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How Can We Define Society?

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Society can be considered as a community who work together and make decisions about how to do things. It can be seen as a union of people who have a developed culture. Yet this can be seen as controversial because some societies in todays world can be seen as primitive as they have not yet developed some of the vital things what we call the norm in society like culture. But for what we see as normal way not somewhere else. There are many different people or communities which have different ways of living. Therefore creating a debatable question; how can we define society? Modern western society today is seen as normal, due to theorists defining society from our experiences. like Fletcher stated ‘not merely to explain the odd actions of neurotics or primitives, but to use their actions to understand and explain what counts as normal and ordinary action in western societies’ Fletcher R (2013) pg17, there has been many attempts by different theorists and sociologists to understand the concept of society, each with their own view but the school of structural functionalism representative, Talcott Parsons used a system approach analysing society as a social system, ‘Talcott Parsons was probably the most prominent theorist of this time, and it is unlikely that any one theoretical approach will so dominate sociological theory again.’ (Turner 1998) He wanted to explain why people act as they do. His theory contains subsystems which interact with each other creating a wider view on
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