Evaluate the role of an individual in the development of any society (essay)

Evaluate the role of an individual in the development of any society

Today, the world Is full of many different societies. However, there was a time when human societies were brand new. In this lesson, we'll talk about the development of society, and explore how early people learned to define themselves.

Early Human Societies

Imagine you are going to throw a party with some friends, and you're to first to arrive. You’ve got some decisions to make. Do you want to put up decorations? What kind of music will you play? What kind of food will you have? By the way, make sure you have food. Don't be that person who throws a party without food.
My point is that being first means having to figure out how to do things all on your own. Now imagine being the first person to have ever lived somewhere. Yeah, now you really have a lot of decisions to make. How do you live? How many people live with you? What do you do in your free time?
Modem humans, homo sapiens, evolved roughly 200,000 years ago and began spreading across the world. Across time, various groups developed their own ways of doing things, like creating their own cultures, or sets of productions, beliefs, and behaviors. People of the same culture composed societies, or communities who saw themselves as belonging together. Yeah, early people had a lot of decisions to make, but that's what happens when you're the first to arrive.

Social Divisions

Let's take a look at some of the basic ways that people started to define themselves, and started creating early societies. Most early human groups were relatively small, and travelled consistently. As they started to develop unique cultures, they found ways to distinguish themselves from other groups and began to define the places of every individual within their own group. This is one of the first steps to defining a society. Now, some groups were egalitarian, in which everyone was completely equal, but many found It was useful to put someone in charge. This led to a system of social stratification. In which people had different roles in society. Compared to later societies, early humans had pretty low levels of separation, but they were there.
So, how did people differentiate themselves? One common way was through gender. Men and women often had different tasks, although it's actually undear in the archaeological record just how common this was in the early world. Another form of division was based on skill sets. Have you ever made a stone tool? I have - it’s really hard, and it takes lots of time. So, rather than having the entire group make tools, one or two people may spedalize in that skill, while others hunted or gathered food.

Cultural Divisions

So, if social divisions helped define the roles of people within a society, what defined societies from each other? Well, as time passed, each human group developed their own unique sets of beliefs, customs, rituals, and attitudes, which we collectively call their culture. Understanding a society’s culture was a sign of belonging to that society. Some of the early cultural divisions indude things like different spoken languages and different religious beliefs, so we’re not talking about subtle differences here. Cultural divisions could absolutely define people and their sodeties. Just think about how hard it would be for you to move into another culture, one that speaks another language and does things differently. Early humans may have lived in smaller societies, but were anatomically just like us, just as capable of creating complex cultures, and they did!
Role set is the term used to describe the variety of roles and relationships you have as a result of your status in society. For instance, a high school student interacts with a variety of different people as he goes through the school year, including teachers, guidance counselors, the principal and administration, and his peers. His role set Includes the different behaviors, or roles, he uses to meet the demands of this one social status of 'student.'
Everyone has a status set, or a combination of many social statuses. Social statuses include our gender, occupation, ethnic group, volunteer associations, and hobbies. We can either choose to associate ourselves with a status (an achieved status), such as an occupation, or we are bom into one (an ascribed status), such as our ethnicity. So one person may have a status set that includes being a woman, a sales professional, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a person with a Latina heritage, and a volunteer tutor.
Roles are the way that statuses get expressed. For instance, a person whose status in society is 'high school student' will behave in particular ways. This behavior is the 'role' the student is playing.
Likewise, a 'sales professional' will behave in a certain way, and a 'volunteer tutori in still another way. Each social status can be expressed through the roles we act out.

Merton's Analysis

Think about just one social status that applies to you now or in the past. For instance, this could be the job you do, or your status as a student. Now think of the different people you interact with while you are playing out the related roles of this status. For instance, for your occupation, you may interact with your manager, your customers, other businesses, your coworkers, your human resources department, and others. Now think about each of the people you interact with, and consider that they all have a complex set of roles they play in society as well, through their own social statuses, such as occupation. Now imagine a whole country, or even the whole world filled with individuals acting out their roles with one another. Society starts to look pretty complicated.
Sociologists, such as Merton, are interested in how society functions and maintains itself with such complicated interactions happening every day. Why don’t we come apart at the seams? What holds things together and ensures that we don't constantly wake up in the morning overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of so many people interacting with one another in their different role sets?
After defining role set as a concept, Merton's next step was to discuss the social mechanisms of role sets that help answer the question of how society functions. Social mechanisms are the ways that people, activities, and other building blocks of society interact. Social mechanisms include particular ways that people relate to one another, the tendencies we notice about our society, and the sequence in which things typically take place. He looked at social mechanisms as a way of better understanding the glue that holds society together.
Merton pointed out that one social mechanism that comes into play to hold society together is that some of the statuses we have may be more scrutinized than others. If all of our statuses were under a microscope and were equally important all of the time, it would be very difficult for us to act out our role set. Thankfully, not all statuses are equally important. Their importance is relative, with some more important and some less important. The part-time volunteer work a person does on the weekends, for instance, does not demand the same attention as a full-time job. You can prioritize the more important status as appropriate which helps simplify things for you and for society.