Social structure

Talcott Parsons states - "Social structure is the term applied to the particular arrangement of the
inter-related institutions, agencies, and social patterns, as well as the statuses and roles which each
person assumes in the group".

Ginsberg opines, "Social structure is concerned with the principal forms of social organization, i.e.
types of groups, associations and institutions and the complex of these which constitute societies."

According to Radcliffe Brown "Social structure is defined as the continuing arrangement of persons
in relationships defined or controlled by institutions, i.e., socially established norms or patterns of
behaviour."
 Continuing arrangement of persons- According to Brown social structure is a continuing
arrangement of persons in relation to each other. This arrangement of persons is different in
a village, a city or a primitive tribe. The characteristics of this arrangement are in fact the
characteristics of social structure. In other words, the characteristics of social structure are
the characteristics of social groups which constitute it.

Structural features of social life

According to Brown, the most important structural features of social life are as follows:

1. Existence of social groups- Social structure consists of all kinds of social groups within it.

2. Internal structure of groups- These groups, again, have a specific internal structure. For example,
the family group consists of the relations of father, mother and children to each other.

3. Arrangement into social classes-These groups, again, are arranged into social classes and
categories such as the castes in Indian society and the economic classes in western societies.

4. Social distinctions-There is again a system of social distinctions between different classes based
upon sex, authority, economic distinctions, caste distinctions etc. One finds a system of social
distance between them as can be seen between Brahmins and Sudras in India.

5. Arrangement of persons in dyadic relationship- Dyadic relationships are person to person

relationships such as those found between master and servant. In social structure one finds
arrangement of persons in dyadic relationship.

6. Interactions between groups and persons- Finally, the most important feature of social structure is
the interaction between groups and the interactions between persons. An example of interactions
between groups is seen when one nation goes to war with another. Interactions between persons
can be seen in social processes involving cooperation, conflict, accommodation etc.

Constituents of social structure: Social structure is constituted by continuing arrangement of persons

in relationship. These arrangements of persons are generally in the form of social groups. According
to Brown, "social group means a body of persons having certain cohesion." The social groups are
named differently according to their different forms such as a family, a horde, a clan, a kinship, a
tribe etc. Radecliffe Brown has defined each of these types of social groups clearly.
1. The Family - According to Brown, "The family as a group was formed by marriage and the birth of
children and came to an end as a separate group on the death of the husband, thus having
continuous existence for only a limited number of years." Thus, family is composed of a man with his
wife or wives and their young children. It is a domestic group. It has its own hearth, shelter and food
supply.

2. The Horde- the internal structure of the horde consists of family. A horde may be described as
being politically autonomous, under the authority of the old men, and as being very largely self-
sufficient economically."

3. The Clan- Several hordes together constitute the social structure of the clan. Men connected with
a particular territory form a distinct social group known as clan. The clan is a unit of fundamental
importance in the primitive social structure. A woman belonged to a clan of her father. Marriage
between persons of one clan was forbidden.

The clans constituted a wider system of structure known as a tribe.

4. The Tribe- In the words of Radcliffe Brown, "A number of clans had the same language, and had
similar customs; they therefore formed a linguistic community which is referred to as a Tribe." Tribe
is not a politically united group.

5. The kinship system- Persons of different hordes and of different tribes are linked by means of
kinship system. The basis of the recounting consisted of actual genealogical relationships, including
therein the relations between fellow-members of one clan. Kinship relationships were classified into
a number of categories. Each category was denoted by one kinship term distinguished as being
nearer or more distant to other kinship relationship.

6. The Moieties- Sometimes primitive social structure is divided into two moieties. Each moiety
includes a number of tribes. Each clan belongs to one of the moieties. Thus a moiety is wider than
tribes. "Essentially the system is a classification or grounding of class, which cuts across the
classification into tribes or linguistic communities."

7. Social sections- Each clan contains at all times the adult and the children, male and female, thus
there is a four fold division of society into sections which have particular names. These sections
determine marriage and kinship relationships.

8. Totemic group- Each clan is a distinct totemic group having its own sacred totem centres, its own
myths, its own rites. Each clan has its own totemic solidarity and continuity which differentiates it
from other clan. They provide the religious structure of society.

9. Social classes- According to Brown, in some primitive societies one may find division of social
structure into social classes.

SOCIAL CLASS: Social class is generally defined as ‘a stratum of people occupying similar social
position in terms of income, wealth, occupation and factors like education’.

Social class refers to a group of people with similar levels of wealth, influence, and status. A social
class is also a cultural group sharing a particular way of life. In industrialized nations, our status
derives from our social class position, among other things. Social class refers to a group of people
who share the same relative status in a given society

Social class resembles primate hierarchies involving whole families across generations. These
hierarchies, obviously social and not biological are the class which segregates people, allows mobility
and determines roles as stated by Sapolsky (2004). Classes are related to one another in terms of
inequality or hierarchy.

Class is a system of stratification in which a person’s social status depends upon his or her
achievement. An individual is permitted to strive for and attain a change in her or his status. It
encourages individuals to select their professions. Membership of a class is not inherited as in the
case of the caste system. The boundaries between classes are never rigid. Social mobility is much
more common in the class system than in other forms of stratification like caste system.

Class has its (interpersonal) privileges such as flattering dispositional attributions for affluence,
presumed competence, enhanced self-esteem, no obligation for nonverbal engagement, and an
enjoyable status quo.

 Dispositional attributions reward the upper classes. Social class carries achieved status,
allegedly earned by internal factors such as effort and talent. Unlike all the three kinds of
ascribed status (gender, age and race), people are supposedly responsible for their social
class standing. People get credit for high status and blame for low status.
 Higher status people get credit for competence. As early as elementary school, children rate
the academic competence of rich children as higher than poor children. Samples across
culture assign competence to both rich and middle class people, whereas the poor appear
incompetent. Although both obtain high status, rich people differ from the middle class in
having both higher status and seeming less warm and trustworthy.
 Not only do other people respect the well-off, the wealthy also tend to think highly of
themselves. Socioeconomic status grants high self esteem, which increases from childhood
through middle middle age. (Tuenge & Campbell, 2002). Social class is a more salient aspect
of self concept for groups who view themselves having earned it. Hence, correlation is
higher for adults than children, for women of later birth coherts given their greater
workforce participation, for more recent immigrants with ambitions for mobility and for
occupational and educational measures of class, which reflect effort more than income does.
All these patterns fit a self-salience interpretation viewing class as a central part of the self,
more than reflected appraisals , whereby others opinions reinforce one’s self esteem.
 People’s social class (eg: parent education and income) predicts their nonverbal expression
of privilege, and other people know this allowing them to detect social class from nonverbal
behaviour. Higher social class appears in more nonverbal cues to disengagement (doodling,
self-grooming, fiddling) and fewer to engagement (gazing at one’s partner, nodding,
laughing and raised eyebrows).
 Sidanius and Patto(1999)- people enjoying the advantages of social status might well wish to
maintain the status quotient and income does correlate with more conservative ideologies.
Social class constitutes an important segment of social structure in modern India. There are many
ways of defining social class in India, including occupation, lifestyle, education, language and value
systems. Perhaps the two most frequently used variables in attempting to define India’s embryonic
class system are income and urban versus rural.

An income based measure of class in India takes the shape of a very steep pyramid divided into six
tiers. The base of the pyramid consists of households that are mostly destitute above and below the
poverty line, a middle class, lower middle class, small upper class and upper middle class The Indian
middle class is far from homogenous. It lacks a collective consciousness, is split along urban-rural
lines, and is preoccupied with its own precarious status. The fastest growing segment of india’s
emerging class system is the lower middle class. It is the lower middle class and the poor that have
become increasingly politically conscious since independence and have began to challenge the
traditional political domination of the deeply entrenched urban middle class power elite composed
of political leaders, bureaucracy, the organized sector of trade and industry, intellectuals,
technocrats and the upper echelons of the military.

Social Class Identification

Persons, irrespective of their own class identification, usually perceive the system as consisting of
just a few classes, and they usually use the same general and specific criteria to distinguish any class
from the other classes.
The most prominent of these criteria are :
 ranks based on ascription/achievement (wealth/property, job-role, income and education)
 the acceptance or rejection of action-norms (honesty, helpfulness, etc)
 the psychological state of the person (contentment or discontentment)

Social Role theory posits that social structure commonly divides men and women into roles of higher
(wage-earning) and lower (child-rearing) status. People observe these diagnostic distributions by
gender, throughout society, and infer more agency (competence) for men and communality
(warmth) for women.

Social Identity Theory examines the group status and its interplay with legitimacy. One way that
group status differences can appear legitimate is by apparently corresponding to differences in
competence or deservingness. These are dimensions relevant to the social identity of the high status
group.
There are in-group biases often is higher for high-status groups. They show more in-group
favouritism, evaluate themselves more positively, and evaluate the out-group more negatively. For
high status groups, legitimacy (“we deserve our privileges”) supports in-group bias and cements the
status hierarchy.

Few Findings Most psychological research on conceptions of social class focuses on describing the
developmental differences in the conceptions of social class.

 Power differentials among various social groups and their access to resources might affect how
an individual conceptualizes social class (Omvedt, 1993, 1995).
 Higher social class also lowers the risk of depression and distress and illness. They also
experience fewer negative life events and have more resources for coping with those do occur.
 Psychologist PJ Henry demonstrated that low-status individuals have higher tendencies toward
violent behaviour.
 Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler carried out another research project to study the long-term
consequences of our social class position on values. They argued that there is an ongoing
feedback loop in which our class position influences the development of values that, in turn,
influences the type of job we look for. The type of job we get then influences the type of people
we are—our personality. Aspects of our personality, our intellectual flexibility and self-directed
orientation, can also affect our job choices. These work and personality characteristics interact
to create the feedback loop.
 According to House (1981), there are three basic principles: (a) the component principle-
reference has generally been made to income level or to social status in order to define
membership of any social class, (b) The proximity principle. The effects of social structures are
transmitted to individuals via stimuli that are in contact with them. Thus, the effect of complex
structures on individuals should be understood, generally, in terms of the smaller structures that
constitute the proximal social experiences and proximal stimuli in their lives It was hypothesized
that social integration and stress are proximal stimuli. Stressors are one of the mediators
through which social structure is related to mental health. (c) The psychological principle. It
includes psychological processes that allow interactions and stimuli to be incorporated. In other
words, psychological constructs must be used in order to understand and explain the impact of
social structures on the individual i.e. perceived social support and self-esteem. Results show
that social structure has consequences for individuals, and, in this sense, there seems to be an
imbalance in the distribution of mental health. Data underlines the importance of social
integration, as well as the role of stress as an environmental factor.

India contains a large number of different regional, social, and economic groups, each with
distinctive or dissimilar customs and cultural practices. Region-wise, differences between social
structures of India’s north and south are marked, especially with respect to kinship systems and
family relationships. Religious differences are pervasive through out the country. There is the Hindu
majority and the large Muslim minority or “second majority”. There are other Indian groups—
Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Jews, Parsis, Sikhs, and practitioners of tribal religions—and hundreds of
sub-religions or religious communities within larger communities like the Arya Samajis, Sanatanis
among the Hindus; Shias and Sunnis among the Muslims; Monas and Keshdharis among Sikhs and
hundreds of other castes, sub-castes, communities, vegetarians and non-vegetarians from each
religion.

A highly noticeable feature of India’s social structure is highly inequitable division of the nation’s
wealth. Access to wealth and power varies sharply. Extreme differences in socio-economic status are
glaringly visible among the smallest village communities to metropolitan cities and mega-towns. The
poor and the rich live side by side in urban and rural areas. Urban-rural differences too are immense.
Gender distinctions are highly pronounced. The behaviour norms of men and women are very
different, more so in villages. Prescribed ideal gender roles are fast losing to new patterns of
behaviour among both sexes.