Social structure
Later, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber would all contribute to structural concepts in sociology.
The latter, for example, investigated and analyzed the institutions of modern society: market, bureaucracy (private enterprise and public administration), and politics (e.g. democracy).
Subsequent Marxist accounts, such as that of Louis Althusser, proposed a more complex relationship that asserted the relative autonomy of cultural and political institutions, and a general determination by economic factors only "in the last instance.
Émile Durkheim, drawing on the analogies between biological and social systems popularized by Herbert Spencer and others, introduced the idea that diverse social institutions and practices played a role in assuring the functional integration of society through assimilation of diverse parts into a unified and self-reproducing whole.
[4] As did Marx and Weber, Georg Simmel, more generally, developed a wide-ranging approach that provided observations and insights into domination and subordination; competition; division of labor; formation of parties; representation; inner solidarity and external exclusiveness; and many similar features of the state, religious communities, economic associations, art schools, and of family and kinship networks.
Still others, notably Peter Blau, follow Simmel in attempting to base a formal theory of social structure on numerical patterns in relationships—analyzing, for example, the ways in which factors like group size shape intergroup relations.
Giddens's analysis, in this respect, closely parallels Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the binaries that underlie classic sociological and anthropological reasoning (notably the universalizing tendencies of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism).
Bourdieu's practice theory also seeks a more subtle account of social structure as embedded in, rather than determinative of, individual behavior.
It shares with role theory, organizational and institutional sociology, and network analysis the concern with structural properties and developments and at the same time provides detailed conceptual tools needed to generate interesting, fruitful propositions and models and analyses.
Research from scholars Nicole M. Stephens and Sarah Townsend demonstrated that the cultural mismatch between institutions' ideals of independence and the interdependence common among working-class individuals can hinder workers' opportunities to succeed.
Some argue that men and women who have otherwise equal qualifications receive different treatment in the workplace because of their gender, which would be termed a "social structural" bias, but other variables (such as time on the job or hours worked) might be masked.
The way these agents of socialization influence your individualism varies on each one; however, they all play a big role in your self-identity development.
