II

THE MAJOR POINTS OF REFERENCE

AND STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS OF
THE SOCIAL SYSTEM

AS WE have seen in the preceding chapter, a social system is a mode of organization of

action elements relative to the persistence or ordered processes of change of the
interactive patterns of a plurality of individual actors. Regardless of the enormous
variability in degrees of stability and structural integration of these interaction patterns, of
their static character or involvement in processes of structural development or change, it
is necessary for the present type of theoretical analysis to develop a scheme for the
explicit analysis of the structure of such systems. This scheme must provide a
fundamental set of points of reference for the analysis of motivational processes.
In the preceding chapter we outlined the general character of systems of action and
their major components. Now we must undertake the specific spelling out of the theory of
action in relation to social systems as such. The present chapter will focus on the general
problems of the constitution of social systems and the bases of their structure, while those
which follow it will deal with the problems of structural differentiation and variability.
First a word should be said about the units of social systems. In the most elementary
sense the unit is the act. This is of course true, as was shown in the last chapter, of any
system of action. The act then becomes a unit in a social system so far as it is part of a
process of interaction between its author and other actors.
Secondly, for most purposes of the more macroscopic analysis of social systems,
however, it is convenient to make use of a higher order unit than the act, namely the
status-role as it will here be called. Since a social system is a system of processes of
interaction between actors, it is the structure of the relations between the actors as
involved in the interactive process which is essentially the structure of the social system.
The system is a network of such relationships.
Each individual actor is involved in a plurality of such interactive relationships each
with one or more partners in the complementary role. Hence it is the participation of an
actor in a patterned interactive relationship which is for many purposes the most
significant unit of the social system.
This participation in turn has two principal aspects. On the one hand there is the
positional aspect—that of where the actor in question is “located” in the social system
relative to other actors. This is what we will call his status, which is his place in the
 The social system 16

relationship system considered as a structure, that is a patterned system of parts. On the

other hand there is the processual aspect, that of what the actor does in his relations with
others seen in the context of its functional significance for the social system. It is this
which we shall call his role.
The distinction between status and role is at the root very closely related to that
between the two reciprocal perspectives inherent in interaction. On the one hand each
actor is an object of orientation for otlier actors (and for himself). In so far as this object-
significance derives from his position in the social relationship system, it is a status
significance. On the other hand each actor is oriented to other actors. In this capacity he is
acting, not serving as an object—this is what we mean by his playing a role.
It should be made quite clear that statuses and roles, or the status-role bundle, are not
in general attributes of the actor, but are units of the social system, though having a given
status may sometimes be treated as an attribute. But the status-role is analogous to the
particle of mechanics, not to mass or velocity.
Third, a word should be said about the sense in which the actor himself is a unit of the
social system. As a point of reference, as he who holds a status or performs a role, the
individual actor is always a significant unit which, however, for purposes of the analysis
of social systems is to be treated as a higher order unit than the statusrole. The actor in
this sense is a composite bundle of statuses and roles. But this social actor must be
distinguished from the personality as itself a system of action. This distinction derives
from the mutual irreducibility of personality and social systems as discussed in the last
chapter.
We have, then, three different units of social systems referable to the individual actor
ranging from the most elementary to the most composite. The first is the social act,
performed by an actor and oriented to one or more actors as objects. The second is the
status-role as the organized sub-system of acts of the actor or actors occupying given
reciprocal statuses and acting toward each other in terms of given reciprocal orientations.
The third is the actor himself as a social unit, the organized system of all the statuses and
roles referable to him as a social object and as the “author” of a system of role-activities.
Finally, cutting across the individual actor as a composite unit is the collectivity as
actor and as object. Here the particular sectors of the action-systems of the relevant
individual actors are abstracted from their other status-roles and treated together. Part of
the significance of the status-role as a unit derives from the fact that it is the unit which is
a unit both for the action system of the individual and for that of the collectivity. It thus
serves to articulate the two cross-cutting modes of organization of social systems.
It is naturally extremely important to be clear which of these four units is meant when
a social structure is broken down into units.

§ THE FUNCTIONAL PREREQUISITES OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS1

INTERACTIVE relationships analyzed in terms of statuses and roles occur as we have

seen in systems. If such a system is to
1
On the general problem of functional prerequisites of the social systern see Aberle, Cohen, Davis,
Levy, Sutton, “The Functional Prerequisites of a Society,” Ethics, IX (January, 1950), 100–111.
The present treatment is indebted to their paper but departs from it rather radically.