Society is an intimation or an idealization rather than a social structure.

What is a society?  It appears to be a group of people, like a tribe or a nation state or a civilization, which is self sufficient in that it provides in its institutions all that is required to provide a distinctive way of life for a people. The trouble is, though, that these entities are not self-sufficient, as when the Arab civilization has to sell oil and is beset by the  inroads of Western civilization and so grapple with what is essentially Islamic, becoming more and more like a set of nation states. And, more grandly, what is society in itself, that to be understood as a simile for the sea in which the fish swim? What is that overarching but central and essential object for sociologists to study? Take note that in looking at that large item a choice is being made between examining the thing as a whole rather than the basic building blocks out of which it is made. Biologists can look at living bodies for the various functions they undertake, such as respiration and digestion and reproduction, but can also look at the life of the cell and so see that is the real meaning of biological life. Similarly, sociologists can study the role or the norm as the building block which animates society as that appears to be the overwhelming and encompassing social entity which is indispensable to mind. 

A usual and workable idea of society is that it is the intersection of all the social forces that are in play within a society and so make people familiar with it. So a society is made up of social class and ethnicity and institutions of politics and religion and the mass media, and everybody responds to these structures and so are in society whether or not people think of society as an object in itself. Society recognizes us even if we don’t recognize it. But that is the rub. People can recognize they have familial obligations and interests without thinking themselves trapped or maybe safe within its strictures. Society is therefore the opposite or the residual of all the actual relations people have, in which case sociology sets society in opposition to the individual, ever diminishing the ability to act as individuals as when political sociologists ever more restricted the voter to make an independent rational decision about who to select by showing that voting was contingent on social class or education and less and less on beliefs or doctrines.The opposition between the individual and society as the two negations of one another is also manifested in psychological life when people are unhinged from their self directed mental decision making by the mind being invested and overcome with totalitarian or cultish thinking or by the pernicious effects of social media. It is always possible to find the pernicious cause that leads the individual to become absorbed by society, as happened when people thought that comic books were the poison that destroyed reason before comic books became regarded as an art form.