Social ontology is a branch of ontology and metaphysics that studies the nature and basic categories of the social world. It asks which kinds of social entities exist—such as social groups, institutions, social roles and social categories—and what their existence consists in, including how they depend on and arise out of social interaction, shared attitudes and material realizations.
A primary concern of social ontology is to distinguish genuinely social entities from mere aggregates of individuals, and to clarify the relations between individual minds and collective phenomena such as norms, organizations and social structures. The field investigates, for example, the metaphysical status of corporations and states, the nature of money and property, the ontology of social categories such as gender and race, and the structure of social practices, rules and institutions.
