Social Structure - Overview

Overview

The notion of social structure as relationships between different entities or groups or as enduring and relatively stable patterns of relationship' ' emphasises the idea that society is grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meanings or purposes. One example of social structure is the idea of "social stratification", which refers to the idea that society is separated into different strata (levels), guided (if only partially) by the underlying structures in the social system. This approach has been important in the academic literature with the rise of various forms of structuralism. It is important in the modern study of organizations, because an organization's structure may determine its flexibility, capacity to change, and many other factors. Therefore, structure is an important issue for management.

Social structure may be seen to influence important social systems including the economic system, legal system, political system, cultural system, and others. Family, religion, law, economy and class are all social structures. The "social system" is the parent system of those various systems that are embedded in it.

Society: self contained, self sufficient population united by social relationships, bounded from other populations by geographic locations

Stratification: unequal distribution of valued goods or holdings in a population (i.e. class, status, resources, grades, wealth, positional goods, etc.)

Network: pattern of relationships in a population of actors

Social structure variables: pattern of relationships, size of institution, income distribution, and concurrency of social relationships