Negotiating a social relationship can also be understood by way of another example.
A person has to negotiate a distance to reach a desired destination. Thus the person is an actor (a traveller), and the destination is his/her goal. To reach the destination, he has to cover a distance, symbolized by the road. The distance can be covered either on foot, or by a motorized vehicle. The amount of time taken in negotiating that distance would depend upon the speed of the vehicle, amount of traffic on the road, traffic lights, and the weather. Thus, the effort to cover the distance is influenced by the ‘means’ one employs to reach the destination, the ‘conditions’ (man-made and nature-made) on the pathway, and the mental frame of the actor-traveller. See the number of concepts that are invoked in this simple act: actor, goal, means (when an actor has choice-options), conditions (over which the actor has no control, and they remain unchangeable; the moment they can be altered, they move to the category of means), traffic rules, and state of mind (influenced by his social status, and experience of immediate previous actions and interactions, and past experience of travelling). A sociological analysis of a short journey undertaken by our actor in this story would require covering all the above-mentioned concepts.
This is, in essence, the Theory of Social Action, propounded by Talcott Parsons and his associates, and which shaped the sociological orientation, giving it an interdisciplinary character–combining the insights provided by previous work in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and social psychology.
In sociological analysis, the ‘essential starting point is the conception of two (or more) individuals interacting in such a way as to constitute an interdependent system’, writes Parsons (1965: 41). Sociological analysis does not focus on the individual as a person,4 but on his particular status vis-a-vis his alter (counterpart) in an interaction system. In other words, the unit of analysis is ‘status’ and not the individual. In this sense, as a status holder, an individual is a component of the system constituted by two or more status holders of the same or different rank, or specialization. When we analyse a social system, we see the participants in terms of the ‘status’ (defined by the role expectations) or ‘position’ (rank in the hierarchy within the system) they hold, and not as a totality of the statuses that each individual occupies at a particular point in time.
It must be said, however, that some scholars use these words–status, position, and role—as interchangeable, and designating a common phenomenon. This is confusing and must be avoided. Each of these words is a concept with a clearly defined meaning and, thus, not a synonym of any other two. Therefore, for purposes of clarity we shall make a distinction between status, social position, and role.
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