CHAPTER 3

UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

• We saw that each of us as individuals, occupies a place or location in society. Each one of us has a
status and a role or roles, but these are not simply what we as individuals choose.
• There are social institutions that constrain and control, punish and reward.
• They could be ‘macro’ social institutions like the state or ‘micro’ ones like the family.

This chapter puts forth a very brief idea of some of the central areas where important social
institutions are located namely:
• Family, marriage and kinship
• Politics
• Economics
• Religion
• Education

Institution

Something that works according to rules or customs.

It control on individuals

It gives individual opportunities

Social institution (Functionalist)

• Social Institution as a complex, integrated set of social norms, beliefs, values and relationships that
arise in response to the needs of society.
• It satisfy human needs
• We find informal and formal social institutions in societies.
– informal social institutions
• family and religion
– formal social institutions.
• Law, education

Social institution (Conflict)

• All individuals are not placed equally in society.
• All social institutions will operate in the interest of the dominant sections of society.
• The dominant social section ensures that the ruling class ideas become the ruling ideas of a society.
This is very different from the idea that there are general needs of a society.

Family, marriage and kinship

Sociology and social anthropology have over many decades conducted field research across cultures to show how the
institutions of family, marriage and kinship are important in all societies and yet their character is different in different
societies. They have also shown how the family (the private sphere) is linked to the economic, political, cultural,
educational (the public) spheres.
• A family is a group of persons directly linked by kin connections
Family (Functionalists)
• Family performs important tasks
• Which contribute to society’s basic needs
• It helps perpetuate social order.
• Modern industrial societies function best if women look after the family and men earn the family
livelihood.
• The nuclear family is seen as the unit best equipped to handle the demands of industrial society

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 • In such a family one adult can work outside the home while the second adult cares for the home
and children.
• In practical terms, this specialisation of roles within the nuclear family involves:-
o the husband adopting the ‘instrumental’ role as breadwinner, and the
o wife assuming the ‘affective’, emotional role in domestic settings

Variation in Family Forms

• The sociologist A.M. Shah remarks that in post-independent India the joint family has steadily
increased.
• Reason:- increasing life expectancy in India.

Forms of family
Father, Mother and Unmarried children only Nuclear
Structure
Minimum three generation live together Joint
Newly married couple stay with the bridegroom’s
Patrilocal
Residence parents.
Newly married couple lives with the bride’s parents. Matrilocal
In the family men exercise authority and dominance Patriarchal
Authority
Women play major role in decision making Matriarchal
Family’s inheritance through father Patrilineal
Inheritance
Family’s inheritance through Mother Matrilineal
Family of Birth Family of orientation
Orientation Family of
Family formed through marriage
procreation

How gendered is the family?

• The belief is that the male child will support the parents in the old age and the female child will
leave on marriage results in families investing more in a male child.
• Despite the biological fact that a female baby has better chances of survival than a male baby the
rate of infant mortality among female children is higher in comparison to male children in lower age
group in India.
• The incidence of female foeticide has led to a sudden decline in the sex ratio.
• The percentage of decline in the child sex ratio is more alarming.
• The situation of prosperous states like Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra and western Utter Pradesh is
all the more grave.
• In Punjab the child sex ratio has declined to 793 girls per 1,000 boys.
• In some of the districts of Punjab and Haryana it has fallen below 700.

Marriage
• It exists in a wide variety of forms in different societies.
• It has also been found to perform differing functions.
According to Mazumdar:-
• “Marriage as a socially sanctioned union of male and female”.

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 Forms of Marriage

Monogamy
• One person marries one women
• Most common form of marriage
Polygamy

• One person marries more than one person of opposite sex at one time.
• Man can marries more than one women and Women can marries more than one men.

Polygyny Polyandry
• One Men marries more than one Women • One women marries more than one men.
• Eg: Muslims, Hindu religions • Eg: Tibetans, Todas, Kotas tribes in India.

Serial Monogamy
• Individual can marry again on the death of first spouse or after divorce at the same time they
cannot have more than one spouse.

Arranged marriage
• In some societies parents or relatives arrange partners and the girl and boy has no choice.

Rules of Endogamy and Exogamy

Endogamy
• Life partners can be selected only from within their group.
• Marrying a person from within one’s own group
• (cast, class, religion, tribe, village etc.)

Exogamy
• Some one marries from outside the group
• Marriage form within group is not allowed
• Marriage between close blood-relation is not permitted.
o Exogamy brings people of different castes, races and religion together.
• In India, village exogamy is practised in certain parts of north India.
• Village exogamy ensured that daughters were married into families from villages far away from home.

Kinship
• It is relatedness or connection by blood or marriage or adoption.
• “the bond of blood or marriage which binds people together in group”
• Kinship bonds are very strong in tribal societies and rural communities.

Types of Kinship
• Affinal Kinship
• Consanguineous Kinship

Affinal Kinship
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 • Kinship by Marriage
• When a man marries, he establishes a relationship not only with the women he marries but
also with a number of other people in her family. Vise versa.
o Eg: Husband and Wife
o Father- in- law
o Mother- in- law
o Daughter- in- law
o Son –in-law
Consanguineous Kinship
• Relation by blood or common ancestry.
• The bond between parents and their children

WORK AND ECONOMIC LIFE

We can define work, whether paid or unpaid, as the carrying out of tasks requiring the expenditure
of mental and physical effort, which has as its objective the production of goods and services that cater to
human needs.

Modern Forms of Work and Division of Labour

• In pre-modern forms of society most people worked in agricultural field and livestock.
• In the industrial society carried on largely by means of machines rather than by human hand.
• In a country like India, the larger share of the population continues to be rural and agricultural
based occupations.
• In modern societies
 Highly complex division of labour.
 Work has been divided into an enormous number of different occupations in which people
specialise.
• In traditional societies
 Non-agricultural work entailed the mastery of a craft.
 Craft skills were learned through a lengthy period of apprenticeship
 Worker normally carried out all aspects of the production process from beginning to end.
• One of the main features of modern societies is an enormous expansion of economic
interdependence.

Transformation of Work

• Mass production demands mass markets.

• Construction of a moving assembly line.
• Monitoring or surveillance systems.
• Over the last decades there has been a shift to what is often called ‘flexible production’ and
‘decentralisation of work’.

POLITICS

• Political institutions are concerned with the distribution of power in society.

• Two concepts, which are critical to the understanding of political institutions, are power and
authority.

Power
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 • It is the ability of individuals or groups to carry out their will even when opposed by others.
• There is a fixed amount of power in a society and if some wield power others do not.
• An individual or group does not hold power in isolation, they hold it in relation to others.
• The principal has power to maintain discipline in school. The president of a political party possesses
power to expel a member from the party.

Authority

• Power is exercised through authority.

• Authority is that form of power, which is accepted as legitimate
• It is institutionalised because it is based on legitimacy.
• People in general accept the power of those in authority as they consider their control to be fair and
justified.

Stateless Societies

• Order is maintained without a modern governmental apparatus.

• It maintained through alliances, kinship marriage etc.

The Concept of the State

• A state exists where there is a political apparatus of ruling over a given territory.
• The functionalist perspective
o State as representing the interests of all sections of society.
• The conflict perspective
o State as representing the dominant sections of society.
• Modern states are very different from traditional states.
• Characteristics of Modern State
o Sovereignty
o Citizenship
o Nationalism
• Citizenship rights include
o Civil rights:- the freedom of individuals to live where they choose; freedom of speech and
religion; the right to own property; and the right to equal justice before the law.
o Political Rights:- the right to participate in elections and to stand for public office.
o Social rights:- health benefits, unemployment allowance, setting of minimum level of wages.
• Nationalism
o It can be defined as a set of symbols and beliefs providing the sense of being part of a single political
community.
o Thus, individuals feel a sense of pride and belonging, in being ‘British’, ‘Indian’, ‘Indonesian’ or
‘French’.

RELIGION

• The sociological study of religion is different from a religious or theological

study of religion in many ways.
1. It conducts empirical studies of how religions actually function in society and its relationship to other
institutions.
2. It uses a comparative method.
3. It investigates religious beliefs, practices and institutions in relation to other aspects of society and
culture.
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 o The empirical method means that the sociologist does not have a judgemental approach to religious
phenomena.
o The comparative method is important because in a sense it brings all societies on level with each other.
It helps to study without bias and prejudice.
• Religion exists in all known societies, although religious beliefs and practices vary from culture to culture.
• Common Characteristics of all Religion:-
o Set of symbols, Invoking feelings of reverence or awe
o Rituals or ceremonies
o A community of believers.
• The rituals associated with religion are very diverse.
o Ritual acts may include praying, chanting, singing, eating certain kinds of food , fasting on certain days,
and so on.
• Sociologists of religion, following Emile Durkheim, are interested in understanding this sacred realm which
every society distinguishes from the profane.
• In most cases, the sacred includes an element of the supernatural.
• Studying religion sociologically : the relationship of religion with other social institutions.
o Religion has had a very close relationship with power and politics.
o For instance periodically in history there have been religious movements for social change, like various
anti-caste movements or movements against gender discrimination.
o Religion is not just a matter of the private belief of an individual but it also has a public character.
• Classical sociologists believed that as societies modernised, religion would become less influential over the
various spheres of life. The concept secularisation describes this process.
• Max Weber: how sociology looks at religion in its relationship to other aspects of
social and economic behaviour.
o Weber argues that Calvinism (a branch of Protestant Christianity) exerted an important influence on
the emergence and growth of capitalism as a mode of economic organisation.
o The Calvinists believed that the world was created for the glory of God, meaning that any work in this
world had to be done for His glory, making even mundane works acts of worship.
o Calvinists also believed in the concept of predestination, which meant that whether one will go to
heaven or hell was pre-ordained.
o Since there was no way of knowing whether one has been assigned heaven or hell, people sought to
look for signs of God’s will in this world, in their own occupations.
o Thus if a person in whatever profession, was consistent and successful in his or her work, it was
interpreted as a sign of God’s happiness.
o The money earned was not to be used for worldly consumption; rather the ethics of Calvinism was to
live frugally. This meant that investment became something like a holy creed.
o At the heart of capitalism is the concept of investment, which is about investing capital to make more
goods, which create more profit, which in turn creates more capital.
o Thus Weber was able to argue that religion, in this case Calvinism, does have an influence on economic
development.
• Religion cannot be studied as a separate entity.
• Social forces always and invariably influence religious institutions.
• Political debates, economic situations and gender norms will always influence religious behaviour.
• In traditional societies, religion usually plays a central part in social life.
• Religious symbols and rituals are often integrated with the material and artistic culture of society.

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EDUCATION
• Education is a life long process, involving both formal and informal institutions of learning.
• There is a qualitative distinction between simple societies and complex,
modern societies.
o In Simple Society was no need for formal schooling. Children learnt customs and the broader way of
life by participating in activities with their adults.
o In complex societies, we saw there is an increasing economic division of labour, separation of work
from home, need for specialised learning and skill attainment, rise of state systems, nations and
complex set of symbols and ideas.
o In modern complex societies in contrast to simple societies rest on abstract universalistic values.
Functionalists (Education)
• Education maintain and renews the social structure transmits and develops culture.
• The educational system is an important mechanism for the selection and allocation of the individuals in their
future roles in the society.
• It is also regarded as the ground for proving one’s ability
• Selective agency for different status according to their abilities.
Conflict theorists
• Education functions as a main stratifying agent.
• The inequality of educational opportunity is also a product of social stratification.

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