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SOC 120 Ethics & Social Responsibility Week 3 Guidance
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Check My Assignment!What are the components that make up a society? This may seem like a simple question, but it actually is quite complex, as society is enormously complicated. An initial response might be that society is composed of individuals. After all, it is people that make up society, right? Certainly, society is a concept that generally, for our purposes, refers to humans (although it can be used for other species as well), and many humans together form a society. But, interestingly, sociologists could come up with other responses that show that society is not really made up of the individuals that comprise it; or, perhaps more accurately, it is not the individuals alone that make up society, as society is much more than just the sum of all the individuals.
A more sociological approach is to look at the basic components of society as being statutes and roles, rather than individuals. A status is a social construct―it is an idea or perception that has been created through people’s social and cultural practices and beliefs. And to define these terms, a status is a position that a person occupies in society, and the role is what the person does in that status, or the expectations that others have for someone in that status. So, for example, in a classroom one status is teacher, and some of the expectations that are attached to the status of being a teacher are leading the class, offering instruction, giving assignments, helping students who are struggling and the like. All of these expectations form the role of teacher; because others have, through experience, formed expectations of what teachers should do, teachers see all of these as their job description. Another status in a classroom is a student. What are some of the roles attached to the status of student?
So, while we might think of a classroom as consisting of individuals, what we really have are individuals who are occupying specific statuses and playing specific roles. Note that these statuses and roles consist of roughly the same qualities irrespective of any specific individual; the expectations for a teacher are roughly the same whether it is Mr. Gomez or Ms. Yamamoto who is the specific teacher in the classroom. Each has to do many of the same things. Of course, it is fair to say that the expectations are roughly the same because every individual who acts as a teacher will have her own particular way of doing the job, but there are general characteristics of what a teacher is, and what others (students, administrators, parents, others in the community) expect of a teacher. If any teacher deviates too far from these norms, then those around them will start to question and may even punish this deviant behavior, to get them to act more in line with expectations.
So we can think of statuses and roles as social structures, as the stable and constant elements that make up social institutions and hierarchies, and that endure independent of the specific individuals who may occupy these statuses at any given time (Merton, 1938). It is because we have these statuses and roles that we can effectively carry out education; individuals who have some experience with education can quickly move into these statuses and move through an educational system by reproducing the statuses at each level. No one has to relearn the statuses constantly.
