Social Structures

Social Structures

Quiz Thursday, March 15 ^th Beware the Ides of March!

• Social structure

• Social Status

• Ascribed Statuses

• Achieved statuses

• Status set

• Master status

• Role

• Role-set

• Role expectations

• Role performance

• Role conflict

• Role strain

• Secondary groups

• institutions

• Social network

• Closely knit network

• Loosely knit network

• Strong ties

• Weak ties

Defining Social Structure

• Social structure shape:

– Relationships with and

opportunities to connect to others

– The identities of those involved – Barriers to accessing resources

and people

– The relative ease or difficulty

with the those barriers can be

broken.

• Social structures can

– Involve as few as two people

• Parent-child

• Doctor-patient

• Shopper-store clerk

– Be global in scale

• Food industry, pharmaceutical industry

– Be any thing in between

• College dorm

• High school

• Hospital

• NFL stadium

Status and Roles

• Social Status

– Has meaning in only in relationship to other social statuses.

• You can’t be a parent if there is no child

• You can’t be a teacher if there are no students

– Two types

• Ascribed Statuses

– take no effort

• Achieved Statuses

– take effort

Status Set and Master Status

Role

• Distinction between status and roles:

– People occupy statuses and enact or perform

roles.

Status Set and Role-Set

Role Expectations and Role Performances

• Like ideal vs real culture

• We expect people to do specific task in

their roles, but in reality, their

performances do not live up to the

expectations.

Role

expectation

Role performance

Role Strain vs Role Conflict

Group types

• Groups

• Primary Groups

– Personal relationships (Expressive)

• Family

• Friends

• Secondary Groups

– Goal specific relationships (Instrumental)

• Teammates

• Teachers / students

• Study Group

Group relationships

• Instrumental Relationships- focus on goals

– Can be weak or strong

• Expressive Relationships – valued for own sake; no real goals, just enjoy each others company

– Tend only to be strong

Social category and social aggregate

• Social category – people who share a social

characteristic

– Not the same as group

– Ex - high school

seniors / women

Social category and social aggregate

• Social aggregate –

people temporarily in same place at the

same time

– Ex – people in line for

a concert / patients in

Dr. waiting room

Social Network Map

• Node-each point (person) in a network map

• Bridge – any connection between two nodes

• Cut point- key node or bridge that if removed, isolates various parts of the network

• Cliques- smaller subsets of a larger network

• Isolate – a node that is not a part of a network

P C D

B

A H

G

F

M L

J

I

Social Networks

• Two kinds

– Closely knit network – Loosely knit network

• Have two types of bonds

– Strong ties

– Weak ties

Algazi, Alvarez, Alpern, Ametrano, Andrews, Aran, Arnstein, Ashford, Bailey, Ballout, Bamberger, Baptista, Barr, Barrows, Baskerville, Bassiri, Bell, Bokgese, Brandao, Bravo, Brooke, Brightman, Billy, Blau, Bohen, Bohn, Borsuk, Brendle, Butler, Calle, Cantwell, Carrell, Chinlund, Cirker, Cohen, Collas, Couch, Callegher, Calcaterra, Cook, Carey, Cassell, Chen, Chung, Clarke, Cohn, Carton, Crowley, Curbelo, Dellamanna, Diaz, Dirar, Duncan, Dagostino, Delakas, Dillon, Donaghey, Daly, Dawson, Edery, Ellis, Elliott, Eastman, Easton, Famous, Fermin, Fialco, Finklestein, Farber, Falkin, Feinman, Friedman, Gardner, Gelpi, Glascock, Grandfield, Greenbaum, Greenwood, Gruber, Garil, Goff, Gladwell, Greenup, Gannon, Ganshaw, Garcia, Gennis, Gerard, Gericke, Gilbert, Glassman, Glazer, Gomendio, Gonzalez, Greenstein, Guglielmo, Gurman, Haberkorn, Hoskins, Hussein, Hamm, Hardwick, Harrell, Hauptman, Hawkins, Henderson, Hayman, Hibara, Hehmann, Herbst, Hedges, Hogan, Hoffman, Horowitz, Hsu, Huber, Ikiz, Jaroschy, Johann, Jacobs, Jara, Johnson, Kassel, Keegan, Kuroda, Kavanau, Keller, Kevill, Kiew, Kimbrough, Kline, Kossoff, Kotzitzky, Kahn, Kiesler, Kosser, Korte, Leibowitz, Lin, Liu, Lowrance, Lundh, Laux, Leifer, Leung, Levine, Leiw, Lockwood, Logrono, Lohnes, Lowet, Laber, Leonardi, Marten, McLean, Michaels, Miranda, Moy, Marin, Muir, Murphy, Marodon, Matos, Mendoza, Muraki, Neck, Needham, Noboa, Null, O'Flynn, O'Neill, Orlowski, Perkins, Pieper, Pierre, Pons, Pruska, Paulino, Popper, Potter, Purpura, Palma, Perez, Portocarrero, Punwasi, Rader, Rankin, Ray, Reyes, Richardson, Ritter, Roos, Rose,

Rosenfeld, Roth, Rutherford, Rustin, Ramos, Regan, Reisman, Renkert, Roberts, Rowan, Rene,

Rosario, Rothbart, Saperstein, Schoenbrod, Schwed, Sears, Statosky, Sutphen, Sheehy, Silverton,

Silverman, Silverstein, Sklar, Slotkin, Speros, Stollman, Sadowski, Schles, Shapiro, Sigdel, Snow,

Spencer, Steinkol, Stewart, Stires, Stopnik, Stonehill, Tayss, Tilney, Temple, Torfield, Townsend,

Trimpin, Turchin,Villa, Vasillov, Voda, Waring, Weber, Weinstein, Wang, Wegimont, Weed,

Weishaus.

Types of ties

Sociologist David S. Hachen Jr. (2001) suggests that you can identify social ties and their strength by "looking for flows of resources between social actors" and he suggests six possible flows to consider:

• Personal Evaluations: Look at who likes whom, who is friends with whom, who avoids whom, and who dislikes or hates

whom. Friendship networks, social cliques at a church, and prestige hierarchies within communities are all examples of networks created by personal evaluations.

• Transfers of Material Resources: Look at how money, capital, commodities, services, and other valuable material resources flow. Focus on exchanges in which A gives B something in exchange for B giving A something. Examples include who

contributes to a local charity, whom banks lend to and where

they borrow from, and buying and selling in markets.

• Information: Who talks to whom? Who communicates with whom? Though networks, messages are sent and received, creating information networks. Information networks are important in spreading gossip, learning about job openings, and diffusing innovations.

• Movement of People: Look for the flows of people between places, organizations, or occupations. For example, some accounting firms recruit a large number of their new

accountants from specific business schools. Occupations

often are linked by the flow of people such as the recruitment of principals from [the ranks of]) teachers.

• Formal Roles: Look at the rules and regulations that prescribe who can tell who what to do. Command hierarchies in

organizations depicted in organizational charts are examples of such networks.

• Kinship: Look at who is related to whom either by descent or

by marriage. (Hachen, 2001: p. 27-28).

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden

influence of social networks

Social Networks and Kevin Bacon.

Institutions

• Have a History

– Have customs and traditions

• Continuously change

– Can be planned or not, order ally or chaotic, forced or voluntary.

• Allocate scares and valued resources in unequal ways

– Institutions decide who does and does not receive recourses

• Allocate privilege and disadvantaged status

– Prestige, salary, benefits, degree of autonomy

• Promote ideologies that legitimate their existence

– Advanced by those who benefit from the institution or who have

a high status in it.

Electronic-Supported Social Networks

• Allow people in different time zones and on different schedules to communicate at their convenience

• Increase the speed of communication

• Expand the number of people with whom one

communicates to theoretically include anyone with access to the Internet

• Offers people in spatially distant relationships a

convenient and inexpensive tool by which to remain in

touch. Prevents strong ties from fading with distance

and weak ties to remain or even strengthen.

Importance of Weak Ties

• Sociologist Mark Granovetter’s study on “The Strength of Weak Ties”

• 100 professional studied

• 54 found jobs though a contact

• 27.8% saw contact rarely (once a year or less)

• 56% saw contact occasionally (more than once a year but less than twice a week)

• 16.7 saw contact often (more than twice a week)

• Contacts were most likely

– Old friends

– Former co-workers

– Former employer

• Bureaucracy

• Coercive organization

• Formal dimension

• Formal organization

• Ideal type

• Informal dimension

• Utilitarian organization

• Voluntary organization

• Group

• Dyad

• Comprehensive dyads

• Segmentalized dyads

• Triad

• Oligarchy

• Instrumental reactions action

• rationalization

• McDonalizaiton of society

• Efficiently

• Calculability

• Predictability

• Control

• Iron cage of irrationality

• Alienation

• Impression management

• Emotion work

Dyads, Triads, and Beyond

• Dyad

• Comprehensive dyads

– More well round

• Segmetalized dyads

– Specilized

• Triad

– Allows for alliance

• How big can a group get before it splinters into separate groups?

• Oligarchy

– Who is usually in charge of an orginzation?

McDonaldization

• Four basic principals

– Efficiency

– Calculability

– Predictability

– Control

The problem with McDonaldization

• In an effort to deliver goods and services, quickly, efficiently and affordable, an

organization can create dehumanizing

structures that can lower the quality of life.

• Iron cage of irrationality

– When the rational create the irrational

• Example- big phrama

– Creates meds to cure all problems- physical, social, emotional – Tries to fix problems that are natural

» Remove wrinkles, alter mods, weight loss, etc

The workplace and Alienation

• Alienation from the process and the product

– Ex: Like in The Jungle

• Alienation from family and fellow coworkers

– Ex: Always at work, never have time for family or always dealing with family and never at work

• Alienation from the self

– Ex: A cop does not like the person he is becoming

in order to catch the bad guy

Emotional Labor

• Required in jobs in which employees

– Must engage with the public

– Directed to produced specific emotional state in clients / customers

– Are required to follow scripts and penalized for

not doing so.

The best work environments

• Ethical and collaborative values and principals

• Open to communication

• Opportunities

• Concern for helping employees

• Balance between work and home

• Quality of work relationships

• Change to give back to community

• Engaging and positivity challenging to workers

• Fairness in pay and benefits