Structure vs Change

Question 1

What is social sctructure?

Answer 1

Simple defintion: Patterned social relations

Refers to 1) recurring patterns of social behavior & 2) ordered relationships between different elements of a social system/society

Question 2

What are some characteristics of social structure? (6)

Answer 2

• effective in organizing the behavior of large numbers of actors (i.e. organizations, cooperations, networks, etc.)
• constituted by individuals (micro-foundation)
• Individual actions within the structure are influenced/coerced/constrained by the meanings, rules, and enforcement mechanisms that exist within the structure
• exist with reasonably enduring/ stable properties, largely independent of the individuals whom they encompass
• malleable, ergo, subject to change
  –> Zygmunt Bauman = the social world is “liquid”, overstates the case since many structures have significantly more stability than the image of liquidity implies; but nonetheless, we can observe the drift in the functioning and roles of institutions in every aspect of life – political, economic, educational, and ideological.
• distributive consequences that often create features of stratification and differentiation of various social characteristics of individuals (i.e. age, race, income, etc.)

Question 3

Where can we see social structure?

Answer 3

Not directly visible but reflected in statistical distributions of certain characteristics & parameters

Question 4

Difference between nominal vs graduated parameters?

Answer 4

o Nominal parameters (horizontal), e.g. age & sex, describing heterogeneities, constituting determinants of social inequality

o Graduated parameters (vertical), e.g. education & income, describing hierarchies, constituting dimensions of social inequality

Question 5

What is meant by the Agent-Structure-Dualism? + which one is it?

Answer 5

In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour.

1) Structure is the recurrent patterned social arrangements which influence or limit the choices/opportunities available
2) Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.

-> The structure versus agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure.

“Social structures are real causal entities having real effects on individuals’ actions, and social structures are constituted and embodied in the actions and relationships of living human beings.“

-> Both statements are true, and the tension between them continues to stimulate a great deal of fruitful contemporary inquiry

Question 6

Social change & methodological individualism

Answer 6

Social change has many meanings in the discipline of sociology, can be thought of as the sum of people’s personal changes (ubiquitous and continuous) in social contexts = methodological individualism.

+) “Raymond Boudon (1986): “Social change must be seen as produced by the aggregation of individual actions, and what else could bring it about?”

-) Personal changes, however, are part of something bigger than oneself, something social and beyond the purely personal.

Question 7

Social change & sociological theory

Answer 7

Theories of social change are at the core of sociological theory, not only a staple, they ARE classical sociological theories, i.e.

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is trying to answer a very modern question: What drives social change?
• Karl Marx (1852): people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do it under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
• Durkheim’s first major work, The Division of Labor in Society, is not an analysis of how things are but how social life has come to take its late nineteenthcentury form in much of Europe, and what this means for the future

–> they were all talking about social change: its scope, speed, and its consequences and, by implication, what could be done about it.

Question 8

Social change & social mechanisms

Answer 8

Understanding social change in the world today requires a confrontation with the most powerful forces that affect the speed, scope, and direction of social change –> “social mechanisms”

Merton described them as “social processes having designated consequences” (Merton 1968: 43–44)

• Five drivers of social change: social movements, technology, war and revolution, large corporations, and the state (Massey 2016)
• BUT religion, population dynamics – including migration – natural catastrophes (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes), and exceptional individuals are also drivers of social change