The Term Society Has Contested Meaning

However many question this, and from this we have found that society has no fixed definition, and that society means different things to different people. For example people who believe themselves Marxist (or those who believe Marxist beliefs) will take society as the product of space, and that space is the product of social force. However there are many trains of thought on this subject, with many differences between them, and it impossible to state that one thought is ultimately better than the other, therefore Society can be considered to be contested. Secondly we will only be able to tentatively conclude that society has contested meanings, as opinion on the subject is so varied not everybody in each ‘group’ (for example post modernism or humanism) will believe the same as everybody else in their group. Therefore there are so many different thoughts it would be impossible to know them all and therefore we will never know the complete extent of how contested society actually is.

Firstly it is important to know exactly what we are looking at. In general the term society includes (but does not mean) the ways in which social relations, social identities and social inequalities are produced, their spatial variations and the role of space in constructing them. This allows us to see the criteria we are looking for in the definitions of society. Also it is important to remember that although we may consider society as taken for granted by most, there are also those with views that society does not in fact exist, and therefore has no real meaning, only artificial opinions attached to the word ‘society’

Positivists are a fairly ‘new geography’, and concerned with locational analysis and spatial science. Positivists believe that information is there to be analysed, and see society as a fixed system that can be fitted into models, for example the Burgess Concentric ring model for the layout of a city. This belief focuses on the individuals having little control over their lives, with people having to fit into these models and schemes. This is similar to the structuralist way of thinking, where although individuals have some control over what they do and where they go they are ultimately controlled by factors outside their control, in other words they are controlled by ‘society’. Therefore it is clear that structuralists would define society as a controlling force, which governs everyday life.