Chapter 4: Social Structure; The Meaning of Social Control

 Chapter four explains to me about what is social structure and how it varies over time and from one culture to another. Recurring patterns of behavior makes up a social structure. Although structure constrains social behavior by putting limits on it, it also enables social behavior by providing the context in which people can interact. Social life is also made up of patterened routine behaviors. More or less predictable routines are what sociologist calls social instutions. Social instituions are major arenas of social life in which durable routines and patterns of behavior take place.What links people to one another and to patterns that constitutes social structure are status and roles. Statuses are a position in the social system that can be occupied by an individual, and roles are the sets of expected behaviors associated with particular statuses.
They are also two kinds os statuses. Ascribed statuses and achieved statuses. Social structure exists precisely because we construct and reconstruct dovisl order in our daily routines. Etnomethodology is an approach that examines the methods people use to make sense of their daily activities, emphasizes the ways in which we collectively create social structure in our everday activities.Organizational structure refers to the rules and routines, both formal and informal, that shape daily activity within organizations. Globalization has changed the structure of work life and communitied dramatically. Actiondd is the ability to operate independent of social constraints. Webere identifieed three basic types of human action. Traitional action, tha is motivated by custom, Affective action which is guided by emotions and feelings, and Rational action which is motivated by calculations of efficiency.
 "The Meaning of Social Control" stated that the ultimate oldest means of social control is physical violence. Al men live in social situations in which, if all other means of coercion fail, violence may be officially and legally used against them.Universities or churches use economic sanctions just as effectively in restraining their personnel from engaging in deviant behavior deemed by the respective authorities to go beyond the limits of the respective authoritities to go beypond the limits of the acceptable. It may not be actually illegal for a minister to seduce his organist, but the threat of beings barred forever from the exercise of his profession will be a much more effective control over this temptation than the possible threat of going to jail. Gossip, as hardly needs elaboration, is especially effective in small communities, where most people live their lives in a high degree of soial visibility and inspectability by their neighbors. In such communities gossip is one of the principal channels of communication, essential for the maintenance of social fabric. Both ridicule and gossip can be manipulated deliberately by any intelligent with access to their lines of transgression. Immortality is punished by loss of one's job, eccentricity by the loss of one's chances of finding a new one, bad manners by remaining uninvited and uninvitable in the groups that respect what they consider good manners. The sanctions of society are able at each moment of existence to isolate us among our fellow men, to subject us to ridicule, to deprive us of our sustenance and our liberty, and in the last resort to deprive us of life itself.