Culture in Society
The term culture refers to the group’s shared practices, values, and beliefs. Culture encompasses a group’s way of life, from routine, everyday interactions to the most important parts of group members’ lives.
It includes everything produced by a society, including all of the social rules. Culture depends on groups, institutions, and individuals to carry out the practices, instill the beliefs, and often – to create cultural change.
Society is constantly changing, so analyzing the culture in a given society can be difficult. Sociologists often study culture using the sociological imagination, which pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills described as an awareness of the relationship between a person’s behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person’s choices and perceptions. It’s a way of seeing our own and other people’s behavior in relation to history and social structure (1959). The sociological imagination encompasses three levels of analysis:
Personal Issues Public Sentiment Global Implications
micro focus meso focus macro focus
One illustration of this is a person’s decision to marry. In the United States, this choice is heavily influenced by individual feelings; however, the social acceptability of marriage relative to the person’s circumstances also plays a part. To a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do not exist in a vacuum. Remember, though, that culture is a product of the people in a society; sociologists take care not to treat the concept of “culture” as though it were alive and static in its own right. For a sociologist, declining rates of marriage tell us about values in the society as a whole and creates questions about the function, conflict, and/or meaning of the institution of marriage. Sociologists look at how social practices and social interactions are understood, not whether or not they are ‘right’ or ‘real’. Reification is an error of treating an abstract concept as though it has a real, material existence (Sahn 2013).
Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View Society
All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those experiences are shaped by interactions with social groups and society as a whole. Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over another. Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the behavior of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same societal pressures.
Take a minute to think about this. What are some societal pressures that exist today? How are these pressures similar and also different from the pressures faced by your parents and caregivers when they were 20 years old?
Changes in the U.S. family structure offer an example of patterns that sociologists are interested in studying. A “typical” family now is vastly different
than in past decades when most U.S. families consisted of married parents living in a home with their unma