All of these social units connect to make up the social structure—the stable patterns of interactions, statuses (positions), roles (responsibilities), and organizations that provide stability for the society and bring order to individuals’ lives. Think about these parallels between the structure that holds together the human body and the structure that holds together societies and their units.
Sometimes, however, the units within the social structure are in conflict. For example, a religion that teaches that some forms of birth control are wrong may conflict with the health care system regarding how to provide care to women. This issue has been in the U.S. news because many religious organizations and religious business owners have fought against the requirements of the 2010 Affordable Care Act in the United States that employers provide birth control to those who wish to receive it.
Social institutions are organized, patterned, and enduring sets of social structures that provide guidelines for behavior and help each society meet its basic survival needs. Think about the fact that all societies have some form of family, education, religion, politics, health care, and economics; in more complex societies there are also essential structures that provide science, media, advanced health care, and a military. These are the institutions that provide the rules, roles, and relationships to meet human needs and guide human behavior. They are the units through which organized social activities take place, and they provide the setting for activities essential to human and societal survival. For example, we cannot survive without an economic institution to provide guidelines and a structure for meeting our basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing. Likewise, society would not function without political institutions to govern and protect its members. Most social units fall under one of the main institutions just mentioned.
Like the human body, society and social groups have a structure. Our body’s skeleton governs how our limbs are attached to the torso and how they move. Like the system of organs that make up our bodies—heart, lungs, kidneys, and bladder—all social institutions are interrelated. Just as an illness in one organ affects other organs, a dysfunction in one institution affects the other institutions. A heart attack affects the flow of blood to all other parts of the body. Likewise, if many people are unable to afford medical treatment, the society is less healthy, and there are consequences for families, schools, workplaces, and society as a whole.
▲ All social institutions are interrelated, just as the parts of the body are interdependent: If the skeletal system of the body breaks down, the muscular system and nervous system are not far behind.
© AFP/Stringer/Getty
The national society, one of the largest social units in our model, includes a population of people, usually living within a specified geographic area, connected by common ideas and subject to a particular political authority. It also features a social structure with groups and institutions. In addition to having relatively permanent geographic and political boundaries, a national society has one or more languages and a unique way of life. In most cases, national societies involve countries or large regions where the inhabitants share a common identity as members. In certain other instances, such as the contemporary United Kingdom, a single national society may include several groups of people who consider themselves distinct nationalities (e.g., Welsh, English, Scottish, and Irish) and those individuals from former colonies. Such multicultural societies may or may not have peaceful relations.
▲ This refugee mother and child from Mozambique represent the smallest social unit, a dyad. In this case, they are trying to survive with help from larger groups such as the United Nations.
© Getty Images/Peter Turnley/Contributor
Thinking Sociologically
Can you think of any human activities that do not fall into one of the institutions just mentioned? How might change in one national institution, such as health care, affect change in other national institutions, such as the family and the economy?
Social Processes
If social structure is similar to the human body’s skeletal structure, social processes are similar to what keeps the body alive—a beating heart, the lungs processing oxygen, and the stomach processing nutrients. Social processes take place through actions of people in institutions and other social units. The process of socialization teaches individuals how to behave in their society. It takes place through actions in families, educational systems, religious organizations, and other social units. Socialization is essential for the continuation of any society because through this process members of society learn the thoughts and actions needed to survive in their society. Another process, conflict, occurs between individuals or groups over money, jobs, and other needed or desired resources. The process of change also occurs continuously in every social unit; change in one unit affects other units of the social world, often in a chain reaction. For instance, change in the quality of health care can affect the workforce; a workforce in poor health can affect the economy; instability in the economy can affect families, for breadwinners lose jobs; and family economic woes can affect religious communities because devastated families cannot afford to give money to churches, mosques, or temples.
Sociologists try to identify, understand, and explain the processes that take place within social units. Picture these processes as overlying and penetrating our whole social world, from small groups to large societies. Social units would be lifeless without the action brought about by social processes, just as body parts would be lifeless without the processes of electrical impulses shooting from the brain to each organ or the oxygen transmitted by blood coursing through our arteries to sustain each organ.
Our Social World and Its Environment
Surrounding each social unit, whether a small family group or a large corporation, is an environment—the setting in which the social unit works, including everything that influences the social unit, such as its physical and organizational surroundings and technological innovations. Just as each individual has a unique environment with family, friends, and other social groups, each social unit has an environment to which it must adjust. For example, your local church, mosque, synagogue, or temple may seem autonomous and independent, but it depends on its environment, including its national organization, for guidelines and support; the local police force to protect the building from vandalism; and the local economy to provide jobs to members so that the members, in turn, can support the organization. If the religious education program is going to train children to understand the scriptures, local schools are needed to teach the children to read. A religious group may also be affected by other religious bodies, competing with one another for potential members from the community. These religious groups may work cooperatively—organizing a summer program for children or jointly sponsoring a holy day celebration—or they may define one another as evil, each trying to malign or stigmatize the other. Moreover, one local religious group may be composed primarily of professional and businesspeople and another group mostly of laboring people. The religious groups may experience conflict in part because each serves a different socioeconomic constituency in the environment. The point is that to understand a social unit or the human body, we must consider the structure and processes within the unit as well as the interaction with the surrounding environment.
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