Page 145 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

One example of social structure is the idea of "social stratification", which refers to the idea that

most societies are separated into different strata (levels), guided (if only partially) by the

underlying structures in the social system. [Wikipedia]

This approach to look at strata I found has been important in the academic literature with

the rise of various forms of structuralism. It is important in the modern study of organizations,

because an organization's structure may determine its flexibility, capacity to change, and many

other factors. Therefore, structure is an important issue for management and even more so with a

global view of citizens managing governance.

While it is too early for a conclusion I feel it is important to denote the formative contexts

that are the institutional and imaginative arrangements that shape a society's conflicts and

resolutions (Trubek 1990). This is also referred to as order, framework, or structure of social life,

the concept of formative context was developed by philosopher and social theorist Roberto Unger.

Whereas other social and political philosophers have taken the historical context as a given and

seen one existing set of institutional arrangements as necessarily giving birth to another set, Unger

rejects this naturalization of the world and moves to explain how such contexts are made and

reproduced. The thesis of formative context is central to Unger's theory of false necessity, which

rejects the idea of a closed number of institutional arrangements of human societies, e.g. feudalism

and capitalism, and that these arrangements are the product of historical necessity, as theories of

liberalism or Marxism claim. Rather, Unger argues that there are myriad institutional arrangements

that can coalesce, and that they do so through a contingent process of struggle, reconciliation, and

innovation among individuals and groups. For Unger, the concept of formative context serves to

explain the basis of a certain set of institutional arrangements and their reliance upon each other.

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