Societal Needs
celibate group of monks cannot be considered a society, "because it cannot recruit new members by birth without violating its fun damental norms."
Societal Needs No matter how different their peoples and cultures, all societies (big and small) must be self-sufficient. What this means exactly bears some thinking about. What do societies need to survive? Here's a short list of societal needs:
Have a continuing supply of new members. Socialize new members.
Deal with members' sickness and health issues.
Select members for certain jobs and tasks. Create knowledge. Control its members.
Defend against its enemies. Produce and exchange goods and services.
Promote social unity and the search for higher meanings. How does a society meet these needs? The short answer is through social institutions. In chapter 7, I defined an institution as a rec ognized solution to a societal problem. Here is a more detailed definition: An institution is an accepted and persistent constellation of statuses, roles, values, and norms that respond to important societal needs.
Consider the societal problem of membership replacement. How is that problem solved? In large part, this societal problem is solved through the institution of the family. As I illustrate in table 9.1, the family is an accepted and persistent constellation of statuses, roles, values, and norms that together respond to soci ety's need to replace its members. Here is an important point: The institution of the family described in table 9.1 is not the best type of family nor even the normal or average type of family in our society. But the table does represent what Max Weber would call the ideal-type family (the term ideal type was introduced in chapter 8). Although it may well be true that only a statistical minority of families exactly resem ble the ideal-type family, the idea that families ought to follow the institutionalized pattern is widely accepted. Because of this, mem bers of real-life families that depart from the ideal type may be subject to informal negative sanctions from others. For example,
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