People and Social Structures

People and Social Structures

People and Social Structures

Introduction

This paper would discuss and evaluate “how people's lives continue to be shaped in the main by social structures”. This statement will discuss by the social structure theory of Karl Marx and the role of people in this connection. This paper also illustrates how the Marxian conception of social structure underlies even the new work that goes beyond Marx. A second objective is to demonstrate how a more complex image of social structure can be built up by viewing any specific social structural arrangement as a conjuncture of multiple modes of domination. As far as the question of any problem in its explanation is concerned, there are various explanations of this theory but apparently, no clashing viewpoint is found in this theory. A perhaps simplistic way of viewing such a conjuncture is to treat all of the existing modes of domination in an additive fashion. In this view each person's position in a social structure is simply the intersection of his or her social positions in each mode of domination. Although simplistic, this model already offers a powerful tool for analyzing social structure. For example, it is such an additive model that underlies what may be called the triple exploitation thesis describing the conditions of working women in the multinational industrial sectors of the less-developed countries (Cotterell, 1995, 110-125).

Discussion

From the realist perspective social structures are an important variety of generating mechanism in the social sphere. Accordingly there are two major tasks for the sociological study of social structure. The first task is simply to describe the nature of various social structures as generating mechanisms, paying particular attention to the ways in which they generate their causal properties. Marx Capital is a paradigmatic example of such a description. The second task is to explain particular historical events in terms of conjunctures of structural mechanisms. Partly because each conjuncture is unique and partly because human behaviour is intrinsically non-law like, such explanations must adopt the form of a historical narrative. One of my major objectives was to show how such narratives can coherently combine elements of both agency and structure.

The Marxian conception of social structure is fundamentally different from the Durkheimian conception. According to the Marxian conception, social structure for people consists of a nexus of relationships among social classes. Social classes are categories of people who are similarly situated vis-à-vis the means of satisfying basic human interests hat is, the means of production. Whereas the relationships connecting social classes are of many different types, the definitive relationships are relations of production (Karl, 1959, 99-102).

The relationships among all these categories of people's structure the interests that the people of each category pursue, the opportunities and powers for satisfying those interests, and the predicaments that the people of each category face. These structured interests, opportunities, powers, and predicaments are part of what is meant by social structure on the Marxian view. They form an integrated set of conditions in terms of ...