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All human societies organize, recognize and classify types of social relationships based on relations between parents, children and other descendants (consanguinity), and relations through marriage . There is also a third type of familial relationship applied to godparents or adoptive children . These culturally defined relationships are ...
Social institution – Any persistent structure or mechanism of social order governing the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community. The term "institution" is commonly applied to customs and behavior patterns important to a society, as well as to particular formal organizations of government and public services.
Basic groups: The smallest possible social group with a defined number of people (i.e. greater than 1)—often associated with family building: Dyad: Will be a group of two people. Social interaction in a dyad is typically more intense than in larger groups as neither member shares the other's attention with anyone else.
Urban sociology involves the analysis of social life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a discipline seeking to provide advice for planning and policy making. After the Industrial Revolution, works such as Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) focused on urbanization and the effect it had on alienation and anonymity.
Explicitly contrasted against a social cohesion based definition for social groups is the social identity perspective, which draws on insights made in social identity theory. [9] Here, rather than defining a social group based on expressions of cohesive social relationships between individuals, the social identity model assumes that ...
Niklas Luhmann was a prominent sociologist and social systems theorist who laid the foundations of modern social system thought. [5] He based his definition of a "social system" on the mass network of communication between people and defined society itself as an "autopoietic" system, meaning a self-referential and self-reliant system that is ...
Most reconstructions of social communities by archaeologists rely on the principle that social interaction in the past was conditioned by physical distance. Therefore, a small village settlement likely constituted a social community and spatial subdivisions of cities and other large settlements may have formed communities.
Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meanings, or purposes. Examples of social structure include family, religion, law, economy, and class. It contrasts with "social system", which refers to the parent structure in which these various structures are embedded.