Unit II, Lesson 1

Society as an Objective Reality

Learning Objectives
At the end of this Chapter the students are expected to:
♦ Explain how society and its institutions shape individuals
♦ Demonstrate curiosity about the basic social institutions and be able to
explain their respective roles in socialization
♦ Compare different social forms of social organization according to their
manifest and latent functions
♦ Explain the logic of reproduction of social institutions
♦ Discuss the relative independence of society and its institutions from
individual’s consciousness
THE CONCEPT OF SOCIETY AS AN
OBJECTIVE REALITY
The term “society” came from the Latin word societas,
which in turn was derived from the noun socius
(“comrade, friend, ally”) used to describe a bond or
interaction between parties that are friendly, or at least civil.
According to the Greek philosopher Aristotle human
beings are zoo politikon or political
animals.
According to John Holmwood (2006),
The term “society” is used to describe a
level of organization of groups that is relatively
self-contained. However, the boundedness of
groups is always relative and so sociologists
may refer to human society, where the
reference is to the interdependencies among all
social groups, or to subgroups such as family
society, where the reference is to the typical
interactions among the individuals making up a
grouping of close kin (p. 592).
methodological individualism
A view that states collective
concepts such as groups,
associations and societies do not
exist but only individual members
Emile Durkheim, the founding father of
French sociology, argued strongly
against this position. His theory is
called sociological realism.
Durkheim on the objective existence of society:
The case of purely moral maxims; the
public conscience exercises a check on
every act which offends it by means of
the surveillance it exercises over the
conduct of citizens, and the appropriate
penalties at its disposal. In many cases
the constraint is less violent, but
nevertheless it always exists.
The argument of Durkheim that society is an
objective reality is echoed in contemporary
sociology by Peter L. Berger:
The objectivity of society extends to
all its constituent elements.
Institutions, roles, and identities
exist as objectively real phenomena
in the social world, though they and
this world are at the same time
nothing but human productions.
Social Reproduction, or How Societies Persist
If one defines society as “organization of groups that is relatively
self-contained”, then the next question is how societies manage to
exist and persist across time and space? The problem of explaining
how societies manage to exist over a long period of time is called
reproduction by the French philosopher and sociologist, Louis
Althusser. No society can endure over time if it does not
support its very own reproduction. To do this, all societies
require the creation of institutions to perpetuate the existence of
society.
There are two types of institutions that reproduce the
condition of social life, namely, the ideological state
apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses.
From structural functionalist perspective, social
reproduction is carried through four
functional prerequisites elaborated by one of the
major American sociologists, Talcott Parsons.
♦ Adaptation is the capacity of society to
take resources from society and distribute
them accordingly.
♦ Goal Attainment is the capability to set
goals and mobilize the resources and
energies necessary to achieve the goals
set forth by society.
♦ Integration, or the harmonization of the
entire society to achieve consensus. It is a
demand that the values and norms of
society are solid and sufficiently
convergent.
♦ Latency, or latent pattern maintenance,
requires that society is able to constantly
produce and socialize actors who will
follow the norms and roles given to them
by society.
For Parsons, any entity that was
relatively self-subsistent with respect to
an environment qualified as a social
The most important
system.
of these functions is
system integration. When
social integration and the continuous
production of motivated actors are
disrupted society experiences
breakdown.
Manifest functions are the
unintended effects of people’s
actions. And in most cases,
these manifest functions become
dysfunctional to the system.
The strength of reproduction theory is also
its weakness. It fails to explain how people
do not simply reproduce the very social
conditions that they are born with but they
also possess the power of agency.
This criticism is echoed in the
famous statement of Marx:
Men [sic] make their own history, but they
do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen
by themselves, but under circumstances
directly found, given and transmitted from
the past (Marx, 1937).