Anthony Giddens wrote:
Preface
…. We have to be very careful indeed with the concept of ‘social system' and the associated notion of 'society'. They sound innocent terms, and they are probably indispensable if used with appropriate measures of caution. 'Society' has a useful double meaning, which I have relied upon — signifying a bounded system, and social association in general. An emphasis upon regionalization helps to remind us that the degree of ‘systemness' in social systems is very variable and that 'societies' rarely have easily specifiable boundaries — until, at least, we enter the modern world of nation-states. Functionalism and naturalism tend to encourage unthinking acceptance of societies as clearly delimited entities, and social systems as internally highly integrated unities. For such perspectives, even where direct organic metaphors are rejected, tend to be closely allied to biological concepts; and these have usually been arrived at with reference to entities clearly set off from the world around them, having an evident internal unity. But 'societies' are very often not like this at all. To help take account of that, I introduce the terms ‘intersocietal systems' and 'time-space edges', referring to different aspects of regionalization which cut across social systems recognizably distinct as societies. I also use these notions extensively in assessing interpretations of social change …
Chapter 4
Structure, System, Social Reproduction
Societies, Social Systems
It is easy to see that in ordinary usage the term 'society' has two main senses (among others, such as 'society' in the sense of ‘high society'). One is the generalized connotation of 'social association’ or interaction; the other is the sense in which 'a society' is a unity, having boundaries which mark it off from other, surrounding societies. The ambiguity of the term in respect of these two senses is less unfortunate than it looks. For societal totalities by no means always have clearly demarcated boundaries, although they are typically associated with definite forms of locale. The tendency to suppose that societies, as social wholes, are easily definable units of study has been influenced by several noxious presumptions in the social sciences. One is the tendency to understand 'social systems' in close conceptual relation to biological systems, the bodies of biological organisms. There are few today who, as Dürkheim, Spencer and many others in nineteenth-century social thought were prone to do, use direct organic analogies in describing social systems. But implicit parallels remain very common, even among those, for instance, who talk of societies as 'open systems'. A second factor is the prevalence of what I call 'endogenous' or 'unfolding models' in the social sciences. Such models presume that the main structural features of a society, governing both stability and change, are internal to that society. It is fairly evident why this is frequently connected to the first type of view: societies are imagined to have properties analogous to those which control the form and development of an organism. Finally one should mention the widespread proclivity to generalize to all forms of societal totality features that are in fact specific to modern societies as nation-states. Nation-states have clearly and precisely delimited territorial boundaries, but other types of society, by far the more numerous in history, do not.
Resisting these presumptions can be facilitated if we recognize that societal totalities are found only within the context of intersocietal systems distributed along time-space edges. All societies both are social systems and at the same time are constituted by the intersection of multiple social systems. Such multiple systems may be wholly 'internal' to societies, or they may cross-cut the 'inside' and the 'outside', forming a diversity of possible modes of connection between societal totalities and intersocietal systems. Intersocietal systems are not cut of whole cloth and characteristically involve forms of relation between societies of differing types. All these can be studied as systems of domination in terms of relations of autonomy and dependence which pertain between them. 'Time-space edges' refer to interconnections, and differentials of power, found between different societal types comprising intersocietal systems.
'Societies' then, in sum, are social systems which 'stand out' in bas-relief from a background of a range of other systemic relationships in which they are embedded.
They stand out because, definite structural principles serve to produce a specifiable overall ‘clustering of institutions’ across time and space. Such a clustering is the first and most basic identifying feature of a society, but others also have to be noted. These include:
An association between the social system and a specific locale or territory. The locales occupied by societies are not necessarily fixed areas. Nomadic societies roam across time-space paths of varying types.
The existence of normative elements that involve laying claim to the legitimate occupation of the locale. The modes and styles of such claims to legitimacy, of course, may be of many kinds and may be contested to greater or lesser degree.
The prevalence, among the members of the society, of feelings that they have some sort of common identity, however that might be expressed or revealed. Such feelings may be manifest in both practical and discursive consciousness and do not presume a 'value consensus'. Individuals may be aware of belonging to a definite collectivity without agreeing that this is necessarily right and proper.
It is important here to re-emphasize that the term 'social system’ should not be understood to designate only clusters of social relations whose boundaries are clearly set off from others. The degree of 'systemness' is very variable. 'Social system' has tended to be a favoured term of functionalists, who have rarely abandoned organic analogies altogether, and of 'system theorists’, who have had in mind either physical systems or, once more, some kinds of biological formation. I take it to be one of the main features of structuration theory that the extension and 'closure' of societies across space and time is regarded as problematic.
The tendency to take nation-states as 'typical' forms of society, by reference to which others can be assessed, is so strong in the literature of social theory that it is worth developing the point. The three criteria mentioned above apply differentially in varying societal contexts.
Consider, for instance, traditional China at a relatively late date, about AD 1700. It is common amongst Sinologists to speak of 'Chinese society' at this period. Under this label scholars discuss such phenomena as state institutions, the gentry, economic units, family patterns and so on, regarding these as convergent with a specifiable overall social system, ‘China'. But 'China' as designated in this way refers to only a small segment of the territory that a government official would have regarded as the land of the Chinese. According to his perspective, only one society existed on earth, centred upon ‘China’ as the capital of cultural and political life but stretching away to include a diversity of barbarians on the outer edges. Although the latter acted as though they were social groupings distinct from the Chinese, they were regarded in the official view as belonging to China. The Chinese of 1700 included Tibet, Burma and Korea within their concept of 'China', as these were in certain ways connected with the centre. There is some basis for the more restricted notion of 'China' espoused by Western historians and social scientists. But even acceptance that there was a distinct 'Chinese society' in 1700, separate from Tibet, etc., usually means including under that designation several million ethnically distinct groups in South China. These tribes regarded themselves as independent and as having their own organs of government. They were, however, continuously molested by representatives of Chinese officialdom, who treated them as belonging to the central state.
Modern Western nation-states are highly internally co-ordinated administrative unities compared with larger-scale agrarian societies. Let us shift the example somewhat further back, to fifth-century China, and ask what social ties might exist between a Chinese peasant farmer in Ho-nan province and the T'o-pa ruling class. From the point of view of the members of the dominant class, the farmer was at the lowest level of the hierarchical order. But the social relations of the farmer were quite discrete from the social world of the T'o-pa. Most of the farmer's contacts would be with others in the nuclear and extended family: many villages were composed only of lineage members. The fields were usually so arranged that members of lineage groups rarely met anyone other than kin in the course of the working day. The farmer would have visited neighbouring villages only on two or three occasions in the year, and perhaps a local town as infrequently. In the marketplace of a nearby village or town he would have encountered other classes or ranks of people — craftsmen, artisans, traders, and a low-ranking official of the state administration, to whom he would pay taxes. Over his lifetime he would in all probability never see a T'o-pa. Local officials who visited the village would have to be given deliveries of grain or cloth. But the villager would probably avoid any other contacts with higher officialdom if they were ever imminent. For they could potentially mean brushes with the courts, imprisonment or enforced military service.
The borders recognized by the T'o-pa administration would not have coincided with the span of activities of the farmer if he were in certain areas in Ho-nan. Throughout the T'o-pa period many farmers had sustained contacts with members of their clan groups living on the other side of the border, in the southern states. A farmer who did not have such contacts would none the less have treated someone from beyond the border as a member of his own people rather than as a foreigner from another state. Suppose, however, he encountered someone from Kan-su province, in the north-west of the T'o-pa state. Such a person would have been treated as a complete stranger, even if that individual were working alongside him in the fields. The stranger would have spoken a different language (probably a Mongolian or Tibetan dialect), dressed differently and practised different customs. Neither the farmer nor the visitor may have been aware that they were both 'citizens' of the T'o-pa empire.
The Buddhist priests of the time were a different matter again. But with the exception of a small minority who were directly appointed by T'o-pa gentry to serve in their official temples, they also had little contact with the dominant class. Their locale, in which their lives were concentrated, was the monastery, but they had networks of social relationships which ranged from Central Asia to the south of China and Korea. The monasteries contained people of quite different ethnic and linguistic origin, brought together by their common religious pursuits. Their scholarship distinguished them from other social groupings. They travelled across state frontiers without restriction, regardless of those to whom they were nominally 'subject'. They were not, however, regarded as 'outside' Chinese society, as was the Arab community in Canton of the T'ang period. The state administration treated that community in some ways as belonging within its jurisdiction, requiring taxes from them and setting up special offices to deal with them. But it was also recognized that they belonged to a separate social order and therefore were not on a par with others within the realm of the state.
Chapter 6
Structuration Theory, Empirical Research and Social Critique
A Reiteration of Basic Concepts
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(6) Social identities, and the position-practice relations associated with them , are 'markers' in the virtual time-space of structure. They are associated with normative rights, obligations and sanctions which, within specific collectivities, form roles. The use of standardized markers, especially to do with the bodily attributes of age and gender, is fundamental in all societies, notwithstanding large cross-cultural variations which can be noted. …
(8) Among the structural properties of social systems, structural principles are particularly important , since they specify overall types of society. It is one of the main emphases of structuration theory that the degree of closure of societal totalities - and of social systems in general is widely variable. There are degrees of 'systemness' in societal totalities. as in other less or more inclusive forms of social system. It is essential to avoid the assumption that what a 'society' is can be easily defined, a notion which comes from an era dominated by nation-states with clear-cut boundaries that usually conform in a very close way to the administrative purview of centralized governments. Even in nation-states, of course, there are a variety of social forms which cross—cut societal boundaries.
(9) The study of power cannot be regarded as a second-order consideration in the social sciences. Power cannot be tacked on, as it were, after the more basic concepts of social science have been formulated. There is no more elemental concept than that of power. However, this does not mean that the concept of power is more essential than any other, as is supposed in those versions of social science which have come under a Nietzschean influence. Power is one of several primary concepts of social science, all clustered around the relations of action and structure. Power is the means of getting things done and, as such, directly implied in human action. It is a mistake to treat power as inherently divisive, but there is no doubt that some of the most bitter conflicts in social life are accurately seen as 'power struggles'. Such struggles can be regarded as to do with efforts to subdivide resources which yield modalities of control in social systems. By 'control' I mean the capability that some actors, groups or types of actors have of influencing the circumstances of action of others. In power struggles the dialectic of control always operates, although what use agents in subordinate positions can make of the resources open to them differs very substantially between different social contexts. …
(10) There is no mechanism of social organization or social reproduction identified by social analysts which lay actors cannot also get to know about and actively incorporate into what they do. In very many instances the 'findings' of sociologists are such only to those not in the contexts of activity of the actors studied. Since actors do what they do for reasons, they are naturally likely to be disconcerted if told by sociological observers that what they do derives from factors that somehow act externally to them. Lay objections to such 'findings' may thus have a very sound basis. Reification is by no means purely characteristic of lay thought. …
… The social scientist is a communicator, introducing frames of meaning associated with certain contexts of social life to those in others. Thus the social sciences draw upon the same sources of description … as novelists or others who write fictional accounts of social life.
The Source:
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Polity Press 1984
Further reading:
Summaries of Giddens’s positions including comparison with writings of John Urry on ‘mobilities’ (movement across borders) can be found in Anthony Giddens & Philip W. Sutton, Essential Concepts in Sociology, Polity 2017, especially a section on ‘Society’.
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.