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104 CHAPTER 4 Social Structure and Social Interaction
group people who interact with Groups
one another and who believe A group consists of people who interact with one another and who feel that the val-
that what they have in common ues, interests, and norms they have in common are important. The groups to which we
is significant; also called a social
group belong—just like social class, statuses, and roles—are powerful forces in our lives. By
belonging to a group, we assume an obligation to affirm the group’s values, interests,
social institution the organized, and norms. To remain a member in good standing, we need to show that we share those
usual, or standard ways by which
society meets its basic needs characteristics. This means that when we belong to a group, we yield to others the right to
judge our behavior—even though we don’t like it!
Although this principle holds true for all groups, some groups wield influence over
only small segments of our behavior. For example, if you belong to a stamp collectors’
club, the group’s influence may center on your display of knowledge about stamps and
Explore on MySocLab perhaps your fairness in trading them. Other groups, in contrast, such as the family, con-
Activity: Congregational trol many aspects of our behavior. When parents say to their 15-year-old daughter, “As
Membership, Primary Groups, long as you are living under our roof, you had better be home by midnight,” they show
and Secondary Groups
an expectation that their daughter, as a member of the family, will conform to their ideas
about many aspects of life, including their views on curfew. They are saying that as long
as the daughter wants to remain a member of the family in good standing, her behavior
must conform to their expectations.
In Chapter 5, we will examine groups in detail. For now, let’s look at the next com-
ponent of social structure, social institutions.
Social Institutions
At first glance, the term social institution may seem cold and abstract—with little rele-
vance to your life. In fact, however, social institutions—the standard or usual ways that
a society meets its basic needs—vitally affect your life. They not only shape your behav-
ior, but they even color your thoughts. How can this be?
The first step in understanding how this can be is to look at Figure 4.2 on the next
page. Look at what social institutions are: the family, religion, education, the economy,
medicine, politics, law, science, the military, and the mass media. By weaving the fabric
of society, social institutions set the context for your behavior and orientations to life. If your
social institutions were different, your orientations to life would be different.
Social institutions are so significant that an entire part of this book, Part IV, focuses
on them.
Comparing Functionalist and Conflict Perspectives
The functionalist and conflict perspectives give us quite different views of social institu-
tions. Let’s compare their views.
The Functionalist Perspective. Because the first priority of human groups is to
survive, all societies establish customary ways to meet their basic needs. As a result, no
society is without social institutions. In tribal societies, some social institutions are less
visible because the group meets its basic needs in more informal ways. A society may be
too small to have people specialize in education, for example, but it will have established
ways of teaching skills and ideas to the young. It may be too small to have a military, but
it will have some mechanism of self-defense.
What are society’s basic needs? Functionalists identify five functional requisites (basic
needs) that each society must meet if it is to survive (Aberle et al. 1950; Mack and
Bradford 1979).
1. Replacing members. Obviously, if a society does not replace its members, it can-
not continue to exist. With reproduction fundamental to a society’s existence,
and the need to protect infants and children universal, all groups have developed
some version of the family. The family gives the newcomer to society a sense of
belonging by providing a lineage, an account of how he or she is related to oth-
ers. The family also functions to control people’s sex drive and to maintain orderly
reproduction.
