1. Every society can be understood as a system, that is to say, as a collection of parts related in an organized way to each other, forming a totality. It is in social psychology's interest to understand the behavior of people and groups as members of a system in order to examine what in behavior is systemic, or owed to being a member of a system.
2. The functionalist lens conceives systems as living organisms whose parts are determined among themselves within a unitary order. Not every social system is a society, but rather, a society is the ideal social system.
3. According to Parsons, every social system should satisfy four needs to which four functional subsystems correspond: (a) the economic subsystem, which completes an adaptive function by assigning roles; (b) the political subsystem, which is encharged with fulfilling the objectives of collectivities; (c) the community subsystem, which defines the norms for the stratified integration of its members; and (d) the cultural subsystem, which tries to maintain and transmit values as such.
4. The functionalist, Parsonsian framework is critiqued for its basic assumption that every society is fundamentally harmonious (like a living organism is), since it seems founded in the axiological consensus of its members. These assumptions are opposed by the reality of conflict in contemporary societies.
5. Conflict theory conceives society as a system whose order promotes the dominance of some groups or classes over others. Social unity is not defined as harmony, but as the articulation of dominant groups’ interests, which ideology tries to present as universal interests (in the interest of all the system’s members) and even as natural interests (in the interest of all human beings).
6. While, for functionalism, systemic action represents the exercise of functional roles, conflict theory supposes that it is the satisfaction of dominant interests or the struggle for voicing other social interests.
7. Every social order is historically derived from a prior context and does not simply emerge as a consequence of some universal needs or the immediate interaction of its members.
8. Every action and social interaction tends toward an order which makes it effective and efficient. Thus, interaction itself develops or modifies the norms which govern it. But in their emergence and modification, norms which regulate interaction fundamentally depend on the forces and interests on which the actors, whether groups or individuals, rely.
9. The emergence of a social order has three stages: (a) externalization or performance of activities, which gives rise to their habituation (activity as habit) and their institutionalization, or the “reciprocal typification of actions habitualized by kinds of actors;” (b) objectification, or the experience of institutionalized activity as something prescribed, external to each actor; and (c) internalization, or the assumption of institutionalized routines in a social system which each individual makes.
10. The three stages of a social order’s formation imply that: (a) society is a human product, not a “natural” one; (b) that society is an objective reality and not merely a subjective one; and (c) that the individual is a social product. These three affirmations are true, and each one clarifies and complements the others.
11. In Latin-American societies, there exist large sectors of the population which, at first glance, appear marginalized, or separated from the social system: they do not receive its benefits (passive participation), and they lack obligations and duties within it (active participation).
12. According to one framework, marginalization signifies psycho-social disintegration: the marginalized sectors lack the culture and attitudes necessary to integrate themselves into the modern social system. Thus, their integration requires their education and training. However, this focus tends toward psychologism, situating the immediate cause of people's marginalization in their own traits.
13. From the lens of dependency, marginalization is the consequence of principles operating in the ruling capitalist system in the first world and being imposed onto the third world in a partial and more primitive way, subordinating the social order to the needs of the metropoles, or the minority sectors tied to them. Thus, it is the system itself which develops and reinforces marginalization as part of its normal functioning. The marginalized are integrated into the social system, but marginally. The elimination of marginalization thus requires a change in the social system itself.
14. Daily routines are the most important way the order of a social system is reproduced. These routines tend to shape a certain “common sense,” or assumptions of life which groups and people take as part of nature. Everyday, casual conversation plays a fundamental role in maintaining this common sense as the proponent and reproducer of the social order.
15. According to one view, survival brings the marginalized to develop a culture of passivity and low aspirations and to establish exchange networks which allow survival in minimal conditions. This “culture of poverty” is transmitted from parents to children, making the victims responsible for their lack of progress and for thus perpetuating their poverty and marginalization. The studies at hand confirm the description of traits associated with the “culture of poverty,” but not its existence as a relatively autonomous “subculture” of the established social system which reproduces itself.
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