Unit 4 Introduction
Reading: Chapter 4 in Macionis, pp. 95 - 117
Unit 4 introduces how our interaction with others becomes stablized and normalized into patterns. These patterns form a structure, one of the domains that makes up society. Although we generally are aware of social structure, we often don't think about it much as we go through our days interacting with others, and yet much of what we do would be impossible without a basic social structure. Our social structure creates statuses, and in almost all of our interaction with others, we do so representing specific statuses. Others tend to see us not just as an individual, but also as a brother, as a classmate, as a construction worker or as a church organist, to name just a few possible statuses. Each of these statuses has particular characteristics associated with them, and when we occupy these statuses, we take on those characterisitics and others begin to interpret our actions based in part on what they know about those characterisitics. Through the interpretation of others, we start to "become" the status.
 Fig. 4-1: Red's Juke Joint, Clarksdale, Mississippi |
None of us occupy just one status; we interact with many other people in a variety of statuses, and thus our individual personalities are shaped by the unique set of experiences that each of us has. The wide variety of statuses that exist combine to set up a complex social structure, and that structure opens up opportunities for us (by creating legitimate statuses that we can occupy), but also sets boundaries (by channeling us away from illegitimate or undesireable statuses). We can go against social structure, but often find the road is littered with landmines when we do.
For example, in our society the ordinary course is for a male and female of roughly the same age to get married, and when they do we generally celebrate this and their path is made easy. If, however, a woman aged 50 wants to marry a man aged 20, this seems somewhat out of sorts. They could probably do it, but their path would be hard -- they may encounter resistence from relatives and friends, they may find some clergy who are unwilling to perform the marriage, and the like. Their path is possible but somewhat constrained. If a man wants to marry another man, their path is even more cumbersome. They may have to organize many others to demand that laws be changed to allow members of the same sex to marry, they may have a difficult time finding someone willing to perform the ceremony, and they may have to endure protestors and threats in order to get what they want. They may be able to achieve the result, but at great personal cost, and only after they fundamentally alter existing social structures.
Through social interaction, we construct social structures. Unit 4 introduces the term "social construction of reality" to describe the processes through which social interaction becomes converted into social structure. As human beings, our interactions are not random. They are governed by our culture and our social structure, which provide us opportunities to interact in meaningful ways and place constraints on who we interact with and how we relate to others. Unit 4 introduces some of the elements of social structure, including social statuses and social roles, and then considers ways in which interaction occurs between individuals. Dramaturgical analysis is a theory that helps us understand interaction in detail. The Thomas theorem is also presented in this unit, an important insight that posits that it is our perceptions, not objective facts, that motivate our behavior.
In unit 4, you will begin to understand the architecture of society, how we construct society, and how society constructs us.
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