Membership varies from institution to institution, from organisation to organisation. The differentiated character of membership may vary from society to society. The meaning of membership is determined by the societal structures in which it is found. It also varies as a person progresses through the various stages of life. For this reason the analysis of membership is complex; our various responsibilities are entwined, and the way in which they are inter-dependent varies from society to society. Membership varies depending upon where one is located in a structure. Membership also varies according to whether one is male or female, old or young, citizen or foreigner. Membership itself, say in the family or the Church, may not be a matter of choice, but its form is clearly a result of historical formation. Being the child of one's parents is not like choosing to join the Boy Scouts. But the form of one's sonship is surely shaped by the degree of social choice that one has in one's immediate social environment.
Some forms of membership depend upon the place a person occupies in a vertically integrated social whole like an army. A member of the military has a strictly defined role. Other types of membership are integrated in an horizontal manner as in the case of two friends who meet regularly to play cards. Of course two soldiers can be friends yet such is the nature of their military membership it has to be taken into account when we analyse the card-playing. Some memberships are played out with the actors who are incorporated into the organisation not having much, or any, say in the matter; a 6-month child in a Child Minding Centre is looked after because her mother has chosen to avail herself of this facility. The child has had no choice.
Some memberships are inclusive - all residents are subject to the law of the land; some are exclusive - you cannot be a member of a family if you are not born (or adopted) as the child of the parents. Membership can be positive or negative in terms of the normative development of a person's contribution to society; but it may also be positive or negative in terms of a person's orientation to social norms. We say that a person's personality has been "stretched" or "matured" when new responsibilities have been taken on. We also say that a person's development has been constricted - a person might be crushed and repressed. Sometimes this is due to another person's influence; on other occasions this is because the person has taken on too many responsibilities or is too intense in the way in which s/he seeks to fulfil them.
All societies have always had to deal with familial membership. The meaning of such membership - either as a parent or as a child, or a more distant relative of an extended familial group - varies from society to society. But in our society it also varies from family to family, and at times from person to person within the family itself. Family membership in the household of one's parents is never all there is to social life. There are other forms of family membership which open up to any person which do not derive exclusively from the parent-child relationship. Our society exhibits a great diversity of psychological dispositions among people shaped by a great variation in familial inter-relation.
There is of course the relation to one's spouse; even in societies where marriages are strictly arranged (ie they become a form by which the son or daughter shows piety to the patriarch), the marriage relationship has to be granted some social room of its own to develop and thus be in a position to dutifully carry on the familial tribal tradition. Even in societies dominated by family structures there are social spheres which are not regulated and controlled by the rules governing family life itself. There are also social spheres outside of, and parallel with, family norms and traditions.
Inter-family life is governed by rules which are not exactly the rules for intra-family life. And then when society is further disclosed, for instance when bartering and markets become possible, then there are rules which are specifically developed to apply to trade and commerce. The problem for families in complex differentiated societies, geared to a market economy, concerns the way of discerning when relations between separate families in an extended family network are in fact inter-family relations and when they are intra-family relations. It is well known that family feuds fester for decades because of disputes over inheritance which so often means houses. And if one's view of oneself qua parent is overly dependent upon one's relation to one's parents' household then tension between generations are almost certain to be generated.
Simply because a person's parenting role can be woven into other responsibilities it is very important to define the term parent. Parents are those who take responsibility for the initial conception of the child. Membership in a family is based around such biotic attachment; the genetic link between parents and children is qualified by familial love. But that is not all. The genetic link between parents and children anticipates the nurturing task of parents. Bodies are not just biotic; they function in a social network, and human biology is a human responsibility. Families are based on this nature/nurture link. Marriages are the conscious attempt to nurture a common nature. This nature/nurture link needs to be given social expression. We might even say that the link itself is structured and in time is re-constructed.
Discussion of national membership is also very complex. National membership in a complex differentiated society means many things despite the fact that the term nation has an original ethnic meaning. Some thinkers propose that we should consider all national membership as ethnic, as an extension of the social intercourse based upon biotic blood ties. This, they assert, is the underlying reality even whilst the seemingly unchangeable nation-state undergoes profound changes. And the argument has some cogency. When ethnic rivalries re-emerge after decades, or even centuries, we see that ethnicity is not something that can easily be dispensed with, even if people of varying ethnic background have been fully integrated, as citizens, into a modern nation state. Our attempts to understand human society should not forget this.
But the dual use of the term nation in a public legal and ethnic sense introduces an ambiguity. In every-day speech it is either a synonym for tribe (as in the Sioux nation) or as a synonym for the public square of our complex, differentiated globally inter-related civil society. The public square of the modern, or post-modern, nation-state is a national domain legally supervised by the State, but involves much more than merely the activities of persons in their roles either as citizens of their nation or as people with a biotically-based extension of family ties. It certainly does not help us to say that national membership in this latter sense should be defined as ethnicity.
Church membership is another form of social membership. The question of the relation between Church membership and membership in civil society is complex and full of historical subtlety. Moreover, Churches are not only placed in the public sphere, they are part of the social web in which they participate in the familial and private sphere as well. How is this inter-institutional web to be structured and maintained?
Institutions function in a social web of mutual inter-dependence. The web is extremely complicated; we need structural analysis here. The place of religious belief in society needs to be clarified, too. Memberships, therefore, in our kind of society, are not as simple as we may first think. They are tied to a fabric of mutual responsibility; they are woven together in typical ways in the life of any one person. When a person is a member of more than one social group conflicts of interest may occur at a personal level. But a public conflict of interest can also occur. Memberships are inherently comparative and transitive, in that their consideration requires us to see how they move from one person to the next.
We have discussed membership with much attention given to family and marital relations. State and Church. We need also to deepen our understanding of membership in organisations. These have been focussed upon because we cannot dispense with these responsibilities when we go "out" into the public realm and join clubs, take on work or involve ourselves with the many organisations that dot our social landscape. Much remains to be described and explained, particularly membership in organisations. We will also find ourselves returning again and again to this topic when we discuss norms, authority, and other matters later on.
The term is a further specification of the term participant. Membership refers to the fact that social actors act with mutually inter-dependent obligations. Membership obligations are determined by the institution, organisation or relationship in which one's membership is located but the formation of such obligation presupposes other obligations from other memberships. Some memberships are institutional, others are organisational and yet others refer to a dynamic inter-play of an inter-personal character.