Social relation can refer to a multitude of social interactions, regulated by social norms, between two or more people, with each having a social position and performing a social role. In sociological hierarchy, social relation is more advanced then behavior, action, social behavior, social action, social contact and social interaction. Social relations form the basis of concepts such as social organisation, social structure, social movement and social system. Social interaction is a dynamic, changing sequence of social actions between individuals (or groups) who modify their actions and reactions due to the actions by their interaction partner(s). ... In sociology, a norm, or social norm, is a pattern of behavior expected within a particular society in a given situation. ... In sociology, social status also known as Social position social status means a position of an individual in a given society and culture. ... A function is part of an answer to a question about why some object or process occurred in a system that evolved or was designed with some goal. ... For the various types of hierarchy, see hierarchy (disambiguation) A hierarchy (in Greek: Ιεραρχία, it is derived from ιερός-hieros, sacred, and άρχω-arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is subordinate to a single other element. ... Behavior or behaviour (see spelling differences) refers to the actions or reactions of an object or organism, usually in relation to the environment. ... In sociology, social action refer to any action that takes into account actions and reactions of another individuals (real or imagined) and is modified based on those events. ... In biology, psychology and sociology social behavior is behavior directed towards, or taking place between, members of the same species. ... In sociology, social action refer to any action that takes into account actions and reactions of another individuals (real or imagined) and is modified based on those events. ... Social contact is a pair of social actions with no further consequence - i. ... Social interaction is a dynamic, changing sequence of social actions between individuals (or groups) who modify their actions and reactions due to the actions by their interaction partner(s). ... Social organization or social institution is a group of social positions, connected by social relations, performing a social role. ... Social structure (also referred to as a social system) is a system of social relations. ... American Civil Rights Movement is one of the most famous social movements of the 20th century. ... Social structure (also referred to as a social system) is a system in which people forming the society are organized by a patterns of prelationships. ...

Specific meaning

Although Harvard University has featured a "Department of Social Relations" (in which Talcott Parsons played a prominent role), and although the term "social relations" is frequently used in social sciences, there is in fact no commonly agreed meaning for this concept (see also the entry social). "Social" connotes association, co-operation, mutual dependence and belonging. Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902-May 8, 1979) was the best-known sociologist in the United States, and one of the best-known in the world for many years. ... // Latin root meaning The term social is derived from the Latin word socius, which as a noun means an associate, ally, companion, business partner or comrade and in the adjectival form socialis refers to a bond between people (such as marriage) or to their collective or connected existence. ...

It could be argued that a social relation is, in the first instance, simply a relation between people, but more specifically

• a relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a group,
• a relation between groups of people, or
• a relation between an individual and a group of people.

The group could be an ethnic or kinship group, a social institution or organisation, a social class or social stratum, a nation, a population, or a gender etc. In metaphysics and statistics, the word individual, while sometimes meaning a person, more typically describes any numerically singular thing. ... // INTRODUCTION In sociology, a group is usually defined as a collection consisting of a number of humans or animals, who share certain aspects, interact with one another, accept rights and obligations as members of the group and share a common identity. ... An ethnic group is a group of people who identify with one another, or are so identified by others, on the basis of a boundary that distinguishes them from other groups. ... Kinship is the most basic principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. ... A social institution is any institution in a socity that works to socialize the groups or people in it. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. ... One of the most influential doctrines in history is that all humans are divided into groups called nations. ... The word gender describes the state of being male, female, or neither. ...

This definition contrasts with the relationship between people and inanimate objects.

Examples

In this sense, a social relation is therefore not necessarily identical with a unique interpersonal relation or a unique individual relation of some type, although all these kinds of relations presuppose each other; a social relation refers precisely to a condition which groups of people have in common or share. This page meets Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ...

For example, the simple statement "Jack and Jill love each other" might refer to a unique interaction between two people, the meaning of which might be difficult to define for an outsider. Yet, Jack and Jill may also be socially related in many different ways, insofar as they both are, as a matter of fact, members of the same or different social groups, and thus their identity is shaped in good part by the fact that they belong to those groups. If we wanted to understand and explain their behaviour, we would need to refer to those social relations. We might establish the milieu they grew up in, their ancestors, the jobs they do, where they lived, who their friends are, and so on, all of which helps explain why they necessarily interact in the way that they do, and not in some other way.

At a higher level of abstraction, we might consider two groups which are socially related, for example, although they live in different places, they depend on each other in trading goods and services.

At an even higher level of abstraction, we might consider the relationship between an individual and the whole of the world population, or the relationship of the world population to itself.

Some might indeed argue that a social relation exists between mortals and God (or the Gods), though others would regard this more as an imaginary relation. In flights of fancy, we could extend the analysis to the relation of all sentient organisms in the universe. Michelangelos depiction of God in the painting Creation of the Sun and Moon in the Sistine Chapel Krishna, the eighth incarnation of Vishnu, one of the manifestations of the ultimate reality or God in Hinduism This article discusses the term God in the context of monotheism and henotheism. ...

Theorists

However, the difficulties only start here, because now it needs to be established how these social relations exist, how we know they exist, what kinds of social relations there are, and how we can find out about them, verify them or identify them. About these questions researchers often disagree and debate, proposing different kinds of methodology to obtain knowledge of social relations. Methodology is a meta-knowledge. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with epistemology. ...

At one end of the spectrum, Karl Marx approvingly quotes Giambattista Vico's argument that humans can understand their society in its totality because "they made it themselves"; the limits to what humans can know are mainly practical in nature. At the other end of the spectrum, Karl Popper rejects the possibility of objective knowledge about society as a whole, suggesting that methodological holism must lead to totalitarianism; progressive social change can only be achieved through the small steps of piecemeal social engineering. Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ... Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist. ... Human relationships within an ethnically diverse society. ... Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, KT, MA, Ph. ... Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) is the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, mental, linguistic, etc. ... Totalitarianism is a typology employed by political scientists, especially those in the field of comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Social engineering has several meanings: Social engineering (political science) Social engineering (computer security) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

Understanding social relations

There are at least three problems in understanding social relations.

• many social relations are not directly observable by an individual, and can only be inferred with the aid of abstractions. This raises the question of how we know they exist, and how they exist.

• reflexivity: in the case of social science, the scientist is in a very obvious way himself or herself part of the social world being studied (this occurs also in natural sciences; not just in the sense that a biologist is also a biological being, but also even in theoretical physics - cf. the reflections of David Bohm).

• animal and insect populations for example also display a kind of "social" behaviour, so that social relations are not necessarily uniquely human relations (cf. the insights of sociobiology), and social relations might exist between humans and animals (though some dispute this; they argue that associative relations are confused here with true social relations; a human being could associate with all sorts of things or organisms, without a social relation being involved).

In physics, particularly in quantum physics, a system observable is a property of the system state that can be determined by some sequence of physical operations. ... An abstraction is an idea, concept, or word which defines the phenomena which make up the concrete events or things which the abstraction refers to, the referents. ... In mathematics, a binary relation R over a set X is reflexive if for all a in X, a is related to itself. ... David Bohm. ... Phyla Subregnum Parazoa Porifera (sponges) Subregnum Agnotozoa Placozoa (trichoplax) Orthonectida (orthonectids) Rhombozoa (dicyemids) Subregnum Eumetazoa Radiata (unranked) (radial symmetry) Ctenophora (comb jellies) Cnidaria (coral, jellyfish, anemones) Bilateria (unranked) (bilateral symmetry) Acoelomorpha (basal) Orthonectida (parasitic to flatworms, echinoderms, etc. ... Classes & Orders See taxonomy Insects are invertebrate animals of the Class Insecta, the largest and (on land) most widely-distributed taxon within the phylum Arthropoda. ... Trinomial name Homo sapiens sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 Humans, or human beings, are animals biologically classified as bipedal primates belonging to the mammalian genus Homo, in particular to its only extant species, Homo sapiens (Latin for wise man or knowing man), under the family Hominidae (the great apes). ... Sociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines that attempts to explain behaviour in all species by considering the evolutionary advantages of social behaviours. ...

Types of social relations

In broad terms, we can distinguish six basic levels of human awareness:

• sub-conscious awareness (studied by e.g. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Milton Erickson).
• conscious subjective awareness (dissociated, focusing inward on the inner world, or expressing an inner state outwards) (studied e.g. in phenomenology and general psychology).
• intersubjective awareness (an awareness which occurs in association with other people and is internal to that association) (studied e.g. in social psychology and sociology).
• objective awareness (dissociated, focusing outward to a world that exists mind-independently, as is developed e.g. in science to a high level).
• reality-transforming awareness (transitions in practical action reframing the boundaries of different forms of awareness and changing consciousness, or connecting different forms of awareness - occurring in work, play, love, activism, politics etc.
• transcendent awareness (going beyond personal knowledge or experience - some would include intuition and spirituality under this heading; it is the subject of much writing in religion and New Age thought).

Corresponding to these levels of human awareness, we could also define different kinds of social relations, i.e. the different ways in which humans might experience the connections among their own kind: Sigmund Freud, around 1921 Sigmund Freud (IPA: []) (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ... Carl Jungs autobiographical work Memories , Dreams and Reflections, Fontana edition Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961) (IPA:) was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. ... Milton Hyland Erickson, MD (1901 - 1980) was a psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis. ... Look up Phenomenology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Psychology (Gk: psyche, soul or mind + logos, speech) is an academic and applied field involving the study of the mind, brain, and behavior, both human and nonhuman. ... Social psychology is often conceived to be the study of how individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others. ... Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... The scope of this article is limited to the empirical sciences. ... In film, reframing is changing the view of a subject. ... Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... A cartoonish version of the heart, a frequent modern symbol of love. ... Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social or political change. ... Politics, sometimes defined as the art and science of government[1], is a process by which collective decisions are made within groups. ... Intuition has many but close meanings across many cultures, including: Quick and ready insight seemingly independent of previous experiences and empirical knowledge Immediate apprehension or cognition Knowledge or conviction gained immediately and without detailed consideration The power or faculty of attaining knowledge or cognition immediately without thought and inference. ... In Hinduism, spiritual goals and personal experience (self-realization) through yoga and meditation are seen as the ultimate way to attain God (Moksha) and are inseparable from the religion. ... New Age describes a broad movement characterized by alternative approaches to traditional Western culture. ...

• subconscious social relations (for example at the level of the collective unconscious or between parents and children,
• social relations which exist only in subjective awareness or subjective perceptions (a person might act as though a social relation exists),
• intersubjective social relations involving shared meanings conveyed through communication,
• objective social relations which exist whether someone is aware of them or not (they might nevertheless be communicated insofar as we communicate with everything we are and do);
• social relations in the process of being transformed from one kind into another, or being interrelated with each other;
• spiritual or intuitive social relations of some kind.

As illustration, we can apply the foregoing to the notion of a group. Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology originally coined by Carl Jung. ... Parenting comprises all the tasks involved in raising a child to an independent adult. ... A male Caucasian toddler child A child (plural: children) is a young human. ... In Hinduism, spiritual goals and personal experience (self-realization) through yoga and meditation are seen as the ultimate way to attain God (Moksha) and are inseparable from the religion. ...

• A person might almost out of instinct identify with a group or relate to it;
• s/he might imagine being a member of a group, regardless of whether this is really the case;
• a group might exist only in the form of intersubjective relations among its members;
• a group might exist as an objective description, or as an objective reality, even regardless of whether one was aware of belonging to it;
• a group might be forming or dissolving, or both at once, and it might be changing its boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, perhaps overlapping with other groups;
• a group might also exist at the level of a common spiritual affinity or identification (Cf. the notion of a noosphere).

However the group may exist, or be perceived to exist at some level - with the obvious consequences that has for the kinds of social relations involved - it is clear that understanding different kinds of group relations require different methods of inquiry and verification. The suckling of a newborn at its mothers nipple is an example of an instinctive behavior. ... The noosphere can be seen as the sphere of human thought being derived from the Greek νους (nous) meaning mind in the style of atmosphere and biosphere. Just as the biosphere is composed of all the organisms on Earth and their interactions, the noosphere is composed of all the interacting minds... In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods. ...

Precisely because social relations may be experienced at different levels of awareness, they are not necessarily transparent at all. Indeed, Karl Marx wrote ironically in this respect that "science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided". In the physical sciences, specifically in optics, a transparent physical object is one that can be seen through. ... Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ...

See also

• Chinese social relations
• Forms of activity and interpersonal relations
• Relations of production
• Social
• Social order
• Social change
• Timescapes depicting societal-time measured by data clocks

Chinese social relations are social relations typified by a reciprocal social network. ... Forms of activity and interpersonal relations in sociology can be described as follows: first and most basic are animal-like behaviors, i. ... Relations of production (German: Produktionsverhaltnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx in his theory of historical materialism and in Das Kapital. ... // Latin root meaning The term social is derived from the Latin word socius, which as a noun means an associate, ally, companion, business partner or comrade and in the adjectival form socialis refers to a bond between people (such as marriage) or to their collective or connected existence. ... Social order is a concept used in sociology, history and other social sciences. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

References

• Dick Houtman, Class and Politics in Contemporary Social Science: Marxism Lite and Its Blind Spot for Culture
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
• Karl Marx, The German Ideology
• Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
• Frank Furedi, Where have all the intellectuals gone?
• Piotr Sztompka, Socjologia