Theories of social relations seek to provide understanding of what binds people together and organizes us.
- social structure: the forms or patterns of human association that constrain or shape behavior; the whole of human life that cannot be reduced to merely the sum of the parts. There are many different ways of understanding the character of social structure, for example:
- conflict theories understand social structure as a product of inevitable conflict between human groups (e.g., Marxism’s theory of the class struggle).
- systems or functionalist theories (e.g., Durkheim) understand social structure as an organic whole organized functionally so that balance between the different parts is maintained. Because of their emphasis on maintaining wholeness, they are sometimes called consensus theories of society.
- agency: the human capacity for individual action against social constraint.
- social class: a social stratum whose members share similar economic and political characteristics and interests.
- caste: a social group within a society based on distinctions of hereditary rank.
- ethnicity: a social group bound together by a common language or dialect ("accent"), religion, heritage, and/or geographical place. Racial characteristics are often associated with ethnicity, particularly because they are visually easily identifiable, but most sociologists would say that there's no such thing as different "races" of human beings, because we are all too closely related genetically to be grouped into different biological categories; the idea that there are distinct races is generally thought to be the product of a confusion of ethnicity with biological difference.
- social reproduction (contrasted with production or the manufacture of food and goods) is the process by which societies maintain themselves from generation to generation. This process involves things like family structure, peer groups, educational systems, religion, culture and most fundamentally, social identity.