Social Structure as an Independent Influence on Behavior

The interconnected set of statuses that forms the group's social structure is crucial to the functioning of the community's culture through the operation of the components of the statuses, but that same social structure also serves to influence behavior independently of the culture that is its base and most of its substance. I say "most" of its substance because community members need not have understandings about the connections among statuses for those structural connections to affect behavior. A father can be affected in his status as employee by his boss's expectations, some of which stem, for example, from the boss's spouse relationship. The father may impose expectations on his children as a consequence of the expectations imposed on him as an employee even though neither the father nor the children know the boss is married, much less how his relations with his wife affect what he expects from his employees.

The connections among relationships derived from the mutual reference and interdependence of expectations have an influence on behavior that stems from, but is independent of, shared understandings themselves. Parsons is the locus classicus of the view that social structure has an influence on behavior that is independent from culture (1964 [1951]:6, 17–21 passim), and this view is important to the scheme developed here.

In an earlier work, I used data from Pitt-Rivers's (1961) study of an Andalusian village to illustrate one of the processes by which this operates. The Spanish villagers were shown to respond to expectations in one of their social relationships despite having no understandings about the usefulness or desirability of the expected behavior itself. Some of the expected behavior, in fact, was contrary to shared understandings about how people should behave (Swartz and Jordan 1976:93–98).

The expected behavior was forthcoming solely because of the importance those involved attached to maintaining the relationships in which the behavior was expected. This importance, in turn, was a consequence not of the value or utility of the relationship in itself but of its connections to other relationships (ibid., 89–92). In a sense, the influence of the one relationship can be, and frequently is, derived not from understandings about its intrinsic merit

or worth but from its connection with other relationships that are understood as valuable in themselves.