Any human society has its own structure, which means a combination of classes, segments of the population, diversified on various grounds.
The social structure of society can change over time with a change in the mode of production and other influencing factors. So, a few centuries ago, the society of most countries had a clear gradation of the population by belonging to a particular estate, nationality and religious denomination.
A social community is a stable community of people who have similar living conditions and interests. Communities are divided according to the following criteria:
- The real ones are those that actually exist;
- Static - nominal (those that are recorded in the registers);
- Massive - a set of people who have similar behavioral reactions;
- Group - large and small groups;
The following types of social communities exist:
- production classes - differ in the level of development of society and on the principle of attitude to tools;
- professional communities;
- demographic (gender and age);
- ethno-national, regional;
- territorial;
- industry
- racial and religious groups;
- production teams;
- a family;
Social stratification is a hierarchically distributed social stratification of people according to certain criteria on the basis of initial inequality between each other.
There are also mixed stratification schemes, which are especially characteristic of modern society, which is constantly in motion. That is why one of the signs of our time is high social mobility - a person’s change in his place in society. To a greater extent, social mobility is characteristic of Europeans, Americans, and residents of developed countries of Asia, some countries of Africa and Latin America. Social mobility is uncharacteristic of traditional societies.
The social structure of society implies the following types of social mobility :
Vertical mobility - the movement of social groups or individuals from one social layer to another, while changing social status (in the direction of up or down);
Horizontal mobility - the transition of an individual from a previous social group to another, which are at the same social level (moving from one professional team to another, changing family status, religious denomination, etc.);
Geographical mobility - change of place of residence;
The concept of the social structure of society - why is this needed in sociology?
The social structure of society is the group into which the sample of interest to the researcher is divided. They provide the following functions:
- studied social groups are the engine of progress and development of society;
- the situation in a particular society in a particular historical period may depend on the nature of the most numerous or active social groups, in which cases it may even lead to a change in social relations in the world (as, for example, in the case of the October Revolution of 1917);
- the type of society, the level and pace of its development depend on the structural division of this society into groups and which of them occupy the main positions and have real power.
Studying the subject “social structure of society” in detail, sociology can answer the following questions:
- determination of the most promising development strategies for a given social group and society as a whole;
- elucidation of the problems of intra-social conflicts, the search for ways of their most rational and effective solution;
- a solution to the problem of an “ideal society” in which the true needs of the maximum number of people can be satisfied.