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| The
social, interaction, 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. |
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| It includes institutions such as
marriage or friendship, roles such as mother or police officer, status
or class, and other patterns of human behaviour. See Community. |
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| Whenever a pattern is identified,
and recognized by those in it, it can be called a social institution. |
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| Following
Weber,
we say it must have meaning to those in it. |
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| At the micro level, the institutional
dimension is composed of recognizable patterns of interaction within small
groups. |
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| Interaction means action or behaviour
in which we engage while being conscious of other people. |
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| Social stratification, and thus social
class is an institution or set of social institutions. See Inequality. |
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| Kinship arrangements
are institutional, and belong to this dimension. |
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| We can speculate that the origin
of the family, unique among primates to humans, goes way back to the origin
of culture, and to the incest
taboo. |
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| We must be careful, however, to note
that the family, as we know it, is not universal to all cultures, although
its kinship elements, marriage, the regulation of sex, birth, and the tracing
of descent, are. |
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| Bureaucracies, and
other formal organisations, or non kin organisations, are institutions. |
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| A century later Bartle identified
sixteen
elements that could be used to measure strength of, not only bureaucracies
but, all formal organizations, families and communities. |
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| As with other dimensions, we can
gain a better insight into the social organisation of our current society
by looking at some of the ways it was built up over the millennia. |
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| Social change tends to be cumulative,
and many elements of today’s social organisation includes residuals from
much earlier phases of our development. |
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| In the earliest, and even today in
the simplest gathering and hunting, communities, almost all social organisation
is based on kinship. |
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| We see this as the arrangements we
make involving (1) birth, and its extension, descent, (2) marriage and
related regulations and control of sex, and its extensions, affines, and
(3) pseudo kin arrangements, such as adoption. |
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| We say “kinship” instead of the
“family” because the family is not universal, derives from the Latin
word for domestic slaves, and there are many ways to construct social organisation
out of affinity, descent and adoption. |
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| As societies become more complex,
up to a threshold, kinship can become increasingly complex to satisfy increasing
needs. |
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| The invention of agriculture was
the most revolutionary change that our society experienced. |
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| It produced an agricultural surplus
which allowed some members of society to do other things than obtain their
food. |
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| This gave rise to the
earliest division of labour that led to cities
and then states. |
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| The simplest division of labour was
that of aristocracy (headed by a monarch), serfs (food producers), traders
and artisans, scribes (record keepers) and enforcers (military and police). |
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| This was the origin
of the first non kin social institutions. |
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| Recruitment to the recorders and
enforcers was through other than birth, and it was soon observed that it
was best based on merit (skills and motivation). |
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| Durkheim,
one of the “Fathers of Sociology” asked about the “glue” which
holds communities and societies together. |
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| He suggested that simple, homogeneous
societies (as with our gathering and hunting ancestors) were held together
by “sameness.” |
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| The similarity of language,
values, social organisation, all contributed to a felling of unity. |
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| He called this “mechanical
solidarity.” |
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| In contrast, for modern complex societies
as we have today, it is differences which contribute to holding people
together. |
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| Division of labour, so long as it
contributed to the functioning of the whole, resulted in inter dependency. |
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| This he called “organic solidarity"
after the word “organ” as the specialized cells of a living animal,
whose organs each contributed to the whole animal. See Durkheim. |
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| Tönnies introduced the words gemeinschaft
(community) and gesellschaft (society) from the German language. |
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| In strict translation, they mean
only community and society, but now in sociology, in any language, they
are used almost like adjectives, referring to the degree of warm, fuzzy,
face to face groups where everyone knows each other (gemeinschaft)
versus cold, formal, structured groups, where people have different roles,
and know each other by their roles, rather than as whole persons (gesellschaft).
See Characteristics
of Communities. |
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| In the discussion of the Political
Dimension, political parties and parliament were seen themselves not
to belong to that dimension. |
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| They belong here in the Institutional
Dimension, because they are institutions. Of course, all institutions
have a dimension of power in them. |
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| They, too, belong in this Institutional
Dimension because they are institutions. All institutions also have
a world view dimension to them. |
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