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Chapter Learning Outcomes

• Explain the intricate relationship between social structure and social interactions.
• Understand the differences between mechanical and organic solidarity.
• Describe the basic structural features of foraging, horticultural, pastoral, agricultural, industrial and post-industrial societies, and outline the theories on social change.
• Define each type of social status: ascribed, achieved and master status.
• Define social roles and explain their relationship to social status and social interaction.
• Explain the role of rites of passage and be able to compare them across cultures.
• Understand each component of the social structure and relationships to one another, including groups, social institutions, subcultures, statuses and roles.

 5.1 Social Structure: The Building Blocks of Social Life

Social life is composed of many levels of building blocks, from the very micro to the very macro. These building blocks combine to form the social structure. Social structure refers to the social patterns through which a society is organized.

Statuses

Status has many meanings in the dictionary and also within sociology, but for now we will define it as the position that someone occupies in society. This position is often a job title, but many other types of positions exist: student, parent, sibling, relative, friend, and so forth. It should be clear that status as used in this way conveys nothing about the prestige of the position, to use a common synonym for status. A physician’s job is a status with much prestige, but a shoe shiner’s job is a status with no prestige.

Any one individual often occupies several different statuses at the same time, and someone can simultaneously be a banker, Girl Scout troop leader, mother, school board member, volunteer at a homeless shelter, and spouse. This someone would be very busy! We call all the positions an individual occupies that person’s status set (see Figure 5.1 “Example of a Status Set”).

Figure 5.1 Example of a Status Set

Sociologists usually speak of three types of statuses. The first type is ascribed status, which is the status that someone is born with and has little control over. There are relatively few ascribed statuses; the most common ones are our assigned at birth sex, race, age, height, and biological relationships (child, grandchild, sibling, and so forth). Statuses like social class and religion might be ascribed at birth, but can be changed in an open system of stratification, so neither are wholly ascribed.

The second kind of status is called achieved status, which, as the name implies, is a status you achieve, at some point after birth, and is understood as a position you have more control over. Sometimes through your own efforts and sometimes because good or bad luck befalls you. The status of student is an achieved status, as are the statuses of professor, restaurant server, business owner, volunteer, and romantic partner.

Two things about statuses should be kept in mind. First, our ascribed statuses, and in particular our sex, race and ethnicity, and social class at birth, often affect our ability to acquire and maintain many achieved statuses. Second, achieved statuses can be viewed positively or negatively. Our society usually views achieved statuses such as physician, professor, or college student positively, but it views achieved statuses such as burglar or prostitute negatively.

The third type of status is called a master status. This is a status that is so important that it overrides other statuses you may hold. In terms of people’s reactions, master statuses can be either positive or negative for an individual depending on the particular master status they hold. Donald Trump now holds the positive master status of president of the United States: his status as president overrides all the other statuses he holds (husband, father, and so forth), and millions of Americans respect him, whether or not they voted for him or now favor his policies, because of this status. Many other positive master statuses exist in the political and entertainment worlds and in other spheres of life.

Some master statuses have negative consequences. To recall the medical student and nursing home news story that began this chapter, a physical disability often becomes such a master status. If you are bound to a wheelchair, for example, this fact becomes more important than the other statuses you have and may prompt people to perceive and interact with you negatively. In particular, they perceive you more in terms of your master status (someone bound to a wheelchair) than as the “person beneath” the master status, to cite Matt’s words. For similar reasons, gender, race, and sexual orientation may also be considered master statuses, as these statuses often subject women, people of color, and gays and lesbians, respectively, to discrimination and other problems, no matter what other statuses they may have.

Whatever status we occupy, certain objects signify any particular status. These objects are called status symbols. In popular terms, status symbol usually means something like a Rolls-Royce or BMW that shows off someone’s wealth or success, and many status symbols of this type exist. But sociologists use the term more generally than that. For example, the wheelchair that Matt the medical student rode for 12 days was a status symbol that signified his master status of someone with a (feigned) disability. If someone is pushing a stroller, the stroller is a status symbol that signifies that the person pushing it is a parent or caretaker of a young child.

Roles

Whatever its type, every status is accompanied by a role, which is the behavior expected of someone—and in fact everyone—with a certain status. You and most other people reading this book are students. Despite all the other differences among you, you have at least this one status in common. As such, there is a role expected of you as a student (at least by your professors); this role includes coming to class regularly, doing all the reading assigned from this textbook, and studying the best you can for exams. Roles for each status exist before you are born but are always changing. In fact, they continue changing throughout your lifetime. You are most likely aware of how much the social expectations of men and women have changed even in the last 20 years! A major dimension of socialization is learning the roles our society has and then behaving in the way a particular role demands.

Because roles are the behavior expected of people in various statuses, they help us interact because we are familiar with the roles in the first place, a point to which the second half of this chapter returns. Suppose you are shopping in a department store. Your status is a shopper, and the role expected of you as a shopper—and of all shoppers—involves looking quietly at various items in the store, taking the ones you want to purchase to a checkout line, and paying for them. The person who takes your money is occupying another status in the store that we often call a cashier. The role expected of that cashier—and of all cashiers not only in that store but in every other store—is to accept your payment in a businesslike way and put your items in a bag. Because shoppers and cashiers all have these mutual expectations, their social interaction is possible.

Because we all have multiple roles associated with our multiple statuses, there are times when we experience tension between our roles . When our roles associated with the same status are in conflict, sociologists call this role strain. An example or role strain could be if you are a parent and one of your children has a soccer game at the same time that your other child has a piano recital. As a parent you feel compelled to attend both events. At some times the tension lies in roles associated with the same status and at other times tension lies in roles associated with different statuses. If you are struggling with roles associated with different statuses, this is role conflict. For example if you are a student and you are also a parent and your child is sick, you may struggle between caring for your child and studying for an exam.

Role exit occurs when one is getting ready to change statuses and so they begin to give up roles associated with the status they are getting ready to change. An example of role exit is the infamous senioritis. As a high school student begins to think about graduation and no longer being a student, they may become less interested in going to class, studying, and paying attention.

Social Networks

Modern life seems increasingly characterized by social networks and yet they have always existed in societies. A social network is the totality of relationships that link us to other people and groups and through them to still other people and groups. As Facebook and other social media show so clearly, social networks can be incredibly extensive. Social networks can be so large, of course, that an individual in a network may know little or nothing of another individual in the network (e.g., a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend). But these “friends of friends” can sometimes be an important source of practical advice and other kinds of help. They can “open doors” in the job market, they can introduce you to a potential romantic partner, they can pass through some tickets to the next big basketball game.

Groups and Organizations

Groups and organizations are the next component of social structure. A social group (hereafter just group) consists of two or more people who regularly interact on the basis of mutual expectations and who share a common identity. To paraphrase John Donne, the 17th-century English poet, no one is an island; almost all people are members of many groups, including families, groups of friends, and groups of coworkers in a workplace. Sociology is sometimes called the study of group life, and it is difficult to imagine a modern society without many types of groups and a small, preindustrial society without at least some groups.

In terms of size, emotional bonding, and other characteristics, many types of groups exist. But one of the most important types is the bureaucracy which is a large group that follows explicit rules and procedures to achieve specific goals and tasks. For better and for worse, organizations are an essential feature of modern societies. Our banks, our hospitals, our schools, and so many other examples are all organizations, even if they differ from one another in many respects. In terms of their goals and other characteristics, several types of organizations exist.

Social Institutions

Yet another component of social structure is the social institution, or patterns of beliefs and behavior that help a society meet its basic needs. Modern society is filled with many social institutions that all help society meet its needs and achieve other goals and thus have a profound impact not only on the society as a whole but also on virtually every individual in a society. Examples of social institutions include family, economy, education, government and religion.

Societies

The largest component of social structure is, of course, society itself. Society is a group of people who live within a defined territory and who share a culture. Societies certainly differ in many ways; some are larger in population and some are smaller, some are modern and some are less modern. Since the origins of sociology during the 19th century, sociologists have tried to understand how and why modern, industrial society developed. Part of this understanding involves determining the differences between industrial societies and preindustrial ones.

Subcultures

Every society has a dominant culture: the norms, language and beliefs adhered to by the most powerful. In small societies, the dominant culture is typically practiced by everyone. However, large societies, like postindustrial ones, have multiple subcultures within one society. Subcultures are adhered to by a segment of the population, often times a minority population. As discussed previously, the norms and beliefs of a subculture differ slightly from the dominant culture but usually still remain within the realm of legitimate behaviors. If a subculture were too deviant from the dominant norms, they would likely be treated as deviants and negatively sanctioned. An essential component of a functioning social structure in a large society is to have a higher tolerance of cultural diversity. Sociologists look to Emile Durkheim’s concept of social solidarity to explain this component.

Social Solidarity

One of the key differences between preindustrial and industrial societies is the emphasis placed on the community versus the emphasis placed on the individual. In preindustrial societies, community feeling and group commitment create social solidarity, or hold the society together. In these societies, deviance from the dominant culture is rarely tolerated. In contrast, industrial and postindustrial societies are more individualistic and impersonal however cultural diversity is tolerated resulting in the multiple subcultures we see here. So what holds industrialized societies together?

Sociologist Emile Durkheim suggests an explanation in his book The Division of Labour in Society, published in 1893. In this book, he highlights the degree of division of labor within these societies as a key difference. In preindustrial societies, there is little division of labor; there are not many types of labor besides maintaining a food source and taking care of children and men and women work together for a lot of this. It is important for these societies to agree on cultural norms and beliefs; if they did not, they might not get along enough to accomplish their work! Durkheim would say that these societies have mechanical solidarity. Compare this to what you are familiar with: a society where there are thousands of occupations of varying prestige and power and available to men or women. Industrialized societies have extreme division of labor and, because of this, require a tolerance to cultural diversity. Durkheim theorized that this complex and hierarchical system of labor is what holds industrialized societies together and called this organic solidarity. The takeaway here is that, while these types of societies may appear drastically different culturally, the people existing in them are still reliant on everyone else for survival. A functioning society requires some type of social solidarity. As you will read below, agriculture dramatically changes the social structure of societies. Agriculture can produce a surplus of food and this can be done with fewer people, allowing for others to become experts in areas such as medicine and architecture. The division of labor that we see today would not have happened without this initial change in food production strategies.

 5.2 The Development of Modern Society

To help understand how modern society developed, sociologists find it useful to distinguish societies according to their type of economy and technology. One of the most useful schemes distinguishes the following types of societies: foraging, horticultural, pastoral, agricultural, industrial and postindustrial (Nolan & Lenski, 2009). We now outline the major features of each type in turn. Table 5.1 “Summary of Societal Development” summarizes these features.

Table 5.1 Summary of Societal Development

Type of Society	Key Characteristics
Foraging	These are small, simple societies in which people hunt and gather food. Because all people in these societies have few possessions, the societies are fairly egalitarian, and the degree of inequality is very low.
Horticultural and Pastoral	Horticultural and pastoral societies are larger than hunting-and-gathering societies. Horticultural societies grow crops with simple tools, while pastoral societies raise livestock. Both types of societies are wealthier than hunting-and-gathering societies, and they also have more inequality and greater conflict than hunting-and-gathering societies.
Agricultural	These societies grow great numbers of crops, thanks to the use of plows, oxen, and other devices. Compared to horticultural and pastoral societies, they are wealthier and have a higher degree of conflict and of inequality.
Industrial	Industrial societies feature factories and machines. They are wealthier than agricultural societies and have a greater sense of individualism and a somewhat lower degree of inequality that still remains substantial.
Postindustrial	These societies feature information technology and service jobs. Higher education is especially important in these societies for economic success.

Foraging Societies

Beginning about 250,000 years ago, foraging societies are the oldest ones we know of; few of them remain today, partly because modern societies have encroached on their existence. As the name hunting­ foraging implies, people in these societies forage for foods including meat, eggs, berries, nuts, tubers and other vegetation. They have few possessions other than some tools for harvesting or processing their food. To ensure their mutual survival, everyone is expected to help find food and also to share the food they find. To seek their food, foraging peoples often move from place to place. Because they are nomadic, their societies tend to be quite small, often consisting of only a few dozen people.

Beyond this summary of the type of life these societies lead, anthropologists have also charted the nature of social relationships in them. One of their most important findings is that foraging societies are fairly egalitarian. Although men do most of the hunting and scavenging of meat and women most of the gathering, perhaps reflecting the biological differences between the sexes discussed earlier, women and men in these societies are roughly equal. Because foraging societies have few possessions, their members are also fairly equal in terms of wealth and power, as virtually no wealth exists.

Horticultural and Pastoral Societies

Horticultural and pastoral societies both appear in the archaeological record about 10,000–12,000 years ago. In horticultural societies, people use hoes and other simple hand tools to raise crops. In pastoral societies, people raise and herd sheep, goats, camels, or other domesticated animals and use them as their major source of food and also, depending on the animal, as a means of transportation. Some societies are either primarily horticultural or pastoral, while other societies combine both forms. Pastoral societies tend to be at least somewhat nomadic, as they often have to move to find better grazing land for their animals. Horticultural societies, on the other hand, tend to be less nomadic, as they are able to keep growing their crops in the same location for some time. Both types of societies often manage to produce a surplus of food from vegetable or animal sources, respectively, and this surplus allows them to trade their extra food with other societies. It also allows them to have a larger population size than foraging societies that often reaches several hundred members.

Accompanying the greater complexity and wealth of horticultural and pastoral societies is greater inequality in terms of gender and wealth than is found in foraging societies. In pastoral societies, wealth stems from the number of animals a family owns, and families with more animals are wealthier and more powerful than families with fewer animals. In horticultural societies, wealth stems from the amount of land a family manages, and families with more land are wealthier and more powerful.

One other side effect of the greater wealth of horticultural and pastoral societies is greater conflict. As just mentioned, sharing of food is a key norm in hunting-and-gathering societies. In horticultural and pastoral societies, however, wealth (and more specifically, the differences in wealth) leads to disputes and even fighting over land and animals. Whereas foraging peoples tend to be very peaceful, horticultural and pastoral peoples tend to be more aggressive.

Agricultural Societies

Agricultural societies developed some 5,000 years ago in the Middle East, thanks to the invention of the plow. When pulled by oxen and other large animals, the plow allowed for much more cultivation of crops than the simple tools of horticultural societies permitted. The wheel was also invented about the same time, and written language and numbers began to be used. The development of agricultural societies thus marked a watershed in the development of human society. Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome were all agricultural societies, and India and many other large nations today remain primarily agricultural.

We have already seen that the greater food production of horticultural and pastoral societies led them to become larger than foraging societies and to have more trade and greater inequality and conflict. Agricultural societies continue all these trends. First, because they produce so much more food than horticultural and pastoral societies, they often become quite large, with their numbers sometimes reaching into the millions. Second, their huge food surpluses lead to extensive trade, both within the society itself and with other societies. Third, the surpluses and trade both lead to degrees of wealth unknown in the earlier types of societies and thus to unprecedented inequality, exemplified in the appearance for the first time of peasants, people who work on the land of rich landowners. Finally, agricultural societies’ greater size and inequality also produce more conflict. Some of this conflict is internal, as rich landowners struggle with each other for even greater wealth and power, and peasants sometimes engage in revolts. Other conflict is external, as the governments of these societies seek other markets for trade and greater wealth.

If gender inequality becomes somewhat greater in horticultural and pastoral societies than in foraging ones, it becomes very pronounced in agricultural societies. An important reason for this is the hard, physically taxing work in the fields, much of it using large plow animals, that characterizes these societies. Then, too, women are often pregnant in these societies, because large families provide more bodies to work in the fields and thus more income. Because men do more of the physical labor in agricultural societies—labor on which these societies depend—they have acquired greater power over women (Brettell & Sargent, 2009). In the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, agricultural societies are much more likely than foraging ones to believe men should dominate women (see Figure5.2 “Type of Society and Presence of Cultural Belief That Men Should Dominate Women”).

Figure 5.2 Type of Society and Presence of Cultural Belief That Men Should Dominate Women

Industrial Societies

Industrial societies emerged in the 1700s as the development of machines and then factories replaced the plow and other agricultural equipment as the primary mode of production. The first machines were steam-and water-powered, but eventually, of course, electricity became the main source of power. The growth of industrial societies marked such a great transformation in many of the world’s societies that we now call the period from about 1750 to the late 1800s the Industrial Revolution. This revolution has had enormous consequences in almost every aspect of society.

Industrialization brought about technological advances that improved people’s health and expanded their life spans. As noted earlier, there is also a greater emphasis in industrial societies on individualism, and people in these societies typically enjoy greater political and economic freedom than those in older societies. Compared to agricultural societies, industrial societies also have lowered economic and gender inequality. In industrialized societies, people do have a greater chance achieve a higher social class than was true in earlier societies, and rags-to-riches stories continue to illustrate the opportunity available under industrialization. That said, we will see in later chapters that economic and gender inequality remains substantial in many industrial societies.

Industrialization has also meant the rise and growth of large cities and concentrated poverty and degrading conditions in these cities. This urbanization changed the character of social life by creating a more impersonal society. It also led to Riots and other urban violence that, among other things, helped fuel the rise of the modern police force and forced factory owners to improve workplace conditions. Today industrialized societies consume most of the world’s resources, pollute its environment to an unprecedented degree, and have compiled nuclear arsenals that could undo thousands of years of human society in an instant.

Postindustrial Societies

We are increasingly living in what has been called the information technology age (or just information age), as wireless technology vies with machines and factories as the basis for our economy. Compared to industrial economies, we now have many more service jobs, ranging from housecleaning to secretarial work to repairing computers. Societies in which this transition is happening are moving from an industrial to a postindustrial phase of development. In postindustrial societies, then, information technology and service jobs have replaced machines and manufacturing jobs as the primary dimension of the economy (Bell, 1999). If the car was the sign of the economic and social times back in the 1920s, then the smartphone or laptop is the sign of the economic and social future in the early years of the 21st century. If the factory was the dominant workplace at the beginning of the 20th century, with workers standing at their positions by conveyor belts, then cell phone, computer, and software companies are dominant industries at the beginning of the 21st century, with workers, almost all of them much better educated than their earlier factory counterparts, huddled over their wireless technology at home, at work, or on the road. In short, the Industrial Revolution has been replaced by the Information Revolution, and we now have what has been called an information society (Hassan, 2008).

Theories on Societal Transformation

One of the most frequently asked questions in sociology is how and why do societies change? This is also one of the hardest questions to answer. We know that culture and, therefore, society are constantly changing. We know that the changes are comprehensive: societies now are built with ideas from previous societies. Some of the theories about how and why societies change are discussed below.

Most likely, you have heard of the biologist Charles Darwin who wrote The Origin of Species in 1859. In his book, Darwin explains in detail his theory of natural selection as one of the ways that organisms evolve, or change over time. The theory suggests that as populations reproduce, genetic mutations that produce advantageous traits will be ‘selected’; in other words, the individual organisms with this trait will successfully reproduce and pass this trait on to their offspring, which will cause an increase in the occurrence of this trait in the greater population. How does this relate to sociology? Herbert Spencer, a sociologist working at the same time as Darwin, theorized that societies evolved in the same way that organisms do. He argued that all societies moved along the same path of social evolution; early societies were unorganized and animalistic and, overtime, they would either die out or evolve into organized civilizations. This theory is known as Unilinear Evolution. It was he who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” that Charles Darwin borrowed for his theory! Currently, the majority of social scientists would not accept Spencer’s theory because it overlooks and devalues the complexities that exist in preindustrial societies and ignores the political and economic forces of the dominant societies over the less powerful ones, something Conflict theorists are quick to point out.

A currently accepted replacement for the Unilinear model would be the Multilinear Evolution theory proposed by Julian Steward in 1955. He uses cross-cultural evidence to suggest that there are in fact similar social and cultural features shared by many societies across the globe such as complex statehood. Steward, like Spencer, borrows the basic concepts of biological evolution to understand social evolution, however, he acknowledges that because no environment is the same, no evolutionary path will be the same. Each society creates technologies to survive within their environment and therefore no society is exactly the same although they might have similar technologies and forms of organization.

More recently, Talcott Parsons proposed a theory that partially echoes Spencer’s Unilinear Evolution model. He saw societal change over human history as a progression towards a more successful society. As you might expect, this part of the theory has been heavily criticized as ethnocentric. However, his Equilibrium Theory has remained useful for current Functionalists because it helps to explain social change through the maintenance of social order. According to Parsons, if there are changes within one social institution, other social institutions will adapt through changes until order is restored. For example, think of how dramatically the invention of the Internet has impacted our culture. Information is available within seconds online, so manufacturing and even reading books are unnecessary. Our education institution is one social institution that has adapted to this change by providing lessons, textbooks and entire courses online. A more dangerous outcome of the Internet has been the theft of individuals’ identities. The government, our society’s political institution, regularly works to create policies that prevent this from happening. From this perspective, society is continually adapting to changes, and therefore never completely predictable, but it naturally moves towards equilibrium.

From the other macro viewpoint, the Conflict theorists find Parsons’ theory on social change to be naïve. Karl Marx and C.W. Mills among others would argue that Functionalists ignore the power of the dominant group and their justifications for maintaining order as a means of continued oppression. Instead of social change moving towards order, they would say that societies naturally move towards social change and not towards equilibrium. The force behind the social change is conflict, visible and invisible tension, between the ruling elite and the exploited working class. Marx theorizes that, over time, the group in power changes when the exploited population rises up enough to remove the ruling group. Interestingly, he acknowledged that this does not remove inequality but only replaces the ruling group with a new ruling group. The exception is if the result of the conflict is a classless state, of which he outlined in The Communist Manifesto.

Last but not least, William Ogburn’s theory looks to technology as the main driver of social change. According to his theory, society changes because of one of three things: discoveries, inventions or the diffusion of one these across societal boundaries. As most of you may know, discoveries occur when something completely new is observed or found. A famous example of this is the discovery of the Americas, which led to cultural and social changes across the globe. Inventions are when something new is created from things that already exist such as a smartphone. Smartphones combine computer software technology with telephone technology and yet they have dramatically shaped our cultural norms and societal boundaries. As recently as 15 years ago, it would have been viewed as deviant to not acknowledge people when walking down the sidewalk. Today this is the norm, at least in large urban areas. We often consider people who live in other countries as closer friends than those who live near us. Lastly, Ogburn argues that cultural diffusion of inventions and discoveries across social boundaries causes social change. If people migrate from one society to another, they will introduce aspects of material and nonmaterial culture to a new group of people thereby initiating social changes there. As mentioned in Chapter 2, cultural lag, or behavioral norms that have not yet adapted to new technological innovations, tells us that cultural change is imminent.

As you can see, there are many different ways of understanding how and why societies change over time. As a budding sociologist, it is important to be able to look from each of these perspectives and articulate what evidence there is that exists to support each one.

 5.3 Social Interaction in Everyday Life

A fundamental feature of social life is social interaction, or the ways in which people act with other people and react to how other people are acting. To recall our earlier paraphrase of John Donne, no one is an island. This means that all individuals, except those who choose to live truly alone, interact with other individuals virtually every day and often many times in any one day. For social order, a prerequisite for any society, to be possible, effective social interaction must be possible. Partly for this reason, sociologists interested in microsociology have long tried to understand social life by analyzing how and why people interact they way they do. This section draws on their work to examine various social influences on individual behavior. As you read this section, you will probably be reading many things relevant to your own social interaction.

Socialization results from our social interaction. The reverse is also true: we learn how to interact from our socialization. We have seen many examples of this process in earlier chapters. Among other things, we learn from our socialization how far apart to stand when talking to someone else, we learn to enjoy kissing, we learn how to stand and behave in an elevator and we learn how to behave when we are drunk. Perhaps most important for the present discussion, we learn our society’s roles, outlined earlier as a component of social structure. The importance of roles for social interaction merits further discussion here.

Roles and Social Interaction

Our earlier discussion of roles defined them as the behaviors expected of people in a certain status. Regardless of our individual differences, if we are in a certain status, we are all expected to behave in a way appropriate to that status. Roles thus help make social interaction possible.

As our example of shoppers and cashiers was meant to suggest, social interaction based on roles is usually very automatic, and we often perform our roles without thinking about them. This, in fact, is why social interaction is indeed possible: if we always had to think about our roles before we performed them, social interaction would be slow, tedious, and fraught with error. (Analogously, if actors in a play always had to read the script before performing their lines, as an understudy sometimes does, the play would be slow and stilted.) It is when people violate their roles that the importance of roles is thrown into sharp relief. Suppose you were shopping in a department store, and while you were in the checkout line the cashier asked you how your sex life has been! Now, you might expect such an intimate question from a very close friend, because discussions of intimate matters are part of the roles close friends play, but you would definitely not expect it from a cashier you do not know.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1967) argued that unexpected events like this underscore how fragile social order is and remind us that people are constantly constructing the social reality of the situations in which they find themselves. To illustrate his point, he had his students perform a series of experiments, including acting like a stranger in their parents’ home. Not surprisingly, their parents quickly became flustered and wondered what college was doing to their daughters and sons!

These examples indicate that social reality is to a large extent socially constructed. It is what we make of it, and individuals who interact help construct the reality of the situation in which they interact. Sociologists refer to this process as the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1963). Although we usually come into a situation with shared understandings of what is about to happen, as the interaction proceeds the actors continue to define the situation and thus to construct its reality. This view lies at the heart of the symbolic interactionist perspective and helps us understand how and why roles (or to be more precise, our understanding of what behavior is expected of someone in a certain status) make social interaction possible.

Rites of Passage

One of the more obvious examples of our construction of roles through social interaction is the experience of a rite of passage. Rites of passage are special events or ceremonies that mark an individual’s transition from one stage of life to another, for example childhood to adolescence. Reality is being constructed as the individual participates in this process.

In many societies, rituals help signify one’s gender identity. For example, girls around the world undergo various types of initiation ceremonies to mark their transition to adulthood. Among the Bemba of Zambia, girls undergo a month-long initiation ceremony called the chisungu, in which girls learn songs, dances, and secret terms that only women know (Maybury-Lewis, 1998). In some cultures, special ceremonies also mark a girl’s first menstrual period. Such ceremonies are largely absent in the United States, where a girl’s first period is a private matter. But in other cultures the first period is a cause for celebration involving gifts, music, and food (Hathaway, 1997).

Boys have their own initiation ceremonies, some of them involving circumcision. That said, the ways in which circumcisions are done and the ceremonies accompanying them differ widely. In the United States, boys who are circumcised usually undergo a quick procedure in the hospital. If their parents are observant Jews, circumcision will be part of a religious ceremony, and a religious figure called a moyel will perform the circumcision. In contrast, circumcision among the Maasai of East Africa is used as a test of manhood. If a boy being circumcised shows signs of fear, he might well be ridiculed (Maybury-Lewis, 1998).

Rituals

Most people associate this term with preindustrial societies and the initiation rites of boys or girls entering their adult counterpart. However, postindustrial societies have many examples of rites of passage that we may not think about because they are not usually enforced by an authority. Getting a driver’s or marriage license, becoming eligible to vote or buy alcohol are all commonly celebrated rites of passage that are sanctioned by our government. Less institutionalized rites of passage in our culture would be a baby shower, a Sweet 16 or Quinceanera celebration or a high school graduation ceremony. For each of these events, the individual knows that, after the ceremony, they have a new status and therefore a new set of expectations. For example, after graduating high school, individuals are expected to either get a job or go to college.

Rites of passage are helpful for the individual in that they include the individual in a social group, which will ideally support that individual in many ways. Rites of passage are also functional for society because they publicly acknowledge the individual’s transition and new status, highlighting society’s expectations for them in an effort to maintain cultural norms.

Role Problems

Roles help our interactions run smoothly and automatically and, for better or worse, shape our personalities. But roles can also cause various kinds of problems. One such problem is role conflict, which occurs when the roles of our many statuses conflict with each other. For example, say you are a student and also a parent. Your 3-year-old child gets sick. You now have a conflict between your role as a parent and your role as a student. To perform your role as a parent, you should stay home with your sick child. To perform your role as a student, you should go to your classes and take the big exam that had been scheduled weeks ago. What do you do?

One thing is clear: you cannot perform both roles at the same time. To resolve role conflict, we ordinarily have to choose between one role and the other, which is often a difficult choice to make. In this example, if you take care of your child, you miss your classes and exam; if you go to your classes, you have to leave your child at home alone, an unacceptable and illegal option. Another way to resolve role conflict is to find some alternative that would meet the needs of your conflicting roles. In our sick child example, you might be able to find someone to watch your child until you can get back from classes. It is certainly desirable to find such alternatives, but, unfortunately, they are not always forthcoming. If role conflict becomes too frequent and severe, a final option is to leave one of your statuses altogether. In our example, if you find it too difficult to juggle your roles as parent and student, you could stop being a parent (hardly likely) or, more likely, take time off from school until your child is older. Most of us in these circumstances would try our best to avoid having to do this.

Figure 5.3 Example of a Role Conflict

Another role-related problem is called role strain. Here you have one status, and a role associated with it, that is causing the individual to strain in an effort to meet all the expectations associated with one status. Suppose you were a high school principal. In your one role as a principal, you come into contact with people in several different statuses: teachers, students, custodial and support staff, the superintendent, school board members, the community as a whole, and the news media. These statuses may make competing demands on you in your one role as a principal. If your high school has a dress code, for example, the students may want you to abolish it, the teachers and superintendent may want you to keep it, and maybe the school board would agree with the students. As you try to please all these competing factions, you certainly might experience some role strain!

Dramaturgy and Impression Management

From a sociological standpoint, much of our social interaction can be understood by likening it to a performance in a play. As with so many things, Shakespeare said it best when he wrote,

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts. (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7)

From this perspective, each individual has many parts or roles to play in society, and many of these roles specify how we should interact in any given situation. These roles exist before we are born, and they continue long after we die. The culture of society is thus similar to the script of a play. Just as actors in a play learn what lines to say, where to stand on the stage, how to position their bodies, and so many other things, so do we learn as members of society the roles that specify how we should interact.

This fundamental metaphor was developed and popularized by sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) in what he called a dramaturgical approach (recall our conversation from Chapter 3 in which we applied this theoretic approach to socialization). By this he meant that we can understand social interaction as if it were a theatrical performance. People who interact are actors on a stage, the things they say and do are equivalent to the parts actors play, and any people who observe their interaction are equivalent to the audience at a play. As sociologists Jonathan H. Turner and Jan E. Stets (2006, p. 26) summarize this approach, “Individuals are, in essence, dramatic actors on a stage playing parts dictated by culture, and, like all theater, they are given some dramatic license in how they play roles, as long as they do not deviate too far from the emotional script provided by culture.”

Beyond these aspects of his theatrical analogy, Goffman also stressed that the presentation of self guides social interaction just as it guides behavior in a play. Actors in a play, he wrote, aim to act properly, which at a minimum means they need to say their lines correctly and in other ways carry out their parts as they were written. They try to convey the impression of their character the playwright had in mind when the play was written and the director has in mind when the play is presented. In each play, the audience may be different and thus behaviors will be altered according to the audience. We all alter our behaviors depending on our audience, so you likely behavior differently in class than you do when you are hanging out with your friends. You probably behave differently to some extent with your family than you do with your friends.

Such impression management, Goffman wrote, also guides social interaction in everyday life. When people interact, they routinely try to convey a positive impression of themselves to the people with whom they interact. Our behavior in a job interview differs dramatically (pun intended) from our behavior at a party. The key dimension of social interaction, then, involves trying to manage the impressions we convey to the people with whom we interact. We usually do our best, consciously or unconsciously, to manage the impressions we convey to others and so to evoke from them reactions that will please us. Another way Goffman discusses impression management is as front stage behavior. Since we are acting in an effort to impress our audience or to get them to see us in the way we want them to, we aren’t fully our true self. Our behavior when nobody is around and we can “let our hair down” is called back stage behavior. Since there is no audience, we can be our true selves.

How we dress is also a form of impression management. You are the same person regardless of what clothes you wear, but if you dress for a job interview as you would dress for a party (to use our earlier example), the person interviewing you would get an impression you might not want to convey. If you showed up for a medical visit and your physician were wearing a bathing suit, wouldn’t you feel just a bit uneasy?

Sociology Making a Difference Impression Management and Job Interviewing Erving Goffman’s (1959) concept of impression management, discussed in the text, is one of the key sociological insights for the understanding of social interaction. One reason the concept has been so useful, and one reason that it interests many college students, is that impression management has so much practical relevance. Anyone who has gone out on a first date or had a job interview can immediately recognize that impression management is something we all do and can immediately realize the importance of effective impression management. Impression management is important in many settings and situations but perhaps especially important in the job interview. Many scholarly publications and job-hunting manuals emphasize the importance of proper impression management during a job interview, especially an interview for a full-time, well-paying job, (Van Iddekinge, McFarland, & Raymark, 2007). The strategies they discuss include impression management involving dress, body language, and other dimensions of social interaction. Interviewing tips they recommend include (a) dressing professionally, (b) showing up early for the interview, (c) shaking hands firmly while smiling and looking the interviewer in the eye, (d) sitting with a comfortable but erect posture without crossing one’s arms, (e) maintaining eye contact with the interviewer throughout the interview, and (f) shaking hands at the end of the interview and saying thank you. These strategies and tips are probably more familiar to college students from wealthy backgrounds than to working-class people who have not gone to college. Sociologists emphasize the importance of cultural capital, or attitudes, skills, and knowledge that enable people to achieve a higher social status (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). People who grow up in poverty or near-poverty, including disproportionate numbers of people of color, are less likely than those who grow up in much wealthier circumstances to possess cultural capital. The attitudes, skills, and knowledge that many college students have and take for granted, including how to conduct oneself during a job interview, are much less familiar to individuals who grow up without cultural capital. To use some sociological language, they know much less about how to manage their impressions during a job interview should they get one and thus are less likely to be hired after an interview. For this reason, many public and private agencies in poor and working-class communities around the country regularly hold workshops on job interviewing skills. These workshops emphasize strategies similar to those outlined earlier. One of the many organizations that offer these workshops and provides related services is the Los Angeles Urban League (http://www.laul.org/milken-family-literacy-and-youth-training­center) through its Milken Family Literacy and Youth Training Center. According to its Web site, this center “provides a comprehensive system of services of programs and services to assist youth and adults in developing the skills to compete for and obtain meaningful employment.” Much of what the youth and adults who attend its workshops and other programs are learning is impression-management skills that help them find employment. Goffman’s concept is helping make a difference.

Individuals engage in impression management, but so do groups and organizations. Consider the medical visit just mentioned. A physician’s office usually “looks” a certain way. It is clean, it has carpeting, it has attractive furniture, and it has magazines such as People, Time, and Sports Illustrated. Such an office assures patients by conveying the impression that the physician and staff are competent professionals. Imagine that you entered a physician’s office and saw torn carpeting, some broken furniture, and magazines such as Maxim and Playboy. What would be your instant reaction? How soon would you turn around and leave the office? As this fanciful example illustrates, impression management is critically important for groups and organizations as well as for individuals.

Life is filled with impression management. Compare the decor of your favorite fast-food restaurant with that of a very expensive restaurant with which you might be familiar. Compare the appearance, dress, and demeanor of the servers and other personnel in the two establishments. The expensive restaurant is trying to convey an image, using status symbols, that the food will be wonderful and that the time you spend there will be memorable and well worth the money. The fast-food restaurant is trying to convey just the opposite impression. In fact, if it looked too fancy, you would probably think it was too expensive.

Nonverbal Social Interaction

Social interaction is both verbal and nonverbal. Culture greatly influences nonverbal communication, or ways of communicating that do not involve talking. Nonverbal communication includes the gestures we use and how far apart we stand when we talk with someone. When we do talk with someone, much more nonverbal interaction happens beyond gestures and standing apart. We might smile, laugh, frown, grimace, or engage in any number of other facial expressions (with or without realizing we are doing so) that let the people with whom we interact know how we feel about what we are saying or they are saying. Often how we act nonverbally is at least as important, and sometimes more important, than what our mouths are saying.

Body posture is another form of nonverbal communication, and one that often combines with facial expressions to convey how a person feels. People who are angry may cross their arms or stand with their hands on their hips and glare at someone. Someone sitting slouched in a chair looks either very comfortable or very bored, and neither posture is one you would want to use at an interview for a job you really wanted to get. Men and women may engage in certain postures while they are flirting with someone. Consciously or not, they sit or stand in certain ways that convey they are romantically interested in a particular person and hopeful that the person will return this interest.

Learning from Other Societies Personal Space and Standing Apart As the text discusses, one aspect of nonverbal interaction involves how far we stand apart from someone with whom we are talking. Americans and the citizens of Great Britain and the northern European nations customarily stand about three to four feet apart from someone who is a stranger or acquaintance. If we are closer to this person without having to be closer—that is, we’re not in a crowded elevator, bar, or other setting in which it is impossible to be farther apart—we feel uncomfortable. In contrast, people in many parts of the world—South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Western European nations such as France, Spain, and Italy—stand much closer to someone with whom they are talking. In these nations, people stand only about 9 to 15 inches apart when they talk. If someone for some reason wanted to stand another two feet away, a member of one of these nations would view this person as unfriendly and might well feel insulted (Ting-Toomey, 1999; Samovar, Porter, & McDaniel, 2010). When Americans travel abroad, anecdotal evidence indicates that they often think that people in other nations are pushy and demanding and that these citizens view Americans as cold and aloof (Ellsworth, 2005). Although there are many cultural differences between Americans and people in other lands, personal space is one of the most important differences. This fact yields an important lesson for any American who travels abroad, and it also illustrates the significance of culture for behavior and thus the value of the sociological perspective.

As with emotions, gender appears to influence how people communicate nonverbally (Hall, 2006). For example, a number of studies find that women are more likely than men to smile, to nod, and to have more expressive faces. Once again, biologists and social scientists disagree over the origins of these and other gender differences in nonverbal communication, with social scientists attributing the differences to gender roles, culture, and socialization.

Gender differences also exist in two other forms of nonverbal interaction: eye contact and touching. Women tend more than men to look directly into the eyes of people with whom they interact, a process called gazing. Such gazing is meant to convey interest in the interaction and to be nonthreatening. On the other hand, men are more likely than women to stare at someone in a way that is indeed threatening. A man might stare at a man because he resents something the other man said or did; a man might stare at a woman because he eyes her as a sexual object. In touching, men are more likely than women to touch someone, especially when that someone is a woman; as he guides her through a doorway, for example, he might put his arm behind her arm or back. On the other hand, women are more likely than men to touch themselves when they are talking with someone, a process called self­-touching. Thus if a woman is saying “I think that…,” she might briefly touch the area just below her neck to refer to herself. Men are less likely to refer to themselves in this manner.

Enhancing Social Interaction: What Sociology Suggests If a goal of this book is to help you understand more about yourself and the social world around you, then a sociological understanding of social interaction should help your own social interaction and also that of other people. We see evidence of the practical value of a sociological understanding in the “Sociology Making a Difference” and “Learning From Other Societies” boxes in this chapter. The “Sociology Making a Difference” box discussed the impact that Goffman’s concept of impression management has made in job hunting in general and particularly in efforts to improve the employment chances of the poor and people of color. The “Learning From Other Societies” box discussed why Americans sometimes have trouble interacting with people abroad. Differences in personal space can lead to hurt feelings between Americans and people in other nations. If we are aware, then, of the importance of impression management, we can be more conscious of the impressions we are making in our daily interactions, whether they involve talking with a professor, interviewing for a job, going out on a first date, or speaking to a police officer who has pulled you over. By the same token, if we are aware of the importance of personal space, we can improve our interactions with people with different cultural backgrounds. Thus, if we are Americans of northern European ancestry and are interacting with people from other nations, we can be aware that physical distance matters and perhaps stand closer to someone than we might ordinarily feel comfortable doing to help the other person feel more comfortable and like us more. Conversely, readers who are not Americans of northern European ancestry might move back a step or two to accomplish the same goals. To illustrate the importance of enhancing social interaction among people from different cultural backgrounds, the federal government has prepared a document called “Developing Cultural Competence in Disaster Mental Health Programs: Guiding Principles and Recommendations”. The document is designed to help mental-health professionals who are assisting victims of natural disasters in other countries or within the United States. It warns professionals that cultural differences may impede their efforts to help victims: “Both verbal and nonverbal communication can be barriers to providing effective disaster crisis counseling when survivors and workers are from different cultures. Culture influences how people express their feelings as well as what feelings are appropriate to express in a given situation. The inability to communicate can make both parties feel alienated and helpless.” It also advises professionals to be aware of the personal space needs of the people they are trying to help: “A person from one subculture might touch or move closer to another as a friendly gesture, whereas someone from a different culture might consider such behavior invasive. Disaster-crisis counselors must look for clues to a survivor’s need for space. Such clues may include, for example, moving the chair back or stepping closer.” As this document makes clear, if we can draw on a sociological understanding to enhance our social interaction skills, we can help not only ourselves but also people who come from other cultures.

 5.4 End-of-Chapter Material

• The major components of social structure are statuses, roles, groups and organizations, and social institutions.
• As societies moved beyond the foraging stage, they became larger and more impersonal and individualistic and were characterized by increasing inequality and conflict.
• Industrial societies developed about 250 years ago after several inventions allowed work to become more mechanized. The Industrial Revolution has had important consequences, some good and some bad, in virtually every area of society. Postindustrial societies have begun in the last few decades with the advent of the computer and an increasing number of service jobs. While it’s too soon to know the consequences of the advent of post-industrialization, there are signs it will have important implications for the nature of work and employment in modern society.
• One of the questions asked by sociologists is how does society change? Numerous theories have been proposed, from the unilinear and multilinear evolution theories to equilibrium theory. In addition, social change also arises from inventions, discoveries and cultural diffusion.
• Erving Goffman used a theatrical metaphor called dramaturgy to understand social interaction, which he likened to behavior on a stage in a play. More generally, many sociologists stress the concept of roles in social interaction. Although we usually play our roles automatically, social order occasionally breaks down when people don’t play their roles. This breakdown illustrates the fragility of social order.
• Although roles help us interact, they can also lead to problems such as role conflict and role strain. In another problem, some individuals may be expected to carry out a role that demands a personality they do not have.
• Nonverbal communication is an essential part of social interaction. The sexes differ in several forms of nonverbal communication. Biologists and sociologists differ on the origins of these differences.