Milieu/social Structure
C. Wright Mills contrasted the immediate milieu of jobs/family/neighbourhood with the wider formations of the social structure, highlighting in particular a distinction between "the personal troubles of milieu" and the "public crises of social structure".
Emile Durkheim took a wider view of the social environment (milieu social), arguing that it contained internalised norms and representations of social forces/social facts: "Our whole social environment seems to us filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds" - collective representations.
Read more about this topic: Social Environment
Famous quotes containing the words milieu, social and/or structure:
“A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody’s opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a labourer’s fireplace ... will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.”
—Macmillan’s Magazine (London, September 1871)
“The structure was designed by an old sea captain who believed that the world would end in a flood. He built a home in the traditional shape of the Ark, inverted, with the roof forming the hull of the proposed vessel. The builder expected that the deluge would cause the house to topple and then reverse itself, floating away on its roof until it should land on some new Ararat.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)