SOCI0024 Modern Social Theory SOCI6008 Modern Theory and Sociological Analysis A Review and a Preview 1. Introduction: ‘classical’, ‘modern’, ‘theory’

SOCI0024 Modern Social Theory

SOCI6008 Modern Theory and Sociological Analysis

A Review and a Preview

1. Introduction: ‘classical’, ‘modern’, ‘theory’

2. Modernity: the agenda and the ‘answers’ in the classical theories

3. Socio-economic changes in the 20th century

4. Political changes characterizing the modern society

5. Changes as they bear on the individual level

6. Preview of the persistent and new issues, and contemporary ways of theorizing them

1. Introduction:

a. Classical theory: transformation and integration; theories as systems, as programmes and as new idioms/languages

b. Modern theory: diversification of fields of inquiries, and specialization; the further logic/development of capitalism, and multifarious development of interpersonal relationships, and the embodied nature of power

c. Theory: as general synthetic statements; as abstract and formal models; as insights on particular institutions or social categories; as analytical openings for understanding social action

d. Sociology may not have a single common language; but we need to be mulilingual

Introduction

e. ‘The idea is to use a variety of viewpoints: you will, for instance, ask yourself how would a political scientist whom you have recently read approach this, and how would that experimental psychologist, or this historian. You try to think in terms of a variety of viewpoints and in this way let your mind become a moving prism catching light from as many angles as possible’ (C. Wright Mills 1961)

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2. ‘One sentence capture’ of the founding fathers’ responses to the onset of modern society (birth of modern society as also birth of sociology)

Marx

Agenda ‘Answers’

Source of tension or contradictions in modern capitalist societies is the key to its eventual transformation into a modern advanced stage of development, namely socialism

What is both progressive and repressive about modern capitalist society is its system of production, a social organization of production that locked two increasingly homogeneous groups in an unequal and permanent/inevitable relationship, and which entails increasingly intensive conflicts

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Classical theories, cont’d

Agenda ‘Answers’

Weber What is distinctive about modern society is the emergence and combination of ideas and interests that propel a methodical/rational way of organizing all domains of social life; when everything is subject to calculation, everything undertaken for instrumental and impersonal reasons: what does this imply for our values as human beings

Rationalization is the dominant trend in modern societies; such rational/bureaucratic control will persist in both capitalist and socialist societies; at an individual level, the use of the means-end schema to conduct our social life leads to disenchantment of the world

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Classical theories, cont’d

Agenda ‘Answers’

Durkheim What is distinctive is the heterogeneity of social interactions, with social density (urban living) matched by moral density, with people interdependent in a more complex way, with their moralities evolving (or fail to evolve) to meet the needs of such complexity; failing that, social disorder

Social solidarity in modern society is undermined not by inequalities as such, but by the effect of such inequalities on people’s moralities (norms of justice)

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Classical theories, cont’d

The classical theories as providing different and distinctive approaches to the economic, social and cultural aspects of modernity? Yes and No

The classical theories as proffering either optimistic or pessimistic views of the future of human society? Yes and No

The classical theories as a product of their times, and their relevance to 20th century changes is limited? Yes and No

The classical theories as delineating the main areas of sociological analysis from then on, and as also providing for these areas the key concepts and approaches, with these concepts and approaches adopted, adapted, modified and developed by modern social thinkers.

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Classical theories, cont’d

Two sets of questions contained in the classical theories:

a) How should one conceptualize the relations between individual and society (and other related ‘dichotomies’, e.g., actor/agent and structure, subjective and objective) and the relative importance or place of the various dimensions of power/domination

‘Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves…’ (Marx)

Social being determines social consciousness, or the infrastructure/base vs. the superstructure:

Social being and social consciousness, cont’d

‘In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will….the sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures.’ (Marx)

Meta-theories on the agency of the individual vis-à-vis society or structure; conceptualizing the morphology of power (images such as base/economics vs. superstructure, or economic power as the ultimate determinant of social action)

The first set of questions bequeathed to us by the classical heritage is thus the more abstract, more philosophical issues of human agency and social conditions/constraints

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Classical theories, concluded

b) What are the major issues confronting modern society; what could one say are the defining features of modernity, and the things that leave the most important imprint on the human conditions in the 20th century?

‘Within any mode of production the division of labour did not separate individuals randomly into isolated social atoms, but systematically into social classes.’ (Abrams on Marx)

Classical theories, concluded

Domination (forms, ways, means, basis, legitimacy and reproduction)

And more:

‘The division of labour (as fundamental source of inequality) separates individual interests from the common interests, but it also re-groups interests along the lines of class. In doing so, it gives the powerful classes the means of consolidating their power: the surplus they have appropriated can be used to create legal, religious and cultural institutions in which class domination is legitimated and enforced.’ (Abrams on Marx)

Or

‘The tendency of industrialization was to make people increasingly different from one another and morally to encourage them to emphasize differences rather than similarities. Given a powerful tendency in that direction, how could society continue to cohere?’ (Abrams on Durkheim)

Social Integration, Community and Morality (the nature and implications of individualism, the bearing of modern social relationships on things such as trust and commitment

Classical theories, concluded

And more from Abrams on Weber:

‘For him, modern society was above all a society pervaded by rationalism, and its history was a history of rationalization….rationality was the peculiar historical fate of the world’, and

By ‘rationalization’, Weber meant the processes by which explicit, abstract, intellectually calculable rules and procedures are increasingly substituted for sentiment, tradition and rule of thumb in all spheres of activity. Rationalization leads to the displacement of religion by specialized science…the substitution of the trained expert for the cultivated man of letters, the ousting of the skilled handworker by machine technology…It means that there are no mysterious, incalculable forces that come into play…This means that the world is disenchanted.’

Modernity and postmodernity (if modernity is the iron cage of rationality, does postmodernity mean ‘anything goes’?)

Classical theories, concluded

The second set of questions bequeathed to us by the classical heritage is thus about power/domination, social cohesion, cultural values, as they are manifested at two levels:

at the system (institutional) level (e.g., do we still have polarized classes in the late 20th century capitalism? How have the production structures changed? Is economic power still the dominant form? Are there other means, channels, and basis of power?),

and at the individual level (e.g., with the compression of time and space by modern information technology and transport system, are we experiencing a richer emotional life and more satisfying social relationships?)

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Mapping these questions to Modern Social Theories

• Old issues and new languages (eclectic character of modern theorizing)

• Old issues and new context (e.g. ‘self and others’ as undergoing changes as a result of new social movements such as feminism, or the idea of the modern family)

• New issues and new theorizing (e.g., global village and cyber culture as impacting on the meanings of social relationships)

New issues needing new theorizing: an example

‘Modernity.. Is a double-edged phenomenon. The development of modern social institutions and their worldwide spread have created greater opportunities for human beings to enjoy a secure and rewarding existence than any type of pre-modern system….On the whole, the ‘opportunity side’ of modernity was stressed most strongly by the classical founders of sociology. Marx and Durkheim both saw the modern ear as a troubled one. But each believed that the beneficent possibilities opened up by the modern era outweighed its negative characteristics….Weber was the most pessimistic among the three founding fathers… Yet even he did not fully anticipate how extensive the darker side of modernity would turn out to be.’ (Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 7)

3. Socio-economic changes in the late 20th century

a. Work, Corporations and Technology: new Production Structures (Charles Sabel)

• Technology: as permissive and not constraining; as a life-enhancing tool – realizing our changing human needs, and not a machine imposed on its tenders; as malleable, innovative, developing even more flexibly new products; machines even if they are still fixed costs are now much more multi-purpose built (think of computer programming, of robot technology, of nano breakthrough…); they must be adaptable, ungradable, etc., similar to the open platform;

This in turn is affected by (i) the ever differentiated products market; there is more than ever a wider range of niche products; it is no longer mass-production and mass-consumption; consumers demand more customized products, and in a volatile market, this means need for quick development (adaptability) and short production runs; research and development takes control, and technology assumes more open-ended and flexible function

Sabel, cont’d

Implications: consumption fuels production, and production fuels technological innovation, all in a spiral, mutually reinforcing relationship

(ii) change in consumer’s attitude: consumption is like some investment (‘is it worth the money to change to the new model?’; ‘how long could I enjoy this upgrade, and I put down real money for it, before there is another upgrade?’, etc.

• Organization/Corporation

(i) In order to cater to the specialized products market (flexible production), development time and costs must be minimized, and thus design and execution are better integrated in work teams, assigned special projects; there is a decentralization of management and decision-making;

(ii) Managers are required to rotate, to learn their way by shifting from one project, one team, one line of product, to another;

Sabel, cont’d

(iii) In manufacturing (e.g., computers), but also in large service industries, the corporation structure has changed to clusters of work teams and subunits, where skilled workers from different stages of production work as team players: design, execution, advertising, HR, sales, even including supplier firms, subcontractors, consultancies, etc. ; there are more tasks, units and companies to coordinate and monitor ---- the corporate structure has become an open environment; it is difficult to tell who’s the inside and who the outside (moebius strip)

• Work

(i) For the individual, the meaning of work has also changed: no longer something that is tied for a long time to a company; no longer something or some definite skill that could be used for making a living indefinitely; work does not have a clear and distinct meaning when one is required to move from job to job, from one work team to another, and to pick up the skills as one goes along;

Sabel, cont’d

(ii) The labour market for the worker is now an open labour market; different from the traditional craft labour market where the worker possesses a particular skill/craft or material; and different from the internal labour market characteristic of mass- production regimes (internal promotion); the worker in the open labour market works in the clusters of work teams, which are formed and disbanded continuously; the work structure is more in the form of networks than hierarchies; a programming engineer could after a few years move to a consultancy job, then to an independent start-up company (entrepreneurial) --- the attachment to the company is getting ambiguous, as work experience is no longer tied to the same workplace, to the same workmates; boundaries within the corporation blurred; boundaries between companies also blurred;

(iii) Groucho Marx: ‘I do not want to be a member of any club that would want me as a member’: the idea of exclusivity, of fixity, and ambivalent attractions; given the ‘open boundary’ feature of modern corporations and work, the company no longer has exclusive hold on the employee, just as the employee does not see his company as ‘fixed’ or exclusive (think of the job hopping in Silicon Valley); relation between work (individual) and organization has become complex and tenuous

Sabel concluded

Overall implications

(i) If relation between worker and corporation becomes complex and tenuous, then work may no longer be the most important context of identity-formation; loyalty is always hanging in the balance; traditional notions of exploitation and alienation (mass-production regime) are no long adequate to understand this situation;\

(ii) The open labour market is both enhancing autonomy and hampering it: the work experience of working with people from different lines, with different expertise, etc. creates opportunities and incentive to strike out on one’s own (entrepreneurial); at the same time, the worker is also much more dependent on these work networks (in a way ever shifting) for information (new job, nursery for children, schools, etc.); work and private time are much more tied up with these networks;

(iii) The advantaged are those who could travel lightly, moving from one job to another, where their skills and experience could range from computer engineering (the hardware) to intelligence engineering to consultancy to Harvard MBA…; the disadvantaged are those who have nothing to offer to this new production/organization regime; do traditional concepts of working class and middle class suffice to make sense of these new ‘haves’ and ‘haves-not’?

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Socio-economic changes in the late 20th century, cont’d

a. Quality of social relationships in the compressed and accelerated age (Craig Calhoun)

Traditional (Gemeinschaft) Modern (Gesellschaft) Post-Modern?

Relationships Primary, secondary Mediated; primary as now compartmentalized

Mode of integration

Interpersonal, concrete, everyday

Indirect, extended in space and time, abstract, needing co-ordination

Key institutions

Family, community Market, corporations, state

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b. The insights and inadequacies of the classical theories on social relationships, as we experience them in the late 20th century

Marx: social relationships as mediated and hidden by commodity exchange

Weber: the market as the epitome of indirect and impersonal relationships in capitalist society

Durkheim: social relationships multiplied and differentiated, thus requiring a new mode of integration; different modes of social solidarity have different implications for conceptions of mutuality and for individual’s socio-psychological makeup

To Calhoun, the classical responses to social relationships in modern society are inadequate, because

• either they focus too much on the system (how parts/institutions (e.g., economy vs. polity, or social inequality vs. normative order of social justice) relate to one another, and not sufficient attention on social relationships

• or they have focused too much on one or the other factor or dimension of power/force (commoditization of relationships, or the market as representing the dominant mode of rationality)

• or they have not foreseen further dramatic changes since their time, viz. information technology and advancements in transportation

To Calhoun, these theories need to be further developed (new context > old issues > theorizing > new issues)

c. Where to go next? Calhoun’s understanding of modernity and its future

Calhoun, cont’d

Transformations in technology infrastructure and transportation systems led to changing nature of indirect social relationships manifested in

• market: as nodes of economic behaviour, the scope, scale and reach of market have dramatically extended; market is treated as if it is something objective (e.g., predicting market behaviour is like predicting weather)

• corporations: proliferation of these organizations; corporations are like actors, endowed with autonomy and responsibility; as an aggregate of indirect relationships, it is both familiar (as we associated a corporation with an icon, a figure, a personality) and remote (something above and beyond us, we know little about its workings)

These new social relationships enveloping us in manifold structures and affecting our social lives in many contexts could not be characterized as primary, secondary, etc.

These new aggregates of social relationships need a lot of information going through them, and they are sets or ensembles of ties that stretch across space and people, using modern means of communications and transportation; they are thus very powerful control mechanisms

Calhoun developed two concepts to characterize these social relationships:

• tertiary relationships (client writing to the bank, or voter voting for a party; invisible but still intentional; one seems to know the other)

• quaternary relationships (even more remote, more abstract, more indirect: relationships not intended but are ‘pirated’ over and over, falling into manifold parties: examples like PayPal on eBay, or discussion groups with moderators on the Web)

Calhoun, concluded

Overall conclusions

‘New information technology may be used in these ways to organize more of social life through indirect relationships, to extend the powers of various corporate actors, to coordinate social actions on a larger scale, to intensify control within specific relationships’. (p.221)

Social organization is automated (e.g. production automated now not just in the sense of robot replacing workmen for producing things, but also in the sense that say a barcode on a product tells us where it is produced, from which batch, for which destination, information about procuring of raw materials, etc.); automation extends to information, organization, coordination of raw materials and finished products in different parts of the world.

The question then is: what is the impact of this on everyday human experience (e.g., is intimacy possible on internet?), and what is the future of a society where social integration is increasingly dependent on these ‘virtual’ indirect relationships?

This takes us beyond the classical theories.

Alan Touraine:

‘During the last 50 years, we have discovered that we can not only organize the exchange of material goods and produce them more efficiently on the basis of the division and mechanization of labour; we can also produce symbolic goods, languages and informations and modify our relationships to ourselves, most obviously through the progress of biology and medicine..’

and

‘The social philosophers… were interested in the preconditions of social order; sociology, born of the industrial revolution, was concerned with ways and means of reimposing order on the ‘great transformation’. Today we can no longer rely on principles of order or images of the just society; we can only think in terms of actions, change and social relations, and theorize in terms of strategies, politics, or .. .the conflictual self-production of society.’ (Touraine 1989:85)

‘Classical sociology hesitated between the study of social integration and the construction of a meaning of history. Society was seen as existing in history and as moved by it from tradition to modernity; its main task was to defend its cohesion while completing the mutation. Today the idea of evolution has disappeared and been replaced by the more neutral concept of change…. Actors are now recognized as more than simply the components of society or the limbs of a social body; they are real actors who transform the increased ability of society to act upon itself into actions, conflicts and negotiations….’ (1989:89)