1st level (Individual Personality)
Historically speaking, this has
been the sphere or specialty of psychologists through the use of psychoanalytic
or a behaviorist framework. The nature
of social relations among human beings, the sum of which constitutes
civilization, is to a large extent drawn from infant sexuality and instructive
egoism as pointed out by Freud (1958).
There was an attempt to explain the relationships between the properties
of the physical world and what they identified as fundamental psychological
processes (cognition, emotion, and motivation) as elucidated by Proshanky and
Seidenber (1965).
Empirically, the focus of this level of human action and change is on
the individual’s response to externally induced
stimuli or incentives abstracted from the social world that is either ignored
or considered relevant.
2nd level (interaction among individuals)
It constitutes the area of social
psychology, specifically students of group dynamics. Then it goes after the
behaviorist standpoint including personality, interaction, and
self-theory. Porshanky and Seidenber
(1965:4) studied the behavior of individuals in connection with their experiences
and the social setting and the context in which social behavior takes place,
i.e., other individuals or groups.
Simmel (1964) specified the
social in the interaction among the social levels. This involves not only in the relations among
human beings but also the personality developing virtually entirely from human
interaction.
3rd level (group of social systems)
This third level of group is of
general interest to sociologists. The
group is the unit of analysis particularly the emergent properties of the group
where the social level is thought to reside.
Durkheim (1964) clarified this concern with his definition of “social
facts” as “every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the
individual and external constraint.”
The composition of social action
are exteriority to and constraint on the individual which is the area of
inquiry to sociology. Marx’s concept of
the “social” in terms of class-consciousness parallels Durkheim’s concept of collective conscience
in both nature and function. For Marx
and Durkheim, a person is constrained by the group both in thought and in
action; the group or class has an existence above and apart from that of its
members; and individual behavior reflects the exteriority of the group.
Durkheim defines a social group
as a small unit of workers, or a social class, or a nation-state, provided
that the group exercises constraint or affects the
individual.
The
social system was Parsons' concern also. He reiterated that this is society as
a whole, or the various institutions such as the family within society.
Parsons' definition of the social system is:
A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors
interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or
environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the
"optimization of gratification" and whose relation to their
situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system
of culturally structured and shared symbols (The Social System, pp.
5-6). The basic unit of the system for Parsons was the status-role
bundle or complex. These are structural elements, and are not characteristics
of the individual or of interaction. Rather they are like the positions within
the stratification model. A status is a structural position within the social
system, and a role is what the individual who has that status does. For
example, brother or sister could refer to a status, and there are certain roles
that are generally associated with these statuses. Note that these statuses
need not be hierarchical as in the stratification model. Within this social system, Parsons considered the needs of the
system as important, and individuals fulfilled certain system functions by
taking on various roles as means of carrying out the function of their
statuses. Individuals are discussed by Parsons as carrying out actions that
maintain order in the system. Socialization, education and learning in the
child, and continued socialization throughout life are the means by which the
norms and values of society are learned by individuals. This is what binds the
individual to the social system as a whole. If successful, this socialization
process means that the norms and values become internalized by individuals, and
when people pursue their own interests, they also serve the needs of the
society as a whole. In modern society there are many roles, statuses and
opportunities for individuals to express their different personalities. For
Parsons, this is a positive feature of a social system, and a flexible system
of this sort is more able to maintain order. However, if people become too
deviant, there are social control mechanisms that either stop the deviance
(ultimately at the legal level). In most cases though, there are stronger
mechanisms that the social system has to maintain order. This is the
socialization process, and the continued operation of the socialization process
through one's whole life. Parsons comments Without deliberate planning on anyone's part, there have
developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others,
mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the
deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which
puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment
sanctions (The Social System, pp. 319-320).
4th level (cultural system)
A cultural system can be defined
as the group of cultural characteristics (values, beliefs, myths, rituals, use
of space, use of time and self perception, among others) which is shared by a
particular social group or organization. This system can be considered as the
result of the collective programming of the mind of said group or organization.
In every cultural system, there is the cultural vision. This
concept refers to characteristics that must be present in the cultural system
of an organization, in order to successfully implement strategy and achieve
business goals. A cultural vision statement must include core values, beliefs
and interaction paradigms.
When there is full congruence
between an organizations Cultural Vision, and its actual cultural system, and
human interaction is conducted under global standards of effectiveness, then we
can say that there is Cultural Effectiveness.
If there is cultural effectiveness,
there would be interaction effectiveness.
This interaction effectiveness refers to the degree in which
organizational interaction is carried out under cultural best practices and
benchmarks.
These
best practices include:
- Respect of time contracts
- Focus on objectives and results
- Individual accountability
- Clear effective communication
- Teamwork including the four previous characteristics
- Cultural pride
Cultural
leadership focuses on management’s core responsibility of personifying the
target cultural system through its everyday actions.
Also, this 4th level
is the main concern of anthropologists.
Parsons (1965) states that the meanings and intentions of human acts are
formed in terms of symbol systems, along with the codes through which they operate,
in patterns that focus on the universal aspect of human society called
language. Other scientists which include
Hoebel (1962), Murdock (1960, Kroeber and Kluchkon (1952), and Steward (1955)
refer to culture as the characteristics of human behavior and their
transmissions over time, rather than human interactions per se. Major emphasis is
given by society to the learning and transmission of value and symbols. Distinction is made between natural
(technology) and nonmaterial culture, and between culture as a configuration of
existential postulates (about the nature of things) and of normative
postulates (about the desirability of things).
Definition of Cultural system on the Web:
The word culture comes from the Latin root colere (to
inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor). In general, it refers to human activity;
different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding,
or criteria for valuing, human activity. Anthropologists
use the term to refer to the universal human capacity to classify experiences,
and to encode and communicate them symbolically. They regard this capacity as a defining feature of the
genus Homo.
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