Pierre Bourdieu, a renowned French sociologist, attempts to explain the mechanics by which society produces and maintains the social order.  He argues that the accumulation of Capital is the backbone by which society creates the rules that governs itself and sets constraints for the actions of individual agents within that society.   To him, the social world is in essence is an economic game where agents invest limited time and social energy to accumulate Capital by which they can produce outcomes (services, good, profit, etc.)  and rise in status.  Society is view as a field where agents play the game of Capital accumulation with the goal of ascending to the elite class, a class who has a vested interest in excluding potential new members, and a desire to reproduce the conditions that keeps them in that place of status.  To flesh out the idea of Capital accumulation, Bourdieu, challenges the traditional notions of economics at the time which understood  Capital in strictly monetary terms. He introduces two other forms of Capital that more adequately account for the structure and functioning of the social and economic worlds: Cultural, and Social.  Agents exchange and convert these types of Capital into one another to pursue their own self-interest, and Bourdieu concludes with how these forms of Capital are converted.

Forms of Capital, Pierre Bordieu

Ouchi seeks to develop a theoretical framework that predicts what sort of form organizations will take on under certain external conditions.  Under this framework, two main criterion, what he calls transaction costs, affect the form of an organization: goal incongruence and performance ambiguity.  He identifies three types of forms that organizations can take depending on their levels of these transaction costs: Markets, bureaucracies, and clans.  Ouchi ultimately argues for a framework that can evaluate the nature and efficiency criterion of organizations, and how those organizations operate within an economic landscape of transactions. 

Markets, Bureaucracies, and Clans

- Forms of Capital
- Division of Labor
- Organization

Augustana College (IL)

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

The different structures that societies are organized in. They can either be classified as:
- Horizontal
- Vertical

Sociological Structures

A social group is defined as a category of people who interact with each other and share a sense of identity. Furthermore, a collection of people who have a shared set of social expectations and values are said to belong in the same social group. There is typically some awareness of social boundaries within social groups. 

Social Group

- Roles
- Social networks
- Groups and organizations
- Social institutions
- Societies

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