theorists argue that the people with privilege and power in society manipulate institutions such as religion and education. In this way, average people learn the values, beliefs, and norms of the privileged group and accept the dominant group’s beliefs, self-interests, power, and advantage. The status of the privileged will likely be secure. In many school districts, for instance, schools that serve lower-class children teach obedience to authority, punctuality, and respect for superiors—behaviors that make for good laborers and compliant workers. The children of the affluent, meanwhile, are more likely to attend schools stressing divergent thinking, creativity, and leadership, attributes that prepare them to occupy the most professional, prestigious, and highly rewarded positions in society. Conflict theorists point to this control of the education process by those with privilege as part of the overall pattern by which the society benefits the rich.
Conflict theory can also help us understand global dynamics. Many poor nations feel that the global system protects the self-interests of the richest nations and that those rich nations impose their own culture, including their ideas about economics, politics, and religion, on the poorer nations of the Global South. Some scholars believe there is great richness in local customs that is lost when homogenized by cultural domination of the powerful nations (Eitzen and Zinn 2012; Ritzer and Dean 2014).
Conflict theory is useful for analyzing the relationships between societies (at a macro level) and between subcultures (at a meso level) within complex societies. It also helps illuminate tensions in a society when local (micro-level) cultural values clash with national (macro-level) trends. Conflict theory is not as successful, however, in explaining simple, well-integrated societies in which change is slow to come about and cooperation is an organizing principle.
Actually, conflict may contribute to a smoother-running society in the long run. German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and American sociologist Lewis Coser (1913–2003) blended insights from functional and conflict perspectives, insisting that conflict sometimes serves a positive purpose. One example is that it can alert societal leaders to problem areas that need attention; conflict can also serve to bond people together in opposition to others. Both scholars agree that some degree of conflict is essential for any group to be viable—which is a pretty strong statement about how important conflict is (Coser, 1956; Simmel 1904, 1955).
Middle-Range Theories
The perspectives just discussed are comprehensive and cover a wide scope. They are paradigms that explain much behavior and many social patterns, but they are hard to test. Middle-range theories of culture bridge the gap between empirical data and abstract or broad general paradigms. R. K. Merton (1968) coined the term and argued that middle-range theories could be used to break down abstract theories into smaller parts to test, thus providing data that could be generalized to a large group.
For example, Pettigrew, Tropp, Wagner, and Christ (2011) examined more than 500 studies that tested the intergroup contact hypothesis, a middle-range theory that maintains that intergroup contact, under appropriate conditions, can reduce prejudice. Through looking at the results of the 500-plus studies, Pettigrew showed that the positive effects of such intergroup contact are universal—across racial, ethnic, national, age, and gender groups.
Fit Between Hardware and Software
Computer software cannot work with incompatible machines. Some documents cannot be easily transferred to a different piece of hardware, although sometimes a transfer can be accomplished with significant modification in the formatting of the document. The same is true with the hardware of society and the software of culture. For instance, consider the size of families: The value (software) of having a large extended family, typical in agricultural societies, does not work well in the structure (hardware) of industrial and postindustrial societies that are mostly urban and crowded. Children in urban settings are generally a liability compared with those who work on the farm in agricultural societies. In short, there are limits to what can be transferred from one type of society to another, and the change or “formatting” may mean the new beliefs transferred to a different social setting are barely recognizable.
Attempts to transport U.S.-style “software” (culture)—individualism, capitalism, freedom of religion, and democracy—to other parts of the world illustrate that these ideas are not always successful in other settings. The hardware of societies may be able to handle more than one type of software or set of beliefs, but there are limits to the adaptability. Thus, we should not be surprised when ideas from one society are transformed into something different when they are imported to another society. If we are to understand the world in which we live and if we want to improve it, we must first fully understand other societies and cultures.
Thinking Sociologically
Team sports are a core component of most societies. How does participating in team sports help prepare people to successfully navigate life in the United States? In other societies? For example, what lessons learned through playing on an organized team might be relevant to life in the competitive business world or in a cooperative, noncompetitive society?
Because there is such variation among societies and cultures in what they see as normal, how do we learn our particular society’s expectations? The answer is addressed in the next chapter. Each society relies on the process of socialization to teach the culture to its members, especially new members, such as babies and immigrants. Humans go through a lifelong process of socialization to learn social and cultural expectations. The next chapter discusses the ways in which we learn our culture and become members of society.
What Have We Learned?
Individuals and small groups cannot live without the support of a larger society, the hardware of the social world. Without the software—culture—there could be no society, for there would be no norms to guide our interactions with others in society. Humans are inherently social and learn their culture from others. Furthermore, as society has evolved into more complex and multilevel social systems, humans have learned to live in and negotiate conflicts among multiple cultures, including those at micro (microcultures), meso (subcultures), and macro (societal and global cultures) levels. Life in an information age society demands adaptability to different sociocultural contexts and tolerance of different cultures and subcultures. This is a challenge to a species that has always had tendencies toward ethnocentrism.
Key Points
Society refers to an organized and interdependent group of individuals who live together in a specific geographic area, interact with each other more than with outsiders, cooperate to attain goals, and share a common culture over time. Each society has a culture, the way of life shared by a group of people, including ideas and “things” that are passed on from one generation to the next; the culture has both material and nonmaterial components.
Societies evolve from very simple to more complex, from the simple hunter-gatherer society to the information societies of the postindustrial world.
The study of culture requires that we try to avoid ethnocentrism (judging other cultures by the standards of our own culture). Instead, we should use the view of cultural relativism, so that we can understand culture from the standpoint of those inside it.
Just as social units exist at various levels of our social world, from small groups to global systems, cultures exist within different levels of the social system—microcultures,
