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Social structure   /sˈoʊʃəl strˈəktʃər/   Listen
Social structure

noun
1.
The people in a society considered as a system organized by a characteristic pattern of relationships.  Synonyms: social organisation, social organization, social system, structure.  "Sociologists have studied the changing structure of the family"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Social structure" Quotes from Famous Books



... largely desert country with intensive agriculture in irrigated oases and large gas and oil resources. One-half of its irrigated land is planted in cotton, making it the world's tenth-largest producer. With an authoritarian ex-Communist regime in power and a tribally based social structure, Turkmenistan has taken a cautious approach to economic reform, hoping to use gas and cotton sales to sustain its inefficient economy. Privatization goals remain limited. In 1998-2003, Turkmenistan suffered from the continued lack of adequate export routes for natural gas and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... their being, and submission to parental authority are inculcated equally by the morals and the laws of France. The conseilles de famille is a beautiful and wise provision of the national code, and aids greatly in maintaining that system of patriarchal rule which lies at the foundation of the whole social structure. Alas! in the case of the excellent Adrienne, this conseille de famille was easily assembled, and possessed perfect unanimity. The wars, the guillotine and exile had reduced it to two, one of which was despotic in her government, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... whenever any corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties but by a panic and a ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... for gas deliveries contributed to a sharp fall in industrial production and caused the budget to shift from a surplus to a slight deficit. Furthermore, with an authoritarian ex-Communist regime in power and a tribally-based social structure, Turkmenistan has taken a cautious approach to economic reform, hoping to use gas and cotton sales to sustain its inefficient economy. With the onset of economic hard times, even cautious moves toward economic restructuring and privatization have slowed down. For 1995, Turkmenistan will ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... proved necessary, for the Jesuits expressed themselves ready and willing to comply with the order, and, having obeyed it, they were escorted to Buenos Aires. From thence they were sent by ship to Europe, and the great social structure they had erected fell forthwith to ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material matters. A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing through the streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's massed walls of bayonets, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... without united history, without national traditions of civilization and culture, and it was committed to the untried idea of democracy. It was founded in a new faith; yet at the moment that it proclaimed the equality of men, its own social structure and habit north and south contradicted the declaration, not merely by the fact of slavery, but by the life of its classes. The south long remained oligarchic; in the north aristocracy slowly melted away. The coincidence of an economic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Greek influence had acquired one-fifth of the total area of the land, and were completely in the hands of the Greek clergy (Law of December 13, 1863). More important still, as affecting fundamentally the social structure of the country, was the Rural Law (promulgated on August 26, 1864), which had been the cause of the conflict between Cuza and the various political factions, the Liberals clamouring for more thorough reforms, the Conservatives denouncing Cuza's project ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... religion.—All these causes, each added to the other, or each limited by the other, contribute together to form a total result, namely society. Simple or complex, stable or unstable, barbarous or civilized, this society contains within itself its explanations of its being. Strange as a social structure may be, it can be explained; also its institutions, however contradictory. Neither prosperity, nor decline, nor despotism, nor freedom, is the result of a throw of the dice, of luck or an unexpected ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... conditions, and the preservation of the lives of children that formerly died by thousands from preventable causes, the physique, especially of women, is wonderfully improved, and the average longevity is already over sixty. "Our social structure, to be brief, is based on science, or the conservation of energy, as the Greek philosophers predicted. It was known to them that a certain amount of power would produce only a certain amount of work—that is, the weight of a clock in descending or a spring in uncoiling ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... return to their quarters for afternoon tea, so to speak, and win it back again from them: a course pursued later on with brilliant success at Marengo. On the whole, with his foe handicapped by Austrian statesmanship, classic generalship, and the exigencies of the aristocratic social structure of Viennese society, Napoleon finds it possible to be irresistible without working heroic miracles. The world, however, likes miracles and heroes, and is quite incapable of conceiving the action of such forces as academic militarism or Viennese drawing-roomism. Hence it ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw

... of rooms, decorated in a style that already appeared over-charged to the more fastidious taste of the day. Odo's curiosity centred chiefly in the persons peopling this scene, whose conflicting interests and passions formed, as it were, the framework of the social structure of Pianura, so that there was not a labourer in the mulberry-orchards or a weaver in the silk-looms but depended for his crust of black bread and the leaking roof over his head on the private whim of some member ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... the title of women of the lower middle classes, while plain working women are called simply Vrouw. Mevrouw is the title of women of the better classes. And so it is in the Netherlands till to-day: The social structure is a series of classes, graduated in an ascending scale. Single ladies are also called Juffrouw, so that Juffrouw may mean either a young lady or a young matron—who need not necessarily be so young. The young Juffrouwen were Walter's sisters, who had learned how to dance. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... with Augustine, was of the same mind with him on this question of prostitution. He maintained the sinfulness of fornication but he accepted the necessity of prostitution as a beneficial part of the social structure, comparing it to the sewers which keep a palace pure.[195] "Prostitution in towns is like the sewer in a palace; take away the sewers and the palace becomes an impure and stinking place." Liguori, the most influential ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... spiritual regeneration of the individual. But such could only become a reality as it transformed the entire fabric of life. (1) Christ's teaching could not but affect the organisation of industry as well as every other section of the social structure. Though Jesus has many warnings as to the perils of riches, there is no depreciation of wealth (in its truest sense). It is true He refuses to interfere in a dispute between two brothers as to worldly property, and repudiates ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... form of the question must be denied. It is not a movement for a change of masters. To regard this struggle of the classes as one of revenge, of exploited masses ready to overturn the social structure that they may become exploiters instead of exploited, is to misread the whole movement. The political and economic conquest of society by the working class means the end of class divisions once and forever. A social democracy, a society in which all things ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... outside the range of these essays, and I am not competent to deal with evidence that is purely archaeological. But in general I imagine the Cretan religion to be a development from the religion described in my first essay, affected both by the change in social structure from village to sea-empire and by foreign, especially Egyptian, influences. No doubt the Achaean gods were influenced on their side by Cretan conceptions, though perhaps not so much as Ionia was. Cf. the Cretan ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... back its origin to a "hero", and these "heroes" were children of the gods, and deities themselves. Thus were the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders of society; from them was derived, even physically, the unit of the family and the race; and the whole social structure raised upon that natural basis was necessarily penetrated through and through by the spirit ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There is no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, no legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social structure of leisure, power and State responsibility which in the old European theory of Society was supposed to give significance to the whole. The American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does not correspond to an entire European community at all, but only to the middle ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... between these there were series of people, whom I tacitly delegated to make the ascent for me, passing the groups bargaining at the stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I think of is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though there are places on the East River where we ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... subsequent conquests or domestic revolutions, it would be well to glance at the political and social structure of the State, as it was two hundred years before the Christian era, and also at the progress which had been ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... instinct, and the conservative doctrine which is its consequence, are strengthened by superstition. If the social structure, including the whole body of customs and opinions, is ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury

... You, Liuba, will find in them real friends, who will help you on your radiant path; while you—comrades, Liza, Nadya, Sasha and Rachel—you will regard as elder sisters a being who has just struggled out of that horrible darkness into which the social structure places the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... supplanting native humanity as the plant was supplanting the native products of the soil. And with them and the new king were due in time a train of evils to that native humanity, creating disaffection, dividing households against themselves, and threatening with ruin the lordly social structure itself. ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.

... required to see that no society could protect itself against the depredations of the lawless under such a system of non-resistance; and we may be sure that Jesus had no intention of tearing down the social structure or destroying vested rights. Those who demand a literal construction of the parable of Dives and Lazarus must look for it in the Bowery melodrama, wherein the wealthy only are vicious and ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... with the middle states, while the southern portion came into increasingly intimate connection with the south. Nevertheless, it would be a radical mistake not to deal with the west as a separate region, for, with all these differences within itself, it possessed a fundamental unity in its social structure and its democratic ideals, and at times, in no uncertain way, it showed a consciousness of its ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... influence brought to bear upon all classes and conditions so that the conscience and the intellect may both be quickened to perceive and redress the wrongs, with their consequent sufferings, which inhere in the social structure. The moral sentiment must go into harness and be thoroughly trained in order to do its work effectually. The corruptions of to-day are the legitimate results of the want of woman's influence in the formation of public ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... European stocks had been acquired by conquest. Canada held some sixty or seventy thousand settlers, French and Catholic almost to a man. Despite the inefficiency of French colonial methods the plantation had taken firm root. The colony had developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality all its own. Along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the settlements lay close and compact; the habitants' whitewashed cottages lined the river banks only a few arpents apart. The social cohesion of the colony ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... that Confucianism, and all the political and social habits of thought which are the outcome of Confucianism, have "become ingrained in every fibre of the national life," and that they constitute the "fundamental cause of the longevity of China's social structure and of the innate strength of her civilisation." He refuses to believe that Young China, which is imbued with "a doctrinaire spirit of political speculation," though it may tinker with the superstructure, will be able seriously to shake the foundations of this hoary edifice. He has watched ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural order of things the strength of the Federalist party was in New England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure—owing to the system of slavery—was intensely aristocratic. The war of 1812 with England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention of 1814 was ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers



Words linked to "Social structure" :   pluralism, matriarchy, patriarchate, society, matriarchate, separatism, feudal system, political system, meritocracy, social system, social organization, segregation, form of government, system, scheme, feudalism, patriarchy, class structure



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