Assertion (A): Lukes's three-dimensional view of power goes beyond decision-making and agenda-setting. Reason (R): It holds that power can shape people's perceptions and preferences so that they do not recognise their real interests. Choose the correct option.

Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A

Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A

McKim Marriott's description of South Asian persons as 'dividuals' means that persons are understood as:

Composites of substances exchanged through transactions such as food and marriage

Occupants of achieved statuses only

Members of a class defined by the means of production

Bounded, autonomous individuals

Which of the following is NOT correctly matched?

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft — R.M. MacIver

The Power Elite — C. Wright Mills

Techniques of the Body — Marcel Mauss

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft — R.M. MacIver

Sociological Concepts: Structure, Culture, Network, Status, Identity, Community, Diaspora, Norms, Personhood and Power

Unit 3, Basic Concepts and Institutions, opens with a block of ten Sociological Concepts: social structure; culture; network; status and role; identity; community; diaspora; values, norms and rules; personhood, habitus and agency; and bureaucracy, power and authority. These are the working vocabulary of the whole paper, and the questions on them usually turn on who defined a term and how. This chapter takes them in four groups — structure and culture, relations and positions, belonging, and the self and power — giving each concept its classic definition and author.

1. Social structure and culture

Social structure refers to the relatively enduring pattern of relations among the parts of a society. Three definitions recur. For Radcliffe-Brown it is the network of actually existing social relations between persons. For S.F. Nadel (The Theory of Social Structure, 1957) it is the pattern of relations between roles, abstracted from the persons who fill them. For Lévi-Strauss it is not empirical at all but a model built by the analyst. In a looser sense sociologists speak of the class structure, the caste structure or the kinship structure as the arrangement of positions that shapes life chances.

Culture, in E.B. Tylor's classic definition in Primitive Culture (1871), 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'. Culture is learned, shared, symbolic and transmitted, as distinct from biologically inherited. Sociologists distinguish material culture (tools, buildings, technology) from non-material culture (values, beliefs, norms). W.F. Ogburn (Social Change, 1922) coined cultural lag for the delay with which non-material culture adjusts to changes in material culture. Other terms: subculture (a group's distinctive variant within a wider culture), counterculture (one that rejects the dominant culture's values), ethnocentrism (judging other cultures by one's own; the term is W.G. Sumner's) and cultural relativism (understanding a culture on its own terms, the principle Franz Boas established in anthropology).

2. Network, status and role

The concept of social network entered sociology through J.A. Barnes's 1954 study of a Norwegian fishing parish, Bremnes, where he found that ties of kinship, friendship and acquaintance cut across formal groups. Elizabeth Bott, in Family and Social Network (1957), showed that London couples embedded in close-knit networks (where one's friends know each other) kept more segregated conjugal roles than couples with loose-knit networks. Mark Granovetter's 'The Strength of Weak Ties' (1973) showed that acquaintances, who connect us to different circles, carry more new information — about jobs, for instance — than close friends. Network analysis measures density, centrality and bridging positions.

Term	Meaning and source
Status	A position in a social system with attached rights and duties. Ralph Linton (The Study of Man, 1936) distinguished ascribed status (assigned at birth — caste, sex) from achieved status (acquired through effort — profession).
Role	For Linton, the dynamic aspect of a status — the behaviour expected of its occupant. One occupies a status and performs a role.
Master status	A status that dominates others in shaping identity and treatment — a term associated with Everett Hughes.
Role-set, role conflict, role strain	Merton's role-set is the complement of role relationships attached to one status; role conflict arises between the roles of different statuses (a working mother), role strain within one role's demands (William Goode, 1960).

3. Identity, community and diaspora; values, norms and rules

Identity is a person's or group's sense of who they are, formed in relation to others. Interactionists (Mead, Goffman) treat it as produced in interaction; Erik Erikson's psychology made the 'identity crisis' of adolescence familiar; Stuart Hall stressed that cultural identities are not fixed essences but positions that are always 'becoming'; Castells classified collective identities as legitimising, resistance and project. Community, in Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), is Gemeinschaft — relations based on kinship, locality and sentiment, valued for themselves — opposed to Gesellschaft, association based on contract, calculation and self-interest. R.M. MacIver distinguished a community (an area of common life) from an association (an organised group pursuing specific interests). Robert Redfield's The Little Community (1955) studied the small, homogeneous, self-sufficient community.

Diaspora originally named the Jewish dispersal; it now denotes any population living away from a real or imagined homeland that maintains a collective memory of it, a sense of distinctness in the host society and continuing ties across borders. William Safran (1991) listed such criteria, and Robin Cohen, in Global Diasporas (1997), distinguished victim (Jewish, African, Armenian), labour (Indian indentured), imperial (British), trade (Chinese, Lebanese) and cultural (Caribbean) diasporas. The Indian diaspora spans the nineteenth-century indentured labour ('girmitiya') migration to Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Guyana, twentieth-century professional migration to the West, and the Gulf labour migration.

Term	Meaning
Values	Shared conceptions of what is good, desirable and worth pursuing (equality, purity, success)
Norms	Specific rules of conduct that put values into practice, backed by sanctions
Folkways and mores (W.G. Sumner, Folkways, 1906)	Folkways are everyday customs whose breach brings mild disapproval; mores are norms held essential to group welfare, whose breach brings strong condemnation
Rules and laws	Formally stated norms, laws being those enacted and enforced by the state

4. Personhood, habitus and agency; bureaucracy, power and authority

Personhood asks what a society counts as a person. Marcel Mauss, in 'A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person' (1938), traced how the idea of the person moved from a ritual mask or role (persona) to the modern bounded, self-conscious individual. McKim Marriott argued that South Asian persons are better understood as 'dividuals', made up of substances exchanged through food, touch and marriage, rather than as indivisible individuals. Habitus was used by Mauss in 'Techniques of the Body' (1934) for socially learned bodily ways of walking, swimming or sitting, before Bourdieu made it a theory of durable dispositions. Agency is the capacity to act otherwise — to make a difference — and the structure-agency problem runs from Weber and Durkheim to Giddens's structuration and Bourdieu's practice.

Power, for Weber, is the probability that one actor will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance; authority is power accepted as legitimate, and bureaucracy is the administrative apparatus of legal-rational authority. Steven Lukes (Power: A Radical View, 1974) identified three dimensions: the one-dimensional view of power as prevailing in observable decisions (Robert Dahl), the two-dimensional view that adds agenda-setting and non-decisions (Bachrach and Baratz), and his own three-dimensional view in which power shapes people's very preferences so that conflict never surfaces. C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) described an interlocking elite of corporate, military and political leaders, against pluralists who saw power dispersed among competing groups.

🧠 Who first used 'habitus' in modern social science?

Mauss, in 'Techniques of the Body' (1934), and Norbert Elias also used it, before Bourdieu gave it its theoretical centrality. If a question asks who gave habitus a full theory of practice, the answer is Bourdieu; if it asks who described culturally learned bodily techniques, it is Mauss.

Key takeaways

Social structure is observed relations (Radcliffe-Brown), a pattern of roles (Nadel) or an analyst's model (Lévi-Strauss); culture is Tylor's 'complex whole', and Ogburn's cultural lag describes non-material culture trailing material change.
Network analysis runs from Barnes and Bott to Granovetter's strength of weak ties; Linton defined ascribed and achieved status and role as the dynamic aspect of status.
Tönnies opposed Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft; MacIver separated community from association; Cohen classified diasporas as victim, labour, imperial, trade and cultural.
Sumner's folkways and mores differ in the strength of sanction; values are ideals, norms are the rules that enact them.
Mauss traced the notion of the person and first used habitus for bodily techniques; Weber defined power and authority, and Lukes added three dimensions of power.

Practice questions (10)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

'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.' This definition of culture was given by:
1. Clifford Geertz
2. Bronislaw Malinowski
3. E.B. Tylor
4. W.F. Ogburn
Show answer
Answer: C — E.B. Tylor
The definition opens Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871). Geertz's definition speaks of webs of significance; Ogburn contributed cultural lag.
Elizabeth Bott's Family and Social Network found that couples embedded in close-knit networks tended to have:
1. Segregated conjugal roles
2. Higher divorce rates
3. No kinship ties
4. Joint conjugal roles
Show answer
Answer: A — Segregated conjugal roles
When a husband's and wife's friends all know one another, each spouse draws support from the network and roles stay segregated; loose-knit networks pushed couples to rely on each other, producing joint roles.
Who distinguished between ascribed and achieved status?
1. Max Weber
2. Robert K. Merton
3. Ralph Linton
4. Talcott Parsons
Show answer
Answer: C — Ralph Linton
Linton's The Study of Man (1936) introduced ascribed and achieved status and defined role as the dynamic aspect of status. Parsons's related but distinct pair is the pattern variable ascription-achievement.
A job-seeker learns of a vacancy from a distant acquaintance rather than from close friends. Which concept explains why this is common?
1. Mechanical solidarity
2. The strength of weak ties
3. Role strain
4. Cultural lag
Show answer
Answer: B — The strength of weak ties
Granovetter (1973) showed that weak ties bridge different social circles and so carry non-redundant information, whereas close friends tend to know the same things we know.
Which of the following are among Robin Cohen's types of diaspora? Select all that apply.
1. Trade diaspora
2. Labour diaspora
3. Dominant diaspora
4. Victim diaspora
Show answer
Answer: A — Trade diaspora; B — Labour diaspora; D — Victim diaspora
Cohen's Global Diasporas names victim, labour, imperial, trade and cultural diasporas. 'Dominant diaspora' is not one of his types.
In Sumner's terms, the norm against incest, whose violation provokes intense moral outrage, is an example of:
1. A mos (plural mores)
2. A folkway
3. A fashion
4. A role-set
Show answer
Answer: A — A mos (plural mores)
Mores are norms regarded as vital to the group's welfare and carry strong sanctions; folkways are routine customs whose breach is only mildly disapproved.
Assertion (A): Lukes's three-dimensional view of power goes beyond decision-making and agenda-setting. Reason (R): It holds that power can shape people's perceptions and preferences so that they do not recognise their real interests. Choose the correct option.
1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
3. A is true, but R is false
4. A is false, but R is true
Show answer
Answer: A — Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
The third dimension is precisely the shaping of wants, which makes observable conflict (first dimension) and agenda exclusion (second dimension) unnecessary; R states why the view goes further.
Which German word did Tönnies use for community based on kinship, locality and sentiment, as opposed to association based on contract?
Numerical answer — type the value.
Show answer
Answer: Gemeinschaft
Gemeinschaft (community) rests on natural will and relations valued for themselves; Gesellschaft (society or association) rests on rational will and calculated, contractual relations.
McKim Marriott's description of South Asian persons as 'dividuals' means that persons are understood as:
1. Composites of substances exchanged through transactions such as food and marriage
2. Occupants of achieved statuses only
3. Members of a class defined by the means of production
4. Bounded, autonomous individuals
Show answer
Answer: A — Composites of substances exchanged through transactions such as food and marriage
Marriott's transactional analysis held that South Asians see persons as divisible and permeable, constituted by the coded substances they give and receive — which is why rules about food and contact carry such weight.
Which of the following is NOT correctly matched?
1. The Power Elite — C. Wright Mills
2. Cultural lag — W.F. Ogburn
3. Techniques of the Body — Marcel Mauss
4. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft — R.M. MacIver
Show answer
Answer: D — Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft — R.M. MacIver
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) is Ferdinand Tönnies's. MacIver's related contribution is the distinction between community and association.