Q.What is meant by social order and how is it maintained?

Social order refers to the tendency within an established social system to resist, regulate, and slow down change, and understanding how it is actually maintained requires distinguishing why societies need order in the first place from how they go about securing it.

The basic need for order is fairly simple: any society has to be able to reproduce itself and maintain a workable level of stability over time. This requires a degree of predictability -- people need to be able to expect that established rules will continue to hold, that similar actions will produce similar results, and that institutions and individuals will behave in broadly consistent ways. Without this baseline of continuity, a society could not function at all, and social change itself would be meaningless as a concept, since change only makes sense against a backdrop of things that are not changing.

Beyond this general need, there is also a more concrete reason societies tend toward order: most societies are unequally stratified, with some groups holding more command over economic resources, social status, and political power than others. Those who are favourably placed generally have a vested interest in things staying as they are, since "normal," unchanging conditions tend to work in their favour, while those who are disadvantaged have more of a vested interest in change. This means social order is not a neutral, evenly-shared arrangement -- it tends, in practice, to be maintained in ways that favour already-dominant groups. …