SocialStructure

SOCIAL INEQUALITY

SOCIAL INEQUALITY

Social inequality is characterized by the existence of unequal opportunities and rewards for different social positions or statuses within a group or society.

It contains structured and recurrent patterns of unequal distributions of goods, wealth, opportunities, rewards, and punishments

SOCIAL STRUCTURE refers to social patterns that guide

our behavior in everyday life. -J.J. Macionis

STATUS• a social

position that is part of our social identity and that defines our relationships to others

ROLE

• the action expected of a person who holds a particular status

Building Blocks

STATUS

Ascribed

Status

a social position a person receives at birth or takes on involuntarily later in life

Achieved

Status

a social position a person takes on voluntarily that

reflects personal ability and effort

-a social position that is part of our social identity and that defines our

relationships to others

STATUS

status set - all the statuses a person

holds at a given time

master status- status that has special importance for

social identity, often shaping a person’s entire life

ROLE

role set - a number of roles attached to a

single status

-the action expected of a person who holds a

particular status

ROLE

Role Confli

ct

conflict among the roles connected to two or more statuses

Role Strain

tension among the roles

connected to a single status

PERSPECTIVES

conceived of social structure as logic behind reality

while social relations constitute the raw materials out of which the models making up the social structure are built, the structure itself cannot be reduced to an ensemble of social relations rather such relations themselves result from such re-existing structures.

Claude Levi Strauss

PERSPECTIVES

views social structure as reality itself

regards the role system of any society with its given coherence as the matrix of the social structure

two specific advantages of structural analysis:1. lending a higher degree of

comparability to social data2. rendering such data more

readily

Siegfried Frederick Nadel

PERSPECTIVES

his principal concern is the ethnographic facts and the taxonomic classification of societies on the basis of manifest readily discernible characteristics

The taxonomy established by Murdock is based on statistical correlation rather than the functional analysis.

George Peter Murdock

REFERENCES

Macionis, J. J. (2012). Sociology (14th ed.). Pearson Education.

Palispis, E. S. (2007). Introduction to Sociology and Anthropology (Revised ed.). Rex Book Store, Inc.