Week-14

Concept of the society and Mass Society (Social Classes)

Definition:

the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community: For example
"drugs, crime, and other dangers to society".

A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social

group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority
and dominant cultural expectations.

Societies construct patterns of behavior by deeming certain actions or concepts acceptable or

unacceptable. These patterns of behavior within a given society are known as societal norms.

The term "society" came from the 12th-century French société (meaning 'company'). This was in
turn derived from the Latin word societas, which in turn was derived from the
noun socius ("comrade, friend, ally"; adjectival form socialis) used to describe a bond or
interaction between parties that is friendly, or at least civil.

In Sociology:

 Hunter-gatherer bands (categorization of duties and responsibilities). Then came the

agricultural society.
 Tribal societies in which there are some limited instances of social rank and prestige.
 Stratified structures led by chieftains.
 Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments.
In addition to this, there are:

 Humanity, humankind, upon which rest all the elements of society, including society's
beliefs.
 Virtual society, a society based on online identity, which is evolving in the information age.

Types of Societies:
Pre-industrial
In a pre-industrial society, food production, which is carried out through the use of human and
animal labor, is the main economic activity. These societies can be subdivided according to their
level of technology and their method of producing food. These subdivisions are hunting and
gathering, pastoral, horticultural, and agricultural.[8]
Hunting and gathering

San people in Botswana start a fire by hand.

The main form of food production in hunter-gatherer societies is the daily collection of wild
plants and the hunting of wild animals. Hunter-gatherers move around constantly in search of
food. As a result, they do not build permanent villages or create a wide variety of artifacts, and
usually only form small groups such as bands and tribes.
Pastoral (Rural)
Pastoralism is a slightly more efficient form of subsistence. Rather than searching for food on a
daily basis, members of a pastoral society rely on domesticated herd animals to meet their food
needs. Pastoralists live a nomadic life, moving their herds from one pasture to another
Horticultural
Fruits and vegetables grown in garden plots that have been cleared from the jungle or forest
provide the main source of food in a horticultural society. These societies have a level
of technology and complexity similar to pastoral societies. Historians use the phrase Agricultural
Revolution to refer to the technological changes that occurred as long as 10,000 years ago that
led to cultivating crops and raising farm animals.
Agrarian

Ploughing with oxen in the 15th century

Agrarian societies use agricultural technological advances to cultivate crops over a large area.
Increases in food supplies due to improved technology led to larger populations than in earlier
communities. This meant a greater surplus, which resulted in towns that became centers of trade
supporting various rulers, educators, craftspeople, merchants, and religious leaders who did not
have to worry about locating nourishment.
Industrial
Between the 15th and 16th centuries, a new economic system emerged. Capitalism is marked by
open competition in a free market, in which the means of production are privately owned.
Europe's exploration of the Americas served as one motivation for the development of
capitalism.
Industrial societies rely heavily on machines powered by fuels for the production of goods. This
produced further dramatic increases in efficiency. This created a great surplus of labor and gave
capitalists plenty of laborers who could be hired for extremely low wages.
Post-industrial
Post-industrial societies are societies dominated by information, services, and high technology
more than the production of goods. Advanced industrial societies are now seeing a shift toward
an increase in service sectors over manufacturing and production. The United States is the first
country to have over half of its workforce employed in service industries. Service industries
include government, research, education, health, sales, law, and banking.

Characteristics
Gender
The division of humans into male and female gender roles has been marked culturally by a
corresponding division of norms, practices, dress, behavior, rights, duties, privileges, status,
and power. Cultural differences by gender have often been believed to have arisen naturally out
of a division of reproductive labor; the biological fact that women give birth led to their further
cultural responsibility for nurturing and caring for children.
Kinship
All human societies organize, recognize and classify types of social relationships based on
relations between parents, children and other descendants (consanguinity), and relations
through marriage (affinity). There is also a third type applied to godparents or adoptive
children (fictive). These culturally defined relationships are referred to as kinship. In many
societies, it is one of the most important social organizing principles and plays a role in
transmitting status and inheritance.
Ethnicity
Human ethnic groups are a social category that identifies together as a group based on shared
attributes that distinguish them from other groups. These can be a common set of
traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, culture, nation, religion, or social treatment within
their residing area. Ethnicity is separate from the concept of race, which is based on physical
characteristics, although both are socially constructed. Assigning ethnicity to a certain population
is complicated, as even within common ethnic designations there can be a diverse range of
subgroups, and the makeup of these ethnic groups can change over time at both the collective
and individual level.
Government and politics
The early distribution of political power was determined by the availability of fresh water, fertile
soil, and temperate climate of different locations. As farming populations gathered in larger and
thicker communities, interactions between these different groups increased. This led to the
development of governance within and between the communities. As communities got bigger the
need for some form of governance increased, as all large societies without a government have
struggled to function.
Governments create laws and policies that affect the citizens that they govern. There have
been multiple forms of government throughout human history, each having various means of
obtaining power and the ability to exert diverse controls on the population. As of 2017, more
than half of all national governments are democracies, with 13% being dictatorships and 28%
containing elements of both.
Trade and economics
Trade, the voluntary exchange of goods and services, is seen as a characteristic that differentiates
humans from other animals and has been cited as a practice that gave Homo sapiens a major
advantage over other hominids.
Early human economies were more likely to be based around gift giving instead of
a bartering system. Early money consisted of commodities; the oldest being in the form of cattle
and the most widely used being cowrie shells. Money has since evolved into governmental
issued coins, paper and electronic money.
Conflict
Humans commit violence on other humans at a rate comparable to other primates, but kill adult
humans at a high rate (with infanticide being more common among other animals).
The willingness of humans to kill other members of their species en masse through organized
conflict (i.e., war) has long been the subject of debate. One school of thought is that war evolved
as a means to eliminate competitors, and has always been an innate human characteristic.
Another suggests that war is a relatively recent phenomenon and appeared due to changing social
conditions.

Contemporary usage
The term "society" is currently used to cover both a number of political and scientific
connotations as well as a variety of associations.
Western
The development of the Western world has brought with it the emerging concepts of Western
culture, politics, and ideas, often referred to simply as "Western society". Geographically, it
covers at the very least the countries of Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New
Zealand. It sometimes also includes Eastern Europe, South America, and Israel.
Information
Although the concept of information society has been under discussion since the 1930s, in the
modern world it is almost always applied to the manner in which information technologies have
impacted society and culture. It, therefore, covers the effects of computers and
telecommunications on the home, the workplace, schools, government, and various communities
and organizations, as well as the emergence of new social forms in cyberspace.
Knowledge
As the access to electronic information resources increased at the beginning of the 21st century,
special attention was extended from the information society to the knowledge society. The
capacity to manipulate, store and transmit large quantities of information cheaply has increased
at a staggering rate over recent years. The digitisation of information and the associated
pervasiveness of the Internet are facilitating a new intensity in the application of knowledge to
economic activity, to the extent that it has become the predominant factor in the creation of
wealth. As much as 70 to 80 percent of economic growth is now said to be due to new and better
knowledge.