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 than behavior, action, social behavior, social action, social contact and social interaction. Social relations form the basis of concepts such as social organization, 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. ... A hierarchy (in Greek: , derived from — hieros, sacred, and — arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is a subordinate to a single other element. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... 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). ... A social animal is a loosely defined term for an organism that is highly interactive with other members of its species to the point of having a recognizable and distinct society. ... See Social structure of the United States for an explanation of concepts exsistance within US society. ... 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

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. ... In sociology, a group is usually defined as a collection of humans or animals, who share certain characteristics, interact with one another, accept expectations 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. ... In sociology, social stratification is the hierarchical arrangement of social classes, castes, and strata within a society. ... For other uses, see Nation (disambiguation). ... Gender symbols: female (left), male (right). ...

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. This article is about 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. Meethodology is defined as the analysis of the principles of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline, the systematic study of methods that are, can be, or have been applied within a discipline or a particular procedure or set of procedures [1]. It should be noted that methodology is... For other uses, see Knowledge (disambiguation). ...

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 – March 14, 1883) was a 19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ... Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (June 23, 1668 – January 23, 1744) was an Italian philosopher, historian, and jurist. ... Young people interacting within an ethnically diverse society. ... Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 â€“ September 17, 1994) was an Austrian and British[1] philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. ... The Earth seen from Apollo 17. ... Totalitarianism is a term employed by some 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. ... Social change (or Social development) is a general term which refers to: change in the nature, the social institutions, the social behaviour or the social relations of a society, community of people, or other social structures. ... 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.^{citation required} 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. ... For other uses, see Animal (disambiguation). ... Orders Subclass Apterygota Archaeognatha (bristletails) Thysanura (silverfish) Subclass Pterygota Infraclass Paleoptera (Probably paraphyletic) Ephemeroptera (mayflies) Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) Infraclass Neoptera Superorder Exopterygota Grylloblattodea (ice-crawlers) Mantophasmatodea (gladiators) Plecoptera (stoneflies) Embioptera (webspinners) Zoraptera (angel insects) Dermaptera (earwigs) Orthoptera (grasshoppers, etc) Phasmatodea (stick insects) Blattodea (cockroaches) Isoptera (termites) Mantodea (mantids) Psocoptera... This article is about modern humans. ... This article or section includes a list of works cited or a list of external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ...

Types of social relations

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

• unconscious 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 (IPA: ), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ... Jung redirects here. ... Milton Hyland Erickson, MD (1901 - 1980) was a psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis. ... This article is about the philosophical movement. ... Psychological science redirects here. ... The scope of social psychological research. ... Sociology (from Latin: socius, companion; and the suffix -ology, the study of, from Greek λόγος, lógos, knowledge [1]) is the scientific or systematic study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture[2]. Areas studied in sociology can range from the analysis of brief contacts between anonymous... A magnet levitating above a high-temperature superconductor demonstrates the Meissner effect. ... In film, reframing is changing the view of a subject. ... This article is about work. ... Play might be described as unrestrained, amusing interaction with people, animals, or things, often in the context of learning. ... For other uses, see Love (disambiguation). ... Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action or inaction to bring about social or political change. ... For other uses, see Politics (disambiguation). ... Intuition is an unconscious form of knowledge. ... Spirituality, in a narrow sense, concerns itself with matters of the spirit. ... 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. ... Spirituality, in a narrow sense, concerns itself with matters of the spirit. ...

• 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. For other uses, see Instinct (disambiguation). ... 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. In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere... 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 – March 14, 1883) was a 19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ...

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