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From Martin, J.L., Lee, M., 2015. Social Structure. In: James D. Wright

(editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,

2nd edition, Vol 22. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 713–718.

ISBN: 9780080970868

Elsevier

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Social Structure

John L Martin and Monica Lee, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by F. Chazel, volume 22, pp. 15233–15237, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

Social structure is about patterns of relations. Two main families of approaches conceive these patterns differently. One, a top

down one, tends to see a global organization as stemming from a common shared culture. The second, a bottom up, pays

more attention to agglomerative processes that begin with individuals who may or may not begin with shared cultural

templates.

Social structure refers to patternings in social relations that have

some sort of obduracy. Within this general deﬁnition, there are

two primary families of more speciﬁc approaches. In the ﬁrst,

‘structure’ may be used to refer on the macro level to the

abstract organization of reciprocally deﬁned social categories

that are seen to comprise some social whole. In the second, the

term can be used to refer to smaller scale ‘social structures,’

conﬁgurations of concrete relationships among individuals

without reference to a notion of a larger societal totality. We

organize our exposition accordingly. (We note that Porpora

(1989) in addition gave as conceptions of social structure

ﬁrst, that of Anthony Giddens, which we treat here as an

extreme form of the ﬁrst understanding of structure, and

second, relations between variables, but we have not seen any

examples of people claiming this as a deﬁnition of structure,

and we discuss this under the related heading of social systems

below.)

Structure as Abstract Relations between Social

Positions

Although all the approaches in this category link structure to

some sort of organization of positions or types that anchor

action, they differ as to the logic of the organization of the

positions that may variously be taken to be social functions,

roles, or classes.

Structure and Function

The idea of ‘social structure’ was ﬁrst introduced by Herbert

Spencer (e.g., 1896[1873]: pp. 56–60). At the time, the word

‘structure’ in biology referred to what we would now call

‘organs,’ sets of contiguous tissue that performed a speciﬁable

function for the organism as a whole. Spencer argued that

society had ‘social structures’ that carried out social functions.

Thus the root of the idea of social structure comes from the

organismic metaphor applied to society. This metaphor is

certainly an old one; in the Western tradition we often begin

with Plato, who (we now say) suggested that the city might be

understood as a ‘man writ large, ’ and thus a convenient place

for an anthropology. (In the Republic (II:368d) Plato argues

that, given that those of us with imperfect vision have an easier

time reading larger letters, we should ﬁnd a place to study the

nature of justice similarly writ large, and that is the city. From

here, he uses our interdependence to derive the need for

speciﬁc occupations, for specialization, and for trade

(369–371).) Now indeed, Plato did suggest a mapping

between characteristics of persons and those of the city. Most

important, Plato made a distinction between (what might

appear to us as) cognition, emotions, and instincts. Thus in the

fourth book of the Republic (espec. x436), Plato had Socrates

demonstrate that there are three parts of the soul that have

different functions – that we “learn with one part of ourselves,

feel anger with another, and with yet a third desire the pleasures

of nutrition and generation.” (The physical organs to which

these were taken to correspond were for many centuries taken

to be the head, the heart, and the liver, organized in a vertical

hierarchy.) So too, he argued, the city has three classes, each of

whom must do its part. Some make things (or ‘make money,’

corresponding to the appetitive), some make rules (corre-

sponding to the nous, the intellect), and some make war. These

correspond to three qualities of the good city, which should be

wise (the wisdom of the city is the wisdom of its counselors),

brave (the bravery of the city is the bravery of its ﬁghters), and

sober (Republic, x428–434). Now despite his famous emphasis

on our interdependence and even on the division of labor,

Plato did not propose an organismic model of the state, and it

seems that no such developed analogies arose in Europe until

the mass of differentiable urban occupations were no longer

associated with servile status.

With the rise of materialist views of human beings and of

society, organismic metaphors were extended into more

developed allegories: thus Hobbes (1943[1651]: pp. 8, 171,

183–188, 193f., 246–257) proposed correspondences in the

body politic to nerves, blood and joints, and could liken its

states of illness to pleurisy, Siamese triplets, and constipation.

But despite his categorical rejection of metaphor, Hobbes’s use

of the organismic language stemmed as much from his love of

pursuing a simile as from his explanatory goals. (Thus not only

is the distribution of goods analogous to nutrition, but these

good ultimately come from either the land or the sea, ‘(the two

breasts of our common Mother), ’ adds Hobbes (1943[1651]:

p. 189).) Certainly, Hobbes treated the organismic predicate as

one of metaphor and not as one of identity (e.g., systems “may

be compared . to the similar parts of man’ s body” (emphasis

added)), and alternated between it and others (the common-

wealth as building, as Leviathan, or as ‘Mortall God’).

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Although such organismic metaphors remained popular,

we do not know of any attempt to produce a serious and

detailed exposition until Spencer. Comte (1974[1842]: 510ff)

too had advanced an organismic metaphor by applying it to the

societal division of labor, examining the laws according to

which the societal whole develops and how the whole regulates

its constituent organs. But Comte’s overriding theme of whol-

ism (and his impatience to begin wholesale social reconstruc-

tion) led him to neglect a detailed consideration of the parts.

By contrast, Spencer argued that the functional needs of the

whole not only were met by the parts (like Plato), nor that there

were laws of development of the whole (like Comte), but that

structures (and functions) have their own developmental

tendencies that direct the social organism’s course of develop-

ment. (“Just as in the man there are structures and functions

which make possible the doings his biographer tells of, so in the

nation there are structures and functions which make possible

the doings its historian tells of; and in both cases it is with these

structures and functions, in their origin, development, and

decline, that science is concerned” (Spencer, 1896[1873]:

p. 52).) Further, despite his use of the organismic metaphor,

Spencer (e.g., 1910: p. 244) always saw the functions that were

met by social structures as being, at base, functional needs of the

individuals who composed society (and not those of the social

whole apart from the individuals). Human action is funda-

mentally driven to meet human needs and wants such as

defending against enemies and obtaining food. Individuals

cooperate to fulﬁll those ends, giving rise to structures. Thus

‘social structure’ referred to the internal organization of the social

whole arising as a by-product of the functional interdependence

of human life (a point that Malinowski was later to reiterate).

The organismic analogy developed in ways charted by

Kaufmann (1908) and Levine (1995). What was crucial for

sociology and anthropology was the duality of structure and

function that was accepted by Durkheim (most notably in The

Division of Labor) and elaborated by Radcliffe-Brown.

Like Spencer and Comte, Durkheim proposed that society is

structured according to the functions that social groups fulﬁll in

the division of labor. But while Spencer retained an emphasis

on the ontological primacy of the individual, Durkheim unre-

servedly based his theory in the sui generis existence of social

order. He examined how the functional interdependence upon

which the division of labor is based served as society’s source of

social solidarity. The most fundamental ‘function’ in society is

the division of labor’s function of integrating and uniting the

societal organism, thereby sustaining its life (1933[1893]:

p. 11). While mechanical solidarity – solidarity based on indi-

viduals’ similarities – was the dominant foundation for social

bonds in earlier epochs, modern society, according to Dur-

kheim, is bound primarily by ‘organic’ solidarity – solidarity

that arises from individuals’ interdependence in the societal

division of labor. Differentiated social groups comprise a system

of ‘organs’ (p. 132), each of which performs a specialized duty

that sustains the whole. These organs are bound to each other by

relationships of functional interdependence (pp. 83, 173),

where the survival of the whole depends on each organ per-

forming its speciﬁc duty. The more specialized the function of

an organism, the more integrated and developed the society.

This perspective was inﬂuential in anthropology, largely

mediated by the work of Radcliffe-Brown (1952: p. 179), who

emphasized that a structure ‘is thus to be deﬁned as a set of

relations between entities.’ Further, while other theorists had

focused on a few roles as key – kinship or occupation, most

notably – Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 191f) argued that such

structure had to be understood as involving all such relations.

This suggested a more complete vision of an all-encompassing

and mutually consistent social structure. Strangely, sociology

tended to be inﬂuenced by earlier work in anthropology that

drew more upon notions of kinship than social functions,

perhaps because it had clearer implications.

Structure as Role

In particular, anthropologist Ralph Linton (1936) had sug-

gested a second duality (after that of structure/function),

namely that of status and role. A status, argued Linton (1936:

p. 113) is a slot in social structure, or as he said (he used the

idea of social ‘systems,’ not ‘structures’), ‘a position in

a particular pattern.’ Such a position has both rights and duties

associated with it, and action in accordance with these is the

performance of a role. Thus the role is the active counterpart to

the status, the verb form as opposed to the noun. (One will

note that in English, perhaps the bulk of early terms for

common objects also have proper usage as verbs: to hammer is

to use a hammer, to water is to put water on, and so on. So too

a mother mothers, and this is a status ‘roling.’)

A number of sociologists have similarly examined social

structure as an organized set of roles. This ‘structure’ was

increasingly understood by sociologists as one-half, or one-

third, of the realm of study at hand. Pitrim Sorokin (e.g., 1962)

proposed a triad of personality, society, and culture (though he is

more known for employing the latter two as a pair), and this

triad was also adopted by both his younger colleague (and

nemesis), Talcott Parsons and his graduate student, Robert

Merton. Both saw the ‘social’ dimension as referring to some-

thing structural, and both paradigmatically took this to mean

the organization of social roles, thus preserving the Lintonian

duality. Parsons in particular emphasized the close mapping

between structure and culture. In Parsons’ s (1961) words, “ the

structure of social systems . consists in institutionalized

patterns of normative culture.” Societal roles, in other words,

are deﬁned by speciﬁc norms that prescribe rules for behavior.

Robert Merton (1957) also explicitly began with this

understanding of social structure, and indeed said “status and

roles become concepts serving to connect culturally deﬁned

expectations with the patterned conduct and relationships

which make up a social structure.” (Parenthetically, we also

note that Merton (e.g., 1976) maintained an interest in the

emerging structuralist theories and believed them related to his

own structural approach. We return to this branch below.)

In sum, this approach to social structure tended to

emphasize culture, and see structure as, at least in the long-run

equilibrium, a nonproblematic objectivation of cultural

patterns. This priority tended to be reversed in most approaches

that drew from Marx.

Structure and Class

Now we have said that Spencer was the ﬁrst to use the term

‘social structure,’ and this is indeed true. However, Marx had

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used similar language, and, with Engels in The German Ideology

(Marx and Engels, 1976[1845–1846]: 35f), had written “The

social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the

life-process of deﬁnite individuals, however, of these individ-

uals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s

imagination, but as they actually are; i.e., as they act, produce

materially, and hence as they work under de ﬁnite material

limits, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their

will.” The term translated as social structure, namely gesell-

schaftliche Gliederung (Werke, 3:25) carries more connotations

of organization or arrangement, and somewhat fewer of

a construction. Marx’s conception in its most general is to

emphasize what he called (in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’) the

‘ensemble of societal relations’ (Werke 3:7).

The social relations of paramount interest to Marx were

economic ones, more speciﬁcally, the social relations of

production. These relations appear in juridical form as property

relations, but in social form as the relations between classes. It

is this set of relations that Marx argued constituted the

‘economic structure’ of society; the ‘superstructure’ erected on

top of this includes legal, political, and ideological formations

that have some degree of homology to the underlying

economic structure (see Marxism). Thus as in the previous

conception of social structure, we have a close duality between

cultural understandings and patterns of relations. But while the

ﬁrst conception privileged the cultural realm as having

explanatory priority, here it is the pattern of relations that must

be understood ﬁrst.

Structure as Culture as Structure

These conceptions tend to establish a duality between what

one’s position in structure is, and what one does; we have seen

that in the Lintonian and Parsonian versions, this implies

a duality between social structure and aspects of culture. This

was taken to its logical vanishing point in the work of Anthony

Giddens. Giddens decided to claim as ‘structure’ in social

systems ‘rules and resources,’ arguing (e.g., 1979: pp. 64–66)

that structure exists only as the structural – indeed, the struc-

turing – properties of a social system. (Here he seems to have

been inﬂuenced by the conception of structuralism discussed

below.) Although intellectually pleasing, by placing a heap of

social structure in the heads of the actors (in the form of rules),

Giddens, wittingly or unwittingly, sent social theory careening

down a hill in which structure and culture would end up being

not simply dual, but indistinguishable. This was associated

with further confusions.

For whether it is the expectation that the duties of the

younger sister include looking after aging parents, or it is the

class relation that the proletariat does not own the means of

production but instead sells labor power, social structure was

easily assimilated to constraint and restriction of individuals.

As a result, especially in Britain, there arose a conviction that

social action could be analyzed as a two-part beast, one part the

structural constraint and the other, agency. Unlike the seem-

ingly homologous division of the self by Mead into the ‘me’

(including, ‘what they expect me to do’) and the ‘I’ (‘what I

actually did’), here most conceptions made a differentiation

between those actions that reproduced structure (and hence had

no valid claim to agency) and those that challenged,

transformed, or at least grumbled about the structure. But with

the transition from (1) structure being deﬁned as organized

relations to (2) structure being de ﬁned by its pernicious effects,

we leave the realm of sociology, and hence do not pursue this

approach further. Instead, we brieﬂy indicate how these top-

down conceptions of social structure inﬂuenced and then were

inﬂuenced by the development of two related concepts.

Continuities

Systems Theory

This conception of social structure inﬂuenced the development

of two relatively coherent schools of thought, treated separately

in this volume. The ﬁrst is systems theory ( see Systems Theory),

which also started with the organismic metaphor (indeed,

when Hobbes spoke of ‘social systems,’ he was using the then-

current term ‘system’ for ‘organ’). Modern systems theory, the

rise of which is often assumed to begin with Ludwig von

Bertalanffy’s (1968) work in the 1940s, explores the regulari-

ties that emerge when sets of elements – whether physiological,

environmental, or social – assume such a form that they

become self-regulating. In other words, they maintain them-

selves within a range of possibilities (a state space) through

self-correcting feedback mechanisms. In the context of social

science, systems theory explores how societies remain stable

and functioning as their constituent parts cooperate and adapt

to one another. What is important for us is the effects that this

had on notions of social structure.

Talcott Parsons ﬁrst popularized a systems approach to the

study of social structure in The Social System (1951). He went on

to propose four systemic necessities – basic functions that

systems must perform in order to maintain their existence – as

key to understanding the organization and development of

societies. Parsons tended to propose subsystems that were

deﬁned wholly functionally (and not structurally), and to

examine the media that various subsystems used to order their

relations or to interact with other subsystems. To the extent that

such systems thinking was taken seriously, it tended to lessen

interest in social structure as such (an emphasis preserved by

Merton, who maintained an ambivalent relation to the idea of

systems).

A further divergence of systems and structural thinking came

with the work of Luhmann. Once mentored by Parsons, Niklas

Luhmann developed a rival approach to systems theory whose

core is communication rather than action. Humans are not

coordinated into action systems but systems of observing and

sense making. Actors confront an external environment in which

massive amounts of information circulate. As they observe, select

out, and make sense of, bits of information, the system is

constituted (1996: p. 24). By observing the environment, the

observer distinguishes between himself and the environment,

and this act of distinction brings the observer into being. What is

essential for us are three points: ﬁrst, the components here are

acts of communication, not social relationships. Second, there is

a self-organization (autopoiesis) of this set of communications

that may be largely decoupled from the needs of organic indi-

viduals. Third, such systems are more than a mere analytical tool

that elucidates societal processes; rather, ‘systems exist’ (1995:

p. 12). Thus although Luhmann did argue that the major social

subsystems corresponded to well-understood realms (which he

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successively explored: law, art, politics, religion, economy and

education), we must be prepared for functional sub-sub-systems

that are potentially divorced from needs of individuals and even

from the role structure.

Structuralism

The second offshoot is the line of thought termed ‘structur-

alism’ (see Structuralism). This tradition in many ways

branched off of Comte and Durkheim; although it is generally

understood to have originated with the structural linguistics of

Ferdinand de Saussure, Saussure himself was inﬂuenced by

Durkheim’s Comtean division between statics and dynamics.

Saussure argued that words’ meanings arise not from an

intrinsic quality that links them to the phenomena they

represent, but from the systematic distinctions that differentiate

them (as signs or sounds) from one another in a linguistic

system (Saussure 1983[1916]). (Words are “purely differential

and deﬁned not by their positive content but negatively by their

relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise

characteristic is in being what the others are not” (Saussure

[1916]1983: p. 651).) This approach was then elaborated in

the science of phonology by Roman Jakobson, who examined

how the organization of sounds into systems conveys linguistic

meaning. In all cases, structuralism proposed two types of

relations (syntax/system, metonymy/metaphor, afﬁne/cognate)

that, brought into the realm of social structure, suggested

attention both to empirical relations of interaction (on the one

hand) and relations of structural equivalence – functional

substitutability (on the other).

Claude Levi-Strauss (1969[1949]) applied these structur-

alist principles to the study of social structure in The Elementary

Structures of Kinship. Here Levi-Strauss examined the structural

logics that organize complex patterns of kin relationships by

understanding them as formal laws of transfers (as a marriage

may be seen as the transfer of a daughter (or son) from one

lineage to another). Levi-Strauss went on to focus on cognitive

structures, but the encouraging results of this work on kinship

led to a common enthusiasm for ‘structure’ in the social sense

as well. There were relatively few rigorously structuralist

approaches to social structure, however, though we discuss one

below.

Structure as Patterns of Concrete Interaction

A second major approach divorces the idea of structure from

the abstract notion of an organized society. Instead, it sees

structure as concrete patterns of interaction among individual

persons that may exhibit greater or lesser levels of organization.

These social relationships are also attached to cultural mean-

ings of various sorts – for instance, subjective orientations or

cultural narratives. But these approaches tend to be more

bottom up, and suggest a plurality of structural elements that

may overlap with or without mutual reinforcement.

Structure as Forms of Interaction

This general approach was largely rooted in the work of Georg

Simmel. Like Durkheim and Marx, Simmel saw society (or

social life) as fundamentally about relations among persons.

But he eschewed the structural functionalists’ presupposition

that society is divided into subparts organized into a (more or

less) functional whole or system. Indeed, in his ﬁrst major

work, Simmel (1890: p. 13) challenges the organismic view of

society, which sees society as ‘an absolute unity.’ Rather, this

concept of ‘society’ is ‘only secondary to the real interaction of

its parts, only a result of it – as much in reality as in concep-

tualization.’‘The social organism,’ speaking loosely, must be

understood as but ‘a summary expression of the interaction of

the parts,’ and it is only these parts – individuals – that have

vitality. Rather than the process of differentiation leading to

simpler and more unitarily deﬁned individuals (as in Dur-

kheim’s conception), the true differentiation is internal to

individuals who straddle multiple social roles.

As a result, Simmel decoupled the concept of structure from

social groups’ functional roles in society, and proposed

a ‘formal sociology’ focused on patterns of interaction among

individuals. These interactions – continuously broken off and

remade – do not necessarily amount to ‘actual organization’

(1992[1908]: p. 33), nor must they conform to the routines of

society’s ‘service organs’ (Simmel, 1897). Thus, ‘Society’ for

Simmel is social interaction among persons “continuously

making connections and breaking them off and making them

again, a perpetual ﬂowing and pulsing that unites individuals,

even when it does not amount to actual organization” (1992

[1908]: 33). Social life consists of the living interactions,

constantly being made and remade, that pulse beneath and

beyond their ‘service organs’ (

Simmel, 1897). The regularity of

these interactions comes from their being stamped from

a limited set of forms.

This sociology of forms has been appealed to by some

network researchers as an aegis for their own efforts. However,

despite his focus on formal patterns like the dyad and the triad

(actually terms supplied by his translator), Simmel’s use of

‘form’ had a somewhat different meaning than a geometrical

structure. Hoping to extend a neo-Kantian approach to social

life, as he had previously attempted for the study of history,

Simmel meant to uncover the ‘a prioris’ for social interaction,

which he considered forms. Here he certainly meant to draw on

Kant’s idea of forms, quite possibly interpreted in the Platonic

way of Hermann Cohen, as something structured in the

subjectivity of actors – not a pattern of relationships itself.

While purely geometric abstractions may be useful sociological

tools, they cannot be separated from the complex subjective

orientations from which they tend to emerge. These objective

and subjective elements coalesce in ideal typical forms of

‘sociation’ (Vergesellschaftung): e.g., exchange, conﬂict, and

super- and subordination.

Most important for the science of social structure was that

Simmel, by not proposing a partition (or multiple partitions) of

society into subparts bound by relations, was able to see

structure as shifting patterns of interaction between individual

persons and thereby frame structural analysis as a conceptual

tool that could be applied to different types of connections. As

he (1955[1922]) explained in The Intersection of Social Circles,an

individual may stand simultaneously in multiple social groups

that overlap with each other at the site of that individual. Society

is a web of relationships that is not organized into a uniﬁed and

harmonious set of structures but into multiple overlapping,

often uncoordinated, and sometimes conﬂicting, ones.

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Structure as Conﬁgurations of Individuals

Thisline of research was continued by Leopold von Wiese (1932),

in his ‘theory of relations’ and his ‘theory of social conﬁgurations

(soziale Gebilde).’ Von Wiese’s work was freely translated by

Howard Becker, who rendered Gebilde as ‘plurality pattern.’ Von

Wiese’sconﬁgurations or structures were ensembles of social

relationships that had a particular form: he argued that there were

three main types of conﬁgurations: masses, groups, and corporate

bodies. These were structures, generally composed of other

structures, that were somewhat farther from the individual than

their component structures and consequently more abstracted.

(Sorokin’s(1962)own approach was similar in many ways,

emphasizing the components of social organization as opposed

to beginning with functional requirements.) The somewhat

exciting aspect of von Wiese’s work was the implication that one

could begin with social relationships and scale upward, ﬁrst to

simple conﬁgurations composed of relationships, and then larger

structures. This general approach has been used by Tilly (1998),

Martin (2009),andMartin and Lee (2010).

Structure as Stories

This type of approach may seem to have a great deal in

common with the structural approach of Harrison White

(1992), who was concerned with the question of how social

formations emerge. White’s ﬁrst book was a recasting of Levi-

Straussian kinship structures using permutation matrices. He

then applied this rigorous structuralist understanding of social

structure to other types of social structure in a pair of important

papers, the ﬁrst of which (White et al., 1976) was very inﬂu-

ential for social networks (see below); although the second

(Boorman and White, 1976) was more theoretically central, it

was more methodologically challenging and hence less inﬂu-

ential. (This line of work was continued by Breiger and Pattison

(e.g., 1986), among others.)

White went on to formulate a more general approach to

social organization, and here he drew more heavily on S.F.

Nadel’s (1957) perspective with its cultural grounding, which

became clear in White’s magnum opus, where he posited

a strict duality between structural form and cultural narratives.

Structural ties are bound by common identities. Each tie exists

both as a pair of individuals, as well as an identity – a story

about the basis of the tie’s solidarity that provides it continuity.

Small structures like dyads concatenate to create larger ones as

‘ties mesh with stories’ (2008: p. 27). The conversations that

take place in ties, the shared beliefs or understandings that bind

them, link up to those of other ties, presenting the opportunity

for those ties to concatenate into larger structures.

A somewhat related approach is seen in Ronald Burt’s

(1982) Structural Theory of Action, though the focus on action

takes him more to the Parsonian legacy of a dialogue with

economic theories of action. As with White, we start with

a focus on the actor who sees social structure sometimes as if it

were a jungle gym to be climbed, and sometimes as if it were an

undergrowth to be hacked away with a machete. Even more

than in the previous understandings, the duality of cultural and

structural understandings is one that in no way requires an

overarching order; rather, local ordering principles may

emerge, but even when they do, skilled actors may choose to

crack them.

Social Structure and Social Networks

As the discussion in the previous section makes clear, this

approach to social structure often dovetailed, inspired, or

turned into social networks research (see Social Networks).

Scholarship on social networks focuses on the relationships

between concrete actors rather than individuals, groups, or

roles. Although the foundational theoretical works in social

networks research (e.g., Barnes, 1954) envisioned the network

as sprawling, connecting, and all-encompassing form, and

hence diametrically opposed to the conventional ideas of well-

nested social sub-sub-systems and/or groups, networks have

often been understood as being a skeletal structure that should

reproduce the outlines of social structure conventionally

understood. This is, of course, an empirical question, but the

challenges to mounting a full-scale social network survey of

a population in order to determine the relation of networks to

role structures remain daunting.

Conclusion

Social structure ha s proved one of the most confusing theo-

retical terms in our lexicon; it tends to be among the most

abstract of our concepts, but has implications of solidity. It

often seem s to connote constraint o f individual actions, but is

itself nothing but a set of actions. It is regularly counterposed

to culture, but just as regularly appears to be simply the

second side of the same coin as culture. Perhaps the best that

can be said is that it appears to be an idea we cannot do

without.

See also: Action, Theories of Social; Class: Social; Exchange:

Social; Institutions; Interactionism, Symbolic; Luhmann’s

Social Systems: Meaning, Autopoiesis, and Interpenetration;

Macrosociology-Microsociology; Marxism in Contemporary

Sociology; Power in Society; Social Networks; Sociological

Theory; Status and Role: Structural Aspects; Structuralism.

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