3. SOCIETY AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL SYSTEM

The concept of society as a sociocultural system emerged in recent years. The basic thesis in justifying this position was that social interaction is considered as the foundation of social life.

The elements of a social system are people and their activities, which they carry out not in isolation, but in the process of interacting with other people united in various social communities in the given social environment. The individual can not disobey the laws of the social environment in which he is included. He to some extent accepts its norms and values, socializes.

The inclusion of a person into society is carried out through various social communities that each individual person personifies: social groups, social institutions, social organizations and systems of norms and values ​​accepted in society, i.e. through culture.

Society is viewed from here as a sociocultural system, in which two main subsystems are singled out - social, representing a set of social relations and connections between people, and cultural, including fundamental social values, ideas, symbols, knowledge, beliefs and helping to regulate people's behavior.

These two subsystems are closely related. So, culture can be spoken of as a complex dynamic education that has a social nature and expresses social relations aimed at creating, assimilating, preserving and distributing objects, ideas, value ideas that ensure mutual understanding of people in various social situations. Sociologists usually fix attention on culture as a value-normative system that guides and regulates people's behavior.

All daily life (and activity) takes place in a certain institutionalized framework and in accordance with certain standards. Both those and others exist in the form of stable ideas shared by people, customs, customs, etiquette. Representations are these poorly dismembered formations that combine elements of image, knowledge, attitudes, and evaluations. Sociocultural images are products of people's experience, developed in the course of their joint activities, relating to the ways of organizing typical sociocultural situations or solving life problems. Socially, they are more mandatory than submissions. They are multiple, and each person has the opportunity to choose for themselves the one that suits their individual life problem or group situation.

Values ​​are formed in the course of establishing interpersonal group preferences in relation to certain objects and socio-cultural patterns. Cultural values ​​are even more socially binding. They record individual or group preferences, reference samples, according to which people assess the significance of their own experience, as well as the activities and behavior of others.

Socio-cultural norms are relatively stable formations that fix the boundaries of permissible in each cultural area or significant situation of interaction. They are already binding. Their violation, or even “borderline” behavior, necessarily causes social, including legal, sanctions. However, within the regulatory limits, people exhibit a plurality of behaviors.