Concepts / Structure

The enduring patterns formed by relationships among people, groups and institutions form the basic social structure of a society. In other words, social structure is an enduring emergent outcome of a complex system.

In sociology, structures are defined in terms of rules and resources or sets of transformation relations that are organized as properties of social systems. (See structuration theory.)

Popular software frameworks, platforms and protocols are structure.

In everyday conversation, use of “they” in referring to some remote or inaccessible third party can often be interpreted as a reference to structure. “What have they done now?” “When are they going to fix it?” “Why would they do that?”