**4.2 Peopling processes (Filling the boxes)**

Once (as it were) the empty places in social structures are set up, they can be filled with people. Further processes deal with how the people that are recruited for positions are then handled in that position: their sustenance, promotion and disposal! In turn, the types of people who come to occupy a social structure can, by virtue of their own characteristics, have social consequences, since they may well endeavour to shape the structure 'in their own image'. It should surprise no-one that social structures are very often designed (not necessarily at all consciously) with a particular social category very much in mind.

Much interest in peopling centres on how people are recruited into positions. The most basic distinction is between recruitment on inscriptive criteria and recruitment on achievement criteria. In ascription frames, recruitment is fixed by pre-set biological or kinship characteristics, whereas in achievement frames, wider bases of selection criteria are possible. Especially for paid-work positions, recruitment is largely structured on a social class basis, albeit mediated by the effect of schooling and educational credentials. Gender, ethnic and other effects are also strong. Bourdieu has pointed out that this social class basis for recruitment involves the cultural capital obtained from people's home environments, reinforced by the way schooling (largely captured by middle-class intellectuals) is organised to in fact amplify the effects of class-based cultural capitals. The very style and ambience of education institutions operate to reinforce these processes.

Attention also needs to be addressed to the mechanisms through which people may come to hear of jobs to apply for. In his classic network study, Granovetter (1995/1973) was able to show that, for many, the information which yielded a job offer came from relatively remote and chance linkages. After all, the information scanning range of close contacts is more likely to be narrow and overlap with the information horizon of the job-seeker themselves, whereas the far-flung nature of the network immensely broadens its scanning range.

Once people are in place they may be motivated, instructed, cooled-out, monitored, supervised, sanctioned, rewarded and perhaps placed within a promotional ladder or other schemes for handling their progress.

Once places have been filled with people, the compositional pattern resulting can have its own effects. For example, in various community studies, the question has been posed about the extent to which a locality affects the people living within it. One major influence is clearly the effect of the physical and spatial environment and another is the particular history of the area. However, an important point is that, beyond these obvious comparisons, many of the differences between communities arise precisely out of the mix they contain of different social categories of people. A community of middle class people is likely to operate in quite a different way than one composed of working-class people; a retirement community will be different than a 'nappy valley' of young newly marrieds. Compositional features of a community can have quite a direct effect in their own right. Of course, this point applies to social structures other than communities as well.

Analysing Social Structures 33

identified 'authoritative resources' as those which offer power levers over other people. Bourdieu extends this yet further with the term 'cultural capital', and the even wider conception of 'social capital'. He draws useful distinctions between such aspects of 'capital' as the extent to which they can be institutionalised and to what extent they can be appropriated by individuals (e.g. with educational capital in the form of credentials). Philosopher Karl Popper referred to the whole cultural heritage which people build and

Economists have developed some distinctions about different types of resources. As opposed to the usual commodity of capitalism which is a 'private good', other resources are described as 'public goods'. These differ from private goods in terms of whether the use of a good exhausts it, and/or whether access to the benefits of the good can be kept private. Sunsets, for example, are clearly a public good, although access to a gorgeous uninterrupted view of them (accompanied by champagne on a warm unpolluted beach!) may not be. There are many intermediate categories, especially where goods have 'externalities': where their use by one person has effects on other people. That goods have beneficial externalities, which people can enjoy but cannot be readily charged for, allows 'free-riders' to benefit. In fact, very few goods are 'purely' private, perhaps just household retail items such as bread and butter. Another distinction which can be important for distinguishing between different types of resource is whether or not they are renewable (e.g. hydro-electric power) or nonrenewable (eg coal-generated electricity), to give examples relating to physical resources.

These distinctions have important implications relating to the operation of markets, as well as the social groupings in these markets. Classic markets work best with pure private goods, and progressively are less and less able to handle goods with more 'public' characteristics. Public goods are more likely to be handled through non-market mechanisms such as rationing or direct state control. Sometimes, as in contemporary welfare state reform , attempts are made to set up 'quasi-markets' in which coupons or other money-substitutes are artificially provided to enable the good to be allocated other than on a rationing basis. In a market society, public goods are usually not handled very well, and this is likely to lead to

How are resources allocated and acquired? In some part, resources are allocated 'rationally' (in the eyes of the authorities distributing the resources) to enable people in particular positions to carry out those tasks. This type of bland assertion, though, suppresses the often vigorous processes of competition and conflict between and within social units. Within any firm there will be struggles between different departments for more resources, although there may be quite different types of resource which are struggled over. For example, a common conflict is between a marketing or sales department which wishes to serve the interests of the firm's customers, and the production side which is sensitive to the internal limitations of the production technology. In markets, firms compete for market share. And similarly, nations compete to keep up their standards of living and their ability to beat the

Similarly, the distribution of resources (once they have been rendered ready for use) as rewards is also seen as rational in the eyes of the authorities responsible for their distribution. Certainly, ideological justifications to legitimate income distributions argue this. But as with the pattern of resource allocation, the pattern of reward allocation is the

'private wealth but public squalor' (in Galbraith's evocative phrase).

goods produced in other nations in terms of price or standard.

then live in as 'World 3', with its own (albeit constructed) autonomous reality.

Peter Blau (e.g. 1975 see also Calhoun et al 1990) has developed an ambitious theory of the effects of social compositions deploying a 'primitive theory' of macro-structure. This provides a more clear specification of Durkheim's concerns about the consequences of division of labour for the pattern of social integration. However, for Blau, the 'division of labour' involves the considerably wider conception of the composition of the pre-given social structure, and any interest in the overall level of social integration is deflected into the narrower issue of the patterns of social interaction between the groups comprising that social structure.

The key to his theory is that any social structure has 'structural parameters' which are built up from the characteristics of aggregates of its members. These then form aggregate-level opportunity-structures which in turn may constrain or provide opportunities for individual behaviour, especially behaviour which involves interaction across (or within) the social boundaries indicated by these parameters. An obvious example is that one finds it hard to meet an Eskimo in a town without Eskimos: or rather more realistically, that one's chances of meeting an Eskimo tend to be shaped by the proportion of Eskimos in your place of residence.

Much of the flow of people into the slots provided by social structures is controlled by those who set them up or run them in the first place. On the other hand, those who come to fill them adapt various long term strategies and short term tactics in the way they 'use' their position. It is in the peopling of social structures where much of the interplay between ordinary people and controllers of structures takes place.
