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Example of a Social Structure in Egypt during the time of King Tut.
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Check My Assignment!What are some other statuses in society? Within families we see mother, son, cousin, grandfather, and many others. Within government we see senator, mayor, voter, and the worker at your local Department of Motor Vehicles, among many others. In the realm of religion, we have rabbi, pope, imam, minister, parishioner, organist, and others. Within a business, statuses might be vice president, accountant, sales representative, or mail room clerk. In addition to defining what others expect, statuses also carry a particular weight both in the institution and society—people form judgments based on how they perceive the importance of the status. Thus, statuses also separate people out into hierarchies. Institutions and social hierarchies are also examples of social structures.
Social Structures and Morality
In addition to judgments about the social weight of different statuses, people form judgments about the social value of what other people do. Values shape our perceptions of what is right or wrong, good or bad, positive or negative. As we have seen, people typically make moral or value judgments based on what is best for social functioning—generally speaking, something is viewed as moral if it advances the collective good, and immoral if it interrupts social functioning (Durkheim, 1925/1973). Morals are embedded in the social statuses and roles (expectations) that make up society, and like other social features, they create and shape the identities of individuals in that society. Morals do not dictate behavior; rather, they provide guidelines for individuals to make ethical choices and to behave in particular ways, both right and wrong.
Rights and Responsibilities
Social structures provide the means to create and enforce the rights and responsibilities that individuals enjoy in social settings. Morality shapes how we perceive these rights and responsibilities. Those who exercise their rights within the moral codes of society—generally, those who adhere to the responsibilities that attach to any right—are viewed as more worthy of those rights. Their actions are moral because they advance social functioning, or the common good. Likewise, those whose actions disrupt social functioning as it is commonly conceived are not exercising their responsibilities and are punished by society. Punishment may take various forms—it may be directed at bringing the deviant back into society (e.g. through education or rehabilitation), it may be directed at pushing the deviant out of society (e.g. through the death penalty or life in prison), or it may aim somewhere in between, for example by allowing a deviant to interact in society but under specified conditions. To view a list of rights and responsibilities of American citizens as defined by the American government, see this page from the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services:
Note that the common good is not always conceived of as a collective good, per se, in contrast to the individual good. Some social theory constructs individual rights and responsibilities as the foundation of social functioning. For example, some sociologists study a particular perspective called rational choice theory, which proposes that society functions best when individuals are given the liberty to make choices that are in their own self-interest (Collins, 1994). (This is similar to the psychological egoist perspective). When individuals act in their own interest (or “maximize their utility,” in economic terms), they can more easily accumulate wealth, and this has a social value—if individuals are not allowed to act in their own interest, no one would have the individual motive to take the risks and make the investments of time and money to generate that wealth, and the wealth would not be available to society. Once the wealth exists, it goes to the social good in many ways—in taxes paid to government, in philanthropy by the one who created it, in jobs and wages to those the owner hires to create more wealth, in capital that is available for others to invest, and in benefits to the members of the owner’s own family, including descendants. All of these promote a particular vision of the social good, one that is commonly held in the United States and other Western countries. For more information on rational choice theory, see this page from Iowa State University:
http://www.soc.iastate.edu/Sapp/soc401rationalchoice.pdf
Our perceptions about ethics in the workplace are shaped by our ideas of rights and responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities can be shaped by various theories, but rational choice theory is one approach that is influential in American workplaces. In what ways does a rational choice approach shape what is perceived as ethical in the case studies discussed in Chapter 4?
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