4: Integration, Contradiction, and Conflict

My argument has been that sociology as the study of interaction, involves a focus on the ways in which individual and collective actors generate the long, interweaving chains of action and reaction that comprise the social structures through which they live their lives. Social structures are produced, reproduced, and transformed through social action; and social actions are conditioned, facilitated, and constrained by those social structures. Sociology is the study of both action and structure and of their interrelations.

I further argued that social structures are real features of all social life, but they do not exist as substantive ‘things’ separate from the actors who produce, reproduce, and transform them. Social structures are virtual objects. They are ‘patterns’ of norms and relations that emerge from social action and have properties that are irreducible to the properties of social actors. It is these properties that constitute the reality of social structures. Their facticity, as social facts, is what makes it legitimate to treat them, as Emile Durkheim argued, ‘as if’ they are things.