3.1 Describe the structure (the “hardware”) of our social world.

3.2 Illustrate how culture affects individuals.

3.3 Provide examples of microcultures, subcultures, countercultures, and global cultures.

3.4 Compare key ideas in the symbolic interactionist, functionalist, and conflict perspectives on culture.

3.5 Explain why culture (the “software”) from one society does not always “fit” with the structure (“hardware”) of another society.

Key Points:

• Society refers to an organized and interdependent group of individuals who live together in a specific geographic area, interact with each other more than with outsiders, cooperate to attain goals, and share a common culture over time. Each society has a culture, the way of life shared by a group of people, including ideas and “things” that are passed on from one genera­tion to the next; the culture has both material and non­material components.
• Societies evolve from very simple societies to more com­plex ones, from the simple hunter-gatherer society to the information societies of the postindustrial world.
• The study of culture requires that we try to avoid ethno­centrism (judging other cultures by the standards of our culture). Instead, we should use the view of cultural rela­tivism, so that we can understand culture from the stand­point of those inside it.
• Just as social units exist at various levels of our social world, from small groups to global systems, cultures exist within different levels of the social system—micro­cultures, subcultures, national cultures, and global cul­tures. Some social units at the micro or meso level stand in opposition to the dominant national culture, and they are called countercultures.
• Various theories offer different lenses for understand­ing culture. While symbolic interaction illuminates the way humans bring meaning to events (thus generating culture), the functionalist and conflict paradigms exam­ine cultural harmony and conflict between cultures, respectively.
• The metaphor of hardware (society’s structure) and soft­ware (culture) describes the interdependent relationship of society and culture, and as with computers, there must be some compatibility between the structure of a soci­ety and the culture. If there is none, either the cultural elements that are transported into another society will be rejected, or the culture will be “reformatted” to fit the society.

Summary:

Individuals and small groups cannot live without the sup­port of a larger society, the hardware of the social world. Without the software—culture—there could be no soci­ety, for there would be no norms to guide our interactions with others in society. Humans are inherently social and learn their culture from others. Furthermore, as society has evolved into more complex and multileveled social systems, humans have learned to live in and negotiate conflicts among multiple cultures, including those at micro (microcultures), meso (subcultures), and macro (societal and global cultures) levels. Life in an Information Age soci­ety demands adaptability to different sociocultural contexts and tolerance of different cultures and subcultures. This is a challenge to a species that has always had tendencies toward ethnocentrism.