Journal article
ARE THERE LEVELS OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE?
Humboldt journal of social relations, Vol.22(2)
01 Jan 1996
Abstract
That there are multiple levels of social structure — from face-to-face interaction to the world system — is one of sociology's taken for granted assumptions. Durkheim, in fact, based his vision of the discipline on a theory of social levels. That Durkheimian legacy remains strong today, even among those closer to Marx and Weber than to Durkheim. This article demonstrates that sociology's unexamined assumption of different structural levels is much more problematic than it appears. In nature, clear levels can be demarcated because the elements of a lower level stand in relation to those of the next higher level as parts to whole. Social phenomena, however, cannot be very widely ordered this way. It is not the case, for example, that individual actors form the parts of hierarchies or institutions, which in turn form the parts of collective agencies, which in turn form the parts of classes or the world system. We might think to establish social levels according to other criteria: ontological priority; causal priority; encompassment; or locality. The problem is that none of these other criteria fares any better than the part/whole distinction in exhaustively ordering social structures. Compounding the difficulties, properties of face-to-face interaction continue to resurface at whatever level of structure we choose to examine — including the world system. In the end, each social form may have to be located on multiple, entangled levels of social structure across different dimensions.
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Details
- Title
- ARE THERE LEVELS OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE?
- Creators
- Douglas V. Porpora
- Publication Details
- Humboldt journal of social relations, Vol.22(2)
- Publisher
- Humboldt State University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Communication
- Identifiers
- 991021863610104721