Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life - The Structure of Society

The Structure of Society: Organizations, Social Institutions, and Globalization

The 2000 Presidential Election

The 2000 presidential election was marked by significant political chaos.
Initial projections favored Al Gore, but the results were quickly retracted due to the closeness of the race in Florida.
Street protests, allegations of voter fraud, recounts, and lawsuits ensued.
The Florida State canvassing board initially certified George Bush as the winner.
The Florida Supreme Court ordered another recount, but the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled the recount unconstitutional.
George W. Bush was declared the winner despite receiving fewer nationwide votes than Al Gore.
The news media described the U.S. as being in a state of political confusion, facing a potential constitutional crisis and even anarchy.
The government continued to function, and life went on as usual for the average U.S. citizen.
Social structure played a key role in maintaining the political system's integrity despite the chaos.
Legal and political institutions functioned as designed, preventing large-scale catastrophe.
The structure was more important than the actions of individuals.

Social Structure and Its Paradoxes

Social structure is a human product that we experience as something external to ourselves.
We live within and respond to the influence of larger structural entities.
This relationship presents a sociological paradox, especially in a society that values individualism.
Social structure must be examined from both the individual's and the macrosociological perspective.

Social Structure and Everyday Life

Social structure is the framework of society that exists above the level of individuals providing a social setting in which individuals interact.
It includes organizations, groups, statuses and roles, culture, and institutions.
Social structure adds order and predictability to our lives.
The concept of social structure suggests there is regularity in how we live and how societies work.
Components of social structure that affect the high school experience:
- Organizations: National Education Association, state teachers' associations, accrediting agencies, local school boards, school districts
- Groups: faculty, administrators, classes, clubs, teams, cafeteria staff
- Statuses: teacher, student, principal, vice principal, counselor, nurse, secretary, custodian, coach, librarian
- Role expectations: teaching, learning, disciplining, making and taking tests, advising, coaching, feeding
- Cultural beliefs: education is the principal means of achieving financial success and enables a complex division of labor, and a technologically advanced society
- Institutionalized norms: expectation that everyone attend school until at least the age of 16, school rules that determine acceptable behavior.
The educational system determines life chances and choices.
Personal preferences are often secondary to the structural demands of college life.
Structural requirements of the educational system can overshadow learning and intellectual growth.
The competitive educational atmosphere can create incompatibility between the needs of the individual student and the needs of the system.
Social structure can cause problems, such as preventable medical errors in hospitals.
As many as 25% of hospitalized patients a year will experience a preventable medical error of some sort, and some 100,000 will die as a result.
Between 2007 and 2009, there were more than 700,000 safety incidents leading to close to 80,000 preventable deaths.
Only about one out of every seven errors is actually reported.
Structural failures are often responsible for drug errors in hospitals.
Poor dissemination of drug knowledge, inadequate patient information, faulty systems for checking dosage, and inefficient hospital procedure.
The quality of medical care in hospitals decreases significantly in the summer months due to the timing of new physician residency programs (July Effect).
The United States has no federal agency charged specifically with hospital oversight.
Hospitals may actually profit from their own mistakes because insurance companies usually pay for the longer stays and extra care that result from preventable errors
Hospitals are switching to electronic medical record systems.
Hospitals will soon face financial punishments if they don't reduce the number of medical mistakes.

Social Dilemmas: Individual Interests and Structural Needs

Individual actions can have an enormous effect on social structure and stability.
People seldom voluntarily act to achieve a common objective, they usually act to ensure their own personal interests.
The experience of each person in a group pursuing his or her self-interest regardless of the potential ruin for everyone is known as a social dilemma.
Major social problems, such as environmental pollution, can be understood as stemming, at least in part, from social dilemmas.
Two important types of social dilemmas are the tragedy of the commons and the free-rider problem.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The term "commons" refers to public pasture ground where local herders could bring their animals to graze.
When villagers used the commons in moderation, the grass could regenerate, resulting in a perpetual supply of food for the herds
When many of the herders came to the conclusion and allowed their herds to eat without limit, the grass in the commons could not regenerate fast enough to feed them all.
Cell phone companies and network operators usually respond by expanding carrying capacity and building more cell towers.
The impulse to seek individual gain over the collective good becomes particularly tempting when personal well-being is at stake.
Lack of communication and lack of trust among individual members of a community is part of the problem.
The tragedy of the commons arises when everyone, or at least a substantial number of people, conclude that it will not.
As we collectively ignore or downplay the consequences of our actions, we collectively overuse the resource and pave the way for disasters that none of us has caused individually

The Free-Rider Problem

Social dilemmas can also occur when people refrain from contributing something to a common resource because the resource will be available regardless of their contribution.
A free rider is an individual who acquires goods or services without risking any personal costs or contributing anything in return.
Free rider behavior can be seen in a variety of everyday activities, from reading a magazine at a newsstand without buying it to downloading music files for free from other people's online collections.
The care and education of all children can be seen as a public resource.

The Structure of Formal Organizations

Those of us who live in a complex society are all, to varying degrees, organizational creatures.
Organizations help meet our most basic needs.
Life in a complex society is a life touched by public and private organizations at every turn.
In such a society, things must be done in a formal, planned, and unified way.
The tasks that need to be carried out just to keep that system going are too complex for a single person to manage.
This complexity makes bureaucracy necessary.

Bureaucracies: Playing by the Rules

The 19th-century sociologist Max Weber was vitally interested in understanding the complexities of modern society.
Bureaucracies were certainly an efficient and rational means of managing large groups of people, although Weber acknowledged that these qualities could easily dehumanize those who work in and are served by those organizations.
In a sociological sense, bureaucracy is simply a large hierarchical organization that is governed by formal rules and regulations and that has a clear specification of work tasks.
The bureaucratic organization has three important characteristics:
- Division of labor: The bureaucracy has a clearcut division of labor. A clear division of labor is efficient. Division of labor enables large organizations to accomplish more ambitious goals than would be possible if everyone acted independently.
- Hierarchy of authority: Tasks are ranked in a hierarchy of authority. Authority tends to be attached to the position and not to the person occupying the position. The hierarchy of authority in bureaucracies not only allows some people to control others but also justifies paying some people higher salaries than others. When applied to political organizations, the hierarchy of authority can create an oligarchy.
- Impersonality: Bureaucracies are governed by an elaborate system of rules and regulations that ensure a particular task will be done the same way by each person occupying a position.
Schools are a clear example of a bureaucratic organization.
People are fitted into roles within bureaucracies that completely determine their duties, responsibilities, and rights, they often become rigid and inflexible and are less concerned about the quality of their work than about whether they and others are playing by the rules.
Relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast in 2005 were blocked by many bureaucratic obstacles.
Weber warned that bureaucracies could take on a life of their own, becoming impersonal "iron cages" for those within them.
The bureaucratic model pervades every corner of modern society.
The most successful bureaucracies not only dominate the business landscape but have come to influence our entire way of life.

The Construction of Organizational Reality

According to the symbolic interactionist perspective, organizations are created, maintained, and changed through the everyday actions of their members.
The language of an organization is one of the ways it creates its own reality.
For an organization to work well, everyone must also internalize the same rules, values, and beliefs.
People still have their own ideas and may develop their own informal structure within the larger formal structure of the organization
People shouldn't talk too much in class
One of the ironies of large complex organizations is that if everyone followed every rule exactly and literally, the organization would eventually self-destruct.
The informal system of plea bargaining has taken root, allowing the courts to continue functioning.
Organizational life is a combination of formal structural rules and informal patterns of behavior.

Organizations and Institutions

Organizations themselves exist within a larger structural context, acting as a liaison between people and major social institutions such as the economic system, government, religion, health care, and education.
Institutions are stable sets of statuses, roles, groups, and organizations that provide the foundation for behavior in certain major areas of social life.
They are patterned ways of solving the problems and meeting the needs of a particular society.

Organizational Networks Within Institutions

Like individual people, organizations are born, grow, become overweight, slim down, migrate, form relationships with others, break up, and die.
Massive networks of organizations are linked by common goals and needs.
Consider the U.S. health care system.
The needs of the larger system can sometimes clash with an individual's health care needs, making even face-to-face interactions problematic and, possibly, even detrimental to the patient's health.

Institutional Pressures Toward Similarity

Organizations seem to be more similar than different and even tend to imitate one another's actions as they become established in a particular institution.
When Apple sought to corner the electronic gadget market with the popular iPad, it was inevitable that other companies would follow suit with their own tablet devices.
The surprising fact is that the imitated practices are not necessarily more effective or successful.
The net effect of the imitations is to reduce innovation within the industry.
The tendency for organizations to emulate one another is especially strong in times of institutional uncertainty.
Such similarity makes it easier for organizations to interact with one another and to be acknowledged as legitimate and reputable within the field.
When organizations replicate one another, institutional change becomes difficult, and the iron cage of bureaucracy becomes harder to escape.