You are part of a complex society. The company is the interconnection between individuals, which depend on each other in the execution of their duties. In this definition, the relationships established between them are valid, such as coexistence and the way in which they demonstrate their ideas, needs, feelings, dreams, interests.
Society is a part of the totality of human social life, in which factors of heredity influence as much as cultural elements (knowledge, scientific techniques, beliefs, ethical and metaphysical systems) and forms of aesthetic expression – provided by the environment.
Social workers with knowledge are those who really make a difference in society. They think about the information they receive, even if it is related to their culture, adapt it to their needs and transform it when they pass it on to other people.
This is how we participate in society, allowing the interrelation between the parts (functions) to constitute and maintain the functioning (transformation) of the whole (system).
In sociology , a society is the group of people subject to a social organization, laws and regulatory institutions in the lives of individuals, and who favor mutual relations and interaction, thus constituting a community.
Society concept for the classics
Emile Durkheim
For Émile Durkheim , the individual, at birth, would be subject to a series of social rules and customs which he should follow, under penalty of sanction or punishment in case of disobedience. Thus, the Durkheimian theory affirms the prevalence of society, of the collectivity, over the individual.
Such beliefs were based on the verification of the existence of institutions that held control over individual wills, starting to impose certain behaviors and to prohibit others, in order to create a space of human sociability. In this sense, the institutions manifested themselves through social facts , common to the various forms of organization of human communities and their values.
Institutions such as family and religion were identifiable in human societies, which revealed the existence of a hierarchical order and defined rules of collective coexistence, which are external to individuals and exercise a certain coercivity that extends to the whole of society, elements that make up the social fact.
Karl Marx
For Karl Marx , it was men in “flesh and blood”, materials, that evolved as they sought survival and improved the material conditions of existence. Therefore, it was essential that these men lived together, that is, in society. After all, it was exactly this collective life that would guarantee them better conditions.
However, in the process of constituting companies, economic exploitation also emerged. This could be visualized in society through the understanding of the existence of classes .
The working class was subjected to exploitation by means of political-institutional means of coercion. But the primary basis for this exploitation was found in the private ownership of the means of production. It was in this materiality of life and the contradictions inherent in social organization that humanity’s evolution took place.
Max Weber
Max Weber relativized the class struggle identified by Marx in social unrest. Thus, even if the historical context was common, the Weberian proposal for understanding society was a reading linked to its formation in the academic career.
Weber developed a comprehensive proposal from society that presupposed that socially shared values were the foundation of bonds even before the existence of a mode of production, this being a material expression of the universe of ideas shared among the members of a given society.
Weberian thought presents cultural events as singularities that must be studied as such, and it is not appropriate to place comprehensive statements that go beyond certain historical frameworks. Thus, the social scientist must be careful not to make his judgments about a certain object of study as true, since his judgments are marked by considerations of value of his time, of a certain ideology.
It is up to the social scientist to understand social events, not to judge them. Hence the importance of, even in social studies, making clear the point of view assumed in relation to an object of study, externalizing the given guidance. After all, it is not possible to affirm laws that govern society and that are timeless.
In this sense, Weber denies that social science can reduce empirical reality to laws. What gives an objective character to the study of society is the understanding, based on the understanding of the stated values and their systematization, a methodical study, of historical singularities.
