The Personal and the Structural
Most of what we experience in our lives is connected to the structure of one system or another. At first glance, problems that seem to be just a matter of personality or human nature turn out to be at least partly structural, although it’s easy to confuse the two. This happens most often with systems we know well, such as families. We experience them in such a personal and immediate way that we may think that’s all they amount to, that they aren’t systems at all. I have often heard students, for example, state as a matter of obvious fact that their families are unique, that they have no culture or structure, and that they are nothing more than the people who are in them.
Such perceptions make me wonder why they would use the same word— ‘family’—to refer to all these groups that supposedly have nothing in common. How is it that family life, for all this uniqueness, looks so remarkably similar from one household to another, such that we can almost always tell a ‘family’ when we see one? Regardless of each family’s idiosyncrasies, they are all families because they are a particular kind of social system that has characteristics that distinguish it from other kinds of systems.
Even if every family were unique, this would not tell us much about the patterns that shape families—and our lives in them—in such recognizable ways. Nor can family ‘uniqueness’ explain patterns we find among families—the effects of poverty, racism, sexism, and divorce on family life, for example, or what difference it makes whether a family is based on a marriage that’s heterosexual, lesbian, gay, or something larger and more communal. Even the most personal emotional problems are increasingly tied to how families work as systems. Many psychotherapists, for example, will not treat adolescent patients without also seeing the rest of the family, because they know that individual troubles don’t develop in a vacuum. Our inner emotional lives are never just that—they always happen in relation to a social context.
Abuse in families, for example, is often explained in purely psychological terms. But this ignores research showing that people who abuse children, partners, or the elderly don’t have personalities that differ markedly from the rest of the adult population. Extensive research on sexual violence has failed to identify a personality type that distinguishes male perpetrators from ‘normal’ men. Sexually, men who rape seem to be pretty much like other men and exhibit only a slightly higher propensity toward violent behavior in general. The explanation behind ‘intimate violence’ won’t be found inside the heads and personalities of individuals, because the explanation is both systemic and personal.6
The simple fact that men commit most serious acts of family violence and sexual exploitation is itself a structural fact of enormous significance. ‘Man,’ ‘husband,’ and ‘father’ are social statuses that are linked to paths of least resistance for the people who occupy them. That so many perpetrators of intimate violence occupy those statuses compels us to ask questions not so much about men as individuals and whether they are good or bad people but, more importantly, about the systems they participate in that load the odds in favor of abusive behavior.
Movies, television, music, video games, and other forms of popular culture, for example, routinely glorify a capacity for control and violence as key traits of ‘real men’ and denigrate as ‘wimps’ men who don’t measure up. Even presidents worry about being seen as weak and may do foolish things—such as going to war without good reason—to avoid the appearance of being less than strong and decisive. Given this, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that men are more likely than women to abuse partners and children.
Abuse is especially likely from men who have more power than their wives in family decision making and from men who are unemployed and cannot measure up to the cultural standard of fulfilling the provider role. In households where abuse occurs, it is more likely to continue if the wife is financially dependent and cannot afford to move out and support the children on her own. Dependence is compounded by the threat of violence itself: it is not uncommon for women to stay in abusive households because they’ve been threatened with even greater violence if they leave.
Structures of power in family systems create paths of least resistance that make violence far more likely to occur. From this perspective, men’s violence against women and girls wouldn’t be the epidemic that it currently is in the United States if we lived in a society that supported female independence and gender equality, that valued the health and safety of women and children more than it does, and that didn’t promote the capacity for control, domination, and violence as tests of manhood. This doesn’t mean that everything is society’s fault and that we shouldn’t hold individuals accountable when they’re abusive. But it does mean that if we want to change pervasive patterns of abusive behavior, we have to see how those patterns are connected to paths of least resistance and how people choose whether to follow them.
It is also important to consider that a social system can be organized in ways that promote destructive behavior that goes against important cultural values. Consider, for example, such crimes as theft, robbery, and drug dealing that people commit to get things they want and cannot otherwise afford to buy. Are people who break the law participating in a society that actually promotes such behavior as a path of least resistance? Robert K. Merton’s theory of deviance and opportunity structures responds with a clear “yes.”7
As Merton points out, capitalist industrial societies place a high value on accumulating possessions. The good life is portrayed as being full of things, and shopping and buying are routinely offered as ways to feel better about ourselves and our lives. No matter which social class you belong to, it’s impossible to escape the steady stream of advertising and its underlying message that getting what you do not have is the answer to just about every personal problem.
Although we are all exposed to the cultural value placed on possessions, the distribution of legitimate opportunities to acquire them is highly unequal. Affording many of the goods paraded before mass audiences requires well-paying jobs, which most people do not have. I live near Hartford, Connecticut, which is one of the poorest cities in the United States while at the same time being the capital city of one of the wealthiest states. For years, on a billboard beside the highway that runs past some of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods, there was a prominent advertisement for Rolex watches, a brand that typically costs thousands of dollars. I always wondered how most residents of Hartford were supposed to see this ad in relation to themselves and what they could afford. All kinds of people would drive by that billboard every day and could not help but see its message— this object is what everyone should want to have—but only a select few could afford to buy one. The combination of shared values and an unequal distribution of opportunities makes people more similar in what they’re encouraged to want than in their ability to get what they want in socially acceptable ways.
Being caught in this bind can produce a sense of strain and contradiction that people will try to resolve. One way is to work hard in legitimate ways—such as a job—to get what we are all encouraged to want. The opportunity structure is unequal, however, so this approach works for only a portion of the population, since there aren’t enough good jobs to go around. For everyone else, the choices are less appealing. One option is to let go of the cultural value by deciding that possessions aren’t so important after all. But this is hard to do since we acquire values at an early age and they are not easy to get rid of, especially when they’re being promoted every time we go online, turn on the television, or drive down the interstate.
So, if we cannot stop wanting things and we don’t have access to legitimate ways to get them, then what? One answer is what Merton calls ‘innovative deviance’: if the only way to get a Rolex (or feed our children or wear good clothes) is to break the law, then that is what we’ll do. Another response is to rebel by challenging the system and its unequal distribution of opportunities. We might make revolution by demanding a good job for everyone and a
redistribution of wealth. Or, we might drop out altogether and move to a cabin in the mountains and try to live off the land, rejecting both the pursuit of possessions and the ‘normal’ life people live to own things without having to break the law.
The larger the gap is between the distribution of what people are encouraged to want and the distribution of legitimate opportunities for achieving it, the more likely deviance is to occur, whether in the form of innovation, rebellion, or dropping out. This doesn’t mean that high crime rates happen because people don’t have what they need in some absolute sense. Instead, high crime rates happen because people don’t have what others around them have and what their culture says they should have.
If everyone in a community has the same standard of living, they tend to share values that are consistent with their common condition. But if a community has an impoverished population living next to a wealthy one, theft and other property crimes will be more common because values about wealth are shared but opportunities to acquire it are not. This is exactly what researchers have found. One study, for example, found that rates of burglary and larceny are highest in cities that have the highest levels of income inequality, regardless of the absolute level of poverty.8 So, communities with high levels of poverty where everyone is pretty much in the same boat will have less crime than communities where people are generally better off but some are much better off than others.
The distribution of values and the distribution of opportunities are characteristics of systems, not of individuals who participate in them. In another example, students who cheat are in part responding to how schools are organized as systems. Most school cultures place a high value on grades but do not distribute legitimate ways to achieve them equally. How much encouragement and support students get from their teachers varies considerably by gender, race, ethnicity, and social class. In addition, students differ in how much time and energy for school-related activities they have available (especially when they have to work to support themselves). They also vary in the backgrounds they bring to school, resources available at home, and how much they’ve been able to develop their abilities and talents. Added to this disparity is the common practice of scaling grades so that a certain percentage of each class must do poorly to round out the low end of the curve. The result is a competitive system with paths of least resistance that motivate students to cheat or ‘lower the curve’ by sabotaging the work of other students.
This explanation doesn’t tell us which students will cheat as they participate in the school system, but it does tell us that we can be sure cheating will occur as a pattern of behavior, because the system loads the odds in that direction. If I flip a fair coin, I can be confident that over the long run, the pattern of results will be roughly equal proportions of tails and heads. Knowing this, however, doesn’t tell me what will happen on any given flip. In the same way, knowing how a social system works doesn’t tell us how each person is going to participate at any given moment, because sociological practice is not about predicting individual behavior. It is about understanding how social circumstances shape patterns of behavior in one way or another and the consequences that result.
Sociologically, whether a particular student cheats is not the point. That many cheat or only a few, or that the incidence of cheating varies from one kind of school or one social group to another, is. Cheating in school and crime in society are not problems because this person cheated or that person stole or this one wound up living in poverty. What individuals do, of course, matters to us when we are talking about ourselves or people we know. But that is not what alarms us about such problems as poverty, violence, and economic insecurity, which people consistently rank at the top of their concerns. What alarms us is that on some level, we know these problems are rooted in systems we all participate in. As such, they involve all of us, all the time.
Structure as Relation
Statuses are important in the structure of social life because of the relationships that connect them to one another. In a sense, statuses are inherently relational in that they do not exist except in relation to other statuses. You cannot describe what a manager, a mother, or a teacher is without referring to some other status, such as employee, daughter, or student. This is true of anything that indicates position and location. ‘New York’ has no meaning by itself, but it does have meaning in relation to names of other places located by some direction and distance from it. If a community or civilization were to live entirely without awareness of anything beyond itself, naming it is probably the last thing people would think to do.
The relationships that link statuses—or entire systems or parts of systems—to one another are the main part of what we think of as social structure. Seeing how various structural aspects of systems are shaped as people participate in them is a key to sociological practice.
Every system, for example, has a role structure that consists of a mix of statuses and role relationships. The simplest structure consists of the same two statuses in relation to each other, such as two partners in a lesbian marriage. A heterosexual marriage is more complex in that the two statuses are differentiated by gender into wife and husband, and the wife’s role in relation to her husband is culturally defined as different from his role in relation to her. In either case, a marriage system can change radically by adding just one more status—that of child—to the mix, as new parents know all too well.
Adding a child to a heterosexual marriage adds not only that status but also the statuses of mother and father. As a result, the role structure goes from two statuses to five, and the number of role relationships goes from one to eight even though only three people participate in the system (see Figures 2 and 3). Life suddenly becomes far more complicated and causes familiar patterns of stress and confusion.
A girl’s father, for example, is also her mother’s husband, and a wife’s husband is also her child’s father. In such a system, whom people communicate with, whom they pay attention to, whose needs they meet in a given moment, and how they feel about one another all emerge from a complex interplay of several paths of least resistance operating at once. Men’s jealousy over the attention their wives (who are also mothers, but not theirs) pay to newborn children is the best known of these structural phenomena that happen so often because family structures load the odds in that direction. If, instead, every household had numerous adults available for child care, family dynamics would be very different than they are in typical two adult nuclear families based on heterosexual marriage.
Figure 3. Role structure of a heterosexual marriage with one child.
Family role structures can be complicated further by exchanging a stepparent for a birth parent. This happens in every family organized around a remarriage for one or both spouses. With children related by birth to only one spouse and to a parent who no longer lives in the household, the potential for conflict and bad feelings is built in to the system. Until stepparents develop their own place in the new family, they can feel left out and be denied loyalty, affection, and respect from stepchildren. Competition can also erupt over the attention and loyalty of the birth parent, who feels torn between the children and the new partner. Coalitions against the stepparent—children and either birth parent ganging up against the newcomer— are always a danger, especially when children still hope to bring their birth parents back together.
None of this structural information tells us just what will happen in each individual family. It does, however, tell us a lot about built-in paths of least resistance and where they are likely to lead family dynamics when people follow them. When stepparents feel rejected and unwelcome by stepchildren, for example, they are bound to take it personally. But they might take comfort from knowing that the system’s structure sets things up to go this way until a new structure emerges from the interactions of daily life, which are in turn shaped by how each member of the family chooses to participate.
We can do this kind of analysis on every social system from the smalle
st and simplest to the largest and most complex, from the flow of information in business and government to problems of command and control in the military or a terrorist organization, from the success or failure of social movements to the role structure of urban gangs, from the structure of international conflict and the global economy to the changing relations between doctors and patients in managed-care health systems. The basic questions about how structure shapes social life remain the same.
We can ask, for example, about the roles of industrial and nonindustrial societies in the world economy and how these lead to a widening gap between rich and poor nations and increased levels of inequality within them as well, all of which can encourage resistance movements, including those that resort to terrorism and other violent means. We can also ask how global dynamics affect the small scale of family life as corporations maximize profit and returns paid to investors by closing factories and moving jobs from one place to another or by hiring people on a part-time basis only, with lower pay and no benefits. Sociological practice always takes us toward the vital and difficult truth that everything is related in one way or another to everything else. This truth is what makes the practice so challenging, but it is also what gives it such great promise.
Structure as Distribution: Who Gets What
We saw earlier that a heterosexual marriage has a more complex structure than does a lesbian or gay marriage because of gender distinctions between wives and husbands. The differences do not stop there, however, because the concept of structure also includes various kinds of distributions in systems.
The Forest and the Trees Page 10
