History of societies provides us with a picture of evolved and relatively stable differences, oppositions, and other forms of interdependencies between social categories by which human beings are considered united into homogeneous classes. Such categories—nations, social classes, gender groups, age cohorts, professional guilds, or castes—are all semiotic management devices of the process of regulating social orders. Social classes are results of semiotic distinctions—partitions of the heterogeneous class of human beings into homogeneous groups. Thus, the traditional Marxist distinction of classes by the criterion of their relationship with the means of production (the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the intelligentsia) treats all the classes as unified by that criterion. Likewise, the feminist distinction of human beings into males (or “oppressors”) and females (or “victims”) assumes a value-laden contrast of homogeneous classes. The usual distinction of classes in the social sciences—combining educational level, occupation, and income (Hollingshead SES index) creates the distinction of higher, middle, and lower classes along similar lines. In this chapter, we could see how human beings—from birth to death (and ostensibly after that—in the beliefs of the lining in the “other lives” of the dead) are operating “under the influence”—of the highly heterogeneous and redundantly semiotically encoded field of social suggestions. The social structure of communication channels—some explicit, some promoted, and others silenced—regulates most of the societal integration of persons.

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Social Structures and Their Differentiation

  • Jaan Valsiner

摘要

History of societies provides us with a picture of evolved and relatively stable differences, oppositions, and other forms of interdependencies between social categories by which human beings are considered united into homogeneous classes. Such categories—nations, social classes, gender groups, age cohorts, professional guilds, or castes—are all semiotic management devices of the process of regulating social orders. Social classes are results of semiotic distinctions—partitions of the heterogeneous class of human beings into homogeneous groups. Thus, the traditional Marxist distinction of classes by the criterion of their relationship with the means of production (the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the intelligentsia) treats all the classes as unified by that criterion. Likewise, the feminist distinction of human beings into males (or “oppressors”) and females (or “victims”) assumes a value-laden contrast of homogeneous classes. The usual distinction of classes in the social sciences—combining educational level, occupation, and income (Hollingshead SES index) creates the distinction of higher, middle, and lower classes along similar lines. In this chapter, we could see how human beings—from birth to death (and ostensibly after that—in the beliefs of the lining in the “other lives” of the dead) are operating “under the influence”—of the highly heterogeneous and redundantly semiotically encoded field of social suggestions. The social structure of communication channels—some explicit, some promoted, and others silenced—regulates most of the societal integration of persons.