07/02/03 Grade: B The Meaning of Culture A society’s culture is all the ways in which its members think, behave, interact, and communicate. The three major dimensions of a society suggested by Robert Bierstedt in the middle 1900’s are ideas, norms, and material culture. There are also combinations of these major dimensions which provide additional analysis. Ideas are the ways humans think, which organize our consciousness. Values are shared ideas by the culture about what are right and affect personal responses in different situations. Values can range from how a society follows religions to ones patriotism or loves of ones country. Derived, supported, and justified from values are norms. Norms are specific rules of behavior, which indicate if a particular behavior is proper or improper relative to the situation. "The moral order of society is a kind of tissue of thought’s, negative ones which forbid certain actions and positive ones which require certain actions." (Robert Nislet, 1970 p. 226). Under norms are laws. Laws are official written codes of behavior thought up and written by specialists. -All the things society provides is the third major dimension, material culture. -The combination of both ideas and norms are ideologies. The members of a particular society are expected to believe and act upon under the systems of their ideologies without question. A famous sociologist Max Weber studied the emergence of the classic ideology linkage between Protestantism and Capitalism. He analyzed how early protestants value’s and norm’s prepared good work ethic which in turn created capitalism. Another combination of Bierstedts dimensions was technology. Technologies are the available material for a culture and the known norms for using the available material found in the culture. Social control, sets of rules and understandings that control the behavior of individuals and groups in a culture, is needed for society’s ability to regulate policies. Without social control there will be no orderly fashion just violence and chaos and the use of coercive force by police and armies would amount. Park and Burgess noted that all groups form basic norms for the well-being of society. A society regulates itself by using a set of "higher moral principle" and those principles help achieve peaceful social control. Rewards and punishments which are adhered to or violated against are known as sanctions. Two types of sanctions are known as mores and folkways. Mores are stronger sanctioned with or against the society and weakly sanctioned are folkways. A societies culture consists of all the ways in which its members think about their society, understand its symbols and rules, and communicate among themselves (William Kornblum, 2002). Just about everything made or thought by humans is studied by sociologists, but social organization and behavior are the most studied aspects of sociology studied by sociologists and through this modern culture are analyzed. |