Social Structure, Stratification and Social Processes in Society

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XI (Understanding Society), Chapter 1.

Are you free to choose, or is your path already drawn?

You did not choose the language you first spoke, the kind of school nearby, or whether your family expected you to sit an entrance exam. Yet you feel you make your own choices. This chapter asks how far that feeling is true. How much does your place in society decide what you can do, and how much room do you have to push back? The answer shapes how sociologists explain three everyday things: why people cooperate, why they compete and why they clash.

Social structure: the pattern behind the crowd

Social structure means that society is organised in repeating patterns. People do not behave at random. There are regularities in how they act and in the relationships they have, and these regularities are what we mean by structure.

Giddens compares this to the walls, floor and roof of a building that give it a shape. The textbook then warns that the comparison can mislead. A building is made of fixed bricks, but a society is made of human actions and relationships, and those actions are repeated across time and space. That repetition is what produces a pattern. This is why social reproduction and social structure are closely linked ideas: a structure survives only because people keep re-enacting it.

Think of your school. Admission procedures, a code of conduct, the daily assembly, the annual day and the school song are repeated every year. Students and teachers leave and new ones arrive, but the school carries on. A family works the same way, with its marriage customs, ideas of duty and expectations of who looks after whom. Both also change, because the people inside them bring in new habits and sometimes resist the old ones.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Durkheim stresses constraint, Marx stresses constraint plus agency, and the building is Giddens's image. In reality: Giddens later argued that structure is both the medium and the outcome of what people do. We follow rules, and by following them we keep the rules alive. The chapter's school and family examples fit this idea exactly. Why it matters: it gives you a one-line answer to "constrained or free?": both, at the same time.

Pause and predict: a school replaces its printed notice board with a class WhatsApp group. Has the school's structure disappeared?

Check your answer: No. The medium changed, but the pattern (who announces, who must read and obey, what happens if you ignore it) continues. Structure is a pattern of behaviour, not a particular object. This is also how change enters: people repeat the pattern with small differences.

Social stratification: unequal groups, not unequal individuals

Social stratification is the existence of structured inequalities between groups in access to material or symbolic rewards. Two words in that definition matter. The inequality is between groups, and it is structured, meaning patterned and not random. A topper in a class has more marks than you, but that is not stratification. Stratification is when children from some groups systematically get better schools, health care and jobs than children from others, and the advantage is passed on to the next generation.

Class is the most visible basis in modern societies, but caste, race, region, community, tribe and gender also continue to matter. Members of a superior group usually see to it that their position passes to their children, which is why stratification persists across generations.

Groups can hold three different kinds of advantage. NTA likes to swap their meanings.

Why it matters. Your position in the stratification system decides the choices you have: whether you go to school at all, what you wear and eat, how you spend leisure time, what health care you can reach. Like structure, stratification constrains individual action. The three social processes in this chapter are played out by people who start from very different positions.

Two ways of explaining social processes

Common sense says people compete, cooperate and fight because "that is human nature". Sociology does not accept this as an answer. Common sense is not necessarily false, but it is unexamined and taken for granted. Sociology does not settle for psychological or naturalist explanations. It looks for reasons in the actual social structure: who holds resources, who holds power, what norms apply.

Within sociology, two traditions read the same processes differently.

The functionalist system requirements are three: socialisation of new members, a shared system of communication and methods of assigning individuals to roles. Both Marx and Durkheim agree that humans must cooperate to meet basic needs and to produce and reproduce themselves and their world. They differ on whether that cooperation is harmonious.

For Marx, in simple societies with no surplus, cooperation did not run along class, caste or race lines. Once a surplus is produced, whether in a feudal or capitalist society, a dominant class appropriates it, and cooperation then carries potential conflict and competition.

Cooperation and the division of labour

Without cooperation human life could not survive. Durkheim says the moral force behind it is solidarity, and he argued that wherever there are societies there is altruism because there is solidarity. He rejected the picture of early humans as driven only by hunger and thirst. For him the division of labour both meets society's needs and is a moral rule of conduct.

Durkheim named two forms of solidarity. Both are forms of cooperation, but they bind people in opposite ways.

A memory hook: in a mechanical society everyone is a copy of everyone else, like identical parts. In an organic society people differ, like organs of a body, and need each other. The words feel reversed because "organic" sounds traditional, which is the standard trap.

Marx on cooperation. Marx distinguishes humans from animals by consciousness, which shows itself when they begin to produce their means of subsistence. Humans do not only adjust to their world to cooperate. They also change it. Technology has transformed human life and, in a sense, nature itself. The chapter's language example is that Indians had to adapt to English during colonial rule, and in the process produced Hinglish, a living form of its own.

Marx also argues that, in a class society, cooperation is not voluntary. The collective power that arises from the division of labour appears to individuals as an alien force outside them. This is connected with alienation: workers lose control over how to organise their work and over the fruits of their labour. Compare a potter or weaver who shapes the whole product with a worker whose only task is to press a button all day. Cooperation in the second case is enforced.

Pause and predict: a worker on a packing line does the same single motion 8 hours a day and has no say in the process. Which term fits: alienation or anomie?

Check your answer: Alienation. The worker has lost control over the content of labour and its product. Anomie is about the breakdown of norms, not about loss of control over work.

Competition: natural, or a product of history?

It is easy to assume competition is natural. In today's India, exams like CUET, entrance tests and cut-off lists make it feel like the air we breathe. But the chapter argues that competition is a social entity that became dominant at a particular point in history.

The proof is an anecdote. A teacher working in a remote area of Africa suggested a race where the winner would get a chocolate. The children were not excited but anxious and distressed, because they disliked a game with winners and losers. Their idea of fun was cooperative and collective, so a game that rewards one or a few and excludes the rest did not feel like fun at all.

In the contemporary world, however, competition is the dominant norm and practice. Durkheim noted the growth of individualism and Marx the growth of competition in modern societies, and both are intrinsic to how modern capitalist society works. Capitalism's underlying assumptions are expansion of trade, division of labour, specialisation and rising productivity. Its central theme is rational individuals competing freely in the marketplace, each trying to maximise profit. The ideology of competition says the market ensures efficiency: the most efficient firm survives, and the students with the best marks reach the best colleges and the best jobs. Here "best" means the greatest material rewards.

The catch. This ideology assumes everyone competes on equal terms. But stratification places people differently. If large numbers of children never enrol in school or drop out early, they are out of the competition entirely, and it cannot be called a level race.

Two views. For the exam: competition is a social product that flourished with capitalism, and the claim that it is natural must be questioned. Another reading: economic liberals such as J.S. Mill saw competition as directed at maximum output at minimum cost, even while judging its wider effects to be generally harmful. The sociologist Bottomore points out that we cannot find an exact link between the intensity of competition and the rate of economic growth, and that competition has less welcome effects too.

Pause and predict: the same board exam is taken by a student with a quiet room and tutor, and another who studies by streetlight and shares one phone. Is this competition "fair"? What does the ideology of competition assume?

Check your answer: The ideology assumes all competitors begin from an equal position. Stratification means they do not, so the same marks can reflect very different starting points.

Conflict: visible and hidden

Conflict means a clash of interests. Conflict theorists hold that scarcity of resources makes groups struggle to gain access to and control over them. Its bases can be class, caste, tribe, gender, ethnicity or community, and its scale ranges from clashes between nations to clashes within a household.

A common belief is that conflicts are new. Sociologists point out that conflicts have always existed and only change in form. Social change and the assertion of democratic rights by disadvantaged groups simply make conflict more visible. Srinivas argued that treating conflict as abnormal, or treating equilibrium as a special value, can be a handicap when studying developing societies, because the old order was not conflict-free and imposed hardship on large sections of people.

Conflict appears as an open clash only when it is expressed. A peasant movement is the visible expression of a deep conflict over land. But the absence of a movement does not mean the absence of conflict. This is why the chapter links conflict, involuntary cooperation and resistance.

The family: where conflict hides inside cooperation

The family is traditionally seen as harmonious, ruled by altruism. Feminist analysis over the last decades has questioned this. Amartya Sen noted the possibility of enforced cooperation: the people in a household have much to gain by cooperating, so their activities take an overtly cooperative form even when substantial conflicts of interest exist. Family organisation requires such conflicts to be moulded into a general format of cooperation, with conflict treated as an aberration or deviant behaviour.

Women and natal property. In a study among different sections of society, a significant number of women (41.7 per cent) spoke of a daughter's love when they were asked about their right to property. But they stressed apprehension more than affection. They would not claim a full share, or any share, because they feared souring relations with their brothers and losing the welcome in their natal homes. A woman who demands her share was labelled "hak lene wali", the greedy shrew. Many also wished to remain part of the natal family by contributing to its prosperity or helping in crises.

Two views. For the exam: a functionalist reading calls this accommodation, an effort to compromise and co-exist despite conflict. Another reading: from a conflict and feminist angle the same behaviour is enforced cooperation, produced by norms of socialisation that keep a social order tilted towards one section in place. Both views describe the same behaviour and differ on what it means.

Studies cited in the chapter add more. Women often appear to accept discrimination in how resources are shared in the household, because their material interest in long term security depends on it. In a society with strong son preference, "selfless" devotion to sons can serve as insurance for an uncertain future. Kabeer calls this maternal altruism, seen as a response to patriarchal risk. Women are not powerless, but their resistance is covert: trusted allies to run small businesses, secret lending and borrowing, and negotiating the meaning of purdah and motherhood. The secrecy reflects the lack of options outside the household and the high risk of open conflict.

Land and technology: Oommen's case

The chapter draws on T.K. Oommen's study of the Bhoodan-Gramdan movement. In one case a man had borrowed money against two acres of land. After his death his heir wanted the land back and offered double the sum, but the lender refused. The arrangement was informal and absent from the revenue records, so legal action was not possible. The heir was a police constable and used his influence. The lender was taken to the police station and made to agree, and the land was returned at a village meeting. The lesson is that power and access to resources decide how conflicts end, and that records, position and influence matter more than fairness.

Oommen's second illustration shows how technology shapes the need for cooperation.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: heavier capital and better technology reduce the need for cooperation among households. In reality: the same logic is visible today when a family with its own pump or tractor no longer depends on neighbours at sowing or irrigation time, while those without capital still have to rely on shared arrangements. Why it matters: it shows that cooperation is not simply a moral quality. It depends on the technology and the economic arrangements of production.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Earlier ideas: Understanding Social Institutions and Sociology and Society give the family, stratification and the functionalist and conflict perspectives that this chapter applies.
• Next: Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society takes the idea of structure into villages, cities, change and order.
• Thinkers: Introducing Western Sociologists develops Marx and Durkheim, whose ideas run through this chapter.
• Class XII link: Patterns of Social Inequality and Exclusion builds on stratification in the Indian context.