least in theory, they comprise the whole of the social environment.
[W]hen society is made up of segments, whatever is produced in one of the segments has as little chance of re-echoing in the others as the segmental organization is strong. . . . This is no longer true when society is made up of a system of organs. According to their mutual dependence, what strikes one strikes the others, and thus every change, even slightly significant, takes on a general interest (Durkheim, 1933, pp. 107-8).
Durkheim later explains that the more interdependent discrete social elements are, the more members in the various divisions of labor are "united by ties which extend deeper and far beyond the short moments during which the exchange is made. Each of the functions that they exercise is, in a fixed way, dependent upon others, and with them forms a solidary system" (p. 111). Nothing solidary that involves such form of interdependence, however, detracts from the segmented frame of reference that differentiates the fundamental experience within each segment. Like Durkheim
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