Micro Social Structure

Gender, race, class and sexuality—socially constructed hierarchies—were made purely because of power relationships. Though individuals can adopt the types of gender, race, class and sexuality to represent themselves, they weren’t made in the first place to accommodate that. They were made for a dominant group to “secure its position of dominance of the system”; to differentiate who is the subordinate group and who isn’t. The subordinate groups were instantaneously put into categories so dominant groups can pinpoint who is different from them, exerting their privilege and power onto those less fortunate for their personal gain. They exploit the subordinate groups for their valued resources, creating conflict between the two opposing groups. Weber says that, “There can be no
Macro social structure focuses on the bigger picture: are there any patterns of certain things occurring in a certain population or place? Weber describes macro social structural trends as being “often represented analytically as a set of lifeless statistics about different populations.”; she sees it as data and information. Looking at trends in, for example, economic or health indicators, it doesn’t tell us why the trends are like that. Is there anything affecting why the trends are the way they are? However, when we look at the micro social structure, we can see a whole new aspect of those different populations. Weber says, “When we follow the everyday lives of a group of people, we can learn how they live with financial constraints, how they feed their families, how they deal with the stresses they face, how they manage work and family life, how they stay healthy.” These multiple factors can affect the patterns and trends we see in the macro social structure which focuses purely on the statistical side of a population, not the