If we substitute the static notion of "Structure" that underlies social relations and organization, by the more active and dynamic notion of construction, we bring back to society the many implications of its social history, its praxis, practice, performance and process. Construction relocates the relevant structure of the conjunction in the surface patterning rather than in its depths and resituates human action and transaction in regard to human interest, involvement, intentionality, and its counterfactual accounting of unintended consequences.

We are left with a stage set by individual actors, each guided by tradition-bound scripts that are improvised modified to fit the uncontrolled dynamics of human dialectics and social relations. Social relations are marked by a contradiction between reciprocity and asymmetry of action. Social patterning, social relations, organizations and stratification, are largely determined by processes of social production, power and resource distribution. Social process is in a sense always in the present moment of action. It is contemporaneous without a deep sense of history. It is both the beginning and the end of the circle of the construction of reality, where the actual act of construction takes place.

Social relations describe the character and volume and differences in social interactions and transactions that occur at any given moment. In social relations, we can distinguish analytically between the processes of social organization and transmission--the former being seen synchronically over space, the latter diachronically through time. Issues of social complexity, circumscription and stratification are important considerations in the calculus of social process. Cultural and social processes are also dialectical--secondary social processes surround, reinforce and cause change in basic cultural orientations. Part of what is socially transmitted is cultural. On the other hand, cultural boundaries mark the pathways along which social relations are possible or probable, and help to define the character and nature of these relations.

Social relations have been a central determinant in the anthropological construction of reality. These relations have largely driven historical changes in social patterning, organization and structure. This is primarily so because social relations govern and predetermine the distribution between people and their resources. This constitutes the basis for power in society, and social relations constitute the social transfer and transmission of this power as well. It is in this regard that the discussion of social mobility and mobilization becomes important, as a sense of movement within social relations--a movement of people, statuses and resources.

Social processes have been throughout history as destructive as they have been constructive, as competitive as they are cooperative. Social integration has only been accomplished through increasing stratification and status-role specialization within societies, and the centralization and augmentation of destructive forces has only been increased as a result of this integration.

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It is difficult to know if the appropriate way of studying cultural process is analytically through nomothetic use of statistics and analysis of social status and roles, or else through the use of biography and corporate institutional history that will secure a greater sense of depth and understanding of the background causes which set the stage for social action. A science rooted in comparison must be based upon interpersonal differences of status, role, resource, power, etc., but any such comparison is bound to be limited and shallow if it fails to take into account the psycho-social factors involved in the phenomenology of human interest and involvement. Psychological and individual identity and power are inseparable from social identity and power. Each lends legitimacy and efficacy to the other.

When we refer to "status-role identity" we must understand how this secondary form of identification is vital to the adaptive functioning and health of the individual in the world. The human is by definition a social being who exists in the world of other humans. Who a person is and how that person adjusts is largely dependent upon the socially defined and constrained role that that person acquires in the world. Human well being is only possible in relation to the social processes of production, performance and practice.

Thus there is a place for nomothetic statistical comparisons in the study of society and social relations, but there is also a great need for a phenomenological inquiry into the subjectively constituted idiographic dimensions of social process. We properly refer to a structure of the conjunction that occurs at the critical moment in time and space, that we understand as a social event, or episode, or state of affairs, or moment of action. We can see society as an interlocked web of series of events or states marked by transitions.

It is a wonder why, in our theories about our social order, we are quick to explain social relations and organization as the result of basic forces, but we are reluctant to confer upon social process the causal primacy that may account for society and its many forces. In a sense, we need to turn Hegel, Marx and Freud inside-out and understand that social relations are not constrained by a material, sub-structural base, so much as they constrain the construction of such a basis in the world. Aggression, male-domination and a "cult of male superiority" may not account for social gender stratification so much as be accounted for by it. Social relations permit and constrain the limits and variability of personal actions.

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Human relation, or what might be called human social relatedness, have not only changed in time, but they have evolved. Social relations and human sociability has an intrinsic character and coherence about them. They entail transmission and communication which entails the disambiguation of internal contradiction or external conflict. Their character is fundamentally different in the world today from what they had been in the age of Rome, or in the time before human history. If today we speak of the modern isolation and alienation of the liberated ego, we can refer to ego-less, totally dehumanized identity of the slave in the time of Caesar who nevertheless occupied a place in the classical cosmos.

In this regard we can refer to the relative "social world" and social worldview in which social relations are situated at any particular period or place, and to the inherent social relativity which characterizes the situations of people in the world. We are born into a particular time and place, into a web of relations and sphere of social action that we cannot escape. Though we will make many transitions in the course of our life-time, we will always be surrounded by and engulfed within a sea of humanity. The situation of one person at one point in time and place, is quite unlike that of another person at some other point.

The paradox of this is that our only standards of measurement and identity in the social world are based upon the comparison of only superficially comparable, or else incommensurable realities. Though we have no real basis in the judgment of others, we must act on the basis of such judgments. Though we may refrain from such judgment or withhold it in our relations with others, we are nevertheless constrained indirectly by society in our capacity to make such judgments. We have no choice but to adopt the standards and constraints of our society if we are to manage within it at all.

Thus we are all constrained and ultimately determined by our social world and our positions within it. Whatever we may choose to do or to believe in, the consequences of such choices will be weighed in terms of the social world. We can act to change our positions, and our social world, in accordance with our wishes or expectations, but even these actions are ultimately constrained and severely limited within the social world, and were only made possible in the first place by the room that we were provided within it.

I will call "sociality" the net measure of any person's place within a social world, as a nodal point in a nexus of relations, and as "societas" the net measure of the total field of social relations at any moment in place and time. It is expected that though both of these measures would show much turbulence in the local context, but in the structure of the long run they should demonstrate a dynamic stability upon some level of "criticality" which is related to the self-organizational character of the total field of social interrelations. Corporate, institutional social organization is itself defined within this larger continuum of societas. The structural character of these institutional forms which organize social relations into enduring patterns are an intrinsic aspect of the self-organization of society which achieves local acceptance states.

It is important in this regard that we seek to get away from a structural model of human society as organized like a pyramid with a base and a superstructure. Such a model has been an implicit and paradigmatic design in a great deal of social theory. The centralization of power and social relations accompanying social integration always occurs within a larger field of social relations. Though there has been an increasing tendency towards higher and more encompassing levels of integration, this process is never complete or comprehensive, and always proves ephemeral and transitory in the long run. It is always subject to the occurrence of critical events that might bring about a dramatic reorganization or else decentralization of the overall order.

There is a sense of indirect social relations, such that the resonance and consequences of social action may be delayed or displaced from the local context of its immediate social situation. We are forced to act within situations without really ever knowing what the net outcome of our involvement will be. Our acts may eventually rebound upon us as their reverberations come full circle to visit upon our doorstep. We can thus define a kind of social horizon based upon the situation of our social actions, one that critically limits our ability to act in a larger context of social significance. This horizon will itself be quite variable for different social actors, with the span encompassed from one or another's position being much more advantageous or of greater social elevation than others.

We can speak in this regard of strategic and tactical positioning of people within the social system, by which people maneuver and manipulate social relations in order to gain ascendancy and advantage within the system of stratification. Such movement itself can either reinforce or else destabilize existing social relations.

If we speak of the changing character of social relations, we can also speak of the changing character of human social identity. The net value and profile of sociality and societas will be distinctive and historically relative. We might refer to the historical dialectics of social identity and difference as being fundamental to the process of change in human social relations. People enact their parts in relation to the relative presence or absence of significant others who in turn react, sometimes unpredictably.

When we refer to the dialectics of identity and difference in social relations, we are necessarily referring to reciprocity and asymmetry in social transaction, and to the institutionalization and secondary legitimization, and internalization of these dialectics in the social construction of reality. Society knows itself in terms of the stratification and organization of diversity that accompanies social integration. We must see in this regard that societas and sociality constitute basic functional models and "maps" of social reality by which we navigate in our world. These models orient us in the social world and provide us a sense of direction within that world. They also provide us with a means of making sense of our own social status as well as the social status of other.

We might refer to "class consciousness" or to "social conscience" as basic dimensions of such models which underlie our interpretation of social experiences and which serve to motivate us in the field of social action. It might be referred to as a critical, if embedded, awareness of our own and other's relative positions in the world, which pre-structure our construction of reality via our social relations. This form of social consciousness can be seen as humanly basic and pervasive in the assessments and interpretations which we bring to our experience, bounded by the horizon of our own situation in the social world.

There is an inherent tendency to defer the social realities of our current situation and to displace the consequences of our own social involvement in such a way as to foster a deceptive illusion of our own legitimacy and moral efficacy in the world, often at the expense of other people. People in positions of authority who are conceded even a modicum of limited power over others, may quickly come to abuse such power in their lording over of their subjects. These social psychological dynamics will tend to be excused or over-looked in our social assessments, or framed within paternalistic terms. Not only will the legitimacy of the underdog in a party of such relations remain fundamentally ignored and implicitly denied, but often such people become the hapless victims blamed for their own victimization. People devise sophisticated strategies and rationales for the justification of their position and behavior within a social world. This is so especially if the basic motivation for such behavior entails uneven advantage at another person's expense. And we can construct external social worlds which will reinforce stratification in such a way that a sense of contradiction and discrepancy between our actions and our basic values arise only under unusual circumstances, if at all.

We can thus speak of our psycho-social conscience as a system for making coherent our world of social relations, and for dispelling and dealing with a sense of contradiction or ambiguity which is bound to be encompassed within such a system. This system is of course bound within a cultural universe, and itself constitutes a constraint upon this universe. This system is social because it is collective and shared by many others within our social world. It is a socially embodied system. Roles and statuses within the system come to acquire a symbolic value and an action potency. It sets the common standards by which we judge people and their actions, and by which we coordinate our own actions and attitudes. Whether or not it is necessarily a vicious circle of deceit or a screen of obfuscation, it nevertheless remains a cybernetic circle of meaning and action in the world.

As reiterated before, though such systems work to eliminate a sense of contradiction or conflict within its social nexus of relations, never are they completely without contradiction or conflict. All social organization entails the incorporation of contradiction and the management of conflicting, schismatic relations.

It can be said that a moral question mark always hangs over the state of affairs of human society, a question rooted in the ethical dilemmas inherent in human relationship, over reciprocity or asymmetry of transaction. This question mark becomes only more critical if more diffuse when it comes to the social institutionalization of corporate organizations. This question-mark about moral legitimacy of human social order always threatens to undermine the basis of human social relations. These questions are tied up not only with the legitimacy of the social world, but of the social world view which we have as well--with questions of its ethical efficacy and philosophical status, with its validity and relevancy in the world. Societies can provide simple "Solutions" to such questions, by effacing all fronts of respectability or of moral goodness--but never can we act in the world free of such questions.

Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.

Last Updated: 03/07/05