From chapter 4, I'd like to answer one of the questions that it ask at the end of this chapter: the significance or accuracy of the statement, "Societies with different languages actually see or perceive the world differently." My boss is really into Hawaiian culture and language, in fact he teaches it at night school and he occasionally goes over a few things here and there as they come up in our discussions. He always mentions how the Hawaiians have different meanings in their language and how they speak of different things. For one, to me (Japanese-American) thinks of a computer as just an electronic that process things for us and makes our lives a little easier, something of convenience. While for Hawaiians they take literal meanings, computer is something that thinks and processes, stress on the thinking part. Lolo uila literally meaning electric brain or kamepiula which would be the Americanized version of computer.
Within a social structure there are different parts that make it up: status, ascribed and achieved status, social roles, groups, organizations, and institutions. When we think of status we think of someone who hold a high title or high prestige, but it could be anyone doing anything. For example I am a student, mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, etc., I do not hold a high title or someone of great accomplished importance. I have achieved status, things that I have earned and have strived for. I don't have ascribed status, things that were just handed to me; I do not have a huge trust and will not inherit a big company with a huge name attached to it. There are different roles that we play, the way we are expected to behave. A mother expected role is different than that of a father. Social groups interact with one another and there are five different types of social interactions: exchange, cooperation, competition, conflict and coercion. When people interact they do with expectations of a reward and in a group the people in it share a common goal and strive for that goal together, there are and will always be where someone doesn't agree with what the other person is doing and this creates tension, coercion is when you want to use force or violence to control others. There are non-social groups that share things in common but do not talk or sometimes even know that they belong to this group (i.e.: red heads, they share the same color hair but all the red heads may never met one another). Limited social groups are those who have limited time together but still share some/a common interest. Social groups require: interaction, sense of belonging/members, shared interests, and structure. Primary and secondary groups differ in such a way that one involves face-to-face interaction and the secondary group still has face-to-face interactions but are more formal.
Discussion: What is meant by the statement, "Society is socially structured?" I think it simply means what the book has already to obviously stated for us. Each and every single one of us holds some kind of status, whether the president of a fortune 500 company or the data entry clerk at a small company and within that status we either are given that status as a birth right or we have strived for and earned it. Social roles is something that helps define us and helps give us structure. Different people hold different expectations of each other. Then it is broken down into prescribed roles or role perception. Prescribed roles are those that society itself suggests is right and what/how we should do what we do.
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