Basic Concepts

of
Community

Dr. Ashok Shivaji Yakkaldevi

LAXMI BOOK PUBLICATION

258/34, Raviwar Peth, Solapur - 413005
+91 9595359435 / 0217-2372010
[email protected] / [email protected]
Rs. : 325/-
Basic Concepts of Community

Dr. Ashok Shivaji Yakkaldevi

© 2013 by Laxmi Book Publication, Solapur

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in

any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN - 978-1-312-68303-7

Published by,
Laxmi Book Publication,
258/34, Raviwar Peth, Solapur, Maharashtra, India
Contact No. : +91 9595-359-435 / 0217-2372010
Website : http://www.lsrj.in
Email ID : [email protected] / [email protected]
Dedicated
to
My Guru Dr. H. N. Jagtap
And
My Family Members
 INDEX

Chapter Page
Title
No. No.

1. Basic Concepts 1

2. Community 22

3. Culture 39

4. Norms and Values 80

Concept of Community
5. 137
in Indian Social Science

References 160
 Acknowledgement

I am using this opportunity to express my gratitude to

everyone who supported me throughout the completion of this
book. I am thankful for their aspiring guidance, invaluably
constructive criticism and friendly advice during the written work. I
am sincerely grateful to them for sharing their truthful and
illuminating views on a number of issues related to the project.
At the very outset, I would like to record my deep sense of
gratitude and everlasting indebtedness. I would like to express my
deepest appreciation to all those who provided me the possibility to
complete this book.
I gratefully acknowledge the unstinted encouragement and
unreserved support from my beloved teacher, Dr. H. N. Jagtap for
providing me the necessary knowledge and support in bringing this
work. Also I would like to thankful to Principal Dr. Rajendra Shendge,
A. R. Burla Mahila Varishta Mahavidyalay, Solapur.
It is with great pleasure and a sense of gratitude I remember
the encouragement I received from my parents, wife, son and my
loving daughters. More than anything else, their love and affection
is so gratifying that it always motivates me to do the things to be
worthy of their love and affection. But for the blessings, incessant
help at all levels and the constant insistence of my parents, this
work could not have been completed. I am ever grateful to them for
the sincerity and warmth in their blessings.

Dr. Ashok S. Yakkaldevi

 Chapter-1

Basic Concepts

Introduction :
The term community is one of the most elusive and
vague in sociology and is by now largely without specific
meaning. At the minimum it refers to a collection of people in a
geographical area. Three other elements may also be present in
any usage. Communities may be thought of as collections of
people with a particular social structure; there are, therefore,
collections which are not communities. Such a notion often
equates community with rural or pre-industrial society and
may, in addition, treat urban or industrial society as positively
destructive. A sense of belonging or community spirit. All the
daily activities of a community, work and non work, take place
within the geographical area, which is self contained. Different
accounts of community will contain any or all of these
additional elements.
We can list out the characteristics of a community as
follows:
 Territory  Common values and
 Close and informal beliefs
relationships  Organized interaction
 Mutuality  Strong group feeling
 Cultural similarity
Talcott Parsons defined community as collectivity the
members of which share a common territorial area as their base

1
of operation for daily activities. According to Tonnies
community is defined as an organic natural kind of social group
whose members are bound together by the sense of belonging,
created out of everyday contacts covering the whole range of
human activities. He has presented ideal-typical pictures of the
forms of social associations contrasting the solidarity nature of
the social relations in the community with the large scale and
impersonal relations thought to characterize industrializing
societies. Kingsley Davis defined it as the smallest territorial
group that can embrace all aspects of social life. For Karl
Mannheim community is any circle of people who live together
and belong together in such a way that they do not share this or
that particular interest only but a whole set of interests
What Is Community?
Introduction:
A mobilizer, animator or activist is a person who tries to
move (activate, animate) a community. The training material on
this web site is aimed at mobilizers and their managers,
explaining methods of making a community move.
The Nature of Communities:
Like most things in the social sciences, community does
not fit into a nice neat package. We use the word a lot, but in
this training it is important to ask more seriously what it is.
First, let us note that a "community" is a construct, a
model. We cannot see a whole community, we cannot touch it,
and we cannot directly experience it. See elephant. Like the
words "hill" or "snowflake," a community may come in one of
many shapes, sizes, colors and locations, no two of which are
alike.
More importantly, a community is not just the people
who are in it. A community usually already existed when all of
its current residents were not yet born, and it will likely
continue to exist when all of the people in it have left. It is
something that is beyond its very components, its residents or
2
community members. A community may have members who
have temporarily moved to other locations. They may wish to
eventually return, but not all do.
A "community" in some senses may not even have a
physical location, but be demarcated by being a group of
people with a common interest. In the training material here,
however, the "community" which is the object of a mobilizer's
attention, is usually one with a physical geographic location.
A Community is a Sociological Construct:
Not only is the concept of a community a "construct"
(model), it is a "sociological construct." It is a set of
interactions, human behaviours that have meaning and
expectations between its members. Not just action, but actions
based on shared expectations, values, beliefs and meanings
between individuals.
To understand how a community operates, and how it
changes, it is necessary to learn a little bit about sociology the
science. The mobilizer is an applied scientist; social scientist.
While a pure scientist is interested in how things work, the
applied scientist is interested in taking that knowledge and
getting useful results.
A Community has Fuzzy Boundaries:
When an identified community is a little village,
separated by a few kilometers from other villages, in a rural
area, its boundaries appear at first to be very simple. That
pattern of human interaction may be seen as consisting only of
relations between the residents living inside that location,
inside that village.
But its residents interact also with people outside the
village. They marry persons from near and far, and may move
or bring a spouse in to live with them. At any one time, those
village residents may have sisters, brothers, cousins, parents
and extended relatives living elsewhere. The boundary of that
community is not so precise.
3
Communities can be Within Communities:
There may be communities within larger communities,
including districts, regions, ethnic groups, nations and other
boundaries. There may be marriages and other interaction that
link villages on both sides of national borders.
Communities May Move:
Furthermore, where technology is not based on local
horticulture, the community residents may be physically
mobile. They may be nomadic herders walking long distances
with their cattle. They may be mobile fishing groups who move
from time to time as the fish are available. They may be hunters
who move to follow the game. They may be hunters who move
to follow the game.
Urban Communities are Special:
In urban areas, a community may be a small group of a
few homesteads of people from a common origin. That
community in turn, may be part of a neighborhood community
or a barrio or other local urban division. As the boundaries
become wider, there is more heterogeneity (differences in
origin, language, religion or other features that can form a
common identity). It may be in turn, a part of a wider
municipality, which in turn may be part of a conglomeration
comprising a large city.
In general (with exceptions) an urban community has
more fuzzy boundaries, is more difficult to demarcate, is more
heterogeneous (varied, mixed), more complex, and more
difficult to organize using standard community development
methods, and has more complex and sophisticated goals, than
rural communities.
The Social Perspective of Human Settlements:
A human settlement, or community, is not merely a
collection of houses. It is a human (social and cultural)
organization. (The houses, which are cultural products of

4
humanity, belong to one of the six dimensions of society or
culture, the technological dimension, as explained below).
Also, it is not just a collection of human individuals; it
is a socio-cultural system; it is socially organized. This means
that you need to know some things about society things learned
in sociology. The community has a life of its own which goes
beyond the sum of all the lives of all its residents. As a social
organization, a community is cultural. See Culture. That means
it is a system of systems, and that it is composed of things that
are learned rather than transmitted by genes and chromosomes.
All the social or cultural elements of a community, from its
technology to its shared beliefs, are transmitted and stored by
symbols.
Social Animation (promoting community participation
or self help) mobilizes and organizes a community. This means
that the social organization of the community is changed,
however slightly or greatly. The mobilizer or animator,
therefore, is a social change agent, or catalyst. Understanding
the nature of social change, its social nature, in a community,
should be in the mobilizer's tool box.
An Animator Must Know About Society:
It may be dangerous to dabble in changing something
about which you know nothing. It is therefore the responsibility
of the mobilizer to learn something from the sciences of
anthropology and sociology.
A mobilizer is an applied sociologist, so must know
some important features of the subject. (While mobilizing is an
applied social science, it is not the same thing as Social
Engineering. See Social Engineering).
Although the science of sociology is usually taught at
the university level, and a social scientist needs a PhD
nowadays, you do not need all that formal education. Starting
from here, perhaps doing a little private literature research on

5
your own as well, you can learn what you need about sociology
to understand the social nature of communities.
The most important thing to learn was mentioned already, that
a social organism such as a community has a life of its own that
goes beyond the lives of the residents in it. Those individuals
have their own changes while they develop as human
individuals. They are born, they get older, they become adults,
they marry, they get jobs, some become recognized leaders,
they have children, they die. All of these personal changes in
individuals do not, in themselves, change society or a
community. In fact, as they are recognized, they contribute to
the stability of society, and to the continuation of the
community.
The second thing to learn was briefly mentioned also.
All things social and cultural are transmitted by symbols rather
than by genes. Community development, which is a form of
social change, requires changes in the messages of symbols
rather than genetic surgery.
Keep the Essential Elements of Society in Mind:
While sociology in itself can be interesting, the
mobilizer needs to know more about it so as to be a better
mobilizer. Since the notion of "community" is a social
construct, the nature of "social" is important to understand.
What, for example, is the "glue" that holds a community (or
any social organization) together? How can individuals be
interdependent upon each other, even while they believe they
are independent organisms? Do such beliefs, even if they are
not accurate, serve some purpose in sustaining or supporting
social organization?
It is important for the animator to note the inter-
connections between the cultural dimensions (described below)
which comprise a community. While social scientists may
disagree about the precise nature of those inter-connections, all
will agree that the basic characteristic of society (and thus of

6
the communities within a society) is that they are
interconnected.
A community, like other social institutions, is not
merely a collection of individual persons; it is a changing set of
relationships, including the attitudes and behaviour of its
members.
Remember that your goal is community empowerment.
Knowing what a community is, and its social and cultural
nature, will help you to know what it is that is becoming
empowered by your efforts.
Culture is learned:
We mentioned above that a community is a cultural
organism, and that it was something that went beyond those
individual human beings that make it up. Culture in the social
sciences is something far more than opera and ballet, so what is
it? Culture consists of all those things, including actions and
beliefs which human beings (as physical animals) learn, which
make them human. Culture includes learned behaviour, but not
things which are determined genetically. Culture is stored and
transmitted by symbols; never by chromosomes. While some
culture is learned in childhood (like how to talk, for example),
other culture is learned by adults.
When the animator is engaging in promoting social
change, she or he is promoting the learning of new ideas and
behaviour. When culture is learned first, by a child, to become
human, the process is called enculturation or socialization.
When it is re-learned, as when a person moves to a different
society, or when a community changes around the individual, it
is called acculturation. Since you as a mobilizer are much
involved in stimulating social change in a community, then you
will come face to face with acculturation. Adult educating skills
are therefore needed.
This sociological definition of "culture," which means
"socio-cultural system," which is society itself, is not the
7
common everyday definition of culture, where people usually
think only of drumming and dancing, or only the arts (those
belong to only one of the six dimensions of culture, the
aesthetic).
Culture Transcends its Humans:
Culture is super organic (and a community is cultural).
Understanding this concept, "super organic," is important in
understanding a community. Just as the organic level is based
on inorganic (living cells are made up of non living atoms, etc.;
a dog or a tree is not a cell even though it is made up of cells),
so the super organic is based on the organic (society is not a
human being even though it is made up of human beings). This
means that, during animation (mobilization and organization)
of a community, the animator must always be able to separate
what is happening to the overall community itself, in contrast to
what is happening to particular individuals.
We use the word "transcend" here to mean "go beyond."
It does not have a religious connotation in this use. Just as a
tree, as a living organism, transcends its atoms, molecules and
cells which make it up, so a community, or any social
organization in culture, transcends the individual human beings
which make it up. The tree or dog would not exist without its
atoms or cells, nor would a community exist without its
individual human beings.
The principles which affect an atom or a cell (in a dog
or a tree), are not the same as those which affect the dog or tree.
The forces which affect an individual human being (in a
community) are not the forces which affect the development of
a community.
A good mobilizer must understand the nature of social
change in a community, and be able to distinguish that from the
changes undergone by individuals in that community. To do
that, you the mobilizer must develop a social perspective, and
see how a community transcends its residents.

8
A Community is a Super Organic Organism or System:
A community can be seen as being something like an
organism (i.e. it is organized; it has organs). It lives and
functions even though its human members come and go, are
born or die. Just as a living cell, plant or animal, transcends its
atoms, so an institution, a behaviour pattern, or a community,
transcends its individual humans. The behaviour of an atom or
the life cycle of a molecule happens according to a different set
of forces than the living plant or animal in which the atom or
molecule is found. So, too, an individual human being is
subject to a different set of forces than a social organization
(such as a community) where it is found. A belief, for example,
is believed by living persons, but that belief may live on
through other persons long after the first ones die. The same
with an institution such as marriage, an organization such as an
air force, a town such as Kumasi, a custom such as shaking
hands, a tool such as a hoe, or a system such as marketing. All
of these transcend the individual human beings which carry
them.
A society, then, is a system not an inorganic system like
an engine, not an organic system like a tree, but a
superorganic system built up of learned ideas, expectations
and behavior of human beings. Think of three levels of
organization: inorganic, organic and superorganic. Although a
community is a cultural system (in that it transcends its
individual persons) do not assume that a community is a
harmonious unity. It isn't. It is full of factions, struggles and
conflicts, based upon differences in gender, religion, access to
wealth, ethnicity, class, educational level, income, ownership of
capital, language and many other factors. In order to promote
community participation and development, it is the task of the
animator to bring these factions together, encourage tolerance
and team spirit, and obtain consensus decisions. For you to
promote social change in a community, it is necessary to know

9
how that system operates, and therefor how it will respond to
changes, and toyour interventions. Just as an engineer (an
applied physical scientist) must know how an engine operates,
the community facilitator (an applied social scientist) must
know how a community operates.
To know how a community operates one must not
anthropomorphise a community. To"anthropomorphise" means
to assume and ascribe human characteristics to a non human
thing (e.g. thinking that ducks and bears have "families" when
"family" is a human institution). A community does not talk,
does not think, cannot feel, and does not act like a human
being. It is a super organic entity, and therefore moves,
responds, grows and behaves through different principles,
forces and mechanisms than a human being does.
Dimensions of Culture; Dimensions of Community:
When we say a community is not the same thing as a
human being, we say it does not have emotions, a head,
thoughts, legs, or a hobby. It does, however, have different
parts to it that apply to social organizations and culture rather
than to individual human beings. One important way to
analyses a community, break it into different parts, is to use the
six cultural "dimensions." We use "dimension" because these
are analytical categories, made by us human beings, rather than
being based upon observable parts (like parts of the body: head,
arms, legs). In one of the training modules, Community
Research, you will see that these six cultural dimensions (plus
geography and demography) can be used as organizing
categories for you to research, observe, and understand the
community where you intend to work.
In mathematics, an object has three dimensions, such as
height, width, and depth, four if you include time. No matter
how small or in what ways you cut up that object, each piece
will still have all four dimensions. So too a socio cultural
entity, like a community. No matter how small or in what ways

10
you cut up a piece of culture, it will always have all six of its
dimensions.
These dimensions of community include:
1. Technological,
2. Economic,
3. Political,
4. Institutional (social),
5. Aesthetic-value, and
6. Belief-conceptual.
Each of these dimensions of culture are transmitted by
symbols (not genes) and consist of systems of learned ideas and
behavior. They are not "aspects" of culture; they are
dimensions. Cultural dimensions may vary in size but, by
definition, permeate the whole.All of these are systems within
every social (or cultural) system. They are based on learned
behavior, which transcends the individuals who each learned
parts of them. If anyone dimension of culture is missing, by
definition, all are missing.
You cannot "see" a dimension of culture or society, as
you can see an individual person. Every individual manifests
each of the six dimensions of culture. To become socially
aware, the animator must be able to analyse all six of the
dimensions, and their interrelationships, even though s/he can
only see individuals, not those dimensions.
The Technological Dimension of Community:
The technological dimension of community is its
capital, its tools and skills, and ways of dealing with the
physical environment. It is the interface between humanity and
nature.
Remember, it is not the physical tools themselves which
make up the technological dimension of culture, but it is the
learned ideas and behaviour which allow humans to invent, use,
and teach others about tools. Technology is much a cultural

11
dimension as beliefs and patterns of interaction; it is symbolic.
Technology is cultural.
This cultural dimension is what the economist may call
"real capital" (in contrast to financial capital). It is something
valuable that is not produced for direct consumption, but to be
used to increase production (therefore more wealth) in the
future; investment. In capacity development, it is one of the
sixteen elements of strength that changes (increases) as an
organization or a community becomes stronger. In the war
against poverty, technology provides an important set of
weapons.
For an individual or a family, technology includes their
house, furniture and household facilities, including kitchen
appliances and utensils, doors, windows, beds and lamps.
Language, which is one of the important features of being
human, belongs to the technological dimension (it is a tool).
This goes along with communication aids such as radio,
telephones, TV, books and typewriters (now computers). In an
organization, technology includes desks, computers, paper,
chairs, pens, office space, telephones, washrooms and lunch
rooms. Some organizations have specific technology: footballs
and uniforms for football clubs, blackboards desks and chalk
for schools, alters and pews for churches, guns and billie sticks
for police forces, transmitters and microphones for radio
stations.
In a community, communal technology includes its
facilities such as public latrines and water points, roads,
markets, clinics, schools, road signs, parks, community centers,
libraries, sports fields. Privately owned community technology
may include shops, factories, houses and restaurants. When a
facilitator encourages a community build a latrine or well, new
technology is introduced. A well (or latrine) is as much a tool
(and an investment) as is a hammer or computer.

12
 In general (i.e. there are exceptions) technology is
perhaps the easiest of the six dimensions for introducing
cultural and social change. It is easier to introduce a transistor
radio than to introduce a new religious belief, new set of values
or a new form of family. Paradoxically, however, introduction
of new technology (by invention or borrowing) will lead to
changes in all the other five dimensions of the culture.
Remember there are always exceptions; in Amish
society, for example, there is a conscious communal decision to
resist the introduction of new technology. They rely on the
preservation of older technology (no tractors, no automobiles,
and no radios) such as horse drawn carts and plows, to
reinforce their sense of cultural identity. Those changes are not
easily predicted, nor are they always in desired directions. After
they happen, they may appear to be logical, even though they
are not predicted earlier.
Through human history, technology has changed
generally by becoming more complex, more sophisticated, and
with a greater control over energy. One form does not
immediately replace another (although horse whips have now
gone out of fashion after the automobile replaced the horse over
a century of change). Usually changes are accumulative, with
older tools and technologies dying out if they become relatively
less useful, less efficient and more expensive. In the broad
sweep of history, gathering and hunting gave way to agriculture
(except in a few small pockets of residual groups). Likewise,
agriculture has been giving way to industry. People still
practicing older less efficient technologies often find
themselves marginalized and facing poverty. Where technology
is highly advanced (e.g. in information technology, computers,
the internet) it is practiced by a very small proportion of the
world population.
Technology that might be introduced by mobilizers may
belong to medicine (clinics and medicine) and health (clean

13
water, hygiene), school buildings or covered markets in rural
areas. There the residents are not usually unaware of them; they
simply did not have them, before mobilizing to obtain them.
The facilitator must be prepared to understand the effects on
other dimensions of culture by the introduction of a change in
the technological dimension.
The Economic Dimension of Community:
The economic dimension of community is its various
ways and means of production and allocation of scarce and
useful goods and services (wealth), whether that is through gift
giving, obligations, barter, market trade, or state allocations. It
is not the physical items like cash which make up the economic
dimension of culture, but the ideas and behavior which give
value to cash (and other items) by humans who have created
the economic systems they use. Wealth is not merely money,
just as poverty is not merely the absence of money.
Wealth is among the sixteen elements of community
strength or organizational capacity. When the organization or
community has more wealth (that it can control as an
organization or community) then it has more power and more
ability to achieve the things it wants to achieve. Over the broad
course of human history, the general trend in economic change
has been from simple to more complex. One system did not
immediately replace another, but new systems were added, and
less useful ones slowly died out.
In simple small groups, wealth (anything that was
scarce and useful) was distributed by simple family obligations.
When someone came home with some food or clothing, it was
allocated to the other members of the family with no
expectations of immediate returns. As society become more
complex, and different groups came into contact with each
other, simple trade through various forms of barter were
acquired. Distribution within each family group remained more
or less the same. As barter became more complex and

14
extensive, new institutions were added to simplify the
accounting: currency, accounts, banks, credit, credit cards, and
debit cards. This did not immediately remove earlier forms, but
gift giving and family distribution eventually became relatively
smaller among the wide range of distribution systems, and
barter became less important.
Remember that currency (cash, money) it has no
intrinsic value. It has value only because society the
community; the culture has ascribed some value to it. A
hundred euro bill, for example, may be used to start a fire or
to wrap tobacco into a cigarette, but its face value is worth
much more than for those. In any community, you will find
various forms of wealth distribution. It is important for you to
learn what they are, and what things can be given, what
exchanged and what bought and sold. In many societies some
kinds of wealth may not be allocated by purchase, such as
sexual favors, spouses, hospitality, children, entertainment. It
varies. Learning how they are distributed and under what
conditions and between whom (because these differ) is part of
the research you need to do.
When a community decides to allocate water on the
basis of a flat rate for all residences, or to allocate it on the
basis of a payment for each container of water when it is
collected, then a choice is being made between two very
different systems of economic distribution. The animator
should encourage the community to choose what it wants so as
to be more consistent with prevailing values and attitudes. (A
good mobilizer will not try to impose her or his notion of what
would be the best system of distribution; the community
members, all of them, must come to a consensus decision).
The Political Dimension of Community:
The political dimension of community is its various
ways and means of allocating power, influence and decision
making. It is not the same as ideology, which belongs to the

15
values dimension. It includes, but is not limited to, types of
governments and management systems. It also includes how
people in small bands or informal groups make decisions when
they do not have a recognized leader. Political power is among
the sixteen elements of community power or organizational
capacity. The more political power and influence it has, the
more it can do the things it desires.
An animator must be able to identify the different types
of leaders in a community. Some may have traditional or
bureaucratic authority; others may have charismatic personal
qualities. When working with a community, the animator must
be able to help develop the existing power and decision making
system to promote community unity and group decision making
that benefits the whole community, not just vested interests. In
the broad sweep of human history, leadership (power and
influence) at first was diffuse, temporary and minimal. In a
small band of gatherers and hunters, a leader might be anyone
who suggested and organized a hunt. In small bands, there were
no chiefs, elders or kings, and these groups are named by
anthropologists as "acephalous" (headless).
As history progresses, political systems become more
complex, and power and influence increased and affected larger
numbers of people. Levels of political sophistication, and
hierarchy, ranged from acephalous, band, tribe, through
kingdom to nation state. In the simplest band, there is very little
difference between the amount of power and influence of the
leader and the lowest member of the band. Compare that with
the difference in amount of power and influence of the
President of the USA and some janitor cleaning toilets in a
Washington slum hotel.
Communities, including the ones where you work, all
have some political system, and some distance between the
most and least levels of power between individuals and groups.
It is your first task to understand how it works, how power and

16
influence are distributed (not always the same way) and what
changes are occurring. You will have some influence on that
power arrangement as you stimulate the formation of a
development committee. And you will be responsible for
encouraging an increase of political complexity if that is the
first such committee in that community.
The Institutional Dimension of Community:
The social or institutional dimension of community is
composed of the ways people act, interact between each other,
react, and expect each other to act and interact. It includes such
institutions as marriage or friendship, roles such as mother or
police officer, status or class, and other patterns of human
behaviour. The institutional dimension of society is what many
non sociologists first think about when they hear "sociology." It
is only one of six dimensions of social organization (culture),
however.
The dimension has to do with how people act in relation
to each other, their expectations, their assumptions, their
judgments, their predictions, their responses and their reactions.
It looks at patterns of relationships sometimes identified as
roles and status, and the formation of groups and institutions
that derive from those patterns. A "mother-in-law," for
example, is both a role (with a status) and an institution. In a
community, the social organization of the community is the
sum total of all those interrelationships and patterns.
The level of organization (or organizational
complexity), the degree of division of labor, the extent of
division of roles and functions, is another of the sixteen
elements of community strength or organizational capacity. The
more organized, and the more effectively organized, it is (and
you can help it to become more so), the more capacity it has to
achieve its communal or organizational objectives. As with the
other dimensions, over history, the general movement has been
from simple to complex. In early simple societies, the family

17
was the community, and was the society. The family defined all
roles and status. As societies became more complex, first the
families became more complex, and then new non-familial
relationships developed and were recognized. Later the family
itself declined in relative importance among all the many other
kinds of relationships.
Every time a new role is created, with its duties,
responsibilities, rights, and expected behavior patterns, then the
society becomes more complex. If you encourage the formation
of a new development committee, with its official positions and
membership, then the community has become that much more
complex. A small rural community with no clinic or school is
very likely composed of residents who are all related to each
other through descent and/or marriage. If you stimulate that
community to build a school or clinic, with paid teachers or
health workers (usually outsiders), then you are increasing the
social complexity of that community.
In that sense, perhaps the social dimension is similar to
the technological dimension in being less difficult (than the
other dimensions, especially the last two) in introducing social
change. As with all six dimensions, a change in one such as the
social dimension will have effects in each other the other five
dimensions.
For the animator to be successful, she or he must know
what the local institutions are, what different roles are played
by men and women, and what the main forms of social
interaction are.
The Aesthetic-Values Dimension of Community:
The aesthetic-value dimension of community is the
structure of ideas, sometimes paradoxical, inconsistent, or
contradictory, that people have about good and bad, about
beautiful and ugly, and about right and wrong, which are the
justifications that people cite to explain their actions. The three
axes along which people make judgments are all dependent
18
upon what they learn from childhood. These include judging
between right and wrong, between good and bad, and between
beautiful and ugly, all based upon social and community
values. They are not acquired through our genes, but through
our socialization. That implies that they can be relearned; that
we could change our judgments.
Values, however, are incredibly difficult to change in a
community, especially if residents perceive that an attempt is
being made to change them. They do change, as community
standards evolve, but that change cannot be rushed or guided
through outside influence or conscious manipulation. Shared
community standards are important in community and personal
identity; who one is very much is a matter of what values one
believes in. The degree to which community or organizational
members share values, and/or respect each others' values, is an
important component among the sixteen elements of strength
and capacity. Values tend to change as the community grows
more complex, more heterogeneous, more connected to the
world. Changes in values tend to result from changes in
technology, changes in social organization, and not by
preaching or lecturing for direct changes.
It appears that there is no overall direction of change in human
history, that judgments become more liberal, more tolerant,
more catholic, more eclectic, or less as societies become more
complex and sophisticated. Communities at either end of the
social complexity spectrum display standards of various
degrees of rigidity. In spite of that range, within any
community there is usually a narrow range of values among
residents. Urban and heterogeneous communities tend to have a
wider variation in values and aesthetics.
It is not easy to predict the value standards of any
community before you go to live there and to find out how to
operate within the community. Because of their importance,
however, it is necessary that you, the mobilize learn as much as

19
you can about community standards, and do not assume that
they will be the same as your own.
While the introduction of new facilities and services in a
community may eventually lead to changes in community
standards, anything a mobilize proposes must be seen to be
within the prevailing sets of community values.
Whenever an animator introduces new ways of doing
things in the community, prevailing values, however
contradictory and varied, must be considered.
The Beliefs-Conceptual Dimension of Community:
The belief-conceptual dimension of community is
another structure of ideas, also sometimes contradictory, that
people have about the nature of the universe, the world around
them, their role in it, cause and effect, and the nature of time,
matter, and behavior.
This dimension is sometimes thought to be the religion
of the people. It is a wider category, and also includes atheistic
beliefs, for example, that man created God in his own image. It
includes shared beliefs in how this universe came to be, how it
operates, and what is reality. It is religion and more.
When you drop a pencil onto the floor, you demonstrate
your belief in gravity. When you say the sun comes up in the
morning (it does not; the earth turns) you express your world
view. If you, the mobilize, are seen to be someone who is
attacking the beliefs of the people, you will find your work
hindered, opposition to you and your goals, and failure as a
mobilize. Whether or not you want to oppose local beliefs, you
must be seen to do not want to change them.
In the broad sweep of human existence, the general
trend of change has been for a decrease in the number of
deities, and a reduction from sacred-profane differences in
space to secular space. From local polytheism with many gods,
humans moved to a polytheism with fewer gods, from that
humans moved to monotheism (one god) and from there an
20
increase in the proportion of people who believe in no god. In
humankind experience, it appears that those groups with local
traditional gods tend to be more tolerant of other gods than are
the so-called "universal" religions which each say they alone
have the true answer. Huge wars have been fought over
religions (an irony in that most religions call for peace and
tolerance), and this should be a warning to the mobilize about
the extent to which people fervently hold their beliefs.
The animator must learn study and be aware of what the
prevailing beliefs are in the community. To be an effective
catalyst of social change, the animator must make suggestions
and promote actions which do not offend those prevailing
beliefs, and which are consistent with, or at least appropriate to,
existing beliefs and concepts of how the universe works.
All Six Dimensions are in Each Bit of Culture:
The important thing to remember is that in any society,
in any community, in any institution, in any interaction
between individuals, there is an element of culture, and that
includes something of each of those six cultural dimensions.
All of these are learned from birth. The new-born child is like
an animal, not yet a human being, but he or she begins learning
culture (humanizing) immediately (for example, when drinking
from the breast) by interacting with other humans, and thus
starts becoming human. (Many say that this humanizing
process begins in the womb). This process of learning, and thus
of becoming, continues until death. If you are not learning, you
are dead.
When you are at a community meeting, when you are in
a classroom, when you meet someone face to face, wherever
you are, you are part of culture, part of the sociocultural
system, and you can find all six dimensions. Sometimes, when
we try to look objectively at culture in a scientific way, we
forget that we are part of culture ourselves. The tools we use,
the interaction we are engaged in, the beliefs and values we

21
hold, are all part of our culture, and part of our existence as
social animals. If we do our work as a mobilizer in a
community other than where we grew up, our culture will differ
from that of the residents. See: Acculturation.
We are not free of that obligation if we are trying to
mobilize our own community. A proverb that illustrates an
anthropological principle is, "It is a strange fish that knows the
existence of water."
Because our very existence, and our understanding of
ourselves, is a product of our culture, and our socialization into
it, we are not aware of the nature of that culture. Like a fish that
has never been out of water (and able to compare it with its
absence) we cannot and do not exist outside of culture.
Interconnectedness Has a Practical Use:
For the mobilizer, and for anyone who is engaged in
any development activities, the important part of all this is the
variety of interconnections between those cultural dimensions.
They may be causally and functionally inter-related.
Technology (in contrast to popularly held ideas), for example,
both the tools and the skills to use them, are as much a part of
culture or social system as are beliefs, dances, and ways of
allocating wealth. To make changes in any one dimension has
repercussions in each of the other dimensions. To introduce a
new method of obtaining water, for example, requires the
introduction of new institutions to maintain the new water
system.
Learning any new ways of doing things will require the
learning of both new values and new perceptions. Changes in
any dimension will start changes, like the ripples of water on a
calm lake when you throw a stone into it, and ultimately all six
dimensions will change. To ignore such interconnections while
promoting technology transfer is to do so at your peril
(unexpected and/or unwanted results may be produced). You
need to carefully observe changes in the community where you
22
may be working, and look for the repercussions in change in
each dimension as they affect the other dimensions.
The Interconnectedness Affects Social Change:
To change something in one cultural dimension not only
requires changes in other dimensions, it causes changes in other
dimensions. That is why social impact assessment should be
made of all projects, large and small. As you become more
experienced, you will begin to see some changes that follow as
a result of introductions of new ways of doing things. The more
you can predict such changes, the more you can be prepared for
them. The more you can predict changes in each dimension, the
more you can modify your actions so that the community might
be more likely to change in ways you desire.
Remember, however, that you are not a social engineer,
and cannot precisely determine how a community will respond
to your work.
Conclusion: The Mobilizer Must Understand Community:
To be more effective as a mobilizer, to empower or
strengthen communities, you need to know the nature of
communities, and how they behave. Communities are social or
cultural organizations, and, as such, are characterized by the six
cultural dimensions. Communities are not the same as human
individuals, but grow and change by their own sets of
principles. The key to understanding these characteristics and
principles is to recognize those six dimensions of culture, and
their inter-relationships.
The interconnections between these cultural (2)
dimensions are neither simple nor easy to predict. The animator
must be aware that they exist, and continually encourage
observation, analysis, sharing of ideas, reading, and attending
lectures or seminars. By working with communities, the
animator must learn more and more about their culture, and the
dynamics of their cultural dimensions.

23
 Chapter-2

Community

The term community is one of the most elusive and

vague in sociology and is by now largely without specific
meaning. At the minimum it refers to a collection of
people in a geographical area. Three other elements may be
present in any usage of the term community.
(a) Communities may be thought of as collections of people
with a particular social structure; there are, therefore,
collections which are not communities. Such a notion often
equates community with rural or preindustrial society and
may, in addition, treat urban or industrial society as positively
destructive.
(b) A sense of belonging or community spirit.
(c) All the daily activities of a community, work and non-
work, take place within the geographical area; it is self-
contained.
Different accounts of community will contain any or all
of these additional elements.
The century sociologists used a concept of community,
explicitly or implicitly, in that they operated with dichotomies
between preindustrial and industrial, or rural and urban
societies. Ferdinand Tonnies, for example, in his distinction
between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, treats communities as
particular kinds of society which are predominantly rural,
united by kinship and a sense of belonging, and self-
contained. We shall elaborate this later while discussing
association. The century sociologists, the term community
was part of their critique of urban, industrial society. On

24
the one hand, communities were associated with all the
good characteristics that were thought to be possessed by
rural societies. Urban societies, on the other, represented a
destruction of community values. Some of these attitudes
persist today.
However, it became clear that societies could not
be sharply divided into rural or urban, communities or
non-communities, and sociologists proposed a rural-urban
continuum instead, along which sentiments could be ranged
according to various features of their social structure.
There was little agreement about what features
differentiated settlements along the continuum, beyond an
insistence on the significance of kinship, friendship and self-
containment. The community study tradition was also
important in its development of techniques of participant
observation but has lost favor recently, partly because, as
national considerations become important, communities
become less self-contained, and partly because urban
sociologists have become interested in other problems.
Amitai Etzioni in New Golden Rule (1996) points out that
community may be defined with reasonable precision.
Community has two characteristics:
(a) A web of affect-laden relationships among a group of
individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce
one another (as opposed to one-on-one relationships);
(b) A measure of commitment to a set of shared histories
and identities in short, a particular culture.
David E. Pearson (1995) states:
To earn the appellation of ―community‖, it seems to me,
groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a
measure of compliance from their members. That is,
communities are necessarily, indeed by definition, coercive as
well as moral, threatening their members with the stick of

25
sanctions if they stray, offering them the carrot of certainty
and stability if they dont. More recently, the term community
has been used to indicate a sense of identity or belonging that
may or may not be tied to geographical location. In this sense,
a community is formed when people have a reasonably clear
idea of who has something in common with them and who has
not. Communities are, therefore, essentially mental constructs,
formed by imagined boundaries between groups (Anderson
2006). An example of this is the nation as a community (for
example, ―Indianness‖) and thereby different from other
nations even when they could not know personally other
members of the imagined community.
The term community continues to have some practical
and normative force. For example, the ideal of the rural
community still has some grip and we often see town
planners aim at creating a community spirit in these designs.
Community:
―A community is that collectivity d members of which share a
common territorial areas d base of operation for daily activities.
1. Territory
2. Common act & life style
3. Permanency
4. Gratification of multiple end (needs)
5. Small sign (MacIver ; size may b large also) strong feeling
6. Commercial relation not driven by law rather defined by
values & norms.
Institution
In the social sciences, institutions are the structures and
mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the
behavior of a set of individuals within a given human
collectivity. Institutions include the family, religion, peer
group, economic systems, legal systems, penal systems,
language, and the media.

26
 A social institution is a complex, integrated set of social
norms organized around the preservation of a basic societal
value. Obviously, the sociologist does not define institutions in
the same way as does the person on the street. Lay persons are
likely to use the term "institution" very loosely, for churches,
hospitals, jails, and many other things as institutions.
Sociologists often reserve the term "institution" to
describe normative systems that operate in five basic areas of
life, which may be designated as the primary institutions.
1. In determining Kinship;
2. In providing for the legitimate use of power;
3. In regulating the distribution of goods and services;
4. In transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next;
and
5. In regulating our relation to the supernatural.
6. In shorthand form, or as concepts, these five basic
institutions are called the family, government, economy,
education and religion.
The five primary institutions are found among all
human groups. They are not always as highly elaborated or as
distinct from one another as into the United States, but, in
rudimentary form at last, they exist everywhere. Their
universality indicates that they are deeply rooted in human
nature and that they are essential in the development and
maintenance of orders. Sociologists operating in terms of the
functionalist model society have provided the clearest
explanation of the functions served by social institutions.
Apparently there are certain minimum tasks that must be
performed in all human groups. Unless these tasks are
performed adequately, the group will cease to exist. An analogy
may help to make the point. We might hypothesize that cost
accounting department is essential to the operation of a large
corporation. A company might procure a superior product and
distribute it then at the price which is assigned to it, the
company will soon go out of business. Perhaps the only way to
27
avoid this is to have a careful accounting of the cost of each
step in the production and distribution process.
An institution is any structure or mechanism of social
order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of
individuals within a given community may it be human or a
specific animal one. Institutions are identified with a social
purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating
the rules that govern cooperative living behavior.
The term "institution" is commonly applied to customs
and behavior patterns important to a society, as well as to
particular formal organizations of government and public
services. As structures and mechanisms of social order among
certain species, institutions are one of the principal objects of
study in the social sciences, such as political science,
anthropology, economics, and sociology (the latter being
described by Durkheim as the "science of institutions, their
genesis and their functioning").Institutions are also a central
concern for law, the formal mechanism for political rule-
making and enforcement.
Examples of Institutions [edit]
 Marriage and the family - sociology of the family
 Religion and religious institutions - see sociology of religion;
civil religion
 Educational institutions schools (preschool, primary/
elementary, secondary, and post-secondary/higher - see
Sociology of education)
 Research community Academia and universities; research
institutes - see sociology of science
 Medicine- hospitals and other health care institutions - see
sociology of health and illness, medical sociology
 Psychiatric hospitals (history)
 Law and legal system - courts; judges; the legal profession
(bar) - see jurisprudence, philosophy of law, sociology of law
 Criminal justice or penal systems - prisons - see sociology of
punishment
28
  Military or paramilitary forces - see military sociology
 Police forces
 Mass media- including the news media (television,
newspapers) and the popular media - see media studies
 Industry - businesses, including corporations - see financial
institution, factory, capitalism, division of labor, social class,
industrial sociology
 Civil society or NGOs - Charitable organizations; advocacy
groups; political parties; think tanks; virtual communities
In an extended context:
 Art and culture (See also: Culture industry, Critical theory,
Cultural studies, Cultural sociology)
 Language (See also: Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and
Sociology of language)
 The nation-state - Social and political scientists often speak
of the state as embodying all institutions such as schools,
prisons, and so on. However, these institutions may be
considered private or autonomous, whilst organised religion
and family life certainly pre-date the advent of the nation
state. In the Neo-Marxist thought of Antonio Gramsci, for
instance, a distinction may be felt between the institutions
of political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.)
which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society
(the family, the education system, etc.)
 In some circumstances, individuals can be considered
institutions if they are responsible for creating motifs or
worldwide phenomena. Examples of this include Stanley
Kubrick, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.
Aspects of institutions
Although individual, formal organizations, commonly
identified as "institutions," may be deliberately and
intentionally created by people, the development and
functioning of institutions in society in general may be
regarded as an instance of emergence; that is, institutions arise,
develop and function in a pattern of social self-organization,
29
which goes beyond the conscious intentions of the individual
humans involved.
As mechanisms of social interaction, institutions
manifest in both formal organizations, such as the U.S.
Congress, or the Roman Catholic Church, and, also, in informal
social order and organization, reflecting human psychology,
culture, habits and customs, and encompassing subjective
experience of meaningful enactments. Most important
institutions, considered abstractly, have both objective and
subjective aspects: examples include money and marriage. The
institution of money encompasses many formal organizations,
including banks and government treasury departments and
stock exchanges, which may be termed, "institutions," as well
as subjective experiences, which guide people in their pursuit
of personal well-being. Powerful institutions are able to imbue
a paper currency with certain value, and to induce millions into
cooperative production and trade in pursuit of economic ends
abstractly denominated in that currency's units.[citation needed]
The subjective experience of money is so pervasive and
persuasive that economists talk of the "money illusion" and try
to disabuse their students of it, in preparation for learning
economic analysis.[citation needed]
Perspectives of the social sciences [edit]
While institutions tend to appear to people in society as
part of the natural, unchanging landscape of their lives, study of
institutions by the social sciences tends to reveal the nature of
institutions social constructions, artifacts of a particular time,
culture and society, produced by collective human choice,
though not directly by individual intention. Sociology
traditionally analyzed social institutions in terms of
interlocking social roles and expectations. Social institutions
created and were composed of groups of roles, or expected
behaviors. The social function of the institution was executed
by the fulfillment of roles. Basic biological requirements, for

30
reproduction and care of the young, are served by the
institutions of marriage and family, for example, by creating,
elaborating and prescribing the behaviors expected for
husband/father, wife/mother, child, etc.
The relationship of institutions to human nature is a
foundational question for the social sciences. Institutions can be
seen as "naturally" arising from, and conforming to, human
nature a fundamentally conservative view or institutions can be
seen as artificial, almost accidental, and in need of architectural
redesign, informed by expert social analysis, to better serve
human needs a fundamentally progressive view. Adam Smith
anchored his economics in the supposed human "propensity to
truck, barter and exchange". Modern feminists have criticized
traditional marriage and other institutions as element of an
oppressive and obsolete patriarchy. The Marxist view which
sees human nature as historically 'evolving' towards voluntary
social cooperation, shared by some anarchists, is that supra
individual institutions such as the market and the state are
incompatible with the individual liberty which would obtain in
a truly free society.
Economics, in recent years, has used game theory to
study institutions from two perspectives. Firstly, how do
institutions survive and evolve? In this perspective, institutions
arise from Nash equilibrium of games. For example, whenever
people pass each other in a corridor or thoroughfare, there is a
need for customs, which avoid collisions. Such a custom might
call for each party to keep to their own right (or left such a
choice is arbitrary, it is only necessary that the choice be
uniform and consistent). Such customs may be supposed to be
the origin of rules, such as the rule, adopted in many countries,
which requires driving automobiles on the right side of the
road.
Secondly, how do institutions affect behavior? In this
perspective, the focus is on behavior arising from a given set of

31
institutional rules. In these models, institutions determine the
rules (i.e. strategy sets and utility functions) of games, rather
than arise as equilibrium out of games. For example, the
Cournot duopoly model is based on an institution involving an
auctioneer who sells all goods at the market-clearing price.
While it is always possible to analyse behavior with the
institutions as equilibrium approach instead, it is much more
complicated.
In political science, the effect of institutions on behavior
has also been considered from a meme perspective, like game
theory borrowed from biology. A "mimetic institutionalism"
has been proposed, suggesting that institutions provide
selection environments for political action, whereby
differentiated retention arises and thereby a Darwinian
evolution of institutions over time. Public choice theory,
another branch of economics with a close relationship to
political science, considers how government policy choices are
made, and seeks to determine what the policy outcomes are
likely to be, given a particular political decision-making
process and context.
In history, a distinction between eras or periods implies
a major and fundamental change in the system of institutions
governing a society. Political and military events are judged to
be of historical significance to the extent that they are
associated with changes in institutions. In European history,
particular significance is attached to the long transition from
the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages to the modern
institutions, which govern contemporary life.
Institutionalization
The term "institutionalization" is widely used in social
theory to refer to the process of embedding something (for
example a concept, a social role, a particular value or mode of
behavior) within an organization, social system, or society as a
whole. The term may also be used to refer to committing a

32
particular individual to an institution, such as a mental
institution. To this extent, "institutionalization" may carry
negative connotations regarding the treatment of, and damage
caused to, vulnerable human beings by the oppressive or
corrupt application of inflexible systems of social, medical, or
legal controls by publicly owned, private or not-for-profit
organizations.
The term "institutionalization" may also be used in a
political sense to apply to the creation or organization of
governmental institutions or particular bodies responsible for
overseeing or implementing policy, for example in welfare or
development.
Social Institutions
A social institution may be defined as an organizational
system which functions to satisfy basic social needs by
providing an ordered framework linking the individual to the
larger culture.
The Basic Institutions
 Family
 Religion
 Government
 Education
 Economics
General Functions of Social Institutions
 Institution Satisfy the Basic Needs of Society.
 Institution Define Dominant Social Values.
 Institutions Establish Permanent Patterns of Social Behavior
 Monogamy Institutions Support Other Institutions.
 Institutions Provide Roles for Individuals.
 Husband and Wife.
Specific Functions of Individual Institutions
 The Specific Functions of the Family
 The control and regulation of sexual behavior.
 To provide for new members of society (children).
33
  To provide for the economic and emotional maintenance of
individuals.
 To provide for primary socialization of children.
The Specific Function of Religion
 Providing solutions for unexplained natural, phenomena.
 Supplying a means for controlling the natural world.
 Religion tends to support the normative structure of the
society.
 Furnishing a psychological diversion from unwanted life
situations.
 Sustaining the existing class structure.
 Religion serves as an instrument of socialization.
 Religion may both promote and retard social change.
 Religion may both reduce and encourage conflict in groups.
The Specific Functions of Government
 The Institutionalization of norms (Laws).
 The enforcement of laws.
 The adjudication of conflict (Court).
 Provide for the welfare of members of society.
 Protection of Society from external threat.
The Specific Functions of Education
 Transmitting culture.
 Preparation for occupational roles
 Evaluating and Selecting competent individuals
 Transmitting functional skills for functioning in society.
Specific Functions of Economy
 Provide methods for the production of goods and services.
 Provide methods for the distribution of goods and services.
 Enable society’s members to consume goods and services
which are produced.
Functions of Activities
 All activities have, or result in certain functions. These
functions may be thought of as the effects of an activity.

34
  The concept of manifest and latent function was introduced
into sociology by Robert K. Merton (1910-???)
 Manifest Function is those functions which are both
recognized and intended.
 Latent Function is those functions which are neither
intended nor readily recognized.
Topics in Sociology: Social Institutions
Social institutions are established or standardized
patterns of rule-governed behavior. They include the family,
education, religion, and economic and political institutions.
Major Perspectives
Marx
 Social institutions are determined by their society’s mode of
production.
 Social institutions serve to maintain the power of the
dominant class.
Weber
 Social institutions are interdependent but no single
institution determines the rest.
 The causes and consequences of social institutions cannot
be assumed in advance.
Durkheim
 Set the stage for later functionalist analyses of institutions
by concluding that religion promotes social solidarity and
collective conscience.
Functionalist theory
 The social institutions listed in this section (along with other
social institutions) fulfill functional prerequisites and are
essential.
 Conflict theory
 Social institutions tend to reinforce inequalities and uphold
the power of dominant groups.
 Emphasizes divisions and conflicts within social institutions.
 Symbolic interactionism
35
  Focuses on interactions and other symbolic communications
within social institutions.
The term, ―social institution‖ is somewhat unclear both
in ordinary language and in the philosophical literature (see
below). However, contemporary sociology is somewhat more
consistent in its use of the term. Typically, contemporary
sociologists use the term to refer to complex social forms that
reproduce themselves such as governments, the family, human
languages, universities, hospitals, business corporations, and
legal systems. A typical definition is that proffered by Jonathan
Turner (Turner 1997: 6): ―a complex of positions, roles, norms
and values lodged in particular types of social structures and
organising relatively stable patterns of human activity with
respect to fundamental problems in producing life-sustaining
resources, in reproducing individuals, and in sustaining viable
societal structures within a given environment.‖ Again,
Anthony Giddens says (Giddens 1984: 24): ―Institutions by
definition are the more enduring features of social life.‖ He
(Giddens 1984: 31) goes on to list as institutional orders, modes
of discourse, political institutions, economic institutions and
legal institutions. The contemporary philosopher of social
science, Rom Harre follows the theoretical sociologists in
offering this kind of definition (Harre 1979: 98): ―An
institution was defined as an interlocking double-structure of
persons-as-role-holders or office-bearers and the like, and of
social practices involving both expressive and practical aims
and outcomes.‖ He gives as examples (Harre 1979: 97) schools,
shops, post offices, police forces, asylums and the British
monarchy.
In this entry the above-noted contemporary sociological
usage will be followed. Doing so has the virtue of grounding
philosophical theory in the most salient empirical discipline,
namely, sociology.

36
 At this point it might be asked why a theory of social
institutions has, or ought to have, any philosophical interest;
why not simply leave such theorising to the sociologists? One
important reason stems from the normative concerns of
philosophers. Philosophers, such as John Rawls (Rawls 1972),
have developed elaborate normative theories concerning the
principles of justice that ought to govern social institutions. Yet
they have done so in the absence of a developed theory of the
nature and point of the very entities (social institutions) to
which the principles of justice in question are supposed to
apply. Surely the adequacy of one's normative account of the
justice or otherwise of any given social institution, or system of
social institutions, will depend at least in part on the nature and
point of that social institution or system.
The entry has five sections. In the first section various
salient accounts of social institutions are discussed. Accounts
emanating from sociological theory as well as philosophy are
mentioned. Here, as elsewhere, the boundaries between
philosophy and non-philosophical the orising in relation to an
empirical science are vague. Hence, it is important to note the
theories of the likes of Durkheim and Talcott Parsons as well as
those of John Searle and David Lewis.
In the second section so-called collective acceptance theories of
social institutions are discussed (Searle 1995 and 2010;
Tuomela 2002 and 2007.
In the third section a teleological account of social
institutions is presented (Miller 2001 and 2010). Teleological
explanation is out of fashion in many areas of philosophy.
However, it remains influential in contemporary philosophical
theories of social action.
In the fourth section, the so-called agent-structure
question is addressed. At bottom, this issue concerns the
apparent inconsistency between the autonomy (or alleged
autonomy) of individual human agents, on the one hand, and

37
the ubiquity and pervasive influence of social forms on
individual character and behaviour, on the other.
In the fifth and final section the specific normative issue
of the justice of social institutions is explored. This section
includes a discussion of intra-institutional justice, e.g. the
justice or injustice of the reward system within an institution, as
well as extra-institutional justice, e.g. the justice or injustice of
a power relationship between a government and refugees.
Social Institutions
Definition: Groups of persons banded together for common
purposes having rights, privileges, liabilities, goals, or
objectives distinct and independent from those of individual
members.
Definition Source: Webster's II New Riverside University
Dictionary
Social Institutions Categories:
1.3.4.1 Community: A group of people residing in the same
locality and under the same government or a group or class
having common interests. (Definition Source: Webster's II New
Riverside University Dictionary)
1.3.4.2 Community Service Organizations: Non-profit,
charitable organizations dedicated to assisting others meet basic
needs, resolve personal or family problems, or improving their
community. This includes soup kitchens, rotary clubs, Boys
and Girls Clubs, scouts, etc. (Definition Source: None)
1.3.4.3 Educational Institutions: Social organizations
dedicated to teaching skills and knowledge to individuals.
(Definition Source: None)
1.3.4.4 Ethnic or Cultural Groups: A social organization
consisting of many extended family groups related by a distant,
common ancestry. (Definition Source: None)

38
1.3.4.5 Extended Family: A social organization consisting of
several nuclear family groups related by common ancestry.
(Definition Source: None)
1.3.4.6 Families and Households: A fundamental social group
consisting especially of a man and a women and their offspring;
a domestic establishment including the members of a family
and other who live under the same roof. (Definition Source:
Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary)
1.3.4.7 Governments and Legal Institutions: The office,
function, authority, or organization that sets forth and
administer public policy and the affairs. A government consists
of a legislative branch which writes law and policy, executive
branch which executes law and policy, and judicial branch
which enforces law and policy. This includes local, state, and
national governments. This includes all branches of the
military. (Definition Source: Monitoring Social Indicators for
Ecosystem Management)
1.3.4.8 Health Care Institutions: Social institutions that
specialize in monitoring public health, providing health
maintenance, and treating illness and injury. (Definition
Source: None)
1.3.4.10 Intellectual and Cultural Organizations: Social
organizations dedicated to search for new knowledge or the
development and preservation of art. (Definition Source: None)
1.3.4.11 Market Institutions: Social organizations dedicated
to barter and trade. This includes all corporations and
businesses. (Definition Source: None)
1.3.4.12 Political and Non Government Organizations:
Social organizations dedicated to influencing the processes of
government; political parties. This includes non-governmental
organizations and groups of people with common goals,
interests, or ideals formally bound together by a common set of
rules or by-laws that influence public policy. (Definition
Source: None)
39
1.3.4.13 Religious Organizations: Groups of people who share
a common, codified belief in and reverence for a supernatural
power accepted as the creator and governor of the universe.
(Definition Source: Webster's II New Riverside University
Dictionary)
Definition:
Social institutions are a system of behavioral and relationship
patterns that are densely interwoven and enduring, and function
across an entire society. They order and structure the behavior
of individuals by means of their normative character.
Institutions regulate the behavior of individuals in core areas of
society:
a) Family and relationship networks carry out social
reproduction and socialization;
b)Institutions in the realm of education and training ensure the
transmission and cultivation of knowledge, abilities and
specialized skills;
c) Institutions in the labor-market and economy provide for the
production and distribution of goods and services; d)
institutions in the realm of law, governance and politics provide
for the maintenance of the social order;
e) While cultural, media and religious institutions further the
development of contexts of meaning, value orientations and
symbolic codes.
Description
Social institutions are important structural components
of modern societies that address one or more fundamental
activity and/or specific function. Without social institutions,
modern societies could not exist. Societies consist of a range of
institutions that play myriad specific roles in facilitating human
social life, and which themselves are dependent upon one
another for the performance of their respective functions. A
given institution can also perform different functions at once

40
and/or over time. In this respect they differ from formal
organizations, which are hierarchically differentiated via an
organizational structure and serve primarily to facilitate rational
action (Zweckhande ln) and the realization of particular
interests.
In sociological theory, there are three prevailing
interpretations of social institutions: functionalist approaches,
Marxist-inspired conflict-oriented explanations, and neo-
institution a list approaches.
Functionalist approaches in the tradition of Durkheim
and Parsons emphasize the importance of social institutions for
the maintenance of social systems. Social integration is only
possible when institutions perform core functions. Three such
functions can be distinguished: first, institutions structure
human social relationships and serve as a catalyst for the role
expectations with which individuals are confronted in their
everyday actions. Second, institutions regulate the distribution
of gratifications and the allocation of suitable persons to
positions of power. Third, by means of symbols, policies and
ideologies, certain social institutions represent and stabilize the
value canons and contexts of meaning of social systems. In
contrast to functionalist approaches, conflict theory (Coser) has
as its point of departure the insight that because conflict and
inequality are inherent in modern societies, social institutions
do not perform equally well for all members of society. From
this perspective, institutions are seen as instruments for the
realization of power and hegemony, and help stabilize
prevailing inequalities. For scholars in this tradition, it is easy
to demonstrate that ethnic minorities, women and those in
lower social strata benefit less from the functioning of
institutions, or are shaped by them in specific ways. Moreover,
several members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory
(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) underscore that institutions
can function in manipulative and alienating ways, for they

41
serve first and foremost to legitimate prevailing power
relations.

42
 Chapter-3

Culture
Introduction
Bottom of Form
Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the question
of what is culture. Culture is a complicated phenomenon to
understand because it is both distinct from but clearly
associated with society. Also, different definitions of culture
reflect different theories or understandings, making it difficult
to pin down exact definitions of the concept.
Generally speaking, the following elements of social
life are considered to be representative of human culture:
"stories, beliefs, media, ideas, works of art, religious practices,
fashions, rituals, specialized knowledge, and common sense"
(Griswold 2004:xvi).
Yet, examples of culture do not, in themselves, present a clear
understanding of the concept of culture; culture is more than
the object or behavior. Culture also includes, …norms, values,
beliefs, or expressive symbols. Roughly, norms are the way
people behave in a given society, values are what they hold
dear, beliefs are how they think the universe operates, and
expressive symbols are representations, often representations of
social norms, values, and beliefs themselves. (Griswold 2004:3)
To summarize, culture encompasses objects and
symbols, the meaning given to those objects and symbols, and
the norms, values, and beliefs that pervade social life.
Notes: The word 'culture' comes from the Latin root 'colere' (to
inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor), meaning, the customs and
beliefs, art, way of life and social organization of a particular

43
country or group, or, the beliefs and attitudes about 5th that
people in a particular group or organization share.
'High' Culture
Many people today use a concept of culture that
developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
This concept ofculture reflected inequalities within European
societies and their colonies around the world. It identifies
culture with civilization and contrasts both with nature.
According to this thinking, some countries are more civilized
than others, and some people are more cultured than others.
Thus some cultural theorists have actually tried to eliminate
popular or mass culture from the definition of culture. Theorists
like Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) believed that culture is
simply that which is created by "the best that has been thought
and said in the world" (Arnold 1960:6). Anything that doesn't
fit into this category is labeled as chaos or anarchy. On this
account, culture is closely tied to cultivation, which is the
progressive refinement of human behavior.
In practice, culture referred to elite goods and activities
such as haute cuisine, high fashion or haute couture, museum-
caliber art and classical music, and the word cultured referred
to people who knew about, and took part in, these activities.
For example, someone who used culture in the sense of
cultivation might argue that classical music is more refined
than music by working-class people, such as jazz or the
indigenous music traditions of aboriginal peoples.
People who use culture in this way tend not to use it in the
plural. They believe that there are not distinct cultures, each
with their own internal logic and values, but rather only a single
standard of refinement to which all groups are held
accountable. Thus people who differ from those who believe
themselves to be cultured in this sense are not usually
understood as having a different culture; they are understood as
being uncultured.

44
The Changing Concept of Culture
Today most social scientists reject the cultured vs.
uncultured concept of culture and the opposition of culture to
human nature. They recognize that non-elites are as cultured as
elites (and that non-Westerners are just as civilized); they are
just cultured in a different way.
During the Romantic Era, scholars in Germany,
especially those concerned with nationalism, developed a more
inclusive notion of culture as worldview. That is, each ethnic
group is characterized by a distinct and incommensurable world
view. Although more inclusive, this approach to culture still
allowed for distinctions between civilized and primitive or
tribal cultures.
By the late 19th century, anthropologists had changed the
concept of culture to include a wider variety of societies,
ultimately resulting in the concept of culture outlined above -
objects and symbols, the meaning given to those objects and
symbols, and the norms, values, and beliefs that pervade social
life.
This new perspective has also removed the evaluative
element of the concept of culture and instead proposes
distinctions rather than rankings between different cultures. For
instance, the high culture of elites is now contrasted with
popular or pop culture. In this sense, high culture no longer
refers to the idea of being cultured, as all people are cultured.
High culture simply refers to the objects, symbols, norms,
values, and beliefs of a particular group of people; popular
culture does the same.
The Origins of Culture: Attentive to the theory of
evolution, anthropologists assumed that all human beings are
equally evolved, and the fact that all humans have cultures
must in some way be a result of human evolution. They were
also wary of using biological evolution to explain differences
between specific cultures - an approach that either was a form
45
of, or legitimized forms of, racism. Anthropologists believed
biological evolution produced an inclusive notion of culture, a
concept that anthropologists could apply equally to non-literate
and literate societies, or to nomadic and to sedentary societies.
They argued that through the course of their evolution, human
beings evolved a universal human capacity to classify
experiences, and encode and communicate them symbolically.
Since these symbolic systems were learned and taught, they
began to develop independently of biological evolution (in
other words, one human being can learn a belief, value, or way
of doing something from another, even if they are not
biologically related). That this capacity for symbolic thinking
and social learning is a product of human evolution confounds
older arguments about nature versus nurture. Thus, Clifford
Geertz (1973: 33 ff.) has argued that human physiology and
neurology developed in conjunction with the first cultural
activities, and Middleton (1990:17 n.27) concluded that human
"instincts were culturally formed."
This view of culture argues that people living apart
from one another develop unique cultures. However, elements
of different cultures can easily spread from one group of people
to another. Culture is dynamic and can be taught and learned,
making it a potentially rapid form of adaptation to change in
physical conditions. Anthropologists view culture as not only a
product of biological evolution but as a supplement to it; it can
be seen as the main means of human adaptation to the natural
world.
This view of culture as a symbolic system with adaptive
functions, which varies from place to place, led anthropologists
toconceive of different cultures as defined by distinct patterns
(or structures) of enduring, although arbitrary, conventional
sets of meaning, which took concrete form in a variety of
artifacts such as myths and rituals, tools, the design of housing,
and the planning of villages. Anthropologists thus distinguish
between material culture and symbolic culture, not only
46
because each reflects different kinds of human activity, but also
because they constitute different kinds of data that require
different methodologies to study.
This view of culture, which came to dominate between
World War I and World War II, implied that each culture was
bounded and had to be understood as a whole, on its own terms.
The result is a belief in cultural relativism.
Level of Abstraction
Another element of culture that is important for a clear
understanding of the concept is level of abstraction. Culture
ranges from the concrete, cultural object (e.g., the
understanding of a work of art) to micro-level interpersonal
interactions (e.g., the socialization of a child by his/her parents)
to a macro-level influence on entire societies (e.g., the
Puritanical roots of the U.S. that can be used to justify the
exportation of democracy â€" a lá the Iraq War; see Wald
2003). It is important when trying to understand the concept of
culture to keep in mind that the concept can have multiple
levels of meaning.
The Artificiality of Cultural Categorization
One of the more important points to understand about
culture is that it is an artificial categorization of elements of
social life. As Griswold (2004) puts it, there is no such thing as
culture or society out there in the real world. There are only
people who work, joke, raise children, love, think, worship,
fight, and behave in a wide variety of ways. To speak of culture
as one thing and society as another is to make an analytical
distinction between two different aspects of human experience.
One way to think of the distinction is that culture designates the
expressive aspect of human existence, whereas society
designates the relational (and often practical) aspect. (Griswold
2004:4)
In the above quote, Griswold emphasizes that culture is
distinct from society but affirms that this distinction is, like all
47
classifications, artificial. Humans do not experience culture in a
separate or distinct way from society. Culture and society are
truly two-sides of a coin; a coin that makes up social life. Yet
the distinction between the two, while artificial, is useful for a
number of reasons. For instance, the distinction between culture
and society is of particular use when exploring how norms and
values are transmitted from generation to generation and
answering the question of cultural conflict between people of
different cultural backgrounds (say, Japanese and United
Statesians).
In summary, culture is a complex component of social
life, distinct from the interactions of society in particular
because it adds meanings to relationships. Culture is also multi-
leveled in that it can range from concrete cultural objects to
broad social norms.

48
Subcultures & Countercultures
A subculture is a culture shared and actively
participated in by a minority of people within a broader
culture.A culture often contains numerous subcultures.
Subcultures incorporate large parts of the broader cultures of
which they are part, but in specifics they may differ radically.
Some subcultures achieve such a status that they acquire a
name of their own. Examples of subcultures could include:
bikers, military culture, and Star Trek fans (trekkers or
trekkies).
A counterculture is a subculture with the addition that
some of its beliefs, values, or norms challenge those of the
main culture of which it is part. Examples of countercultures in
the U.S. could include: the hippie movement of the 1960s, the
green movement, and feminist groups.
Ethnocentrism & Cultural Relativism
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world
primarily from the perspective of one's own culture. Many
claim that ethnocentrism occurs in every society; ironically,
ethnocentrism may be something that all cultures have in
common.
The term was coined by William Graham Sumner, a
social evolutionist and professor of Political and Social Science
at Yale University. He defined it as the viewpoint that
"oneâ€(tm)s own group is the center of everything," against
which all other groups are judged. Ethnocentrism often entails
the belief that one's own race or ethnic group is the most
important and/or that some or all aspects of its culture are
superior to those of other groups. Within this ideology,
individuals will judge other groups in relation to their own
particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to
language, behaviour, customs, and religion. It also involves an
incapacity to acknowledge that cultural differentiation does not

49
imply inferiority of those groups who are ethnically distinct
from one's own.
Cultural relativism is the belief that the concepts and
values of a culture cannot be fully translated into, or fully
understood in, other languages; that a specific cultural artifact
(e.g. a ritual) has to be understood in terms of the larger
symbolic system of which it is a part.
An example of cultural relativism might include slang
words from specific languages (and even from particular
dialects within a language). For instance, the word tranquilo in
Spanish translates directly to 'calm' in English. However, it can
be used in many more ways than just as an adjective (e.g., the
seas are calm). Tranquilo can be a command or suggestion
encouraging another to calm down. It can also be used to ease
tensions in an argument (e.g., everyone relax) or to indicate a
degree of self-composure (e.g., I'm calm). There is not a clear
English translation of the word, and in order to fully
comprehend its many possible uses a cultural relativist would
argue that it would be necessary to fully immerse oneself in
cultures where the word is used.
Theories of Culture
While there are numerous theoretical approaches
employed to understand 'culture', this chapter uses just one
model to illustrate how sociologists understand the concept.
The model is an integrationist model advocated by Ritzer
(Ritzer & Goodman 2004:357). Ritzer proposes four highly
interdependent elements in his sociological model: a macro-
objective component (e.g., society, law, bureaucracy), a micro-
objective component (e.g., patterns of behavior and human
interaction), a macro-subjective component (e.g., culture,
norms, and values), and a microsubjective component (e.g.,
perceptions, beliefs). This model is of particular use in
understanding the role of culture in sociological research
because it presents two axes for understanding culture: one

50
ranging from objective (society) to subjective (culture and
cultural interpretation); the other ranging from the macro-level
(norms) to the micro-level (individual level beliefs).
If used for understanding a specific cultural
phenomenon, like the displaying of abstract art (Halle 1993),
this model depicts how cultural norms can influence individual
behavior. This model also posits that individual level values,
beliefs, and behaviors can, in turn, influence the macro-level
culture. This is, in fact, part of what David Halle finds: while
there are certainly cultural differences based on class, they are
not unique to class. Displayers of abstract art tend not only to
belong to the upper-class, but also are employed in art-
production occupations. This would indicate that there are
multiple levels of influence involved in art tastes â€" both
broad cultural norms and smaller level occupational norms in
addition to personal preferences.
The Function of Culture
Culture can also be seen to play a specific function in
social life. According to Griswold, "The sociological analysis
of culture begins at the premise that culture provides
orientation, wards off chaos, and directs behavior toward
certain lines of action and away from others" (Griswold
2004:24). Griswold reiterates this point by explaining that,
"Groups and societies need collective representations of
themselves to inspire sentiments of unity and mutual support,
and culture fulfills this need" (p. 59). In other words, culture
can have a certain utilitarian function â€" the maintenance of
order as the result of shared understandings and meanings (this
understanding of culture is similar to the Symbolic
Interactionist understanding of society).
Cultural Change
The belief that culture is symbolically coded and can
thus be taught from one person to another means that cultures,
although bounded, can change. Cultures are both predisposed to
51
change and resistant to it. Resistance can come from habit,
religion, and the integration and interdependence of cultural
traits. For example, men and women have complementary roles
in many cultures. One sex might desire changes that affect the
other, as happened in the second half of the 20th century in
western cultures (see women's movement), while the other sex
may be resistant to that change (possibly in order to maintain a
power imbalance in their favor).
Cultural change can have many causes, including: the
environment, inventions, and contact with other cultures. For
example, the end of the last ice age helped lead to the invention
of agriculture. Some inventions that affected Western culture in
the 20th century were the birth control pill, television, and the
Internet.
Several understandings of how cultures change come
from Anthropology. For instance, in diffusion theory, the form
of something moves from one culture to another, but not its
meaning. For example, the ankh symbol originated in Egyptian
culture but has diffused to numerous cultures. It's original
meaning may have been lost, but it is now used by many
practitioners of New Age Religion as an arcane symbol of
power or life forces. A variant of the diffusion theory, stimulus
diffusion, refers to an element of one culture leading to an
invention in another.
Contact between cultures can also result in
acculturation. Acculturation has different meanings, but in this
context refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with
those of another, such as what happened with many Native
American Indians. Related processes on an individual level are
assimilation and transculturation, both of which refer to
adoption of a different culture by an individual.
One sociological approach to cultural change has been
outlined by Griswold (2004). Griswold points out that it may
seem as though culture comes from individuals "which, for

52
certain elements of cultural change, is true" but there is also the
larger, collective, and long-lasting culture that cannot have
been the creation of single individuals as it predates and post-
dates individual humans and contributors to culture. The author
presents a sociological perspective to address this conflict,
Sociology suggests an alternative to both the
unsatisfying it has always been that way view at one extreme
and the unsociological individual genius view at the other. This
alternative posits that culture and cultural works are collective,
not individual, creations. We can best understand specific
cultural objects... by seeing them not as unique to their creators
but as the fruits of collective production, fundamentally social
in their genesis. (p. 53)
In short, Griswold argues that culture changes through
the contextually dependent and socially situated actions of
individuals; macro-level culture influences the individual who,
in turn, can influence that same culture. The logic is a bit
circular, but illustrates how culture can change over time yet
remain somewhat constant.
It is, of course, important to recognize here that
Griswold is talking about cultural change and not the actual
origins of culture (as in, "there was no culture and then,
suddenly, there was"). Because Griswold does not explicitly
distinguish between the origins of cultural change and the
origins of culture, it may appear as though Griswold is arguing
here for the origins of culture and situating these origins in
society. This is neither accurate nor a clear representation of
sociological thought on this issue. Culture, just like society, has
existed since the beginning of humanity (humans being social
and cultural). Society and culture co-exist because humans
have social relations and meanings tied to those relations (e.g.
brother, lover, friend; see, for instance, Leakey 1994). Culture
as a super-phenomenon has no real beginning except in the
sense that humans (homo sapiens) have a beginning. This, then,

53
makes the question of the origins of culture moot â€" it has
existed as long as we have, and will likely exist as long as we
do. Cultural change, on the other hand, is a matter that can be
questioned and researched, as Griswold does.
Cultural Sociology: Researching Culture
How do sociologists study culture? One approach to
studying culture falls under the label 'cultural sociology', which
combines the study of culture with cultural understandings of
phenomena.
Griswold (2004) explains how cultural sociologists
approach their research,
...if one were to try to understand a certain group of
people, one would look for the expressive forms through which
they represent themselves to themselves... The sociologist can
come at this collective representation process from the other
direction, from the analysis of a particular cultural object, as
well; if we were to try to understand a cultural object, we
would look for how it is used by some group as representing
that group. (p. 59)
In other words, because of the perspective of cultural
sociologists, their approach to studying culture involves
looking for how people make meaning in their lives out of the
different cultural elements that surround them.
A particularly clear example of cultural sociology is the
study of the Village-Northton by Elijah Anderson (1990).
Anderson is interested in a number of things in his book, but
two cultural components stand out. First, Anderson is looking
at the border of two culturally and socio-economically distinct
neighborhoods. Because these two neighborhoods are distinct
yet share a border, this research site provides numerous
opportunities for the exploration of culture. Not surprisingly,
cultural conflict is an optimal scenario for the exploration of
culture and cultural interaction. Additionally, Anderson is
interested in how individuals in these neighborhoods negotiate
54
interpersonal interactions, especially when individuals from the
Village (middle to upper-middle class and predominantly
white) are forced to interact with members of the Northton area
(lower class and poor blacks).
Andersonâmethodology is a combination of participant
observation and interviews. But when viewed in light of the
quote above by Griswold, it becomes apparent that
Andersonâ€(tm)s focus in these interviews and observations is
self-presentation (also see impression management). Anderson
regularly describes the individuals he interviews and observes
in light of their clothing, behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and
opinions. As he interacts with more and more individuals,
patterns begin to develop. Specifically, individuals dressed in
certain outfits behave in similar ways. For instance, those
dressed in business attire (even when walking their dogs) â€"
the yuppies â€" have particular perspectives on the future of the
Village: they are interested in increasing property values in
order to maximize their investment. Another example of
cultural significance of clothing is older black men who
intentionally wear button-up shirts and ties because of the
cultural symbolism of that particular outfit: it signifies to the
cultural outsider that the wearer is refined and distinct from the
athletic-suit-wearing drug dealers who control numerous
Northton corners.
Ultimately, Andersonâgoal is to develop a sort of
typology of streetwise individuals: people who can manage
awkward and uncomfortable interpersonal interactions on the
street in such a fashion that they emerge from the interactions
unharmed. While he does develop a loose description of these
types of individuals, the important part to understand here is
how he explores these aspects of culture. First, he found a
cultural border that presented cultural conflict. When
individuals have to negotiate meaning publicly, it makes it
much easier for the sociologist to tease out culture.
Additionally, Anderson observed both the transmission of
55
culture from generation to generation (i.e., socialization, but
also the self-representation that is provided by cultural
expressions (clothing, behavior, etc). Through years of
observation, Anderson gained a familiarity with these elements
of culture that allowed him to understand how they interacted.
In summary, cultural sociology (or the study of culture) is
performed by examining how individuals express themselves to
others and is likely facilitated by finding cultural boundaries
where cultural expression is important to successful social
functioning.
Sociology of culture
'"Cultural sociology" redirects here. You may also be
looking for Cultural Sociology (journal).The sociology of
culture concerns culture—usually understood as the ensemble
of symbolic codes used by a society —as it is manifested in
society. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation
of individuals through the agency of external forms which have
been objectified in the course of history".[1] Culture in the
sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the
ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a
people's way of life. Culture can be any of two types, non-
material culture or material culture.[2]
Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany,
where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term
Kultursoziologie (cultural sociology). Cultural sociology was
then "reinvented" in the English-speaking world as a product of
the "cultural turn" of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist
and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of
cultural sociology may loosely be regarded as an approach
incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural
sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead
hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols.
"Culture" has since become an important concept across
many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific
56
fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a
result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists
to the field. Thus there is now a growing group of sociologists
of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These
scholars reject the abstracted post-structural aspects of cultural
sociology, and instead look for a theoretical backing in the
more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.
Cultural sociology is one of the largest sections of the
American Sociological Association. The British establishment
of cultural studies means the latter is often taught as a loosely-
distinct discipline in UK.
Development of Sociology in Culture
Early researchers and development of cultural sociology
The sociology of culture grew from the intersection
between sociology, as shaped by early theorists like Marx,
Durkheim, and Weber, and with the growing discipline of
anthropology where researchers pioneered ethnographic
strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures
around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development
of the field is still felt in the methods (much of cultural
sociological research is qualitative) in the theories (a variety of
critical approaches to sociology are central to current research
communities) and substantive focus of the field. For instance,
relationships between popular culture, political control, and
social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.
Karl Marx
As a major contributor to the Conflict Theory, Marx's
ideas also dealt with culture. Marx's belief of culture is that the
most powerful members of a society are those who live in the
ruling class. These members set up the culture of a society in
order to provide the best interests to that society. He has also
talked about how a society's economic status determines their
values and ideologies.
Émile Durkheim
57
 Durkheim held the belief that culture has many
relationships to society which include:
 Logical- Power over individuals belongs to certain cultural
categories, and beliefs such as God.
 Functional- Certain rites and myths create and build up social
order by having more people create strong beliefs. The
greater the number of people who believe strongly in these
myths more will the social order be strengthened.
 Historical- Culture had its origins in society, and from those
experiences came evolution into things such as classification
systems.
Max Weber
Weber innovated the idea of a status group as a certain
type of subculture. Status groups are based on things such as:
race, ethnicity, religion, region, occupation, gender, sexual
preference, etc. These groups live a certain lifestyle based on
different values and norms. They are a culture within a culture,
hence the label subculture. Weber also had the idea that people
were motivated by their material and ideal interests, which
include things such as preventing one from going to hell.
Weber also explains that people use symbols to express their
spirituality, and that symbols are used to express the spiritual
side of real events, and that ideal interests are derived from
symbols.
Georg Simmel
For Simmel, culture refers to 'the cultivation of
individuals through the agency of external forms which have
been objectified in the course of history'.[3] Simmel presented
his analyses within a context of 'form' and 'content'.
Sociological concept and analysis can be viewed.

58
The Elements of Culture
 Symbols: Anything that carries particular meaning
recognized by people who share the same culture.
 Language: A system of symbols that allows people to
communicate with one another.
 Values: Culturally defined standards of desirability,
goodness, beauty and many other things that serve as broad
guidelines for social living.
 Beliefs: Specific statements that people hold to be true.
 Norms: Rules and expectations by which a society guides
the behavior of its members. The two types of norms are
mores and folkways. Mores are norms that are widely
observed and have a great moral significance. Folkways are
norms for routine, casual interaction.
Anthropology
Anthropologists lay claim to the establishment of
modern uses of the culture concept as defined by Edward
Burnett Tylor in the mid-19th century. Some of the 20th
century scholars include Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and
Mauss.
Major Areas of Research in Sociology of Culture
Theoretical Constructs in Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture
The study of culture has complex relationships that
provide the societal information in the given society. This is the
reason why Tylor explained it as complex whole as it provides
the multi-dimension societal factors that is affected by the inter
and intrarelationships of man in the social environment.
The educational learning process of human beings in
given societal information. This can be learn in the parents later
on revolves in the family then to the tribal community as it
could adopt the sensory motors of the child in the environment.
Basically, in the pedagogy of education the learning process is
confined in the cognitive domain or simply the intelligence or
the mental ability of the human beings. It directs the
59
physiological response of the brain to mentally process that
dictated in the sensory system as primarily directed by sight;
felt by touch; listen by the sounds and taste by the smell. The
mental capability must go hand in hand with the emotional or
psychological attachment including intimacy and love.
Primarily, the concept of culture revolves in the human
society on its belief, art, morals, custom and other capabilities
such as values, norms, traditions, mores, folkways, language,
race, ethnicity, technology, fads, and laws. These social
variables provide the unique definition of culture for the
understanding and adjustment of life in a given societal
condition.
This article revolves the discussion on important
concept of culture such as values, beliefs, norms, language,
folkways, mores, laws, traditions and other similar concepts
that will provide better understanding about the whole social
experiences of man in the society.
1. Tradition as a general term refers to the customs, rituals,
belief, folklore, habits in a given ethnic group. When we speak
about culture, the usual key concept is still on tradition
because of the universality of the concept on the social
experiences derive from that community.
2. Folkways are the expected behavior being practiced in certain
ethnic groups. They provide us the set of expected behavior to
follow within the customs and habits in the ethnic groups. A
good example of the folkways in the community is the
courtship and dating, which prescribed certain behavioral
practices that need to be followed as it is distinctly
complement the kind of custom and habits they have in that
ethnic group.
3. Beliefs are the ideas, viewpoints and attitudes of the
particular group of society. They are consists of fables,
proverbs, myths, folklore ,traditions, superstition, education
and etc. that influence the ideas, values, emotions,
perceptions and attitude of the members of the society. They
60
 also think and decide on particular course of action which they
believe conform on the sets social experience in the society.
4. Values are the common ethical standards in a civilized society
wherein group members have the ability to distinguish what is
right or wrong. These are approved sets of action to follow as
part of societal life and violation of this act may require
sanctions and punishment within the family or institutions of
the society.
5. Norms are the proper conduct of social behavior that should
be followed in the society. Norms are unquestionable
standards of what society consider as good and proper for
social behavior. There are prescribing societal standards that
should be followed because these are appropriate, legal,
ethical and right actions. However, those who would not
follow the set of societal standards are considered illegal,
immoral, wrong, bad and improper.
6. Language is a form of communication that represents the
spoken and written words to convey information to an
individual or group of people. The language also the best way
to communicate specific group of people who have decipher
and construct new form symbolic dialect that have been
passed by one generation to another. These are in written
forms, words, numbers even non-verbal communication such
as facial expression and body movements and other sign
languages.
7. Mores are the long-established customs and traditions that
have bearing in moral and ethical values of the society. They
are the accepted customs of the society that prohibits
following such as incest, infidelity or sex abuse.
8. Laws are the rules, regulation and guiding policies of societal
institutions. The violation of the laws means sanction or
punishment for some wrongful acts by the individual such as
homicide, murder, abortion, rape, robbery and other criminal
acts.
9. Basically, these are the common concepts as applied in
sociology and anthropology to further study the nature of

61
 man and society. It is usually the understanding of the social
experiences as man interacts in the society. Generally, it is the
way of life that would focus the how the people think, act and
produce materials in its natural habitat. On the other hand,
the sense of culture reflects the human products such as
audio- visual arts and literary arts that revolved in the past
history and civilization of the ethnic society. The grouping as
one tribal community interacted to form a distinct and unique
culture that defines them later as race.
Current Research
Computer-mediated Communication as Culture
Computermediated communication (CMC) is the
process of sending messagesprimarily, but not limited to text
messagesthrough the direct use by participants of computers
and communication networks. By restricting the definition to
the direct use of computers in the communication process, you
have to get rid of the communication technologies that rely
upon computers for switching technology (such as telephony or
compressed video), but do not require the users to interact
directly with the computer system via a keyboard or similar
computer interface. To be mediated by computers in the sense
of this project, the communication must be done by participants
fully aware of their interaction with the computer technology in
the process of creating and delivering messages. Given the
current state of computer communications and networks, this
limits CMC to primarily text-based messaging, while leaving
the possibility of incorporating sound, graphics, and video
images as the technology becomes more sophisticated.
Cultural Institutions Studies
Cultural activities are institutionalized; the focus on
institutional settings leads to the investigation "of activities in
the cultural sector, conceived as historically evolved societal
forms of organising the conception, production, distribution,
propagation, interpretation, reception, conservation and

62
maintenance of specific cultural goods".[9] Cultural Institutions
Studies is therefore a specific approach within the sociology of
culture.
Key Figures
Key figures in today's cultural sociology include: Julia
Adams, Jeffrey Alexander, John Carroll, Henning Eichberg,
Ron Eyerman, Andreas Glaeser, Wendy Griswold, Michele
Lamont, Stjepan Mestrovic, Margaret Somers, Yasemin
Soysal,Lynette Spillman, Ann Swidler, Diane Vaughan,
Annette Lareau, Diana Crane, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Eva Illouz,
Dan Sperber, and Sarah Gatson.
Culture
The concept of culture is among the most widely used
notions in sociology. Normally,one can presume culture to be
equivalent to higher things of the mind such as art,literature,
music and painting. However, in the perspective of sociologist
it goes beyondsuch activities. Culture refers to the ways of life
of the members of society, or of groups within a society. It
includes how they dress, their marriage customs, language and
family life, their patterns of work, religious ceremonies and
leisure pursuits (Giddens, 2005).Cultural sociology is one of
the main major and most popular areas of the American
Sociological Association. The sociology of culture developed
from the intersectionbetween sociology, as shaped by early
theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, andwith the rising
specialization of anthropology where researchers lead the way
of ethnographic approach for unfolding and examining
different diversity of cultures aroundthe world (Macionis and
Gerber, 2010). Culture can be conceptually distinguished
fromsociety but there are very close connections between these
notions. A Society is asystem of interrelationships which
connects individuals together. All societies are unitedby the
fact that their members are organized in structured social

63
relationships accordingto a unique culture. No cultures could
exist without societies. But equally, no societ
The simplest way to think about culture is to think about
the distinction between nature (our biology and genetics) and
nurture (our environment and surroundings that also shape our
identities). Because of our biology and genetics, we have a
particular form and we have certain abilities. But our biological
nature does not exclusively determine who we are. For that, we
need culture. Culture is the non-biological or social aspects of
human life, basically anything that is learned by humans is part
of culture.
The two avatars to the right help illustrate this idea. The
avatar wearing nothing but shorts comes close to representing
nothing but nature. The form of the avatar reveals several
things about this person, but they are not necessarily tied to a
specific culture. For instance, the fact that he has lighter
colored skin suggests he has Caucasian ancestry, but that is
biological, not social. Otherwise, there is very little about this
avatar that reflects culture (the exceptions are his shorts and
hair stylings, which do, in fact, reflect culture). The avatar
wearing the colorful vest and pants stands in stark contrast to
the other avatar. This second avatar is reflective of a particular
culture. The colors of the vest - red, white, and blue - in the
specific pattern they are in (stars and stripes) suggests this
avatar is in some way associated with the United States of
America. The cut of the avatar's top and pants suggest a
particular time period - the late 1960s or early 1970s. The
backdrop, with the wordsRock the Vote scrawled across it, also
suggest something about the avatar - perhaps that he is a
musician participating in the Rock the Vote movement.
Additionally, the avatar's hairstyle, dreadlocks, also suggest
something about this second avatar as dreadlocks are prominent
only in certain sub-cultures. In short, the first avatar is mostly
a-cultural or lacking in culture while the second avatar is
heavily enmeshed in culture.
64
 Generally speaking, the following elements of social
life are considered to be representative of human culture:
"stories, beliefs, media, ideas, works of art, religious practices,
fashions, rituals, specialized knowledge, and common sense"
(p. xvi).[1]
Yet, examples of culture do not, in themselves, present
a clear understanding of the concept of culture; culture is more
than the object or behavior. Culture also includes,…norms,
values, beliefs, or expressive symbols. Roughly, norms are the
way people behave in a given society, values are what they
hold dear, beliefs are how they think the universe operates, and
expressive symbols are representations, often representations of
social norms, values, and beliefs themselves. (p. 3)[1]
To summarize, culture encompasses objects and symbols, the
meaning given to those objects and symbols, and the norms,
values, and beliefs that pervade social life. "The definition is
understood to include two elements - that which differentiates
one group or society from others and the concept of acquired or
learned behavior". (p. 43)[2]
Keep in mind that, in any given society, culture is not
necessarily rigid and totally uniform. As is the case with most
elements of social life, culture is relatively stable (thus it is
functional in the structural-functionalist sense) but at the same
time contested (in the conflict sense).[3] Culture is in flux,
especially in our modern world in which different cultures are
in constant contact with each other.
'High' Culture
Ballet, traditionally considered high culture.
Many people today think of culture in the way that it
was thought of in Europe during the 18th and early 19th
centuries. This concept of culture reflected inequalities within
European societies and their colonies around the world. This
understanding of culture equates culture with civilization and
contrasts both with nature or non-civilization. According to this
65
understanding of culture, some countries are more civilized
than others, and some people are more cultured than others.
Theorists like Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) believed that
culture is simply that which is created by "the best that has
been thought and said in the world" (p. 6). Anything that
doesn't fit into this category is labeled as chaos or anarchy.
From this perspective, culture is closely tied to cultivation,
which is the progressive refinement of human behavior.
In practice, culture referred to elite goods and activities
such as haute cuisine, high fashion or haute couture, museum-
caliber art and classical music. The word cultured referred to
people who knew about and took part in these activities. For
example, someone who used culture in this sense might argue
that classical music is more refined than music by working-
class people, such as jazz or the indigenous music traditions of
aboriginal peoples.
People who use culture in this way tend not to use it in
the plural. They believe that there are not distinct cultures, each
with their own internal logic and values, but rather only a single
standard of refinement to which all groups are held
accountable. Thus people who differ from those who believe
themselves to be cultured in this sense are not usually
understood as having a different culture; they are understood as
being uncultured.
The Origins of Culture
Chinese Opera, a culture tradition quite distinct from
European Opera.Attentive to the theory of evolution,
anthropologists assumed that all human beings are equally
evolved, and the fact that all humans have cultures must in
some way be a result of human evolution. They were also wary
of using biological evolution to explain differences between
specific cultures - an approach that either was a form of, or
legitimized forms of, racism. Anthropologists believed
biological evolution produced an inclusive notion of culture, a

66
concept that anthropologists could apply equally to non-literate
and literate societies, or to nomadic and to sedentary societies.
They argued that through the course of their evolution, human
beings evolved a universal human capacity to classify
experiences, and encode and communicate them symbolically.
Since these symbolic systems were learned and taught, they
began to develop independently of biological evolution (in
other words, one human being can learn a belief, value, or way
of doing something from another, even if they are not
biologically related). That this capacity for symbolic thinking
and social learning is a product of human evolution confounds
older arguments about nature versus nurture. Thus, Clifford
Geertz argued that human physiology and neurology developed
in conjunction with the first cultural activities, and Middleton
(1990:17 n.27) concluded that human "instincts wereculturally
formed."
This view of culture argues that people living apart
from one another develop unique cultures. However, elements
of different cultures can easily spread from one group of people
to another. Culture is dynamic and can be taught and learned,
making it a potentially rapid form of adaptation to changes in
physical conditions. Anthropologists view culture as not only a
product of biological evolution but as a supplement to it; it can
be seen as the main means of human adaptation to the natural
world.
This view of culture as a symbolic system with adaptive
functions, which varies from place to place, led anthropologists
to conceive of different cultures as defined by distinct patterns
(or structures) of enduring, although arbitrary, conventional
sets of meaning, which took concrete form in a variety of
artifacts such as myths and rituals, tools, the design of housing,
and the planning of villages. Anthropologists thus distinguish
between material culture and symbolic culture, not only
because each reflects different kinds of human activity, but also

67
because they constitute different kinds of data that require
different methodologies to study.
This view of culture, which came to dominate
anthropology between World War I and World War II, implied
that each culture was bounded and had to be understood as a
whole, on its own terms. The result is a belief in cultural
relativism, which suggests that there are no "better" or "worse"
cultures, just different cultures.
Recent research suggests that human culture has
reversed the causal direction suggested above and influence
human evolution.[6] One well-known illustration of this is the
rapid spread of genetic instructions that left on a gene that
produces a protein that allows humans to digest lactose.[6] This
adaptation spread rapidly in Europe around 4,000 BCE with the
domestication of mammals, as humans began harvesting their
milk for consumption. Prior to this adaptation, the gene that
produces a protein allowing for the digestion of lactose was
switched after children were weaned. Thus, the change in
culture - drinking milk from other mammals - eventually led to
changes in human genetics. Genetics has, therefore, resulted in
culture, which is now acting back on genetics.

68
Level of Abstraction
Another element of culture that is important for a clear
understanding of the concept is level of abstraction. Culture
ranges from the concrete, cultural object (e.g., the
understanding of a work of art) to micro-level interpersonal
interactions (e.g., the socialization of a child by his/her parents)
to a macro-level influence on entire societies (e.g., the
Puritanical roots of the U.S. that can be used to justify the
exportation of democracy – a lá the Iraq War). It is important
when trying to understand the concept of culture to keep in
mind that the concept can have multiple levels of meaning.
The Artificiality of Cultural Categorization
One of the more important points to understand about
culture is that it is an artificial categorization of elements of
social life. As Griswold puts it. There is no such thing as
culture or society out there in the real world. There are only
people who work, joke, raise children, love, think, worship,
fight, and behave in a wide variety of ways. To speak of culture
as one thing and society as another is to make an analytical
distinction between two different aspects of human experience.
One way to think of the distinction is that culture designates the
expressive aspect of human existence, whereas society
designates the relational (and often practical) aspect.
In the above quote, Griswold emphasizes that culture is
distinct from society but affirms that this distinction is, like all
classifications, artificial. Humans do not experience culture in a
separate or distinct way from society. Culture and society are
truly two-sides of a coin; a coin that makes up social life. Yet
the distinction between the two, while artificial, is useful for a
number of reasons. For instance, the distinction between culture
and society is of particular use when exploring how norms and
values are transmitted from generation to generation and
answering the question of cultural conflict between people of

69
different cultural backgrounds (say, the Japanese and
Americans).

70
Subcultures & Countercultures
Trekkies (or fans of Star Trek) are a subculture; they
share specific understandings and meanings that those outside
their subculture may not understand.
A subculture is a culture shared and actively
participated in by a minority of people within a broader culture.
A culture often contains numerous subcultures. Subcultures
incorporate large parts of the broader cultures of which they are
part, but in specifics they may differ radically. Some
subcultures achieve such a status that they acquire a name of
their own. Examples of subcultures could include: bikers,
military culture, and Star Trek fans (trekkers or trekkies).
The woman and children in this photo are members
ofThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints (or FLDS), which advocates the practice polygamy,
making members part of a countercultural group (polygamy is
illegal in the United States).
A counterculture is a subculture with the addition that
some of its beliefs, values, or norms challenge or even
contradict those of the main culture of which it is part.
Examples of countercultures in the U.S. could include: the
hippie movement of the 1960s, the green movement,
polygamists, and and feminist groups.
Subcultures bring together like-minded individuals who
feel neglected by societal standards and allow them to develop
a sense of identity.[9] Subcultures can be distinctive because of
the age, ethnicity, class, location, and/or gender of the
members. The qualities that determine a subculture as distinct
may be linguistic, aesthetic, religious, political, sexual,
geographical or a combination of factors. Members of a
subculture often signal their membership through a distinctive
and symbolic use of style, which includes fashions,
mannerisms, and argot.

71
 Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world
primarily from the perspective of one's own culture. Many
claim that ethnocentrism occurs in every society; ironically,
ethnocentrism may be something that all cultures have in
common.
The term was coined by William Graham Sumner, a
social evolutionist and professor of Political and Social Science
at Yale University. He defined it as, "The sentiment of
cohesion, internal comradeship, and devotion to the in-group,
which carries with it a sense of superiority to any out-group and
readiness to defend the interests of the in-group against the out-
group."Ethnocentrism often entails the belief that one's own
race or ethnic group is the most important and/or that some or
all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups.
Within this ideology, individuals will judge other groups in
relation to their own particular ethnic group or culture,
especially with concern to language, behavior, customs, and
religion. It also involves incapacity to acknowledge that
cultural differentiation does not imply inferiority of those
groups who are ethnically distinct from one's own.
Sociologists study ethnocentrism because of its role in
various elements of social life, ranging from politics to
terrorism. This is also an area where sociologists often become
advocates as they attempt to reveal ethnocentric biases to those
who hold them with the aim of helping people realize that such
biases are seldom beneficial to social solidarity and peaceful
human relations.
Cultural relativism is the belief that the concepts and
values of a culture cannot be fully translated into, or fully
understood in, other languages; that a specific cultural artifact
(e.g. a ritual) has to be understood in terms of the larger
symbolic system of which it is a part.
An example of cultural relativism might include slang
words from specific languages (and even from particular

72
dialects within a language). For instance, the word tranquilo in
Spanish translates directly to 'calm' in English. However, it can
be used in many more ways than just as an adjective (e.g., the
seas are calm). Tranquilo can be a command or suggestion
encouraging another to calm down. It can also be used to ease
tensions in an argument (e.g., everyone relax) or to indicate a
degree of self-composure (e.g., I'm calm). There is not a clear
English translation of the word, and in order to fully
comprehend its many possible uses a cultural relativist would
argue that it would be necessary to fully immerse one in
cultures where the word is used.
Theories of Culture
While there are numerous theoretical approaches
employed to understand 'culture', this chapter uses just one
model to illustrate how sociologists understand the concept.
The model is an integrationist model advocated by Ritzer.
Ritzer proposes four highly interdependent elements in his
sociological model: a macro-objective component (e.g., society,
law, bureaucracy), a micro-objective component (e.g., patterns
of behavior and human interaction), a macro-subjective
component (e.g., culture, norms, and values), and a micro-
subjective component (e.g., perceptions, beliefs). This model is
of particular use in understanding the role of culture in
sociological research because it presents two axes for
understanding culture: one ranging from objective (society) to
subjective (culture and cultural interpretation); the other
ranging from the macro-level (norms) to the micro-level
(individual level beliefs).
If used for understanding a specific cultural
phenomenon, like the displaying of abstract art, this model
depicts how cultural norms can influence individual behavior.
This model also posits that individual level values, beliefs, and
behaviors can, in turn, influence the macro-level culture. This
is, in fact, part of what David Halle finds: while there are

73
certainly cultural differences based on class, they are not
unique to class. Displayers of abstract art tend not only to
belong to the upperclass, but also are employed in art-
production occupations. This would indicate that there are
multiple levels of influence involved in art tastes both broad
cultural norms and smaller level occupational norms in addition
to personal preferences.
The Function of Culture
Culture can also be seen to play a specific function in
social life. According to Griswold, "The sociological analysis
of culture begins at the premise that culture provides
orientation, wards off chaos, and directs behavior toward
certain lines of action and away from others." Griswold
reiterates this point by explaining that, "Groups and societies
need collective representations of themselves to inspire
sentiments of unity and mutual support, and culture fulfills this
need." In other words, culture can have a certain utilitarian
function the maintenance of order as the result of shared
understandings and meanings.
Cultural Change
The belief that culture is symbolically coded and can
thus is taught from one person to another means that cultures,
although bounded, can change. Cultures are both predisposed to
change and resistant to it. Resistance can come from habit,
religion, and the integration and interdependence of cultural
traits.For example, men and women have complementary roles
in many cultures. One sex might desire changes that affect the
other, as happened in the second half of the 20th century in
western cultures (see, for example, the women's movement),
while the other sex may be resistant to that change (possibly in
order to maintain a power imbalance in their favor).
The symbol of the ankh has its roots in Egyptian
religious practice, but the symbol diffused over time and was

74
adopted by other groups, including pagans, as a religious
symbol.
Cultural change can have many causes, includingthe
environment, inventions, and contact with other cultures. For
example, the end of the last ice age helped lead to the invention
of agriculture. An invention that substantially changed culture
was the development of the birth control pill, which changed
women's attitudes toward sex. Prior to the introduction of the
birth control pill, women were at a high risk of pregnancy as a
result of sex. After the introduction of the pill, their risk of
pregnancy was substantially reduced, increasing their
willingness to engage in sexual activity outside of wedlock.[16]
Likewise, the introduction of the television substantially
reduced American involvement in civic life.
Several understandings of how cultures change come
from Anthropology. For instance, in diffusion theory, the form
of something moves from one culture to another, but not its
meaning. For example, the ankh symbol originated in Egyptian
culture but has diffused to numerous cultures. Its original
meaning may have been lost, but it is now used by many
practitioners of New Age Religion as an arcane symbol of
power or life forces.
Contact between cultures can also result in
acculturation. Acculturation has different meanings, but in this
context refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with
those of another, such as what happened with many Native
American Indians as Europeans took over their lands. Many
Native Americans were acculturated into European cultural
norms, from religion to how to raise children. Related
processes on an individual level are assimilation and
transculturation, both of which refer to adoption of a different
culture by an individual.
Griswold outlined another sociological approach to
cultural change. Griswold points out that it may seem as though

75
culture comes from individuals, but there is also the larger,
collective, and long-lasting culture that cannot have been the
creation of single individuals as it predates and post-dates
individual humans and contributors to culture. The author
presents a sociological perspective to address this conflict,
Sociology suggests an alternative to both the unsatisfying it has
always been that way view at one extreme and the
unsociological individual genius view at the other. This
alternative posits that culture and cultural works are collective,
not individual, creations. We can best understand specific
cultural objects... by seeing them not as unique to their creators
but as the fruits of collective production, fundamentally social
in their genesis.
Griswold suggests, then, that culture changes through
the contextually dependent and socially situated actions of
individuals; macro-level culture influences the individual who,
in turn, can influence that same culture. The logic is a bit
circular, but it illustrates how culture can change over time yet
remain somewhat constant.
It is, of course, important to recognize here that
Griswold is talking about cultural change and not the actual
origins of culture (as in, "there was no culture and then,
suddenly, there was"). Because Griswold does not explicitly
distinguish between the origins of cultural change and the
origins of culture, it may appear as though Griswold is arguing
here for the origins of culture and situating these origins in
society. This is neither accurate nor a clear representation of
sociological thought on this issue. Culture, just like society, has
existed since the beginning of humanity (humans being social
and cultural beings). Society and culture co-exist because
humans have social relations and meanings tied to those
relations (e.g. brother, lover, friend).[18] Culture as a super-
phenomenon has no real beginning except in the sense that
humans (homo sapiens) have a beginning. This, then, makes the

76
question of the origins of culture moot it has existed as long as
we have, and will likely exist as long as we do.
Culture
As Homo sapiens, evolved, several biological
characteristics particularly favorable to the development of
culture appeared in the species. These included erect posture; a
favorable brain structure; stereoscopic vision; the structure of
the hand, a flexible shoulder; and year round sexual receptivity
on the part of the female. None of these biological
characteristics alone, of course, accounts for the development
of culture. Even in combination, all they guarantee is that
human beings would be the most gifted members of the animal
kingdom.
The distinctive human way of life that we call culture
did not have a single definite beginning in time any more than
human beings suddenly appearing on earth. Culture evolved
slowly just as some anthropoids gradually took on more human
form. Unmistakably, tools existed half a million years ago and
might be considerably older. If, for convenience, we say that
culture is 500,000 years old, it is still difficult day has appeared
very recently.
The concept of culture was rigorously defined by E.B.
Taylor in 1860s. According to him culture is the sum total of
ideas, beliefs, values, material cultural equipments and non-
material aspects which man makes as a member of society.
Taylor's theme that culture is a result of human collectivity has
been accepted by most anthropologists. Tylarian idea can be
discerned in a modern definition of culture - culture is the man
made part of environment (M.J. Herskovits).
From this, it follows that culture and society are
separable only at the analytical level: at the actual existential
level, they can be understood as the two sides of the same coin.
Culture, on one hand, is an outcome of society and, on the other
hand, society is able to survive and perpetuate itself because of
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the existence of culture. Culture is an ally of man in the sense
that it enhances man's adaptability to nature. It is because of the
adaptive value of culture that Herskovits states that culture is a
screen between man and nature. Culture is an instrument by
which man exploits the environment and shapes it accordingly.
In showing affection, the Maori rub noses; the
Australians rub faces; the Chinese place nose to cheeks; the
Westerners kiss; some groups practice spitting on the beloved.
Or, consider this; American men are permitted to laugh in
public but not to cry; Iroquois men are permitted to do neither
in public; Italian men are permitted to do both. Since this is
true, physiological factors have little to do with when men
laugh and cry and when they do not do either. The variability of
the human experience simply cannot be explained by making
reference to human biology, or to the climate and geography.
Instead, we must consider culture as the fabric of human
society.
Culture can be conceived as a continuous, cumulative
reservoir containing both material and non-material elements
that are socially transmitted from generation to generation.
Culture is continuous because cultural patterns transcend years,
reappearing in successive generations. Culture is cumulative
because each generation contributes to the reservoir.
An inherent paradox exists within the social heritage
where culture tends to be both static and dynamic. Humans,
once having internalized culture, attach positive value
judgments to it and are more or less reluctant to change their
established ways of life. Through most of recorded history
men have apparently considered that change per say is
undesirable and that the ideal condition is stability. The
prospect of change can seem threatening, yet every human
culture is subject to and does experience change. Those who
speak of a generation gap portray two generations at odds with
each other. According to this view, the parent generation

78
embodied the dynamic dimension. We contend that if, in fact, a
generation gap does exist in modern societies, and the
differences are of degree and not of substance. Part of the social
heritage of almost every modern society is the high value
placed on progress. Parents encourage young people to seek
progress, and progress is a form of social change. Debates
between generations in modern societies are seldom about
whether any change should occur. The debates are usually
about how such change should occur, how fast it should occur,
and which methods should be used for bringing about change.
Culture and Society Defined
Culture consists of the beliefs, behaviors, objects, and
other characteristics common to the members of a particular
group or society. Through culture, people and groups define
themselves, conform to society's shared values, and contribute
to society. Thus, culture includes many societal aspects:
language, customs, values, norms, mores, rules, tools,
technologies, products, organizations, and institutions. This
latter term institution refers to clusters of rules and cultural
meanings associated with specific social activities. Common
institutions are the family, education, religion, work, and health
care.
Popularly speaking, being culturedmeans being
welleducated, knowledgeable of the arts, stylish, and well‐
mannered. High culturegenerally pursued by the upper
classrefers to classical music, theater, fine arts, and other
sophisticated pursuits. Members of the upper class can pursue
high art because they havecultural capital, which means the
professional credentials, education, knowledge, and verbal and
social skills necessary to attain the ―property, power, and
prestige‖ to ―get ahead‖ socially. Low culture, or popular
culturegenerally pursued by the working and middle
classesrefers to sports, movies, television sitcoms and soaps,
and rock music. Remember that sociologist‘s defineculture

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differently than they do cultured, high culture, low culture, and
popular culture.
Sociologists define society as the people who interact in
such a way as to share a common culture. The cultural bond
may be ethnic or racial, based on gender, or due to shared
beliefs, values, and activities. The term society can also have
geographic meaning and refer to people who share a common
culture in a particular location. For example, people living in
arctic climates developed different cultures from those living in
desert cultures. In time, a large variety of human cultures arose
around the world.
Culture and society are intricately related. A culture
consists of the ―objects‖ of a society, whereas a society consists
of the people who share a common culture. When the terms
culture and society first acquired their current meanings, most
people in the world worked and lived in small groups in the
same locale. In today's world of 6 billion people, these terms
have lost some of their usefulness because increasing numbers
of people interact and share resources globally. Still, people
tend to use culture and society in a more traditional sense: for
example, being a part of a ―racial culture‖ within the larger
―U.S. society.‖
Define Culture and discuss its features
Culture is one of the most important and basic concepts
of sociology. In sociology, culture has a specific meaning. The
anthropologists believe that the behavior, which is meant, is
called culture. In other words the behavior which is transmitted
to us by someone is called culture. The way of living, eating,
wearing, and singing, dancing and talking is all parts of a
culture.
In common, parlance, the word culture, is understood to
mean beautiful, refined or interesting. In sociology, we use the
word culture to denote acquired behavior, which are shared by
and transmitted among the members of the society. In other
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words, culture is a system of learned behavior shared by and
transmitted among the members of a group.
Characteristics of Culture
For a clear understanding of the concept of culture, it is
necessary for us to know its main characteristics. Culture has
several characteristics. Following are the main characteristics
of culture.
1. Culture is learnt
Culture is not inherited biologically, but learnt socially
by man. It is not an inborn tendency. There is no culture
instinct as such culture is often called learned ways of behavior.
Unlearned behavior such as closing the eyes while sleeping, the
eye blinking reflex and so on are purely physiological and
culture sharing hands or saying ‗namaskar‘ or thanks and
shaving and dressing on the other hand are culture. Similarly
wearing clothes, combing the hair, wearing ornaments, cooking
the food, drinking from a glass, eating from a plate or leaf,
reading a newspaper, driving a car, enacting a role in drama,
singing, worship etc. are always of behavior learnt by man
culturally.
2. Cultural is Social
Culture does not exist in isolation neither it is an
individual phenomenon. It is a product of society. It originates
and develops through social interaction. It is shared by the
members of society. No man can acquire culture without
association with other human beings. Man becomes man only
among men. It is the culture, which helps man to develop
human qualities in a human environment. Deprivation is
nothing but deprivation of human qualities.
3. Culture is shared
Culture in the sociological sense, is something shared. It
is not something that an individual alone can possess. For
example customs, tradition, beliefs, ideas, values, morals, etc.

81
are shared by people of a group or society. The invention of
Arya Bhatta or Albert Einstein, Charaka or Charles Darwin, the
literary, works of Kalidas or Keats, Dandi or Dante, the
philosophical works of Cunfucius or Lao Tse, Shankaracharya
or Swami Vivekananda, the artistic work of Kavi Verma or
Raphael etc. are all shared by a large number of people. Culture
is something adopted, used, believed practised or possessed by
more than one person. It depends upon group life for its
existence. (Robert Brerstedt)
4. Culture is Transmissive
Culture is capable of being transmitted from one
generation to the next. Parents pass on culture traits to their
children and them in turn to their children arid so on. Culture is
trasmitted not trough genes but by means of language.
Language is the main vehicle of culture. Language in its
different forms like reading, writing and speaking makes it
possible for the present generation to understand the
achievements of earlier generations. But language itself is a
part of culture. Once language is acquired it unfolds to the
individual in wide field. Transmission of culture may take place
by intution as well as by interaction.
5. Culture is Continuous and Cumulative
Culture exists, as a continuous process. In its historical
growth, it tends to become cumulative. Culture is growing
completely which includes in itself, the achievements of the
past and present and makes provision for the future
achievements of mankind. Culture may thus be conceived of as
a kind of stream flowing down through the centuries from one
generation to another. Hence, some sociologists like Lition
called culture the social heritage of man. As Robert Brerstedt
writes culture or the money of human race. It becomes difficult
for us to imagine what society would be like without this
accumulation of culture what lives would be without it.
6. Culture is Consistent and Interconnected
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 Culture, in its development has revealed tendency to be
consistent. At the same time, different parts of culture are
interconnected. For example the value system of a society, a
society is closely connected with, its other aspects such as
morality, religion, customs, traditions, beliefs and so on.

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7. Culture is dynamic and Adaptive
Though culture is relatively stable, it is not altogether
static. It is subject to slow but constant change. Change and
growth are latent in culture. We find amazing growth in the
present Indian culture when we compare it with the culture of
the Vedic time. Hence, culture is dynamic.
Culture is responsive to the changing conditions of the
physical world. It is adaptive. It also intervenes in the natural
environment and helps man in his process of adjustment. Just
as our house shelters us from the storm, so also does our culture
help us from natural dangers and assist us to survive. Few of us
indeed could survive without culture.
8. Culture is Gratifying
Culture provides proper opportunities, and prescribes
means for the satisfaction of our needs and desires. These needs
may be biological or social in nature. Our need for food, shelter
and clothing and our desire for status, name, fame and money
etc are all, for example, fulfilled according to the cultural ways.
Culture determines and guides the varied activities of man. In
fact culture is defined as the process through which human
beings satisfy their wants.
9. Culture varies from Society to Society
Every society has a culture of its own. It differs from
society to society. Culture of every society in unique to itself.
Cultures are not uniform. Cultural elements such as customs,
traditions, morals, ideals, values, ideologies, beliefs in
practices, philosophies institutions, etc. are not uniform
everywhere. Ways of eating, speaking, greeting, dressing,
entertaining, living etc. of different sects differ significantly.
Culture varies from time to time also. No culture ever remains
constant or changeless. If Manu were to come back to see the
Indian society today he would be bewildered to witness the vast
changes that have taken place in our culture.

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10. Culture is Super Organic and Ideational
Culture is sometimes called the super organic. By super
organic Herbert Spencer meant that culture is neither organic
nor inorganic in nature but above these two. The term implies
the social meaning of physical objectives and physiological
acts. The social meaning may be independent of physiological
and physical properties and characteristics. For example, the
social meaning of a national flag is not just a piece of colored
cloth. The flag represents a nation. Similarly, priests and
prisoners, professors and profanation, players, engineers and
doctors, farmers and soldiers and others are not just biological
beings. They are viewed in their society differently. Their
social status and role can be understood only through culture.
Definitions of culture in sociology and anthropology
Culture is all around us, an inherit part of our social life
as well as our personality and sense of subjectivity. However,
culture, as cultural studies researcher Raymond Williams noted,
is one of the most complex words in the English language.
Culture is popularly used to denote as narrow sense that is
usually related to the arts and humanities. In a broader sense,
culture denotes the practices, beliefs and perceptions of a given
society. Culture is additionally often opposed with "savagery",
relating to something which is "cultured" as a product of a
certain evolvement from a natural state. In the theoretical sense
culture is often related as a system of structures with power
relations running through them.
In social sciences, sociology, anthropology and cultural
studies, there is hardly a consensus regarding the meaning of
the term culture and various definitions of culture are in
circulation. Researchers Kroeber and Kluckhohn (Culture: A
Critical Review of Literature", 1952) gathered an array of
various definitions of culture is sociology and anthropology and
have divided them into six primary categories: 1. Descriptive
definitions of culture which view culture as a total system of

85
customs, beliefs, knowledge, laws, means of expression as so
forth. 2. Historical definitions of culture which view culture as
the continuation of generations. 3. Normative definitions of
culture which related to value systems which construct social
and personal behavior. 4. Psychological definitions of culture
which stress culture's role in interpersonal relations. 5.
Structural definitions of culture that focus on relational aspects
of cultural components through abstraction. 6. socio-genetic
definitions of culture which focus on the genesis and continued
existence of a culture.
A different, more contemporary, way to distinguish
definitions of culture is to note the way in which culture is
theoretically perceived as either something which is opposed to
materiality, technology and social structures from which culture
is something different, or as a space of non-material ideas
which are also, obviously, abstract. Other definitions of culture
focus on its autonomy from social and economical structures.
This leads us to propose two fundamental understanding
regarding definitions of culture: A. culture is an ensemble of
practices, values and meanings common to a collective entity;
B. culture is the totality of activities and objects through which
meaning is generated and circulated in a given collective entity.
The term "culture" traces its roots back to German
Romanticism and Herder's idea of the Volksgeist (the "spirit"
of a people), which was adapted for anthropological use by
Adolf Bastian. From Bastian the term diffused (via Edward B.
Tyler) into British anthropology (where it never received great
prominence), and (via Franz Boas) into American anthropology
(where it came to define the very subject-matter of
anthropology). Nevertheless, in one of the many paradoxical
turns of the history of anthropology, it is Tylor's definition that
is most often cited as classical.
By Tylor, the term "culture" was used to denote the
totality (see holism) of the humanly created world, from

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material culture and cultivated landscapes, via social
institutions (political, religious, economic etc.), to knowledge
andmeaning. Tylor's definition is still widely cited:
"Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad,
ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society."
Often this is still what is meant by the term, though
there have been a number of attempts at narrowing down the
definition and giving it a less totalizing meaning. Two extremes
may here be noted:
 Within ecological anthropology there is a tendency to describe
culture as a "tool" used by society to maintain its adaptation
to nature. This "tool" comprises concrete, physical tools, but
also knowledge, skills and forms of organization. A classical
definition of this kind was offered by Rapp port (1968 [1980]:
233). According to this definition, culture is"... a part of the
distinctive means by which a local population maintains itself
in an ecosystem and by which a regional population maintains
and coordinates its groups and distributes them over the
available land."
 A number of anthropologists have argued for a purely
cognitive definition of culture. The idea is here that "culture"
may be limited to the communicative and meaningful aspects
of social life: from language to the meaning carried by
symbols, persons, actions and events. This definition has its
roots in the American Culture and Personality School (see
Ruth Benedict). It was formalized in 1952 by Kroeber and
Kluckhohn in their famous compilation of 162 definitions of
culture that were current in the anthropological literature at
the time. In an attempt to bring order into this definitional
jungle, the authors suggested that the subject matter of
anthropology be culture, defined as the symbolic, linguistic
and meaningful aspects of human collectivities. Sociology, in

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 contrast, was to concern itself with "society", i.e. social
organization, social interaction etc. In formulating this
"division of labor" between anthropology and sociology, the
influence of the sociologist Talcott Parsons (who cooperated
extensively with Kroeber and Kluckhohn) is clearly visible.
Even in the USA, however, the "division of labor" was
never strictly upheld: Clifford Geertz, Kluckhohns influential
student, though he adhered to the conceptual division of culture
and society, was not (even in his early works) willing to
surrender "society" to the sociologists. For British social
anthropologists, whose canonical father was Durkheim and
who understood anthropology as "comparative sociology", the
American "division of labor" was not acceptable at all.
Geertz himself provided a classical "cognitive"
definition of culture, as:"... an historically transmitted pattern of
meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited
conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which
men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge
about and attitudes toward life" (Geertz 1973: 89).
In spite of heated debates and heavy critique, the
contrast between (cognitive) "culture" and (sociological)
"society" has wide currency in anthropology even today, with
the latter comprising the interactive and material aspects of
social life: everything people do - with themselves, with objects
and with each other.
In the 1980's, the concept of culture was stridently
attacked by the postmodernists, who argued that it misleads us
to think of societies as static units, with an internal cohesion
that is simply taken for granted; the reifiedexotification of the
lifeways of an entire "people" was also heavily criticized by
indigenous groups; while other actors saw culture as a
politically dangerous term that might legitimize nationalism,
ethnic stigmatization and racism. Even in the 2000's, the culture
concept has not recovered from this barrage of critique, and

88
many anthropologists have argued that the term (which has
gained increasing popularity outside anthropology) should no
longer be used by anthropologists. It is worth noting, however,
that it is the cognitive definition of culture that is most
vulnerable to critique, and that the old, Tylorean definition may
still survive into post-postmodernism. Moreover, the critique of
culture is to a large extent part of an internal debate in
American "cultural anthropology", and has had much less
impact in the European anthropological traditions, with their
sociological bias.

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 Chapter-4

Norms and Values

Social Values and Norms
Values and norms are evaluative beliefs that synthesize
affective and cognitive elements to orient people to the world in
which they live. Their evaluative element makes them unlike
existential beliefs, which focus primarily on matters of truth or
falsehood, correctness or incorrectness. Their cognitive element
makes them unlike motives that can derive from emotions or
psychological drives. Values and norms involve cognitive
beliefs of approval or disapproval. Although they tend to persist
through time and therefore faster continuity in society and
human personality, they also are susceptible to change (Moss
and Susman 1980; Alwin 1994).
The evaluative criteria represented in values and norms
influence the behavior of subject units at multiple levels (e.g.,
individuals, organizations, and societies) as well as judgments
about the behavior of others, which also can influence
behavior. For example, values and norms affect the evaluation
of individuals as suitable marriage partners and in that way
influence marital behavior. Values and norms also affect
evaluation of the governing policies and practices of societies
and thus have an impact on diplomatic relations and the
policies of one society‘s government toward other societies.
Concept of Value
A value is a belief about the desirability of a mode,
means, or end of action (Kluckhohn 1951; Schwartz and Bilsky
1987). It indicates the degree to which something is regarded as
good versus bad. A value tends to be general rather than
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specific, transcending particular types of action and situations.
As a general evaluative criterion, it is used to assess specific
behaviors in specific situations.
The evaluative criteria represented by values derive
from conceptions of morality, aesthetics, and achievement.
That is, a mode, means, or end of action can be regarded as
good or bad for moral, aesthetic, or cognitive reasons and often
for a combination of those reasons (Kluckhohn 1951; Parsons
and Shils 1951). For example, being considerate of others may
be valued positively (i.e., be viewed as desirable or good) for
moral reasons, neatness may be valued positively for aesthetic
reasons, and intelligence may be valued positively for cognitive
reasons. Since the distinguishing characteristic of a value is
evaluation as good or bad, a value that has a cognitive basis is a
function of cognitive appraisal based on competency and
achievement rather than on scientific or utilitarian grounds. For
example, the choice of steel rather than iron to construct a
building is a decision based on scientific or utilitarian criteria
rather than on values.
The concept of a value must be differentiated from
other concepts that appear to be similar. One of those concepts
is a preference. A value may be thought of as a type of
preference, but not all preferences are values. The distinctive
characteristic of a value is that it is based on a belief about what
is desirable rather than on mere liking. A preference for an
equitable rather than inequitable distribution of rewards is a
value, but a preference for vanilla rather than chocolate ice
cream is not.
The concept of a value also bears some similarity to the
concept of an attitude. Some analysts have suggested that a
value is a type of attitude (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975; Glenn
1980), but there are differences between the two concepts. An
attitude refers to an organization of several beliefs around a
specific object or situation, whereas a value refers to a single

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belief of a specific kind: a belief about desirability that is based
in conceptions of morality, aesthetics, or achievement and
transcends specific behaviors and situations. Because of its
generality, a value occupies a more central and hierarchically
important place in human personality and cognitive structure
than does an attitude. It is a determinant of attitudes as well as
behavior. Thus, evaluations of numerous attitude objects and
situations are based on a relatively small number of values. Not
all attitudes, however, derive from values. For example, an
attitude toward skiing may be based on the extent to which that
sport is found to be enjoyable rather than on a value. The
concept of a value also differs from the concept of an interest in
much the same way that it differs from the concept of an
attitude, since an interest is a type of attitude that results in the
directing of one‘s attention and action toward a focal object or
situation. As is true of attitudes more broadly, some interests
derive from valuesbut others do not.
The concept of a value also can be distinguished from
the related concept of a motive. The basic property of a motive
is the ability to induce valences (incentives) that may be
positive or negative. A value has a motive property, involving a
predisposition to act in a certain way, because it affects the
evaluation of the expected consequences of an action and
therefore the choice among possible alternatives; however, it is
a less person-centered concept than a motive, which also
encompasses emotions and drives. A value is a particular type
of motive involving a belief about the desirability of an action
that derives from an evaluation of that action‘s expected
consequences in a situation. A value is a distinctively human
motive, unlike motives that operate at both the human and the
infrahuman levels.
A value also differs from a need. Although both
function as motives because of their ability to induce valences,
a need is distinctive in being a requirement for the continued
performance of an activity and the attainment of other valued
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outcomes (Emerson 1987). Some needs have a biological basis;
others are psychological, often deriving from the persistent
frustration of important goals. Although a value may arise from
a need, becoming a cognitive transformation of that need, not
all needs are transformed into values and not all values derive
from needs. Needs also may derive from the structure of a
situation, having a social or economic basis rather than a person
centered biological or psychological basis. For example, a need
for income may cause an actor to behave in ways that conflict
with his or her values. A need differs from a value in that the
continued functioning of the actor and the acquisitions of other
valued outcomes are contingent on its being met. A need also
differs from a value in that it implies a deficit that imposes a
requirement, whereas a value implies motivation that is based
on a belief about desirability.
Finally, a value can be differentiated from a goal. A
value sometimes is thought of as a goal because goals are
selected on the basis of values. However, some values focus on
modes of action that are personal attributes, such as
intelligence, rather than ends of action, or goals. Values are not
goals of behavior. They are evaluative criteria that are used to
select goals and appraise the implications of action.
Concept of Norm
Like a value, a norm is an evaluative belief. Whereas a
value is a belief about the desirability of behavior, a norm is a
belief about the acceptability of behavior (Gibbs 1965; Marini
1984). A norm indicates the degree to which a behavior is
regarded as right versus wrong, allowable versus unallowable.
It is an evaluative criterion that specifies a rule of behavior,
indicating what a behavior ought to be or ought not to be. A
prescriptive norm indicates what should be done, and a
proscriptive norm indicates what should not be done. Because a
norm is a behavioral rule, it produces a feeling of obligation. A

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value, in contrast, produces a feeling of desirability, of
attraction or repulsion.
A norm also differs from a value in its degree of
specificity. A norm is less general than a value because it
indicates what should or should not be done in particular
behavioral contexts. Whereas a value is a general evaluative
criterion that transcends particular types of action and
situations, a norm is linked directly to particular types of action
and situations. For example, there may be a norm proscribing
the killing of other human beings that is generally applicable
except in situations such as war, self-defense, capital
punishment, and euthanasia. Situational variability of this type
sometimes is referred to as the conditionality of a norm. A
norm, like a value, is generally applicable to the types of action
and situations on which it focuses, but it is less general than a
value because it is less likely to transcend particular types of
action and situations.
Because norms often derive from values, they have their
basis in conceptions of morality, aesthetics, and achievement
and often in a combination of those conceptions. The basis of a
norm tends to affect its strength, or the importance attached to
it. For example, a norm based in morality that differentiates
right from wrong is likely to be considered more important than
a norm based in aesthetics that differentiates the appropriate
from the inappropriate, for example, in matters of dress or
etiquette. A norm, however, differs from a custom in much the
same way that a value differs from a preference. A norm
involves an evaluation of what an actor should do, whereas a
custom involves an expectation of what an actor will do. It may
be expected, for example, that people will drink coffee, but it is
usually a matter of indifference whether they do. Drinking
coffee is therefore a custom, not a norm; it is not based on a
belief about what people ought to do.
The Structure of Values and Norms

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 Multiple values and norms are organized and linked in
the cultures of human social systems and also are linked when
they are internalized by individuals. Cultural ‗‗value
orientations‘‘ organize and link values and norms to existential
beliefs in general views that also might be called worldviews or
ideologies (Kluckhohn 1951). They are sets of linked
propositions embracing evaluative and existential elements that
describe preferred or obligatory states. Values and norms are
linked to and buttressed by existential beliefs about human
nature, the human condition, interpersonal relations, the
functioning of social organizations and societies, and the nature
of the world. Since existential beliefs focus on what is true
versus untrue, they are to some degree empirically based and
verifiable.
In most of the early conceptual and theoretical work on
values, values and norms were not differentiated clearly. Later,
particularly as attempts to measure values and norms were
made, the two concepts were routinely considered distinct, and
studies focusing on them have been carried out separately since
that time. As a result, the relationship between values and
norms rarely has been analyzed theoretically or empirically.
Values and norms are closely related because values
usually provide the justification for norms. As beliefs about
what is desirable and undesirable, values often are associated
with normative beliefs that require or preclude certain behavior,
establishing boundaries to indicate what is acceptable versus
unacceptable. For example, the positive value attached to
human safety and security is supported by norms that proscribe
doing harm to other persons and their property. Not all values
are supported by norms, however. Displaying personal
competence in a variety of ways is positively valued, but norms
do not always require it. Similarly, not all norms support
values. For example, norms in regard to dress and etiquette can
be quite arbitrary. Their existence may support values, but the
specific rules of behavior they establish may not.
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 Many cultural value orientations organize and link the
values and norms that operate as evaluative criteria in human
social systems. These orientations are learned and internalized
by individuals in unique ways that vary with an individual‘s
personal characteristics and social history and the interaction
between the two. Cultural value orientations and internalized
individual value orientations are more comprehensive systems
of values and norms than those activated as influences on
particular types of behavior. The latent structure of values and
norms that characterizes a social system or an individual can be
thought of as a map or blueprint (Rokeach 1973). Only a
portion of the map or blueprint that is immediately relevant to
the behavioral choices being made is consulted, and the rest is
ignored temporarily. Different subsets of values and norms that
make up different portions of the map or blueprint are activated
when different types of behavioral choices are made. For
example, the values and norms relevant in choosing a mate
differ from those relevant in deciding how to allocate one‘s
time among various activities.
The Object Unit
A characteristic of values and norms that is important
for understanding their structure is the type of object unit to
which they pertain, such as an individual, an organization, or a
society. Values and norms establish what is desirable or
acceptable for particular types of object units. For example,
physical and psychological health are positively valued ends of
action for individuals, and norms that proscribe or prescribe
action to maintain or promote health govern individual action.
Democracy, distributive justice, and world peace are positively
valued ends of action for societies, and norms, usually in the
form of laws, proscribe and prescribe certain actions on the part
of a society‘s institutions in support of those values. Individuals
may value democracy, justice, and peace, but these are societal
values, not individual values, since they pertain to the
characteristics of societies, not to those of individuals.
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Differentiating values by their object units is important in
conceptualizing and measuring values relevant to the
explanation of behavior because correspondence between the
actor, or subject unit, and the object unit determines the extent
to which behavior by the actor is relevant to achieving a
particular end. Individuals differentiate between personal and
societal values because they do not have direct influence over
social values, thus distinguishing their beliefs on the basis of
whether they think those beliefs will lead to action (Braithwaite
and Law 1985).
The Basis of Evaluation
As evaluative criteria, values and norms have the ability
to induce valences (incentives). They affect evaluation of the
behavior of others and involve a predisposition to act in a
certain way because they affect the evaluation of the expected
consequences of action. The evaluation that occurs on the basis
of values and norms derives from two structural properties: the
polarity, or directionality, of the value or norm and the standard
of comparison that is used.
 Polarity→ The polarity of a value or norm is the direction of its
valence, or motive force, which may be positive or negative. In
the case of a value, something that is evaluated as desirable
will have a positive valence, whereas something that is
evaluated as undesirable will have a negative valence. In the
case of a norm, something that should be done will have a
positive valence, whereas something that should not be done
will have a negative valence.
 Standard of Comparison→ A value or norm also is
characterized by a standard, or level, of aspiration or
expectation. This evaluative standard is a reference point with
respect to which a behavior and its consequences are
evaluated. A subject unit’s own action and that of others, as
well as the ends that result or may result from action, are
evaluated on the basis of whether they are above or below an
evaluative standard.
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 In the case of a value, the evaluative standard
determines the neutral point on the value scale at or above
which a behavior or its consequences will be evaluated as
desirable and below which a behavior or its consequences will
be evaluated as undesirable. In both economics and
psychology, it has been recognized that there is a utility, or
value, function that should be considered nonlinear (Marini
[1992] provides a discussion of these developments), and there
is empirical evidence that it generally is appropriate to assume
the existence of a reference point on a utility, or value, scale.
This reference point plays a critical role in producing a
nonlinear relationship between the value scale and the objective
continuum of behavior and its consequences. It has been
observed that value functions change significantly at a certain
point, which is often, although not always, zero. In the prospect
theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979), outcomes are
expressed as positive or negative deviations from a neutral
reference outcome that is assigned a value of zero. Kahneman
and Tversky propose an S-shaped value function that is
concave above the reference point and convex below it but less
steep above than below. This function specifies that the effect
of a marginal change decreases with the distance from the
reference point in either direction but that the response to
outcomes below the reference point is more extreme than is the
response to outcomes above it. The asymmetry of the value
function suggests a stronger aversion to what is evaluated as
undesirable, an asymmetry that is consistent with an
empirically observed aversion to loss.
In the case of a norm, the evaluative standard is set by
what is defined to be acceptable versus unacceptable. It is a
level of expectation that is determined by the specific behaviors
that are regarded as right versus wrong, appropriate versus
inappropriate. An important difference between a value and a
norm is that whereas there is a continuous, nonlinear
relationship between a value scale and the objective continuum
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of behavior or its consequences above the neutral point set by
the evaluative standard, this relationship is not expected
between the scale of evaluation based on a normative criterion
and the objective continuum of behavior. Because a normative
standard establishes a boundary of acceptability or requirement
that applies to all those covered by the norm, compliance with a
normative expectation is not evaluated as a continuous variable
on the basis of variation in behavior above the reference point
set by the normative expectation. However, violation of a
normative standard is evaluated as a continuous variable on the
basis of variation in behavior below the reference point set by
the standard. Negative deviations from the standard are likely
to be evaluated in much the same way as are negative
evaluations from the reference point on a value scale, which is
convex below the reference point. Because of the strong
aversion to what is evaluated as being below the reference
standard, behavior that violates a normative standard is likely to
be eliminated from consideration as an option.
The level of aspiration or expectation that operates as an
evaluative standard for an actor is socially determined to a large
degree. It is a ‗‗comparison level‘‘ learned from others whom
the actor takes as referents. As a result of variation in the
characteristics of actors, the social environments to which they
are exposed, and the interaction between those two factors, the
evaluative standards associated with values and norms vary
across actors. Even among actors in the same social
environment, the evaluative standard is specific to the actor,
although there may be a high degree of consensus about it in a
social group.
The evaluative standards associated with values and
norms are subject to change in an individual actor. An
important source of change is experience that affects the level
of ability, knowledge, or accomplishment of an actor. For
example, the evaluative standard for achievement values is
affected by an actor‘s level of achievement. There is evidence
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that people tend to raise their value standards with success and
lower them with failure. Thus, as a worker learns a job, that
worker‘s ability to perform the job increases, as does the
worker‘s evaluative standard. A level of ability that once was
aspired to and evaluated as ‗‗extremely good‘‘ may, after
increases in the worker‘s ability, come to be viewed as
‗‗mediocre‘‘ and below the worker‘s current evaluative
standard for expected performance. Experience also may affect
the evaluative standard for norms. For example, there is
evidence that the experience of divorce changes normative
beliefs about divorce in the direction of increasing its
acceptability (Thornton 1985). Another source of change in the
evaluative standards associated with the values and norms of an
actor is an increase in knowledge of the world that alters the
existential beliefs connected with values and norms.
The evaluative standards associated with values and
norms vary not only among actors and over time for the same
actor but also with the characteristics of other actors whose
behavior is the object of evaluation. These characteristics may
differentiate among actors or among the circumstances of the
same actor at different times. For example, the value standard
used by an adult to evaluate a child‘s knowledge will vary for
children who have completed different amounts of schooling,
such as an elementary school student, a high school student, or
a college student: The amount of knowledge evaluated as
‗‗very good‘‘ for an elementary school student will differ from
that evaluated as ‗‗very good‘‘ for a student at a more advanced
stage of schooling. Different value standards will be applied to
different students and to the same student at different stages of
schooling. Similarly, in a work organization, the value standard
used to evaluate performance may vary for different categories
of workers: Those with more experience may be evaluated
according to a higher standard. Again, these different tandards
may be applied to different workers who are in different

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categories or to the same worker as he or she progresses from
one category to another.
Like a value standard, a normative standard may vary
with the characteristics of other actors whose behavior is an
object of evaluation. However, there is a difference between a
value and a norm in this regard. Because a value is a
continuous variable, variation in the value standard with the
characteristics of the other actors whose behavior is being
evaluated need not have implications for whether the value
applies to those actors. In contrast, because a norm is a discrete
variable that differentiates what is acceptable from what is
unacceptable, variation in the evaluative standard of a norm
with the characteristics of other actors whose behavior is being
evaluated determines whether the norm applies to other actors
with particular characteristics. This variabilitythat is, variability
in whether a value or norm applies based on the characteristics
of the actors being evaluated is a dimension of the importance
of a value or norm and is labeled its conditionality.
Dimensions of Importance
It is commonly recognized that values and norms differ
in their priority, or importance, and that those differences are
another aspect of the structure of values and norms. Differences
in priority produce a structure that is to some degree
hierarchical. Recognition that not all values are of equal
importance has led to the use of ranking procedures to measure
values (Allport et al. 1960; Rokeach 1973). These procedures
have been criticized for forcing respondents to represent their
values in a ranked order that does not allow for the possibility
that some values may be of equal importance (Alwin and
Krosnick 1985; Braithwaite and Law 1985). Although there is a
hierarchy among values, there may be sets of values that
occupy the same position in the hierarchy. The priority of a
value or norm not only has implications for its influence on
behavior but also may have implications for the probability that

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it will change, since values and norms of high priority have
been argued to be less likely to change than are those of low
priority.
The priority, or importance, of a value or norm can be
assessed on a number of dimensions:
1. strength, or intensity,
2. centrality,
3. range,
4. conditionally, and
5. intent
Although these dimensions are conceptually different,
they are likely to overlap empirically to a considerable degree.
The extent to which and ways in which they overlap in
reflecting the importance of a value or norm are not known.
 Strength→ The strength of a value or norm can be defined as
the maximum strength of the force field it can induce. The
strength of the valence reflects its hierarchical position in the
latent map or blueprint that characterizes the structure of
values and norms for a social system or an individual.
Although the strength of a value or norm is likely to display
considerable stability, it is also subject to change. At the level
of the social system, it may change as a result of long-term
changes in social organization and aspects of culture as well as
precipitating events. As the social system changes, socializing
influences on individuals change. Changes in the values and
norms of individuals occur both over the life course (Glenn
1980; Alwin 1994) and as a result of differences between
those who are born and move through life in different
historical periods. The motivational force of a value at a
particular time, however, is not necessarily the maximum
strength of its latent force field, because attaining a valued
outcome may reduce the subjective utility of additional units
of that outcome as a result of diminishing marginal utility, or
satiation. In the case of either a value or a norm, whether one
attains an outcome also may alter the maximum strength of
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 its latent force field. For example, if attainment is problematic,
the importance of a value or norm may decline as a way of
reducing cognitive dissonance.
 Centrality→ The centrality of a value or norm can be defined
as the number and variety of behaviors or ends to which it
applies. Because a central value or norm contributes more
than does a peripheral one to the coherent organization and
functioning of the total system, the disappearance of a central
value or norm would make a greater difference to the total
system than would the disappearance of a peripheral value or
norm. A central value or norm is more resistant to change
than is a peripheral value or norm; however, if change occurs,
the more central the value or norm changed, the more
widespread its repercussions (Rokeach 1973, 1985).
For individuals and even for social groups, concern and
responsibility for the well-being of others is a central value that
pertains to a large number and variety of specific behaviors and
ends. It is supported by a central proscriptive norm that one
should not harm others and a central prescriptive norm that one
should help others, particularly if they are in need. These norms
pertain to a large number and variety of specific behaviors. In
contrast, excitement and adventure are more peripheral values,
affecting a smaller number and variety of specific behaviors
and ends. In connection with these values, peripheral norms
govern the carrying out of specific types of activities that may
be sources of excitement and adventure, such as the rules
governing sports and potentially dangerous recreational
activities.
For individuals, life values that pertain to the overall
ends, or goals, of life along with the norms that support them
tend to be more central than are the values and norms that
pertain to particular life domains or social roles. Part of the
reason for this is that life values affect whether particular life
domains or social roles are entered into and the amounts of
time and energy a person spends in different domains and roles.
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They also affect an individual‘s domain- and role-specific
values and norms. For example, life values include things such
as attaining a high material standard of living, having
meaningful family relationships and friendships, making the
world a better place, and having a good time. Life values of this
type are among the factors that influence entry into various life
domains and roles, the activities in those domains and roles,
and how much investment is made in each one (e.g., marriage,
parenthood, employment, friendships, leisure activities and
hobbies, community activities, religion). Values and norms
pertaining to each of the domains and roles are to some degree
a function of overall life values. For example, if an individual
places a higher priority on making the world a better place than
on material well-being, that individual‘s employment values
will place a higher priority on the possible influence and
significance of the work performed than on the earnings
derived from the work. Similarly, if an individual places a
higher priority on meaningful relationships than on material
wellbeing, marital values will place a higher priority on love
and mutual respect than on the shared material standard of
living.
 Range→ The range of a value or norm can be defined as the
number and variety of actors of a particular type of object unit
(e.g., individuals, organizations, and societies) to which it
applies. Whereas the dimension of centrality focuses on the
characteristics of action and its ends (i.e., the number and
variety of behaviors or ends to which a value or norm applies),
the dimension of range focuses on the characteristics of actors
(i.e., the number and variety of individuals or larger social
units to which a value or norm applies). The characteristics of
actors used to define the range of a value or norm tend to be
as creative or group defining characteristics of individuals or
larger social units. In the case of individuals, these are
characteristics such as age, sex, nationality, race, and
ethnicity. A value or norm with a broad range applies to all

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 actors of a particular type of object unit, whereas a value or
norm with a narrow range applies to a very restricted category
of actors of that type. For example, concern about and
responsibility for the wellbeing of others is a value with a
broad range that applies universally to individuals throughout
the world. In contrast, wisdom is a value with a narrower
range because although it applies throughout the world, it
applies primarily to people of older ages. Similarly, the norm
against incest has a broad range because it applies universally
to individuals throughout the world. In contrast, the norm
prescribing paid employment has a narrower range because it
applies primarily to men in particular age categories.
 Conditionality→ The conditionality of a value or norm can be
defined as the number and variety of situations to which it
applies. Whereas the dimension of centrality focuses on the
characteristics of action or its ends and the dimension of
range focuses on the characteristics of actors, the dimension
of conditionality focuses on the characteristics of situations,
including a situation’s actors. When conditionality pertains to
the characteristics of a situation’s actors, it usually refers to
emergent or potentially changing characteristics of actors that
define the situation rather than to ascriptive characteristics
that define membership in social groups. Although values are
less tied to specific types of situations than norms are, both
values and norms vary in the degree to which they are
conditioned on the characteristics of situations. For example,
some values pertaining to modes of conduct, such as courtesy,
cleanliness, and honesty, are applicable across most
situations. Others are applicable in many fewer situations or
may even be bipolar, with the polarity of the value being
conditional on the situation. For example, aggressiveness is
positively valued in some types of competitive situations, such
as warfare and sports, but negatively valued in some types of
cooperative situations, such as conversation and child rearing.
The conditionality of a value or norm is evident when a
given subject actor who is evaluating a given type of action or
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end of action makes different evaluations in different types of
situations, that is, when the evaluation varies with the
characteristics of the situation. For example, friendliness is
valued positively, but it is a value characterized by some
conditionality, since it is valued negatively when exhibited
toward strangers in dangerous environments. Killing other
human beings is normatively proscribed in almost all situations,
but the norm has some conditionality because killing is not
proscribed in warfare, self-defense, capital punishment, and
euthanasia. In capital punishment and some types of warfare,
killing actually is prescribed. Abortion is believed by some
people to be normatively proscribed, and whether it is
normatively proscribed often depends on the characteristics of
the situation, including how conception occurred, whether the
mother‘s health is in danger, and whether the mother can care
for the child. Opposition to abortion is therefore a norm of
higher conditionality than is the proscription against killing
other human beings. The conditionality of a value or norm is
defined by the number and variety of situations to which it
applies consistently, that is, with the same polarity. A value or
norm that has the same polarity across many and varied types
of situations is a value or norm of low conditionality and
therefore of high priority. A value or norm that has the same
polarity in only a few similar types of situations is a value or
norm of high conditionality and low priority.
 Intent→ Whether a value applies to a mode, means, or end
of action has been labeled its intent (Kluckhohn 1951).
Mode values pertain to the manner or style in which an
action is carried out and refer to both the action and the
actor. They pertain to qualities manifested in the act, and if
such qualities are observed consistently over time for a type
of action or for an actor, they are applied not just to a single
instance of action but to a type of action or to an actor more
generally. Adjectives such as ‘‘intelligent,’’ ‘‘independent,’’
‘‘creative,’’ ‘‘responsible,’’ ‘‘kind,’’ and ‘‘generous’’ describe

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 mode values. Instrumental values focus on necessary means
to other ends. They refer to action that constitutes the
means or from which the means are derived. For example, a
job and the earnings it provides may be viewed as means to
other ends such as acquiring the material resources
necessary to sustain life. Goal values, in contrast, pertain to
self-sufficient, or autonomous, ends of action. They are not
subordinate to other values and are what an actor values
most. Some analysts have argued that they can be defined
as what an actor desires without limit. They focus on
sources of intrinsic satisfaction or happiness but are
distinguished from pleasures, which, except when elevated
to become goal values, are satisfactions that are enjoyed
incidentally and along the way. Pleasures are not necessarily
based on beliefs about desirability, since they can be based
on mere liking.
A norm may apply to a mode or means of action but not
to an end of action. By requiring or prohibiting a way of acting
or a type of action, norms limit the modes and means used in
accomplishing ends. For example, the values of honesty and
fairness govern modes and means of accomplishing ends, and
associated with these values are norms that require honest and
fair action.
Values and norms cannot always be identified as falling
into a single category of intent. For some types of action, mode
values and norms and instrumental or goal values and norms
overlap; choosing an action as a means or to directly achieve an
end actually defines the mode of action. For example,
accomplishing a task by a means that shows concern for others
defines a mode of acting that is kind, considerate, polite, and
caring. Choosing to accomplish a task by honest means defines
a mode of acting honestly. Acting to achieve an end that
benefits others defines a mode of acting that is caring, giving,
and generous. Mode values and norms and instrumental or goal
values and norms do not always overlap, however. A given
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mode may be applied to a variety of means and ends, and
choosing a means or acting to achieve an end does not
necessarily imply or define a mode. For example, for modes
that reflect ability or competence, as described by adjectives
such as ‗‗intelligent‘‘, ‗‗creative,‘‘ ‗‗efficient,‘‘ ‗‗courageous,‘‘
‗‗organized,‘‘ and ‗‗self-reliant,‘‘ there may be no necessary
connection or only a limited one between the values reflected in
the mode and the values reflected in the acts undertaken as
means or ends.
Differentiating between instrumental values and goal
values is difficult because the two types are interdependent.
Their relationship is not just one of sequence, since achieving
particular ends may require the use of certain means
(Kluckhohn 1951; Fallding 1965). Differentiating between
instrumental values and goal values also requires reflection by
the actor. An important concern of moral philosophy has been
identifying the end or ends of action that ultimately bring
satisfaction to human beings, that is, that have genuine,
intrinsic value (Lovejoy 1950). The focus has been on
identifying important goal values and distinguishing them from
less important instrumental values. This means–end distinction
is not as well developed in the category systems of all cultures
as it is in Western culture (Kluckhohn 1951), and even among
persons exposed to Western culture, it is not developed equally
or similarly in all actors. Not all actors make the distinction or
make it in the same way. What are instrumental values to some
actors are goal values to others.
When mode, instrumental, & goal values are separable,
they can all affect behavior. Sometimes they point to identical
actions, and sometimes they do not. Similarly, when mode and
instrumental norms are separable, both can affect behavior.
Among values that can pertain to either means or ends, the
distinction between instrumental and goal values is a dimension
of importance, with goal values being of higher priority than
instrumental values (Fallding 1965; Braithwaite & Law 1985).
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However, values that can pertain only to a mode or means are
not necessarily of lower priority than are values that can pertain
to ends.
Interrelationships
Because social structure, as defined both
organizationally and culturally, links sets of values and norms,
there are patterned relationships among the sets of values and
norms held by actors. These relationships can be seen as being
influenced by conceptual domain, dimensions of importance,
behavioral context, and interdependence.
Conceptual Domain→ Values and norms that are conceptually
similar are thought of as falling within the same conceptual
domain, and a conceptual domain is identified by the
observation of strong empirical relationships among sets of
values or norms. Domains that are conceptually distinct also
can have relationships to one another. Compatible domains are
positively related, and contradictory domains are negatively
related. Empirical research provides some evidence of the
existence of conceptual domains of values and norms and the
relationships among them. For example, in Western societies, a
value domain emphasizing pleasure, comfort, and enjoyment
has a negative relationship to a prosocial value domain that
emphasizes concern and responsibility for others. Similarly, a
value domain emphasizing the extrinsic attainment of power,
money, and position has a negative relationship to the prosocial
value domain (Schwartz and Bilsky 1987).
Values appear to be organized along at least three broad
dimensions:
 emphasis on the self versus others,
 emphasis on achievement versus pleasure, and
 emphasis on the external versus the internal.
Although there has been less research on the pattern of
interrelationships among norms, evidence indicates that norms
fall into conceptual domains. Norms pertaining to honesty, for

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example, are conceptually separable from norms pertaining to
personal freedom in family matters, sexuality, and mortality.
 Dimensions of Importance→ Interrelationships among values
and norms also are affected by dimensions of importance,
since these dimensions affect their application across object
units, social institutions, social roles, and behavioral contexts.
Dimensions of importance such as centrality, range, and
conditionality are linked to variability in application across
object units, social institutions, and social roles. Values and
norms that have high importance because they are broadly
applicable are more likely to be interrelated than are values
and norms that have low importance, which apply more
narrowly. Values and norms that apply narrowly are related to
each other and to values and norms that apply more broadly
only under the conditions in which they apply.
 Behavioral Context→ Interrelationships among values and
norms are influenced not only by conceptual domains and
dimensions of importance but also by the behavioral contexts
to which they apply. Values and norms that are relevant to the
same or related behavioral contexts tend to be interrelated.
For example, the values and norms that play a role in
interpersonal relationships differ in some respects from those
which play a role in educational and occupational
performance. The value of concern for others and the norms
that support it are of high priority in interpersonal
relationships but can be of low priority in the performance of
educational and occupational tasks.
 Interdependence→ Socially structured or otherwise necessary
links among modes, means, and ends of action are a source of
interdependence among values and norms. Mode values and
norms and instrumental or goal values and norms can overlap,
and instrumental and goal values are interdependent when
achieving particular ends requires the use of certain means.
This interdependence constrains the extent to which the
relative priority of values can affect action. For example,
attaining a less highly valued means cannot be forgone to
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 attain a more highly valued end if the end cannot be attained
without the means.
The Origin of Values and Norms
Multiple values and norms are organized and linked in
the cultures of human social systems, which are linked when
they are internalized by human actors or institutionalized by
corporate actors. Social values and norms, in contrast to
personal, or internalized, values and norms refer to the values
and norms of a social unit that encompasses more than one
person. These may refer to the officially stated or otherwise
institutionalized values and norms of an organization or
society, or to the collective, or shared, values and norms of the
individuals who constitute a social unit such as an informal
reference group, a formal organization, a society, or a societal
subgroup defined by a shared characteristic. When a social
value or norm refers to a collective property of the members of
a social unit, it may be held with varying degrees of consensus
by those who constitute that unit (Rossi and Berk 1985). An
important difference between formal organizations and
informal social groups or geographically defined social units is
that formal organizations usually come into being for a specific
purpose and are dedicated to particular types of activity and to
achieving particular ends. As a result, their objectives are both
narrower and more varied than those of other social units.
The Social Origin of Personal Values and Norms
The values and norms of individual persons derive from
the social environments to which they are exposed. Through
socialization, individuals become aware of and internalize
social values and norms, which then become important internal
determinants of action. An individual‘s internalized values and
norms reflect the values and norms of the society and the
various subgroups and organizations within that society to
which that individual is exposed, particularly, although not
exclusively, in the early stages of the life course. Once social

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values and norms are internalized, they can direct the behavior
of individuals irrespective of external influences. Internalized
values and norms are a source of selfexpectations and a basis of
selfevaluation, with the subjective response to an outcome
ensuing from the self concept. Adherence to selfexpectations
enhances self-esteem, producing a sense of pride and other
favorable self-evaluations. Violation of self-expectations
reduces selfesteem, producing guilt, self-depreciation, and
other negative selfevaluations. To preserve a sense of self-
worth and avoid negative selfevaluations, individuals try to
behave in accordance with their internalized values and norms.
Sociologists tend to see internalized values and norms as an
important influence on human behavior, and this makes them
see the social values and norms of society as governing and
constraining the choices individuals make. Social values and
norms also affect behavior because they are internalized by
significant others and thus affect an actor‘s perception of other
people‘s expectations. To the extent that actors are motivated to
comply with what they perceive the views of others to be,
social values and norms become a source of external pressure
that exerts an influence that is independent of an individual‘s
internalized values and norms.
Although change in personal values and norms occurs
over the life course, there is some evidence that levels of
stability are relatively high (Moss and Susman 1980; Sears
1983; Alwin 1994). It has been argued that values and norms
that are more closely tied to the self-concept and considered
more important are more resistant to change (Rokeach 1973;
Glenn 1980). Those values and norms may undergo less change
because they are internalized through conditioning-like
processes that begin early in life and are strongly linked to
existential beliefs. They tend to be tied to shared mental models
that are used to construct reality and become embedded central
elements of cognitive organization with a strong affective basis.
Some types of values, norms, and attitudes (for example,
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political attitudes) are quite malleable into early adulthood and
then become relatively stable. After this ‗‗impressionable,‘‘ or
‗‗formative,‘‘ period when change is greatest, they are
relatively stable in midlife, and this stability either persists or
declines in the later years (Alwin et al. 1991; Alwin 1994). The
pattern of life-course change and stability described above has
been argued to be due to a number of influences. One is the
process of biological and psychological maturation with age,
which is most rapid in the early stages of life. As functional
capacity develops, influences at that time have the advantage of
primacy, and when they are consistent over a period of years,
affective ‗‗mass‘‘ is built up. Nevertheless, some types of
values, norms, and attitudes remain malleable into early
adulthood, and strong pressure to change or weak earlier
socialization can lead to resocialization in late adolescence or
early adulthood (Sears 1981; Alwin et al. 1991). It is likely that
change declines after early adulthood in part because
individuals tend to act on previously formed values, norms, and
attitudes as they seek new information and experiences. This
selective structuring of new inputs enhances consistency over
time, since new inputs tend to reinforce rather than call into
question earlier ones.
Another influence on life-course change and stability in
values and norms is change in social experiences and roles over
the life course (Wells and Stryker 1988; Elder and Caspi 1990).
These changes are extensive during the transitional years of
early adulthood and may increase after retirement. They
represent opportunities for change because they bring the
individual into contact with new individuals, reference groups,
and situations, and change in values and norms is likely to
occur through both interaction with others and adaptation to
situations. Role change can produce change as a role occupant
engages in new behaviors, is exposed to new circumstances and
information, and learns the norms governing role behavior.
After early adulthood, a decline in the number of changes in
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social experiences and roles leads to greater stability in values
and norms.
Sources of Change in Social Values and Norms
Change in social values and norms occur through a
variety of processes. One influence is historical change in the
conditions of life that occurs through technological innovation,
alterations in economic and social organization, and change in
cultural ideas and forms. Historical change by definition
involves ‗‗period effects,‘‘ but because those effects tend to be
experienced differently by different birth cohorts (i.e., those at
different ages when a historical change occurs), the influence of
historical change on social values and norms occurs to some
degree through a process of cohort succession.
Change in social values and norms also occur through
change in the social values and norms of subgroups of social
units. This change can be of several types. First, change in the
presence and size of subgroups with different values and norms
produces change in the collective values and norms of the
group. For example, the presence of new immigrant groups
with different values and norms or a change in the relative size
of groups with different values and norms affects the values
and norms of the collective unit. Second, change in the degree
of similarity or difference in the values and norms of subgroups
can produce change in overall values and norms. On the one
hand, acculturation through intergroup contact and similar
experiences will reduce the distinctiveness of subcultural
groups; on the other hand, segregation and increasing
divergence in the life experiences of subgroups will widen their
cultural distinctiveness. Third, some subcultural groups may be
more subject to particular period influences than others are, and
this differential responsiveness can increase or decrease
differences in values and norms among subgroups.
Another source of change in social values and norms is
change in exposure to social organizations that exert distinct

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socializing influences. For example, exposure to religious,
educational, or work organizations may produce differences in
values and norms between those with such exposure and those
without it. The extent to which exposure to different
organizational environments is likely to affect personal values
and norms depends on the distinctiveness of those
environments, which also is subject to change. Thus, social
values and norms are affected by both changes in the exposure
of the population to different organizations and changes in what
is socialized by those organizations.
The Role of Values and Norms in Explaining Behavior
The ways in which values and norms influence behavior
must be understood in a larger explanatory framework, and
models of purposive action in all the social sciences provide
that framework (Marini 1992). These models rest on the
assumption that actors are purposive, acting in ways that tend
to produce beneficial results. Although the models of purposive
action that have emerged in various social sciences differ in the
nature of the assumptions made about purposive action, they
share the basic proposition that people are motivated to achieve
pleasure and avoid pain and that this motivation leads them to
act in ways that, at least within the limits of the information
they possess and their ability to predict the future, can be
expected to yield greater reward than cost. If reward and cost
are defined subjectively and individuals are assumed to act in
the service of subjective goals, this proposition links subjective
utility, or value, to action. In sociology, a model of purposive
action assumes the existence of actors who may be either
persons or corporate actors. The usefulness of these models in
sociology hinges on making appropriate connections between
the characteristics of social systems and the behavior of actors
(the macro–micro connection) and between the behavior of
actors and the systemic outcomes that emerge from the
combined actions of multiple actors (the micro–macro
connection).
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 In a model of purposive action, an individual actor
(person or corporate actor) is assumed to make choices among
alternative actions structured by the social system. Choices
among those actions are based on the outcomes expected to
ensue from those actions, to which the actor attaches some
utility, or value, and which the actor expects with some
probability. The choices of the actor are governed by beliefs of
three types:
 The perceived alternatives for action available,
 The perceived consequences expected to result from each
alternative, and
 The perceived probabilities with which those consequences
are expected to result.
The choices of the actor also are governed by the actor‘s
preferences, or the subjective utility (rewards and costs) of the
consequences expected to result from each alternative. Values
and norms are among the preferences of an actor that influence
action. As evaluative beliefs that synthesize affective and
cognitive elements, they affect the utility of the outcomes
expected to ensue from an action. Action often results not from
a conscious weighing of the expected future benefits of
alternatives but from a less deliberate response to internalized
or institutionalized values and norms (Emerson 1987). The
actor‘s finite resourcesthe human, cultural, social, and material
capital available to the actor that enables or precludes
actionoperate as influences on the choices made by the actor.
The component of a model of purposive action that
makes the macro micro connection links the characteristics of
the social system to the behavior of actors and models the
effects of social structure (both organizational and cultural) on
the beliefs and preferences of actors as well as on the available
alternatives for action and actors‘ resources. In this component
of the model, characteristics of the micro model are taken as
problematic and to be explained. These characteristics include:

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  The beliefs and preferences on the basis of which an actor
makes choices,
 The alternatives available to an actor, and
 The resources available to an actor.
A third component of a model of purposive action
makes the micro– macro connection, linking the behavior of
individual actors to the systemic outcomes that emerge from
the combined actions of multiple actors. This link may occur
through a simple mechanism such as aggregation, but it is more
likely that outcomes emerge through a complex interaction in
which the whole is not just the sum of its parts. The action,
behavior, of the system is usually an emergent consequence of
the interdependent actions of the actors that compose it.
Norm (social)
Shaking hands after sports match is an example of a social
norm.
A norm is a groupheld belief about how members
should behave in a given context. Sociologists describe norms
as informal understandings that govern society‘s behaviors,
while psychologists have adopted a more general definition,
recognizing smaller group units, like a team or an office, may
also endorse norms separate or in addition to cultural or societal
expectations. The psychological definition emphasizes social
norms' behavioral component, stating norms have two
dimensions: how much behavior is exhibited and how much the
group approves of that behavior.
Norms running counter to the behaviors of the overarching
society or culture may be transmitted and maintained within
small subgroups of society. For example, Crandall (1988) noted
that certain groups (e.g., cheerleading squads, dance troupes,
sports teams, and sororities) have a rate of bulimia, a publicly
recognized lifethreatening disease that is much higher than
society as a whole. Social norms have a way of maintaining
order and organizing groups.

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 Contents
 Social control
 Sociology
 Norm emergence
 Transmission of norms
 Deviance from social
norms
 Focus Theory of
Normative Conduct
 Other types of norms
 Prescriptive and
proscriptive
 Subjective
 Mathematical
representations of norms
 Return Potential Model
 Game theory
 Examples of norms
 See also
 Further reading
 References
 External links

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Social control
Although not considered to be formal laws within
society, norms still work to promote a great deal of social
control. Social norms can be enforced formally (e.g., through
sanctions) or informally (e.g., through body language and non-
verbal communication cues.) Because individuals often derive
physical or psychological resources from group membership,
groups are said to control discretionary stimuli; groups can
withhold or give out more resources in response to members'
adherence to group norms, effectively controlling member
behavior through rewards and operant conditioning. Social
psychology research has found the more an individual values
group-controlled resources or the more an individual sees group
membership as central to his definition of self, the more likely
he is to conform. Social norms also allow you to assess what
behaviors the group deems important to its existence or
survival, since they represent a codification of belief; groups
generally do not punish members or create norms over actions
which they care little about. Norms in every culture create
conformity that allows for people to become socialized to the
culture in which they live.
As social beings, individuals learn when and where it is
appropriate to say certain things, to use certain words, to
discuss certain topics or wear certain clothes, and when it is
not. Thus, knowledge about cultural norms is important for
impressions,[6] which is an individual's regulation of their
nonverbal behavior. One also comes to know through
experience what types of people he/she can and cannot discuss
certain topics with or wear certain types of dress around.
Typically, this knowledge is derived through experience (i.e.
social norms are learned through social interaction).[6]
Wearing a suit to a job interview in order to give a great first
impression represents a common example of a social norm in
the white collar work force.

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Sociology
For Talcott Parsons of the functionalist school, norms
dictate the interactions of people in all social encounters. On
the other hand, Karl Marx believed that norms are used to
promote the creation of roles in society which allows for people
of different levels of social class structure to be able to function
properly. Marx claims that this power dynamic creates social
order.
Norm emergence
Groups may adopt norms through a variety of ways.
Norms can arise formally, where groups explicitly outline and
implement behavioral expectations. Laws or club rules serve as
an example of this. A large number of these norms we follow
naturally such as driving on the right side of the road in the
United States or not speeding in order to avoid a ticket. Many
formal norms serve to provide safety to the general public.
However, social norms are much more likely to develop
informally, emerging gradually as a result of repeated use of
discretionary stimuli to control behavior. Not necessarily laws
set in writing, informal norms represent generally accepted and
widelysanctioned routines that people follow in everyday life.
These informal norms, if broken, may not invite formal legal
punishments or sanctions, but instead encourage reprimands,
warnings, or bothering; incest, for example, is generally
thought of as wrong in society, but many jurisdictions do not
legally prohibit it.
Finally, individuals may also import norms from a
previous organization to their new group, which can get
adopted over time.Without a clear indication of how to act,
people typically rely on their past history to determine the best
course forward; what was successful before may serve them
well again. In a group, individuals may all import different
histories or scripts about appropriate behaviors; common
experience over time will lead the group to define as a whole its

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take on the right action, usually with the integration of several
members' schemas.Under the importation paradigm, norm
formation occurs subtly and swiftlywhereas with formal or
informal development of norms may take longer.
Transmission of norms
Groups internalize norms by accepting them as
reasonable and proper standards for behavior within the group.
Once firmly established, a norm becomes a part of the group's
operational structure and hence more difficult to change. While
possible for newcomers to a group to change its norms, it is
much more likely that the new individual will adopt the group's
norms, values, and perspectives, rather than the other way
around.
Deviance from social norms
"Normal is a bad word", a graffito in Ljubljana, Slovenia
Deviance is defined as "nonconformity to a set of norms
that are accepted by a significant number of people in a
community or society." More simply put, if group members do
not follow a norm, they become labeled as a deviant. In the
sociological literature, this can often lead to them being
considered outcasts of society. What is considered ―normal‖ is
relative to the location of the culture in which the social
interaction is taking place. In psychology, an individual who
routinely disobeys group norms runs the risk of turning into the
"institutionalized deviant." Similar to the sociological
definition, institutionalized deviants may be judged by other
group members for their failure to adhere to norms. At first,
group members may increase pressure on a non-conformist,
attempting to engage the individual in conversation or explicate
why she should follow their behavioral expectations. Especially
with new members who perhaps do not know any better,
groups may use discretionary stimuli to bring an individual's
behavior back into line. Over time, however, if a member
continues to disobey, the group will give up on her as a lost

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cause; while the group may not necessarily revoke her
membership, they may give her only superficial consideration.
If a worker is late to a meeting, for example, violating the
office norm of punctuality, a boss or other co-worker may wait
for the individual to arrive and pull him aside later to ask what
happened. If the behavior continues, eventually the group may
begin meetings without him since the individual "is always
late." The group generalizes the individual's disobedience and
promptly dismisses it, thereby reducing the member's influence
and footing in future group disagreements.
Group tolerance for deviation varies across
membership; not all group members receive the same treatment
for norm violations. Individuals may build up a "reserve" of
good behavior through conformity, which they can borrow
against later. These idiosyncrasy credits provide a theoretical
currency for understanding variations in group behavioral
expectations. A teacher, for example, may more easily forgive a
straight-A student for misbehaving than a repeatedly disruptive
student who has past "good credit" saved up. While past
performance can help build idiosyncrasy credits, some group
members have a higher balance to start with. Individuals can
import idiosyncrasy credits from another group; childhood
movie stars, for example, who enroll in college, may
experience more leeway in adopting school norms than other
incoming freshmen. Finally, leaders or individuals in other
high-status positions may begin with more credits and be
appear to be "above the rules" at times. Even their idiosyncrasy
credits are not bottomless, however; while held to a more
lenient standard than the average member, leaders may still
face group rejection if their disobedience becomes too extreme.
Focus Theory of Normative Conduct
Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren developed the Focus
Theory of Normative Conduct to describe how individuals
implicitly juggle multiple behavioral expectations at once;

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expanding on conflicting prior beliefs about whether cultural,
situational or personal norms motivate action, the researchers
suggested the focus of an individual‘s attention will dictate
what behavioral expectation they follow. They define a
'Descriptive Norm' as people's perceptions of what is
commonly done in specific situations; it signifies what most
people do, without assigning judgment. The absence of trash on
the ground in a parking lot, for example, transmits the
descriptive norm that most people there do not litter. An
Injunctive norm, on the other hand, transmits group approval
about a particular behavior; it dictates how an individual should
behave. Watching another person pick up trash off the ground
and throw it out, a group member may pick up on the injunctive
norm that he ought to not litter. Descriptive norms depict what
happens while injunctive norms describe what should happen.
Other types of norms
Prescriptive and proscriptive
Unwritten rules that are understood and followed by
society, prescriptive norms indicate what we should do.[17]
Expressing gratitude or writing a Thank You card when
someone gives you a gift represents a prescriptive norm in
American culture. Proscriptive norms, in contrast, comprise the
other end of the same spectrum; they are similarly society's
unwritten rules about what one should not do. These norms can
vary between cultures; while an acceptable greeting in some
European countries, kissing a stranger on the cheek constitutes
a proscriptive norm in the United States.
Subjective
Subjective norm is determined by beliefs about the
extent to which important others want them to perform a
behavior. Social influences are conceptualized in terms of the
pressure that people perceive from important others to perform,
or not to perform, a behavior.

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Mathematical representations of norms
Over the last few decades, several theorists have
attempted to explain social norms from a more theoretical point
of view. By quantifying behavioral expectations graphically or
attempting to plot the logic behind adherence, theorists hoped
to be able to predict whether or not individuals would conform.
The Return Potential Model and Game Theory provide a
slightly more economic conceptualization of norms, suggesting
individuals can calculate the cost or benefit behind possible
behavioral outcomes. Under these theoretical frameworks,
choosing to obey or violate norms becomes a more deliberate,
quantifiable decision.
Return Potential Model

Developed in the 1960s, the Return Potential Model

provides a method for plotting and visualizing group norms. In
the regular coordinate plane, the amount of behavior exhibited
is plotted on the X-axis while the amount of group acceptance
or approval gets plotted on the Y-axis. The graph represents the
potential return or positive outcome to an individual for a given
behavioral norm. Theoretically, one could plot a point for each
increment of behavior how much the group likes or dislikes that
action. For example, it may be the case that among first-year
graduate students, strong social norms around how many daily
cups of coffee you drink exist. If the return curve in Figure 1
correctly displays the example social norm, we can see that if

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someone drinks 0 cups of coffee a day, the group strongly
disapproves. The group does not approve of member behavior
until someone hits four cups of coffee a day; the graduate
students (as represented by the return curve) find it excessive to
drink more than seven cups, however, as the approval again
dips below zero. As exhibited by the coffee example, the return
potential model displays for each increment of behavior how
much group approval one can anticipate.
Point of Maximum Return. The point with the greatest
y-coordinate is called the point of maximum return, as it
represents the amount of behavior the group likes the best.
While c in Figure 1 is labeling the return curve in general, the
highlighted point just above it at X=6, represents the point of
maximum return. Extending our above example, the point of
maximum return for first-year graduate students would be 6
cups of coffee; they receive the most social approval for
drinking exactly that many cups. Any more or any fewer cups
would decrease the approval.
Range of Tolerable Behavior
Label d represents the range of tolerable behavior, or
the amount of action the group finds acceptable.[2] It
encompasses all the positive area under the curve. In Figure 1,
the range of tolerable behavior extends is 3, as the group
approves of all behavior from 4 to 7 and 7-4=3. Carrying over
our coffee example again, we can see that first-years only
approve of having a limited number of cups of coffee (between
4 and 7); more than 7 cups or fewer than 4 would fall outside
the range of tolerable behavior. Norms can have a narrower or
wider range of tolerable behavior. Typically, a narrower range
of behavior indicates a behavior with greater consequences to
the group.
Intensity
The intensity of the norm tells how much the group
cares about the norm, or how much group affect is at stake to

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be won or lost. It is represented in the Return Potential Model
by the total amount of area subsumed by the curve, regardless
of whether the area is positive or negative. A norm with low
intensity would not vary far from the x-axis; the amount of
approval or disapproval for given behaviors would be closer to
zero. A high-intensity norm, however, would have more
extreme approval ratings. The intensity of the norm appears
high, as few behaviors invoke a rating of indifference.
Crystallization
Finally, norm crystallization refers to how much
variance exists within the curve; translated from the theoretical
back to the actual norm, it shows how much agreement exists
between group members about the approval for a given amount
of behavior. It may be that some members believe the norm
more central to group functioning than others. A group norm
like how many cups of coffee first years should drink would
probably have low crystallization, since a lot of individuals
have varying beliefs about the appropriate amount of caffeine
to imbibe; in contrast, the norm of not plagiarizing another
student's work would likely have high crystallization, as people
uniformly agree on the behavior's unacceptability. Showing the
overall group norm, the Return Potential Model in Figure 1
does not indicate the crystallization. Another Return Potential
Model, however, that plotted individual data points alongside
the cumulative norm, could demonstrate the variance and allow
us to deduce crystallization.
Game theory
Another general formal framework that can be used to
represent the essential elements of the social situation
surrounding a norm is the repeated game of game theory.A
norm gives a person a rule of thumb for how they should
behave. However, a rational person only acts according to the
rule if it is optimal for them. The situation can be described as
follows. A norm gives an expectation of how other people act

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in a given situation (macro). A person acts optimally given the
expectation (micro). For a norm to be stable, people's actions
must reconstitute the expectation without change (micro-macro
feedback loop). A set of such correct stable expectations is
known as a Nash equilibrium. Thus, a stable norm must
constitute a Nash equilibrium. From a game-theoretical point of
view, there are two explanations for the vast variety of norms
that exist throughout the world. One is the difference in games.
Different parts of the world may give different environmental
contexts and different people may have different values, which
may result in a difference in games. The other is equilibrium
selection not explicable by the game itself. Equilibrium
selection is closely related to coordination. For a simple
example, driving is common throughout the world, but in some
countries people drive on the right and in other countries people
drive on the left (see coordination game). A framework called
comparative institutional analysis is proposed to deal with the
game theoretical structural understanding of the variety of
social norms.
Examples of norms
Norms affect the way one behaves in public. When one
enters an elevator, it is expected that one turns around to face
the doors. An example of a social norm violation would be to
enter the elevator and remain facing the rest of the people.[19]
The community has much to do with the development of social
norms. Although it is not illegal to not be courteous, it is a
social norm.
Social Norms
Social norms grow out of social value and both serve to
differentiate human social behavior from that of other species.
The significance of learning in behavior varies from species to
species and is closely linked to processes of communication.
Only human beings are capable of elaborate symbolic
communication and of structuring their behavior in terms of

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abstract preferences that we have called values. Norms are the
means through which values are expressed in behavior.
Norms generally are the rules and regulations that
groups live by. Or perhaps because the words, rules and
regulations, call to mind some kind of formal listing, we might
refer to norms as the standards of behavior of a group. For
while some of the appropriate standards of behavior in most
societies are written down, many of them are not that formal.
Many are learned, informally, in interaction with other people
and are passed "that way from generation to generation.The
term "norms" covers an exceedingly wide range of behavior. So
that the whole range of that behavior may be included.
Sociologists have offered the following definition. Social
norms are rules developed by a group of people that specify
how people must, should, may, should not, and must not
behave in various situations.Some norms are defined by
individual and societies as crucial to the society. For example,
all members of the group are required to wear clothing and to
bury their dead. Such "musts" are often labeled "mores", a term
coined by the American sociologist William Graham Sumner.
Many social norms are concerned with "should "; that
is, there is some pressure on the individual to conform but there
is some leeway permitted also. The 'should behaviors' are what
Sumner called "folk-ways"; that is, conventional ways of doing
things that are not defined as crucial to the survival of either the
individual or the society. The 'should behaviors' in our own
society include the prescriptions that people's clothes should be
clean, and that death should be recognized with public funerals.
A complete list of the should behaviors in a complex society
would be virtually without end.
The word "May" in the definition of norms indicates
that, in most groups, there is a wide range of behaviors in
which the individual is given considerable choice. To continue
the illustration, in Western countries girls may select to wear

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dresses or halters and jeans. Diets may be done through trainers
at the gym or through the benefit of Medifast coupons, some
people may even prefer diets advertised on tv. Funerals may be
held with or without flowers, with the casket open or closed,
with or without religious participation, and so on. We have
confined our examples to just three areas, but students should
be able to construct their own examples from all areas of life.
The remainder of the definition, including the 'should-
not' and the 'must-not' behaviours, probably does not require
lengthy illustration because such examples are implicit in what
has already been said. One should not belch in public, dump
garbage in the street, run stop signs, or tell lies. One must not
kill another person or have sexual intercourse with one's sister
or brother.
Social norms cover almost every conceivable situation,
and they vary from standards where almost complete
conformity is demanded to those where there is great freedom
of choice. Norms also vary in the kinds of sanctions that are
attached to violation of the norms. Since norms derive from
values, and since complex societies have multiple and
conflicting value systems, it follows that norms frequently are
in conflict also.
Taking the illustration of American sex norms, two
proscriptive norms prohibit premarital intercourse and
extramarital intercourse. But many boys also have been taught
that sex is good and that they should seek to "score" with girls
whenever possible. Somewhat similarly, girls have been taught
that promiscuous intercourse before marriage is bad; but they
have also been taught that sex is acceptable within true love
relationships. Members of both sexes, then, find themselves
faced with conflicting demands for participation in sex and for
abstinence from it. They also discover that there are sanctions
associated with either course of action.

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 Normative conflict is also deeply involved in social
change. As statistical norms come to differ too blatantly from
existing prescriptive norms, new prescriptive norms give
sanction to formerly prohibited behavior and even extend it.
Recent changes in the sex norms of teenage and young adult
groups provide examples. The change is more apparent in
communal living groups where sometimes there is an explicit
ideology of sexual freedom and the assumption that sexual
activities will be shared with all members of the group. In less
dramatic fashion, the change is evident among couples who
simply begin to live together without the formality of a
marriage ceremony
Values
The term 'value' has a meaning in sociology that is both
similar to and yet distinct from the meaning assigned to it in
everyday speech. In sociological usage, values are group
conceptions of the relative desirability of things. Sometimes
'value' means 'price'. But the sociological concept of value is far
broader than here neither of the objects being compared can be
assigned a price.
What is the value, for illustration, of the right of every
human being to dignity in comparison to the need to improve
the technical aspects of education? This issue is directly
involved in the desegregation of the public schools and has
been debated bitterly. Some attempts have been made to
estimate the dollar costs of the old system of segregated schools
and, more recently, estimates have been made of the costs of
using both black and white children to end segregation. Most of
the social costs of the two systems, however, defy statement in
monetary terms and most people take their stand on the issue in
terms of deeply held convictions about what is important in
life.
The idea of deeply held convictions is more illustrative
of the sociological concept of value than is the concept of price.

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In addition, there are four other aspects of the sociological
concept of value. They are: (1) values exist at different levels of
generality or abstraction; (2) values tend to be hierarchically
arranged (3) values are explicit and implicit in varying degrees;
and (4) values often are in conflict with one another.
In sociology, you will hear the term "norm" quite often.
Norms are the specific cultural expectations for how to behave
in a given situation. They are the agreed-upon expectations and
rules by which the members of a culture behave. Norms vary
from culture to culture, so some things that are considered
norms in one culture may not be in another culture. For
example, in America it is a norm to maintain direct eye contact
when talking with others and it is often considered rude if you
do not look at the person you are speaking with. In Asian, on
the other hand, averting your eyes when conversing with others
is a sign of politeness and respect while direct eye contact is
considered rude.
Cultural Values; Norms and Sanctions
Many of the rules of our society we abide by
subconsciously wearing clothes, stopping at lights, etc. Why
do we "agree‖ to these rules?
Cultural values = shared assumptions about what is
good, right or important What is considered good, right or
important in one culture may be considered bad, wrong or
unimportant in another.
Cultural values may change over time. In a complex
society this may happen relatively quickly.
Med School changed to COPS: women in the
workforce, small cars instead of big ones.
Values of Americans?
1. Individual Endeavour - the most "respected" are often the
money-makers.
2. Education

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 3. Bigness - homes, businesses building, stadiums, planes, etc.
4. Spatial movement - cover long distances for movies, work, etc.
5. Time - time is money. Computers make things happen in less
time. “Get here On time!'
6. Technology - invention/advances are continuous
7. Physical comfort - Lazy-boy chair, work overtime to get more
money to make our lives more comfortable
8. Self-improvement-physical, educational (foreign languages,
correspondence courses).
Canadians' Values?
Make a list of some values you believe Canadians share.
Social Norms :
Group-shared rules of behaviour which in turn are
based on the shared values of a community¬: examples:
wearing clothes, paying bills, obeying traffic signals, remaining
silent in a library, standing for the anthem, brushing our teeth.
One who breaks the norms (does not follow the rules) is called
a deviant. Some people are expected to behave in certain ways.
This depends on their role in the community. Example: at the
scene of an accident the role of the doctor is different than the
role of the onlooker when injured people must be taken care of.
The centre of a football team is expected to do a certain job on
the field while the quarterback is expected to do another.
Suspension of the norms may occur under special
circumstances. Ex: Ambulances Fire engines rushing to an
accident
Kind of norms:
 Folkways: the etiquette and customs of a people that are not
of critical importance to the society. Ex: Playing a trumpet
late at night when others can hear it. Be courteous to older
people. Don’t park in the parking zone. For infractions of
some folkways you may be reprimanded or be considered
boorish, thoughtless or a nuisance but you would not be

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 considered evil or immoral. Spanking naughty children is a
folkway.
 Mores: rules of behaviorthat is very important since violation
would endanger the basic stability of a society. Ex: Do not kill,
steal, set fire to your neighbor’s house, cheat on exams (marks
tell other that you are better than you really are), do not lie.
One who violates the mores is considered immoral. Can be
stated negatively or positively: ex: don't kill = Let others live.
 Laws: the more complex a society becomes, the more its
folkways and mores are turned into laws.The difference
between laws and mores: laws are set up and enforced by the
state. Mores are setup, maintained and enforced by public
sentiment. Laws are thus formalized norms that specify the
rules and carry the threat of punishment. They are the most
clearly defined of the three kinds of social norms.
Why does every society have norms? The way people
keep order can be quite different in different parts of the world.
It is based on the values people hold dear.
What makes people in a society conform to the norms?
Internalization =the belief that a norm is good, useful or
appropriate. They obey and feel others should. Ex: we have
internalized what to do with a napkin. Did Genie?
 Sanctions = rewards or punishments that a society sets up to
enforce the norms. Done to protect society from chaos.
 Positive sanctions=rewards (promise, awards, bonuses)
 Negative sanctions = punishment (ridicule, fines,
imprisonment, beatings, spankings)physical sanctions =
bring physical pain or pleasure. Ex: Having it brings
pleasure, losing it brings pain. (A spanking also brings
pain.)
 Psychological sanctions = address the feelings and
emotions of a person. They can make one feel good or
bad. Positive psychological sanctions are found in
compliments ribbons, badges and awards.

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Norms→Every society has expectations about how its
members should and should not behave. A norm is a guideline
or an expectation for behavior. Each society makes up its own
rules for behavior and decides when those rules have been
violated and what to do about it. Norms change constantly.
How Norms Differ
Norms differ widely among societies, and they can even
differ from group to group within the same society.
Different settings: Wherever we go, expectations are placed
on our behavior. Even within the same society, these norms
change from setting to setting.
Example: The way we are expected to behave in church differs
from the way we are expected to behave at a party, which also
differs from the way we should behave in a classroom.
Different countries:Norms are place-specific, and what is
considered appropriate in one country may be considered
highly inappropriate in another.
Example: In some African countries, it‘s acceptable for
people in movie theaters to yell frequently and make loud
comments about the film. In the United States, people are
expected to sit quietly during a movie, and shouting would be
unacceptable.
Different time periods: Appropriate and inappropriate
behavior often changes dramatically from one generation to the
next. Norms can and do shift over time.
Example: In the United States in the 1950s, a woman almost
never asked a man out on a date, nor did she pay for the date.
While some traditional norms for dating prevail, most women
today feel comfortable asking men out on dates and paying for
some or even all of the expenses.
Norm Categories
Sociologists have separated norms into four categories:
folkways, mores, laws, and taboos.

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Folkways
A folkway is a norm for everyday behavior that people
follow for the sake of convenience or tradition. People practice
folkways simply because they have done things that way for a
long time. Violating a folkway does not usually have serious
consequences.
Example: Holding the door open for a person right
behind you is a folkway.
Mores:
A more (pronounced MORE-ay) is a norm based on
morality, or definitions of right and wrong. Since mores have
moral significance, people feel strongly about them, and
violating a more usually results in disapproval.
Example: Parents who believe in the more that only
married people should live together will disapprove of their son
living with his girlfriend. They may consider their son‘s action
a violation of the moral guidelines for behavior.
Laws : A law is a norm that is written down and enforced by an
official agency. Violating a law results in a specific
punishment.
Example: It is illegal in most countries to drive a car
while drunk, and a person violating this law may get cited for
driving under the influence (DUI), which may bring a fine, loss
of driver‘s license, or even jail time.

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Taboos
A taboo is a norm that society holds so strongly that
violating it results in extreme disgust. The violator is often
considered unfit to live in that society.
Example: In most countries, cannibalism and incest are
considered taboo. In some Muslim cultures, eating pork is
taboo because the pig is considered unclean.
Deviance
Where there are rules, there are rule breakers.
Sociologists call the violation of a norm deviance. The word
deviant has taken on the negative connotation of someone who
behaves in disgusting or immoral ways, but to sociologists,
deviant is anyone who doesn‘t follow a norm, in either a good
way or a bad way. See Chapter 6 for more about deviance.
Example: Most people don‘t graduate from college
with a 4.0 grade point average, so sociologists view someone
who does graduate with a 4.0 as deviant. Likewise, most
Americans get married at some point in their lives, so someone
who chooses not to marry is sociologically a deviant.
Although deviance can be good and even admirable,
few societies could tolerate the chaos that would result from
every person doing whatever he or she pleased.Social control
refers to the methods that societies devise to encourage people
to observe norms. The most common method for maintaining
social control is the use of sanctions, which are socially
constructed expressions of approval or disapproval. Sanctions
can be positive or negative, and the ways societies devise to
positively or negatively sanction behaviors are limited only by
the society‘s imagination.
Positive Sanctions
A positive sanction rewards someone for following a
norm and serves to encourage the continuance of a certain type
of behavior.

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 Example: A person who performs well at his or her job
and is given a salary raise or a promotion is receiving a positive
sanction. When parents reward a child with money for earning
good grades, they are positively sanctioning that child‘s
behavior.
Negative Sanctions
A negative sanction is a way of communicating that a
society, or some group in that society, does not approve of a
particular behavior. The optimal effect of a negative sanction is
to discourage the continuation of a certain type of behavior.
Example: Imprisoning a criminal for breaking the law,
cutting off a thief‘s hands for stealing, and taking away a
teenager‘s television privileges for breaking curfew are all
negative sanctions.
Positive or Negative?
A sanction is not always clearly positive or negative. A
child who throws a temper tantrum may find he has everyone‘s
attention, but while his parents might be telling him to stop, the
attention he receives for his behavior is actually a positive
sanction. It increases the likelihood that he‘ll do it again.
Attention can be a powerful positive sanction, while lack of
attention can be a strong negative
Sociology is the systematic study of human behavior in
groups. It examines how people interact in different social
structures such as teams, families, at work and in online
communities. It is a branch of, and is often synonymous with,
social science. It has a broad reach, encompassing all aspects of
human social interaction, allowing it to cover a wide range of
topics including religion, sexuality, gender, culture, education
and deviance.
Two fundamental concepts within sociology are those
of norms and values. They help to describe the framework of

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perceptions and ideas which influence an individual's or group's
behavior.
Norms are the behavioral expectation that a group will
follow. An action dictated by socially approved rules, a norm
will differ from group to group. The rough-housing between
members of a football team is unlikely to be acceptable in an
office environment.
Norms can be divided into descriptive and injunctive
varieties. A descriptive norm is an individual's perception of
the usual action in a particular set of circumstances, such as
joining the back of a queue. An injunctive norm is the
perception of what is acceptable or unacceptable within a
society, as determined by the values of a particular culture.
While in one culture haggling for prices is expected and
encouraged, in another it can be seen as offensive.
Values are the ideas which define what is good, right or
fair. They are held by individuals and groups and are a product
of the culture they find themselves within. A person's values
may be tied to their religious or political beliefs, influenced by
their family, heritage and upbringing, or by their social
environment. Specific to an individual, they differ from person
to person. An example of which could be the level of altruism
or selfishness they show to others.
A group's values are determined by the values of it's
members. They define what is important to the group and can
be demonstrated in those individuals a group chooses to praise
or condemn. The brave fire fighter, the compassionate hospice
nurse, the evil drug dealer or soulless murderer all show traits
and behaviours regarded by the society as inherently good or
evil.
Not all members of the society will share these values.
Some may find themselves forming a smaller group with others
who share their differing values, thus forming a subculture.
They can find a basis in any shared social characteristic, from

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taste in music to ethnicity and can involve particular styles of
dress or language which distinguish them from the primary
culture. For example, naturists do not share society's values in
regards to social nudity and are clearly differentiated by their
alternative choice of dress code.
Norms and values are closely linked, with norms
outlining acceptable behaviour in a situation while values
determine what should be considered good or bad.

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Cultural Norms
Norms are the agreed‐ upon expectations and rules by
which a culture guides the behavior of its members in any
given situation. Of course, norms vary widely across cultural
groups. Americans, for instance, maintain fairly direct eye
contact when conversing with others. Asians, on the other hand,
may avert their eyes as a sign of politeness and respect.
Sociologists speak of at least four types of norms:
folkways, mores, taboos, and laws. Folkways, sometimes
known as ―conventions‖ or ―customs,‖ are standards of
behavior that are socially approved but not morally significant.
For example, belching loudly after eating dinner at someone
else's home breaks an American folkway. Mores are norms of
morality. Breaking mores, like attending church in the nude,
will offend most people of a culture. Certain behaviors are
considered taboo, meaning a culture absolutely forbids them,
like incest in U.S. culture. Finally, laws are a formal body of
rules enacted by the state and backed by the power of the state.
Virtually all taboos, like child abuse, are enacted into law,
although not all mores are. For example, wearing a bikini to
church may be offensive, but it is not against the law.
Members of a culture must conform to its norms for the culture
to exist and function. Hence, members must want to conform
and obey rules. They first must internalize the social norms and
values that dictate what is ―normal‖ for the culture; then they
must socialize, or teach norms and values to, their children. If
internalization and socialization fail to produce conformity,
some form of ―social control‖ is eventually needed. Social
control may take the form of ostracism, fines, punishments, and
even imprisonment
Social Values and Norms
Values and norms are evaluative beliefs that synthesize
affective and cognitive elements to orient people to the world in
which they live. Their evaluative element makes them unlike

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existential beliefs, which focus primarily on matters of truth or
falsehood, correctness or incorrectness. Their cognitive element
makes them unlike motives that can derive from emotions or
psychological drives. Values and norms involve cognitive
beliefs of approval or disapproval. Although they tend to persist
through time and therefore faster continuity in society and
human personality, they also are susceptible to change (Moss
and Susman 1980; Alwin 1994).
The evaluative criteria represented in values and norms
influence the behavior of subject units at multiple levels (e.g.,
individuals, organizations, and societies) as well as judgments
about the behavior of others, which also can influence
behavior. For example, values and norms affect the evaluation
of individuals as suitable...
Norms and values
The purpose of this document is to research, from a
sociological perspective the norms, values and socialization
that is essential for family, society and culture. These key
attributes provide the individual with key skills, behaviours and
habits necessary to enable participation within their own
society - observing the rules and boundaries established within
their "Norms and Values" and modifying and changing
behaviours throughout their life time
"The Culture of Society is the way of life of its members; the
collection of ideas and of habits which the learn and transmit
from generation to generation"
Ralph Linton
Norms are the social and cultural guidelines by which
we live our lives, and both knowingly and unknowingly
conform and comply too during our life time. Out norms are
key attributes that define our behaviors‘ and can determine the
groups and individuals, social acceptance - Or non acceptance.
We learn how to behave through a complex combination of

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stimulus - Visual, Oral and Sensory. As we grow in our mental
maturity and awareness, the influence of family, environment
and culture, combine to define our Norms. These key
developmental elements combined, influence and determine,
personal and social interactive abilities - developing social
skills to recognise social boundaries, acceptable behaviors‘ and
responses. Therefore our Norms are intrinsic to our
development, our personal behavior, and social acceptance.
Key aspects of our "Norms" are:
Convention - Being a standard, non culturally specific element
within the Norms of convention.An example being that an
individual is expected to follow the "rules" which are an
established expectation of behaviors, within the context of
conventional social acts and responses.
An example of a culturally specific "Injunctive Norm"
is when a Cultural belief, such as polygamy is accepted as a
"Norm". This is defined as "Culturally Specific" as this practice
is not legally practised or recognised within the Western
Society. An exception could be the Mormons, who have Sects
that practice polygamy, based mainly in America. The main
Mormon Churchm the Latter Day Saints, no longer advocates
such practice, although there are certain Mormon
Fundamentalists Sects, whose religious fundamental belief
systems adhere to the original writings of Brigham Young.
Within many Muslim cultures, a husband can legally
take more than one wife. This practice is not recognised legally
with Western cultures.Sociological Values may be material or
nonmaterial, internal or external. Values and beliefs are
culturally specific - Given this the evaluation of their respective
value is specific to the individual or group.
An example might be, when an individual uses their Core value
system, they relate into either a cultural or belief system that is
specific to the influences within their social "Norms and Value"

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origin, group or society. Ultimately Social "Norms and Values"
cover a wide range of Sociological study.
Example of Cultural Values defined: Sociological
"Norms and Values" under stress from changes, can impact an
individual, group, society or cultural perspective. Change or
deviation when combined with poor or irrational judgment -
that sits outside the "Norms and Values" of either, a specific
Culture or Belief System, can have a mired level of impacts.
Therefore Norms and Values can and do change. What may be
acceptable as an individual would not necessarily be acceptable
at group level. Differentials on the range of what would be
acceptable within their own personal attitude and value system
is specific.
Change to an Individuals "Norm and Values" can be
challenged by the individual on the basis that the "Worth or
Value is not acceptable to them - because it fails to resonate
within them as acceptable as a Social or belief Value.
Alternatively if may present as an abstract Value and hold no
specific desirability. Values are abstract in nature and general.
A culture's values are its ideals about what is good, right, fair,
and just. Sociologists disagree, however, on how to
conceptualise values. There is a conflict theory that focuses on
how values differ between groups within a culture. The
National Centre for social research annual report for 2009
indicates that the British values are changing, the 2009 survey
consisted of more than 4,000 interviews with a representative,
random sample of people in Britain. It finding have shown that
change in society's values is generally slow and is impacted by
the media and other external stimuli.
Functional sociologist Talcott Parsons noted that
Americans share the common value of the "American work
ethic," Whilst this is most certainly a cultural social observation
which encourages hard work. Herbert Spencer one of the first
British Sociologists stated that "Society exists for the benefit of

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its members, not the members for the benefit of society."
Common values within western societies are based on
materialism, and money, although reliance on science and
technology, and the role of democracy and freedom are key
norms and values that exist - although these can change during
stressed and unexpected change. A culture may have
conflicting values; an example would be that value of
materialistic success may be in opposition to that of charitable
acts. Equally the value of social equality may be in opposition
to that of the value placed on the individual state. This can be
explained as a contraction in what people say, what they really
think, and what they do. Social pressure to conform can be a
deciding factor, as individuals own norms and values system
will be a sub conscious factor in that decision making.
So when does socialization begin; its starts as soon as
we are born and ultimately ends with our death. As soon as a
child is born, primary socialization begins. In every instance of
social interaction, a child can uses this period as a learning
experience - particularly in terms of cultural concepts of
identity, social roles, and norms of behaviour. The very young
child is totally reliant on its parents or carers. The baby will
initially respond to the external stimuli provided by parents or
carers. The main senses initially used by the child will be
responsive, such as when they are hungry, in discomfit, or want
human contact/ touch. They will respond to sound and vision -
this is important time for child/parent/careersocialization - this
represents a very emotional time, and the close bonds of love
and loyalty, which in theory will last a life time, are
established.
As chronological development of the child takes place,
by the age of two, a child will be in procession of a rudimentary
set of primary skills and behaviours. The child will be able to
copy its parents and siblings, and will be learning a wider set of
social skills - these will be both culturally specific and socially

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generic. The socialisation of the child within its own society
and culture will be established during an intense period of self
development and awareness; children acquire a sense of their
"self". This is an important developmental milestone that
occurs between 18/24 months.
Psychologist Jean Piaget defined the fact that children
progress through clear stages in their ability to think.The
Sensorimotor Stage, which is from birth to age two, is when the
developing child's reliance on "touch" for information about it
surrounding world is the most commonly used of the child's
developing skills. They will also experience the tactile warmth
from parent/carers and will also gain stimulation and
development from, copying, gestures and actions - taste is also
a key action of the developing child , and they will put most
objects to their mouth, toys, food and potentially anything they
can get their hands on. This period represents a time of great
discovery and learning socially, and is part of the set of primary
socialisation skills, which are prerequisite key developmental
milestones. The next stage as described by Piaget is the Pre-
Operational Stage. This stage generally starts between ages'
Two to Seven. Children now have the ability to think
symbolically, that being to relate in abstract or via simple
symbols. However they cannot perceive the world from another
person's perspective. This period also differs from later ones,
because it is a time when children learn through hands-on
manipulation of objects through copying, play and trial and
error. When a child reaches the Operational Stage, ages of 7-
12, Young children can now begin to think and reason
rationally and logically. At approximately age seven or eight
children enter "the age of reason," when they can manipulate
their own ideas, and apply learnt concepts. A child will now
possess the ability to independently interact and abide to a set
of social rules and boundaries. They achieve this via the
mediums of school, social, family, cultural settings. Children

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are able to rationalise, apply logic, use and interact with media,
and participate in debate verbally. Children are able to
recognise "self", which is an important milestone in self
development: as is the ability to recognise their place socially
and culturally. Finally a child moves to the Logical Stage at
ages 12 and on. The child and young adolescent, are capable of
complex abstract, logical thought. They are able to have
reasoned logical discussion, reach decisions based on fact, and
are able to initiate and formulate argument and debate. They
have a fully developed sense of self within their family, society
and culture.
The family plays a significant and defining role in the
primary socialisation of a child. The family acts as the primary
socialising agent for the first few years of life; however
Socialisation in the family varies greatly, and can be dependent
on Social, cultural, ideological and ethnical differences. Within
Britain, the structure of family has changed; there are more
working class single parent's families, who have no immediate
family support available to provide child care - this has resulted
in child care providers having a far greater role in childhood
socialisation over the last 20 years. One of the most important
primary functions of the family is to produce and reproduce
biologically, socially and culturally-however, producing
children is not the only function of the family. A child's
perspective is that the family is its core and primary socialising
agent; however the family perspective is one of responsibility,
to provide the growing child with the necessary skills and
knowledge in their socialisation and acceptance in their
common culture. From the parental/carer point of view the
family is the central nucleus that provides the care, learning,
development, social, cultural education: the goal of which is to
socialise and incorporate cultural ideologies and values in their
children. However there are many variants in societies and
cultures, which place more emphasis on the sexual division of

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labour, marriage, and the resulting relationship between family
groups and the economics.
An example being; that child labour is still practised
illegally and openingly in Asia, and parts of Africa. Many of
these countries have poor economies and the communities and
families require a child to work to contribute to the household
or village - this can be the difference between life and death.
Equally the value of a male child may be greater than that of a
female child, as in many cultures, males are preferred for
financial and social reasons. In time of hardship cultures such
as the Eskimo's would practise infanticide, if they were lacking
enough food or provisions, this was a decision made on the
basis that males contribute more, as they grow in to hunters and
support the community, where as a females contribution was
seen as less valuable to the community.
As in family, education is an important agent of
socialisation and the school environment is a formal agent of
socialisation. The purpose of education is to socialise children
in selected skills and knowledge, preparing them with so that
they can build on the skills and knowledge acquired, as they
grow and mature. The formal education system in England
starts at Playschool for ages 2-4 - this is now a socially
acceptable form of early socialisation. The child then
progresses to a more formalised, yet still free play, Reception
Class- these are mainly attached to a primary school, which the
child then transition into - thereby keeping the social group
intact. Primary education provides a child with a formalised
approach to learning. The child will learn new social rules and
boundaries; these will build on the norms and values that they
have been taught by their parents/carers. The family influence
is still very strong, as these age groups are heavily dependent
upon their family. The child continues its primary socialisation
via classroom activities, playing, and school social interaction,
within its peer group. The peer group becomes important, as it

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is based on a child's ability to interact, make friends and
socialise - the pressure to conform and be accepted, increases
with age. There are many reasons for this: such as social
standing IE: family wealth, material possession, ethnicity,
extrovert /introverts behaviors' and the pecking order of
favorability within the peer group.
Exclusion from a peer group is a highly stressful and
can be initiated by the school due to behavioral or attendance
issues - these issues would require remedial agreement and
action between the school, child and parent. Wider involvement
of care agencies, such as educational psychologists and family
welfare social workers, would be required if the family were
found to be unable to function or cope, due to a verity of social
or financial reasons.
An example being: a male child of 4 with undiagnosed
ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) who in
reception class could not settle, presenting as disruptive,
Impulsive, restlessness with a high level of hyperactivity - and
an inability to concentrate or focus for any period of time.
ADHD will often present as inattentiveness, and will prevent a
child from learning and will stunt their socialisation if not
addressed. This child was excluded from school at 5 years old.
At this point a wider most specialized group of social,
education workers - worked with the parents, and school, after
ADHD was diagnosed. Once the appropriate level of
medication (Ritalin- commonly used for ADHD) was
prescribed, an immediate change in behaviour was evident. A
plan of resocialisation and integration was applied, and an
educational statement was issued by the local educational
authority. This ensured the funding necessary for one to one
support, and additional help required to enable the child to be
educated and resocialised. One of the key learning aids for this
child reintegration was the use of media - the use of media in
the home and school, leisure environments have become an

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integrated part of contemporary life. Such is the impact of
Media, that it has become a dominant agent of socialisation.
Children are exposed from a very early age to media; examples
being a music DVD, Television or Computer games - which
can be interactive, educational and agility based. Multimedia is
used in a variety of ways within the family, and is seen a key
aspect of socialisation and development. Equally Multi Media
is used within the formal setting of school and is used regularly
as part of an Educational programme. There have been negative
aspects in attributed to media and the violence seen in games,
music, TV and film.
Secondary Socialisation is the wider process of
learning; a child learns what is expected of them, and what is
acceptable/appropriate behaviour, for them; within a small
group that is part of a larger society and culture. Secondary
socialisation represents a new developmental stage, and is
generally associated with teenagers and adults. The social
changes we experience are different to those of primary
socialisation. An example would be, starting a new a level of
education at college or university, relocating to a new
environment or a change in social status or society. Some
students may be transferring from a rural community to a more
urban environment, whilst others may be international students
being socialised to the British way of life. Others may be
mature students without any prior higher educational
experience. Moreover, any social structure can act as a
socialising agent. For example, the work environment
socialises the employees to conform to their way of business
and their culture. In most organisations employees have clear
responsibilities to respect authority, adhere to corporate
policies, and work hard in exchange for financial compensation
in the form of income and status promotions. Also, the wider
public venues we all go to; such as shopping centres, libraries,
hospitals, football matches, act as social interaction and educate

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us about new boundaries and constraints - thereby influencing
our behaviour. When considering the norms of behaviour, of
passengers on airplanes; those of a diner at a Michelin Star
restaurant; or the fans at a Rugby or Tennis game. We all
conform and adapt without conscious thought a large
percentage of our lives - this conditioning allows us to move in
a complex structure of Culture and Society. The secondary
socialisation process is crucial particularly in times of stress
and change. Transition from infancy to childhood to
adolescence and adulthood are all companied by a socialisation
process that is designed socially and culturally to give the
individual, all the skills necessary to grow and co-exist. If the
process of secondary socialisation fails, due to internal or
external factors, the individual may not be in possession of the
necessary social or cultural skills to cope logically and
rationally. This situation could lead to a change in their values
and social group. As an adult we experience the socialisation
process through changes in careers, family structure, personal
relationships, interests, such as politics. As our lives continue,
we move to retirement age, the changes in family and career are
now viewed differently; our priorities change, as situations
such as being, unwell, or alone take precedence. The extended
older family highlight the changing cultural values in the
socialisation process.
With the introduction of media, older generations, are
now learning and experiencing new experiences of information
and communication, which is a new form of socialisation for
them. This is a new agent of socialisation and is a powerful
teacher and influencing agent within the context of
socialisation, second only to Family. The media plays a
significant role in shaping the social attitudes and social
behaviours of our children and adolescents... Parents do exert
the most influence on children; however the mass media can be
considered secondary agents of socialisation.

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 For example, viewing of advertisements is related to
lower self-esteem and depression among children who come
from low-income families. It is likely that children feel bad
about themselves because they cannot have the products that
are advertised on television.
Media and Marketing work hand in hand to influence
our views - We are targeted as either specific social groups, age
groups and economic groups - specifically to sell Products and
Services. What we buy, where we buy, how we spend, and who
we vote for, is heavily influenced by a range of Multi - Media.
Such as The TV, internet, Radio, advertising in magazines.
Gender identity is one of the most important elements
of our sense of self. Some aspects of gender identity are rooted
in our biology, such as our physical strength. However most of
our gender identity is culturally defined. As we grow and age
we develop our self awareness, and how we should relate to
others, and the role we play in a larger society. The lessons
children learn and the processes through which cultural norms
are passed from one generation to the next is known as
socialisation. Gender socialisation shows that there are roles, or
cultural expectations and norms, which are associated with
each sexual classification - Sociologists make distinctions
between sex and gender. Whilst sex is based on biological
factors, gender is the based on cultural factors that
stereotypically construct different social roles for men and
women. Therefore Gender socialisation is the process through
which males and females learn gender specific appropriate
behaviour, dress, personality characteristics, and demeanour.
While gender socialisation is an ongoing and lifelong - the
majority of the sociological theories tend to focus on early
childhood socialisation, as the key factor in Gender
determination - Four such perspectives are the
psychoanalytical, cognitive development, social learning, and
social interaction perspectives.

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 In all societies there is a need for resocialisation of an
individual. Resocialisation is a sociological concept dealing
with the process of mentally and emotionally "re-training" an
individual so that they can exist in an environment other than
that which he or she is used to.
Examples of a need for Resocialisation such as the
release from prison, mental health institutions and the Army ;
New recruits into the army are encouraged to bond, so that they
can operate as a cohesive unit - and then the process is reversed
for those who may have become institutionalized by their
experiences in the socialization process. Without appropriate
support and counseling, mental health problems could present.
Equally if an individual have been institutionalized due to
lengthy incarceration because of illness or a criminal offence -
such as Murder: a staged plan of integration would be required,
to allow assimilation and resocialisation to take place in
society.

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 Chapter-5

Concept of Community
in Indian Social Science

While identity has become a major theme of research in

international anthropology and sociology, within Indian
sociology research on this issue has not progressed to the extent
required given the contemporary political and social situation.
This is due in part to lack of an adequate theoretical apparatus,
and in part to the confusion caused by the interpenetration of
sociological categories and concepts with those employed
beyond the academy. This paper attempts to work towards a
conceptual clarification of the issues pertaining to identity and
community in India by drawing on some of the recent debates
within social-cultural anthropology (especially American) that
have arisen out of studies of ethnicity, nationalism, and identity
politics in other contexts. Two major theoretical problems are
discussed: the relation between sociological and non-
sociological concepts of community and identity (such as those
employed by the media or in political discourses), and the
related issue of the politics of academic knowledge. The
insights gained from reviewing this literature are then used to
critically assess discussions of community and identity in the
Indian context.
Over the last decade or two, largely in response to the
world-wide emergence of identity politics of various kinds‘
ethnic conflicts, separatist movements, fundamentalism identity
has become a major theme of research and debate within
international anthropology and sociology. While this interest
has permeated Indian sociology as well, research along these

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lines here has not progressed to the extent required in the
context of contemporary politics. In part this is due to lack of a
theoretical apparatus within mainstream Indian sociology
adequate to handle issues of identity, and in part to the
immense confusion caused by the inter-penetration of
sociological categories and concepts with those employed by
leaders and activists of identitarian social movements.
Therefore, before discussing the issue of contemporary
discourses of identity and community, it is necessary to be very
clear about our concepts and theoretical frame of reference.
This paper is not about particular discourses of community or
identity in India but about the concepts themselves. The
objective is to raise some questions that should be kept in mind
in any discussion of community or identity formation, but not
to provide answers to those questions. To do this I draw on
some of the recent debates surrounding issues of identity,
ethnicity and nationalism within social-cultural anthropology
(especially in the USA). The intention is to work towards a
reframing of similar questions about community and identity in
India, not by importing theoretical positions wholesale but by
widening the context of the debate by comparison with
examples taken from outside of India. Two major theoretical
problems are discussed in this way: the relationship between
sociological concepts of community and identity on the one
hand, and the everyday conceptualizations employed in other
contexts (e.g., in popular understandings, political and state
discourses, and the media), on the other; and the related issue
of the politics of academic knowledge.
Communities in the Indian sociological tradition
In this section I outline two major conceptualizations of
‗community‘ -- a traditional one and a more recent one --
within Indian sociology (and other disciplines), which I
tentatively term the ‗substantivist‘ and the ‗constructivist‘. I
have formed these two broad categories somewhat artificially

154
out of range theoretical positions, and acknowledge that this
procedure necessarily entails over-simplification of the existing
literature. Also, I have not attempted a thorough review of the
literature but have referred to a small section of it for the sake
of illustration.
The substantives approach :
The concept of community has played a central
roie in the development of sociological discourses on Indian
society. In general, ‗community‘ has been associated with
‗traditional‘ modes of social organisation (jati, village, religious
sect) and opposed, implicitly or explicitly, to the individualism
of modem western society. In the Dumontian view, for one,
Indian forms of community are not just different institutionally
but are based on a fundamentally different system of values.
This kind of dichotomy is implicit in the anthropological
understanding of the ‗jajmani system‘, for example, as a non-
monetary system for the exchange of goods and services within
the relatively autonomous village. This system is counterpoised
to the western market economy which is supposedly based on
the activities of the rational self-seeking individual. For
Dumont, the jajmani system is not merely an economic system
but part of an entire cultural system, ‗oriented to the whole' the
expression in the economic realm of traditional community
(Fuller 1989). This conceptualisation clearly derives from one
of the foundational dichotomies of sociology, that which
opposes community (Gemeinschaft), composed of primordial
bonds of blood, territory, culture, and/or language, to modem
society (Gesellschaft), which is but a collectivity of atomised
individuals. Similar themes can be found in other segments of
the sociological literature, whether the focus is on caste,
kinship, the joint family, or peasant movements.
While much has been written about these kinds of
community/individual and east/west dichotomies within
sociology, there is another dichotomous pair embedded in this

155
discourse which may be even more fundamental: the opposition
between the realm of culture (= religion = hierarchy = caste)
and that of economy (= materiality = production/exchange =
class). The reification of the jajmani system, for example, in
which material relations of exchange are subsumed under caste/
community/ hierarchical structures (Fuller 1989), derives from
a definition of Indian society as inherently ‗cultural‘, i.e., not
rooted in the material world. This in turn comes, at least in part,
from colonial Indological traditions which emphasise the
spirituality and ‗other-worldliness‘ of Indian culture in explicit
contrast to the materialism, rationality and ‗this-worldliness‘ of
western capitalist society (a la Weber). Although several efforts
have been made to re-think such ‗orientalist‘ constructions, the
more basic culture/economy dichotomy onwhich they are based
which is not specific to the Indian context has not been
challenged.3 In fact, this dichotomy has been basic to much of
sociological and anthropological theory right from its inception,
probably stemming from the bifurcation of the social sciences
into economics versus the rest. It also underpins one of
sociology‘s central problematics, i.e., the relation between the
realm of ideology, consciousness, beliefs, values (i.e., ‗culture‘)
and that of ‗real‘ social or economic action and structures.
One of the forms in which this central opposition
between culture and economy appeared in the context of India
was in the ‗caste vs class‘ debate of the 1970s. Those who
argued that ‗caste‘ is the central organising principle of Indian
society did not dispute the presence of class, defined as some
kind of economic inequality, but argued that class ‗cuts across‘
caste divisions and therefore is less salient with regard to
identity formation and social mobilisation. Similarly, the class
theorists did not deny the existence of caste but simply
subsumed it under class hierarchy or dismissed it as an
epiphenomenon or as a relic of feudalism. For both, caste was
defined as some kind of socio-cultural unit or ideological

156
system based on the religious principle of hierarchy, and class
as an economic phenomenon (Upadhya 1997). Under the terms
of this debate, it was not possible to reverse the equation and
understand class as ‗cultural‘ or caste as ‗economic‘, except in
the most subsidiary way (e.g., the ‗economic‘ appears as
jajmani relations or as the ‗dominant caste‘ with reference to
land ownership).5 Thus, in the older sociological tradition,
caste (= traditional culture) got defined in opposition to class (=
economy).
There is another aspect of this conceptualisation of caste
which is relevant here. Within much of the sociological
literature, castes or jatis are defined not only externally in terms
of their position within a hierarchical structure but also
internally in terms of relations of kinship and marriage (and in
the case of dominant castes, in their relation to land or
territory). Jati as a kind of solidary unit made up of ‗primordial‘
kinship-based units came to be equated with community, which
in turn was identified as the locus of cultural tradition and
identity. Even in the realm of politics, collective action is
usually conceptualised in terms of caste or other ethnic
identities. In other words, politics also gets subsumed by caste
(as in Dumont), and implicitly this kind of politics (the
‗Indian‘) is juxtaposed to the ‗other‘ variety which is
supposedly based on individual interests or instrumental goals.
The outcome of this theoretical trajectory has been the
identification of ‗culturally‘- defined groups (ethnic, religious,
caste) as the authentic units of social organisation in India. The
communities which make up Indian society are understood in
terms of such categories, which are based on ‗real‘ social
relationships and rooted in Indian cultural and religious
traditions. Although the presumption that such communities
whether villages, jatis or kin groups are characterised internally
by harmony, democracy and solidarity has long ago been
discredited, the founding concept of community itself has not

157
been adequately contested. Instead, it has been given a new
lease on life through recent communitarian writings that posit
the existence of a ‗real‘ submerged community which has been
denied and repressed by a non-authentic and all powerful state,
itself a product of an imposed and alien ‗modernity‘. In this
discourse, the community is the repository of traditional culture
and humane values; the state and market relations threaten to
decimate the community, which is what gives identity, meaning
and anchorage to the individual. It is significant that in such
writings, ‗modernity‘ has also reappeared as the central trope
around which an understanding of contemporary India must be
constructed. The notion of community employed in such
communitarian (or semicommunitarian) discourses clearly has
its roots in the older sociological tradition, as I argue below.
The constructivist approach
Recent work by a number of historians and
anthropologists of Indian society takes a very different view by
demonstrating that most of the communities we see today
(religious groups, castes, tribes), and the identities on which
they are based , are not survivals from pre-colonial times but
are the creations of colonialism, politically constructed through
the discourses and policies of colonial administration. These
scholars (both historians and anthropologists) argue that caste
and other community identities do not have roots in the hoary
past but were in fact ‗invented‘ quite recently. This
‗constructivist‘ argument has brought the earlier substantives
theories of caste and community into serious question. Many of
these writers follow Foucault in identifying the (colonial) state
as the primary or sole source of such identities. Through its
disciplining and authorising practices, the argument goes, the
state in a sense created civil society in line with the demands of
governing and controlling large populations.
Perhaps the strongest statement of the ‗colonial
construction of identity‘ argument has been developed by

158
Dirks, who argues that the colonial regime robbed the caste
system of its former political base and reconstructed it as a
primarily religious or cultural institution and as the ‗authentic‘
basis of Indian society. Because of the operations of colonial
discourses and the politicisation of caste and other ‗community‘
categories, caste ―...became a specifically Indian colonial form
of civil society, the most critical site for the textualization of
social identity‖ (Dirks 1997:135). This colonial project, which
involved an ―official colonial sociology of knowledge‖
(1997:133), was reproduced in academic writings on India,
especially of the Dumontian variety (1997:123). He concludes
that the ―...forms of casteism and communalism that continue to
work against the imagined community of the nascent nation
state have been imagined as well‖ (1997: 135).
A number of scholars have developed this kind of
argument in various ways and in different contexts. Here I refer
only to a short piece by Dipesh Chakrabarty (1995), who draws
on the work of several others and therefore provides a
convenient summary of the constructivist position. He argues
that colonial rule introduced the modem bureaucratic state into
India, which employed the typical techniques of government,
surveillance and control that have been identified by Foucault.
India‘s people were measured, classified, and quantified
through the censuses and other such information-gathering
exercises in which invented community categories were central.
Because governing practices entailed the counting and
categorising of people in terms of collectivities, people began
to see and organise themselves in terms of these categories,
leading to the formation of new identities. As Sudipto Kaviraj
(1992) has articulated it, pre-colonial communities which had
‗fuzzy‘ boundaries were replaced with discrete categories
which could be enumerated exactly and which claimed
exclusive identification by their members. However,
Chakrabarty suggests that this movement from ‗fuzzy‘ to

159
enumerated communities did not entail a complete change of
consciousness for the people, who in their ‗everyday lives‘
continue to have multiple or overlapping ethnic identities.
Administrative categories produced the kinds of identities we
see at work today, which are modem, public and imbued with
political meaning, but these co-exist and interpenetrate with a
more ‗fuzzy‘ and private sense of community that exists,
apparently, at the sub-political level (1995:3377). Chakrabarty
argues that colonial governing practices reconstituted the
meaning of ‗community‘ or ‗ethnicity‘, that people learned to
participate in the public sphere through terms defined by the
state, and that as a result we have a kind of modem ethnic
consciousness in India in which the politics of cultural
difference is primary (1995:3378). I return to examine this
argument below. Invention of tradition: the anthropological
view
As in the constructivist trend in the Indian literature,
much of the recent work on ethnicity and nationalism within
anthropology and other disciplines has moved away from
substantivist conceptions of identity and community to
highlight the ways in which collective identities are
‗constructed‘ and politically mobilised. This ‗invention of
tradition‘ (following Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) literature
within anthropology has focused mainly on indigenous
movements in the Pacific and North America and on ethnic
conflicts in Africa and Europe. By deconstructing notions of
authenticity and tradition with regard to modem identities and
showing them to be products of specific historical and political
processes, these studies have led to a re-writing of the concept
of culture itself.
Much of this work aims to critique what Appadurai has
termed the ‗primordialist thesis‘ of ethnic violence, which
revolves around a concept of primordial group identities based
on claims to shared blood, soil, or language (1997:140).

160
Underlying this thesis is the idea that social collectivities
possess a ―...collective conscience whose historical roots are in
some distant past and are not easily changeable but are
potentially available to ignition by new historical and political
contingencies‖ (1997:141). The primordialist thesis, found in
much of the mainstream writing on ethnic strife in Africa,
Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, rests on a view of certain
populations as ‗infantile‘ and ‗non-modern‘. Appadurai refers
to this kind of popular understanding of all sub-national
movements as tribalist as the ‗Bosnia Fallacy‘ (1997:21).
Instead he argues that ethnicity should be understood as a
historically constituted form of social classification that is ―...
regularly misrecognized and naturalized as a prime mover in
social life‖ (1997:140). In this view, politically mobilised
ethnic communities can no longer be seen as ‗traditional‘
collectivities that have failed to be subsumed within the
state/civil society model, but instead appear as very modem
identities which have been formed in the course of
(post)modem history. According to Appadurai, the burgeoning
of ethnicities in recent years can be understood precisely as
identity politics directed against the state (rather than
originating in pre-state identities or loyalties). Such ethnic or
‗culturalist‘ movements involve the ―...conscious mobilization
of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or
transnational politics‖ (Appadurai 1997:15).
We now have a large number of studies which illustrate
the complexity of such processes of mobilisation or creation of
cultural difference. Hanson‘s (1989) work on the Maori of New
Zealand, for example, suggests that the Maori ‗traditions‘ that
have been valorised in the current cultural revival are not
indigenous but were constructed, drawing on colonial
knowledge systems, in the process of resistance to European
domination. Thomas (1992), writing on several Pacific
indigenous movements, similarly suggests that ‗cultural

161
objectification‘ is often a reactive process in which traditions
are constructed around particular reified practices, symbols or
identities against another kind of construction of identity. This
is particularly true in the context of colonialism:
Where colonialism has had a more sustained and
repressive impact, indigenous peoples may come to couch their
identity and resistance in terms made available by the
dominant: they celebrate and affirm what colonialist discourse
and practice subordinate and denigrate (1992:216)
According to this school of thought, it is no longer
possible to presume that a social identity or tradition linked to a
particular ‗community‘ has an autonomous or authentic
existence, and that it has been simply appropriated for political
ends by an identitarian movement. Rather, traditions and
identities are seen to be constructed in complex ways in an on-
going process of cultural production, which includes politically
motivated objectifications of culture, embodied in emblems of
identity which represent the distinctiveness of the community
or ethnic group. The process of objectification is a dialectical
process in which ―...dominant and dominated groups reify the
attributes of both others and themselves in a self-fashioning
process‖ (Thomas 1992:215). Even the realm of kinship, a
seemingly autonomous domain, does not escape from this
process, nor does religion, as is evident in the rise and near
triumph of the politics of communalism in India. Thus, to
understand the formation of any particular identitarian
movement or social collectivity, one must look at its cultural
specificities and the political and historical context in which it
has arisen, and at the ways in which particular symbols or
practices have been invoked and reworked by people in their
strategies aimed at producing active political collectivities.
Politics of academic knowledge
Although anthropologists have documented a number of
instances of identity construction through inventions of

162
tradition, not all have been conscious of the fact that
anthropological and other academic texts and discourses
themselves have been implicated in such processes. Yet it is
now clear that the social science disciplines, especially
anthropology (but history as well), have come to play a major
role in the formation and stabilisation of political identities and
authorizations. The boundary between cultural or social
analyses produced by academics and intellectuals, and the self-
objectification by spokespersons of various communities or
groups, is becoming increasingly porous (if indeed it was ever
clear-cut). This interpenetration is manifested in various ways.
As discussed above, the process of ‗invention‘ of identities and
traditions through the operations of colonial law or policies or
by the writings of early amateur historians and ethnographers
has been well-documented. A well-known example is the
utilisation of anthropological texts (as well as the more recent
active participation of anthropologists) in the construction of
Maori traditions in the context of the ‗Mana Maori‘ (Maori
Power) movement in New Zealand (Hanson 1989). However,
there has been somewhat less discussion of the continuing role
played by the social sciences and history, through the media
and instruments of the state, in the on-going reconstruction and
representation of identities.
At a more abstract level, as Spencer (1990) points out in
an insightful article on Sinhalese nationalism, the relationship
between academic and political discourses about identity has an
even deeper origin than this: both anthropology as a discipline
and nationalism as an ideology were bom almost
simultaneously from the same philosophical and political roots.
The anthropological concept of culture derives directly .from
the writings of Herder and other German romantics, and
anthropology shares some of its central concepts with the
discourses of nationalism as well as racism: culture, tradition,
community, and so on (Spencer 1990:290; cf. Friedman 1994,

163
Chap. 4). Anthropological explanations of nationalisms in
cultural terms are therefore the dilemma outlined by Spencer
has no real resolution, but he suggests that anthropologists
recognise that "... we are arguing within the same world‖ as
that of our subjects rather than from without (1990:290).
Anthropologists such as Appadurai have been troubled
by the persistent interpretation of ethnic conflict in the media as
‗tribalism‘, especially in the African context. Yet often the
source of such interpretations has been anthropology itself.
Besteman (1996a, 1996b) shows how the terrible carnage and
disintegration of the Somalian state in the early 1990s was
projected in the US media as the product of inter-clan warfare
or ‗tribalism‘, an understanding in which classical
anthropological theories about African social organisation were
deeply implicated. This evolutionist understanding of political
violence, which attributes inter-group conflict to pre- modern,
pre-state loyalties, precludes a more complex historical analysis
which would take into account multiple cleavages in Somali
society such as those of class and race, as well as the struggle
for control over the Somali state which has been the recipient
of massive amounts of US aid (including arms) since the 1980s.
Besteman‘s discussion illustrates how anthropological
‗knowledge‘, in this case the segmentary lineage system model,
can be appropriated by other knowledge-producing agencies in
the service of various ends. In this case, the media image of
Somali tribesmen caught up in ancient clan rivalries and
slaughtering each other with modem weapons served to justify
US military intervention as a ―late-20th-century civilizing
mission‖ (1996a: 123).
Critique of constructivism
The Somali case illustrates a more widespread process
in which the substantivist view of ethnicity, deriving from the
older Durkheimian anthropology, has become ‗common-sense‘
understanding through its dissemination in the media.

164
However, such conceptualisations of identity have also taken
root within identity-based politics, especially diose of
‗indigenous peoples‘. As a result, new work stemming from
the ‗invention of tradition‘ thesis has been opposed by ‗native‘
groups for calling into question the authenticity of their
‗constructed‘ cultural identity and traditions. While the
constructivist argument is on the surface directed against the
common and more pervasive tendency to reify communities
and identities, its broader political aim is to deconstruct
nationalist and sub-nationalist ideologies. It is for precisely this
reason that the ‗invention of tradition‘ thesis has come in for
heavy criticism recently, both from within and outside of
anthropology. This debate, much of which has taken place
within the context of Pacific cultures, is perhaps the most
interesting part of the literature and may be the most relevant to
the Indian context.
A well-known example of such confrontation between
the anthropologist‘s analysis and the self-definition of an
indigenous group is the attack launched by Hawaiian scholar
Haunani- Kay Trask against anthropologists Roger Keesing and
Jocelyn Linnekin. Trask criticised their ‗invented tradition‘
arguments about Pacific islands cultures and identitarian
movements (which suggested that local political leaders use
reified and essentialised identities for their own ends) as a case
of ―hegemony recognizing and reinforcing hegemony‖
(1991:160, quoted in Briggs 1996:437). Linnekin‘s work on the
invention of Hawaiian tradition w'as seen as an ―...attack on
Hawaiian cultural continuity that was staged precisely when
Native resistance was beginning to enjoy limited success on
issues of land rights and sovereignty‖ (Briggs 1996:437). White
anthropologists such as Keesing were accused of seeking ―...to
take away from us the power to define who and what we are,
and how we should behave politically and culturally‖ (Trask
1991:162, quoted in Briggs 1996:437). The irony in such

165
debates is that the anthropologist generally seeks to represent
his or her position as more radical than that of the local activist,
on the ground that he/she is helping to ‗de-colonise‘ the
discourses with which such groups construct their pasts. But the
other side sees constructivist theories simply as a re-assertion
of the representational authority of scholars vis-a-vis
indigenous groups:
Having assumed the right to create cultural forms and
then impose them on dominated communities, whites have now
asserted their authority to declare such constructions to be
‗factitious‘ ... and to withdraw them from circulation without
feeling the need to consult the communities that may have
adopted these ‗fictions‘ as part of their lived experience (Briggs
1996:438).
Briggs argues that the ‗invention of tradition‘ scholars,
mostly non-native, ―...claim discursive authority by virtue of
the way that they construct their own distanced position with
respect to tradition‖ (1996:460). This authority is buttressed by
the class, race and otherwise privileged positions of the
scholars with regard to hegemonic knowledge systems, which
render ―...null and void claims to knowledge based on direct
participation in processes of cultural transmission‖ (1996:461).
There is, in other words, not a free market in interpretations of
the past but a ―hierarchical structuring of representations of
tradition‖ (1996:461).
This kind of conflict stems from one of the
contemporary ‗predicaments of culture‘ (Clifford 1988) that the
more ‗culture‘ comes into everyday and political discourse
(‗multiculturalism‘, ‗Indian culture‘, ‗youth culture‘), the more
compromised the concept becomes for the discipline which had
made it its central trope. Friedman (1992) poses this problem
somewhat differently: The construction of identities requires
the production of in historical schcmes which valorise them: a
meaningful universe of events and narratives is created by

166
making history, or imprinting the present onto the past. But
identities are also ‗invented' by anthropologists through their
own academic practices as much as by those involved in
identity politics. The difference is that anthropology (and all
academic praxis) is situated within a modernist discourse,
which is based on objectivism the idea that there is a ‗real‘,
narrative history to which the scientific subject has access
(1992:849) while the discourses of actors are derived from
‗non-modernist‘ identity spaces. The notion of ‗invented
tradition‘ falls squarely within this objectivist model. But such
a position can only be held from a stance of authority, which by
now is increasingly unavailable to the anthropologist (Clifford
and Marcus 1990), or to the historian. The fact that both
academics and actors are engaged in ‗inventing‘ identities
means that there will be an ―...inevitable confrontation between
Western intellectual practices of truth-value history and the
practices of social groups or movements constructing
themselves by making history‖ (Friedman 1992:837). In this
conflict there can be no middle ground, because the strategy of
truth value on which modernist anthropological understandings
are based is as political a strategy as is the construction of
identities within political movements (1992:852). All
constructions of the past are socially motivated, including the
kind ‗objective‘ history produced by academics.
This debate raises a host of questions that cannot be
discussed in detail here but which are critical to keep in mind
while pursuing any academic research on identities or
communities. In particular, it highlights the fact that local
activists or political leaders, members of ‗communities‘, and
the scholars or journalists who are studying or writing about
them (not to mention representatives of the state whose job it is
to elicit information about them) construct their representations
of those communities from different locations within a
particular political- economic formation, and that such

167
representations are bound to conflict with one another. Some
anthropologists have tried to disown responsibility for how
their work is interpreted and used beyond the academy by
arguing that they have no control over what happens to what
they write. But as Briggs (1996) argues, the problem here is not
one of misrepresentation or misuse of academic scholarship; it
is an outcome of the structural relation between the subject-
positions of the scholar and his/her subjects and their
consequent conflicting claims to authoritative knowledge about
the communities in question. This is a problem that has no
solution as long as the scholar adheres to an ‗objective‘ or
value-neutral stance in which he/she refuses to take a political
position with regard to the nationalist other political objectives
of the particular ‗community‘ or movement: the scholar‘s
analysis of that community‘s culture as either invented or
authentic is bound to have political implications, one way or
the other.
While it may seem that such debates are purely
academic and have no resonance in the real world, in fact they
have burst into the political arena in a number of cases
precisely because questions of authenticity, tradition and
culture are crucial to contemporary social movements,
especially those of indigenous groups. Interpretations of
tradition and the past by anthropologists and others have been
widely deployed to fight cases in the defense of ‗native‘ rights,
such as for land rights. In this context, the interpretation of
what is ‗traditional‘ or ‗customary‘ can be pivotal. For
example, Trask (1991:166) suggests that the U.S. Navy used
Linnekin‘s (1983) work on the invention of Hawaiian tradition
to justify its bombing operations on Kaho‘olawe Island,
because the thesis allowed them to challenge native claims that
the island is of great cultural significance (Briggs 1996:462).
As a result of movements of indigenous peoples around the
world, especially in North and South America, Australia, and

168
the Pacific, anthropologists who study such groups are no
longer able to maintain an objectivist or modernist stance with
regard to cultural identity. In fact, increasingly they find
themselves pulled into the identity politics of ‗their‘
communities, and many are required to espouse a position of
‗anthropological advocacy‘ as a pre-condition of the
ethnographic relationship (Albert 1997:57-8). Activists and
organisations working in the defense of indigenous people‘s
rights look to the anthropologist for knowledge that will further
their own projects, which are usually based on a notion of
cultural continuity. This kind of legitimation of such groups as
political subjects in the international arena depends on their
self-objectification as ‗indigenous‘:
In this global ‗culturalist‘ political environment,
ethnographic discourse has become a strategic tool a symbolic
mirror (in identity reconstruction) and a means of legitimating
(by scholarly recognition) (Albert 1997:59).
In such situations, anthropologists have been forced to
shift from their cherished method of ‗participant-observation‘
to a stance of‗observant participation‘ (1997:60).
Clearly, once all traditions are thought of as ‗invented‘,
it will become very difficult for subaltern groups, whose
struggles now revolve largely around issues of identity and
community rights, to fight for rights to land or livelihood on
such grounds. Given the superior control over valued
knowledge (embodied in written texts) by political and
academic elites vis-à-vis oppressed groups, this devaluation of
their claim to authentic knowledge based on oral traditions and
other such sources is not likely to be in their interest. Thus,
contrary to the constructivists‘ argument that they contribute to
the loosening of western hegemonic control over ‗native‘
discourses, Briggs and other critics suggest that the invention
literature in fact ―...extends and legitimates scholarly control
over the discourses of Others‖ (1996:463). This perspective,

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whose aim is to critique nationalist or sub-nationalist ideologies
from a postmodern perspective, has its own politics, which
must be understood within the wider context of the politics of
subaltern groups.
The ‗invention of tradition‘ thesis has also been
criticised theoretically from within anthropology for its
emphasis on the cultural processes of ‗invention‘ without equal
attention to the social and political context in which such
inventions occur. As Rosenblatt (1997) puts it, while the past is
read in terms of the present, the present also has a real
historical connection with the past which places limits on how
the past gets constructed:
When people ‗invent‘ traditions as interested political
actors, they do so in ways that are meaningful to themselves
and others, out of existing practices, and with purposes that
were shaped by a particular historical experience (Rosenblatt
1997:291).
He argues that the concept of culture needs to be
retained (rather than jettisoned, as advocated by the post-
structuralists) in order to provide a link between the meaningful
practices of human agents and the structured political and
historical situations within which they carry out their projects
and struggles (1997:292). As Friedman puts it, the problem
with the ―...invention thesis is that it is self-contradictory. If all
culture is invention then there is nothing with which to compare
a particular cultural product, no authentic foundation‖
(1992:856, note 5).
Indian social science and everyday discourses of society
Returning now to the problem of conceptualizing the
concept of community in Indian sociology, what insights can
we draw from the debates discussed above? To begin with, they
suggest that researching and writing about communities and
identity formation involve complex theoretical, epistemological
and political questions that are not easily resolved. These issues

170
stem mainly from the multiple ways in which the discourses
and practices of the academy and those of the ‗real world‘
interpenetrate with and inform one another, especially with
regard to concepts of culture and tradition. These complex
interconnections are seen in the common historical origin and
shared vocabulary of these discourses; in the dissemination of
academic knowledge through the projects of the state into
society and people‘s movements; in the conflicts and alliances
that have arisen between anthropological and local
constructions of identity; and in the fact that community
identities are built on notions of cultural difference and social
continuity that are also the staple of anthropological and
sociological theories.
The constructivist argument about Indian society has
identified colonial discourses and practices as the source of
modern identities, but by and large it has not been extended up
to the present to examine the ways in which such identities
continue to be politically constructed, nor does it foreground
the relationship between academic knowledge and the
knowledge practices of the state or social movements. In many
ways, the relationship between social science and the state that
was established under colonialism has not changed after
independence. Although the population is no longer counted by
caste in the census, it is regularly enumerated according to
every other conceivable social criterion. The relation of these
modes of classification to political issues such as reservation or
to the calculations of political parties at election time is well
known. The ‗fixing‘ of community identities by the state
evokes a political response by people in which categories are
accepted, negotiated, or rejected. In this process new identities
may be bom while others die out or merge. Studies
demonstrating the historical fluidity or recent origin of
apparently deep-seated social identities such as ‗Sikh‘ or
‗Hindu‘ are numerous, but what is not often noted in these

171
studies is the influence of academic writing in political
processes of identity formation.
Yet it is clear that sociological understandings of caste,
religion, and kinship based social formations as the authentic
units of Indian society are interdigitated with public and
governmental discourses about the place of communities in
Indian society. For example, the project of ‗national
integration‘ has been built upon the delineation of various
tribes and castes in terms of certain cultural and/or physical
attributes, and their display in books, museums, exhibitions,
handicraft outlets, and on state ceremonial occasions. Annual
national rituals include the performance of the ‗folk‘ dances
and songs of‗tribal‘ and other ethnic groups. The idea that the
nation is made up of diverse and discrete communities (‗unity
in diversity‘), which has been tied into the ideological project
of Indian nationalism right from its inception, has been fully
naturalised. This has been accomplished in part through the
state-directed educational system, which disseminates
sociological' concepts such as caste, tribe, cultural diversity,
and sanskritisation in history and social studies lessons.
Adivasis and diverse regional groups get ethnicised in school
textbooks, their cultural specificity designated by type of dress,
food habits, and customs. As a result of such practices,
substantivist, culturalist and essentialised conceptualisations of
communities have become part of everyday understandings of
the social world, at least among the educated middle classes.
While the origins of such public conceptualisations of
community are complex, it is not difficult to trace their
circulation through official state documents and practices,
education and the media.
The wide acceptance of such ideas is demonstrated in
that fact that most incidents of inter-group violence are
portrayed in the media as ‗inter-community7 conflict of some
sort, rather than as stemming from some other kind of struggle

172
(e.g., over land rights). For example, the ongoing incidents of
violence perpetrated by the private armies of the landowning
class on poor peasant and landless labourer groups in Bihar are
usually represented as inter-caste conflict, as have been similar
incidents in Andhra Pradesh when members of ‗dominant
caste‘ landowning groups have attacked landless labourers
belonging to the scheduled castes. It is not difficult to see how
sociology and social anthropology are deeply implicated in all
such constructions, directly and indirectly.
Such ‗common-sense‘ concepts of community clearly
derive from the older ‗substantivist‘ approach within sociology,
which is equivalent to the ‗primordialist‘ thesis about ethnicity
against which much of the constructivist literature is directed.
While constructivism has made inroads within Indian
academia, it has not yet provoked much public debate or
opposition, as in the cases cited from the anthropological
literature above. However, the constructivist position in the
Indian case still needs to be examined closely to determine
whether it provides a more satisfactory theoretical approach to
these questions, especially since some of the writers in this
camp have been contributing to debates on communalism,
secularism and other such issues.
From substantivism to constructivism and back
As discussed above, Chakravarty (1995) puts forth the
constructivist position regarding the hardening of community
identities in India, but also argues that such modem identities
co-exist with another kind of private and ‗fuzzy‘ community.
He then brings his discussion to bear on the debate on
secularism by suggesting that as a result of colonial governing
practices, cultural difference became central to Indian politics.
This kind of cultural consciousness came into contradiction
with the official state ideology of secularism put into place by
Nehru, which ignored the ―... actual culture of political practice
in India where a religious idiom and imagination had always

173
been very strongly present‖ (1995:3378; emphasis added).
What we see here is the subterranean reproduction of the older
sociological conceptualisation of community in Chakravarty‘s
analysis, a concept that flies in the face of his professed
constructivist stance. He shifts easily from the Foucaultian
position that the ―...very structure of modem govemmentality
carries with it the seeds of ethnic bloodbath‖ to another, almost
contrary, argument about the ―...everyday religiousness of
Indian political culture‖ (1995:3378). Rather than following
through with his insight about the hardening of ethnic or
communal identities under colonialism as a result of political
practices in order to understand present-day communalism, his
desire to critique the Nehruvian ideology of secularism leads
him to revert to the idea that Indian communities are at bottom
religious, kinship-based, and rooted in cultural traditions in
other words, not political (and certainly not economic).
Another version of this argument is provided by Partha
Chatteijee, who in a recent paper (1998) has combined the
substantivist notion of ‗community‘ as based on particularistic
ties of kinship (whether ‗actual‘, extended or Active) with the
constructivist position. Even while arguing against the
‗primordialist‘ conception of community found in the writings
of Ashis Nandy and other communitarians, Chatteijee appears
to fall back into the same trap of understanding collective
action (e.g., against the state, as in the case of Calcutta
squatters described by him) in terms of the mobilisation of pre-
state or non-modem social relations. According to him,
community is opposed to capital (the culture/economy
dichotomy); community is also apparently opposed to state
(culture/politics; cf. Das 1995). ‗Fuzzy‘ or otherwise, the
conception of community remains a substantivist one: it is a
non-political (and non-economic) entity which, although it can
act politically, is formed through processes that cannot be
understood within the same frame of reference as can other

174
collectivities such as classes, political pressure groups, or social
movements. Even while arguing that ‗communities‘ today have
become ―...some of the most active agents of political practice‖
(1998:282), Chatteijee apparently does not envision the
construction of these communities themselves as a political
process. Thus, we see here a tendency for substantivist
understandings of community to get reproduced even within
apparently constructivist positions. While constructivism
should represent an advance over the earlier substantivist or
structuralist ideas about Indian communities, it appears that in
much of this literature community continues to be regarded as
the primary social and political category, or site of social
action, within civil society. Regardless of their ‗invention‘ by
colonialism, caste, religious or ethnic identities are credited
with a certain social reality and cohesiveness that is itself not
interrogated by these writers. In addition, a major problem is
that multiple identities or subject positions cannot easily be
encompassed within a theory which posits communities as
concrete moral and social entities, set off against the state.
There are other problems with the kind of constructivist
argument we see in the Indian literature, which can be
illustrated by returning to Dirks‘ (1997) thesis. Although Dirks
(1997:134) explicitly distances himself from Foucault and Said,
his theory suffers from the same faults that have often been
pointed out in the case of the latter two: the absence of a
concept ofagency on the part of the colonised, an over-
emphasis on knowledge systems and discourses of the state
with less attention to the ways in which such discourses get
played out in real social life, and lack of a concept of power
tied to actual human agents (Ahmad 1991). While pointing
correctly to the non-authentic nature of caste and communal
identities, this kind of argument, while professing to be
political, is in fact apolitical in that it fails locate ‗identities‘
within the politically determined subject positions of those who

175
profess those identities. While arguing, again correctly, against
the notion of caste as the centre-piece of Indian social structure,
Dirks in effect reproduces a culturalist understanding of politics
and the state. In this view, the state becomes an actor which,
engaged in a grand disciplinary project, produces new
identities, creates forms of knowledge, and reinforces and
totalises its power through its ordinary functions of counting,
registering, classifying, and so on.
Conclusion: more questions
For historical reasons, including the particular history of
sociological writing on Indian society, certain ideas about that
society and its component communities have become fixed
within a variety of discourses and have thereby come to form
the basis of diverse social movements, political ideologies, and
constructions of social phenomena. This is not to argue,
following Dirks, that colonialism simply ‗invented‘ caste which
then took on a life of its own, i.e., that the categories made the
people. Rather, it is to suggest that the concepts with which we
(as academics and as people) think and understand the world
have a history, as well as a present, which is closely bound up
with multiple political processes, past and present, such as
colonialism, nationalism, state-directed development, and
social movements. By becoming more aware of the history and
structure of these concepts we have at least a chance of moving
outside of them and formulating a more satisfactory
understanding of social and political processes. Till date, it
appears that there are few intellectuals who are attempting to do
this. Both communitarian and constructivist positions (in their
various combinations and permutations, such as in the work of
Veena Das, Ashis Nandy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha
Chatterjee) tend to valorise a given understanding of
community as an authentic social unit and political actor, and to
reproduce the older dichotomy in which community (= the
cultural = authentic identity) is set off against the state as well

176
as the market. Thus, in Indian social science and history writing
as well as in more public and popular understandings, the
‗community‘ continuesto belong to the realm of "culture‘, and
therefore has roots in the ancient past; it represents a genuine
social formation as well as a major source of identity, even if it
has been shown to have been ‗invented‘ at some point in the
past. Conversely, political and economic practices or
formations perceived as non-community (such as the state, the
market, classes) are less authentic (because non-cultural and
therefore non-Indian?), and therefore are to be bracketed
outside of the discourse of community.
It now appears that neither of two conceptualisations of
community discussed above the traditional substantivist one
nor the more recent constructivist one are adequate to grapple
with the complex problem of how to understand ethnicity,
community or identity politics. While each approach has its
own problems, they share a larger common one: both reflect the
view from the outside, or the objectivist stance, in which the
analyst presumes him/herself to be apart from the object
(subject) of discussion. In doing so the anthropologist or
historian also assumes that the terms and concepts through
which she writes form a separate universe of discourse, or
‗meta-narrative‘, which can be used to analyse the narratives of
the informants. This assumption ignores the diverse ways in
which the discourses of the academy are interconnected with
those of society at large, in politics and the state, as discussed
above. It also completely elides the issue of the politics of
academic knowledge which has been so sharply debated within
and with anthropology. In general, those who write about
Indian history and society, whether constructivists or not,
refuse to recognise the political import of their knowledge
products, perhaps because they have not yet been challenged by
people‘s movements. They also largely fail to acknowledge
their complicity with the various projects of the state. These are

177
major issues that need to be raised and debated within Indian
sociology if it is to reconstitute itself as a knowledge-producing
system which is both politically committed and capable of
yielding a better understanding of social and cultural processes
in contemporary India.

178
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