Notes

norms

from Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology

These are expectations shared by members of a group or collectivity that more or less effectively determine individual behavior. Norms typically attach to social roles rather than human individuals, who in performance of their roles conform to a greater or lesser extent to norms. The concept of norm is located in various categories associated with the development of sociology.

William Graham Sumner, for instance, in Folkways (1906), holds that collective life, necessary for individual survival, requires the preservation of efficacious experience, stored in and communicated as custom. Custom is the collective form of individual habit. Folkways are produced, according to Sumner, in the frequent repetition of petty acts. Folkways are accepted because of the conviction that they are conducive to societal welfare and can therefore be defined as systems of persisting expedient customary behavior. Sumner says that, within a group, folkways are uniform, universal, imperative, and invariable; over time they become increasingly arbitrary. Socially formed and selected inferences derived from folkways, Sumner calls mores. Mores consist largely but not exclusively of taboos (see sacred and profane dichotomy), things that should not be done. A characteristic of mores, as coercive ethical principles, is the likelihood that they will contain an explicit rationalization or reason for adherence to them, for example don't eat pork because pigs are unclean. Sumner's approach was related to Social Darwinism. Believing that social change is achieved through the evolution of folkways and the development of folkways into mores is no longer in vogue.

Talcott Parsons argues that, through social interaction, persons are able to communicate because signs and symbols acquire common meaning. By virtue of a shared meaning system there arises a mutuality of expectations and sanctions that constitutes what Parsons calls a normative order in The Social System (1951). Thus norms operate through internalization of a standard of group expectations and are maintained by the reactions of others, both positive and negative. These reactions are sanctions that reward conformity to role expectations and punish departure from expectation such as deviance. For Parsons, the institutionalization of both expectation and sanction constitutive of norms is achieved in varying degrees. Anomie occurs in the absence of institutionalization. Norms therefore are not to be located at the level of individual social actor but necessarily function in the institutionalized activity of a plurality of social actors.

While the notion of norm can adequately describe the habitual institutional patterns of a society, explanations of societal processes in terms of norms risks accounting for regularities of social action in terms of expectations. In fact, interaction in groups or societies may result from a number of possible factors, of which norms are only one. One alternative approach to explanation of social process points not to the system of norms, but to power relations and the balance of power that is the outcome of social conflict between groups. Exponents of this approach include Ralph Dahrendorf in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) and John Rex in Key Problems of Sociological Theory (1961). David Lockwood's Solidarity and Schism (1992) developed a sophisticated critique of the normative approach that avoids the problems of conflict theory.