Social Structure: A Guide to Everyday Living

Sociology points to the many rules that guide behaviour in everyday situations. The more we learn about the rules of social interaction, the better we can play the game. CHAPTER Such everyday experiences are the focus of this chapter. The central concept is social interaction, the process by which people act and react in relation to others. We begin by presenting several important sociological concepts that describe the building blocks of common experience and then explore the almost magical way that face-to-face interaction creates the reality in which we live. Members of every society rely on social structure to make sense of everyday situations and frame their lives. The world can be confus-ing—even frightening—when society's rules are unclear. We now take a closer look at the ways societies set the rules of everyday life. Status In every society, one of the building blocks of everyday life is status, a social position that a person holds. In general use, the word status means " prestige, " in the sense that a university president is of higher status than a newly hired assistant professor. But sociologically speaking, " president, " " professor, " and " student " are statuses within the university organization. Status is part of social identity and helps define our relationships to others. As Georg Simmel (1950; orig. 1902), one of the founders of sociology, once pointed out, before we can deal with anyone, we need to know who the person is. Each of us holds many statuses at once. The term status set refers to all of the statuses that a person holds at a given time. A teenage girl is a daughter to her parents, a sister to her brother, a student at school, and a goalie on her hockey team. Status sets change over the life course. A child grows up to become a parent, a student graduates to become a lawyer, and a single person marries to become a husband or wife, sometimes becoming single again as a result of death or divorce. Joining an organization or finding a job enlarges our status set; withdrawing from activities makes it smaller. Over a lifetime, people gain and lose dozens of statuses. Matt and Dianne are on their way to visit friends in an unfamiliar section of Calgary. They are now late because, for the last 20 minutes, they have been going in circles looking for Riverview …