Society
Society
The concept of society has been formulated in various ways in sociological thought. At a general level there is some agreement as to the referent of the concept, but to abstract this common meaning from the welter of different and competing meanings of the term, we must first eliminate from consideration those usages which merely adopt the term as a shorthand label for the fabric of social phenomena in general. As the historical section of this article will show, the word is often used in this all-embracing sense. Indeed, “society” is frequently used merely to refer to an encompassing network of social relationships that enclose some more specific phenomenon which is the primary object of analysis. Thus, a student of race relations may insist that interracial behavior can be understood only as a part of the organization of the larger society in which it occurs and yet may fail to provide any analytical conception of the nature of this larger whole. It is only when analysts begin to isolate the attributes of the larger whole which we term “a society” that analytical treatments of the concept begin to emerge.
Definitions of society. Analytical definitions usually treat a society as a relatively independent or self-sufficient population characterized by internal organization, territoriality, cultural distinc-tiveness, and sexual recruitment. Specific definitions vary considerably in regard to which of these elements is emphasized. For example, some stress internal organization so strongly that they define the society as consisting in the organization and not in the population. Definitions also vary in the specific meaning given to such concepts as “self-sufficiency,” “organization,” and “culture.” Careful formulations must develop precise apparatus for specifying the units and boundaries of societies, for describing the nature of the links between units, and for establishing the mechanisms by which these links influence social processes within society. Nevertheless, the basic concept of the inclusive, self-sufficient group remains a constant element in most concepts of society.
When the concept of society is formulated in definitive detail, it is capable of entering into sociological thought in significant ways. Various conceptions of society define the essential problems of sociological analysis and thus shape conceptions of the subject matter of sociology.
The well-known functional conception of society put forth by Aberle and his colleagues will serve to illustrate a detailed concept of society and the way it enters into a system of sociological thought. According to these analysts, “A society is a group of human beings sharing a self-sufficient system of action which is capable of existing longer than the life-span of an individual, the group being recruited at least in part by the sexual reproduction of the members” (Aberle et al. 1950, p. 101). The authors proceed to specify four conditions that would terminate the existence of a society: biological extinction or dispersion of the members, apathy of the members, the war of all against all, and the absorption of the society into another society. These conditions enable the authors to specify the functional requisites of a society by enumerating the mechanisms that permit a society to exist, thus specifying the meaning of the core concept of a “self-sufficient system of action.” If the conditions terminating the existence of a society are to be avoided, mechanisms must develop to insure provision for sexual recruitment, provision for adequate relationship to the environment, role differentiation and the assignment of members to roles, communication, shared definitions of the world and of the goals of the society, normative regulation of means and of emotional expression, socialization, and the control of disruptive behavior. Thus, the authors have proceeded directly and logically from a definition of society to a conception of the essential concerns of societal analysis, even developing along the way some relatively specific hypotheses. For example, it is proposed that extremely rapid social change, such as revolution, tends to be accompanied by increases in the conditions terminating the existence of a society—mortality, morbidity, apathy, force, and fraud.
It is not surprising that definitions of society are so closely articulated with conceptions of the nature and functions of sociological thought, for from the very beginning of the analytical development of the concept, social theorists have found in “society” a convenient foundation for relating their specific problems to a larger context. Thus the student interested in elucidating the nature of bureaucracy may insist that it is embedded in a larger network of organization which determines, or at least influences, the emergence of bureaucracy and the forms which it assumes and which constrains purposive attempts to shape bureaucratic development.
If society is conceived as a set of external and constraining social forces, it is natural that the concept should be put to ideological use. He who would assert that some social institution ought to change or ought to be protected from change may point to the external and constraining forces of the larger society that encompass the institution, finding in those forces both an evaluative standard and an empirical justification for that standard. The emergence of analytical concepts of society has been inextricably bound up with the development of political ideology of this type.
History of the concept
In the Western world the concept of society as an entity distinct from the state emerged rather late. The age of reason, when philosophers began to search for secular foundations for critical analysis of existing political institutions, was one of the earliest periods when Western thinkers came to view society as something clearly prior to and outside of the state. The vehicle used to establish this differentiation was the social contract doctrine.
The utilitarian conception of society
In some of its forms the contract concept failed to distinguish between state and society. Thus Hobbes, wishing to insist that there is no middle ground between an organized state and the war of all against all, treated the social contract, the law of nature, and civil society as virtually identical. But the liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment wished to justify secular rational criticism of the state. In developing a critical doctrine, such thinkers as Locke began to distinguish the law of nature from the social contract that had formed the state. For Locke there is a layer of natural order guaranteed by man’s interdependence and his sense of the natural rights of all. It exists prior to and outside of positive political institutions; the state is a utilitarian device for insuring a more efficient, less cumbersome social order by developing specialized machinery for enforcing natural law. Such a theory squarely establishes the state as a dependent sector of a larger social order.
By a similar logic the critical philosophers sought to establish analytical distinctions between society and church and to separate church and state. The church was defined by reference to its utilitarian functions for the larger society, and these functions were distinguished from the functions of the state. Thus, through the use of the concepts “civil society” and “religious society,” church and state were defined as analytical functional aspects of a larger society.
Despite the incipient emergence of the conception of society as a set of interdependent organized functions, the idea of society developed during the Enlightenment was not entirely satisfactory, for the ultimate premises of argument continued to be the same premises from which Hobbes had derived the war of all against all. Enlightenment thought was founded on the concept of reason. The method of reason is analytical reduction; complex wholes must be reduced to their fundamental particles and the whole reassembled by a process of deduction from the laws governing particles. For society, the particle is the individual, and the law governing particles derives from the most essential quality of individuals, their natural reason. Each man uses his reason to rationally pursue his chosen ends. Parsons (1937) has termed this conception of society “utilitarian” and has shown that the attempt to derive social coherence and order from the faculty of reason in the individual was unsuccessful. The utilitarians could protect their Achilles heel, that is, the problem of conflicting ends, only by arbitrarily postulating such metaphysical concepts as the “natural identity of interests,” “natural rights,” and “the spirit of sociability.” [SeeUtilitarianism, article onsociological thought.]
The more perceptive figures of the Enlightenment—Hume, for example—recognized the inner weakness of the utilitarian conception. However, only a sweeping new movement of thought placed the concept of society on a less atomistic foundation.
Romanticism and organismic conceptions
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, and especially in the period after the French Revolution, many social theorists became disillusioned with individual reason and the reductive methods of the analytical philosophers. As the philosophy of romanticism became more influential, a conservative theory of society developed which stressed the unity of the integrated whole. Society came to be viewed as an organic growth, embodying the practical and profound wisdom of convention and tradition. Being a cumulative organic product, society has an organic unity. Abstract analytical segments cannot be separated from the whole and arbitrarily changed; to do so is to destroy the complex interdependence of the web of social life.
Again we have a concept of society as a larger whole, containing within it the standards by which particular phenomena are to be evaluated, but in this formulation the concept was put to conservative use. By assuming that the totality has an integrated character, one can effectively refute demands for arbitrary and rapid change in the parts.
The organismic conception sharpened the concept of society as a set of interdependent functions (which was already implicit in the philosophy of the Enlightenment) and drew attention to a new element, cultural tradition, as a functionally necessary part of a society. The idea of a cultural order as a constituent element of a society was developed further by August Comte in the early nineteenth century. Comte sought to synthesize Enlightened and Romantic modes of thought. Accordingly, he incorporated into his sociological system elements of classic liberal thought, such as the idea of a level of order arising from man’s natural economic interdependence, and the concept of a larger society from which government derives its legitimacy. At the same time he refused to derive the larger society from individual reason and the concurrence of interests. Drawing on organismic conservatism, he found in cultural tradition the specifically collective factor in society. For Comte, the formation of any society presupposed a system of common opinions about nature and man. The Enlightenment philosophers, by destroying the normative order of the religiously based society, had loosed anarchy upon the world. Comte argued that the reformation of society required the creation of a new, scientifically based moral order. Again we see an example of the ideological use of the concept of society. Society remains a set of external and constraining forces by which we are to judge the acceptability of political ideology. The concept enters into sociological thought as a set of fundamental premises from which we are to derive the social constraints on political action.
Comte’s plans for the reconstitution of society revolved about ideas for the reconstruction of religious, familial, educational, and political institutions. Embedded in his program is a contribution to the conceptual elaboraton of the idea of society. Comte did not believe that a bare consensus is a sufficient condition for organized collective life. The consensus must be organized in an institutional order that symbolizes, teaches, enforces, and implements moral ideas and rules.
The belief that society is an institutional order which embodies a fundamental set of cultural ideas was prominent in another branch of romantic thought which might be termed “idealism.” Idealism, which was especially prominent in nineteenth-century German thought, stresses the cultural distinctiveness of each society. A society reflects a peculiar Geist or spirit that is embodied in its distinctive traditions and institutions. The spirit of a society progressively unfolds in history. Once again the ideological implications are clear: proposals for change are to be evaluated according to whether they are consonant with the cultural distinctiveness of the larger society. [See the biographies ofBosanquetandHegel.]
The economic conception of society
Marx was an heir to the idealistic tradition, and the concept of society entered into his thought in a similar way. For Marx, as for the idealists, the elements of a society are closely intertwined into a complex and distinctive whole. For Marx, as for his idealistic predecessor Hegel, society is undergoing continuous transformation according to a logic of immanent development. The ideological implication is that social action is to be judged in relation to its correspondence to the immanent forces of change within society. At this point the similarity to idealism ceases, since for Marx the notion of a spirit or Geist is as metaphysical an explanation for the collective as the utilitarian postulate of natural order.
According to Marx, society exists in the concrete relations between social groups and not in the concepts used by philosophers to summarize these relations. The Geist is a mere analytical construct of the observer. The real foundations of society and the real springs of social development lie in the economic relations between men. The idea that the society outside of state and church is largely economic in character did not originate with Marx. The original utilitarian conception of society had stressed man’s natural economic interdependence as the source of order which is logically prior to the state. However, Marx developed the idea of society as an economy in rich detail.
The economic conception of society starts with the assumption that man’s most fundamental problem is to provide for his material needs. To do so, man must cooperate with other men by entering into relations of production. Stable relations of production constitute economic structures. Economic structures are variable, but they generally involve two crucial phenomena: the division of men into classes and the exploitation of one class by another. Stratification and exploitation make the continuing stability of economic structures precarious, and for this reason whole complexes of compulsive apparatus develop to support the economic order. The state, law, religion, and ideology function to bring temporary stability into inherently unstable situations. Since economic structure is more basic, it can be termed the “substructure” of society; and the supporting institutions may be termed the “superstructure,” since they are derivative in the sense that they are responses to the problems of economic relations. In the theory of substructure and superstructure, we see one of the first and most comprehensive theories of society as an institutional order. [SeeEconomy and society.]
Conflict theory
The Marxian conception of society is one of a larger set of conceptions that can be combined under the heading of “conflict theory” (Martindale 1960). The premise of conflict theory is that men are organisms, and as such they must compete for access to the resources of life. The struggle for existence does not occur between isolated individuals but between groups. In various versions of conflict theory the competing units may be families, bands, classes, nations, or races, depending on the special interests of the analyst or the stage of social development under analysis. As the conflict between groups becomes stabilized or organized or regulated, we may speak of the emergence of a structured society. Society is viewed as an organizational device for relating populations of organisms to an environment, and in this sense conflict theory may be said to adopt an ecological perspective. In conflict theory the concept of society enters into sociological thought as a means of relating social life to natural forces. In this way social scientists were able to develop a less metaphysical, more naturalistic account of society than had been produced by either Enlightened or Romantic philosophers. [SeeConflict.]
To see society as a device for regulating the struggle for existence and for relating man to his environment is not necessarily to renounce interest in cultural and normative phenomena. Sumner’s classic account (1906) views society as a product of antagonistic cooperation between competing organisms and groups; but the phenomenon that emerges to stabilize, organize, and regulate cooperation is a complex of customs, mores, conventions, laws, and institutions. The theory remains naturalistic in insisting that normative complexes develop gradually and naturally as a response to environmental problems. They do not emanate from cultural spirits, nor are they created de novo from a social contract.
Conflict theory is too general a rubric to imply any particular ideological purpose. It is apparent that some forms of conflict theory are susceptible to use in support of racial or nationalistic ideologies. It is less often remarked that conflict theory was often used in the development of liberal doctrines.
The perspective of conflict theory dominated sociological thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its acceptance is closely associated with the impact of the Darwinian revolution in biology and the popularity of evolutionary modes of thought. It was in connection with the use of conflict theory as an evolutionary doctrine that sociological thinkers were able to place classic liberal ideas on a naturalistic foundation.
Emergence of the “utilitarian society.”
Nineteenth-century evolutionary theory was manifold, and its devotees worked out developmental sequences for every institutional sphere of society. Insofar as the evolutionary school had any common theory of the development of total societies, it was the idea of movement toward the development of larger and more inclusive wholes. By processes of consolidation, conquest, incorporation, and differentiation, societies come to increase in scale and complexity. As this occurs, unregulated conflict between small fractionated groups becomes less important, and the regulation of internal process becomes more important. Further, as the relations with the environment and other societies become more stabilized and the larger society becomes more consolidated, new forms of social organization become possible. Social organization can be built upon processes of free discussion, free exchange, and the pursuit of individual interests. The inflexibility of the “cake of custom” and rigid military organization becomes nonadaptive; only a looser framework of organization can improve the adaptation of society to the environment by unleashing the forces of creativity and innovation.
In this brand of evolutionary theory we see the re-emergence of the concept of the “utilitarian society.” However, in nineteenth-century thought the concept was no longer used as an analytical definition of the nature of any society, but as an increasingly accurate description of a historically emergent form of society.
Not all of the social analysts writing at the end of the nineteenth century viewed the emergence of the utilitarian society with equanimity. According to some analysts, the breakdown of old forms of organization meant the loss of what had once provided society with integration, coherence, and meaning. The utilitarian society, founded upon the industrial revolution, the capitalist system, and the market mentality, fails to provide for an ethical standard outside of the individual or a viable source of social cohesion.
In 1887 Tönnies incorporated this type of perspective into his famous dichotomy between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In the Gemeinschaft (usually translated as “community”) men are held together by communal feeling and organic ties. In the Gesellschaft (usually translated as “society”) organic ties are replaced by artificial ties of calculating self-interest. [SeeCommunity-society continua.]
Thus, from varied ethical perspectives and varied ultimate premises, social theorists came to conceptualize modern society as a mere collection of individuals united only through ties of self-interest. Spencer, working in the naturalistic tradition of conflict theory, and Tonnies, drawing on a more philosophical tradition, saw modern society as a collection of wills.
The independent reality of society
In 1893 Durkheim severely attacked both Spencer and Tonnies and reaffirmed the reality of society as an entity. Durkheim retained an evolutionary perspective; he accepted the notion of a developmental drift from a society based on very direct ties and commonalities to a society based upon more indirect interdependencies. However, he insisted that a modern society, founded on the extensive division of labor, cannot be conceptualized as a mere collection of the wills of isolated individuals. It is not a collection of contracts based upon self-interest; it is no less organic than earlier forms of society. It remains an entity sui generis (Durkheim 1893).
Durkheim wrote at a time when the young discipline of sociology was struggling for establishment in an academic setting. The problem for the sociologist was to establish the independence of his field from economics, political science, and psychology. Thus, it was essential to establish society as a set of external and constraining forces, more inclusive than the economic order, outside of the state, and independent of the sum of its individual members. Durkheim adopted the strategy of stressing the independent reality of such social facts as vital rates, currents of opinion, and established conventions. Social facts require explanation at their own level. It follows that society is an entity which cannot be reduced to a set of members or a set of economic contracts between members. It exists in the complex relations and interdependencies which unite its members into an organic whole and which in turn are reflected in a collective consciousness and a collective moral order. Persons who are drawn together in a web of interdependency interact as moral beings and create a body of collective representations of reality and regulative rules. The resulting complex regulates the utilitarian economic order and the actions of persons and is external to them.
Other analysts of the era developed similar techniques for identifying the reality of the social. Simmel found a social level in the mutual influence that interacting persons have upon each other. Mutual influence comes to have coherent forms, and thus, as people interact, they create society ([1902-1917] 1950, part 1).
Weber, although he insisted on relatively nominalistic definitions of collective entities, developed a perspective of the social order that gave a somewhat independent reality to social processes. As persons orient themselves toward each other, social relationships form; complexes of social relationships constitute a social order. Drawing upon Tonnies, Weber suggested that when actors take a rational orientation to each other, they create a Gesellschaft, whereas when they adopt communal solidary attitudes, they form a Gemeinschaft. But in either case the resulting social order is not a mere collection of wills or economic interests, since it is given stability by administrative organization, shared orientations to systems of status, and shared beliefs in the legitimacy of the order (Weber [1922] 1957, part 1).
The social-psychological approach
In the United States a social-psychological school emerged which found in the concept of symbolic interaction the key to the integrated treatment of society and the social person. Cooley, Mead, and others explored the development of personality and society as they emerge through interaction. Their analysis permitted a novel conceptualization of human society as a symbolically regulated process. Mead, for example, traced the process of becoming a social person. The human being comes to acquire a social personality as he learns to communicate symbolically. As he learns to adopt the perspectives of others toward himself, he is also learning to regulate his own activity symbolically by defining his self and his acts in appropriate ways. It is through participation in that complex of differentiated and interrelated roles called “society” that we develop our distinctly human capacities and identities. It is through adopting, playing, and imaginatively construing social roles that we develop social personality. Thus, self and society are intimately connected through the concept of role. Further, the analyst may make the transition in either direction; he may stress either socialization, that is, the process by which the individual organism is socially formed, or he may stress the process by which interacting persons create and transform society. The human capacity for symbolic control over action and sympathetic understanding of the action of others makes it possible for men to innovate, to appreciate innovation, and to incorporate innovations into complex networks of symbolically regulated activity (Mead 1934).
Society as process
The developments of the decades when sociology emerged as a discipline can be summarized by reaffirming that the most sophisticated analysts converged on the idea that society is ultimately an organized process. If society is more than the sum of its individual participants, its reality must lie in the organized relations that emerge as men interact. The units of these relations are not people but activities. Even Durkheim, with his insistence on the independent reality of the social, recognized that the coherence of society rests on the interdependence of activities and the moral regulation created by interaction.
The new emphasis on process did not eliminate the ideological component of the concept of society. To a greater or lesser extent, all of the thinkers of the formative period saw in society a standard for evaluating the acts and programs of individuals and other social units. In some instances the ideological functions of sociological method are quite plain, as in the case of the sociological jurisprudence of Ehrlich (1913). Ehrlich saw external and constraining social reality as existing in the “living law.” A spontaneous moral order develops in the associations and groups of society as men live and work cooperatively. It is this inner order of society that is the yardstick for measuring the value of the positive law of the state. Sociological jurisprudence is conceived as a corrective to conceptual jurisprudence. The latter, in its reliance on concepts and logic, is likely to become out of step with the real moral order of society and thus fail to respond to pressing social interests and problems. [SeeLaw, article onthe legal system.]
In other cases the ideological affinities of the concept of society as process are more subtle. For example, the popularity of the social-psychological approach in the United States cannot be separated from its capacity to provide a sociological foundation for modern liberalism. Classic laissez-faire liberalism had been founded on the utilitarian conception of society as a collection of wills. Sociologistic conceptions are more suited to the defense of either conservatism or radicalism, depending on whether social reality is conceived as an irreducible obstacle or an inexorable transformative force. The problem for modern liberalism was to justify individual freedom in the context of social regulation. The concept of society as an emergent regulative process, founded on the responsible actions of social persons, is consistent with the program of modern liberalism.
Some contemporary approaches
Despite the developments of the formative period of sociology, relatively little progress was made in defining the concept of a society. “Society” remained a term for designating an emergent and constraining level of reality. Until recent decades, the main purpose of analysis was to examine the nature of social reality and its modes of constraint, not to define the units and boundaries of concrete societies as entities.
Society as a social system
The major technical device used in recent years to attack the problem of defining a society has been the concept of a social system. A social system is an organized set of interdependent social persons, activities, or forces. It is called a system because its organization includes mechanisms for maintaining an equilibrium or some other constancy in the relations between the units. From another perspective such mechanisms can be seen as boundary-maintaining mechanisms, for systems can be isolated as separate entities only if they maintain some constancies in the face of environmental change, that is, if they maintain some boundaries vis-à-vis the environment. If every event within a system were a direct consequence of some event outside the system, it would be impossible to draw a boundary for the system; it would be, in effect, a mere unit in a larger complex. The concept of a social system seems ideally suited for use in defining a society analytically, for it contains within it the crucial concepts of “unit” and “boundary”; to define society as a special sort of social system automatically prepares the way for identification of its units and boundaries.
The idea of a social system was used by earlier thinkers, notably Spencer and Pareto, but it has been formulated in greater detail and applied to the present problem by the modern school of structural-functionalism. The paper by Aberle and his colleagues cited earlier in this article is an example of the functional mode of attack on the problem. The approach of that paper has been more fully elaborated by Levy (1952; 1966) and is similar to a definition proposed by Parsons: “A social system … which meets all the essential functional prerequisites of long term persistence from within its own resources will be called a society” (1951, p. 19).
The key concept in these definitions is “self-sufficiency.” All systems are self-sufficient to some degree; the definition of the term requires some mechanisms of self-maintenance. The isolation of total societies involves the search for global complexes with the highest degree of self-maintenance and the least reliance on other social systems for their requisite resources. Local communities, administrative units, institutional spheres, and bureaucratic organizations are all relatively dependent segments of a larger whole. Total societies are dependent only on other types of systems: personalities, cultural traditions, and a physical environment. [SeeSystems analysis.]
Overlapping process systems
The search for the self-sufficient society may be futile. In fact, the concept of a society with exclusive boundaries may be obsolete. This is not to say that it is not valid to do comparative study over very large aggregates. Indeed, one of the achievements of twentieth-century empirical social science is the thorough demonstration that society is real in the sense that social variables relate to each other differently in “societies” with different characteristics. In this sense the concept of society no longer rests on conjecture. However, at the theoretical level the search for a universally valid definition of the nature and boundaries of a society as a self-contained unit may obscure the complexity of social life.
Many of the historic and contemporary problems in the conceptual analysis of society may be clarified by viewing society as a complex of overlapping process systems. We may abstract from the concrete interaction of concrete social persons a number of types of interaction systems. Economic, religious, political, educational, and other types of activity come to cohere into partially independent systems with units, boundaries, and mechanisms of their own. These systems overlap; and when a relatively broad range of such systems cohere around a common population, we may speak of a society. There is no reason to suppose, however, that this society will be self-contained, that it will not overlap with other societies, or that its boundaries will be uniform across its constituent systems.
It would be a mistake to regard the notion of a self-sufficient society as intrinsically absurd. One might be tempted to argue that any society engages in at least some trade and cultural exchange with at least one other society, and that therefore there are no self-sufficient societies. This argument, however, misconstrues the concept of self-sufficiency. To call a society self-sufficient implies not that it is isolated but that its social system contains within itself cultural materials and role opportunities sufficient for carrying on controlled relations with an environment (Parsons 1966).
The truth or falsehood of alternative conceptions of society is not at issue here. Rather, we are contrasting alternative ways of approaching the problems of societal analysis. Thus, an approach based on the concept of social system can be criticized for failing to make several important phenomena immediately problematic. But this is very far from saying that it causes logical difficulties so severe as to prevent analysis of these phenomena altogether.
The alternative to the social system approach is to start with the concept of population. This involves making problematic not only the degree to which the activities of a population are organized into systems, but also the units and boundaries of these systems and their forms of interdependence. Thus the emergence of a bounded, unified social system is no longer assumed but becomes an object of inquiry.
The boundaries of a society are usually drawn at the outer limits of the interdependencies and commonalities that give it coherence. Special criteria are often used to define particular types of society. Thus, in the case of the nation-state the limits of political jurisdiction are taken to define the limits of the political system and, thus, of the society. In fact, if societies are viewed as complexes of overlapping process systems, it becomes natural to accept the fact that societal boundaries are irregular. From this, one is led to consider the sources and consequences of variation in the scope of systemic boundaries (for instance, by examining the consequences of the involvement of national states in international colonial development).
Another single-criterion approach to defining the boundaries of the societal population is to adopt the social system’s own normatively defined concept of membership (Parsons 1966). To this it may be objected that the members of a societal population may be involved in well-organized social systems that crosscut membership boundaries. The common solution to this problem is to treat the basic unit of society as the “person-in-role,” and then to allege that behavior in boundary-crossing roles is external to the society. One then attempts to identify the mechanisms for segregating roles and regulating members who cross societal boundaries. Again, the focus is on how such regulation is accomplished, not on the conditions under which it will emerge or the consequences of its absence.
To define society as a set of overlapping process systems also permits flexibility in the analysis of the units of society. The utilitarian conception of society was based on the notion of the isolated individual. As early as Comte, the wisdom of this approach was called into question. Comte saw the utility of beginning with more socially relevant units; for him, the unit of society was the family. Other analysts continued this tradition in their treatment of the communal aspects of society. Later, with the development of processual concepts, segments of the actions of social persons came to be used as units of analysis. Thus, Parsons has spoken of the units of social systems as actors in roles (1951, pp. 24-26).
If society is viewed as a complex of overlapping process systems, it would appear that the ultimate social unit is the act. However, it does not follow that the intermediate units of different process systems will be the same. Society does not have a single type of unit, but many: its constituent systems have units of different types, and these differences can be of considerable analytical importance. For example, many of the strains in modern societies derive from the fact that, although families are the molecular units of modern status systems, rational market and bureaucratic systems are predicated on the evaluation of specific performances in roles. In consequence, competing bases of evaluation are present in society.
The links between units may also vary from system to system. Theories of society have postulated six major types of links between units: emotional attraction, orientations of actors to each other, shared cognitive and evaluative perspectives, mutual influence or coercion, economic or functional interdependence, and common participation in an environment. There is no reason to assume that any of these types of links constitutes the one true mechanism of social coherence. On the other hand, one or another of them may be dominant in particular process systems. This possibility is itself a source of important sociological problems: we are led to ask such questions as “What is the consequence of the expansion of systems of economic interdependence beyond the boundaries of systems based upon emotional attachments?”
The notion of a set of overlapping process systems is not by itself a satisfactory model of society. It leaves open the question of the relation between a society and other social groupings. How, for instance, is a society to be distinguished from a community? The term community has been used in a variety of ways. For some, communities are locally based units of a larger society; for others, “community” refers to some aspect of society, such as its solidarity (that is, communal) or spatial components. Others, particularly in the German sociological tradition, distinguish communities as relatively solidary types of societies [seeCommunity-society continua].
It is legitimate to use the term “community” to refer to both locally based units and some aspect of the larger society. The former usage is well established in English speech. The latter usage is sometimes said to be justified by the need to establish a distinction between societies and other social entities. Institutions and special-purpose associations are said not to be societies because they have no communal components. The concept of population can be used in a similar way to distinguish societies from other sets of systems of social processes, since the latter may have sets of members without having populations in the biotic sense. A society is sustained by a population. To establish the boundaries of a societal population we may adopt a definition of population quite similar to the one employed by bioecologists. A population consists of the self-perpetuating inhabitants of a territorial area. In this context the term “self-perpetuation” implies mating, and the term “inhabitant” implies relatively permanent residence. Thus, the boundaries of a population that sustains a society are established by the limits of the largest territorial area within which mating is common and residence is relatively permanent.
These criteria establish a model that, while it does not completely correspond to any empirical population, does provide a means of clearly excluding types of groups that are not societies. Many groups do not qualify as societies because membership in them is not conferred by birth. Further, members of local communities quite often cross community boundaries for the purpose of mating and establishing new residences, while members of societies do not often cross societal boundaries for these purposes—indeed, that is why they form what I have called a population.
To start with the concept of a population is not to define a society as consisting in its population. The society is not the population but the complex systems of action in which the units of the population participate.
The next problem for the analyst is to establish the boundaries of these systems of action. In a highly organized society, which closely controls the relations between the units of its population and members of other populations, it may be useful to treat only relations within the societal population as internal to the society. On the other hand, when societal systems become very permeable to social influences that transcend population boundaries, it is more realistic to consider the society to have irregular boundaries and to overlap other societies.
Historically, conceptions of society have had ideological implications and overtones. Perhaps this conception of society as a set of overlapping process systems is not an exception, for it seeks to call attention to the problems of the emergence of larger and more inclusive networks of social organization. As man has expanded his ecological niche there has been a continuous growth of national organization that transcends the less inclusive traditional solidarities. At the same time, cosmopolitan and international organization has outrun national boundaries. The modern world is regularly upset by shock waves reverberating from local traditional cleavages through national political systems; sometimes these shock waves reach the international arena. If sociological analysis is adequately to represent the constraints imposed by this emergent global level of social reality, its analytical conceptions must not be inflexibly tied to the concept of the national boundary.
Leon H. Mayhew
[See alsoCooperation; Culture; Evolution; Integration; International integration; Natural law; Political sociology; Social contract; Social Darwinism; Sociology, article onthe development of sociological thought; and the biographies OfComte; Cooley; Durkheim; Hobbes; Locke; Marx; Mead; Mill; Simmel; Spencer; Sumner; Tönnies; Weber, Max.]
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Aberle, David F. et al. 1950 The Functional Prerequisites of a Society. Ethics 60:100-111.
Durkheim, Émile (1893) 1960 The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, III.: Free Press. ? First published as De la division du travail social.
Ehrlich, Eugen (1913) 1936 Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law. Translated by Walter L. Moll with an introduction by Roscoe Pound. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ? First published as Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts.
Levy, Marion J. JR. 1952 The Structure of Society. Princeton Univ. Press.
Levy, Marion J. JR. 1966 Modernization and the Structure of Society: A Setting for International Affairs. 2 vols. Princeton Univ. Press.
Martindale, Don 1960 The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Mead, George H. (1934) 1963 Mind, Self and Society From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Univ. of Chicago Press. ? Published posthumously.
Parsons, Talcott (1937) 1949 The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott 1951 The Social System. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott 1966 Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Simmel, Georg (1902-1917) 1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, III.: Free Press. ? First published in German.
Sumner, William Graham (1906) 1959 Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. New York: Dover. ? A paperback edition was published in 1960 by New American Library.
TÖnnies, Ferdinand (1887) 1957 Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press. ? First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper.
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