Sociological Theory: The Group Sells

Abstract

The role of functionalism in sociological theory is considered. Functionalism is defined and different kinds of functionalism are considered. This leads to a discussion of grid-group theory, which asserts there are four and only four lifestyles in modern society and these lifestyles shape our consumption preferences. The four lifestyles are hierarchical elitists, competitive individualists, egalitarians, and fatalists, all of which are in conflict with one another. An article by Mary Douglas, who invented grid-group theory, on shopping is discussed. She asserts that lifestyle choice, not personal taste, shapes consumption preferences. A chart is offered that shows suggested popular culture preferences of members of each lifestyle. The VALS (Values and Lifestyles) typology and the Claritas/Nielsen typology are described. It is suggested by marketers that the more advertisers know about their target audiences, the better job they can do in reaching them and persuading them to purchase a product or service.

Demographics is destiny.

Auguste Comte

There is an old conflict over the nature of society. One side mystically exaggerates its significance, contending that only through society is human life endowed with reality. The other regards it as a mere abstract concept by means of which the observer draws the realities, which are individual human beings, into a whole, as one calls trees and brooks, houses and meadows, a “landscape.” However one decides this conflict, he must allow society to be a reality in a double sense. On the one hand are the individuals in their directly perceptible existence, the bearers of the processes of association, who are united by these processes into the higher unity which one calls “society;” on the other, the interests which, living in the individuals, motivate such union: economic and ideal interests, warlike and erotic, religious and charitable.…Just so the impulses and interests, which a man experiences in himself and with push him out toward other men, bring about all the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into “society.”

Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability”