Social Structure and Social System

Levi-Strauss and others used it to mean an underlying model, not directly observed, which the visible relations express. On this view structure is something the analyst constructs to explain the observed pattern, rather than the pattern itself.

An answer that notes the two usages and says which it is following is a strong answer.

Social system

The idea

The concept belongs above all to Talcott Parsons. A social system exists wherever two or more people interact in a situation, orient themselves to one another, and are guided by shared norms and values. It has parts; those parts perform functions; and the parts are interdependent, so that a change in one produces adjustment in the others.

Its elements

1. Actors, individuals or collectivities, occupying statuses.
2. Interaction between them, oriented to one another.
3. A situation, the environment in which they act.
4. Shared norms and values, which make interaction predictable.
5. Goals, pursued by the actors and the system.
6. Interdependence of the parts.
7. A boundary distinguishing the system from its environment.
8. A tendency to equilibrium, the system returning to balance after disturbance.

The functional prerequisites

Parsons held that every social system must solve four problems to survive, the AGIL scheme met in [The Functionalist Perspective]: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency or pattern maintenance. Law belongs chiefly to integration.

Levels

The concept scales. A family is a social system; a court is a social system; a whole society is a social system; and each is a subsystem of the next.

Structure and system compared

The relation, which is the point of teaching them together: a social system has a social structure. The structure is the arrangement of positions; the system is what happens when those positions are occupied and their occupants interact. Neither concept can be explained without the other, which is why they are one topic.

A worked example

Look at a district court first as a structure. Its parts are statuses: judge, additional judge, advocate, clerk of court, stenographer, process server, litigant, witness, accused. Each carries a role. The statuses stand in defined relations: who may address whom, who files with whom, who serves whom. There is a hierarchy, and there is a set of institutions, adjudication, the profession, the record, that the arrangement expresses. All of this can be described on paper, and it persists although every person in the building retires eventually.

Now look at it as a system. The parts interact. A delay in the process server's work changes the judge's board. A change in the appellate court's view changes what advocates argue. Shared norms make it predictable: everyone knows what will happen when a matter is called. There are goals, disposal, correctness, the appearance of fairness, that pull against one another. There is a boundary: the court is distinguishable from the society around it, though litigants cross it daily. And there is a tendency to equilibrium: disturb it with a strike or a vacancy and it adjusts, absorbs and returns to something like its previous state.

The two views answer different questions, and that is exactly why both concepts exist. Asked what a court is, describe the structure. Asked why a reform failed, describe the system: because the parts are interdependent, a change introduced at one point is absorbed by adjustments elsewhere, and the intended effect disappears. Anyone who has watched a procedural reform swallowed by the practice around it has seen a social system maintaining its equilibrium.

Criticism

1. The system concept assumes more integration than societies have. Real societies are loosely joined, full of contradictions, and not obviously tending to any equilibrium.
2. Equilibrium smuggles in conservatism. If the normal state is balance, change appears as disturbance and the model has no natural account of conflict. This is the objection in [The Conflict Perspective].
3. Structure can be reified. It is easy to slip into speaking of structure as a thing that acts, when it exists only in the repeated behaviour of people.
4. The individual disappears. Both concepts describe people as occupants of positions, which is the objection pressed by [Symbolic Interactionism].
5. They are hard to operationalise. Neither can be observed or measured directly, which makes empirical testing difficult.

Quick revision

1. Social structure: the enduring arrangement of statuses, roles, groups, institutions and norms, and the relations between them. Anatomy.
2. Social system: those parts interacting as a working, interdependent whole guided by shared norms. Physiology.
3. A social system has a social structure; each is defined against the other.
4. Structure is abstract, stable, external to the individual, normative, and changes slowly.
5. Radcliffe-Brown: structure as the actual network of relations. Levi-Strauss: structure as an underlying model.
6. Parsons is the theorist of the social system; its elements include actors, interaction, situation, shared norms, goals, interdependence, boundary and equilibrium; its prerequisites are AGIL.
7. Criticism: overstates integration, equilibrium is conservative, structure gets reified, the individual disappears, and neither is easily measured.

Test yourself

1. Define social structure and social system and state the relation between them. Social structure is the more or less enduring pattern in which the parts of a society, its statuses, roles, groups, institutions and norms, are arranged and related. A social system is a plurality of actors interacting in a situation under shared norms, whose parts function interdependently as a whole. The relation is that a social system has a social structure: structure is the arrangement, system is that arrangement in operation.

2. Why is social structure called abstract? Because it cannot be observed directly. What is observable is people behaving; the structure is inferred from the regularity of that behaviour and from the expectations people hold. It exists only in repeated performance and shared expectation, which is also why it would cease to exist, rather than merely stand empty, if enough people stopped performing their roles.

3. Give the elements of a social system. Actors occupying statuses; interaction between them oriented to one another; a situation or environment; shared norms and values that make interaction predictable; goals pursued by actors and by the system; interdependence of the parts; a boundary separating the system from its environment; and a tendency to return to equilibrium after disturbance.

4. How does the systems view explain the failure of a reform? By interdependence. Because the parts of a system act on one another and the whole tends towards equilibrium, a change introduced at one point provokes adjustments elsewhere that absorb it, so that the intended effect is dissipated and the system returns to something close to its former state. A procedural reform swallowed by the surrounding practice is the standard example.

5. Give two criticisms of the social system concept. That it assumes far more integration than real societies possess, which are loosely joined and full of contradictions; and that its central idea of equilibrium is conservative, since it makes stability the normal state and treats conflict and change as disturbances rather than as ordinary features of social life.