SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 18 › dati › corsi › 36068 › 13269-fulcher_ch02.pdf ·...

··

Pioneers of social theory 22

Social development and evolution 23Hegel: society as spirit 23

Comte and Saint-Simon 24

A positive science of society 25

Spencer and social evolution 27

Karl Marx 28Marx’s model of society 28

Historical materialism 30

A theory of knowledge 30

Summary points 31

The classic period of sociology 32

Émile Durkheim 33The nature of social facts 33

Studying social facts 34

Social differentiation and social solidarity 36

Suicide and social solidarity 37

Max Weber 39Concepts, values, and science 39

Understanding social actions 41

Traditionalism and rationality 42

Summary points 42

Academic sociology established 43

Structural-functionalist theories 45The action frame of reference 46

Social structure 47

Functional analysis 49

The evolution of modern society 51

Systems theory 51

Interaction theories 52Symbolic interactionism 52

Phenomenological approaches to interaction 55

Rational choice theory 56

Conflict theories 58Authority, resources, and conflict 58

Critical theory 59

Summary points 61

Sociology moves on 63

Feminist theories 63

Post-modernism and theory 65

Summary points 67

Key concepts 68

Revision and exercises 69Theories of structure 69

Theories of interaction 69

Theories of conflict 70

Further reading 70

Web links 71

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM 8

··

2

Theories andtheorizing

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 19

··

H2345H67890H234567890H234567890H234567890H2345678901234H

20 2: Theories and theorizing

‘That’s all very well in theory’

How often have you heard someone say ‘That’s all very well in theory’ or ‘Well, I know how it ought to work in theory’? The implication of these statements is that‘theory’, no matter how logical or clear-cut, can never grasp the realities of a situ-ation and so is a poor guide to action. Theory is seen as abstract and irrelevant, per-haps as produced by those who live in ‘ivory towers’ and do not understand what the‘real world’ is like. Sometimes, theory is seen as an evaluative, ideological positionthat contrasts with a sombre reliance on ‘the facts’. These ideas are particularlystrong in discussions of the social world. People can be castigated for theorizing,rather than getting on with more important things, much as Nero was criticized for,allegedly, fiddling while Rome burned. This view often goes hand in hand with theassertion that sociological theory is, in any case, mere jargon: commonplace ideasdressed up in scientific mumbo-jumbo language. Theory consists of spinning outlong but essentially meaningless words. The jargon serves as a smokescreen for ignorance or platitudes. The implication is clear: sociological theorizing is not thekind of thing that any self-respecting person need be concerned with.

Such views misunderstand the nature of theory. Theory is—or should be—an attempt to describe and explain the real world. In a very important sense, it is impossible to know any-thing about the real world without drawing on some kind of theoretical ideas. Sociologicaltheories are attempts to highlight the varying social situations that are of interest by draw-ing out their general features. They abstract from the particular and unique features of eventsand situations in order to isolate those things that they have in common and that can,therefore, guide us in understanding events and situations that we have not yet encountered.

It is undoubtedly true that sociologists can be as susceptible to prejudice and jargon as anybody else. Perhaps they have sometimes adopted cumbersome terminology in a misguided attempt to justify their claims to a scientific status in the face of exactly thesekinds of objections. However, any scientific activity must employ technical terms in its theories, and these terms will not always be comprehensible to the person in the street.Many sociological terms come from everyday language, and they have to be given precisetechnical meanings if they are not to be misunderstood.

Theory can be dibcult and demanding. You will not necessarily understand all that we say inthis chapter the first time that you read it. However, you should not worry about this. It is not yourfault. The problem lies with the complexity of the theories and—it has to be said—with the failure ofcertain theorists to present their ideas clearly. You will find it best to skim through the chapter as awhole, not worrying too much about the detail. You can spend more time on the parts that you findeasiest to handle. Treat the whole chapter as a reference source, as something to come back to asand when you read the ‘Understanding’ sections of the book. Theory is best handled in context.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 20

··

Theory lies at the heart of sociology. Theory enables us to understand and explain thenature of the social world. Many sociological theories are concerned with specific socialphenomena or with explaining particular social processes. They concern such things ascrime, health, education, or politics, or they concern deviance, socialization, or stratification.You will encounter many such theories in the various chapters of this book. These theories are, however, connected into larger theoretical frameworks that try to grasp themost general features of social life as a whole. It is these theories that we will look at in thischapter. We will outline the key ideas of the main theorists, and we will show how theirideas are related to the issues that we raise in the other chapters of the book.

There is no single theory to which all sociologists subscribe. There are, instead, a numberof different theories, each of which has its advocates and its detractors. These theories aresometimes presented as mutually opposed to each other and as defining rival positionsfrom which sociologists must choose. It is sometimes assumed that adherents of one theory have nothing to learn from considering any others. Some textbooks, for example,present their readers with three (or perhaps four, five, or more) different theoretical posi-tions on each topic and imply that all are equally valid. It is as if you enter the sociologicalsupermarket and see, laid out on the shelves in front of you, ‘Marxism’, ‘functionalism’,‘feminism’, ‘interactionism’, and so on. You walk down the aisles, picking up those theoriesthat appeal to you or that have the best packaging. Having made your choice, you returnhome to use your new theories.

Theoretical choice is not like this. The choice between theories is not made on the basisof individual preference (‘I just don’t like functionalism’) or political standpoint (‘I’m work-ing class, so I’m a Marxist’). Preferences and politics do, of course, enter into sociology, butthey do not determine the merits of particular theories. The choices that we must makeamong theoretical positions are shaped, above all, by empirical considerations. When judg-ing a theory, what really matters is its capacity to explain what is happening in the realworld. Theories must always be tested through empirical research. As we show in this andthe next chapter, the ‘facts’ are not quite as straightforward as this statement suggests.However, the point still remains. Theories are attempts to describe and explain the socialworld. Their merits and limitations depend, ultimately, on their ability to cope with what weknow about that world.

We will show that the leading theorists of the sociological tradition have attempted, intheir different ways, to understand the modern world. They have each, however, concen-trated on particular aspects of that world. None has given a full and complete picture. Theleast satisfactory theorists are, in fact, those who have tried to move, prematurely, towardsthat comprehensive picture. The most powerful theories are those that have emphasized aparticular aspect of the social world and have concentrated their attention on understand-ing that aspect. In doing so, they neglect or put to one side the very processes that othertheories take as their particular concern.

If it is possible to produce a comprehensive understanding of the social world, this islikely to result from the slow synthesis of these partial viewpoints. In so far as the socialworld is constantly changing, it is undoubtedly true that any such synthesis would not lastlong before it, too, was in need of reformulation. Theoretical change and the developmentof new theories are constant features of scientific activity. Even in such a well-developedfield as physics, there are numerous partial theories that have not yet been synthesized intoa larger and more comprehensive theory.

Theories and theorizing 21

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 21

For as long as people have lived in societies, theyhave tried to understand them and to construct theories about them. So far as we know, people have always lived in societies, and so social theory has along history. For much of this history, however, theseattempts at understanding have looked very differentfrom what we currently mean by the word sociology.Early attempts at social understanding had a greatersimilarity to myths or to poetry than they did to science, and many of these attempts were religious orhighly speculative in character. The creation of a dis-tinctively scientific approach to social understandingis, in fact, a very recent thing. Only since the seven-teenth century, and then mainly in Europe, has therebeen anything that could truly be called a science ofsociety.

The origins of a scientific perspective on social life can be traced to the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. TheEnlightenment marked a sea change in the wholecultural outlook of European intellectuals. In onefield after another, rational and critical methods wereadopted and religious viewpoints were replaced byscientific ones. It was in this period that the very ideaof science first emerged.

The greatest of the early achievements of theEnlightenment were the philosophy of Descartes and the physics of Newton. Writing in the middledecades of the sixteenth century, Descartes set out aview of intellectual enquiry as the attempt to achieveabsolutely certain knowledge of the world, usingonly the rational and critical faculties of the mind.


··

Pioneers of social theory

For the present, then, different theories must be seen, in principle, as complementary toone another. We must emphasize that we are not proposing that all theories are of equalvalue, or that they can simply be hashed together in some unwieldy mixture. Some theoriesare bad theories that have received no support from empirical research. Even the useful theories have their particular strengths and, of course, their particular weaknesses. Eachtheory must be assessed against the facts that are relevant to its particular concerns, notagainst those that are more relevant to some other theory. By the end of this chapter you should have some appreciation of how the various sociological theories do, indeed,complement one another. You should begin to see how, collectively, they provide a pictureof the social world that is far better than any of them can provide alone.

In this chapter we place great emphasis on the historical development of sociolo-gical theory. Theories constructed over 100 years ago are, of course, likely to have been superseded, in many respects, by more recent theories. Many of them, however, still have agreat deal of relevance for us today, and most contemporary theories have developed out ofthe ideas of the nineteenth-century theorists. It is possible to gain a better understandingof them if these lines of development are traced.

We begin with an overview of the earliest attempts to establish a science of sociology,and we go on to show how these attempts were the basis of the classical statements of sociology produced around the turn of the twentieth century. The section on ‘Academic sociology established’ looks at the three main theoretical traditions of the twentieth century: structural-functionalist theories, interaction theories, and conflict theories. We con-clude the chapter with a sketch of the feminist, post-modernist, and globalization theoristswhose arguments have moved sociological debates on to a broader set of issues. We con-sider these arguments at greater length in the various chapters of Part Two. In this chapterand throughout the book you will find that we consider both classic and contemporary theorists, treating them as participants in the same great intellectual enterprise that is sociology.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 22

From this point of view, science was the attempt to construct theories that could be assessed againstthe evidence of the human senses. Observation anddirect experience of the world provided the raw materials for scientific work. The rational and criticalfaculties of the scientist guided the way that thesewere accounted for. In Newton’s physics, this methodled to the construction of elegant mathematical theories that saw the behaviour of physical objects in relation to their mass, volume, and density, and tothe forces of gravity and magnetism.

During the eighteenth century, the scope of sci-entific knowledge in physics was enlarged, and thesame scientific method led to advances in chemistry,biology, and many other specialist fields. Progress inthe construction of a scientific sociology was muchslower. At first, social life was understood in almostexclusively individual terms. Those who explored social life tried to explain it as resulting from the behaviour of rational, calculating individuals whosought only to increase their own happiness and satisfaction. They were aware that individuals livedin societies, but they saw societies only as collectionsof individuals. They had not grasped what most people now take for granted: that individuals cannotbe understood in isolation from the social relationsinto which they are born and without which theirlives have no meaning.

In Britain and France, and later in Germany, a moreproperly social perspective was gradually developed.British theorists were particularly concerned witheconomic activities and economic relations and have often been described as taking a materialistview of social life. For them, the central features of social life were the struggle over economic resourcesand the inequalities and social divisions to whichthis gave rise. French and German writers, on theother hand, highlighted the part played by moral values and ideas, and they have been described asidealist theorists. These theorists saw societies as possessing a cultural spirit that formed the foundationof their customs and practices.

Social development and evolutionThe first systematic theories of social life were thoseof Hegel and Comte. Hegel built on the work of hisGerman predecessors to construct a comprehensiveidealist theory of society and history. Similar con-cerns are apparent in the work of Comte, though hewas a more self-consciously scientific writer whoowed a great deal to the economic analyses of the earlier materialists. Where Hegel remained satisfied

with a very general account of the nature of the distinctive social element in human life, Comte triedto analyse this into its constituent elements. Thesewere, he said, aspects of the structure of social sys-tems. Both writers identified long-term processes ofsocial change that they described as processes of social development. Spencer, writing later in thenineteenth century, carried all these themes forward.He saw society as a social organism that developedover time through a process of social evolution.

Hegel: society as spiritThe stimulus behind Georg Hegel’s ideas was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the next great land-mark in philosophical thought after Descartes. Kant’scentral argument was that scientific knowledge wasan active and creative production of the humanmind. All observations, Kant argued, depended uponthe particular ways in which experiences were interpreted in relation to current cultural concerns.According to Hegel, the interpretation of experiencereflects the ‘spirit’ of the culture. This term, takenfrom Montesquieu (1748), referred to the generalprinciples and underlying ideas that lay behind theparticular customs and practices of a society. Thespirit of a culture shapes the subjective ideas andmeanings on which individuals act, and so Hegel sawindividuals as the mere embodiments of the culturalspirit. There was, then, a one-to-one relationship between cultural spirit, social institutions, and socialactions. Hegel saw actions and institutions as simplythe means through which cultural ideas and valueswere formed into a social reality.

frontiers

Hegel’s ideas are complex and his works are dibcult to read. At this stage, you should not try to track down his books. If you everdo feel able to tackle him, you should start with his Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1821). Do not expect an easy ride!

Hegel saw history as involving a gradual shift from local to more global social institutions. In theearliest stages, family and kinship defined the basicsocial pattern. People’s lives were contained withinlocalized communities that were tied tightly togetherthrough bonds of kinship and family obligations.The family spirit prevailed. These communal formsof social life were followed in Europe and in certain of the great civilizations of the world, by societies inwhich the division of labour and market relationstied local communities into larger societies. Hegelsaw these societies as marked by deep divisions into


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 23

unequal social classes and as driven by the commer-cial spirit of property-owners and merchants.

In his own time, Hegel identified the beginnings of a new stage of social development. The nationstate was becoming the key social institution. In contemporary societies, he held, the state embodied the spirit of the people as a whole and not just thespirit of a particular class or kinship group. This waswhat he called the world spirit, a universal and all-embracing cultural spirit that marked the end pointof historical development.

Hegel’s work, while pioneering, was not yet socio-logy. He saw history as the automatic and inevitableexpression of an abstract spirit into the world. Spirititself was seen as the active, moving force in sociallife. Yet spirit was an unsatisfactory idea and was notanalysed in a scientific way. Hegel personified spirit,seeing it as some kind of active and creative force.Furthermore, when Hegel looked to what it is thatdrives the human spirit itself, he discovered God. Theholy spirit lies behind the human spirit, and socialdevelopment is seen as the progressive realization ofGod’s will.

Hegel’s work drew together many of the insights of the French idealists and put them into a com-prehensive general framework. Its religious character,however, meant that he had few direct followers.Some aspects of his thought were taken ahead, in avery different direction, by Marx, as we will shortlyshow. Idealism had its greatest impact on the development of sociology in France. The key writerhere was Auguste Comte, who was the first to set outa comprehensive, if flawed, account of a theoreticalscience of society.

Comte and Saint-SimonIt is thanks to Comte that the science of society is called ‘sociology’, as it was he who invented theword in 1839 to describe the system of ideas that he had developed. Comte, however, was carrying forward and enlarging some of the ideas that he had learned from his teacher and first employer, Saint-Simon. Comte’s intellectual and personal relationship to Saint-Simon was very close, but a disagreement between the two men led Comte todeny the importance of Saint-Simon and to exag-gerate the originality of his own work. Despite this, it is undoubtedly Comte’s efforts at systematizingand unifying the science of society that made possible its later professionalization as an academic discipline.

Saint-Simon was a radical, but eccentric aristocratwho popularized the idea of what he called posit-ive science. The term positive means definite and


··

THEORY

AugusteComte

. . . inventor of theword ‘sociology’.

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (1798–1857)was born in Montpellier. After an unspectacular education,during which his political interests led him into conflict with the authorities, he settled in Paris. He was a dogmaticand self-important individual, whose arrogance made itdibcult for him to establish secure relationships. Hisintellectual relationship to Saint-Simon was stormy, andended a year before the death of Saint-Simon in 1825. His personal life was equally unstable. Comte’s early lifewas marked by periods of depression and paranoia, and his marriage broke down because of his extremejealousy.

Comte decided on the plan for his life work while stillworking for Saint-Simon. He planned a Course in PositivePhilosophy, which he delivered in public lectures andpublished in serial form between 1830 and 1842. TheCourse eventually ran to six volumes, covering the whole ofwhat he took to be established knowledge in mathematics,astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. The part on sociology (which he originally called ‘socialphysics’) was its centrepiece and took up three of the sixvolumes.

Having completed this task, Comte went on to writewhat he considered to be even more important, the System of Positive Politics. This, too, was a multi-volumework and was completed in 1854, just 3 years before hisdeath. The System set out a summary of his position and his programme for the social reconstruction of Europeansociety. This reconstruction involved the establishment of a‘Religion of Humanity’, a religion that abandoned dogmaand faith and was itself constructed on a scientific basis.Sociology was to be the core of this religion, withsociologists replacing priests as the expert teachers and policy-makers.

Comte’s works are dibcult to get hold of in Englisheditions, but you might like to scan some of the extractsreprinted in K. Thompson (1976).

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 24

··

While many of the details of Comte’s sociology are no longer accepted by sociologists, his main prin-ciples have largely been accepted and they now forma part of the mainstream of the subject. His key insight was that societies had to be understood ascomplex systems. They are organic wholes with a unitysimilar to that of biological organisms. The humanbody, for example, is a biological system of parts thatare connected together into a living whole. Similarly,a society may be seen as a cohesive and integratedwhole. The parts of a society are not simply indi-viduals, but social institutions. A society consists offamily and kinship institutions, political institutions,economic institutions, religious institutions, and so on.These do not exist in isolation but are interdepend-ent parts of the whole social system. Change in anyone institution is likely to have consequences for theother institutions to which it is connected.

Comte identified two broad branches of sociology,corresponding to two ways in which social systemscould be studied:

• social statics: the study of the coexistence ofinstitutions in a system, their structures and theirfunctions;

• social dynamics: the study of change in institutionsand systems over time, their development andprogress.

The study of social statics is similar to the study of organization or anatomy in biology. It looks at the structure of a social system, at the way in whichthe institutions that make up the system are actu-ally connected to each other. Comte argues that the aim of social statics is to produce laws of coexistence,principles concerning the interdependence of socialinstitutions.


unquestionable, and Saint-Simon used it to describethe precise or exact sciences based on observationand mathematics that he saw emerging in one intel-lectual field after another. This led him to advocatethe building of a positive ‘science of man’, a psycho-logical and social science of the human mind. Oncethis science had been achieved, he held, we would be well on the way to possessing a complete know-ledge of everything that exists. At this point, the various positive sciences could be unified into a single ‘positive philosophy’.

The work of Saint-Simon was confused and unsys-tematic, and he recognized that he needed a collabor-ator. Comte, who had been convinced by the work of Montesquieu and Condorcet that there was apressing need for a social science, took on this taskand worked closely with Saint-Simon from 1817 to1824. It was this period of intellectual apprenticeshipthat gave Comte the confidence to begin to constructthe outlines of the positive philosophy and its posit-ive science of society.

A positive science of societyComte’s importance in the history of sociology is due to the particular method that he proposed andhis general view of the subject matter of sociology. The method that Comte proposed for sociology wasthat of positive science. He held that sociology couldadvance human understanding only if it emulatedthe other positive sciences in its approach. Comtewas not saying that sociology had slavishly to followthe natural sciences. On the contrary, he was veryconcerned to emphasize that each of the major dis-ciplines had its own distinctive subject matter, whichhad to be studied in its own right and could not be reduced to the subject matter of any other science.His point was simply that there was only one way ofbeing scientific, whatever the subject matter of thescience.

Comte’s positivism presented science as the studyof observable phenomena. The scientist must makedirect observations of those things that are of inter-est, examining their similarities and differences, andinvestigating the order in which they occurred. Theseobservations had then to be explained by theoreticallaws, or logical connections. These laws stated causalrelationships between observed events, so allowingthe scientist to predict the occurrence of events. If,for example, we have a law stating that intellectualunrest is a cause of political instability, then the observation of intellectual unrest would lead us topredict a period of political instability. The task of thescientist is to produce theories that are able to arriveat just these kinds of laws.

BRIEFING

For Comte, the positivist approach in science simplyinvolves an emphasis on rational, critical thought andthe use of evidence. In many contemporary discussions,however, it is presented as a much narrower and morerestricted idea. ‘Positivist’ is often used almost as a termof abuse, and is applied to those who use mathematicsor social surveys. This kind of distortion is not helpful.You will find it much easier to handle sociologicaldebates if you avoid trying to label people as positivistsand non-positivists. If you must use the word, try to use itas Comte intended. Bear in mind, however, that Comtetied positive science to positive politics and his religionof humanity.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 25

The main elements of a society, according toComte, are its division of labour, its language, and itsreligion. It is through their division of labour thatpeople organize production and satisfy their mater-ial needs. Through their language they communicatewith each other and pass on the knowledge and valuesthat they have learned. Through their religion, theycan achieve a sense of common purpose and of working towards a common goal. These elements are all cemented together into the overall social structure.

The connections between the parts of a social sys-tem are studied by identifying their functions. Wewill come back to this idea later in this chapter. Ingeneral terms, however, Comte used the term func-tion to refer to the contribution that particular insti-tutions or practices make to the rest of the society,the part that they play in reproducing or maintain-ing it in existence by contributing to its solidarity or coherence. Comte saw a coherent society as a‘healthy’ society. Those systems that show a highlevel of solidarity, consensus, or coherence workmore smoothly and are more likely to persist thanthose with only a low level of coherence. Coherentsocieties are in a healthy state of balance or equi-librium, with all their parts working well together. In some situations, however, societies, like other organisms, may be in a ‘pathological’ condition ofimminent breakdown or collapse. If their parts arenot functioning correctly, they will not have the kindof coherence that they need to survive.

The study of social dynamics is concerned with theflow of energy and information around a social sys-tem and, therefore, with the ways in which societieschange their structures in certain ways. Structuralchange is what Comte calls development or progress.The aim of social dynamics is to produce laws of suc-cession that specify the various stages of developmentthrough which a particular social system is expectedto move.

Comte saw the emergence of positive science itselfas something that could be explained by the most important law of succession that sociologists possess.This was what he called the law of the three stages.According to this law, the religious ideas produced by the human mind pass through three successivestages, and particular types of social institutions correspond to each of them. These three stages arethe theological, the metaphysical, and the positive.In the theological stage, people think in exclusivelysupernatural terms, seeing human affairs as resultingfrom the actions of gods and other supernatural beings. In the metaphysical stage, theological ideasare abandoned and people begin to think in terms of

more abstract spiritual forces such as ‘Nature’. Finally,the positive stage is one in which these abstractionsgive way to scientific observation and the construc-tion of empirical laws.

Comte saw the theological stage as having lasted in Europe until the fourteenth century. This periodinvolved a vast range of human societies from thesimplest tribal societies to more complex kingdoms.The metaphysical stage lasted from the fourteenthcentury until about 1800, and Comte saw its devel-opment as having been closely linked with the rise of Protestantism. Societies in the metaphysical stagewere militaristic and feudal societies that dependedon a vast agricultural base. The positive stage beganearly in the nineteenth century and corresponds towhat Comte called industrial society. This term,now so taken for granted, was first used by Saint-Simon and was taken up by Comte to describe thetype of society that was gradually maturing in theEurope of his day. The term industrial was initiallycontrasted with earlier ‘militaristic’ types of society,and was intended to suggest that social life had become organized around the peaceful pursuit ofeconomic welfare rather than the preparation forwar. More specifically, an industrial society is one organized around the achievement of material well-being through an expanding division of labour and a new technology of production. This kind of societyis headed by the entrepreneurs, directors, and man-agers who are the technical experts of the new indus-trial technology.

As it developed, however, industrial society createdgreat inequalities of income. The resentment that thepoor felt towards the wealthy was responsible for apathological state of unrest and social crisis. The onlylong-term solution to this, Comte argued, was for arenewed moral regulation of society through the establishment of a new, rational system of religionand education. This would establish the moral con-sensus that would encourage people to accept the inevitable inequalities of industrialism.

Comte’s political aspirations were unfulfilled, andhis religion of humanity inspired only small and eccentric groups of thinkers. His view of the need fora critical and empirical science of society, however,was massively influential and secured the claims of his sociology to a central place in intellectual dis-cussions. His particular view of the development ofmodern industrial society rested on a rather inade-quate historical understanding of pre-modern societ-ies, but he accurately identified many of its most important characteristics. His concept of the indus-trial society has continued to inform debates aboutthe future development of modern societies.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 26

Spencer and social evolutionThe materialist tradition in Britain had its major impact on the growth of economic theory (usuallytermed political economy), where a long line of the-orists attempted to uncover the way in which theproduction of goods is shaped by the forces of supplyand demand. In the work of Herbert Spencer this wascombined with ideas drawn from the work of Comteto form a broader sociological theory. Spencer wasseen by many people as the direct heir to Comte, although this was certainly not how he saw himself.Although he gave far less attention to religious andintellectual factors than did Comte, there is, never-theless, a great similarity in their views. It is also true to say, however, that Spencer remained very close to the British tradition in giving a great emphasis to individual action. Spencer took forward Comte’sidea that societies were organic systems, but he alsoemphasized that they must be seen in terms of indi-viduals and their actions.

Spencer adopted Comte’s distinction between socialstatics and social dynamics as the two main branchesof his sociology. His social statics stressed the idea of society as an organism. Each part in a society is specialized around a particular function and somakes its own distinctive contribution to the whole.A society is an integrated and regulated system of interdependent parts. Much of Spencer’s work in sociology consisted of the attempt to describe these

interdependencies in general terms and as they arefound in actual societies.

His most distinctive contribution to sociology, how-ever, was his emphasis on the principle of evolutionin his social dynamics. Evolutionary ideas achieved agreat popularity in Victorian Britain following thepublication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859.The debate over Darwin’s work made widely knownthe idea that biological species evolve through a con-stant struggle for existence in which only the fittestcan survive. Those species that are best adapted to the biological conditions under which they live aremore likely to survive than those that are only weaklyadapted or not adapted at all. In fact, the phrase ‘sur-vival of the fittest’ had been introduced by Spencersome years before Darwin published his work, andboth Darwin and Spencer acknowledged that the ideaof a struggle for existence came from Malthus’s (1798)work on population.

Spencer’s great contribution to the debate overevolution, however, was his advocacy of the principleof social evolution. This consisted of two processes:

• structural differentiation;

• functional adaptation.

Structural differentiation was a process through whichsimple societies developed into more complex ones.This idea was modelled on the biological processthrough which, as Spencer saw it, advanced organ-isms had more differentiated and specialized partsthan less advanced ones. In all spheres of existence,he held, there is an evolution from the simple to the complex. In the social world, structural differ-entiation involves the proliferation of specialized social institutions.

Spencer saw simple societies as organized aroundfamily and kinship relations, and as achieving theirmaterial needs through hunting and gathering. Fewaspects of social life are specialized, and everything is, ultimately, organized through kinship. Gradually,however, separate governmental and economic insti-tutions are formed and systems of communicationare established. Many activities previously organizedthrough the family come to be organized throughthese specialized institutions. As a result, the familyloses some of its functions, which have been ‘differ-entiated’ into the specialized institutions. Over time,the specialized institutions are themselves subject tostructural differentiation. Governmental institutions,for example, become differentiated into separate political and military institutions.

The reason why structural differentiation occurs,Spencer held, is that it allows societies to cope withthe problems and dibculties that they face in their


··

THEORY

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was born in Derby and wasprivately educated in mathematics and physics. He startedwork in the new railway industry, and became a successfulrailway engineer. His intellectual interests in geology andbiology, and his interest in political issues, led him topublish a number of articles, and in 1848 he decided tomove into journalism. His first book was Social Statics. Thisand a series of papers on population and evolution werefollowed by a major work that was to take the whole of therest of his life to complete. Like Comte, he aimed at anencyclopaedic summary of human knowledge; a ‘syntheticphilosophy’. He published this work in his Principles ofBiology, Principles of Psychology, Principles of Sociology,and Principles of Ethics.

Spencer’s sociological works are dibcult to get hold ofand it is probably better to approach him through theextracts reprinted in Andreski (1976).

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 27

material environment (physical conditions, climate,natural resources) and from other societies. This pro-cess of coping with the environment is what Spencercalled functional adaptation. Structural differentiationallows societies to become better adapted, and so achanging environment is associated with an increas-ing level of structural differentiation.

The nineteenth century, according to Spencer, wasa period in which industrial societies were beginningto evolve. These societies were well adapted to theconditions under which people then lived. They werehighly differentiated social systems with only a veryloose degree of overall regulation. Individuals had agreat degree of autonomy in an industrial society, andfurther evolution depended on the maintenance of their intellectual, economic, and political free-doms. Spencer tried to explore what he saw as thebalance between individual freedom and collectivewelfare in industrial societies. Adam Smith had argued that the economic market operated as a ‘hidden hand’ to ensure that the greatest level of economic happiness resulted from individually selfishbehaviour. Spencer extended this argument and heldthat all the structurally differentiated institutions ofcontemporary societies could be seen as working,generally in unintended ways, to produce the greatestcollective advantages. There was a natural harmonyor coherence that resulted only from the rational,self-interested actions of free individuals. Spencerwas, therefore, opposed to state intervention of anykind, whether in the sphere of education, health, orthe economy. Individuals had to be left to strugglefor existence with each other. The fittest would sur-vive, and this was, he argued, in the best interest ofsociety as a whole.

Karl MarxWe have looked at two writers who were engaged in acommon intellectual exercise. Despite the differencesin their views, Comte and Spencer both produced pion-eering versions of a science of sociology. Karl Marxtoo aspired to build a science of society, but he wasvery much on the margins of the intellectual worldand he did not describe himself as a sociologist. Tothe extent that he took any account of the work ofthe sociologists, he was critical of it. This failure ofMarx to identify himself as a sociologist reflects thefact that the word was still very new and, for manypeople, it still described only the specific doctrines ofComte and Spencer. As we will see in ‘The ClassicPeriod of Sociology’, pp. XX–XX, it was only in thenext generation of social theorists that Marx’s ideas

began to receive any proper recognition as a part ofthe same sociological enterprise as the works of Comteand Spencer.

The inspiration for Marx’s work was the growth of the European labour movement and of socialistideas. He tried to tie his philosophical and scientificinterests to the needs of this labour movement. Marxwas trained in the tradition of Hegel’s philosophy,studying at Berlin just a few years after Hegel’s death,but he was also influenced by the British materialisttradition. He saw the work of writers such as Fergusonand Millar as providing the basis for an understand-ing of the power and significance of the labour movement, but only if combined with the historicalperspective of Hegel.

Marx’s model of societyThe central idea in Marx’s early work was alienation.This described the way in which the economic relations under which people work can change theirlabour from a creative act into a distorted and de-humanized activity. As a result, people do not enjoytheir work or find satisfaction in it. They treat it as amere means to ensuring their survival (by providingthemselves with a wage) and therefore their ability to turn up the next week to work once more. In thisway, work and its products become separate or ‘alien’things that dominate and oppress people.

Marx accounted for alienation in terms of propertyrelations and the division of labour. The economy,he held, was central to the understanding of humanlife. He argued that the existence of private propertydivides people into social classes. These are categor-ies of people with a specific position in the divi-sion of labour, a particular standard of living, and adistinct way of life. The basic class division was thatbetween property-owners and propertyless workers.The existence of classes and of social inequality wasfirst highlighted by the British materialists, and Marxsaw his own contribution as showing how and whythese classes were inevitably drawn into conflict witheach other. This he did in his later work for Capital.Classes, he argued, were involved in relations of exploitation. The property-owning class benefits atthe expense of the propertyless, and this leads theclasses to struggle over the distribution of economicresources.

Marx saw societies as social systems that could bedivided into two quite distinct parts: the base and the superstructure. The economy and class relationscomprised what he called the material base or substructure of society. The base always involves aparticular mode of production. By this term, Marxreferred to the technical and human resources of


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 28

··

production and the specific property relations anddivision of labour under which they are used. Thiseconomic base is the foundation upon which a superstructure of political, legal, and customary so-cial institutions is built. It is also the basis of variousforms of consciousness and knowledge. The ideas thatpeople form, Marx said, are shaped by the mater-ial conditions under which they live. They must beregarded as what he called ideologies.

There has been much controversy as to how Marx’s division of the social system into a base and a superstructure is to be interpreted. In its most gen-eral sense, it is simply a claim that only those soci-eties that are able to ensure their material survival,through an ebciently organized system of produc-tion, will be able to sustain any other social activities.People must eat and have adequate clothing andshelter before they can stand for parliament, write

poetry, or engage in sociology. The economic systemacquires a compulsive power that shapes all other social activities because of the priority that has to begiven to meeting basic economic needs.

frontiers

Young Marx and old Marx

There is some controversy about the relationship between theworks of the older, mature Marx of the 1860s and those of theyouthful Marx of the 1840s. For some commentators, the earlyworks on alienation were immature exercises that he laterabandoned. For others, however, exploitation and alienation are closely related ideas. A close reading of Marx’s texts shows that there is a great deal of continuity and that the so-calledGrundrisse (Marx 1858) is a key link between the two phases of his work.


THEORY

Karl Marx

. . . highlighted theimportance of classconflict in socialchange.

Karl Marx (1818–83) was born in Trier, Germany. He studiedlaw at Bonn and Berlin. His radical political views led him into a journalistic career, but this was cut short by the suppression of the various journals for which he wrote. He fled tJzo Paris in 1843, to Brussels in 1845, and, finally, to London in 1848. It was in London that he spent the rest of his life. His massivetomb can still be seen in Highgate cemetery.

Marx began to work on a series of philosophical andeconomic books while in Paris, and he spent the rest of his lifestudying, engaging in radical politics, and writing articles fornewspapers and periodicals. He was able to use his time in thisway only because of the financial support from his friend andcollaborator Friedrich Engels.

Engels (1820–95) was the son of a wealthy cottonmanufacturer. Like Marx, he was involved in radical politics andintellectual work, but he was sent to Manchester by his father tomanage the English branch of the family firm. This gave him thefinancial independence to support both himself and Marx.

Engels wrote an important study of poverty, The Condition ofthe Working Class in England in 1844 (Engels 1845), and hecollaborated with Marx on a number of works, including TheCommunist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848).

Marx found it dibcult to complete books. A number of hismost important studies were published long after his death,thanks to the editorial work of Engels and others. The mostimportant of his early works, where he set out a theory of‘alienation’, was the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts(Marx 1844), published only in 1932. After The CommunistManifesto, he went on to produce a series of massive drafts forCapital, a critical study of economic theory and the economicbasis of society. Only volume i (Marx 1867) was published in his lifetime.

The details of Marx’s work are discussed in various parts ofthis book. You will find them in the following chapters:

alienation and the nature of work Chapter 15

poverty Chapter 16

class relations and class polarization Chapter 17

labour organization, ruling class, politics, and the state Chapters 18, 19

religion and ideology Chapter 11

Useful discussions of Marx’s ideas can be found in Giddens (1971) and Craib (1997). There is more detail inMcLellan (1971), which contains some extracts from Marx’sown work. A good biography is McLellan’s Karl Marx: His Lifeand Thought (McLellan 1973). If you want to try to understandMarx’s economic theory, you should try Mandel’s (1967) The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 29

Some of Marx’s followers, along with his critics,have claimed, however, that he was setting out aform of economic determinism that allowed no autonomy at all for politics and culture. According to this view, political institutions and cultural ideassimply reflect economic divisions and struggles.While Marx did sometimes seem to suggest that theeconomy should be seen in this way, he was too sophisticated to accept such a deterministic position.Indeed, the claims for his work made by some of hisfollowers led him to make the famous remark ‘I amnot a Marxist’.

Comte and Spencer saw social systems, in theirnormal states, as characterized by harmony and co-hesion. Marx’s view, on the other hand, recognizedconflict and division as normal features of all societies. There are divisions not only within the economic base (between classes), but also betweenbase and superstructure. While a superstructure norm-ally reinforces and supports the economic base, it can frequently come into contradiction with it. Bythis, Marx meant that the form taken by the super-structure obstructs the further development of themode of production. If production is to expand anyfurther, the superstructure must be transformed to re-establish a closer correspondence with the economicbase.

Historical materialismSocial systems develop over time as a result of thecontradictions that develop within their economies.Marx’s materialism, then, was a specifically histor-ical materialism, the name by which Marxism isoften known. Historical materialism is a theory of the transition from one mode of production to another.

Marx distinguished a number of modes of produc-tion that he used to chart the sequences of historicaldevelopment that resulted from increases in the level and scale of production. The simplest, least-developed forms of society were those in which themode of production could be described as primitivecommunism. In this type of society, property is ownedby the community as a whole, and the community itself is organized around bonds of kinship.

Marx argued that, as technology develops and production expands, so the property relations mustchange. If they do not, societies will not be able tocontinue to expand their powers of production. Outof the simple form of primitive communism, then,systems with private property and more complex divisions of labour evolve. In these societies, there are distinct political institutions and, in many cases,centralized states.

Marx often suggests that the evolutionary line inwestern Europe led from the primitive communismof the Germanic and Celtic tribes, through the slave-owning systems of ancient Greece and Rome, and onto the feudal states of the medieval period. Feudal societies centred on the division between landownersand unfree labourers, who must work for the land-lord as well as for themselves. Eastern Europe and theNear East followed a similar progression, but passedthrough an ‘Asiatic’ stage instead of a feudal one. It is to feudalism that Marx traced the emergence of the capitalist societies to which he gave his greatestattention.

The form of society that was emerging in westernEurope at the time that Marx was writing was notsimply an industrial society (as Comte had argued)but a specifically capitalist society. Beginning in thetowns and commercial centres of the feudal world, a class of private property-owners had become themost important economic force. Since at least the sixteenth century, these capitalists had built plants,workshops, and factories in which they employedlarge numbers of workers. Capitalist entrepreneursgenerated profits for themselves through a system of market exchange and the employment of wagelabour. Marx held that these capitalists eventually became the ruling classes of their societies. They displaced the old feudal landowners, often throughviolent revolutions such as that in France from 1789to 1799. They were responsible for the alienation, exploitation, and oppression of the workers who actually produced the goods that provided them withtheir profits.

As capitalist societies developed, Marx argued, exploitation grew and their superstructures no longerencouraged economic growth. If production was tocontinue to expand, property relations and the wholesuperstructure had to be swept away in a revolu-tion. This time, however, it would be a revolution of the workers, who would displace the capitalist ruling class. Workers, Marx held, would become conscious of their alienation and of the need tochange the conditions that produced it. They wouldjoin together in radical political parties and, in due course, would overthrow the capitalist system. A workers’ revolution, Marx rather optimisticallythought, would abolish alienation, exploitation, andoppression, and it would establish a new and moreadvanced form of communist production.

A theory of knowledgeMarx derived a distinct philosophical position fromhis social theory. He accepted that the natural sci-ences might produce absolute and certain knowledge


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 30

about the physical world, as Descartes and Kant had argued, but he held that this was not possible for the social sciences. The social world could not beknown objectively, but only ever from particularstandpoints. These standpoints were those providedby the class backgrounds of the observers. Membersof a dominant class do, quite literally, see the socialworld differently from those who stand below themin the class hierarchy.

All social knowledge, then, is relative or ideolo-gical. It is historically determined by the class posi-tion of the knower. There is no standpoint outside theclass structure, and so there can be no impartial orcompletely objective knowledge of the social world.For Marx, commitment is unavoidable. Social know-ledge—and therefore social science—reflects a politicalcommitment to one side or another in the struggle of classes.

Marx accepted the logical conclusion that his owntheories were relative. They were relative, not to the standpoint of his own class, but to that of hisadopted class. This was the proletariat, the subordin-ate class of the capitalist system. He believed that

theorists who adopted the standpoint of this sub-ordinate class, the oppressed and exploited class,were able to achieve a deeper and more adequate understanding of their society than those who weretied to the standpoint of the ruling class. It was forthis reason that he did not hesitate to present his core ideas in a political manifesto for the communistmovement (Marx and Engels 1848).

By contrast, he saw the ideas of almost all other social theorists as adopting the standpoint of the ruling, capitalist class. Classical economics and thesociologies of Comte and Spencer were, for Marx, uncritical expressions of the capitalist or bourgeoisworld-view. Their ideas could serve the labour movement only if they were subjected to rigorouscriticism. Hence, he subtitled his major work on economics (1867) ‘A Critique of Political Economy’.Unless bourgeois thought was subjected to criticismfrom the standpoint of the proletariat, it would remain simply an intellectual defence of the existingsocial order.

Marx’s work provides a powerful challenge to theideas of Comte. Where Comte emphasized that modern societies were industrial societies ruled by benign industrialists, Marx saw them as capitalist soci-eties ruled by an oppressive capitalist class. Marx alsodiffered from Comte in his stress on the importance of conflict and struggle in human history and in his emphasis on the economic basis of social life.Marx’s claim to have produced a complete and com-prehensive social theory cannot be upheld, but it is undoubtedly true that he highlighted many factorsthat had been minimized or ignored by Comte andSpencer.

Marx saw all social knowledge as relative to the classstandpoint of the observer. What social divisions, other thanclass, could he have seen as providing distinctive standpointson the social world? Do you agree with his rejection of thepossibility of ‘objectivity’? Come back and consider thisquestion again when you have read our discussions of Max Weber and of feminist theories.

Summary pointsThis section has traced the early stages of scientificsociology from the Enlightenment thinkers throughto the pioneering statements of Comte, Spencer, andMarx. Although you are not expected to understandor recall everything that we have written about them,you should try to make sure that you have some familiarity with their key ideas.


··

BRIEFING

Modes of production

Marx recognized six main modes of production, eachdefined by a particular type of property ownership andlabour:

• primitive communism—relatively egalitarian,communal property;

• ancient—slave-owning systems;

• Asiatic—despotic and bureaucratic control;

• feudalism—serfdom, combined with urban commercialcentres;

• capitalism—wage labour and private property;

• advanced communism—re-establishes communalproperty.

In each of these modes of production, the productiveforces are developed to a different level. Before the stageof advanced communism they are also marked bygrowing levels of exploitation and alienation.

Do not worry about the details of this scheme. We will introduce some of these, where relevant, in otherchapters. You might like to compare Marx’s scheme withthe stages of development identified by Hegel, Comte,and Spencer.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 31

• The idea of a science of society was a product of theEuropean Enlightenment of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries.

• Only gradually was an understanding of the dis-tinctively social features of human life separatedfrom an understanding of individuals.

• Social thought is diverse, each theoretical frame-work emphasizing particular aspects of social life.We looked at the way in which early social thoughttended to follow distinct materialist and idealisttraditions.

The pioneering statements of a specifically soci-ological approach are found in the works of Comteand Spencer. An alternative approach, that of Marx,broadened out this emerging form of social thought.

Comte established the idea of sociology as a positivescience that explained empirical observations throughcausal laws.

• Both Comte and Spencer used a distinction between social statics and social dynamics. Socialstatics is concerned with the structure and func-tioning of social systems. Social dynamics is con-cerned with their development over time.

• The contrast between contemporary industrial soci-eties and earlier militaristic societies was importantfor both Comte and Spencer.

The classic period of sociology

The period from the 1880s to the 1920s was one in which sociology began to be established as a scientific discipline in the universities of Europe andNorth America. Increasing numbers of professorsbegan to call themselves sociologists or to take soci-ological ideas seriously. Both Spencer and Marx hadtheir heirs and followers. In Britain, Spencer’s ideaswere developed in a more flexible way by LeonardHobhouse, the first person to hold a sociology pro-fessorship in a British university. In the United States,William Sumner developed versions of Spencer’sideas that had a considerable influence, and LesterWard developed a sociology that owed rather more toComte.

Marx’s ideas were taken up in the leading Com-munist parties of Europe and, even before his death,they began to be codified into ‘Marxism’. Those whoregarded themselves as Marxists shared his identi-fication with the proletariat. Marxism was seen not

simply as a theoretical framework but as the basis forthe political programme of the labour movement.The country in which Marxism had the greatest impact was Russia, where the revolution of 1917 ledto the dominance of the Communist Party and theenshrinement of Marxism as the obcial ideology ofthe Soviet Union. The political content of Marxismlimited its influence in academic sociology. Whilethere was some attempt to grapple with his ideas—especially in Germany—Marxism was a neglected tradition of thought until the 1960s.

Sociology thrived most strongly in France andGermany, where a number of important theoristsbegan to construct more disciplined and focused theoretical frameworks that could be used in detailedempirical investigations. In France, there was thework of Le Play, Tarde, and, above all, Durkheim. In Germany, the leading theorists were Tönnies,Simmel, and Weber. In terms of their impact on the

• Spencer saw social development as a process ofstructural differentiation, shaped by functionaladaptation.

While Marx also saw societies as systems that could be studied in terms of their structures and development over time, he placed more emphasis on the part played by conflict and struggle in socialdevelopment.

• Marx saw economic activity as fundamental to social life. Work, property, and the division oflabour form the economic base of society, its modeof production.

• Work and property ownership are the basis of classdivisions that result in the alienation and exploita-tion of labour.

• Social development has followed a sequence ofmodes of production from primitive communismthrough feudalism to contemporary capitalist societies.

• Political and legal institutions, together with cul-tural values and ideologies form the superstructureof society and are shaped by the economic base.

• Revolutionary change, resulting from class conflict,will transform the base and the superstructure ofcapitalist society and will introduce a new systemof communist production.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 32

later development of sociology, it is Durkheim andWeber who must be seen as the key figures.

Émile DurkheimÉmile Durkheim saw one of his principal academictasks as the construction of a philosophical basis for a science of sociology. He wanted to show that soci-ology could be a rigorous scientific discipline that wasworthy of a place in the university system. An under-standing of Durkheim’s thought, then, must beginwith this philosophy of science and his attempt toproduce a distinctive view of the nature of sociology.

The nature of social factsAccording to Durkheim, the subject matter of soci-ology is a distinctive set of social facts. These are notjust any facts that happen to concern people’s lives in societies. They are quite specific phenomena thatcan be sharply distinguished from the facts studiedby other scientists. They are, in particular, distinctfrom the facts of individual consciousness studied by psychology and the organic facts of individual bodiesstudied by biology. They are the things that definethe specific intellectual concerns of sociology.

Durkheim characterizes social facts as ways of acting, thinking, or feeling that are collective, ratherthan individual, in origin. Social facts have a realitysui generis. This is a Latin phrase that Durkheim usesto mean ‘of its own type’ or ‘distinctive to itself’.Because this was a dibcult idea for others to under-stand—and it is still not completely understood bymany critics of sociology—he set out his views atsome length.

Durkheim gives as an example of a social fact whatlater writers would call a role. There are, he says, cer-tain established ways of acting, thinking, or feeling as a brother, a husband, a citizen, and so on. They are, in the most general sense, expected, required, or imposed ways of acting, thinking, or feeling for thosewho occupy these positions. They are conventionalways of behaving that are expected by others andthat are established in custom and law.

Social facts are collective ways of acting, thinking,or feeling. They are not unique to particular indi-viduals, but originate outside the consciousness ofthe individuals who act, think, or feel in this way.They most often involve a sense of obligation. Even when people feel that they are acting throughchoice or free will, they are likely to be following apattern that is more general in their society and thatthey have acquired through learning and training.We learn what is expected of us quite early in life,

and these expectations become part of our own personality.

Social facts, then, are external to the individual.They do not, of course, actually exist outside indi-vidual minds, but they do originate outside the mindof any particular individual. They are not created


··

THEORY

ÉmileDurkheim

. . . saw sociology asthe study of socialfacts.

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was born in Épinal, France.He studied social and political philosophy at the ÉcoleNormale Supérieure in Paris, reading deeply into the worksof Montesquieu and Rousseau. He studied for a year inGermany. He taught educational theory at Bordeaux from1887 to 1902, after which he moved to a professorship atthe Sorbonne in Paris. He made a close, but critical study of the work of Comte, and he produced a number ofexemplary sociological studies. In 1913, only 4 years before his death, he was allowed to call himself Professor of Sociology.

Durkheim’s key works appeared regularly and becamethe basis of a distinctive school of sociology. His majorwritings were The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Suicide: AStudy in Sociology (1897), and The Elementary Forms of theReligious Life (1912). He founded a journal that became afocus for his work. One of his principal followers was hisnephew, Marcel Mauss, who produced some importantwork (Durkheim and Mauss 1903; Mauss 1925).

You will find more detailed discussions of Durkheim’sprincipal ideas in various parts of this book:

religion Chapter 11

education Chapter 9

anomie and the division of labour Chapter 15

The texts by Giddens (1971) and Craib (1997) giveuseful discussions of Durkheim. More detail and abiographical account can be found in Lukes (1973). A good brief introduction is K. Thompson (1982).

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 33

anew as each individual chooses what to do. They are passed from generation to generation and are received by particular individuals in a more or lesscomplete form. Individuals are, of course, able toinfluence them and contribute to their development,but they do so only in association with other indi-viduals. It is in this sense that social facts are the collective products of a society as a whole or of particular social groups.

Because they are matters of expectation, obliga-tion, or deep commitment, social facts also have a‘compelling and coercive power’, which Durkheimsummarizes by the term constraint. This constraintmay be expressed in punishment, disapproval, rejec-tion, or simply the failure of an action to achieve its goal. Thus, someone who breaks the law by killing another person is likely to face arrest, trial,and imprisonment or execution. On the other hand,someone who misuses language is simply likely to be misunderstood. Durkheim remarks, for example,that he is not forced to speak French, nor is he punished if he does not, but he will be understood by his compatriots only if he does in fact use the rulesand conventions of French vocabulary and grammar.

Durkheim emphasizes that social facts are verydibcult to observe. Indeed, they are often observableonly through their effects. We cannot, for example,observe the role of husband, but only particular individuals acting as husbands. Similarly, we cannotobserve the grammar of a language, but only thespeech of particular individuals. Social facts are, ingeneral, invisible and intangible and their properties

have to be discovered indirectly. By observing the actions of large numbers of people who act in similarways, for example, we may be able to infer the exist-ence of the role of husband. By observing a largenumber of conversations, we may be able to infer theexistence of particular rules of grammar.

In some cases, however, social facts may appear to be more visible. They may, for example, be codi-fied in laws, summarized in proverbs, set down in religious texts, or laid down in books of grammar.Durkheim makes clear, however, that these laws,proverbs, texts, and books are not themselves the social facts. Social facts are mental, not physical, andwhat we have are simply the attempts that indi-viduals have made to bring these social facts to con-sciousness and to make them explicit. These explicitformulations can, nevertheless, be useful sources ofevidence about social facts and can be employedalongside the direct observation of actions in any investigation into social facts.

Studying social factsDurkheim’s approach to the study of social facts owes a great deal to Comte’s positivism. It was set outas a set of rules or principles that Durkheim thoughtshould guide the scientific sociologist. The first ofthese directly reflected Comte’s contrast betweenmetaphysical thought and positive science, thoughDurkheim cast it in a more convincing form. The firstrule simply says ‘consider social facts as things’.

What Durkheim meant by this was that it was necessary to abandon all preconceived ideas and tostudy things as they really are. He held that all sci-ences must do this if they are to be objective and ofany practical value. The transformation of alchemyinto chemistry and of astrology into astronomy occurred because the practitioners of the new sci-ences abandoned the common-sense preconceptionsthat they relied on in their everyday lives. Instead,they made direct observations of natural phenomenaand constructed theories that could explain them.Sociology, Durkheim argued, must move in the samedirection. It must treat its objects—social facts—as‘things’.

Our natural, everyday attitudes towards social facts tend to be shaped by religious and political pre-conceptions and by personal prejudices. We use awhole range of everyday concepts such as the state,the family, work, crime, and so on, and we tend to assume (with little or no evidence) that these are universal features of human life. We assume, for example, that all families in all societies are more or less the same as the families that we are familiarwith in our own social circle. Such ideas, as Marx


··

BRIEFING

Social facts

Social facts ‘consist of manners of acting, thinking andfeeling external to the individual, which are vested witha coercive power by virtue of which they exercise controlover him’ (Durkheim 1895: 52). Social facts arecharacterized by

• externality

• constraint.

Some social facts are institutions. These are beliefsand modes of behaviour that are long established in a society or social group. Others are collectiverepresentations: shared ways of thinking about a groupand its relations to the things that affect it. Examples of collective representations are myths, legends, andreligious ideas.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 34

recognized, are ideological. They reflect our particu-lar social position. While Marx simply accepted thatall thought was ideological, Durkheim saw a funda-mental distinction between ideology and science.Those who adopt the scientific attitude, he said, must abandon all the accepted ideas of their social groupand attempt to construct new concepts that directlygrasp the real nature of things. Preconceived ideascome from outside science; scientific concepts aregenerated from within scientific practice itself.

Durkheim’s claim that we need to study things,rather than rely on preconceptions, is, perhaps, toosimple. While he correctly identified the need toavoid the prejudice and distortion that often resultsfrom preconceived ideas, he was mistaken in his belief that it was possible to observe things independ-ently of all concepts. Marx’s philosophy, for all itsproblems, recognized that the things that exist in theworld can be known only through concepts. As wewill see, Max Weber, too, recognized this and pro-duced a rather better account of scientific knowledgethan did Durkheim.

Nevertheless, the core of what Durkheim was trying to establish remains as a valuable insight. Hestressed that, if sociology is to be a science, it must engage in research that collects evidence through thedirect observation of social facts. This must be donethrough the adoption of an attitude of mind that is as open as possible to the evidence of the senses. Wecannot substitute prejudice and ideology for scientificknowledge.

Durkheim’s approach to the study of social factsmakes a distinction between two complementary aspects of sociological explanation. These are causalexplanation and functional analysis. Of the two,causal explanation is the more fundamental. In acausal explanation, the origins of a social fact are accounted for in relation to the other social facts thatbrought it into being. The punishment attached to acrime, for example, may express an intense collectivesentiment of disapproval. The collective sentiment,then, is the cause of the punishment. If the sentimentdid not exist, the punishment would not occur.

Showing causal relationships is not quite asstraightforward as Durkheim implies. The fact that variations in A are followed by variations in B may not indicate that B iscaused by A. The variations could indicate that both A and Bare caused by some other, as yet unknown, third factor. Welook at this problem in Chapter 16, pp. XXX–X, where weconsider it in relation to occupational achievement.

Functional analysis is concerned with the effects ofa social fact, not with its causes. It involves looking atthe part that a social fact plays in relation to the needsof a society or social group. The term ‘need’ referssimply to those things that must be done if a soci-ety is to survive. More generally, the function ofsomething is the part that it plays in relation to the adaptation of a society to changing circumstances.

The nature of functional analysis is shown inFigure 2.1. This model simplifies Durkheim’s account


··

Social solidarityReligious observance

reduce

high

low

increase

Figure 2.1

Functional analysis

Source: J. Scott (1995: fig. 6.2).

This model is based on Durkheim’s account of suicide, which we discuss on pp. X–X below, and the view of social solidarity that we set out onpp. XX–XX. You might find it useful to come back to this diagram after you have read our account of social differentiation and social solidarity.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 35

of the function of religion in a society. Durkheim argued that religion helps to meet a society’s need forsocial solidarity. High levels of religious observancetie people together and so increase the level of socialsolidarity; low levels of religious observance, on theother hand, reduce the level of social solidarity. Thisis matched by the effects of social solidarity on reli-gion. If the level of social solidarity is too low, thenindividualistic impulses may threaten the survival of the society. Stability can be maintained only if religious observance increases and a higher level ofsocial solidarity is re-established. If, on the other hand,the level of social solidarity becomes too high, indi-vidual creativity may be stifled, and a reduction in thelevel of religious observance may be required. Reli-gion and social solidarity are, then, interdependent.

There is much in this view of functional analysisthat remains unclear. In particular, it does not show what mechanisms actually ensure that increasesor reductions in religious observance take place.Durkheim minimizes this problem by equating needwith ‘goal’ or ‘purpose’. That is, he assumes that people consciously and deliberately act to meet socialneeds. Most later writers have rejected this view andhave tried to show that the meeting of needs is oftenan unintended and unrecognized consequence of social action.

frontiers

Rules of the sociological method

Durkheim (1895) set out a number of rules or principles. We haveconsidered only the most important of these. A simplified andslightly shortened version of his list is:

– consider social facts as things;

– cause and function must be investigated separately;

– a particular effect always follows from the same cause;

– a full explanation of a social fact involves looking at itsdevelopment through all the stages of its history;

– social facts must be classified according to their degree oforganization;

– a social fact is normal for a given type of society when it is foundin the average example of the type;

– a social fact is normal when it is related to the generalconditions of collective life in a type of society.

Reread the discussion of Durkheim’s philosophy and identify the paragraphs in which we discuss each of these rules.

In the title of his book, Rules of the Sociological Method,Durkheim uses the word method in the sense of a philosophy ofscience or ‘methodology’ of science. He is not talking about thespecific research methods that we discuss in Chapter 3.

Social differentiation and social solidarityDurkheim applied his scientific method in his great book on the development of modern society(Durkheim 1893). This book, the first that he wrote,was an attempt to examine social differentiation,the specialization of activities into a complex struc-ture of occupations. Durkheim labelled this the division of labour, using this term to refer not onlyto the differentiation of economic activities, but alsoto the specialization of political, administrative, legal,scientific, and other tasks. The division of labour wasa principal topic of investigation for economists, butDurkheim wanted to show that their understandingof it was limited. The division of labour, which hadachieved an unprecedented scale in modern society,was not simply an economic matter. It was central tothe very cohesion and integration of modern societies.

Durkheim’s book is divided into two parts: the firstis concerned with the causal explanation of the divi-sion of labour and the second with its functionalanalysis. Durkheim’s discussion of the causes of thedivision of labour is the shorter part of the book andcan be dealt with briefly. He argued that the divisionof labour can occur only when communal societiesgive way to more organized societies. Communal societies are divided into ‘segments’ (families, clans,local villages) and have little or no division of labour.Each segment is self-subcient. As segments breakdown, however, individuals are brought into greaterand more intimate contact with those in other partsof their society. This expansion in the scale of socialinteraction depends on increasing population dens-ity and on the emergence of cities and commercialcentres. These all bring about an increase in whatDurkheim called dynamic density. This refers to anincrease in the number of social relationships andtherefore in the amount of communication and inter-action between the members of a society.

A growing population density leads to more and more people carrying out the same activities.This results in growing competition and an ever-increasing struggle to survive. The only way that thiscompetition can be reduced is by people becomingmore specialized in their activities. Self-subcienthouseholds may, for example, become specialized infarming, milling, brewing, weaving, and other tasks.They begin to form a division of labour. The divisionof labour, Durkheim argues, develops in direct pro-portion to the dynamic density. As the dynamic dens-ity of a society increases, so the division of labour becomes more marked. Hence, growth in the scale ofsocieties over time produces ever more complex anddifferentiated societies.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 36

Far more attention has been given to Durkheim’sfunctional analysis of the division of labour. In thispart of the book, he looks at the consequences thatthe division of labour has for the wider society. In adivision of labour, he argues, people’s actions arecomplementary and interdependent. The division of labour creates not simply exchange relationshipsin a market system, but a feeling of solidarity that becomes an essential factor in the integration of thesociety as a whole.

Social solidarity consists of the integration of indi-viduals into social groups and their regulation byshared norms. As a social fact, solidarity cannot beobserved directly, but only through its external indi-cators. Durkheim argued that the most important external indicator of social solidarity is the system oflaw. In societies with an extensive division of labour,he argued, the law tends to be restitutive rather thanrepressive. Legal procedures attempt to restore thingsto the way that they were before a crime occurred.Punishment for its own sake is less important. This,Durkheim says, indicates a sense of solidarity that is tied to cooperation and reciprocity. Durkheim calls this organic solidarity. People are tied togetherthrough relations of trust and reciprocity that cor-respond to their economic interdependence, and eachsphere of activity is regulated through specific typesof norms.

The organized, organic solidarity that is producedby the division of labour is contrasted with the mechanical solidarity of traditional, communal societies. In these undifferentiated societies that are characteristic of the pre-modern, pre-industrialworld, social solidarity revolves around a sense ofsimilarity and a consciousness of unity and com-munity. Conformity in such a society is maintainedthrough the repressive force of a strong system ofshared beliefs.

Organic solidarity is a normal or integral feature ofmodern society, but it may fail to develop in some. Inthe early stages of the transition from pre-industrialto industrial society, Durkheim argued, there is a par-ticular danger that abnormal forms of the division oflabour will develop. The normal condition of organicsolidarity encourages a high level of individual free-dom, controlling this through the normative systemsthat Durkheim called moral individualism. The abnormal forms of the division of labour, however,lack this moral framework, and individual actions areleft uncontrolled. The two abnormal situations thathe describes are egoism and anomie.

Egoism is that situation where individuals are notproperly integrated into the social groups of whichthey are members. Anomie is the situation where

individual actions are not properly regulated byshared norms. Durkheim saw anomie and egoism as responsible for the economic crises, extremes of social inequality, and class conflict of his day. As weshow below, he also saw them as responsible for highrates of suicide. All of these problems, he held, wouldbe reduced when the division of labour was properlyestablished and organic solidarity instituted in itsnormal form.

Suicide and social solidarityDurkheim’s best-known book is his study of suicide(Durkheim 1897). His aim in this book was not onlyto provide an account of suicide but also to illustratehow his methodology could be applied to even themost individual of acts. The book was intended toserve as a model of sociological explanation.

Durkheim demonstrated that the taking of one’sown life, apparently the most individual and per-sonal of acts, was socially patterned. He showed thatsocial forces existing outside of the individual shapedthe likelihood that a person would commit suicide.Suicide rates were therefore social facts. He demon-strated this by showing how suicide rates varied fromone group to another and from one social situation to another. Some of the main variations that heidentified were as follows:

• Religion. Protestants were more likely to commitsuicide than Catholics. The suicide rate was muchhigher in Protestant than Catholic countries.Similar differences could also be found betweenProtestant and Catholic areas within the samecountry.

• Family relationships. Those who were married wereless likely to commit suicide than those who weresingle, widowed, or divorced. Whether people hadchildren or not was also very important. Indeed,the suicide rate for married women was lower thanthat for single women only if they had children.

• War and peace. The suicide rate dropped in time of war, not only in victorious but also in defeatedcountries. Thus, Germany defeated France in the war of 1870 but the suicide rate fell in bothcountries.

• Economic crisis. Suicide rates rose at times of eco-nomic crisis. It might be expected that a recessionthat caused bankruptcies, unemployment, and increasing poverty would send up the suicide rate.Suicide rates also rose, however, when economiesboomed. It was not worsening economic con-ditions but sudden changes in them that caused suicide rates to rise.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 37

This demonstration of systematic variations in thesuicide rate showed that suicide cannot be explainedsolely in terms of the psychology of the individual.Even the taking of one’s own life is socially organ-ized behaviour and therefore requires sociological explanation.

In order to provide an explanation, Durkheim putforward a sociological theory of suicide that wouldaccount for these variations. Durkheim’s theory ofsuicide was based on the idea that it was the degree of social solidarity that explained variations in suicide rates. If a person is only loosely connectedinto a society or social group, he or she is more likelyto commit suicide. If their level of solidarity is toostrong, then this, too, could lead to a higher suiciderate.

His theory went further than this, however, for he distinguished between two aspects of social con-nection, which he called integration and regulation.Integration refers to the strength of the individual’sattachment to social groups. Regulation refers to the control of individual desires and aspirations bygroup norms or rules of behaviour. This distinctionled him to identify four types of suicide, which cor-responded to low and high states of integration andregulation:

• egoistic suicide;

• anomic suicide;

• altruistic suicide;

• fatalistic suicide.

Egoistic suicide results from the weak integration ofthe individual that we have shown he described as‘egoism’. The higher suicide rate of Protestants is one example of it. Protestantism is a less integrativereligion than Catholicism, for it places less emphasis

on collective rituals and emphasizes the individual’sdirect relationship with god. Those who are single orwidowed or childless are also weakly integrated andtherefore more prone to suicide. War, on the otherhand, tends to integrate people into society andtherefore reduces the suicide rate. This form of sui-cide was called egoistic because low integration leadsto the isolation of the individual, who becomes excessively focused on the self or ego.

Anomic suicide results from the lack of regulationthat Durkheim described as anomie. Durkheim be-lieved that people would only be content if theirneeds and passions were regulated and controlled, forthis would keep their desires and their circumstancesin balance with each other. Changes in their situ-ation, such as those brought about by economicchange or divorce, could upset this balance. In thesecircumstances, the normal regulation of a person’slife breaks down and they find themselves in a stateof anomie. This word means normlessness, lackingany regulation by shared norms.

Altruistic suicide is the opposite of egoistic suicide.In this case, it is not that social bonds are too weak but, rather, that they are too strong. People set little value on themselves as individuals, or theyobediently sacrifice themselves to the requirementsof the group. Durkheim saw this form of suicide ascharacteristic of primitive societies, though it wasalso found among the military, where there is astrong emphasis on the importance of loyalty to the group. He used the term altruistic to convey theidea that the individual self is totally subordinated to others.

Fatalistic suicide is the opposite of anomic suicideand results from an excessively high regulation thatoppresses the individual. Durkheim gives as an example the suicide of slaves, but he considered this


··

Figure 2.2

Durkheim’s typology of suicide

Type Degree of solidarity Social situation Psychological state Examples

Egositic Low Lack of integration Apathy, depression Suicides of protestants and single people

Anomic Low Lack of regulation Irritation, frustration Suicides during economic crisis

Altruistic High Excessive integration Energy and passion Suicides in primitive societies; military suicides

Fatalistic High Excessive regulation Acceptance and resignation The suicide of slaves

There has been much discussion in the media about the motives of Palestinian suicide bombers. How do you think that Durkheim wouldclassify these suicides?

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 38

type to be of little contemporary significance and helimited his discussion of it to a footnote.

Durkheim recognized that egoism and anomiewere often found together, as, for example, when a divorce occurred. This both isolated people and left their lives in an unregulated state. He was, however, careful to distinguish between the socialprocesses involved in egoism and anomie, on the one hand, and the states of mind that each produced, on the other hand. One of the most notable fea-tures of Durkheim’s theory of suicide, and one that is often overlooked by commentators, is that he shows the consequences of social conditions for anindividual’s psychological state. He demonstratednot only that the behaviour of the individual was social but also that the individual’s internal world of feelings and mental states was socially produced.

Thus, Durkheim argued that the social isolationcharacteristic of egoistic suicide results in apathy ordepression. Anomic suicide is associated with a muchmore restless condition of irritation, disappoint-ment, or frustration. When lack of regulation leadsdesires and ambitions to get out of control, peoplebecome upset and frustrated by their inability toachieve them. Altruistic suicide is generally accom-panied by an energy and passion quite opposite tothe apathy of egoism. Durkheim did not discuss thepsychological state characteristic of fatalistic suicidebut it would seem to involve a mood of acceptanceand resignation.

Since Durkheim, the study of suicide has moved on and later sociologists have pointed to problemswith the methods that he used. The main problemwas that the suicide rates on which he based his study were calculated from obcial statistics. Thesedepended on coroners’ decisions on the classificationof deaths as suicides and it has been shown that theirpractices vary (Douglas 1967; J. M. Atkinson 1978).For a death to be suicide, it must be intentional, andthe assessment of intention is dibcult, particularly if no suicide note is left. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation and considerable scope for others,such as friends and relatives of the dead person, toinfluence coroners’ decisions. The existence of socialvariations in suicide rates cannot, however, be denied, and Durkheim’s fundamental point, that theapparently most individual of acts requires sociolo-gical explanation, stands.

We discuss general problems with the use of obcialstatistics in Chapter 3, pp. XXX–XX.

Max WeberMax Weber worked as an economic historian and alawyer, but he also worked along with other socialscientists in Germany to develop a distinctively soci-ological perspective on these issues. His approach to sociology, however, was very different from that of Durkheim. Weber argued that sociology had tostart out not from structures but from people’s actions.This contrast between a sociology of structure and a sociology of action, two complementary perspect-ives on social life, was to mark the whole of the subsequent development of sociology.

We will begin by discussing Weber’s general approach to social science, and we will then look athis application of this approach in his investigationsinto the development of European societies.

Concepts, values, and scienceDurkheim said that the sociologist must consider social facts as things, disregarding all preconceptions.Weber set out a more complex position, arguing that observation was impossible without concepts of some kind. In his principal essay on this subject(Max Weber 1904), he set out to show that this wasperfectly compatible with the production of object-ive scientific knowledge.

Taking his lead from Kant, Weber argued that therecan be no knowledge of things as they actually exist,independently of thought. To have knowledge is togive meaning to the world and to interpret it in someway. The world does not simply present itself to oursenses already interpreted. It must be interpreted inthe light of what is significant to the observer. Anarea of land, for example, may be of interest as a placefor physical exercise, an environment for flora andfauna, a beautiful landscape, the site of a historicalruin, and so on. The particular interest that we bringto our observation leads us to focus on different aspects of the world and to use different concepts tointerpret it. All observers, scientists included, carveout particular aspects of reality to give them meaningand significance.

The concepts that are used to give this meaning tothe world, Weber argued, derive from cultural values.It is our values that tell us which aspects of reality aresignificant and which are insignificant. All conceptsare ‘value relevant’. They are relative to particular cul-tural values. Those who hold on to feminist values,for example, are likely to focus on the relationshipsbetween men and women and to develop such con-cepts as patriarchy to describe the domination ofwomen by men. Those who hold on to communistvalues, on the other hand, are likely to focus on the


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 39

relationships between workers and property-ownersand to develop such concepts as exploitation to de-scribe these relationships. Values differ considerablyfrom one social group to another, and they changeover time. There are no universally valid values, and so there can be no universally valid scientificconcepts. There are a large number of possible valuestandpoints, and reality can only ever be known fromparticular value-relevant points of view.

This does not mean, however, that all knowledge is simply arbitrary or merely subjective. Scientificknowledge can be objective, despite being value relevant. This is possible if sociologists adopt strictand disciplined methods of investigation. They mustbe critical in their use of concepts and evidence, and they must follow strict logical principles in theirreasoning. It must be possible for any other sociolo-gist to replicate the research and test the results. Onthis basis, a feminist and a communist may disagreeover which concepts are most useful for studying the modern world, but they should each be able tosee whether the other has been honest, rational, andcritical in carrying out his or her research.

In this way, Weber also distinguished quite clearlybetween factual judgements and value judgements.Sociologists, like all scientists, come to objective factual judgements about what is happening in theworld. They may also make subjective value judge-ments about those things in the world of which they approve or disapprove. These value judgements,however, are no part of science. That someone dis-approves of inequality has no bearing upon the question of how great the level of inequality might be in any particular society. The latter is a purely empirical matter, a matter of fact. When a scientistmakes a value judgement, he or she is making an ethical or political statement, not a scientific state-ment. Weber went to great lengths to show thatthose who allowed their value judgements to inter-fere with scientific activities were abandoning theprinciples of science and the pursuit of objectiveknowledge.

Weber’s argument is very dibcult to follow, so do notworry if you have problems with it at first. It is probably one of the most dibcult things that you will come acrossin sociology: it is not even fully understood by someprofessional sociologists! The important point is that Weberrejected the idea that we all experience the world in exactly the same way. He concluded that there can be a number ofequally legitimate ways of doing sociology. Come back toWeber’s argument after you have completed the rest of thischapter.


··

THEORY

Max Weber

. . . saw sociology asthe study of socialaction.

Max Weber (1864–1920) was born in Erfurt, Germany, butspent most of his early life in Berlin. He studied law at theUniversity of Heidelberg—his father was a lawyer—and didfurther academic work at Berlin and Göttingen. He wasparticularly interested in Roman law and agrarian relations,and he undertook a number of studies in economic history.He became Professor of Economics at Freiburg in 1893,and in 1896 he moved to Heidelberg. Following a disputewith his father, he suffered a mental breakdown and gaveup his teaching post the following year. Although he waslater able to continue with research and writing, he did notfully return to university teaching until 1917, when he wasappointed to a professorship at Munich. Weber was activelyinvolved in liberal politics, and he was a member of theGerman delegation to the Versailles peace treaty after the First World War.

Much of Weber’s work appeared as essays in journals,appearing in book form only later in his life or after his death. His most influential work was his study ofProtestantism and the rise of capitalism (Max Weber1904–5), and he produced related studies of religion inChina (1915) and India (1916). His key works on economicand political sociology were not completed in his lifetimeand were brought together for publication after his death(Max Weber 1914, 1920).

You will find detailed discussions of Weber’s main ideasin the following chapters:

religion and rationality Chapter 11

social stratification Chapter 17

bureaucracy Chapter 18

authority and the state Chapter 20

Giddens (1971) and Craib (1997) both provide veryuseful accounts of Weber’s work. The standard biography is that written by his wife (Marianne Weber 1926). Parkin(1982) gives a good, brief introduction.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 40

The final plank in Weber’s scientific method is the ideal type. The principal concepts used by social scientists are constructions for specific scientific pur-poses. They are logical, ideal constructions from one-sided, value-relevant standpoints. From our particularperspective, we pull together those aspects of realitythat are of interest to us and forge them into an ideal-ized model. They can, therefore, be seen as idealiza-tions in the sense that they do not actually exist in reality. These are ‘ideal’ because they are analytical orconceptual, not because they are desirable or perfect.Ideal types are conceptual models that help us to understand the real world. Such ideal types as cap-italism, the nation state, and bureaucracy are notthemselves realities. They are analytical devices thatare constructed by social scientists in order to under-stand the more complex reality that actually exists.

This is also true, in many respects, for the naturalsciences. The concept of H2O, for example, is an ideal-ization that does not exist in reality. Actual samplesof water contain impurities and additives of all kinds,and it is only under highly artificial, laboratory con-ditions that it is possible to isolate pure H2O. In thesocial sciences, laboratory experimentation is notusually possible and so sociologists are never likely toobserve things that correspond precisely to theirideal types. Class and gender relations, for example,only ever exist in combination and alongside manyother factors.

Understanding social actionsThe most important ideal types for sociology are, according to Weber, types of social action. The morecomplex ideal types are nothing more than intricatepatterns of action, so a typology of action can pro-vide the building blocks for sociological investiga-tions. Weber’s emphasis on action marks anotherarea where he differs from Durkheim. Social struc-tures are not seen as external to or independent of individuals. All social structures must be seen as complex, interweaving patterns of action. They havea reality as social facts only when individuals definethem as things with a separate existence. Sociologistscan describe political activity in terms of the conceptof the state only if particular forms of administrationand decision-making have already been reified—defined as things—by the people involved in them.

Weber identified four ideal types of action as thefundamental building blocks for sociology:

• instrumentally rational action;

• value-rational action;

• traditional action;

• affectual action.

Action is instrumentally rational when people adoptpurely technical means for the attainment of theirgoals. The action involves a clear goal or purpose, and means are chosen as the best or most ebcientways of achieving it. The capitalist entrepreneur calculates the most ebcient and economic means for attaining the maximum profit from a particularline of business. The party leader calculates the particular combination of policy proposals that willmaximize the party’s vote in forthcoming elections.Weber argues that much of the economic, political,and scientific action that involves rational choiceand decision-making approximates to this type of action.

Value-rational action, on the other hand, is actionthat is rational in relation to some irrational or arbitrarily chosen value. The religious believer whoprays and gives alms to the poor may be acting in avalue-rational way. He or she is acting this way for itsown sake and as an absolute duty, and no account atall is taken of instrumental considerations. In thistype of action, there is no discrete or easily observablegoal, even if a believer hopes that his or her actionsmight lead to salvation. In the case of value-rationalaction, there is no suggestion that actions are tech-nically appropriate in cause–effect terms. They are,however, rational in the methods that they adopt forexpressing particular values.

Traditional action is that kind of action that isunreflective and habitual. It barely involves any degree of rationality at all. Traditional action is car-ried out as a matter of routine, with little or no con-scious deliberation. People simply act in the way thatthey always have done in that situation in the past.Many everyday actions have this traditional, habitualcharacter. Finally, affectual action is that which dir-ectly expresses an emotion, taking no account of itsconnection to any specific goals or values. Angry outbursts of violence, for example, would be seen asaffectual in nature.

Because these four types of action are ideal types,they do not exist in reality. All concrete patterns ofaction are likely to be interpretable in terms of morethan one type. For example, the actions of a managerin a large business enterprise faced with the need toset a wage level for its employees may involve aspectsof all four types of action. The manager may instru-mentally calculate the financial consequences of dif-ferent rates of pay, but may also rule out extremelylow pay and certain forms of coercion as contrary tohis or her values. The manager may also respondunreflectively to the wage negotiations, seeing themin the way that he or she has done in the past, andmaking knee-jerk reactions to trade-union proposals.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 41

Finally, a breakdown of negotiations may involveangry recriminations as one side or the other walksaway from the bargaining table and storms out intothe street.

In order to decide how closely a particular course of action corresponds to these and other ideal types,it is necessary to use a technique that Weber sees ascentral to sociology. This is the technique of under-standing (Verstehen in German). The aim of a socialscience, says Weber, is to use ideal types as a way ofunderstanding the meanings that people give to theiractions. These meanings include their intentions and motives, their expectations about the behaviourof others, and their perceptions of the situations inwhich they find themselves. Sociologists must inferthese meanings from their observations of people’sactions, thereby aiming at an interpretative under-standing of them. This involves empathizing withthose that they study, though it does not mean sympathizing with them.

We may not approve of serial murder, for example,but we can hope to explain it only if we get closeenough to serial murderers to begin to see the worldas they see it. We must exercise empathy by trying toidentify with them up to the point at which we cancomprehend why they acted as they did. We do not,however, sympathize with them or condone their actions. To go beyond empathy to sympathy is tomake the same mistake as those who go beyond factual judgements to value judgements.

Traditionalism and rationalityWeber’s philosophy of science led him to reject deterministic systems of explanation. The causal explanations that sociologists produce must alwaysbe rooted in an interpretative understanding of the subjective meanings that individuals give to their actions. Any study of social development must recognize the part played by individual action, and Weber stressed that individuals have free will.Individuals have the power to act freely and not simply as the occupants of class positions or socialroles. The future is open and undetermined, it cannotbe predicted. The explanations of modern industrialcapitalism and the predictions of its future given by Marx and Durkheim would be unacceptable toWeber.

The transition from feudal, pre-industrial societiesto modern industrial capitalism is seen by Weber in terms of a shift in the typical meanings that individuals give to their actions. Europe, he argued,had undergone a process of rationalization. This involves a shift from value-rational actions to instru-mentally rational actions. In medieval societies,

people’s actions were oriented to absolute religiousand political values, while in modern societies theyengage in a rational calculation of the likely effects of different courses of action. Political authority inmodern society, for example, is based on formal, legal procedures, rather than ultimate religious valuessuch as the divine right of kings.

In medieval societies, furthermore, a great deal of everyday action was not rational at all. It was traditional in character. Indeed, tradition itself wastreated as an absolute value in many situations. Inmodern societies, on the other hand, more and moreareas of social life have been opened up to rational,reflective considerations. Thus, economic actionshave come to be based on market calculations andcontractual relations, rather than on fixed ways ofliving rooted in traditional styles of life.

Much everyday action in modern societies, ofcourse, remains traditional in character. It continuesunreflectively and in routine ways with little directconcern for immediate ends or ultimate values.Traditional forms of action may even acquire a newimportance in modern societies. This is clear fromWeber’s consideration of contemporary economicactions. He holds that religious values motivated theactions of those who became the first generations of calculating capitalist entrepreneurs, but later gen-erations of individuals were more likely to continuewith their business activities simply because they had become a matter of routine. As they becomemere cogs in huge bureaucratic machines, their work becomes a ‘dull compulsion’ about which they haveno real choice. Ultimately they may remain free, butin practice they are constrained.

You will understand more about Weber’s views on rationaleconomic action when you have read our discussion of TheProtestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in Chapter 11, pp. XXX–X. You may like to read that discussion now.

Summary pointsIn this section we have looked at the two leadingfigures of the classical period of sociology, Durkheimand Weber. Durkheim was the principal French soci-ologist and founder of an approach that emphasizedsocial structures as the fundamental social facts. He set this out in an account of the basic principles ofsociology.

• Social facts are ways of acting, thinking, or feelingthat are both external and constraining. They are


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 42

collective products, and individuals experiencethem as coercive or obligatory.

• Social facts are to be studied as things, through observation rather than on the basis of prejudiceand preconception. Although they cannot alwaysbe observed directly, social facts can be observedindirectly through their effects on individual actions.

• Even such an individual act as taking one’s own life is socially patterned and can be explained sociologically.

• Durkheim recognized two aspects of sociologicalexplanation: causal explanation and functionalanalysis. In causal explanation, social facts are accounted for in terms of the other social facts thatbrought them into being. In functional analysis,social facts are examined in relation to the part thatthey play in relation to the survival or adaptationof other social facts.

Durkheim applied this sociological approach in a number of substantive studies of the division oflabour, suicide, education, and religion. We discuss a number of these studies in other chapters. Thesewere seen as aspects of a general account of social development.

• Social development is a process of social differ-entiation in which the forms of solidarity change.

• Social solidarity comprises the integration of indi-viduals into social groups and their regulation byshared norms. Durkheim contrasted the mech-anical solidarity of traditional societies with the organic solidarity of modern societies.

• One of the central problems of contemporary soci-ety was the pathological state of individualism that Durkheim described as involving egoism andanomie. Egoism and anomie are associated withparticular psychological conditions and rates ofsuicide.

In the hands of Durkheim, Weber, and their contem-poraries, sociology finally became, by the first decadeof the twentieth century, established as a legitimatescience with a place in the system of university teach-ing and research. Although there were still few pro-fessors of sociology—and sociology was barely taught

in schools—a sociological perspective had been established in the study of history, law, politics, education, religion, and many other areas of special-ization. Figure 2.3 summarizes the origins of theirideas and the main lines of development in sociologyinto the first half of the twentieth century.

Weber, as one of a number of important Germansociologists, tried to build a sociology of social actionthat was sensitive to the meanings and motives thatshaped people’s behaviour.

• Social reality can only ever be studied through theuse of concepts that reflect cultural values. Know-ledge of social reality is objective only if it resultsfrom the rational and critical use of these conceptsin a scientifically disciplined way.

• While all concepts are value relevant, Weber emphasizes the need to distinguish clearly factualjudgements from value judgements.

• Sociological concepts are ideal types and do notcorrespond to things that actually exist in reality.They grasp particular aspects of reality.

• Ideal types of social action are the basic buildingblocks of sociological analysis. Weber identifies instrumentally rational action, value-rational action, traditional action, and affectual action.

• Actions are structured through a process of under-standing that involves empathizing with thosewho are studied.

Weber rejected all forms of structural determinism,emphasizing the open-ended character of social life.He did, however, undertake a number of studies ofsocial development, including the important studyof religion that we look at in Chapter 11.

• Western societies had experienced a process of rationalization. This was a growth in thesignificance of rational motivations and a shiftfrom value-rational to instrumentally rational considerations.

• In modern, capitalist societies, market calculationand contractual relations have achieved a centralsignificance.

• Although capitalist economic actions originated inreligiously motivated actions, they had come to bea mere matter of routine and dull compulsion.


··

Academic sociology established

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 43

There were, of course, great differences in the theoretical positions that were put forward by those who called themselves ‘sociologists’. Durkheim andhis followers stressed the importance of structure in social life, seeing societies as systems of struc-tured relationships. The German sociologists, such asWeber, tended to emphasize action as the centralconcept, showing that all social structures were, ultimately, to be explained as the outcome of humanactions.

These positions must not be seen as stark altern-atives to one another. In the early days of academic sociology it was easy for Durkheim and Weber each to believe that his particular theory wasuniquely appropriate for the study of social life.Indeed, some writers today still suggest that there is agreat gulf between structure and action perspectivesand that only one of them can be correct. As soon as one tries to do any sociological work, however, it becomes clear that the two approaches are complementary.

Durkheim and Weber were emphasizing differ-ent aspects of a highly complex reality. Social life involves both structure and action. Some sociologistshave tried to combine both aspects in the same theory, but these attempts have not been particularlysuccessful. There may one day be a single, all-encompassing theory, but it is probably a long way

from completion (but see Giddens 1976). The point is that sociologists need to develop a theoretical understanding of both the structural aspects of social life and their shaping by social actions.Distinct theoretical traditions may continue to exist,but they must cooperate in studies of particular phenomena.

In the generation that followed Durkheim andWeber, their leading ideas were consolidated and further developed, though there were no major advances for some time. The mainstream of academicsociology in Europe and America owed most to theideas of Durkheim. Sociology and intellectual lifegenerally were suppressed in Germany during the1930s and 1940s, and this limited the wider impact ofthe ideas of Weber and his contemporaries.

In Britain and the United States, Durkheim’s ideas were welded into a theoretical framework thatcame to be described as ‘structural functionalism’, orsimply as ‘functionalism’. Much of this theoreticalwork was undertaken in the study of small-scale,tribal societies of the kind that Durkheim had studiedfor his own investigations into religion (1912), andmany functionalists called themselves anthropo-logists rather than sociologists.

Much of the sociological research that was under-taken in the first thirty years or so of the twentiethcentury ignored theoretical issues. Work by Booth,


··

Weber andGerman sociology

Chicagosociology

Enlightenment thinkers

Spencer

Hegel

Durkheim andFrench sociology

18th century

1790s–1850s

1850s–1870s

1880s–1920s

Structural-functionalanthropology

Hobhouse, Britishand American

sociology

Comte

Marx

OrthodoxMarxism

Culturalanthropology1920s–1940s

Figure 2.3

The development of sociology up to the 1940s

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 44

the new Department of Sociology at Chicago—thefirst full department in the world—was associatedwith a large number of local studies that drew expli-citly on European traditions of theory.

Like the anthropologists, the Chicago sociologistsmade a major contribution to fieldwork methods, but they did so from very different theoretical tradi-tions. In their work, they paid little attention toDurkheim, finding their main inspiration in Germansociology. The main influence was not Weber but his friend Georg Simmel. The Chicago sociologiststook up, in particular, the German writers’ emphasison action and interaction, combining this with anawareness of the part played by group conflict in social life. Their main studies were concerned withthe city of Chicago itself (Park and Burgess 1925), and they began to develop theoretical ideas thatwould achieve their fullest recognition only after the Second World War.

Figure 2.3 shows how these various strands ofthought relate to the wider development of soci-ological theory. From the 1940s, and for at least a generation, sociological theorists continued to build on these foundations. By the 1950s, when soci-ology had begun to break through its old nationalboundaries, the theoretical landscape had been transformed. Theoretical debates crystallized into a smaller number of separate positions, each of which had a far more international character thanbefore. Three principal traditions of thought domin-ated sociological debate: structural functionalism,symbolic interactionism, and a number of conflicttheories.

Structural-functionalist theoriesPost-war structural functionalism had its roots in the sociology of Durkheim and the social anthropo-logy of the inter-war years. However, its leadingfigure came from a very different background. TalcottParsons, who was to dominate sociology for morethan two decades, was trained in economics, spend-ing periods of time in Britain and Germany. Hebegan, in the 1930s, to explore the relationship between economics and sociology and to build anovel philosophical basis for sociology. After this,and influenced by some early work by Robert Merton(1936, 1949), Parsons began to set out his own ver-sion of structural-functionalist theory. This theoryexercised a great influence on the development of sociology and it is currently being developed as systems theory.


··

THEORY

Social anthropology

Social anthropology is the term often used to describe thework of those sociologists who specialize in the study ofsmall-scale, pre-industrial societies.

Most influential among the early followers of Durkheim was Arthur Radcliffe-Brown, a Cambridge-trained anthropologist who carried out fieldwork inAustralia and in the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean. His books (Radcliffe-Brown 1922, 1930) reported on religious ritual and kinship in tribal societies,and he drew out some general conclusions in a series of essays (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). Radcliffe-Brown inspired the work of Lloyd Warner, an American whoundertook investigations in Australian tribal societiesand small American towns during the 1930s and 1940s(Warner and Lunt 1941). Radcliffe-Brown added little to Durkheim’s own ideas, but he popularized the idea that theories had to be applied in detailed fieldworkstudies.

Bronislaw Malinowski developed this fieldwork traditionin Britain. He carried out some early research on nativeAustralian kinship, but his most important work wasundertaken in the Trobriand Islands of the Pacific. His mainbooks (Malinowski 1922, 1929, 1935) emphasized theneed to study all social phenomena in terms of theirfunctions in relation to other social phenomena and inrelation to the structure of the society as a whole. Hefurther emphasized that this kind of research could mosteasily be undertaken by living in a society and trying tograsp its whole way of life.

Franz Boas carried forward a similar fieldwork method in the United States, though his work owed a great deal to Hegel as well as to Durkheim. Boas (1911) emphasizedthe importance of culture and the need to grasp the innerspirit of the culture as a whole. He and his many studentscarried out a series of studies of native American tribes and small communities in the Pacific. While Malinowskisaw functional analysis in relation to material andenvironmental factors, Boas set out a more cultural or idealist theory.

Rowntree, and others in localities and communitiesacross Britain, for example, investigated poverty andinequality with little concern for how these could beexplained in terms of the overall structure of Britishsociety. The principal exception to this neglect oftheory was to be found in the United States, where

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 45

The action frame of referenceIn The Structure of Social Action (Parsons 1937),Parsons set out to synthesize the insights ofDurkheim and Weber. Durkheim, it will be recalled,had stressed the need to consider social facts as thingsand to abandon all theoretical preconceptions.Weber, on the other hand, said that observation was impossible without concepts and that all con-cepts were value-relevant. Parsons would not goalong with either of these positions, though he recognized that each writer had glimpsed a part ofthe truth.

Parsons called his synthesis of the two positionsanalytical realism. It was analytical in that, like

Weber, he recognized that all observations were dependent on concepts. But it was also realist in that,like Durkheim, he saw these observations telling ussomething about what the world was actually like(Scott 1995). He argued that we must use concepts tomake observations, but we must check our observa-tions against evidence.

frontiers

Philosophy and sociology

If you are interested in these philosophical issues, you should look back at our discussion of Durkheim on social facts and Weber on value relevance before continuing. We do not intend to go very far into these issues. You may prefer to look further at them when you have studied moresociology. Once you have tackled a few substantive topics, you may find it easier to struggle with some philosophy! For those who do want to read further, some good discussions are Keat and Urry (1975) and Williams and May (1996).

The particular concepts needed in sociology,Parsons said, comprise an action frame of reference.This is a set of concepts that allow sociologists to talk about social action rather than about physicalevents or biological behaviour. This frame of refer-ence had begun to emerge in the work of the classicalsociologists. Each started from his own distinctivetheoretical position, but they had gradually and unconsciously begun to move towards a similar theoretical approach to social life. This approach wasthe action frame of reference.

According to the action frame of reference, any action involves five basic elements:

• actors: the people who actually carry out theactions;

• ends: the goals that these people pursue;

• means: the resources that are available to achievethese ends;

• conditions: the particular circumstances in whichactions are carried out;

• norms: the standards in relation to which peoplechoose their ends and means.

Parsons holds that sociologists must constructmodels of action using these elements. To do this,they must try to understand things and events asthey appear to the actors involved. The various idealtypes and general concepts that are used in sociolo-gical explanations, according to Parsons, must be


··

THEORY

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (1902–79) was the son of a clergyman. He studied economics at Amherst, and then undertookpostgraduate research at the London School of Economicsand at Heidelberg. He taught economics from 1926 to1931, when he switched to sociology at Harvard University.His early works were concerned with the relationshipbetween economics and sociology, as this had been seen byWeber, Pareto, and the British economist Alfred Marshall.Under the influence of the biologist L.J. Henderson, Parsonsbegan to take Durkheim’s work more seriously and in 1937 he produced his first book, The Structure of SocialAction. Parsons remained at Harvard throughout hisacademic career.

Parsons has a reputation for his impenetrable prose style and the large number of new, long words that heinvented. His work is certainly dibcult. Do try to readParsons’s work, but do not expect to understand it all at a first reading.

After his first book, his most important works were themassive Social System (1951), a book on the family(Parsons and Bales 1956), one on the economy (Parsonsand Smelser 1956), and two shorter volumes on socialdevelopment (Parsons 1966, 1971). Some of his moreaccessible work has been reprinted in a collection of essays(Parsons 1954). A valuable and brief introduction to hiswork is Hamilton (1983).

You will find more detailed discussions of Parsons’s workin the following chapters:

socialization and social roles Chapter 4

family and kinship Chapter 12

health and illness Chapter 8

social stratification Chapter 17

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 46

compatible with these basic principles of the actionframe of reference. You will probably recognize howmuch Parsons owed to Weber here.

This action frame of reference became the basis of the structural functionalism built by Parsons,Merton, and others from the 1940s. In undertakingthis task, they drew heavily on the ideas ofDurkheim. They built a set of concepts that could describe the structural features of social life, but thatwere grounded in the action frame of reference.Societies, and social groups of all kinds, were seen associal systems that consisted of mutually dependentparts, such as roles, institutions, and organizations.These parts together formed the social structure. The task of sociological analysis was to identify theseparts and to show the functions that they fulfil in thesystem as a whole.

Social structureStructural functionalists see the structure of a soci-ety as a normative framework. It consists of thenorms that define the expectations and obligationsthat govern people’s actions and so shape their social relations. At the heart of this normative frameworkare definitions of the various social positions that are linked together into a complex social division oflabour. There may be, for example, family positionssuch as husband, wife, and child, economic and pro-fessional positions such as teacher, miller, doctor,and banker, and such other positions as student,priest, politician, and so on.

Those who occupy social positions are expected to behave in certain ways. These expectations definethe social roles that are attached to the positions. A role is a cluster of normative expectations that set out a script for social actors in particular social positions. It defines standards of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, telling people what is ‘normal’ or expected behaviour in particular situ-ations. A teacher, for example, knows how he or sheought to behave in relation to pupils, parents, headteachers, governors, and others who play their partsin the same school and in the wider educational system (Merton 1957; Gross et al. 1958).

Many norms are quite specific and concern justone role. Others, however, may be very general intheir scope. These generalized norms, rooted inwidely shared cultural values, are termed social institutions by structural functionalists. Institutions,then, are established and solidified sets of norms that cross-cut social roles and help to tie them together. The institutions of property, contract, andthe market, for example, help to define a large num-ber of economic and occupational roles. Similarly,

the institutions of kinship and marriage regulate a range of family roles, and the institutions of bureaucratic administration and democratic leader-ship regulate political roles. Structural functional-ists recognize a tendency for positions, roles, and institutions to cluster together into more or less distinct subsystems. A society may, for example, consist of an economic system, a political system, an educational system, a system of social stratifica-tion, and so on. At its most general, then, the struc-ture of a social system might be described in terms of the connections between such subsystems. A simplified structural functionalist model is shown in Figure 2.4.

The key to the stability and cohesion of a social struc-ture, argue structural functionalists, is socialization.In their infancy and childhood, as well as in theirlater life, individuals learn the norms of their society. They come to learn what is expected of them and of those with whom they are likely to comeinto contact. They learn, in short, how to be an acceptable member of their society. The cultural val-ues and social norms that people learn are, accordingto many structural functionalists, widely shared inthe society. That is to say, they assume the existenceof a social consensus, an agreement over the basicprinciples that will regulate social life. All members ofa society, for example, are seen as sharing a broadcommitment to the same values, beliefs, and ideas.Merton (1938b), however, has recognized that thisconsensus may be far from perfect. Individuals maybe committed to some aspects of their culture, whilerejecting or remaining neutral about others. He usedthis insight to develop a very important theory ofanomie.


··

Educationalsystem

Politicalsystem

Economicsystem

Kinshipsystem

Stratificationsystem

Figure 2.4

A model of social structure

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 47

Merton’s concept of anomie is not exactly the same asDurkheim’s, although they are closely related. Whenever youcome across the word ‘anomie’, make sure that you know howit is being used.

In Chapter 4, pp. XXX–XX, you will find a full discussion of the structural-functionalist view of socialization on which Merton relies.

The starting point for this theory is Merton’s dis-cussion of culture. The culture of a society, he holds,specifies the ends or goals that people should pursueand the means that they are expected to follow inachieving them. People’s goals include such things as promotion at work, pleasing a husband or wife,learning to drive a car, writing a book, passing an examination, and so on. Means are those things thathelp to achieve these goals: working hard, money,physical skills, power, etc. Where people are fully socialized into their culture, they will be committedto the ends and the means that are held out to them.They will be conformists who follow only culturallyapproved goals and use only culturally approvedmeans. Someone may, for example, desire a pleasantand well-decorated home and will work hard to earnthe money required. The conformist would not evenconsider stealing the money from others. If, however,a culture emphasizes the ends much more than themeans, leaving the means only loosely regulated,people’s commitment to the approved means—andtherefore their conformity to social norms—may beeroded. This is especially likely where the materialstructure of opportunities available to people makesit dibcult for them to achieve the approved ends.The conditions under which they must act maymean, for example, that they lack the resources thatare needed for the means to which they are supposedto be committed. It is the rift between culturally approved ends and means that Merton calls anomie.In a situation of anomie, conformity is far from automatic.

Merton suggests that his model is particularly applicable to a modern society such as the UnitedStates, where financial success in an occupation is acentral social value. Contemporary culture, he says,places great emphasis on the need to maximize income. It also requires that individuals should pursue this end through occupational achievement:they should work diligently and ebciently in orderto be promoted to a higher salary. The distribution of resources, however, makes it dibcult for people to compete on an equal basis in this race for finan-cial success. Not all people have the same opportun-ities to enter well-paid employment, for example.

Divisions of class, gender, and ethnicity set limits on the chances that they are able to enjoy. In this situation, their commitment to the prescribed means may be weakened, especially if they are givenless cultural emphasis than the overriding goal ofsuccess.

Merton argues that there are four possible re-sponses to this anomie, as shown in Figure 2.5. Thefirst possible response is what he calls innovation. The innovator is someone who responds to these cultural strains by rejecting the legitimate means and employing illegitimate ones. Criminal activitiesaimed at financial gain are typical innovative acts.This is particularly likely to occur, Merton argues,among the poorest members of society who havefewest opportunities. Merton recognizes this also asthe response of those who are relatively successful,but who are willing to ‘bend the rules’ and engage infraud and embezzlement to increase their income.

Ritualism is the second possible response toanomie. Here, people decide that they have littlechance of attaining any significant success and so reject this as a goal. They remain, however, looselycommitted to the conventional means. They simplygo through the motions in a ritualistic way, with little or no commitment to the approved goal. Thetime-serving bureaucrat who rigidly follows rules and procedures, regardless of the consequences, is atypical ritualist. Such a person, if challenged aboutthe consequences of his or her actions, is likely to respond that ‘I’m only doing my job’. Ritualistic


··

Figure 2.5

Conformity and responses to anomie

Ends Means

Conformity + +Innovation + −Ritualism − +Retreatism − −Rebellion ± ±

+ acceptance;− rejection;± rejection of dominant values and acceptance of alternative values.

Robert Merton was born in 1910 and studied under Talcott Parsons.He has published important papers on roles, anomie, and functionalanalysis. You will find applications of his model of anomie to the rise of new religions in Chapter 11, pp. XXX–X, and to drug use inChapter 7, pp. XXX–X. A useful introduction to his thought is Crothers (1987).

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 48

bureaucrats are likely to be fatalistic, resigned to theirlot. They feel that they have no control over theirlives.

The third response to anomie is retreatism. The re-treatist decides to reject both the means and the endsprescribed by the culture. This is the response of thedrop-out, of whom Merton sees the hobo or vagrantas the typical example. Others have suggested thatpersistent deviant drug use may also be the action ofa retreatist. Merton’s analysis of retreatism, however,fails to recognize that many of those who drop out ofconventional society establish new conventions forthemselves in deviant subcultures. This is the case formany drug users and vagrants.

The retreatist response, therefore, is dibcult to dis-tinguish from rebellion, where the legitimate endsand means are rejected but are replaced by alternativeends and means that may challenge conventionalvalues. Radical political action, aimed at altering thedistribution of resources or the political system, is, forMerton, the typical response of the rebel. This claimcan be seen as Merton’s reformulation of Durkheim’sidea that organized class conflict can be seen as a con-sequence of anomie.

Functional analysisStructural functionalists have developed and clari-fied the method of functional analysis outlined byDurkheim, making it the centrepiece of their work.Both Spencer and Durkheim, like many of their contemporaries, had seen parallels between societies and biological organisms. For Spencer, societies were to be seen as ‘social organisms’ that could bestudied by the same scientific methods as biologicalorganisms. The most important part of any scientificinvestigation, he held, is to uncover the functionscarried out by the various structures of the organism.The function of the heart in the human body, for example, is to maintain the circulation of the blood. In sociology, Spencer suggested, we must investigate such things as the functions of govern-ment and ritual. In Durkheim’s work, functionalanalysis was drawn out more clearly and set along-side causal explanation at the heart of sociologicalexplanation.

The functional method has been much misunder-stood. Some critics of structural functionalism haveclaimed that it involves the idea that societies liter-ally are the same as biological organisms, or that social facts can be reduced to biological facts. Thesemisunderstandings are, in part, the result of the misleading language used by many functionalists.Nevertheless, functional analysis is an important aspect of any sociological investigation into how

societies work, and its core ideas are quite straight-forward. The functionalist method sees any system ashaving needs or requirements. If a system is to surviveand to continue in more or less its current form, thenthese needs must be met in some way. The functionof a structure is the contribution that it makes tomeeting a need, and a functional analysis consists inidentifying the processes through which these needsare met.

The idea of a need is quite simple. A human bodyneeds food if it is to survive; it will die without thisfood. However, it is important to recognize that thereis nothing automatic about the meeting of needs.The need for food does not, in itself, cause food to become available. Many people across the world do,in fact, starve to death. It is for this reason thatDurkheim tried to separate cause from function.

How, then, can functional analysis be used in thestudy of societies? The first step is to identify theneeds of the society. A society is assumed to be a relatively self-contained unit that can be treated as awell-bounded system. As such, it has many internalneeds. These include the biological and psycholog-ical needs of its members (for example, their needsfor food and company) and the need to maintain its boundaries and identity. Some of these needs canbe met, in whole or in part, from its own internal resources. The need to socialize infants, for example,can be met through the educational efforts of its already socialized members, such as the infant’s parents.

However, many needs can be met only if the society draws on resources from its external envir-onment. This external environment comprises the natural world that surrounds the society, togetherwith the other societies and social groups with which it has contacts. A society must adapt itself to its external environment, and the environ-ment must be adapted to its needs. For example, if a large society is to feed its members, then crops must be planted and harvested, soil must be improved and irrigated, commodities must be imported, minerals must be mined and convertedinto ploughs and tractors, and so on. To achieve thiskind of environmental adaptation, a society needs to restructure itself by establishing ways of handlingits external relations and, perhaps, altering its ownboundaries.

The initial internal needs, then, lead to externalneeds. As a result of its restructuring, the society mayface new internal needs. If, for example, a system offood production is established, a society will thenneed to ensure that the pace and level of productionare, in some degree, co-ordinated with its actual food


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 49

requirements and that the resources given over tothis production do not prevent it from meeting anyof its other needs. Social systems, then, are dynamicsystems, constantly altering their structures as theways in which they meet, or fail to meet, their needschange.

It is important to emphasize again that needs willnot be inevitably or automatically met, though somefunctionalists have tended to assume that they will.The needs of a social system are simply the con-ditions that are necessary for its survival in its currentform. These conditions will actually be met only if,for whatever reason, people carry out the actions thatmeet them. The need does not itself cause the actionthat meets it.

A number of theorists have attempted to compilelists of the needs or functional requirements of a social system (Aberle et al. 1950; Levy 1966). Themost influential was that of Parsons himself, thoughthis was not without its critics. Parsons arrived at aclassification of functional needs by looking at twoaspects or dimensions of them:

• whether they are internal or external to the system;

• whether they involve the ends or the means ofaction.

As we have already shown, some needs are internalto the system itself, while others are external to it.Parsons defines internal needs as those that concernthe integrity and cohesion of a social system. Externalneeds, on the other hand, concern the facilities andresources that must be generated from its environ-ment. Whether they are internal or external, needsmay be relevant to either the means or the ends of action. In the former case, they are concerned withthe production and accumulation of human andphysical resources for use in the future, while in thelatter they involve the immediate use and consump-tion of resources in current actions.

According to Parsons—who followed Spencer onthis—the gradual differentiation of social activitiesinto structurally distinct roles, institutions, and sub-systems is a response to attempts to meet functionalneeds. He held that a model of a social system can beconstructed by cross-classifying the two dimensionsthat he identified, as shown in Figure 2.5. Accordingto this model, any social system has four functionalneeds, and its structures can be classified according to which of the four functions they are mainly con-cerned with. This model lies at the heart of Parsons’swork, and versions of it can be found throughout hisbooks. It has come to be known as the Parsonianboxes.

The four functions shown in Figure 2.6 are adapta-tion, goal attainment, integration, and latency.Adaptation is the need to accumulate and control resources from the environment so that they areavailable for future actions. Parsons said that this needis met through the economic structures of produc-tion, distribution, and exchange. Goal attainmentis the need to mobilize existing resources in relationto individual and collective goals. This, he said, canbe met through the political structures of decision-making and executive control.

Integration is the need to ensure the cohesion andsolidarity of the social system itself. Parsons intro-duced the term societal community to designate thestructures concerned with this function. The termrefers not only to localized community structures of kinship and neighbourhood, but also to the larger bonds of national and ethnic community andof social stratification. Finally, latency (or ‘patternmaintenance’) is the need to build up a store of motivation and commitment that can be used, whenrequired, for all the various activities of the society.Institutions such as the family and education, wherepeople are socialized into the values and norms oftheir society, are the main structures concerned with this need. These structures are much less likelyto become differentiated than are other structures,and they remain closely tied to the structures of thesocietal community.


··

Structuresrelated to

A G

L I

Economy Polity

Family andeducation

Societalcommunity

externalaspects

internalaspects

Means Ends

A AdaptationG Goal attainmentI IntegrationL Latency

Figure 2.6

The Parsonian social system

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 50

Parsons’s language sometimes gives the impres-sion that needs are automatically met. PerhapsParsons did, on occasion, believe this. He main-tained, however, that structural functionalism wasrooted in the action frame of reference, whichshowed that functions would be met only if peopleacted in ways that actually did meet these needs. This point has been clarified by Merton (1949), who shows that functions are generally met, if at all,as the unintended consequences of human action.One of the strongest criticisms of Parsons has beenthat he failed to analyse action as thoroughly asstructure and function. Although he claimed to base his arguments on the action frame of reference, action played a minor part in his work. A structuralfunctionalist model that focuses on the structurallevel of analysis must be complemented by an ana-lysis of action.

The evolution of modern societyOne of the main concerns of structural-functionalisttheorists was to use their ideas to build an account of the development of modern society. They tried to show that the need to adapt to changing func-tional needs drove societies in a definite direction.Though no one intended it to occur, traditional agricultural societies underwent a process of modern-ization that brought into being the new social institu-tions that comprise modernity. Modern societies,then, are the results of long processes of structuraldifferentiation that were shaped by the need to adaptto changing environments and the unintended con-sequences of the responses made to this need. This argument has been most clearly stated by Parsons,who placed it in the context of a larger theory of social evolution.

The baseline for studying social evolution, accord-ing to Parsons, is provided by the ‘primitive’ hunt-ing and gathering societies (Parsons 1966). In these relatively undifferentiated societies, the societal com-munity is formed from a network of kinship relationsthat extend across the whole society and there are no functionally specialized structures. Each society is integrated through its shared religious beliefs,which provide an all-embracing cultural frameworkfor people’s actions. As these societies increase in sizeand become more involved in settled agriculture, sostructures of private property and social stratificationbegin to develop to organize the new systems of production. When societies achieve this level of complexity, they may require systems of chiefhoodor kingship to co-ordinate them.

Across the world, tribes and chiefdoms prevailedfor thousands of years. In certain circumstances,

however, development to even more complex forms of social organization occurred. In Egypt and Mesopotamia there were more complex forms of agriculture that were associated with the building of large systems of irrigation. Social stratification became sharper, religion came under the control of a specialized priesthood, and political control became stronger. By the third millennium bc, thesesocieties had evolved into advanced intermediatesocieties that had both a historic religion and an imperial political system. Similar developments occur-red somewhat later in China, India, and the Romanworld. Following Comte, Parsons sees their religionsbecoming more philosophical and metaphysical incharacter.

The breakthrough to modern forms of society,Parsons said, occurred in medieval Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Em-pire and the gradual rebuilding of royal structures.Political and scientific spheres of action were differ-entiated from the previously all-encompassing reli-gious structures, and a separate sphere of economicaction also appeared. Private property, the market,and the division of labour expanded, forming spe-cialized elements in the economies of the Europeansocieties. From the eighteenth century, industrialismand democracy transformed the ways in which theadaptation and goal-attainment functions were met,and more fully modern societies were formed. Nationstates and industrial technologies were the character-istic institutions of these modern societies, whichwere characterized by the spread of bureaucracy and market relations. Modern social institutions developed especially rapidly in the United States,where pre-modern survivals were very much weaker,and it became the characteristically modern societyof the twentieth century.

Systems theoryThe structural functionalism of Parsons came underheavy criticism from those who stressed interactionand conflict, and whose views we consider below.These critics argued, in particular, that structural func-tionalism overemphasized the importance of valueconsensus and of socialization into these values. As the number of writers associated with structuralfunctionalism have attempted to come to terms with these criticisms and have developed a form of structural functionalism that takes the conflict ofvalues and social groups more seriously, but retainsthe structural focus of the original structural func-tionalism. These theorists have generally definedtheir position as neofunctionalism or simply systemstheory. Neil Smelser and Jeffrey Alexander (1985,


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 51

1988) in the United States and Niklas Luhmann(1982, 1984) in Germany have been the key figures in this theoretical work.

Neofunctionalism and systems theory hold that social systems need not be perfectly integrated andcoherent, as Parsons tended to imply. There can be contradictions, strains, and tensions among thevarious parts of a social system, and these are quitelikely to generate conflict and change in the structureof a society. According to Luhmann, these are thedriving forces in a process of structural differentia-tion. Early forms of society, he argues, are organizedaround core institutions of kinship and religion but, over time, distinct spheres of action and struc-ture split off from these core social institutions.Specialized economic, political, legal, scientific, educa-tional, and other social systems are, therefore, dif-ferentiated from each other and may come to operateaccording to different values and norms. This pro-cess, which Parsons saw as one of modernization, is,according to Luhmann, an integral feature of changein all social systems. It is the outcome of often incompatible system processes, and it creates furtherincompatibilities.

The arguments of the neofunctionalists and sys-tems theorists do not mark a fundamental changefrom the earlier structural functionalism. What theyshow, rather, is how to use structural-functionalistideas in a more flexible way and of building theor-etical explanations that are more sensitive to the conflict and change that is such an obvious feature of social life.

Interaction theoriesStructural functionalism provided the mainstream ofsociological thought from the 1940s until at least the1970s, and it remains an important part of contem-porary sociology. With its roots in Comte, Spencer,and Durkheim, it is at the heart of the sociolo-gical tradition. However, it was never unchallenged. Many critics pointed out that, despite its advocacy of an action frame of reference, it did not really take subcient account of action. In providing a comprehensive theory of social structures and their functions, it minimized the active and creative partplayed by social action. This concern for social actionhas a long history, and we have shown how it wascentral to the work of Weber and his contemporariesin Germany. However, it was a subordinate trendwithin sociology, and it has achieved a wider impactonly since the 1960s. Writers critical of structuralfunctionalism returned to the founding statements

of Weber and, above all, the early Chicago sociolog-ists in an attempt to construct a full-blown sociologyof action. In this section, we will look at two relatedtheories of interaction: the symbolic interactionismof the Chicago school and the phenomenologicaltheories developed from a reconsideration of Weber’stypology of action.

Symbolic interactionismSymbolic interactionism was nurtured in the De-partment of Sociology at Chicago from the 1920s tothe 1950s. However, it originated outside Chicagoand it has, since the 1950s, spread far beyond it. The core of the sociological work carried out atChicago was a series of empirical studies in the city of Chicago itself. The theoretical framework used to organize these studies and to explain some of their results stressed the struggle of social groups for resources and their competition over the use of thespace in the city. When they wished to explain whatwas going on within each of these groups and howindividuals responded to their situations, they drewon the ideas that later came to be called symbolic interactionism.

This was a theory of action that originated in thephilosophical and psychological studies of WilliamJames, carried out at Harvard towards the end of the nineteenth century. William James, brother of the novelist Henry James, was not a particularly sophisticated philosopher. He had a number of insightful ideas, but he expressed these in a ratherhomespun and oversimple way. He did, however,nurture the brilliant work of the eccentric CharlesPeirce. The works of James and Peirce together laidthe foundations of the philosophical position ofpragmatism, and it was this approach to knowledgeand meaning that was transformed into symbolic interactionism.

Pragmatism holds that ideas are produced and usedin practical situations. The knowledge that people acquire is not like a photograph. It is not a mentalcopy of things that actually exist in reality. It is,rather, an attempt to understand the world wellenough to make practical sense of it and to act effect-ively. James summarized this point of view in theclaim that truth consists simply of those ideas thathappen to work. Knowledge is true if it helps us to get by in our practical actions. It is this practical orpragmatic test that gave the philosophical position its name. Peirce’s work added much subtlety to thisbasic argument. In particular, he presented prag-matism as a theory of meaning, rather than simply a theory of truth. What Peirce argued was that themeaning of a concept is given by the way in which


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 52

that concept is used. What we mean by a chair is something to sit on when we wish to relax, andmany different physical objects can meet this need.Similarly, one of the things that we mean by amother is someone who looks after children. Therecan be no abstract definitions of these concepts thatidentify essential characteristics of what chairs ormothers ‘really’ are. They simply mean whateverthey are used to refer to in practical everyday situations.

These arguments were developed—and mademuch clearer—in the works of John Dewey, CharlesCooley, William Thomas, and George Mead. It wasThomas and Mead, after they joined the staff atChicago, who began to convert pragmatist ideas into a sociological theory of action. Mead was by far the more sophisticated writer of the two. He hadundertaken his postgraduate studies in Germany,and he found many congenial ideas in the Germanphilosophical and sociological tradition. Weber was,of course, an influence on him, but the most import-ant of the German theorists in the shaping of Mead’sposition was Georg Simmel. Work by Simmel wastranslated and published in the American Journal ofSociology, the journal of the Chicago Department,and through these translations Simmel had a majorimpact on the new theory.

Mead argued that individuals give meaning to theworld by defining and interpreting it in certain ways.

The world is never experienced directly, but alwaysthrough the ideas that we hold about it. The meaningof reality is, in a fundamental sense, the meaningthat we choose to give to it. Thomas summarized thispoint of view in the statement that ‘When mendefine situations as real, they are real in their con-sequences’. What he meant by this is that the actionsof men (and women) depend far more on how theydefine a situation than on the situation itself. Peopledefine situations and act upon those definitions. As apragmatist, however, Thomas stressed that thesedefinitions were not simply arbitrary and artificialconstructions. Only those definitions that are use-ful in practical actions are likely to persist in use forany time.

This becomes clearer if we consider the example of a bus. A bus exists as a purely physical object, an assemblage of metal, plastic, rubber, fabric, and soon. Its meaning for us, however, depends on how we choose to define it. In calling it a bus, we define it as something that will follow a particular route,stop at particular places, and pick up people who pay to take a journey. Redundant buses, however,have been defined and used as social centres, cara-vans, chicken coops, and works of art. Each of thesedefinitions—and many others—is compatible withthe particular physical object that, in other circum-stances, we define as a bus. What makes its defini-tion as a bus appropriate is our practical success inbeing able to use it to travel to our destination. Whatis true of the bus is true of all social objects. It is possible to define things in any of a number of differ-ent ways, and the effective definition is simply theone that works when people come to act on theirdefinitions.

These definitions cannot be unique to particularindividuals, or they will not work. The concept of a bus, for example, is one that is useful only becauseit is widely shared. It is a concept shared by all thoseinterested in its operations: passengers, drivers, con-ductors, inspectors, trabc police, ministers of trans-port, and so on. Many of these people acquire theiridentities from the idea of the bus. It is, for example,impossible to have bus drivers unless we have theconcept of a bus. It is usually possible to rely on a busservice because there are widely shared definitionsand conventions concerning timetabling, queuing,and fare-paying. A widely shared meaning, commu-nicated to us by others, has a greater reality than doesan idiosyncratic one, and it is more likely to be usefulin practical situations.

The definitions that people use are constructedfrom the symbols (the names and labels for objects)that are available to them in their culture. Spoken

Academic sociology establishedg 53

··

THEORY

Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel (1858–1917) was born in Berlin, Germany.He spent most of his academic career at the University ofBerlin. He studied philosophy, but he taught and wrote on both philosophy and sociology. During his lifetime he was probably better known than Weber among other sociologists.

Simmel stressed the need to study the forms of socialrelationships, rather than their content. He explored suchthings as the relations of insiders to outsiders, relations ofdomination and subordination, relations of conflict, and thesignificance of the size of groups. His ideas were developedin a book called Sociology (Simmel 1908), most of whichhas been translated in Wolff (1950). Simmel wasparticularly concerned with uncovering the distinctivefeatures of contemporary urban life, and he set out theseideas in an essay on the metropolis and a book called The Philosophy of Money (Simmel 1900).

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 53

and written words, together with pictures, images,and other conventional signs, convey information andare used by people to give meaning to the situationsin which they find themselves. These symbols arelearned and communicated through interaction withothers. This is why the theoretical position has cometo be called symbolic interactionism.

This name was coined by Herbert Blumer (1966),who also did much to popularize it and to mark out its distinctiveness from mainstream structural-functionalist sociology. According to Blumer, societieswere not fixed and objective structures. What we call‘society’ is the fluid and flexible networks of interac-tion within which we act. To describe these overlap-ping networks of interaction as structures, Blumerheld, is to reify them and to distort the part that indi-viduals play in creating and altering them throughaction. This led Blumer to reject all talk of structures,systems, and functional needs. There are simply actions, interactions, and their consequences for individuals.

Others in the symbolic interactionist traditionhave been less extreme in their opposition to main-stream sociology. They have seen symbolic interac-tionism as concerned merely with those aspects ofaction and interaction that have not given their dueattention in structural functionalism. This is, for example, the case with Erving Goffman, whose workowes as much to Durkheim as it does to Mead(Collins 1994: 218).

The arguments of Mead, Goffman, and other symbolicinteractionists figure prominently in this book. You will findsubstantial discussions of their core ideas in the followingchapters:

self, roles, identity Chapter 4

deviance and social reaction Chapter 7

social construction of health Chapter 8

organizations Chapter 18

Goffman’s work, undertaken between the 1950sand the 1970s, gave particular attention to face-to-face interaction and small-scale social contexts. Hecalled his approach dramaturgical (Goffman 1959). By this he meant that it was a theory of action that uses the metaphor of drama in a theatre to examine people’s abilities to present particular im-ages of themselves in their interactions with others.Goffman used such terms as actor, audience, and, of course, role in his theory. Actors play their parts ininteraction, and they attempt to give their audiencesconvincing performances.

In their interactions, Goffman said, people aim to create a particular impression or image of them-selves in the eyes of others. Goffman calls this imagethe self. People present this image to others throughusing techniques of impression management thathelp them to control the performances that theygive. The image that they present will vary accordingto the expectations of the audience. The self that ispresented to friends at a club on a Friday night islikely to be very different from that presented to abank manager in an interview about an overdrawnaccount. The self that is presented to parents at homeis likely to be different again. Whenever we wish others to think of us as a particular kind of person, wetry to present exactly that image to them.

Goffman has emphasized the ability that peoplehave to manipulate the images that they present toothers. However, symbolic interactionism also showsthat images and conceptions of self can be imposedon people by their audiences. The social process is aninterplay of action and reaction, an interplay in whicheach actor interprets and responds to all others.Interaction involves a reciprocal and continuous negotiation over how situations are to be defined. Adefinition of the situation is the joint construction ofthe participants in interaction. Consensus exists onlywhen this definition has been established and agreedby all involved. Though often implicit, this negotia-tion is necessary because any definition can be con-tested by others. What we call reality is constructed


··

BRIEFING

Social construction

The case of a bus—discussed in the text—is typical of allsocial definitions, which is why we have discussed it atsuch length. Whenever we employ words to refer toobjects in our social world, we are, quite literally,constructing them as meaningful social objects that we can take account of in our actions. Try to think about the implications of attempting to redefine some common social objects. What would happen if you defined a table as a chair? What consequenceswould follow if you defined newly washed curtains as paint covers? (Don’t try this one at home!) When you have considered these relatively simple cases, you might think about the consequences ofdefining an unmarried man as a homosexual rather than a bachelor.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 54

through social interaction; it is a socially constructedreality. Where there is disagreement, and dissension,the individual or group that is most powerful may be able to impose a definition of the situation on allothers. They have the power to ensure that theirviews prevail.

This point of view became the cornerstone of thetrends in the sociology of deviance that powerfullyenlarged symbolic interactionism during the 1960sand 1970s (Becker 1963). This work stressed the wayin which the labels used to define behaviour by thosewith the power to enforce them could influence theactions of those who were labelled. The use of suchlabels as ‘criminal’, ‘junkie’, ‘queer’, and so on definesbehaviour as deviant by identifying it as a departurefrom social norms and attributing certain characterist-ics to the person labelled. Through their reactions toa person’s behaviour, then, an audience of labellersmay cause her or him to take on the image that isheld out.

Phenomenological approaches to interactionWhile symbolic interactionism mounted an increas-ingly successful challenge to the excessive claimsmade by some structural functionalists, it, too, waschallenged in the 1960s by what claimed to be a more radical perspective on interaction. This was the approach of phenomenology that originated in thephilosophy of Edmund Husserl. During the 1920sand 1930s, Husserl began to produce what he saw asthe fundamental basis for knowledge. The aim of hisphilosophy was to describe the contents of people’sexperiences of their world. Husserl’s work inspired anumber of diverse approaches to sociology. The mostinfluential has, perhaps, been that of Alfred Schütz,who saw his task as that of uncovering the contentand form of everyday interpersonal experiences ofthe social world. Schütz took as his fundamentalquestion, how is Weber’s typology of action possible?That is, he asked how the types of action could bejustified, on philosophical grounds, as the necessarybasis for sociological research.

The work of Husserl and Schütz appeared rather idiosyncratic, and it was not until the 1960s that it really began to inspire specific approaches to soci-ology. In the works of Berger and Luckman (1966) andDouglas (1967), phenomenological ideas were usedin order to investigate the taken-for-granted realitythat people construct in the face of the reactions ofothers. These writers have stressed the way in whichthe everyday world comes to be seen as natural, inevitable, and taken for granted. People are borninto a prestructured meaningful world, and they

rarely question it in later life. This taken-for-grantedreality has the character of a Durkheimian social fact. As well as being objective, however, it is also subjective.

The everyday world is seen as the product ofhuman subjectivity. It is a product of human actionthat is reified—made into a thing—whenever peopleforget that it is a human product and begin to take itfor granted. The language that we use is the principalmeans through which we reify social reality. An example might be the very use of the terms symbolicinteractionism and phenomenological sociology asnames for loose and diverse collections of writers.Use of these particular labels gives the impressionthat these approaches have more unity and realitythan is, in fact, the case. Repetition of the words in textbooks, essays, and examination questions reinforces the taken-for-granted assumption that theyexist as sharply defined schools of thought. When we give a name to something, we make it appear assomething that is separate from us, external to us,and that is solid and substantial. Berger and Luckmanshow how this creates the apparent solidity of ‘thefamily’, while Douglas argues that suicide is a sim-ilarly reified term.

These phenomenological approaches began to rediscover some of the themes raised in classicalGerman sociology and to translate them into con-temporary concerns. They stressed, as Weber haddone, that all social realities have to be studied fromthe standpoint of the subjective meanings given to them by individual actors. As they were being developed, however, yet another phenomenologicalapproach was being developed from Schütz’s work.This was the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkeland Aaron Cicourel. Ethnomethodology originatedin Garfinkel’s papers of the 1950s (see the essays collected in Garfinkel 1967), and it was taken up byothers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Garfinkel criticizes Parsons and other structuralfunctionalists for treating people as what he calls cultural dopes. Structural functionalists assumed that people were simply socialized into a culturalconsensus and so had no real freedom of action. They acted in their roles as if they were puppets, controlled by the social system. In place of this point of view, Garfinkel stresses individual auto-nomy. He holds that the objective reality of everydaylife is something that people struggle to achieve in their practical actions: it is, he says, a ‘practical accomplishment’.

In accounting for their actions and for the actionsof others, people continually create and recreate their


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 55

social world. Their accounts, however, are nevercomplete but always leave something implicit ortaken for granted. People rely on their audiencessharing a background of assumptions that allowthem to fill in the gaps for themselves and so to understand what is being said. Organizational accounts, such as police records, medical records, and personnel files, for example, contain gaps and incomplete information that can be filled in by theirreaders. They are descriptions of actions and inter-actions that are seen as meaningful by those involvedand that provide a satisfactory basis for action. They are not, however, so easily readable by non-participants, who are less likely to share the back-ground knowledge and assumptions employed bythose in the organization.

An important part of this taken-for-granted back-ground is a sense of social structure that people use to interpret and account for the actions of others.People explain actions by showing that they are exactly the kinds of things that people in that situ-ation would do. They see it as a part of their role, for example. These interpretative processes are notnormally visible, and ethnomethodology assigns itself the special task of uncovering them in order todemonstrate what is really going on in the routine activities of everyday life. They believe that this canbe achieved through experimental interventions in social life. Taken-for-granted realities have to be disrupted or challenged so that people are forced toreflect on what they are doing. Only in this way canthe ethnomethodologist obtain any proper know-ledge about these processes. Garfinkel suggested, forexample, that his students should react to their parents as they would if they were merely a lodger.

This forced parents to bring out into the open the normally taken-for-granted assumptions abouthow children ought to behave in relation to their parents.

Rational choice theoryA final approach to action and interaction focusesnot on interpretative processes and the constructionof meaning, but on rational choices and calculat-ive decision-making. This theory of action drawsheavily on the models of action used by econom-ists to explain producer and consumer choices inmarkets, but its advocates argue that such models can be applied to actions in the political, religious, familial, ethnic, and other spheres, as well as to theeconomic sphere. One of the most important formu-lations of rational choice theory was given by GeorgeHomans (1969), but it has also been developed byPeter Blau (1964), James Coleman (1990), and JonElster (1989).

What these theories have in common is the viewthat all actions are oriented towards goals and thatpeople choose those means that are likely to be mosteffective in attaining them. They choose from a rangeof alternative courses of action by calculating thechances they have of achieving their goals. In doingso, they consider the rewards and costs that are attached to each alternative. Some of these rewardsand costs will, of course, be monetary, but many arenot. Choosing whether to earn money from employ-ment or to obtain it through theft, for example, involves the obvious monetary rewards but also involves considering the time costs involved, theamount of effort, the hardship that will be caused,the social approval or disapproval that will be ex-perienced, and so on. Similarly, the choice between voting or staying at home on an election day involvesconsidering the time and effort required and thestrength of commitment to the democratic process.While some of these rewards and costs are tangible,material factors and others are less tangible symbolicand emotional factors, all are seen as equally sub-ject to rational calculation. people must find a way of comparing very different rewards and costs and deciding what course of action is, overall, most rewarding or least costly to them.

This kind of theory is often described as game theory, as the emphasis on rational and strategic calculation is comparable with that required by therules of games such as poker and chess. People areseen as acting exclusively on the basis of simplestrategic principles in pursuit of a series of ‘moves’that will ensure they ‘win’ their various social encounters.


··

BRIEFING

Ethnomethodology

Sociology is often criticized for using too many big words and phrases. Our use of phenomenology andethnomethodology might have convinced you that these critics are right. Don’t panic! Many professionalsociologists still find it dibcult to pronounce the words,let alone spell them. Concentrate on the ideas and donot get caught up on the words themselves. To help you along, however, the word ‘ethnomethodology’ has two elements in it: ethno, meaning ‘people’, and methodology, meaning ‘how things are done’. So ethnomethodology simply means ‘how people do things’.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 56

Homans and Blau described their approach as ‘exchange theory’ in order to emphasize that theywere dealing especially with interaction rather thanwith isolated rational actions. When people en-counter one another, each tries to maximize theirprofit—or minimize their loss—by gaining rewardsand avoiding costs. Any interaction, therefore, involves an exchange of some kind: there may be anexchange of goods for money, as in an economictransaction, an exchange of love for financial sup-port, an exchange of loyalty for political support, and so on. In successful, ongoing interactions, eachparticipant will tend to have ensured that the overallreward that they earn is greater than could be earnedfor any other interaction: if this were not the case, they would have abandoned the interaction infavour of that other alternative.

Blau argues, however, that many interactions may,in fact, involve unbalanced exchange: one personwill be gaining more than the other. People may, forexample, undertake a course of action that is costly tothem if they think that, in the long term, they willbenefit in some way. On the other hand, people maycontinue with an unprofitable relationship simplybecause other possibilities have been shut off fromthem. A married woman, for example, may remainwith a violent husband because she has no realisticpossibility of finding employment or housing on her own.

Larger claims have been made for rational choicetheory (Downs 1957; G. Becker 1976, 1981), and it has proved to give valuable insights into many aspects of social life. Its fundamental limitation,however, is that it cannot properly take account ofprecisely those features that are central to symbolicinteractionism. In order to apply a rational choicemodel of action, it is necessary to draw on other action theories to show how people are able to con-struct a definition of the situation and how theirnorms and values influence the decisions that theymake.

Theories of action prospered because of the fail-ure of structural functionalists to pay serious atten-tion to action and interaction. They promised a sociology that properly considered the creative ele-ment that human beings bring to their social rela-tions. Symbolic interactionists, phenomenologists,and ethnomethodologists, in their various ways,aimed to uncover the processes of communicationand interaction that allowed people to make sense oftheir social worlds and to construct the structuresthat structural functionalists treated simply as socialfacts. Many advocates of these theories, however,claimed that the matters that concerned structuralfunctionalists could safely be forgotten. In sayingthis, they overstated their case. Action and structureare not alternative explanatory principles but com-plementary ones.


··

BRIEFING

The opposition between structural functionalist theories and interactionist theories can beusefully seen in terms of their central concepts of system and action. Where the concept ofaction points to issues of agency and will, the concept of system points to issues of structureand determinism. The contrast should not be taken too far, but it highlights a real difference in focus.

System

• Social structures are the basic elements insocial life. They have a reality over andabove individuals.

• Social reality is external to individuals andconstrains their actions.

• Sociologists must look at the functionalconnections among the structural parts ofsocial systems.

• Individuals conform to the roleexpectations that they learn during theirsocialization.

Action

• The actions of individuals are thebasic elements in social life. They arethe building blocks of sociology.

• Individuals define situations andconstruct social reality.

• Sociologists must understandactions in terms of their subjectivemeanings.

• Individuals improvise and createtheir own roles on the basis of whatthey learn during their socialization.

Action and system

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 57

Conflict theoriesThe analysis of conflict has a long history, yet struc-tural functionalism developed as an approach thatplaced far more emphasis on consensus and cohe-sion. This was one of the reasons why Marx—whosaw conflict as playing a central part in social life—refused to identify himself as a sociologist. Whilesome sociologists, like Marx, recognized the im-portance of conflict, they had little impact on the mainstream of academic sociology. Marxism was, ofcourse, a major influence on the work of Weber andother German sociologists, but this tradition itselfwas of secondary importance until after the SecondWorld War. The growing dissatisfaction with struc-tural functionalism as a complete and all-embracingtheory of social life was associated not only with agrowing interest in theories of interaction but alsowith attempts to recover an awareness of conflict.

Those who saw structural functionalism as payingtoo much attention to consensus looked to conflicttheories for an expansion of the intellectual toolsavailable to them. They highlighted, instead, the part played by divisions, power, force, and struggle.They looked at the ways in which groups came to be organized for collective action, entered into con-flict with one another, and established relations of domination and control. No single theory of conflicthas dominated the field, but a great many views ofconflict have been put forward. We will look at fourof the most influential arguments—those of RalfDahrendorf, John Rex, C. Wright Mills, and JürgenHabermas.

Authority, resources, and conflictIn the section on ‘Interaction theories’ we showedthat Weber had an important influence on some ofthe American symbolic interactionists. His major impact, however, has been on conflict theorists.Weber’s discussion of social action has been a particu-larly fruitful source of ideas, and the most import-ant writers to develop this into conflict theories were Ralf Dahrendorf (1957), John Rex (1961), and C. Wright Mills (1959). Dahrendorf argues that struc-tural functionalists presented, in effect, a consensustheory. They looked at only one side of reality, ignor-ing the existence of conflict and division. The theoryof consensus, then, needed to be complemented by atheory of conflict. Dahrendorf wanted to use ideasfrom Weber and Marx to build a theory of conflict.He did not, however, see any need to bring consensusand conflict theories together into a new synthesis.Each theory had something separate to offer. Con-sensus theory illuminated some aspects of reality,

while a conflict theory would be better able to illu-minate others.

At the heart of Dahrendorf’s theory of conflict isauthority. In all organizations, he argues, there is an unequal distribution of authority that creates a division between the dominant and the subordinate,between those who rule and those who are ruled. In abusiness organization, for example, there is a divisionbetween managers and workers, in a state there is adivision between the elite and the mass of citizens,and in a church there is a division between clergy andlaity.

Where consensus theorists focus on the normativeexpectations attached to social positions, Dahrendorflooks at their interests. A person’s interests are thosethings that are advantageous or disadvantageous,given his or her position in society. Those in rulingpositions have an interest in the structure of author-ity as it is and so will act to maintain it. Those they rule, on the other hand, have an interest in altering the distribution of authority and will try to change it in order to improve their positions.Individuals may not always be aware of their own interests, as they rarely have a complete and perfectknowledge of the circumstances that they face. Thislack of knowledge may often lead people to act inways that disadvantage them. Because of these dif-ferences in interest and outlook, rulers and ruled will tend to be formed into what Dahrendorf calls social classes. These are the base from which tradeunions, political parties, and other associations arerecruited. These interest groups come into conflictwith one another and are the actual driving forces insocial change.

Rex focuses on social divisions that originate in the distribution of economic, political, and culturalresources, rather than the distribution of authority.He sees economic resources as fundamental, and hedraws on a number of ideas from Marx to explore theconflicts that result from the unequal distribution of economic resources. He shows that classes areformed around differences of property and marketsituation and that they struggle with each other overthis distribution. Agricultural land, company shares,factories, and houses, for example, are sources ofpower for their owners, who tend to come intoconflict with those who lack these resources and seekto alter their distribution. Similar divisions are pro-duced around political and cultural resources, andthere is a close correspondence between the variousdistributions. Whole societies tend to be divided intosharply defined classes and these become organizedfor conflict through the kinds of interest groups described by Dahrendorf.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 58

Dahrendorf, Rex, and Mills talk about the division ofsocieties into conflicting classes. However, they mean differentthings by this. For Dahrendorf, classes are defined by authorityrelations, while Rex and Mills see them as defined by economicand other resources, but Mills gives particular attention to theirparticipation in political and military power. You will find adiscussion of these issues in ‘Class and status’, Chapter 17, pp. XXX–XX, and ‘Elitist theories’, Chapter 19, pp. XXX–X.

Collective action by conflict groups establisheswhat Rex calls a balance of power. In some situations,a powerful group may be able to impose its ideas andvalues on others, establishing a dominant ideology.In other situations, however, the conflicting groupsmay be more equally balanced and so the institutionsof the society will reflect a compromise between thevalues of the two groups. Occasionally, the membersof a subordinate group may be able to carry throughrevolutionary actions aimed at transforming their society.

Mills drew heavily on symbolic interactionist ideasto provide a social psychological basis for his argu-ments, but his core ideas focused on the class divi-sions of societies and the ways that these organizedpolitical power and cultural processes. Hs particularconcern was to explore the ways in which personalexperiences and problems were linked to possible issues of structural change. Individual biographies,he said, must be related to the historical developmentof social structures.

Social structures, according to Mills, must be explored through uncovering the processes throughwhich they are integrated. Social systems may be integrated through consensus and the ‘correspond-ence’ among their social institutions, but alsothrough processes of ‘co-ordination’ that reflect thesociety’s conflicts and tensions. In a situation of co-ordination, one or more institutional orders pre-dominates over others and regulates their relationswith each other (Gerth and Mills 1953: chapter 12).The clearest examples of this are provided by total-itarian societies in which there is a dominance of the political institutions, which are organized intosingle-party states. Even in the United States and similar capitalist societies, however, Mills saw a closeassociation between the political, economic, and military institutions, and an overlapping of power relations among them (Mills 1956). Ordinary people,as a result, have become increasingly powerless andfeel that they can do little to influence the decisionsthat shape their lives. The United States has become,then, a ‘mass society’, divided between the powerfulelite and the powerless masses. The task for sociology

is to uncover and explore this link between histor-ical trends and individual experiences (Mills 1959: chapter 1).

This might be a useful point at which to review Marx’smain ideas, as you will find they help you to understand thefollowing section on ‘Critical theory’. Look back at our wholediscussion of Marx on pp. XX–X.

Critical theoryRex, Dahrendorf, and Mills made use of ideas fromMarx and Weber. Marx’s recognition of conflict,however, was kept alive even more strongly inMarxist political parties and in the works of a numberof Marxist theorists. Of most importance in develop-ing Marx’s ideas were the so-called critical theorists.They have suggested that a renewed understandingof Marx’s ideas will allow sociologists to advance beyond its conventional concerns and, indeed, beyond Marxism itself.

The idea of critique was, in many ways, a part of the Marxist tradition from its beginnings. This was certainly the way that Marx saw his own work. In the Marxism of the Russian, German, andother European Communist parties, however, Marx’sthought was transformed into an uncritical and dogmatic system of theory. This began to change inthe 1920s, when a number of independent thinkersstarted to develop a critique of established Marxism.Gramsci in Italy and Korsch and Lukács in Germanywere the pioneers in developing a form of Marxismthat broke with dogmatic styles of thought and alsotook the political and cultural spheres more seriouslythan earlier Marxists (see Lukács 1923). Althoughtheir ideas had little impact outside Marxist circles,they helped to change the direction of Marxistthought, and their ideas were taken up by radicalwriters in the 1960s and 1970s. Prominent amongthese has been Jürgen Habermas.

Some of Habermas’s most important work has concerned issues of scientific method, where he hastried to clarify the nature of a truly critical theory. Allknowledge, he argues, develops in relation to whathe calls the cognitive interests of social groups.These are the particular social interests that shapepeople’s needs for knowledge. There are three ofthese cognitive interests, each of which is associatedwith a particular kind of knowledge:

• an interest in technical control;

• an interest in practical understanding;

• an interest in emancipation.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 59

An interest in technical control, argues Habermas, isinherent in the whole way in which human labour isorganized for productive purposes. Labour involvesan attempt to use and to transform the resources pro-vided by the natural environment, and it stimulatespeople to acquire the kind of knowledge that willhelp them to control the natural world. The naturalsciences and industrial technology are based on whathe calls empirical–analytical knowledge of the kindproduced in the positive sciences. This knowledge, hesays, provides the kind of objective information thatcan be used to make explanations and predictionsthat will help to ensure the technical success of ouractions.

An interest in practical understanding, on the otherhand, is fundamental to human communication and

interaction in everyday settings. In their interactions,people need to attain some kind of understanding of one another. They must build up a degree of con-sensus and shared understanding if their actions are not to collapse into mutual incomprehension and conflict. The cultural disciplines, concerned with understanding texts are based on what he calls historical-hermeneutic knowledge. (You need notworry about the precise meaning of all the longwords that Habermas uses.) This knowledge providesthe interpretations and meanings that make practical understanding possible.

Habermas sees approaches to the social world ashaving tended towards one or the other of these two types of knowledge. The positivism of Comte,Durkheim, and structural functionalism more gener-ally has followed the natural-science model and hasaimed at producing empirical–analytical knowledgefor a positive science of society. The interpretativework of Weber and the interactionist theorists, onthe other hand, has been closer to the cultural studiesand has aimed at producing historical–hermeneuticknowledge.

Both forms of knowledge have their uses, butHabermas sees neither of them as giving a satisfactorybase for social theory. Both the main traditions of sociological thought are partial and one-sided. Theyare limited and distorted by the underlying cognitiveinterests around which they are organized. Only anemancipatory interest, he holds, can produce thekind of knowledge that can synthesize these two partial perspectives.

An interest in emancipation is what is required ifdistorted forms of knowledge and action are to beovercome. Habermas holds that people can be liber-ated from ideology and error only through what he calls critical–dialectical thought. Once liberated,they can go on to achieve the kind of autonomy and self-determination that Marx saw as the ultimategoal of human history. An interest in emancipationdevelops along with the evolution of human society,and Marx was the first to construct a properly criticaltheory appropriate to this interest.

This is how Habermas locates his own work, alongwith that of the earlier critical theorists. An interestin human emancipation, he argues, requires that allknowledge is subjected to criticism. To be true to theinterest that motivated Marx’s work, it is necessary to go beyond it and to reconstruct it continually inthe light of changing circumstances. Societies havechanged since Marx’s death, and a critical theorymust reflect these changes. In contemporary societiesthere are new sources of division, unforeseen byMarx. It is no longer possible to see the working


··

THEORY

Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas (1929–) studied under Adorno, a leadingfigure in critical theory, at Frankfurt. It is here that he hasspent most of his academic career. He produced a numberof essays on philosophy and scientific method in the 1960s (Habermas 1967, 1968), and he began to engagewith the radical student movement. His initial attempt to construct a sociological account of this new movement(Habermas 1968–69) owed as much to Weber as it did to Marx.

Habermas set out the basis of a critical theory of modern society, along with a research programme to study it, in Legitimation Crisis (1973). Through the 1970she worked on the more general theoretical principlesunderlying this, publishing the results in his Theory ofCommunicative Action (1981a,b). Since completing this, he has concentrated rather more on philosophical issuesand on engaging with his political and philosophical critics.

You can find more on the applications of Habermas’stheory in other parts of this book:

state and crisis Chapter 20

social movements Chapter 17

Critical theorists’ views on the mass media are discussedin Chapter 10.

A good account of Habermas’s early work can be foundin McCarthy (1978), and a brief overview of his wholeoutput can be found in Pusey (1987). The best accounts of the wider context of critical theory are Jay (1973) andHeld (1980).

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 60

class as the sole agents of revolutionary change. Achallenge to the system may come from any of itsmany oppressed social groups. For some time, criticaltheorists saw the radical student movement as thegroup most likely to initiate social change, but theynow recognize a great variety of groups from thewomen’s movement to environmental and antimil-itarist movements.

Habermas’s critical theory, then, is critical of con-temporary social theories for their distorted views of social reality, but it is also self-critical. Critical theory must continually reassess its own foundationsand the specific theories that it builds on them.Habermas’s own major work (1981a,b) was cast in exactly this spirit. It is an attempt at a comprehensivereconstruction of Marx’s social theory, but it makesthis reconstruction by critically reconsidering alsothe work of structural functionalists and interactiontheorists. All of these strands are synthesized byHabermas.

With structural functionalism and systems theory,Habermas emphasizes the importance of systems and structures, seeing these concepts as especially applicable to the economic and political systems of modern societies. However, he builds an aware-ness of conflict and social division into his account of these social systems. With interaction theories, onthe other hand, he recognizes the importance ofcommunication and meaning, which he sees as essen-tial for understanding face-to-face encounters in everyday life. These face-to-face situations comprise

what he calls the lifeworld through which people’s experiences are formed into human communities.

These two traditions of theory, Habermas says,highlight different aspects of social reality. Modernsocieties, for example, are organized around the separation of systems of economic and political relations from a communal lifeworld of interpersonalinteractions. The systems are concerned with the integration of actions and relations into more or lesscoherent and co-ordinated wholes. They are studiedby tracing the functional connections among thestructures and the parts that they play in the mainten-ance of the system as a whole. Habermas, like Marx,stresses that it is important to look at contradictionswithin these systems as well as at their coherence.The lifeworld is concerned with the harmonizationof the meanings given to actions in the communallife of social groups. It is studied by examining the shared ideas and values that form the taken-for-granted cultural framework for interaction.

Summary pointsIn this section we have identified three broad ap-proaches to sociological theory, and have argued that they have to be seen as grasping different aspectsof a complex reality. They are, therefore, comple-mentary rather than alternative approaches. Thesethree approaches are structural-functionalist theories,interaction theories, and conflict theories.


··

BRIEFING

While the opposition between consensus and conflict perspectives can be exaggerated, thereare real differences that it is important to recognize. The approaches can be contrasted in termsof their main concepts and themes.

Source: adapted from Craib (1984: 60).

• You might like to consider whether Habermas adequately combines consensus and conflictthemes in his work.

Conflict

• Interests are the basic elements of sociallife. They are the sources of conflict.

• People react to one another on the basisof inducement and coercion.

• Social life involves division and exclusion.

• People tend to struggle with one another.

Consensus

• Norms and values are the basic elements ofsocial life. There is a consensus over them.

• People conform because they arecommitted to their societies and their rules

• Social life depends on cohesion andsolidarity.

• People tend to cooperate with one another.

Consensus andconflict

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 61

The main source of inspiration for structural-functionalist theories was the work of Durkheim,who laid its foundations in the classical period. Youmight like to remind yourself about his key ideas.

• The key figure in the construction of structural-functionalist ideas was Talcott Parsons, who sawhis task as that of synthesizing the ideas inheritedfrom the classical writers. He set out the basis forthis in his action frame of reference.

• The basic elements in the action frame of referenceare actors, ends, means, conditions, and norms.

• The structure of a society is the normative frame-work that defines its social positions and their social relations in a division of labour. The norm-ative expectations attached to social positionsdefine the roles to be played by their occupants.

• Dislocations between culturally approved ends andstructurally available means establish conditionsof anomie. Individuals respond to anomie throughinnovation, ritualism, retreatism, or rebellion.

• The function of any structure is its contribution tomeeting the needs of the system of which it is apart. At the most general level, needs include theinternal needs of the system and its adaptation toits external environment.

• Parsons recognized four fundamental needs: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency.

• Neofunctionalism and systems theory try to retainan emphasis on structure and system, but theycombine this with a sensitivity to conflict andchange.

A diverse range of interaction theories have attempted to provide the analysis of action that tendsto get lost in the work of the structural functionalists.We considered symbolic interactionism, phenomen-ological approaches, ethnomethodology, and rationalchoice theory.

• Symbolic interactionism originated in pragmatistphilosophy, which held that the truth of theoriesand concepts depends on their value in practicalactions.

• Central to symbolic interactionism is the idea ofthe definition of the situation. By acting in termsof their definition of the situation, people con-struct and make meaningful the objects of their social world.

• Definitions are built in interaction through processes of self-presentation, labelling, and negotiation.

• Phenomenological approaches focus their atten-tion on the taken-for-granted contents of everydayconsciousness. When reified, these ideas form the external, constraining realities that constitutesociety.

• Ethnomethodology, originating in the work ofGarfinkel, takes this one step further and examinesthe processes through which people sustain ataken-for-granted sense of reality in their everydayencounters.

• Rational choice theory, using an economic modelof action, sees people as making rational calcula-tions about the rewards and costs involved in theirinteractions with others.

The works of Weber and Marx inspired a number of theories that put conflict at the centre of their attention. These theorists criticized the structural-functionalist mainstream for its overemphasis onconsensus.

• Dahrendorf saw conflict as originating in the dis-tribution of authority.

• Rex saw conflict as originating in the distributionof resources.

• Both Dahrendorf and Rex saw interest groups as recruited from classes and as engaged in a struggle.Classes, engaged in collective action, are the agentsof social change.

• Mills emphasized the emergence of a power elite as the central element in contemporary class structure.

• Critical theory aimed at a reconstruction ofMarxism so as to combine its recognition of socialdivisions and social conflict with an awareness ofhow societies had changed since the death ofMarx.

• Habermas placed his analysis of conflict and col-lective action in the context of a theory of the rela-tionship between economic and political systems,on the one hand, and a communal lifeworld, onthe other.

• The claims of critical theory depend on a particularaccount of the relationship between knowledgeand interests in science.


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 62

Structural-functionalist, interactionist, and conflicttheories continue to provide the theoretical core of contemporary sociology, but they have not goneunchallenged. The rise of a strong and powerfulwomen’s movement in the 1970s led many womento challenge not only the male domination of seniorpositions in sociology but also the intellectual content of sociology itself. A number of influentialfeminist theories challenged what they saw as the malebias in all the leading traditions of social theory.These have, they argued, ignored women and thepart played by gender divisions. While feministsfound much of value in existing social theory, theysuggested that nothing less than its whole-scale reconstruction was needed if this bias was to be overcome.

A different challenge to the mainstream has come from the theorists of the post-modern. They have argued that contemporary societies have undergonea transformation that cannot be grasped by our exist-ing intellectual tools. All existing forms of theory, including most feminist theories, are seen as tooclosely tied to the structures of modern societies.They must be replaced by new forms of theorizingthat are better fitted to the post-modern condition thatwe have entered.

We will look at these theoretical approaches in turn. You will find that our discussions of par-ticular topics in Part Two of this book draw on these theories as well as the mainstream theories.Indeed, the suggested shift from modern forms ofregulated, centralized, and organized social life topost-modern flexible and pluralistic forms is one ofthe principal ideas that we explore. While we are critical of the idea of post-modern society, you willfind that each of the chapters in the second part ofthe book looks at contemporary changes in relationto the issues raised by theorists of the post-moderncondition.

Feminist theoriesFeminist writers have posed a fundamental and com-prehensive challenge to all existing social theoriesand to their attempts to inform and interpret empir-ical research. They have attempted nothing less thana long-overdue reformulation of the way in which sociologists—and other social scientists—have tried

to understand modern societies. This transformationof theories and research is still under way, and it has not gone unchallenged by those who cling to existing styles of work. We look at the impact of thesearguments in the various chapters that follow, andparticularly in Chapter 5, where we look at the cent-ral issue of gender divisions and gender identities. Inthis chapter we will concentrate on the philosophicalquestions that they have raised about the status ofknowledge in sociology.

We showed on pp. XX–X that Marx saw all socialknowledge as related to the class position of the observer or theorist. This view was echoed by Lukács,an early influence on critical theory. Lukács held that the standpoint of the proletariat—the workingclass—was the only one that allowed its occupants tograsp the real nature of their society as a whole. InHabermas’s formulation of critical theory, knowledgewas related to deeper and more general cognitive interests. For Habermas, it was the standpoint cor-responding to the emancipatory interest that allowedpeople a broader and deeper perspective on social reality than knowledge built from the standpoint oftechnical and practical interests.

One of the most significant and far-reaching features of contemporary sociology has been the way in which these kinds of arguments have beentaken up and extended by feminist writers. The main thrust of feminist thought has been the claimthat knowledge is related to divisions of sex and gender. Put simply, men and women have differentexperiences and so have different standpoints from which they construct their knowledge. All socialknowledge is related to the gender of the observer or theorist.

At one level there is an agreement among Marxists,critical theorists, and feminists, all of whom see aspects of social position and social action as deter-mining what people can know about their world.Conventional, mainstream theories are seen, vari-ously, as based on bourgeois, technical and practical,or male standpoints. Those who occupy these dominant and privileged positions in society are tied closely to the system from which they benefit;their ideas can do little but legitimate and reinforce existing social relations. Conventional science is neither objective nor neutral. Liberating and criticaltheories, on the other hand, are built from prolet-arian, emancipatory, or female standpoints. Those


··

Sociology moves on

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 63

who occupy subordinate or oppressed social positionsare uniquely able to challenge the social order and toproduce knowledge that is critical of it.

Feminists, then, suggest that mainstream theorymust be seen as malestream theory. It is rooted in patriarchal relations that embody male power overwomen and that establish the male standpoint onknowledge. The technical character of scientificknowledge and its emphasis on objectivity reflects a male way of seeing the world. This gendering ofknowledge is denied, ignored, or unacknowledged by mainstream theorists, virtually all of whom have been male. Women, it is claimed, are invisiblein social theory and in social research. Studies of people are, in reality, studies of men. This genderedknowledge, feminists argue, must be challenged by theorizing and research conducted from a female orfeminist standpoint.

Gender differences are those differences of masculineand feminine identity that are linked to biological differencesof sex. We discuss these issues at length in Chapter 5, pp. XXX–XX, where various strands in feminist thought are identified.

Knowledge is said to be gendered when its content and its structure express specifically masculine or femininecharacteristics. Look back over this chapter and see how fewfemale theorists have been mentioned: can you find any? Is this simply bias on the part of two male authors, or issomething deeper involved? When you have read more widelyinto sociological theory, you might like to see if you can findany female theorists who could have been mentioned in oursections on ‘Pioneers of social theory’ and ‘The classic period of sociology’.

A feminist standpoint is held to yield knowledgethat is radically different from malestream know-ledge (Hartsock 1983; Harding 1986; Smith 1987).The human mind, feminists argue, does not acquireknowledge in abstraction and detachment from theworld. It is only through the senses and through bodily involvement in real situations that knowledgeis possible. Differences of sex and gender, it is held,lead men and women to have quite different patternsof bodily involvement and experience, and so know-ledge is necessarily embodied. Women have primaryresponsibility for childbirth, mothering, and domesticlabour, and they learn to behave in distinctly femaleways. They have quite different ways of being andacting in the world, and their lives are characterizedby a much greater intensity of feeling and emotionthan is typical for men.

Knowledge acquired from a feminist standpoint,then, is deeply marked by this subjectivity. Feminists

do not, of course, see this as a failing, though this ishow subjectivity has often been seen in mainstreamtheory. According to feminists, their standpoint giveswomen distinct advantages in the pursuit of know-ledge. They have access to whole areas of social lifethat are inaccessible or unavailable to men.

Feminist writers have raised crucial issues about the gendered character of scientific methodology and empirical research. They have also suggested that sociological theory itself is gendered. Their argumentsuggests that such concepts as structure, system, andaction may themselves be part of the malestreamworld-view. This is a dibcult position to uphold, asfeminists have developed their criticisms by drawingon precisely these concepts. There are, for example,structural feminists, interactionist feminists, andfeminists who draw on Marxist ideas about conflict.It seems that these most general concepts of sociolo-gical theory are not intrinsically gendered, although


··

BRIEFING

Knowledge and standpoints

There are many different feminist approaches, and not all accept this particularly strong version of the argument for the feminist standpoint. There is,however, a broad agreement about the features that are supposed to characterize malestream and feministknowledge. These are set out below. While malestreamwriters place a positive value on the things listed on the left-hand list, feminists see these in a negative light and stress the importance of things on the right-hand list.

Malestream Feminist

• rationality • emotion

• facts • experiences

• objectivity • subjectivity

• neutral • personal

• detachment • embodied

• public • private

• culture • nature

You might have noticed an interesting ambiguity in these arguments. It is the distinctive standpoint ofwomen that has been identified, yet the theory describesitself as a ‘feminist-standpoint’ theory rather than afemale-standpoint or feminine-standpoint theory. Is itvalid to equate a female standpoint with a specificallyfeminist consciousness?

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 64

they have often been used in gendered ways. That is, arguments about structure, action, and conflict are not, in themselves, malestream discussions. They become part of the malestream when they arediscussed exclusively in terms of the world of male experience and involvement. For example, theoriesof class structure have tended to focus on men’s classposition and have either ignored women or derivedtheir class positions from those of their husbands,partners, and fathers.

Feminist critics of the malestream have correctlyidentified, in particular, the gaps and the absencesthat have characterized substantive sociologicalwork. This substantive work has, for example, tendedto emphasize class as the overriding social division.Until feminist critics raised the problem, little or noattention was given to the significance of gender divisions or to the theorization of the body and theemotions (Shilling 1993; B. Turner 1996).

However, in showing that knowledge is genderedand in promoting the claims of the feminist stand-point over malestream knowledge, feminist writerstend to accept many of the characteristics and con-sequences of contemporary gender differences. Theyargue that women have a distinctive standpoint because of their oppression, and they go on to advocate the cultivation of this standpoint. A trulycritical and radical position would challenge this verydifferentiation of male and female and would try toovercome the oppression that it produces.

Feminist standpoint theorists have, of course, real-ized this problem, and they have made some attemptsto overcome it. Harding (1986), for example, hastried to explore the ways in which feminist know-ledge can be enlarged into knowledge that is not gendered at all. Current feminist standpoints are seen as transitional and as destined to be transformedin the future into a broader form of knowledge that isneither male nor female in character. Butler (1993)has argued for the need to reject all taken for grantedideas about fixed gender divisions. Gendered iden-tities are constructed through interaction and are inherently flexible and malleable. It is for this reasonthat Butler advocates ‘gender bending’ actions thatchallenge established identities and open up newpossibilities.

The original formulations of feminist standpointtheories were based on the idea that the specific experiences of women were common to all women. A number of writers have reminded us, however, thatwomen’s experiences are shaped, also, by ethnicityand sexual orientation, as well as by such factors as class, age, and disability. Black feminist writers, for example, have challenged mainstream white

feminists, on the grounds that they ignore the distinct experiences of women of colour (Hill Collins 1990).

A recognition of such diversity poses a number ofchallenges for sociological theory. Because they arefactors that also divide men, the simple dichotomy of male and female must be abandoned. Middle-classwomen and middle-class men, for example, may have more in common with each other than do middle-class women and working-class women. More importantly, these divisions cross-cut each other andprevent the construction of any single female stand-point. There is no single category of ‘woman’: thereare black middle-class women, Asian working-classwomen, white gay women, and so on.

The feminist criticism of sociological thought hasopened up possibilities for other critiques of themainstream: black and antiracist perspectives, ‘queertheories’, post-colonial theories, and many othershave all been proposed. The end result of the critiqueof the mainstream seems to be a proliferation of competing perspectives. This proliferation has beenencouraged and welcomed by the contemporary theoretical approach that we consider in the next section.

Post-modernism and theoryThroughout the 1960s there was a growing recogni-tion that conventional science did not live up to theimage of positive science presented in the philo-sophy textbooks. The focus of these discussions wasnot the social sciences but the natural sciences.

The leading figure in reconstructing the image ofnatural science was Thomas Kuhn, who stressed thatscience did not deal with given facts but created itsfacts. Scientists, he argued, worked within commu-nities of theorists and researchers who shared certainbasic concepts and methods. Without these sharedpreconceptions, no factual knowledge was possible.Scientists employ what Kuhn called paradigms ofknowledge that tell them what to look for in their experiments and that help them to explain away observations that did not fit their preconceived theories (Kuhn 1962).

Eventually, Kuhn said, the sheer bulk of the observations that had been ignored would become sogreat that support for a paradigm might begin tocrumble. Younger scientists might begin to use a newone that was better able to handle these observations.The history of science, then, is a sequence of theor-etical revolutions in which paradigms replace one another periodically. It is impossible, said Kuhn, to


··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 65

describe this in terms of scientific progress or the advance of knowledge, as there is no way of compar-ing the results produced by scientists using differentparadigms. Each paradigm creates its own facts, andthere are no theory-neutral facts that we can use todecide among them. The paradigm that survives isone that is able to attract the largest number of newrecruits and the highest levels of research funding. As so often in the political world, might makes right. Theoretical approaches are, therefore, differentfrom each other, but it is much more dibcult to say whether any one is better or more truthful than another.

Kuhn’s ideas were enthusiastically taken up in sociology, as his argument suggested that the differ-ences between the natural sciences and the social sciences were not so great as many people assumed.Sociologists did not need to feel inferior about thetheoretical disputes that ran through the discipline.As in physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy,the clash of fundamental and irreconcilable theor-etical positions was a sign of a healthy pluralism(Friedrichs 1970).

Kuhn was not as radical as many of his more enthusiastic supporters. His belief that a paradigmwould collapse when a large number of problematicobservations had accumulated implied that observa-tions were not simply creations of the paradigm itself. If facts really were nothing other than the products of preconceived ideas, then no problematicobservations would ever be made. Many of his followers conveniently ignored this point and sawKuhn as justifying the proliferation of irreconcilabletheoretical positions. Sociologists merely had tochoose a theoretical position that appealed to them.In the world of science, they held, anything goes.There can be as many alternative positions as ourimaginations can produce.

These arguments were echoed and elaborated inthe works of two French writers, Foucault (1971) and Lyotard (1979). Both highlighted the pluralityand diversity of scientific knowledge, and Lyotard argued that this reflected the post-modern conditionthat contemporary societies were entering. It wassimply no longer possible to use such terms as truth and objectivity. In post-modern conditions, all thought has to be seen as relative, partial, and limited. No standpoint is fixed or absolute.

Lyotard’s argument concerned the nature of sci-ence and technical knowledge, but he pointed to awider cultural phenomenon. Cultural activities of allkinds are seen as having become more important inthe second half of the twentieth century. In modern

societies, cultural institutions are embedded in other social institutions that shaped people’s culturalactivities. Marx’s model of the economic base and thecultural and political superstructure was simply themost extreme formulation of this. As these modernsocieties have entered the post-modern condition,however, the autonomy of the differentiated culturalsphere has grown and it has become the most import-ant aspect of social life.

Some theorists of the post-modern condition haveseen this as resulting from changes in economic andpolitical structures themselves. These changes areseen as leading from modern industrial capitalism to late capitalism (Jameson 1984), late modernity(Giddens 1990), or even post-industrialism and post-capitalism (Bell 1979). These writers point to suchthings as the development towards more flexible andglobalized systems of production in which market-ing, advertising, and consumerism play a more cent-ral part. The cultural sphere becomes extended andenlarged, and through the mass media it comes to


··

BRIEFING

Post-structuralism and post-modernism

Foucault’s work is often described as ‘post-structuralist’,as he developed it in response to certain structuralistwriters in the Marxist tradition (see Althusser 1965). We discuss his extremely important ideas at many places in this book, but particularly in Chapter 8.Foucault’s work is often linked with that of Lyotard,though they differ in many ways. What they have incommon is their rejection of the idea that there areoverarching structures in social life, and their recognitionof fragmentation and diversity in cultural and social life.Lyotard saw himself as setting out a theory of the post-modern condition, and he is generally seen as a‘post-modernist’. This position has been most forciblydeveloped by Baudrillard (1977).

You will find that some writers use a hyphen in post-modernism, but others prefer it without. In fact, thedictionary definition of ‘postmodernism’ (without ahyphen) refers to a movement of thought in art andarchitecture. This idea inspired contemporary writings,but the term has now acquired a different meaning. It isused in its hyphenated form to show this difference inmeaning: a post-modern condition is one that goesbeyond the modern condition.

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 66

stress diversity and choice in all matters. We discussthis further in Chapter 10, pp. XXX–X. In the post-modern condition, the idea of absolute and univer-sal standards loses its meaning (see also Lash andUrry 1987).

These writers have remained tied to Marxist or structural-functionalist theories and have, to agreater or lesser extent, been critical of the intel-lectual consequences of the post-modern condition.A more radical group of writers—epitomized byLyotard—have embraced the post-modern condition.These are post-modern theorists, rather than simplytheorists of the post-modern. They argue that it is no longer valid to search for economic and polit-ical realities beyond our cultural images of them.According to Baudrillard, for example, the post-modern condition is one in which there is nothingfor us to do except produce and consume cultural images. He argues that the cultural products of themass media define reality for people, reflected in agrowing intellectual interest in cultural studies andin the need to abandon the idea of building sci-entific theories to explain the world. Sociology, forBaudrillard, is no different from any other culturalactivity: there is no real difference between buildinga theory, writing a poem, and composing an advert-ising jingle. Post-modern theorists enthusiasticallyaccept the complete relativity of knowledge and theabandonment of the Enlightenment idea of scientificknowledge.

These ideas have had a massive impact on recentwork, not only in sociology but also in literature, cultural studies, and many other disciplines. Thereare signs that some of the excessive claims made by post-modernists have begun to wane, and a morereasoned consideration of diversity and difference is beginning to take place. It is too early yet to say what the final outcome of this will be. We hopethat your engagement with some of the implica-tions of their work while you read the rest of thisbook will stimulate you to make your own con-tribution to this debate over the future of sociologyand science.

Summary pointsIn this section we have sketched out the contem-porary criticisms of the mainstream theories that we looked at in ‘Academic sociology established’.These criticisms are explored at greater length in our discussions of particular topics in Parts Two and Three.


··

GLOBAL THEORY

Most of the theories that we have considered have, implicitly or explicitly, taken the nation state as their point of reference. Societies are seen as contained within the territorial boundaries of nation states, and the processesthat sociologists study are largely contained within suchsocieties. Thus, much sociology refers to British society,German society, American society, and so on. As we show in Chapter 14, in particular, this has always been anunreal approach, and the growth in connections betweennational societies has made their boundaries even moreartificial than before. We live in an increasingly globalizedworld, and the proper objects of sociological explanation are transnational organizations and global structuresthemselves.

An awareness of the importance of transnational linkagesand the global integration of the world was, however,depicted in the world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein(1974). Writing in the 1970s, and drawing on argumentsfrom the sociology of development, Wallerstein set out a formof Marxism that saw capitalism as developing within worldsystems rather than nation states and national societies. A world system is a large social system that contains manystates and cultural regions and that is integrated through an extensive division of labour. The modern world system—rooted in a capitalist world economy—came into being insixteenth century Europe and was the context within whichclassical sociology arose. It is the increasing globalization ofthe modern world system that many see as underpinning themove to late modernity or post-modernity and as havingundermined nation-state based sociology. This argument hasmost recently been formulated by Castells (1996), who hastraced the implications of the growing global network ofeconomic and political linkages for the collective identities of social movements.

Albrow (1996) has suggested that contemporary social lifehas involved a transition from the modern age to the globalage. This transition, Albrow argues, occurred during the years1945–89 and was marked by a strengthened dialogue abouthuman rights and by the growth of the women’s, peace, andgreen movements, each of which was involved in a globalagenda. In this global age, people identify less and less withnations and local communities. They rely more and moreupon the construction of individualized identities. At thesame time, they begin to become conscious of the world as asingle social space, albeit a multicultural social space(Robertson 1992).

These theories are taken up in all the various chapters ofthis book, where we try to highlight the shift towards moreglobal forms of social life. You will find a useful discussion of many of these issues in Urry’s Sociology Beyond Societies (2001).

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 67

• Feminist writers have criticized mainstream soci-ology for its malestream characteristics. They arguethat the concern for rationality and objectivity canoften mask the adoption of a male standpoint.

• A feminist standpoint is seen as offering a differ-ent and more adequate basis for knowledge. Thisstandpoint reflects the distinct position and experi-ences of women. Knowledge is gendered.

• Black feminists and others have pointed to theneed to abandon the category of woman and torecognize the diversity of female experiences.

• Post-modern theorists embrace a complete relat-ivism in knowledge and reject the very ideas of rationality, objectivity, and scientific certainty.

When discussing post-modern theorists, we showedthat their ideas were part of a wider movement of

thought that suggested fundamental changes in thestructure of modern societies.

• The modern structures of industrialism and cap-italism, described by structural functionalists andMarxists, have developed into more flexible andfragmented structures that create the post-moderncondition.

• In the post-modern condition, cultural activities ofall kinds acquire a greater autonomy and signi-ficance in social life.

We stressed, however, that the claims made by themore radical post-modern theorists have themselvesbeen challenged and that there is a need to explorethe implications of their work in relation to specificsubstantive topics.


··

Key concepts

• action frame of reference

• adaptation

• alienation

• analytical realism

• anomie

• authority

• base

• bourgeois

• capitalist society

• causal explanation

• cognitive interests

• division of labour

• dynamic density

• evolution

• function

• functional analysis

• gendering

• goal attainment

• historical materialism

• ideal type

• idealist

• ideologies

• industrial society

• integration

• interest group

• interests

• latency

• materialist

• mechanical solidarity

• mode of production

• organic solidarity

• phenomenology

• positivism

• proletariat

• rationalization

• roles

• ruling classes

• self

• social classes

• social differentiation

• social facts

• socialization

• solidarity

• structure

• superstructure

• symbolic interactionism

• understanding

• values

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 68

Revision and exercises 69

··

Look back over the summary points at the end of each section of this chapter and make sure thatyou understand the points that have been highlighted:

• Make sure that you understand the use of the following terms: materialist, idealist, positivist;standpoint, gendered knowledge.

• In what sense can it be said that sociological theory is malestream theory?

• What intellectual problems, if any, can you identify in the post-modern theorists’ defence ofrelativism?

We looked at the origins of structural functionalism in the works of Comte and Spencer, itsenlargement by Durkheim, and its consolidation by Parsons:

• Make sure that you are familiar with the biographical details concerning: Comte, Spencer,Durkheim, Parsons, Merton.

• What is meant by the following terms: structure, function, structural differentiation,functional adaptation; social fact, dynamic density, social solidarity, role, socialization?

• How would you distinguish between social statics and social dynamics?

• Briefly outline the distinction between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity.

• How did Durkheim distinguish between causal explanation and functional analysis?

• Make sure that you understand the following: egoism, egoistic suicide, anomie, anomicsuicide, altruism, altruistic suicide, fatalism, fatalistic sucide.

• How did Merton’s concept of anomie differ from that of Durkheim? What were the responsesto anomie that Merton identified?

• Define the following terms used by Parsons: adaptation, goal attainment, integration,latency.

Towards the end of the chapter, we looked at the debate over industrialism and post-industrialismthat took place in the 1980s and 1990s:

• What did Comte and Spencer mean by industrial society. How did this differ from the way inwhich the term was used by Parsons?

• How useful is it to describe contemporary societies as having entered a post-industrial orpost-modern condition?

We looked at a range of theories that emphasized the investigation of action and interaction. In particular we looked at symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and ethnomethodology:

• Make sure that you are familiar with the biographical details concerning Weber and Simmel.Look at the biographical box on Goffman (Chapter 4, p. XXX).

• What is meant by the following terms: value relevance, value judgements, ideal types,understanding; definition of the situation, social construction, dramaturgical, rewards, costs?

• What are the types of action identified by Weber? Give a one-line definition of each of them.

• What did Garfinkel mean by the term ‘cultural dope’?

• What does it mean to describe a theory of action as phenomenological?

• Do you remember what the word ‘ethnomethodology’ means?

• What do rational choice theorists mean by treating interactions as exchange relationships?

• Why is it appropriate to consider Weber under the headings of both ‘Interaction theories’ and‘Conflict theories’?

Theories of structure

Revision and exercises

Theories ofinteraction

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 69

Conflict theories have their origins in the works of Marx and Weber, but they have been extendedby a number of later writers:

• Make sure that you are familiar with the biographical details concerning: Marx, Engels,Weber, Habermas.

• What is meant by historical materialism? Can it be seen as a form of economic determinism?

• What is meant by the following: alienation, exploitation, social classes; ideology, mode ofproduction; base, superstructure; authority, interest groups?

• On what basis did Marx define the six main modes of production?

• Has the break-up of the Soviet Union and the other Communist states of east and centralEurope finally undermined the intellectual claims of Marxism?

• What did Weber mean by rationalization?

• How would you summarize the main differences between the theories of Dahrendorf and Rex?

We included Habermas as a theorist of conflict, although his theory is much broader in scope thanthis label might imply:

• What did Habermas mean by: technical control, practical understanding, emancipation?Which of these does he associate with the development of a critical theory?

• How did Habermas distinguish between system and lifeworld?

Do not worry if your answers to these questions are still a little vague. You will come acrossdiscussions of many of these ideas later in the book. You might like to return to these questionsperiodically to test how your understanding has developed.

Further reading

Useful overviews of the main trends in sociological theory can be found in:

Craib, I. (1997), Classical Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press). An excellent and veryreadable introduction to the ideas of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel.

Giddens, A. (1971), Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress). Gives an excellent account of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, but also puts them into thehistorical context of the development of European society.

Scott, J. (1995), Sociological Theory: Contemporary Debates (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Looks indetail at Parsons and at the various strands of theory that developed in relation to his work,including interaction theories and conflict theories.

More detailed discussions can be found in:

Berger, P. L., and Luckmann, T. (1966), The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1971). An important and influential statement of the phenomenological point of view.

Dahrendorf, R. (1957), Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1959). A readable statement of the need for a conflict perspective that goesbeyond the ideas of Marx.

Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Gives apowerful extension of the symbolic interactionist position. We look at his work in more detail inChapter 4, pp. XXX–X and Chapter 8, pp. XXX–XX.

You should try to read at least one of the works of each of the leading classical theorists. The best starting points might be:

Marx, K., and Engels, F. (1848), The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).

Durkheim, E. (1897), Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952).

Weber, Max (1904–5), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,2002).


··

Theories of conflict

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 70

W

There are three important sites covering the works of the leading classical sociologists

http://csf.colorado.edu/psu/mark/index.htm

For Marx, and consult his collected works at

http://eserver.org/marx

For Weber

www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Quad/5889/weber.htm

For Durkheim

www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Quad/5889/durkheim.htm

Symbolic interactionism is covered on

http://paradigm.socio.brocku.ca/~/lward

Feminist thought can be found at

http://www.feminist.org

Baudrillard’s post-modernism is covered at

http://www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/baud/index.htm

Finally, two large sites, covering all the leading thinkers, are the so-called ‘Dead Sociologists’Society’ pages

http://www.runet.edu/~lridener/dss/deadsoc.html

http://staff.uwsuper.edu/hps/mball/dead_soc.htm

Web links 71

Web links

··

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 71

SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 18 › dati › corsi › 36068 › 13269-fulcher_ch02.pdf ·...

Documents

Transcript of SocC02 10/9/02 4:25 PM Page 18 › dati › corsi › 36068 › 13269-fulcher_ch02.pdf ·...