interaction. Social relations form the basis of concepts such as social organization, social structure, social movement and social system.

Specific meaning

Although Harvard University has featured a Department of Social Relations (in which Talcott Parsons played a prominent role), and although the term "social relations" is frequently used in social sciences, there is in fact no commonly agreed meaning for this concept (see also the entry social). "Social" connotes association, co-operation, mutual dependence and belonging.

It could be argued that a social relation is, in the first instance, simply a relation between people, but more specifically

• a relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a group,
• a relation between groups of people, or
• a relation between an individual and a group of people.

The group could be an ethnic or kinship group, a social institution or organisation, a social class or social stratum, a nation, a population, or a gender etc.

This definition contrasts with the relationship between people and inanimate objects.

Examples

In this sense, a social relation is therefore not necessarily identical with a unique interpersonal relation or a unique individual relation of some type, although all these kinds of relations presuppose each other; a social relation refers precisely to a condition which groups of people have in common or share.

For example, the simple statement "Jack and Jill love each other" might refer to a unique interaction between two people, the meaning of which might be difficult to define for an outsider. Yet, Jack and Jill may also be socially related in many different ways, insofar as they both are, as a matter of fact, members of the same or different social groups, and thus their identity is shaped in good part by the fact that they belong to those groups. If we wanted to understand and explain their behaviour, we would need to refer to those social relations. We might establish the milieu they grew up in, their ancestors, the jobs they do, where they lived, who their friends are, and so on, all of which helps explain why they necessarily interact in the way that they do, and not in some other way.

At a higher level of abstraction, we might consider two groups which are socially related, for example, although they live in different places, they depend on each other in trading goods and services.

At an even higher level of abstraction, we might consider the relationship between an individual and the whole of the world population, or the relationship of the world population to itself.

Some might indeed argue that a social relation exists between mortals and God (or the Gods), though others would regard this more as an imaginary relation. In flights of fancy, we could extend the analysis to the relation of all sentient organisms in the universe.

Theorists

However, the difficulties only start here, because now it needs to be established how these social relations exist, how we know they exist, what kinds of social relations there are, and how we can find out about them, verify them or identify them. About these questions researchers often disagree and debate, proposing different kinds of methodology to obtain knowledge of social relations.

At one end of the spectrum, Karl Marx approvingly quotes Giambattista Vico's argument that humans can understand their society in its totality because "they made it themselves"; the limits to what humans can know are mainly practical in nature. At the other end of the spectrum, Karl Popper rejects the possibility of objective knowledge about society as a whole, suggesting that methodological holism must lead to totalitarianism; progressive social change can only be achieved through the small steps of piecemeal social engineering.

Understanding social relations

There are at least three problems in understanding social relations.

• many social relations are not directly observable by an individual, and can only be inferred with the aid of abstractions. This raises the question of how we know they exist, and how they exist.

• reflexivity: in the case of social science, the scientist is in a very obvious way himself or herself part of the social world being studied (this occurs also in natural sciences; not just in the sense that a biologist is also a biological being, but also even in theoretical physics - cf. the reflections of David Bohm).

• animal and insect populations for example also display a kind of "social" behaviour, so that social relations are not necessarily uniquely human relations (cf. the insights of sociobiology), and social relations might exist between humans and animals (though some dispute this; they argue that associative relations are confused here with true social relations; a human being could associate with all sorts of things or organisms, without a social relation being involved).

Types of social relations

In broad terms, we can distinguish six basic levels of human awareness:

• un-conscious awareness (studied by e.g. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Milton Erickson).
• conscious subjective awareness (dissociated, focusing inward on the inner world, or expressing an inner state outwards) (studied e.g. in phenomenology and general psychology).
• intersubjective awareness (an awareness which occurs in association with other people and is internal to that association) (studied e.g. in social psychology and sociology).
• objective awareness (dissociated, focusing outward to a world that exists mind-independently, as is developed e.g. in science to a high level).
• reality-transforming awareness (transitions in practical action reframing the boundaries of different forms of awareness and changing consciousness, or connecting different forms of awareness - occurring in work, play, love, activism, politics etc.
• transcendent awareness (going beyond personal knowledge or experience - some would include intuition and spirituality under this heading; it is the subject of much writing in religion and New Age thought).

Corresponding to these levels of human awareness, we could also define different kinds of social relations, i.e. the different ways in which humans might experience the connections among their own kind:

• subconscious social relations (for example at the level of the collective unconscious or between parents and children,
• social relations which exist only in subjective awareness or subjective perceptions (a person might act as though a social relation exists),
• intersubjective social relations involving shared meanings conveyed through communication,
• objective social relations which exist whether someone is aware of them or not (they might nevertheless be communicated insofar as we communicate with everything we are and do);
• social relations in the process of being transformed from one kind into another, or being interrelated with each other;
• spiritual or intuitive social relations of some kind.

As illustration, we can apply the foregoing to the notion of a group.

• A person might almost out of instinct identify with a group or relate to it;
• s/he might imagine being a member of a group, regardless of whether this is really the case;
• a group might exist only in the form of intersubjective relations among its members;
• a group might exist as an objective description, or as an objective reality, even regardless of whether one was aware of belonging to it;
• a group might be forming or dissolving, or both at once, and it might be changing its boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, perhaps overlapping with other groups;
• a group might also exist at the level of a common spiritual affinity or identification (Cf. the notion of a noosphere).

However the group may exist, or be perceived to exist at some level - with the obvious consequences that has for the kinds of social relations involved - it is clear that understanding different kinds of group relations require different methods of inquiry and verification.

Precisely because social relations may be experienced at different levels of awareness, they are not necessarily transparent at all. Indeed, Karl Marx wrote ironically in this respect that "science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided".

Social

Template:Cleanup Although the term "social" is a crucial category in social science and often used in public discourse, its meaning is often vague, suggesting that it is a fuzzy concept. An added difficulty is that social attributes or relationships may not be directly observable and visible, and must be inferred by abstract thought.

Thus the sociologist C. Wright Mills invented the expression "the sociological imagination", which referred to the need to think imaginatively beyond what an individual can empirically observe in order to grasp the social domain in all its dimensions - connecting, for example, "private troubles" and "public issues".

A similar point is made in the context of architecture by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn in their groundbreaking work Invisible in Architecture. General problems concerning the nature of social reality and what (or how) we can know about it are the object of social theory.

Some different definitions

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term "social" is used in many different senses, referring among other things to:

• attitudes, orientations or behaviours which take the interests, intentions or needs of other people into account (in contrast to anti-social behaviour);
• common characteristics of people or descriptions of collectivities (social facts);
• relations between people (social relations) generally, or particular associations among people;
• interactions between people (social action);
• membership of a group of people or inclusion or belonging to a community of people;
• co-operation or co-operative characteristics between people;
• relations of (mutual) dependence;
• the public sector ("social sector") or the need for governance for the good of all, contrasted with the private sector;
• in existentialist and postmodernist thought, relationships between the Self and the Other;
• interactive systems in communities of animal or insect populations, or any living organisms.

In one broad meaning, "social" refers only to society as "a system of common life", but in another sense it contrasts specifically with "individual" and individualist theories of society. This is reflected for instance in the different perspectives of liberalism and socialism on society and public affairs.

The adjective "social" implies that the verb or noun to which it is applied is somehow more communicative, cooperative, and moderated by contact with human beings, than if it were omitted. That is, it implies that larger society has played some role in defining the idea or the principle. For instance terms like social realism, social justice, social constructivism, social psychology and social capital imply that there is some social process involved or considered, a process that is not there in regular, "non-social", realism, justice, constructivism, psychology, or capital.

The adjective "social" is also used often in political discourse, although its meaning in such a context depends heavily on who is using it. In left-wing circles it is often used to imply a positive characteristic, while in right-wing circles it is generally used to imply a negative characteristic. It should also be noted that, overall, this adjective is used much more often by those on the political left than by those on the political right.

For these reasons, those seeking to avoid association with the left-right political debates often seek to label their work with phrases that do not include the word "social". An example is quasi-empiricism in mathematics which is sometimes labelled social constructivism by those who see it as an unwarranted intrusion of social considerations in mathematical practice, which is supposed to be "objective" and "above" social concerns.

Social theorists

In the view of Karl Marx, human beings are intrinsically, necessarily and by definition social beings who - beyond being "gregarious creatures" - cannot survive and meet their needs other than through social co-operation and association. Their social characteristics are therefore to a large extent an objectively given fact, stamped on them from birth and affirmed by socialization processes; and, according to Marx, in producing and reproducing their material life, people must necessarily enter into relations of production which are "independent of their will".

By contrast, the sociologist Max Weber for example defines human action as "social" if, by virtue of the subjective meanings attached to the action by individuals, it "takes account of the behaviour of others, and is thereby oriented in its course". In this case, the "social" domain really exists only in the intersubjective relations between individuals, but by implication the life of these individuals also exists in part outside the social domain. "Social" is thus implicitly also contrasted with "private".

In the positivist sociology of Emile Durkheim, a social fact is an abstraction external to the individual which constrains that individual's actions. In his 1895 work Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim writes: "A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an influence, or an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations." In Durkheim's view, sociology is 'the science of social facts'.

Socialism and social democracy

The term "socialism", used from the 1830s onwards in France and England, was directly related to what was called the social question, in essence the problem that the emergence of competitive market societies did not create "liberty, equality and fraternity" for all citizens, requiring the intervention of politics and social reform to tackle social problems, injustices and grievances (a topic on which Jean-Jacques Rousseau discourses at length in his classic work The Social Contract). Originally the term "socialist" was often used interchangeably with "co-operative", "mutualist", "associationist" and "collectivist".

The term social democracy originally referred to the political project of extending democratic forms of association to the whole of society, substituting popular sovereignty, the universal franchise and social ownership for the rule of a propertied class which had exclusive voting rights.

Modern uses

In contemporary society, "social" often refers to the redistributive policies of the government which aim to apply resources in the public interest, for example, social security. Policy concerns then include the problems of social exclusion and social cohesion. Here, "social" contrasts with "private" and to the distinction between the public and the private (or privatised) spheres, where ownership relations define access to resources and attention.

The social domain is often also contrasted with that of physical nature, but in sociobiology analogies are drawn between humans and other living species in order to explain social behavior in terms of biological factors. The term "social" is also added in various other academic sub-disciplines such as social geography, social psychology, social anthropology, social philosophy, social ontology, social statistics and social choice theory in mathematics.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Definition of Society from the OED.
• Lecture notes on "Defining Society" from East Carolina University.
• Learning Commons - What is Culture ? - Glossary Item - Society
• Effland, R. 1998. The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations Mesa Community College.
• Jenkins, R. 2002. Foundations of Sociology. London: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 0-333-96050-5.
• Lenski, G. 1974. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology. New York: McGraw- Hill, Inc.
• Raymond Williams, "Society", in: Williams, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Fontana, 1976.

• Dick Houtman, Class and Politics in Contemporary Social Science: Marxism Lite and Its Blind Spot for Culture
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
• Karl Marx, The German Ideology
• Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
• Frank Furedi, Where have all the intellectuals gone?
• Piotr Sztompka, Socjologia

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