Society: Meaning, Characteristics and Types
Chapter Ten
Syllabus topic 1.5.1, "Society (Meaning & Characteristics, Types of Society, Pluralistic Nature of Indian Society- Linguistic, Regional, Ethic & Cultural Pluralism)". This chapter is the first three; the pluralism half is the next chapter.
Pages 43 to 46 of 451
In one line
A society is not a place and not a group of people; it is the whole web of relationships among people who live a common life together.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: society is the largest and most general system of social relationships within which human beings live a common life, marked by mutual awareness and interaction, interdependence, cooperation and conflict, a shared culture, a territory in most cases, and a continuity that outlasts the lifetime of any of its members. MacIver and Page define society as the web of social relationships, and add that it is always changing.
The definitions, and the one distinction that matters
- MacIver and Page: society is a system of usages and procedures, of authority and mutual aid, of many groupings and divisions, of controls of human behaviour and of liberties; this ever-changing complex system is called society, and it is the web of social relationships.
- Talcott Parsons: society is a total complex of human relationships in so far as they grow out of action in terms of means and end relationship, intrinsic or symbolic.
- Morris Ginsberg: a society is a collection of individuals united by certain relations or modes of behaviour which mark them off from others who do not enter into these relations or who differ from them in behaviour.
The common element is the emphasis on relationships. That is the point on which the beginner's error turns.
Society is not the people. A crowd at a railway station is a collection of people and not a society. What makes a society is not the bodies but the relationships between them, which is why a society persists although every one of its members is replaced within a century.
Society is not a country or a state. A state is a political organisation with a government and defined territory. A society is the web of relationships. India is one state and contains many societies; a society may straddle borders. Confusing them costs marks and is easy to avoid by remembering that society is prior: there were societies long before there were states.
The characteristics of society
An examiner asking for the characteristics expects six to eight of these, each with a sentence.
- Society consists of people. Obvious but worth stating, since a society has no existence apart from its members even though it is not identical with them.
- Mutual awareness and interaction. People in a society know of one another and act with reference to one another. Without interaction there is aggregation, not society.
- Likeness. MacIver held that likeness is the primary basis of social life: people associate first with those they resemble in language, custom or belief.
- Difference. Equally necessary. A society of people identical in every respect could not divide labour, and the family, the first society, rests on difference of sex and age.
- Interdependence. Members depend on one another for subsistence, protection and companionship, and the dependence grows as the division of labour grows.
- Cooperation and conflict. Both are present in every society, and neither can be removed. Conflict is not a failure of society; it is one of its permanent processes, as [Conflict] shows.
- Society is abstract. It cannot be seen or touched. What can be seen is people and their behaviour; the web of relations is inferred.
- A shared culture. Language, norms, values, beliefs and material objects held in common, which is what [Culture] takes up.
- Dynamic. No society is static. This is the subject of Module III.
- Social control. Every society maintains its own order through custom, morality, religion, public opinion and law, which is Module II.
- A territory, usually, and continuity. Most societies occupy a definite territory; all of them outlive their individual members.
Society: Meaning, Characteristics and Types
Types of society
MU does not print one classification, so the answer should give the main ones and say what each is based on.
By subsistence: the standard evolutionary sequence
The most used classification, associated with Gerhard Lenski, arranges societies by how they get their living, on the ground that this shapes almost everything else.
| Type | Basis of subsistence | Typical features |
|---|---|---|
| Hunting and gathering | Foraging wild food | Small, nomadic, little surplus, little inequality, kinship is the whole structure |
| Pastoral | Herding domesticated animals | Nomadic or semi-nomadic, some surplus, some inequality, trade with settled peoples |
| Horticultural | Cultivation with hand tools | Settled villages, surplus, beginnings of hereditary rank |
| Agrarian | Plough, irrigation, animal power | Large, cities, writing, a state, sharp class and caste stratification, organised religion |
| Industrial | Machine production and inanimate energy | Urban, mass education, formal law, occupational specialisation, nuclear family |
| Post-industrial | Services, information, knowledge | Employment in services, information as the key resource, high mobility |
The great advantage of this classification is that it explains the pattern rather than only naming it: inequality is slight in hunting and gathering societies because there is no storable surplus to accumulate, and it becomes sharp in agrarian societies because there is.
By solidarity: Durkheim
Mechanical solidarity in small undifferentiated societies, where people are alike and held together by shared belief. Organic solidarity in complex societies, where people are unlike and held together by interdependence. Worked in [Durkheim: Division of Labour and Social Solidarity].
By type of association: Tonnies
Gemeinschaft, community, where relationships are personal, permanent, based on kinship and locality, and valued for themselves. Gesellschaft, association, where relationships are impersonal, contractual, specialised and entered into for a purpose. Tonnies held that modern history is a movement from the first to the second, and this is the classification that speaks most directly to law, because contract belongs to Gesellschaft.
Society: Meaning, Characteristics and Types
By openness: open and closed
A closed society fixes a person's position at birth and permits little movement; a caste society is the type case. An open society permits movement on the basis of what a person does; a class society approximates it. Real societies are always mixtures, and this is developed in [Social Stratification].
Other bases
By size and settlement: rural, urban, tribal. By political form: tribal, feudal, capitalist, socialist.
A worked example
An old person can no longer work. Who supports them?
In an agrarian society, the joint family does, and the arrangement is enforced by custom, by the fact that the family holds the land, and by the certainty of public disgrace. No law is needed.
In an industrial society, adult children have migrated for work, the household is nuclear, and neighbours are strangers. The customary machinery has gone, and what appears in its place is legal and administrative: a pension, a maintenance obligation, a tribunal to enforce it.
In a post-industrial society the machinery becomes more formal still: insurance, savings instruments, care institutions, and rules regulating each.
The example is worth keeping because it shows the whole logic of this subject in one page. The need did not change; the social structure changed, and law appeared exactly where the informal arrangement withdrew. That is a proposition an examiner rewards, and it is the theme of [Formal and Informal Social Control].
What society is NOT
Not a group. A group is any set of interacting people with a sense of belonging, and a society contains thousands of them. Society is the widest system within which the groups sit.
Not a community. A community is a group of people living in a particular locality with a sense of belonging to it. A society may contain many communities, as [Community, Association and Institution] explains.
Not the state. The state is one institution within a society, a political one.
Not a physical thing. Society is a system of relationships, and therefore abstract.
Quick revision
- Society is the web of social relationships (MacIver and Page), not a collection of people and not a country.
- Characteristics: people, mutual awareness and interaction, likeness, difference, interdependence, cooperation and conflict, abstractness, shared culture, dynamism, social control, territory and continuity.
- Likeness is primary, difference is necessary.
- Types by subsistence: hunting and gathering, pastoral, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, post-industrial (Lenski).
- Types by solidarity: mechanical and organic (Durkheim).
- Types by association: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Tonnies).
- Types by openness: closed (caste) and open (class).
- As societies move from agrarian to industrial, informal supports weaken and law appears in their place.
Society: Meaning, Characteristics and Types
Test yourself
1. Define society and say why it is not the same as its members. Society is the web of social relationships among people living a common life, in MacIver and Page's phrase. It is not the same as its members because what constitutes it is the pattern of relationships rather than the persons occupying them: every member of a society is replaced within a century, and the society continues.
2. Distinguish society from the state. The state is a political institution with a government, a defined territory and coercive authority. Society is the entire web of social relationships within which such an institution exists. Societies existed long before states, one state may contain several societies, and a society may extend across state boundaries.
3. Give six characteristics of society. It consists of people; its members are mutually aware and interact; it rests on likeness, which MacIver called the primary basis of social life, and equally on difference, without which there could be no division of labour; its members are interdependent; it contains both cooperation and conflict as permanent processes; and it is abstract, dynamic and maintained by social control.
4. Distinguish Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft. Tonnies's pair. In Gemeinschaft, or community, relationships are personal, enduring, based on kinship and locality, and valued for their own sake. In Gesellschaft, or association, they are impersonal, specialised, contractual and entered into as a means to an end. Modern history, on his account, is the movement from the first towards the second.
5. Why is inequality slight in hunting and gathering societies and sharp in agrarian ones? Because inequality requires something that can be accumulated. Foraging produces little that can be stored, so there is no durable surplus to concentrate and no basis for hereditary advantage. Agriculture produces a storable surplus and fixes people to land that can be owned and inherited, and the surplus supports rulers, priests and armies, so rank hardens into caste and class.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.