Thursday, October 17, 2013

The social culure that shapes our daily lives


 
We live in a society where social institutions are part of our daily lives. People know how to behave in different settings within the Social structure because the rules, norms, and the beliefs are obvious. Therefore, we are expected to behave according to the social structure we are part of at a particular movement. For instance, the way a person behaves in a party with friends is not the same way he/she would behaves when in a meeting with a lawyer or an interview for a job. However, someone may challenges the social structure of a work place such as coming late to work and not doing the job properly. This person may not have accepted the norms, believes, and rules of that job. Therefore, he/she decided to violate it by not coming on time and doing the job right.  In other words, we only respect our social institutions when we agree about the rules, norms of the social structure.

Social structures vary depending on the culture it belongs to. As we know, we all belong to a particular culture that makes us significant in way or the other because we have different sets of believes, values, norms, and behaviors that the society we live in expect us to comprehend. For example, in my culture society expects women to get married at an early age than what American society expects from their women. The marriage institution is taken seriously in my culture than most cultures do around the world.

Statuses and Roles play an important thing in our lives. Status defines who we are and our positions in the society. For example, I am a student, a daughter, a classmate and an employee within the social structure I participate in, whether its school, work, and family.  So, the roles I adopt while I am in these structures shape my behaviors towards each status. Like being a daughter, you’re expected to be respectful to your parents as well as other individuals. It’s obvious that we adopt roles as quick as we get involve in a social structure. We do not need to be told that the rules we just understand them how to obey or disobey if we choose to reject the norms or rules of that institution.

As a human being in a society we interact with different people every day in our lives. These interactions are associated with people we mostly have similar activities that we can share together as a society. As the book said, sociologists use two methods; such as ethnomethodology, as a way people understand one another during their daily activities.  In other words, social structure could be put in different types of levels; Micro level, the Meso level, and the macro level. Now, all these help us interact to each other within the social structures of a daily life.

1 comment:

  1. I like how well put together your blog is, you used key words from the sociology book as well as what you learned in class. you made good sentences explaining how important culture is and how it shapes our lives individuallly as well as in one big society.

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