External Structures

(noun)

(of an individual) consist of relationships and social roles, and support the maintenance of a stable self-concept and lifestyle.

Related Terms

  • Internal Structures
  • Continuity Theory

Examples of External Structures in the following topics:

  • Continuity Theory

    • The theory considers the internal structures and external structures of continuity to describe how people adapt to their circumstances and set their goals.
    • The internal structure of an individual - for instance, an individual's personality traits - remains relatively constant throughout a person's lifetime.
    • This internal structure facilitates future decision-making by providing the individual with a strong internal foundation of the past.
    • The external structure of an individual consists of relationships and social roles, and it supports the maintenance of a stable self-concept and lifestyle.
    • " He continued to expound upon the theory over the years, explaining the development of internal and external structures in 1989 and publishing a book in 1999 called Continuity and Adaptation in Aging: Creating Positive Experiences.
  • External Sources of Social Change

    • Generally, a theory of change should include elements such as structural aspects of change (like population shifts), processes and mechanisms of social change, and directions of change.
    • Political Process Theory is similar to resource mobilization theory (which considers the mobilization of resources to be the key ingredient of a successful movement) in many regards, and emphasizes political opportunities as the social structure that is important for social movement development.
  • Sources of Social Change

    • Some of the better-known approaches include deprivation theory, mass-society theory, structural-strain theory, resource-mobilization theory, political process theory and culture theory.
    • This particular section will thus pay attention to structural-strain theory and culture theory, while mass-society theory and political process theory will be discussed in greater detail later in "International Sources of Social Change" and "External Sources of Social Change," respectively.
    • Here is a case in point to illustrate the example of structural-strain theory.
    • Structural conduciveness would occur when a group of people become disgruntled by a change in society.
    • Structural strain is when these people feel a sense of displeasure due to the change, such as being upset or angry.
  • Colonialism, Decolonization, and Neo-Colonialism

    • Local institutions and political structures were dismantled and replaced with ones imposed by colonial powers.
    • Moreover, even though the former colonies were now formally independent, they were still rather dependent on the West for assistance in developing economic and political structures.
    • External forces exert power in Africa in two ways.
  • Analyzing Data and Drawing Conclusions

    • Predictive analytics focuses on the application of statistical or structural models for predictive forecasting or classification.
    • Text analytics applies statistical, linguistic, and structural techniques to extract and classify information from textual sources, a species of unstructured data.
    • External validity concerns the extent to which the (internally valid) results of a study can be held to be true for other cases, such as to different people, places, or times.
  • Informal Social Control

    • External sanctions are enforced by the government to prevent chaos, violence, or anomie in society.
  • Summary

    • This chapter and the next are concerned with the ways in which networks display "structure" or deviation from random connection.
    • In the current chapter, we've approached the same issue of structuring from the "top-down" by looking at patterns of macro-structure in which individuals are embedded in non-random ways.
    • The tools in the current chapter provide some ways of examining the "texture" of the structuring of the whole population.
    • In the next chapter we will focus on the same issue of connection and structure from the "bottom-up. " That is, we'll look at structure from the point of view of the individual "ego."
    • Taken together, the approaches in chapters 8 and 9 illustrate, again, the "duality" of social structure in which individuals make social structures, but do so within a matrix of constraints and opportunities imposed by larger patterns.
  • Structural equivalence

    • Structural equivalence is easy to grasp (though it can be operationalized in a number of ways) because it is very specific: two actors must be exactly substitutable in order to be structurally equivalent.
    • In figure 12.1 there are seven "structural equivalence classes."
    • E and F, however, fall in the same structural equivalence class.
    • Finally, actors H and I fall in the same structural equivalence class.
    • Actors that are structurally equivalent are in identical "positions" in the structure of the diagram.
  • Formal Structure

    • Formal structure of an organization or group includes a fixed set of rules for intra-organization procedures and structures.
    • The formal structure of a group or organization includes a fixed set of rules of procedures and structures, usually set out in writing, with a language of rules that ostensibly leave little discretion for interpretation.
    • When attempting to create a formal structure for an organization, it is necessary to recognize informal organization in order to create workable structures.
    • Tended effectively, the informal organization complements the more explicit structures, plans, and processes of the formal organization.
    • A formal organization is a fixed set of rules of intra-organization procedures and structures.
  • Summary

    • The kind of equivalence expressed by the notion of automorphism falls between structural and regular equivalence, in a sense.
    • Structural equivalence means that individual actors can be substituted one for another.
    • Automorphic equivalence means that sub-structures of graphs can can be substituted for one another.
    • The notion of structural equivalence corresponds well to analyses focusing on how individuals are embedded in networks -- or network positional analysis.
    • Still, the search for multiple substitutable sub-structures in graphs (particularly in large and complicated ones) may reveal that the complexity of very large structures is more apparent than real; sometimes very large structures are decomposable (or partially so) into multiple similar smaller ones.
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