The

Cambridge Dictionary of

SOCIOLOGY

General Editor

BRYAN S. TURNER
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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culture
and because of its crypto-theology (the “global
village” of “the electric age” has echoes of Teilhard
de Chardin’s “noosphere”). Chardin (1881–1955)
defined “noosphere” as the stage of evolutionary
development characterized by the emergence of
consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal re-
lationships. In Canada, the work of McLuhan’s
mentor, Harold Innis, has also received renewed
attention, while a more Baudrillardian version of
the culture and technology approach is evident
in the work of Arthur Kroker and the journal
C-Theory. ANDREW WERNICK
culture
Traditionally the province of either anthropology
or the humanities, culture has become increa-
singly central to sociology, both as a subject of
study, and as a theoretical challenge to sociology’s
self-conception. The sociological definition of and
approach to culture, which refers to the form,
content, and effects of the symbolic aspect of
social life, has emerged out of a critical encounter
with the two more traditional definitions.
In the definition of the humanities, culture
refers to intellectual and artistic activity and the
artifacts produced thereby, to what Matthew
Arnold (1822–88) called “the best that has been
thought and said.” Culture is taken as the highest
moral and aesthetic achievements of civilization.
The sociology of culture has always provided crit-
ical distance from the pretensions of culture so
understood and its ensuing enshrinement in the
literary, dramatic, and musical canon. By showing
the links between social status maintenance and
taste, but also by carefully examining the aesthet-
ics of both popular cultural artifacts, and the
creative cultural activities of social classes, races,
and genders traditionally excluded from the
realm of high arts production, the sociology of
culture has been essential to the deconstruction
of the high/middle/lowbrow culture typology. In
approaching culture as a social object of study,
the sociology of culture forms a subfield alongside
the sociology of religion and the sociology of
science, and takes within its purview both high
literature and pulp fiction, Fellini films and
Hollywood schlock, art music and rock ’n’ roll.
With the advent of the production of culture per-
spective in the 1970s, centered around the work of
Richard Peterson, and the concepts of field and
cultural capital, drawn from the work of Pierre
Bourdieu, this subfield has gained both empirical
purchase and theoretical sophistication.
In the anthropological definition, culture is exp-
ected to do the comparative work of differentiating
culture
the peoples of the world, and thus also to unify
their study; it forms the counterpoint to physical
anthropology’s theories of human nature. Histor-
ical sociology, however, has shown the connec-
tions between the anthropological imagination
and various nationalist and colonialist projects
of nineteenth-century Europe, whereby the total-
izing concept of culture was complicit in the exo-
ticization and simultaneous subordination and
colonization (and sometimes extermination) of
native populations. Extensive debates about the
political valences and historical guilt of the con-
cept of culture have ensued. But perhaps more
importantly for ongoing empirical research, soci-
ologists have found the anthropological concept
of culture to be underspecified; for sociology, dif-
ferentiating culture from nature is not enough.
Rather, culture must be defined in relation to
society, history, and individual psychology, and,
furthermore, the differentiation between culture
and nature must itself be examined historically
with an eye towards its varying social effects
(many anthropologists have also come to this con-
clusion). Thus, while sociology has drawn exten-
sively on symbolic, structuralist, and linguistic
anthropology for its own studies of culture, it
has resisted the temptation to conflate culture
directly with the social as such, and the culture/
society distinction has been a productively un-
stable one. And it would be fair to say that social
constructionist forms of cultural research have
distanced themselves significantly from the
“essentializing” concepts of an earlier era.
However, both the sociology of culture and the
critique of culture inside and outside of anthro-
pology beg fundamental questions. Why are social
actors so interested in cultural artifacts in the
first place, as opposed to other, functionally
equivalent, status markers? If cultural difference
cannot be grasped inside scientific anthropo-
logical theory, does that mean that it cannot
be grasped at all? What is the role of meaning
and symbolic structures in modern and late capit-
alist societies? To answer these questions outside
of the confines of the humanist tradition and
postcolonial anthropology has been the central
task for cultural sociologists, who since the 1960s
have developed a set of increasingly subtle and
nuanced approaches to this contested term of
culture.
For sociology, then, culture refers to the sym-
bolic element of social life, which has been
variously conceptualized, identified, and studied:
signifiers and their signifieds, gestures and their
interpretation, intended and unintended
111
culture
meanings, written discourse and effective speech,
situational framing and scientific paradigms, and
moral and political ideals. Concretely, culture
refers to those social objects and activities which
are primarily or exclusively symbolic in their
intent or social function, such as art, music, and
sports. Analytically, culture refers to the symbolic
and ideational element of any social action, social
relationship, or historical pattern. In modern and
postmodern societies, these two senses of culture
are increasingly intertwined in ways that must
be studied empirically: people may learn how to
conduct intimate relationships from poetry or
romantic movies, and rock stars may endorse
politicians.
The methodologies for studying culture so
conceived range widely, and include surveys of
attitudes and beliefs, participant observation,
ethnography, structured and unstructured inter-
views, textual analysis of written and visual
media, and conversational analysis. Ultimately,
however, all of these methods involve the inter-
pretation of meaning, and thus cannot be mapped
directly from the methods of the natural sciences,
though the extent to which scientific methods can
be adapted to the study of culture is a matter of
significant dispute. Furthermore, culture not only
requires interpretation, but the meanings of sym-
bols have to be understood in a holistic manner,
which is to say that any given sign or symbol takes
its meaning in relation to those with which it is
contrasted and figuratively related. The meaning
of the term culture is not an exception to this,
and as culture has become central to sociology, its
meaning has emerged in relation to three central
concepts, namely social structure, action theory,
and critical theory. After discussing these, we will
briefly discuss the ways in which the consider-
ation of culture has affected other aspects of the
sociological field.
The distinction between culture and society is,
like culture itself, contested and controversial,
and, since it often conflates the analytic and con-
crete dimensions of culture, it is perhaps better to
discuss the relationship of culture to social struc-
ture. Talcott Parsons distinguished the cultural
from the social system in a strictly analytic fa-
shion (his student Niklas Luhmann would later
claim that this should in fact be a concrete dis-
tinction). And Parsons suggested that the study of
culture in all its symbolic elaborations could be
left to anthropology, and that sociology could
focus on the place where culture and social struc-
ture met, namely, on the institutionalization
of values and norms. Structural-functionalism
112
culture
suggested that culture, through the normative in-
terpenetration of society, could perform an
integrative function in the service of social equi-
librium, and thus that social change came with a
breakdown in value consensus (as in Chalmers
Johnson’s (1931– ) theory of social revolution).
These assertions were then subjected to relent-
less ideological attack for suppressing the role of
strife and domination in society (and in the use of
culture). However, it is perhaps more instructive,
now, to notice a deeper problem with structural-
functionalism, namely its interpretive deafness.
By approaching culture as “norms and values,”
structural-functionalism not only projected cer-
tain liberal ideals onto its model of society, but
more significantly, evacuated meaning from cul-
ture, robbing its analysis of nuance and empirical
specificity. For an engagement with the multiple
layers of the symbolic immediately reveals that
culture in modern societies is neither homogen-
ous nor consensual. Rather, the size and makeup
of collectivities that share certain symbolic articu-
lations vary significantly (from small religious
cults to large voting populations), and these sym-
bolic articulations are contested both within and
without collectivities.
Mid-century Marxism and post-1960s conflict
theory insisted that culture was more of a guaran-
tor of hierarchy, exploitation, and inequality, and
thus saw culture as ideology. And though the pol-
itical commitments and theoretical presuppos-
itions of conflict theory were fundamentally at
odds with those of Parsonian functionalism, one
can discern in the studies of the objective basis
of systematically distorted communication, and
in references to the political and economic func-
tions of ideology, very similar problems to those
that plagued the structural-functional approach.
Here too, culture is assumed to be relatively uni-
form, at least in its social effects, and its study is
guided by theoretical intuitions about the work-
ings of the social system, in particular the exploit-
ation of labor, and for a contemporary example
see David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity
(1989). Thus Marxist repudiations of culture as
ideology also suffered from a lack of musicality,
and inattention to the empirical details of
culture’s varied production, performance, and
reception.
In both cases, these problems were exacerbated
by imagining social structures as hard, real, and
external to the actor, in opposition to culture as a
more pliable and less efficacious possession of
individual minds. Furthermore, both structural-
functionalism and Marxism were embedded in
culture
teleological philosophies of history and social
evolution that enabled them to locate the appro-
priate relations between social structure and cul-
ture in an a priori theoretical manner. As these
teleologies came to be seen as more the meaning-
ful, ideational constructions of sociologists’ own
cultures than ontological certainties about actual
societies, the strict scientific distinction between
social structure and culture began to break down,
as did the various conceptions of their relation-
ship. This breakdown created an opening for soci-
ology to develop the tools necessary for a more
sensitive and empirically sophisticated approach
to culture in its collective forms. This has been
accomplished by studying culture as a structure
in its own right, a theoretical development that
has taken three main forms.
First, the study of symbolic boundaries, associ-
ated with the work of Michele Lamont (Money,
Morals and Manners, 1994) and her students, has
shown how actors construct and maintain mean-
ings as a mode of ordering, including, and exclud-
ing their fellow humans, over and against the
exigencies of social structure. Thus, the economic
basis for class is overwritten by an attribution of
certain moral qualities to certain humans, based
on criteria (including religion, race, and so forth)
that may crosscut the expectations of more reduc-
tively minded sociologists that would map class
consciousness directly onto economic position,
and so on.
Second, the study of discourse and its relation-
ship to power, based on the pioneering work of
Michel Foucault, has enabled sociologists to exa-
mine not only articulated boundaries, but also
unstated exclusions, and more generally the cul-
tural construction of certain taken-for-granted
“positivities” of modern life. Thus one can exa-
mine from a reflexive historical perspective how
certain kinds of human subjects (for example,
insane people and medical patients) and social
problems (for example, homosexuality) came to
be of such great concern, and how their meaning-
ful construction effected the way they were dealt
with, inside and outside mainstream society.
Though Foucault’s work has been largely appro-
priated in the humanities as a set of theorems
concerning power and knowledge more appropri-
ate to critical theory than to empirical sociology,
his early studies of madness, medicine, and the
episteme of the classical and modern ages are in
fact rich historical reconstructions of landscapes
of meaning, and their essential role in the social
processes of treatment, exclusion, and philosoph-
ical understanding. These issues are developed
culture
in Foucault, Madness and Civilization (1961 [trans.
1971]) and Chandra Mukerji, A Fragile Power: Scien-
tists and the State (1990).
Finally, the conception of culture as a struc-
ture in its own right has enabled the sociological
transformation of a set of tools from literary
theory and semiotics. Culture can be studied as
a social text, replete with codes, narratives,
genres, and metaphors. Then, culture can be
examined in both its concrete and its analytic
autonomy from social structure, which enables
us to isolate and make clear its effects (and its
varying political valences) from a sociological
point of view. So, for example, the long struggle
for women’s rights in the United States can be
seen as a discursive battle for civil inclusion,
according to which a new set of actors came to
be coded in a democratic and morally positive
way (Jeffrey Alexander, “The Long and Winding
Road: Civil Repair of Intimate Injustice,” 2001).
This conception of culture suggests, moreover,
that social structures themselves are interpreted
variably by social actors, and thus must be
attended to hermeneutically by cultural sociolo-
gists, with an eye to their meaningful aspects,
their locality, and their historical specificity
(see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures,
1973, and Jeffrey Alexander, The Meanings of Social
Life, 2003).
If culture was often contrasted to social struc-
ture, and furthermore associated with subjecti-
vity, then it should not be surprising that it has
often been erroneously conflated with action and
its related terms: agency, reflexivity, and con-
sciousness. However, as culture has become re-
cognized as a structure in its own right, the
relationship of culture to action has become a
key component both of sociological action theory
and of sociological research more generally. The
ongoing debate about culture and action has its
roots in two different sociological traditions, both
of which contribute to the contemporary under-
standing of culture within sociology.
On the one hand, the analytic tradition, des-
cending from Parsons’s formalization of Max
Weber’s means–ends approach to action, ap-
proached culture in terms of the ways culture
sets the ends of action. Action is thus structured
not only by interests, but by norms as well. Origin-
ally opposed to economistic accounts of social
action, the strictly analytic approach to purposive
action has been revived in contemporary socio-
logical debates about agency and rationality. But
a deeper understanding of the role of culture
for action has been developed from within this
113
culture
tradition by recognizing culture as an internal
environment for action, arguing thus that culture
orients action by structuring subjectivity. Social
actors respond to sets of internal typifications of
the social world and thus are dependent upon
meaningful symbolization in setting their goals,
and in imagining how they can go about meeting
them. By reintroducing the symbolic as an envir-
onment of action full of rich narratives and mor-
ally and emotionally loaded oppositions, this
approach integrates the expanded approach to
culture-as-structure elaborated above.
On the other hand, the pragmatic tradition,
descending from George Herbert Mead and
Herbert Blumer, rejects the means–ends charac-
terization of action outright, and suggests instead
that actors constantly negotiate situations in an
improvisatory way, attempting to make sense of
and solve both social and physical problems as
they arise. Originally, because of its distance
from the analytic abstractions of the Parsonian
tradition, and its tendency towards methodo-
logical individualism, this tradition was not really
oriented towards culture per se, though it had a
conception of the use of symbols and framing on
the micro level. Increasingly, however, the des-
cendants of this tradition have developed a con-
ception of culture-as-use that conceives of the
knowledgeable agent as the link between culture
and society. It is actors, in social situations, who
draw on culture when institutional consistency
breaks down.
Thus the contemporary debate is structured by
two positions, that of culture-in-action which is
illustrated by Ann Swidler in “Culture in Action:
Symbols and Strategies” (1986), and that of culture
as thick environment for action by Jeffrey Alexan-
der in Action and Its Environments: Toward a New
Synthesis (1988). Both approaches have significant
insights to offer. The first emphasizes that actors
continually work to render coherent and solvable
discursive and institutional problems that arise in
the flow of social life. The second emphasizes the
way in which the social world is constructed for
the actor by previous interpretations and collect-
ive languages. In either case, these approaches
suggest the importance of culture for the study
of social life. For example, we should perhaps
discuss the discursive repertoires of politicians,
and the resonance of these repertoires with the
shared codes of their audience–electorates, as op-
posed to the “revealed preferences” of either. The
contrasts between the two approaches have, how-
ever, produced significantly different forms of
theory and research.
114
culture
One important manifestation of the symbolic
interactionist tradition has been Gary Fine’s deve-
lopment of the concept of idiocultures, whereby
small groups develop an idiosyncratic set of mea-
nings (beliefs, knowledge, and customs) that
forms the basis for mutual understanding and
further interaction and action. Thus, cooks in vari-
ous classes of restaurants develop an aesthetic
language that enables them to communicate
with each other concerning the manifestly prac-
tical problems of smell and taste.
Alternately, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, in The Moro
Morality Play (1986) and Theorizing the Standoff
(2000), has developed the concept of social drama
within the more analytic tradition of action and
its environments, so as to enable the study of
social situations where symbolic and physical vio-
lence interact. In studying terrorist kidnappings,
standoffs between government and its discon-
tents, and surrenders, she develops a deep under-
standing of morally loaded environments for
action. When the social fabric is breached, actors
must work within certain dramatic frameworks,
and with certain obtainable identities. Thus, in a
standoff between the Freemen of Montana and
the United States Government, it was a mediator
who had fought in Vietnam and, like some of the
leaders of the Freemen, had formed his core iden-
tity in the crucible of that experience and its
subsequent narration who was able to bridge the
symbolic gap between the antagonists. Action was
deeply structured by the symbolic environments
of traumatic memory and the enactment of
masculinity.
The specificity of the kinds of meanings that
are enacted, however, points both to the possible
misinterpretations of the relationship between
action and culture, and to the way forward in
the theoretical debate. For the exclusive emphasis
on culture as it is used by actors can support the
naturalistic approach to social structure and thus
an understanding of culture as unstructured and
primarily the possession of individuals. In this
conception, it is meaningless institutions that set
the parameters of the action problem, and culture
is merely the way actors make sense of things as
they are solving it – perhaps important for filling
out an explanation, but not essential to it. The
environments to action approach is faced with a
similar danger, for, insofar as it retains vestiges of
Parsons’s action frame of reference, it can be
taken to indicate that sociology can produce, in
theory alone, a mechanistic explanation of the
interaction of norms and interests that will apply
everywhere, regardless of cultural differences.
culture
Perhaps most significantly, it is important that
action theory be prevented from becoming a sort
of existential meditation on the capacities (or in-
capacities) of human freedom, rather than a way
to examine the social contingencies of actually
existing meaning. If the knowledgeable agent be-
comes a sort of philosophical and methodological
hero, whose reflexivity about her location in struc-
ture ultimately makes her the master of the cul-
tural formations in her head, then the sociological
purpose of examining cultural structures is viti-
ated, as collective meaning formations melt away
in the face of agency and knowledge as developed
by Anthony Giddens in The Constitution of Society
(1984).
Thus, the way forward in the action–culture
debates lies in the development of a meaningful
account of action through a theorization of social
performance, by linking action theory to Erving
Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology and Kenneth
Burke’s literary theory, but also to Judith Butler’s
reconception of the poststructuralist tradition of
social thought. By thinking of social situations of
varying scope (from small-group interactions to
media events watched by millions) as dramas
being played out on a public stage, with certain
actors and audiences, props and social powers,
emergent scripts and cultural backgrounds, we
can conceive of the exigencies of social action in
a thoroughly cultural way that does not reduce
meaning to social structure. Action, then, involves
putting certain intended and unintended mean-
ings into the social scene. This is to say that the
theorization of action not only has to take into
account cultural structures, but must further
focus on how actions are themselves interpret-
ations of these structures, and thus respond to
logics of meaning and identity underneath the
interests and norms that were once supposed to
do the analytical work of explaining these actions;
this argument is developed in Jeffrey Alexander,
Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (eds.), The Cultural
Pragmatics of Social Performance (2006).
The sociological critique of culture used to be
based almost entirely on references to the social
as existing outside of culture itself. It was thus
diametrically opposed to the sense of criticism
associated with the detailed reading of the literary
canon, and with humanistic studies more gener-
ally. The obvious exception was Marxist literary
criticism, in particular that of Georg Lukács and
Raymond Williams, which entered into literary
texts themselves to find the logics of ideology in
the content and form. While their work fore-
shadowed the development of Cultural studies, it
culture
remained nonetheless within the discourse of sus-
picion about culture, usually understood as bour-
geois culture (and its discontents). Increasingly,
however, sociology has brought its normative con-
cerns with democracy, social inclusion, and the
critique of power to the interpretation
of culture, as well as to the debunking of ideology.
This is to say that the project of hermeneutics,
once associated with the conservative aesthetic
hierarchies of the German philosophical tradition,
can now be seen as a rich source of critique in
a post-positivist and post-orthodox-Marxist age,
as exemplified by the work of Michael Walzer,
Luc Boltanksi, and Laurent Thevenot. The epi-
stemological implication of their work is that
sociological critique must abandon its pseudo-
scientific assumption of an exterior stance or
view from nowhere, and develop critical distance
through extensive engagement, dialogue, and in-
terpretation. They develop critical perspectives
on contemporary societies that share some of
the empirical purchase of cultural sociology, but
have as their ultimate goal the articulation of
new normative understandings of justice and
equality. More generally, in so far as sociological
critique is no longer beholden to scientific cer-
tainty, revolutionary upheaval, and the genre of
debunking, its normative repertoire of critical
tropes, subtle ironies, and imagined ideals can be
expanded.
That culture has become a central theoretical
term in sociology means that it has had signifi-
cant effects on the sociological imagination as a
whole, extending beyond the study of culture as a
set of socially produced artifacts. “Culture,” in
sociology, indicates a perspective as well as an
object of study, and as such has addressed itself
to nearly all of the classic and varied problems of
sociological research. We cannot do the wide var-
iety of cultural research in sociology full justice
here, rather we will point to a few particularly
telling examples.
Sociology’s ongoing occupation with modernity,
and the history of state formation, has led to a
focus on the constitution of nations as collective
identities. In explaining economic takeoff in west-
ern Europe, the consolidation of the power of
states, and the emergence and importance of
democratic publics and the free press, sociologists
have increasingly focused on the construction of
nations as “imagined communities,” or “discur-
sive fields,” and nationalism as “a unique form
of social consciousness,” for example in Benedict
Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991), Lyn Spill-
man and Russell Faeges, “Nations,” in Julia
115
culture
Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orl-
off (eds.), Remaking Modernity (2005), and Liah
Greenfeld’s Nationalism (1992).
The sociology of sex and gender has likewise
experienced a cultural overhaul. While feminist
and queer theory have questioned the naturalness
of the sex/gender distinction, sociological research
has examined the effects of actually existing cul-
tural schemas of gender and sex for social out-
comes, including family structure, women’s
tendency to join or opt out of the workforce, and
the ongoing existence of sexism in wage levels and
status attainment. These studies examine both
gender as a highly rigid structure of meaning,
and its varying enactment by women and men
who attempt to negotiate the political and eco-
nomic contradictions of modern society, for in-
stance in Judith Stacey, Brave New Families (1990);
Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Mother-
hood (1996); and Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions
(2003).
Finally, sociology’s longstanding normative con-
cern with democracy and its incipient populism
has also taken a cultural turn. For example, ana-
lyses of American political participation and activ-
ism have investigated how certain meanings
either enable or discourage civic participation.
The results have often been counterintuitive:
doctrines of individual empowerment encourage
activity and public responsibility, while norms of
civility and politeness discourage political conver-
sation and involvement, a theme which is de-
veloped in Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics (1998),
and Paul Lichterman, The Search for Political Commu-
nity (1996).
Culture has thus moved towards the center of
sociological discourse, as both a topic of study and
a perspective from which to view the social. As re-
interpretation is a primary form of theoretical
advance, the perhaps predictable result of this is
that, simultaneously, the classics of social theory
have come to be seen in a new light. New readings
of Karl Marx, Weber, and Émile Durkheim have
emerged.
While all twentieth-century Marxisms have
given more importance to culture and ideology
than did the crude economic Marxist orthodoxy
that followed Marx’s death, the turn to culture in
the 1960s and 1970s is evident in the increasing
attention given to Marx’s analysis of commodity
fetishism in Capital, as well as to the importance of
the early, humanist, and perhaps even idealist-
Hegelian Marx. Either way, Marx is read as atten-
tive to the capacity of meaning as a social force.
One important result of this has been the way
116
culture
structuralist and poststructuralist theories of lan-
guage have merged with Marxist historiography
to produce a central thesis concerning postmod-
ernism, namely that the postmodern age is one
in which the workings of capitalism are increas-
ingly dependent on signifiers as well as signifieds,
that is, on the relational field of social symbol-
ism. These approaches are illustrated by Frederic
Jameson, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992),
and Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign (1972) [trans. 1981]).
Likewise, since the mid-1960s, we have seen a
recovery of Weber’s sociology of art, as well as
continuing debate on the Protestant Ethic thesis.
However, most significantly, the concern with
culture has also entered into Weberian debates
about the consolidation of state power and the
institutionalization of rational bureaucracy. Here,
sociologists have increasingly read Weber as a
hermeneutic student of rationality as a cultural
form specific to western history. In doing so,
Weber’s concerns are read as not so different
from Foucault’s, and bureaucracy as less a mech-
anism to be uncovered than a form of symbolic
action to be interpreted. This interpretation is
developed in Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolu-
tion (2003).
Finally, the cultural turn in sociology has seen
a renaissance and reconsideration of Durkheim’s
later works, and, in particular, of The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life (1912 [trans. 2001]). This work
has come to be seen as a key prolegomena to the
symbolic study of society as a general project, as
well as to the study of the role of culture in
modern, industrial societies. Durkheim is thus
read as uncomfortable with the materialist inter-
pretations given to The Division of Labor in Society
and as having made a key epistemic break in the
years between the publication of Suicide (1897
[trans. 1951]) and that of Elementary Forms, an
argument developed by Jeffrey Alexander in “Re-
thinking Durkheim’s Intellectual Development II”
(1986). As a result, Durkheim can be seen as a
precursor to cultural structuralism in his em-
phasis on the autonomy of symbolic forms, and
the importance of belief and ritual for the organ-
ization of society.
If culture has become central to sociology
(though some may not hold this opinion, or at
least be unhappy with this development), it has
also remained a controversial subject. And as em-
pirical research on culture has exploded, the the-
oretical presuppositions of this work, which often
does not fit the model of positivist or scientific-
realist sociology, have been left relatively
culture
unexplored. This is to say that, in the future, social
theory must address not only culture, but its ac-
companying methodological and epistemological
term: interpretation. This can be done by
returning to the fundamental questions of the
philosophy of social science, as well as by arti-
culating the immanent epistemological self-
consciousness of cultural research in sociology.
There are two fundamental concerns central to
the question of sociological interpretation,
broadly understood.
The first regards the role of the investigator in
social analysis. Though most cultural sociologists
accept neither scientific norms nor postmodern
normlessness as the parameters for their truth
claims, what norms they do accept is an import-
ant issue to discuss in the abstract. In particular, it
seems clear that sociologists want the meanings
they reconstruct to be translatable, so that cul-
tural comparison is possible, not so much so as
to determine active and latent mechanisms, but
so as to perceive more clearly the varied relation-
ships of meaning in action. Thus, even single case
studies or ethnographies implicitly contain a
comparison, at least to the investigator’s own
meaningful social contexts, and this comparative
consciousness forms an important basis for the
development of theory and research in cultural
sociology.
The second question concerns how much the
methods and modes of explanation common to
cultural sociology may apply outside the domain
of what is analytically or concretely called culture.
A lot of work within poststructuralist theory has
examined the symbolic and discursive basis for
what sociologists are more likely to call social
structure, namely, institutional formations, social
sanction and exclusion, and even violence, as
argued in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1989).
But the extent to which these aspects of social
life can actually be explored empirically remains
to be verified by an epistemology more comfort-
able with the possibility of truth claims that are
relatively autonomous from power. Thus, for
example, we need to ask how even the reconstruc-
tion of political strategies and economic exigen-
cies involves the interpretation of highly reified
and strictly executed meaning.
Ultimately, then, the advent of culture in soci-
ology and the study of its subtleties and social
contestations leads to fundamental questions
about sociology itself. If culture is a perspective
from which to examine society, it is also a pers-
pective from which to examine the meaning-
formation called sociology. As such, its most
cybernetics
important effect will be to push the central con-
cepts of sociology (structure, action, critique),
empirical research topics, and the readings of
sociological classics towards the interpretation
of meaning. I S A A C R E E D A N D J E F F R E Y A L E X A N D E R
culture industry
– see Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno.
culture of poverty
– see poverty.
custom
– see norm(s).
cybernetics
A field of scientific inquiry devoted to self-regulat-
ing information systems, cybernetics, derived
from the Greek word meaning helmsman or gov-
ernor. Developed alongside computing in the later
years of World War II, the reference to governors
attaches the term to the regulatory mechanisms
first used on nineteenth-century steam engines.
The first phase of cybernetic science was math-
ematical, an attempt to quantify the amount of
information in a given system. A critical break-
through came with the information theory pro-
posed in The Mathematical Theory of Information
(1949) by C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, employees
of Bell Labs, the leading commercial research la-
boratory of the time. Bell needed to find engineer-
ing solutions for massive increases in telephone
use in the later 1940s. Shannon and Weaver pro-
posed a probabilistic model in which the informa-
tion content of a message could be calculated as
the ratio of signal – meaningful communication –
to noise. “Noise” they defined as anything insig-
nificant, from static hiss to repetitions and redun-
dancies. Mathematically, the highest probability
was for randomness in communication. In the
Cold War period, early cyberneticians identified
randomness with entropy, the tendency of
systems to cool down, to move to less ordered
states. In complex systems such as living beings
or social organizations, increasing entropy dissi-
pates the information content or patterned rela-
tionships. The task of cybernetic technologies was
to maintain homeostasis: the state of a system
with a high degree of predictable structure, or
order.
As the term suggests, however, homeostasis is
negative entropy in the sense that it resists
change. This was the tenet of two Chilean re-
searchers, H. R. Maturana and F. J. Varela, in
Autopoesis and Cognition (1980); they proposed the
117
evolutionary theory
ignores forms of biology that give much less at-
tention to genes (though considering them im-
portant in explaining the development and
growth of the organism during its lifetime) and
much more attention to the developing organism
in its social and ecological context. P. Dickens
outlines some of these alternative perspectives in
Social Darwinism (2000).
Despite their continuing problems, evolutio-
nary psychology and sociobiology have managed
to shake social theory out of thinking it has a
unique purchase on human behavior and that
the biological world is of no explanatory import-
ance. The focus of future research must be that of
combining ideas from biology, psychology, and
social theory in more nuanced ways, recognizing
the complexity of their interactions. This would
certainly entail recognizing the importance of
genes and biology in affecting the overall growth
and psychic propensities of human beings. But it
would also recognize that households, educa-
tional systems, work hierarchies, and the like all
deeply affect how these biologically based tenden-
cies work out in practice. Similarly, the human
mind is almost certainly less “hard-wired” and
inflexible than the proponents of evolutionary
psychology suggest. Different kinds of psychic
structure come into play according to the social
relations which the mind encounters and indeed
contributes to. PETER DICKENS
evolutionary theory
Evolution and learning are two principal mecha-
nisms of adaptive self-organization in complex
systems. Learning alters the probability distribu-
tion of behavioral traits within a given individual,
through processes of reinforcement and observa-
tion of others. Evolution alters the frequency dis-
tribution of individual carriers of a trait within a
given population, through differential chances of
selection and replication. Selection depends on
heterogeneity which is replenished by random
mutation in the face of replication processes that
tend to reduce it. Selection pressures influence
the probability that particular traits will be repli-
cated, in the course of competition for scarce re-
sources (ecological selection) or competition for a
mate (sexual selection).
Although evolution is often equated with eco-
logical selection, sexual selection is at least as
important. By building on partial solutions rather
than discarding them, genetic crossover in sexual
reproduction can exponentially increase the rate
at which a species can explore an adaptive land-
scape, compared to reliance on trial and error
182
evolutionary theory
(random mutation) alone. Paradoxically, sexual
selection also tends to inhibit ecological adapta-
tion, especially among males. Gender differences
in parental investment cause females to be choos-
ier about mates and thus sexual selection to be
more pronounced in males. An example is the
peacock’s large and cumbersome tail, which at-
tracts the attention of peahens (who are relatively
drab) as well as predators. Sexually selected traits
tend to become exaggerated as males trap one
another in an arms race to see who can have the
largest antlers or be bravest in battle.
Selection pressures can operate at multiple
levels in a nested hierarchy, from groups of indi-
viduals with similar traits, down to individual
carriers of those traits, down to the traits them-
selves. Evolution Through Group Selection (1986) was
advanced by V. C. Wynne-Edwards as a solution to
one of evolution’s persistent puzzles – the viability
of altruism in the face of egoistic ecological coun-
terpressures. Prosocial in-group behavior confers a
collective advantage over rival groups of rugged
individualists. However, the theory was later dis-
missed by George C. Williams in Adaptation and
Natural Selection (1966) which showed that be-
tween-group variation gets swamped by within-
group variation as group size increases. Moreover,
group selection relies entirely on differential rates
of extinction, with no plausible mechanism for
the whole-cloth replication of successful groups.
Sexual selection suggests a more plausible ex-
planation for the persistence of altruistic behav-
iors that reduce the chances of ecological
selection. Contrary to Herbert Spencer’s infamous
view of evolution, following Charles Darwin, as
“survival of the fittest,” generosity can flourish
even when these traits are ecologically disadvan-
tageous, by attracting females who have evolved a
preference for “romantic” males who are ready
to sacrifice for their partner. Traits that reduce
the ecological fitness of an individual carrier can
also flourish if the trait increases the selection
chances of other individuals with that trait.
Hamilton introduced this gene-centric theory of
kin altruism in “The Genetic Evolution of Social
Behaviour” (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1964),
later popularized by R. Dawkins in The Selfish Gene
(1976, 1989).
In “The Cultural Evolution of Beneficent
Norms” (Social Forces, 1992), Paul Allison extended
the theory to benevolence based on cultural re-
latedness, such as geographical proximity or a
shared cultural marker. This may explain why
gene–culture coevolution seems to favor a ten-
dency to associate with those who are similar, to
evolutionary theory
differentiate from “outsiders,” and to defend the
in-group against social trespass with the emo-
tional ferocity of parents defending their off-
spring. This model also shows how evolutionary
principles initially developed to explain biological
adaptation can be extended to explain social and
cultural change (see social change). Prominent
examples include the evolution of languages, reli-
gions, laws, organizations, and institutions. This
approach has a long and checkered history. Social
Darwinism is a discredited nineteenth-century
theory that used biological principles as analogs
for social processes such as market competition
and colonial domination. Many sociologists still
reject all theories of social or cultural evolution,
along with biological explanations of human be-
havior, which they associate with racist and elitist
theories of “survival of the fittest.” Others, like the
sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, believe “genes hold
culture on a leash” (On Human Nature, 1988), lea-
ving little room for cultural evolution to modify
the products of natural selection. Similarly, evolu-
tionary psychologists like Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby search for the historical origins of human
behavior as the product of ancestral natural selec-
tion rather than ongoing social or cultural
evolution.
In contrast, a growing number of sociologists
and economists are exploring the possibility
that human behaviors and institutions may be
heavily influenced by processes of social and cul-
tural selection that are independent of biological
imperatives. These include Paul DiMaggio and
Walter Powell (the new institutional sociology),
Richard Nelson and Sydney G. Winter (evolution-
ary economics), and Michael T. Hannan and John
H. Freeman (organizational ecology). One particu-
larly compelling application is the explanation of
cultural diversity. In biological evolution, speci-
ation occurs when geographic separation allows
populations to evolve in different directions to the
point that individuals from each group can no
longer mate. Speciation implies that all life has
evolved from a very small number of common
ancestors, perhaps only one. The theory has been
applied to the evolution of myriad Indo-European
languages that are mutually incomprehensible
despite having a common ancestor. In socio-
cultural models, speciation operates through
homophily (attraction to those who are similar),
xenophobia (aversion to those who are different),
and influence (the tendency to become more simi-
lar to those to whom we are attracted and to
differentiate from those we despise).
exchange theory
Critics counter that socio-cultural evolution-
ists have failed to identify any underlying repli-
cative device equivalent to the gene. Dawkins
has proposed the “meme” as the unit of cultural
evolution but there is as yet no evidence that
these exist. Yet Darwin developed the theory
of natural selection without knowing that pheno-
types are coded genetically in DNA. Perhaps
the secrets of cultural evolution are waiting to
be unlocked by impending breakthroughs in
cognitive psychology. MICHAEL MACY
exchange theory
The social division of labor is mediated by ex-
change. Exchange theory conceptualizes this as a
bargaining process that reflects the relative de-
pendence of the parties involved. Not all social
interactions involve bargaining and exchange.
Peter M. Blau, who developed the field in 1964
with Exchange and Power in Social Life, warned that
“People do things for fear of other men or for fear
of God or for fear of their conscience, and nothing
is gained by trying to force such action into a
conceptual framework of exchange” (1964: 88).
Yet Blau did not regard most social relations as
outside this framework. “Social exchange can be
observed everywhere once we are sensitized by
this conception to it, not only in market relations
but also in friendship and even in love” (88). Social
exchange differs from economic exchange in
three important ways. First, the articles of ex-
change are not commodities but gifts. No money
is involved, nor credit, nor contract. Giving a
gift is a “selfish act of generosity” in that it creates
in the recipient the need to reciprocate with some-
thing that is desired by the giver. Both parties
to the exchange “are prone to supply more of their
own services to provide incentives for the other to
increase his supply” (89). Simply put, a gift is not
an expression of altruism; it is a way to exercise
power over another. Second, the terms of ex-
change are unspecified (91). One side offers some-
thing the other values, without knowing how or
when the partner will return the favor. Third, the
exchange is not instrumentally calculated. With-
out a quid pro quo and in the absence of explicit
bargaining, one cannot know if the gift is optimal
in a given transaction. Instead, optimization takes
place through incremental adjustments to behav-
ior in response to experience. These need not
be conscious adjustments but could be experi-
enced merely as feelings of satisfaction or dissatis-
faction with the relationship, such that the terms
of exchange emerge as a byproduct of a learning
183
functional theory of stratification
We owe the classical formulation of allocative
functionalism to Kingsley Davis and Wilbert
Moore. In “Some Principles of Stratification,” in
the American Sociological Review (1945), they argued
that in all complex societies the functional im-
portance of social positions and social roles vary.
Some positions are more strategically important
than others, and they require special and rare
talents and skills. Because such talents and skills
are scarce, and because they typically require long
and costly training, there have to be incentives
for their display and cultivation. Differential re-
wards inherent in stratification systems provide
such incentives for cultivating knowledge, skills,
and talents. Similarly, the optimal allocation of
the best candidates to the most important jobs
and continuous motivation of incumbents to
perform well require differential rewards. Soci-
eties that fail to develop such a system of func-
tional stratification lose efficacy, and they are in
a position of disadvantage in developmental
competition.
Thus there are a number of preconditions of
socially functional stratification – and a number
of criticisms directed at functional arguments:
(1) The reward structure has to reflect accurately
the social consensus as to which roles and
positions are more, and which less, strate-
gically important. Critics point out that this
assumption is unrealistic.
(2) Rewards should effectively attract the best
incumbents and motivate them in their per-
formance. According to critics, incompetent
elites prove that this condition is seldom met.
(3) The recruitment process has to be open and
merit-based. In functionally stratified systems
there is no place for inheritance, ascription,
and closure. This claim produced the most
serious bone of contention between function-
alists and their critics. While Davis and Moore
recognized that inheritance and ascription
persist, and it weakens the functionality of
stratification, they nevertheless disagreed
with those critics who argued that functional
theory was unrealistic. The critics also ques-
tion the functionalist explanation of the uni-
versality of stratification. Since functional
principles are similar in most societies, one
would expect to find similarities in stratifica-
tion systems, at least among contemporary
societies at a similar level of development.
Yet one of the striking features of modern
societies has been a broad diversity of social
hierarchies – a fact that contradicts allocative
functionalism.
218
functionalism
These criticisms resulted in a gradual eclipse of
allocative functionalism. In the 1960s–1970s a
more sophisticated Parsonian version of inte-
grative functionalism gained a currency among
sociologists. Talcott Parsons suggested that func-
tionality of stratification systems consisted in
strengthening social integration around core
values. Differential rewards, according to Parsons,
contribute to such integration by rewarding
commitments to central societal values. Stratifica-
tion also contributes to effective value socializa-
tion, because it increases the transparency of the
core value standards according to which social
rewards are allocated. Thus the system of struc-
tured inequalities strengthens value integration
and aids value socialization. JAN PAKULSKI
functionalism
Functionalists argue that society should be under-
stood as a system of interdependent parts. The
different parts of social life depend on each other
and fulfill functions contributing to social order
and its reproduction.
Functionalism can be traced to Émile Durkheim
and Herbert Spencer. The anthropologists Bronis-
law Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–
1955) drew on Durkheim to develop a distinctive
form of functionalist anthropology in the early
twentieth century. Functionalism came to prom-
inence as a school of sociology in the United
States in the 1950s. It was associated with Talcott
Parsons and Robert Merton, although they dif-
fered in approach. From the 1960s, functionalism
was subjected to major criticism and few sociolo-
gists defended it until the 1980s when Jeffrey
Alexander identified a convergence with function-
alism by erstwhile critics such as Jürgen Haber-
mas, Anthony Giddens, and Margaret Archer.
Functionalism departs from the traditional
logic of causal argument where a cause should
precede its consequences. Functionalists identify
a causal loop or feedback linking cause and effect.
When an anthropologist asks “why do the Hopi
dance for rain?” a functionalist considers the con-
sequence of the dance and notes that it maintains
group solidarity. The functionalist concludes
that if the rain dance did not have this positive
function it would not be reproduced.
Functionalists are aware of illegitimate tele-
ology, arguing that the explanation of the origins
of a practice should be distinguished from that of
its reproduction. Radcliffe-Brown distinguished
sharply between diachronic and synchronic analy-
sis, between the analysis of change in a system
and the analysis of the interaction among parts
functionalism
of a system at a moment in time. The latter was
the proper domain of functional analysis.
Malinowski argued that all societies have to
meet some universal and interconnected require-
ments – as well as group solidarity, economic
subsistence, social control, sexual reproduction,
socialization and education of new generations,
and the management of sickness and death –
and that these can form the basis for comparison.
Parsons was influenced by Malinowski, but
believed his identification of functions to be ad
hoc, arguing that functions must be theoretically
specified in a general framework.
For Parsons, there are four different intercon-
nected systems bearing upon human action: the
human organism, the individual personality, the
social system, and the cultural system. The behav-
ioral organism is concerned with the human body
as the primary vehicle for engaging the physical
environment; that of personality corresponds to
the individual actor viewed as a system. It includes
conscious and unconscious motivations (or need
dispositions). Actors respond not only to positive
rewards, but also to internalized feelings of guilt,
anxiety, and the need for approval. The social
system is a system of positions and roles organized
by expectations and maintained by sanctions;
the culture system refers to the symobls and
meanings that are drawn upon by actors in the
pursuit of their personal projects.
Parsons’s primary focus is the social system.
He proposed four functional imperatives neces-
sary to its constitution and operation (the A-G-I-L
scheme). Adaptation is concerned with relation-
ships to external environments and the utilization
of resources in the pursuit of goals. Goal attainment
is concerned with the direction of systems to-
wards collective goals. Integration refers to the
maintenance of coordinated relationships among
the parts of the system, while latency, or pattern-
maintenance, describes the symbolic order in
terms of mutually reinforcing meanings and
typifications.
The A-G-I-L scheme also allows the classifica-
tion of societies in terms of the level of structu-
ral differentiation or institutional specialization
around functions – for example, the extent to
which political institutions are separated from
economic institutions, or economic institutions
separated from the household. The idea of the
“superiority” of higher over lower stages of de-
velopmental complexity carries the implication
of evolutionary change, where better-adapted
forms are realized out of the deficiencies of
“lesser” forms. Modernity – more substantively,
functionalism
the United States, which Parsons called the new
“lead” society – is the culminating stage of devel-
opment. This seemed to critics to be an extreme
form of teleology, one that revealed an ideological
bias inherent in a scheme that Parsons had pre-
sented as the “indispensable logical framework
in which we describe and think about the phe-
nomena of action” (The Structure of Social Action,
1937: 733).
While Parsons regarded functionalism as part
of a unified general theory, Merton saw it as
an adjunct to the development of empirically
grounded theories of the middle range. His argu-
ment, originally in 1949 in “Manifest and Latent
Functions” and reprinted in Social Theory and Social
Structure (1968), was taken to be a veiled criticism
of Parsons, especially the latter’s emphasis on in-
tegration. Merton identified three unsatisfactory
postulates of functionalism: the functional unity (or
integration) of a society, universal functionalism,
and indispensability.
According to Merton, it may be that some non-
literate societies show a high degree of integra-
tion, but it is illegitimate to assume this would
pertain to all societies. It is also possible that what
is functional for society, considered as a whole,
does not prove functional for individuals or for
some groups within the society, and vice versa.
This suggests that, alongside the concept of
function, it is necessary to have a concept of
dysfunction – that is, where the consequences
of an item are negative for some individuals or
groups. For Merton, persisting forms have a net
balance of functional consequences, either for
society considered as a whole or for sub-groups.
Finally, it is necessary to distinguish between
functional prerequisites – preconditions function-
ally necessary for a society – and the social forms
that fulfill those prerequisites. While the former
are indispensable, it is not required that particu-
lar forms meet those functions. There are always
alternative ways of meeting any particular func-
tion. Each of Merton’s qualifications was designed
to transform the postulates into variables.
As a form of methodological holism, functiona-
lism was criticized by methodological individua-
lists, such as George Caspar Homans or Peter M.
Blau, working within the exchange-theory per-
spective. Functionalism was also criticized by con-
flict theorists such as John Rex and Ralph
Dahrendorf, for its neglect of power, though the
criticism was more aptly applied to Parsons and
his definition of functions in terms of the general-
ized collectivity. Merton’s more empirical ap-
proach had asked “functional for whom?” David
219
fundamentalism
Lockwood sought to reformulate functionalism
in order to allow a concept of system contra-
diction. Alvin Gouldner argued that functiona-
lism was an ideological expression of welfare
capitalism. JOHN HOLMWOOD
fundamentalism
Combining both political and religious radical-
ism, fundamentalism constitutes a distinct, spe-
cific, modern social movement and ideology,
promulgating adherence to a strict and intense
interpretation of a scripture or holy text. Al-
though it is a reaction against the secular dimen-
sions of modernity, it cannot be regarded as a
traditional movement. It developed in the late
nineteenth century, first in the United States,
and then spread, especially in the last decade of
the twentieth century, to a variety of Protestant,
Jewish, and Muslim communities around the
world.
Among such movements, it is important to con-
sider the American Council of Christian Churches,
founded in 1941, and the more recent Christian
Coalition founded in 1989, the Gush Emunim
(Block of the Faithful) and various ultra-orthodox
movements (both non-Zionist and anti-Zionist) in
Israel from the 1970s onwards, and many similar
movements in the Muslim world which developed
in the nineteenth century, blossoming in the
last decades of the twentieth century. The most
successful among these movements was the Iran-
ian Revolution (1978–9) which was led by the
Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–89).
With the exception of movements in the United
States and more recently Europe, most of these
fundamentalist movements developed in those
states which were established, like the Kemalist
government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–
1938) in Turkey, after World War I, or in the
colonial-imperial states, which were constituted
by the various national movements after World
War II. Social groups which were dislocated from
their respective traditional settings, and drawn
into modern frameworks, formed a central com-
ponent of these movements. These social groups
often advanced within a modern context – for
example, the experience of social progress among
many Muslim women in Iran, Turkey, or Egypt –
but they also felt culturally dislocated in these
settings and often alienated from them. In the
Islamic movements, the confrontation with secu-
lar modernity constituted a central component of
these movements.
In all these societies and historical settings, the
fundamentalist groups constitute what we may
220
fundamentalism
call “Jacobin movements,” that is totalistic or
totalitarian movements. These totalitarian ten-
dencies were rooted in the Jacobin tradition
that emerged in the French Revolution of 1789,
which promulgated the total reconstitution of
man. Jacobinism, named after the Jacobin club,
was a society of deputies, which acted to con-
centrate power and which believed that the truth
of its vision of society was sufficient to guarantee
its authority. Jacobinism can also be seen in the
high level of political mobilization in the period
between the two world wars, which represented
a major challenge to the pluralistic constitu-
tional regimes of the democracies. The tendency
towards Jacobinism can also be seen in various
communist regimes.
Therefore, contrary to the widely accepted
wisdom of many interpretations, these fundamen-
talist movements are not traditional or anti-
modern religions but distinctively sectarian-
utopian, modern, Jacobin movements which pro-
mulgate an ideological and essentialist concep-
tion of tradition.
Fundamentalist ideologies, movements, and
regimes share, with other Jacobin developments
such as Communism and utopian sects, the ten-
dency to promulgate a strong vision or gospel of
salvation, which is combined with a total world-
view, the implementation of which is to take
place in this world and in the present.
The institutionalization of such totalitarian
visions entails the establishment, through the
powerful mobilization to political action of an
existing social order, of collective and individual
symbols of identity, and the constitution of sharp
social boundaries between the pure inside and
the polluted outside. Such political actions often
involve the sanctification of violence and terror,
oriented above all against both internal and ex-
ternal evil forces and enemies. From the funda-
mentalist perspective, the enemy is typically seen
to be rooted in the secular dynamics of modern
society, that is the West, the United States, or
Israel.
This modern Jacobin mobilization of fundamen-
talist movements and regimes is often combined,
paradoxically, with anti-modern, or at least an
anti-liberal, ideology. This contradictory combin-
ation of the modern and the traditional is most
clearly expressed in the fundamentalist attitude
to women. On the one hand most of these move-
ments promulgate a strong patriarchal, anti-
feminist attitude, segregating women and men,
and placing far-reaching restrictions on the
former. At the same time, and in stark contrast
information society
that emphasize potential monopolistic and ex-
ploitative practices among the owners of media
content. Yet the Marxist-inspired view that the
centralized control of the means of production,
in this case of information, determines material
conditions is being turned on its head due to
technological advances. This line of argument
was pioneered by Ithiel de Sola Pool, who declared
in Technologies of Freedom (1983) that technologies
of freedom aim at pluralism of expression rather
than a dissemination of prefabricated ideas. Pool’s
prescient ideas have become realized, perhaps
more profoundly than even he might have im-
agined. The novel and ever-increasing array of
alternative communication systems continues to
surprise and amaze social scientists. These range
from internet steganography and web-cams to
mobile phone videos, alterative reality games
and geopositional monitoring. These proliferating
and ingenious applications have severely eroded
dominant paradigms of elites and the power of
traditional monopolistic “one-to-many” technolo-
gies (such as newspaper publishing, broadcast TV,
and studio films).
Because of personal communication techno-
logy, information has lost its relevance as part of
a Marxist superstructure of production that sits
atop society. It has instead become a form of
struggle within society. Despite efforts to the con-
trary at the level of policymaking, information is
becoming ever more fungible as a commodity
even while its meaning and interpretation be-
comes more contested. More voices are raised in
every quarter, and there is an open contest over
knowledge claims. Even while more data is col-
lected at the level of the individual social actor,
dictators around the world are confronted by in-
formation they would wish to banish.
The ultimate irony, though, may be that, while
the narrow definition of information discussed
above – that information is uncertainty reduction
– is germane at local levels, the larger-ranging
impact may be the opposite: knowledge leads
to growth in uncertainty and psychological ten-
sion. Shannon’s axioms, as it turns out, are ex-
tremely apposite to social science and public
policy: increased information also leads to in-
creased uncertainty. It does this in the soft terms
of human lives lived, every bit as much as in the
hard terms of communication network efficien-
cies achieved. JAMES E. KATZ
information society
– see information.
300
institution(s)
information superhighway
– see information.
information technology
– see information.
inner-directed character
– see David Riesman.
instinct
– see genetics.
institutional theory
– see institution(s).
institutionalization of conflict
– see social conflict.
institutionalized racism
– see race and ethnicity.
institution(s)
Émile Durkheim defined sociology as the scientific
study of institutions. In everyday language we
refer to institutions in terms of a heterogeneous
array of concrete social forms such as the family,
the church, or the monarchy. Departments of soci-
ology traditionally had mainstream courses that
were called “social theory and social institutions”
indicating that sociology was the study of the
principal institutions that make up what we call
society. There is, however, a second and more
subtle meaning in which institutions are con-
ceived as regular patterns of behavior that are
regulated by norms and sanctions into which in-
dividuals are socialized. Institutions are thus an
ensemble of social roles.
In mainstream sociology, it was conventional to
recognize five clusters of major institutions in
society. These are: (1) economic institutions for
the production, distribution, and consumption of
goods and services; (2) political institutions that
regulate and control access to power; (3) institu-
tions of social stratification that regulate access to
prestige and social status; (4) kinship, marriage,
and family that control reproduction; and finally
(5) cultural institutions that are concerned with
religious, symbolic, and cultural practices.
The analysis of these clusters was a central fea-
ture of social systems theory, and it can be said
that the functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons
was a major contribution to this branch of soci-
ology. In The Social System (1951: 39), Parsons
institution(s)
defined an institution as “a complex of institu-
tionalized role integrates (or status-relationships)
which is of strategic structural significance for the
social system in question.” Parsons argued that
institutions are fundamental to the overall inte-
gration of social systems.
The contemporary analysis of institutions has,
however, been decisively influenced by the socio-
logical writings of Peter L. Berger, whose general
sociology was in turn influenced by the philosoph-
ical anthropology of the German sociologist
Arnold Gehlen. Berger did much to introduce the
work of Gehlen to English-speaking social science,
for example in his introduction to Gehlen’s Man
in the Age of Technology (1957 [trans. 1980]). In gen-
eral terms, Gehlen argued, following Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844–1900), that human beings are
“not yet finished animals.” By this expression,
Gehlen meant that human beings are biologically
ill equipped to cope with the world into which
they are born and they have no finite instinctual
basis that is specific to a given natural environ-
ment, and depend upon a long period of socializa-
tion in order to acquire the knowledge and skills
to exist in the world. Gehlen claimed that, in
order to cope with life, human beings have
“world-openness,” that is human beings have to
create and maintain a cultural world to replace or
to supplement their instinctual world. It is this
incompleteness that provides the anthropological
explanation for the origins of social institutions.
Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in The Construction
of Social Reality (1967), developed this position to
argue that, since human beings are, as it were,
biologically underdeveloped, they have to con-
struct a social canopy or religion around them-
selves in order to complete or supplement their
biology.
Institutions are the social bridges between
human beings and their natural environment
and it is in terms of these institutions that human
life becomes coherent and meaningful. Institu-
tions, in filling the gap created by instinctual
deprivation, provide humans with relief from the
tensions generated by their undirected instinctual
drives. Over time, these institutions come to be
taken for granted and become part of the implicit
background of social action. The social foreground
is occupied by reflective, practical, and conscious
practices. With modernization, however, there is a
process of de-institutionalization with the result
that the taken-for-granted background becomes
less reliable, more open to negotiation, culturally
fluid, and increasingly an object of critical debate
institution(s)
and reflection. Accordingly the social foreground
expands, and the everyday world becomes risky
and precarious. The objective, sacred institutions
of tradition recede, and modern life becomes sub-
jective, contingent, and problematic. According
to Gehlen, we live in a world of secondary or
quasi-institutions. There are profound psycholo-
gical changes that are associated with these social
developments. In premodern societies, human be-
ings had character that is a firm, coherent, and
definite psychological structure that correspon-
ded with reliable social roles and institutions.
In modern societies, people have personalities
that are fluid and flexible, like the precarious
institutions in which they live. The existential
pressures on human beings are significant and to
some extent modern people are confronted with
the uncertainties of what Berger, B. Berger, and
H. Kellner called The Homeless Mind (1973).
This theory of institutions and their decline
presupposes a theory of secularization in which
the traditional sanctions behind institutions de-
cline with the advent of modern, risk-ridden cul-
tures. However, the contemporary revival of
religion suggests that this melancholic picture of
uncertainty requires some correction. Berger’s
early sociology was also influenced by the work
of Helmut Schelsky who, in an influential article,
asked the question “Can Continuous Questioning
be Institutionalized?” in Norman Birnbaum and
Gertrud Lenzer (eds.), Sociology of Religion (1957
[trans. 1969]). His conclusion was that a process
of continuous reflectivity was not humanly pos-
sible, if enduring and reliable social relationships
were to survive. While a number of sociologists,
such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, have
argued that “de-traditionalization” and “reflexive
modernization” are the predominant trends of
late modernity, there are valid counterarguments,
both sociological and psychological, to suggest that
people in their everyday lives need stable social
structures. Where there is de-traditionalization,
there will also be countervailing movements of re-
institutionalization.
Whereas traditional sociology was the study of
institutions, the speed of social change in contem-
porary society and the apparent flexibility of
social arrangements have meant that sociologists
have sought to avoid treating institutions as if
they were things, and have looked more towards
social processes – that is towards processes of in-
stitutionalization, de-institutionalization, and re-
institutionalization – than towards stable clusters
of roles. Institutions should not be reified, but
301
instrumental rationality
rather treated as maps by which to read social
processes. BRYAN S. TURNER
instrumental rationality
– see rationality.
intellectuals
Three notions are intertwined in the idea of the
intellectual: intellectuals, the intelligentsia, and
intellectual labor.
The term intellectual came into common usage
with the Dreyfus affair in France (1894–1906),
during which the novelist Émile Zola wrote a pol-
itically charged open letter in a popular period-
ical. In the public controversy which followed this
crossing of the boundary between culture and
politics, Zola was accused of being a mere “intel-
lectual,” a publicity-seeking dilettante, a popular-
izer who degraded cultural values in seeking a
wider audience. In response, the term intellectual
became a nom de guerre for those who wished to
do public battle with the establishment, be they
cultural or political.
The intelligentsia is historically older, having its
roots in sections of the Russian and Polish elite in
the middle of the nineteenth century who identi-
fied themselves with European modernity. The in-
telligentsia achieved even greater social cohesion
in taking on the missionary task of bringing en-
lightenment to what it considered the darker
regions of eastern Europe and central Asia.
As a sociological concept, the idea that the
working population could be divided and defined
by a division between intellectual and manual
labor emerged later as part of an attempt to ope-
rationalize the concept. The idea of intellectual
labor as the defining characteristic of the intellec-
tual has, however, been projected backward in
time by those seeking to identify a material and
objective basis for empirical investigation. It has
served as a means of distinguishing various strata
of the middle class, for example. The “intellect” is
here treated as a source of income and social
status and “intelligence” as a personal attribute,
a form of rent-bearing property: human capital.
From this perspective, one may speak of “intellec-
tual professions,” as well as attempting to divide
intellectual from manual labor.
Common to these three notions is the attempt
to define the intellectual as a distinctive social
category and to make some judgments about its
functions and its behavior. In the 1920s, Julien
Benda (1867–1956) railed against the “treason of
the intellectuals,” because in his eyes this social
302
intelligence
group was not fulfilling its proper role as social
reformers and critics, while Antonio Gramsci dis-
tinguished “organic” and “traditional intellec-
tuals” on the basis of their role in social change
as much as their allotted class position. Decades
later, the American sociologist Alvin Gouldner
spoke of the intellectuals as a “new class,” to
which Georgy Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, in their
Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979), de-
veloped the idea that intellectuals, expecially in
central and eastern Europe, were moving towards
class power. The opposite point of view was pro-
posed by John Goldthorpe in “On the Service
Class” (1982) in Anthony Giddens and G. Mackenzie
(eds.), Social Class and the Division of Labour, where he
defined intellectuals as a service class with conser-
vative rather than radical political orientations.
Another point of view is offered by Ron Eyer-
man in Between Culture and Politics (1994), who de-
fines intellectuals as an assumed social role,
rather than an assigned social category or person-
ality type. The intellectual from this point of view
mediates and reinvents ideals and traditions in
new historical contexts. Facilitating factors in
this process are often social movements, which
provide opportunities for those without formal
“intellectual” qualifications to assume the func-
tions traditionally associated with intellectuals,
mediating culture and politics. RON EYERMAN
intelligence
The publication of Francis Galton’s Hereditary
Genius (1869) pre-dates by several decades the
period which is normally taken to be the moment
marking the beginning of modern sociology.
Writing in the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species and The Ascent of Man, Galton main-
tained the real objective existence both of racial
differences and of social class differences in
mental ability. Émile Durkheim’s insistence, in
Suicide (1896), that this phenomenon was to be
explained primarily by collective rather than
individual factors can be seen as a deliberate reac-
tion against the prior tendency to suppose that
human behavior is biologically or genetically de-
termined. The question of the “heritability of in-
telligence” was critical in resolving whether or
not a sociology of education might be necessary
or possible and whether it was justifiable to
expend public finance in order to expand educa-
tional provision. The acceptance in general that
human behavior is at least partly modified by
social interaction, that human character is at least
partly the product of “nurture” rather than
wholly determined by “nature”, is a sine qua non
modernity
and rights of individuals, and the notion of social
justice to which even the most acerbic critics of
modernity subscribe, even as they use these
values to highlight modernity’s shortcomings
and its hypocrisies.
As Durkheim observed, the moral ideals of mo-
dernity treat the rights and prerogatives of indi-
viduals as sacred. Each of us should possess these
rights to an equal extent. But these ideals are
contradicted by some very deep-seated modern
realities. Capitalism intrinsically generates vast
inequalities between the rich and the poor,
whether it is in the British slums Dickens described
in nineteenth-century England or the slums found
in every Third World conurbation today. Merely
noting the vast difference between average age of
death among modernity’s rich and poor alerts us to
how dramatic these inequalities are. But, as Pierre
Bourdieu observes, modernity also includes many
forms of cultural inequality that are insidious
insofar as people unselfconsciously reproduce
their habitus, even though in doing so they may
put themselves at a cultural disadvantage vis-à-vis
dominant groups. Some prominent inequalities
between women and men, racial and ethnic mi-
nority groups, and minority groups based upon
sexual differences can be understood in this way.
But critics of these inequalities have had a meas-
ure of success. From socialist movements a cen-
tury ago to women’s movements today, periodic
rebellions against inequality are as modern as the
forms of inequality to which they object.
Social estrangement has been a recurrent
theme in social theory. Marx’s notion of alien-
ation refers both to the loss of control over labor
by workers and to the estrangement of workers
from their material relations with fellow workers
and members of their community. In Suicide (1897
[trans. 1951]), Durkheim conceived estrangement
in two forms: anomie, which is the sense of pro-
found confusion brought about by the social dis-
ruptions to which modernity is prone, and egoism,
an excessively selfish, utilitarian form of individu-
alism which is the unappealing underside of the
moral individualism of which Durkheim approved.
Georg Lukács saw modernity in Kafkaesque terms
as subject to reification, that is, the sense that we
live a social world with hard realities that seem
too vast and powerful to change. Habermas’s
notion of the colonization of the life-world
speaks to estrangement in the sense that the in-
strumental policies of capitalism and the modern
state invade areas of public culture and private
life, suppressing meaningful ties of social inte-
gration in favor of calculations of organizational
394
modernization
advantages and efficiencies. (A good example is
the bureaucratization of universities and schools.)
Though each of these notions of estrangement
makes a specific point, all of them underscore
one of modernity’s enduring problems, the inabil-
ity of modern civilization to generate groups to
replace the local communities that provided cul-
tural meaning, moral solidarity, and spiritual as-
surance in premodern forms of social life. There is
no single great impediment to the maintenance
of communal ways of life in modernity. Capitalism,
the bureaucratized social policies of the state,
the impersonality of scientific technology, and
modern individualistic culture – each adds its
own share of obstacles in this regard. However,
estrangement is not an all-or-nothing matter.
Community groups, stable intimate relationships
and personal friendships, and close extended fam-
ilies remain a part of the modern social scene. But,
then, there is no denying that feelings of power-
lessness, meaninglessness, loneliness, and insecu-
rity are common experiences in modern social
life. And to the extent that these feelings are found,
the critics of estrangement in modernity are right.
Ironically, all of these complaints hinge on
modern values. Other epochs had different com-
plaints. IRA COHEN
modernization
As the United States emerged as the world’s hege-
monic power after World War II, the structural–
functionalist modernization paradigm became
the dominant perspective in United States soci-
ology and world social science. Elaborated by
Harvard’s Talcott Parsons, the lead figure in
American sociology, the modernization paradigm
saw societies as a relatively stable set of inter-
related parts changing along similar lines, from
traditional agricultural to modern industrial soci-
eties, part of a global pattern. The models for this
transition from developing to developed societies
were the industrialized states of western Europe
and their settler offshoots in Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and the United States, along with
countries such as Japan. Poor underdeveloped
traditional societies were believed to be in the
earlier phases of this transition, having yet to go
through the modernization process. Here, the
weight of traditional cultural beliefs and practices
supposedly inhibited the industrialization, differ-
entiation, and specialization of occupational roles
necessary for success. Parsons aimed to provide a
holistic analysis of this process, discussing the
host of structural requirements necessary for
modernization
the orderly functioning of the social system, so as
to promote their diffusion worldwide.
Nils Gilman’s important book, Mandarins of the
Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America
(2003), analyzes how United States social scientists
and policymakers converged on this model in the
context of American superpower competition
against the Soviet Union, including in the struggle
for the hearts and minds of those in the Third
World. Third World states were seen as being
held back by traditional beliefs and cultural prac-
tices, thought to be barriers inhibiting the steps
required for successful growth.
Perhaps the classic work of modernization or
development theory and its vision of elite-guided
democracy was economist Walt W. Rostow’s The
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(1961). Rostow argued that all countries could
pass through these stages to achieve high mass
consumption as had the United States. Rostow, a
former Rhodes Scholar, became an important
member of a host of United States presidential
administrations, playing a significant role in plan-
ning the Vietnam War as part of the group
of men David Halberstram called The Best and the
Brightest (1993), eventually becoming President
Johnson’s National Security Council adviser. As
critics pointed out, many social scientists working
within the modernization framework, from
Rostow to Parsons to Samuel Huntington, saw
their task not just to analyze reality but to try
and shape it to the benefit of the capitalist
nation-states of which they were a part. In the
context of the Vietnam War, such dual roles raised
many questions about the objectivity of social
scientists, and became an important part of the
critique of modernization theory.
While the modernization perspective domi-
nated United States and world social science up
until the 1960s, the tumult of this period, from
civil rights through the anti-war movement, to the
related worldwide revolts of 1968, ushered in a
sharp critique of this view and the forwarding of
radically different perspectives. Forming an influ-
ential critique here were the various brands of
international political economy, including world-
systems analysis formulated by Immanuel Waller-
stein and followers, which borrowed from Third
World radicalism and a host of critical perspec-
tives in world social science. Wallerstein and
others traced the rise of the modernization para-
digm to the shift from biological to cultural
racism, not surprisingly given the horrors of the
Holocaust, the political context of the civil rights
movement, and the progress of decolonization.
modernization
Rather than simply arguing for the racial inferior-
ity of the colonized as during the heyday of colo-
nialism, now Third World backwardness was
seen instead as the result of cultural differences
and traditions, views critiqued most recently in
Jared Diamond’s landmark Guns, Germs and Steel
(1999). This culture of poverty argument also saw
cultural traditions as the cause of minority pov-
erty in the advanced core states. While moderniza-
tion was thus seen as an ideological formulation
designed to uphold power and inequality, Waller-
stein nonetheless recognized that there were
many liberal scholars honestly concerned with
the plight of world poverty and seeking to add
knowledge that could aid in its overcoming. That
being said, it was argued, the modernization view
seriously distorted the actual history of the capit-
alist world-system, within which development
and underdevelopment were part of a single his-
torical process, whereby the minority in powerful
core states benefited from the exploitation of
the great majority in the periphery, the semi-
periphery and the internal peripheries of the core.
There were many critical blows to the paradigm
which represented the dominant consensus in
sociology and the social sciences. In particular,
profound criticisms of the underside of modern-
ization came from the Frankfurt School of critical
theory – Walter Benjamin, Theodor Wiesengrund
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas –
and from Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the
Holocaust (1989). There were also periods of revival,
expressed in the 1980s and 1990s, as in Francis
Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
(1992). Today, modernization theory appears to
be making something of a comeback, this time
not so much by analyzing national backwardness,
but in the clash-of-civilizations discourse.
Increasingly, in the aftermath of the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks, United States scholars
such as Bernard Lewis have sought to explain the
failure to modernize of Islamic civilizations in
ways that provided ideological support to the
Anglo-American argument that it is necessary to
bring democracy to the Islamic world, if necessary
through force, as with the United States’ and
United Kingdom’s retrospective justification of
the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent military
occupation. Yet in spite of the nominal transfer
of sovereignty and elections, the revelations of
United States torture in Iraq and elsewhere have
undermined American claims of promoting free-
dom and modernization. Sociologists such as Paul
Lubeck criticized this new modernization ap-
proach, relating the decline of Islamic civilization
395
money
and its contemporary resurgence as a form of
ethno-national political mobilization to culture
and issues of global wealth and power. The rise
and demise of modernization theory formed a
critical part of the changing structures of know-
ledge in what observers have called “the American
Century,” and thus in the twenty-first century the
modernization project will likely be subject to an
increasingly fierce debate. THOMAS REIFER
money
As a medium of exchange, money has been a piv-
otal social technology in the development of
human societies. With numbers and writing,
money was a basis for the world’s first large-scale
complex societies in the ancient Near East during
the third millennium BC. (Note that these soci-
eties did not possess coinage, but used an abstract
money notation – money of account – for making
budgetary calculations and expressing prices and
debts in monetary value.) Today, globalization is
driven by the electronic transfer of money across
national boundaries and by the rapid changes in
the value of money wrought in the foreign ex-
change markets.
According to the familiar economic textbook
list, money performs the following crucially im-
portant functions: medium of exchange, means of
unilateral payment (settlement), store of value,
and money of account (measure of value). (Note
that these functions describe, but do not explain,
the origins and existence of money.) A medium of
exchange makes possible the operation of the div-
ision of labor and the subsequent exchange of
products in markets of large-scale impersonal
multilateral exchange. Second, money is a store
of value – that is, of abstract purchasing power.
It enables decisions to be postponed, revised, re-
activated, or canceled. In his An lnquiry into the
Meaning of Money, John Buchan (1997) defined it
as “frozen desire.” Third, as Max Weber and John
Maynard Keynes emphasized, money’s most im-
portant attribute, upon which the others are
based, is as a measure of value. The abstract nota-
tion of money of account (pounds and pence,
dollars and cents) enables the calculation of
prices, costs, benefits, debts and credits, profits
and losses – that is to say, the rationalization of
economic life. However, money has a dual nature.
This useful social technology expands society’s
capability, or infrastructural power; but it can be
appropriated by particular interests and used as
their despotic power. The power of money is not
simply found in the form of amassed wealth; but
also in the power to control the actual production
396
money
of money in mints and banks. Today, for example,
the interplay between central banks’ interest-rate
decisions and the money markets’ reactions to
them in their pricing of currencies and every kind
of financial asset is one of the most important
institutional axes of modern capitalism.
Two problems have beset the sociological analy-
sis of money, which has remained relatively
underdeveloped. First, there is considerable dis-
agreement about the nature of money between
and within the different social sciences. Second,
sociology has taken money’s existence for granted
and, rather, has focused on its social and cultural
consequences, especially as an expression of the
“disembedded” economic relations of “modern-
ity,” as in Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of
Modernity (1990). With some exceptions – for
example, Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money
(2004) – modern sociology mistakenly assumed
that economics offered an adequate explanation
of money’s existence. Two developments account
for this situation: the division of intellectual
labor in the social sciences after the Methodenstreit
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, in which money was deemed to be
within economics’ province; and the general
influence of Karl Marx’s political economy.
During the Methodenstreit, Joseph Schumpeter ob-
served that there were two theories of money – the
commodity theory and the claim (or credit) theory –
and that they were incompatible. Orthodox eco-
nomic theories of money are based on the com-
modity theory in which money is seen as a thing
that functions as a medium of exchange in order
to overcome the inconveniences of barter that
arise in the absence of a double coincidence of
wants. According to this theory, barter transforms
myriad bilateral exchange ratios between goods
into a single market price for a uniform good.
Money originates as one of the commodities
in barter transactions that eventually function as
media of exchange – for example, cigarettes in
prison. As a commodity, the medium of exchange
can have an exchange ratio with other commod-
ities. As a medium of exchange, money is a neutral
veil that has no efficacy other than to overcome the
inconveniences of barter.
In Karl Menger’s classical formulation in “On
the Origins of Money” (Economic Journal, 1892),
money is the spontaneous result of market ex-
change and the unintended consequence of indi-
vidual economic rationality. In order to maximize
their barter options, traders hold stocks of the
most tradable commodities which, consequently,
become media of exchange – beans, iron tools,
nation
seeks to discover how the work of storytelling
is itself responsive to the wider round of social
activities within which storytelling is embedded.
Narrative analysis has also been profoundly in-
fluenced by political developments both within
the discipline of sociology itself and in neighbo-
ring disciplines. Social scientists once prided
themselves on their professional ability to use
the information they elicited from their research
subjects to generate superior understandings of
those people and their social worlds. Without ne-
cessarily forsaking their claim to objectivity, many
researchers are now a good deal more attentive to
the fact that they do not possess a monopoly on
the capacity to describe social events objectively.
Feminist scholars, in particular, have promoted
the view that narrative analysis is not merely a
project of generating scientific accounts of the
narratives of others but of giving “voice” to those
historically denied the authority to speak for
themselves. DARIN WEINBERG
nation
– see nationalism.
nationalism
This is an ideology that holds that the nation is
the natural basis of social life and that the best
and most natural political units are states based
on nations, that is, nation-states. Correspondingly,
it gives rise to movements in which groups which
define themselves as nations demand that they
have their own independent national state.
Thus understood, nationalism is unproblem-
atic. The difficulties have to do mainly with the
concept of the nation, and the different under-
standings of nationhood. Who belongs to the
nation? In one tradition, the nation is seen largely
in political, civic, and territorial terms. This has
been the dominant understanding of nationhood
in such countries as Britain, France, Spain, the
Netherlands, the United States, and Canada. To
belong to the nation, in this view, has nothing to
do with religion, race and ethnicity, or any other
cultural marker, and everything to do with polit-
ical membership of a particular, territorially de-
fined, state. In principle, all one needs to be a
national of, say, Britain or France, is to be born on
the territory of the state or to become naturalized
as a citizen. National belonging and citizenship, in
this tradition, are more or less synonymous.
Hence the famous commentary by Ernest Renan
in his lecture “What is a Nation?” at the Sorbonne
in 1882 (published in G. Eley and R. Suny, Becoming
National, 1996) emphasized the willed, voluntary
412
nationalism
nature of civic membership (What is a Nation?,
1889).
The other tradition of nationhood puts the
stress on blood and belonging, on deep or primor-
dial ties of race, ethnicity, religion, history, and
other cultural factors. Membership is a heredit-
ary, involuntary, matter, especially as this concept
tends to stress an assumed common descent.
Nations, in this view, are born, not made. This is
the cultural or ethnic understanding of the
nation. It had its birth in eighteenth-century Ger-
many, from where it spread to eastern Europe and
other parts of the world. The power of the ethnic
concept of the nation is that, though it normally
aims at statehood, it can exist without statehood.
It therefore has wide appeal to those peoples who
feel themselves to be nations but who do not have
their own states or who exist as – often subordin-
ate – groups in states dominated by other nations.
There can in this concept be nations without
states, commonly given examples being the Cata-
lans of Spain, the Scots of Britain, and the Québéc-
ois of Canada. Not all such nations necessarily
want states, and whether or not they actually get
their own states is largely a matter of power polit-
ics – the 20-million Kurdish nation, for instance,
has been waiting and fighting for a very long time
for statehood, but international politics have
stood in the way and are likely to do so for the
foreseeable future.
Nationalism as a doctrine arose in the late
eighteenth century in Europe, and received power-
ful definition in the course of the French Revolu-
tion. This was also the time when the two
principal concepts of nationhood were identified,
though the French themselves tended to promote
the civic concept – leading, by reaction, Germans
and others to stress the ethnic concept. But
whether the nation was politically or ethnically
defined, in the first half of the nineteenth century
nationalism was widely identified with the pro-
gressive currents of democracy and liberalism. Its
earliest and one of its greatest prophets, Giuseppe
Mazzini (1805–72), saw individual nations as sub-
divisions of a larger family of mankind, and envis-
aged a future world order in which nations would
live peacefully and harmoniously together. In the
later nineteenth century, nationalism, affected
partly by the Social Darwinism of the time, took
on a sharper edge. It now tended to be hijacked by
right-wing thinkers and statesmen, and to become
aggressive and intolerant (a form of nationalism
known as integrative nationalism). Nationalism in
this period was often allied with imperialism, and
sought through the acquisition of colonies the
nationalism
aggrandizement of national power at the expense
of other nations. This form of nationalism reached
a climax in the 1930s in Europe, when it was often
transformed into fascism and other totalitarian
ideologies and movements. With the defeat of
fascism, nationalism also suffered a rebuff, the
more so as liberal hostility to nationalism was also
echoed by the left-wing movements of socialism
and Communism. Socialism historically had
always been opposed to nationalism as a bour-
geois, class-based, ideology with which the inter-
national proletariat should have no truck (which
did not stop most socialist parties from supporting
their nations during the two world wars).
But while nationalism was under a cloud in the
post-Second World War western world, it was the
central inspiration behind the liberation move-
ments of the developing, non-western, Third
World as they sought to throw off colonial rule.
Even where the movement took a communist
form, as in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, its driving
force was clearly nationalist. In some cases, espe-
cially in Africa and the Middle East, the national-
ism was made problematic by the fact that many
of the nations were of recent invention, usually
the creation of western powers under colonialism.
They might contain several ethnic groups of
widely differing character, though usually one
managed to achieve dominance during the inde-
pendence struggle. This threw up a welter of con-
flicts after independence as different ethnic
groups claiming national status tried to free
themselves from “alien” rule. Examples were the
Biafrans in Nigeria, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and
the East Timorese in Indonesia.
But it was not only in the developing world that
nationalist conflicts continued to flourish. In the
West too, after a relatively short period of quies-
cence, nationalism revived vigorously, with strong
movements in such places as Britain, Belgium,
Spain, and Canada. Further East, the collapse of
communist regimes after 1989, and the break-up
of the Soviet Union in 1991, were accompanied by
a powerful surge of nationalism throughout the
region – leading, for instance, to the separation of
Czechs and Slovaks and, in a bitter and bloody
conflict, to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and
the rise of five new nations in its place. Nation-
alism, it is clear, far from being the passing phe-
nomenon that most nineteenth-century thinkers
assumed, remains one of the most powerful forces
in the world, overriding most other distinctions of
social class, gender, and region, and apparently
thriving even amidst the current currents of
globalization. KRISHAN KUMAR
Nelson, Benjamin (1911–1977)
nature
– see environment.
nature/nurture debate
– see genetics.
neighborhood
In sociology, neighborhood is a largely under-
theorized and commonsense term referring to
urban locales based on residential proximity. The
context for neighborhood studies in urban soci-
ology was provided by early twentieth-century
sociologists (for example Georg Simmel, Ferdinard
Tönnies, and Louis Wirth), who emphasized the
impersonality and anonymity of the modern city.
Against this view, neighborhood studies (for
example Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s
Family and Kinship in East London, 1957) found that
neighborhoods can be the site of close kinship and
personal ties that are not a residue from the past
but, on the contrary, have been facilitated by
modern cities. Urban living enables people to
form associations based on kinship, or religious,
ethnic, political, or other interests which become
the basis of local networks and subcultures. Cities
may thus facilitate a level of diversity not found in
rural areas. In recent work the idea of neighbor-
hood decline or regeneration has been linked to
the concept of social capital drawing on the work
of Robert Putnam and James S. Coleman. This has
focused on the neighborhood’s potential as a site
of integrative social networks and solidarity. The
level of social capital in a neighborhood is often
related to factors such as stability, integration,
trust, solidarity, and tolerance, which in turn are
used to explain such things as differential eco-
nomic growth or levels of crime between regions.
Two problems should be noted. The specific influ-
ences of the local environment may now be miti-
gated by global factors. The argument is often
circular in that the evidence for and conditions of
social capital in neighborhoods may be the same.
LARRY RAY
Nelson, Benjamin (1911–1977)
A sociologist and historian who trained as a medi-
eval historian at Columbia, Benjamin taught
social sciences at Chicago, Minnesota, and the
State University of New York, before becoming a
professor of history and sociology at the New
School for Social Research.
His classic work remains The Idea of Usury: From
Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (1949),
which engages with and extends Max Weber’s
413
non-response
non-response
– see sampling.
normalization
Defined as those social processes which pressure
individuals to conform to culturally desirable or
appropriate norms of behavior, the practice of
normalization produces certain ideals or stand-
ards against which the members of a society
are judged. Through this process, individuals are
socialized into believing that certain forms of be-
havior or self-presentation are acceptable and
valuable, while other behavior that transgresses
social expectations is not as acceptable or legitim-
ate. Normalization is a key concept in the study of
social control. It helps sociologists understand
how societies develop rules governing conduct,
how they deal with deviance, how individuals
resist or challenge such norms, and how social
values and expectations within a society change
over time.
One way of defining norms is through simple
statistics. However, the standards which are pro-
duced and reinforced through the process of nor-
malization are often regarded as more than
statistical averages. They are often socially valued
and presumed to be good, or even ideal. Certain
rewards (such as esteem, money, or access to re-
sources) are often provided to those who conform
to, reinforce, or exceed, social norms. However,
those who do not conform to social norms may be
punished, socially excluded, or stigmatized. They
may be defined as “deviants” or “non-conformists”
and they may also be pathologized, and treated as
if they had a disease or disability.
Within the area of disability service provision,
the idea of normalization has a more specific
meaning. It is commonly identified with the
work of Wolf Wolfensberger whose theory of
“social role valorization” revolves around ways to
find normative social roles for disabled people.
This approach to disability makes a strong
effort to ensure that both service delivery and the
social relationships which disabled people have
reinforce their image as “normal,” socially valued
citizens.
Much of the sociological interest in the process
of normalization can be traced to the influence
of Michel Foucault, whose work suggested that
normalization is reproduced through various
institutional frameworks (including education,
medicine, the military, and the judicial system).
Foucault argued that these social institutions are
involved in various disciplinary practices which
418
norms
overlap and support one another, with the overall
effect of producing bodies that conform to certain
ideas, which he called “docile bodies.” Normaliza-
tion is not only created through pressure from
social institutions though, Foucault’s later work
suggested that a major element of normalization
stems from the way people think about their own
bodies and their own behavior. An example of the
self-regulation of individuals in this manner can
be found in Susan Bordo’s discussion of the behav-
ior of anorexics in Unbearable Weight (1993). She
suggests that anorexics are not only victims of
gendered social pressures to have slender bodies,
but are also engaged in self-regulation that
requires considerable will, and self-determination.
The behavior of anorexics can be understood,
Bordo argues, by focusing on the normalizing
pressures which lead women to have a preoccupa-
tion with fat, diet, and slenderness. In this way,
social norms about the physical body are seen to
reflect wider cultural codes around gender and
other social vulnerabilities.
The study of normalization begs the question,
“Who defines the norms?” Sociologists are there-
fore very interested in unpacking the power
dynamics that underpin normalization. They
study the ways individuals are encouraged, com-
pelled, and coerced to regulate their behavior so
that it seems “normal,” but also how people resist
such pressures (both collectively and individually).
In this way, a study of normalization shows how
pressure to conform to social norms operates
within social interactions, as well as through a
person’s own desires to control their behavior or
image. MARK SHERRY AND GARY L. ALBRECHT
norms
These are expectations shared by members of a
group or collectivity that more or less effectively
determine individual behavior. Norms typically
attach to social roles rather than human individ-
uals, who in performance of their roles conform to
a greater or lesser extent to norms. The concept of
norm is located in various categories associated
with the development of sociology.
William Graham Sumner, for instance, in Folk-
ways (1906), holds that collective life, necessary for
individual survival, requires the preservation of
efficacious experience, stored in and communi-
cated as custom. Custom is the collective form of
individual habit. Folkways are produced, accor-
ding to Sumner, in the frequent repetition of petty
acts. Folkways are accepted because of the convic-
tion that they are conducive to societal welfare and
norms
can therefore be defined as systems of persisting
expedient customary behavior. Sumner says that,
within a group, folkways are uniform, universal,
imperative, and invariable; over time they become
increasingly arbitrary. Socially formed and selec-
ted inferences derived from folkways, Sumner calls
mores. Mores consist largely but not exclusively of
taboos (see sacred and profane dichotomy), things
that should not be done. A characteristic of mores,
as coercive ethical principles, is the likelihood
that they will contain an explicit rationalization
or reason for adherence to them, for example
don’t eat pork because pigs are unclean. Sumner’s
approach was related to Social Darwinism. Believ-
ing that social change is achieved through the
evolution of folkways and the development of
folkways into mores is no longer in vogue.
Talcott Parsons argues that, through social
interaction, persons are able to communicate
because signs and symbols acquire common
meaning. By virtue of a shared meaning system
there arises a mutuality of expectations and sanc-
tions that constitutes what Parsons calls a norma-
tive order in The Social System (1951). Thus norms
operate through internalization of a standard of
group expectations and are maintained by the
reactions of others, both positive and negative.
These reactions are sanctions that reward con-
formity to role expectations and punish departure
nuclear family
from expectation such as deviance. For Parsons,
the institutionalization of both expectation and
sanction constitutive of norms is achieved in vary-
ing degrees. Anomie occurs in the absence of insti-
tutionalization. Norms therefore are not to be
located at the level of individual social actor
but necessarily function in the institutionalized
activity of a plurality of social actors.
While the notion of norm can adequately de-
scribe the habitual institutional patterns of a
society, explanations of societal processes in
terms of norms risks accounting for regularities
of social action in terms of expectations. In fact,
interaction in groups or societies may result from
a number of possible factors, of which norms are
only one. One alternative approach to explanation
of social process points not to the system of
norms, but to power relations and the balance of
power that is the outcome of social conflict be-
tween groups. Exponents of this approach include
Ralph Dahrendorf in Class and Class Conflict in Indus-
trial Society (1959) and John Rex in Key Problems of
Sociological Theory (1961). David Lockwood’s Solidar-
ity and Schism (1992) developed a sophisticated
critique of the normative approach that avoids
the problems of conflict theory. JACK BARBALET
nuclear family
– see family.
419
sect
showed a high work-rate and obedient following
of procedure and for Taylor represented the best
traits that a worker should possess. The deskilling
and loss of autonomy implied by this procedure
had the greatest effect on a specific class of
workers, that of skilled craftsmen.
Taylor’s book also implicitly presents a theory of
leadership; it asserts the role of the new profes-
sionalizing group of managers, so the theory is
also a legitimization project for the managerial
class. Severe criticisms over the a-social view of
humans, specifically non-managerial employees,
in work organizations have been raised through-
out the twentieth century from a range of social
science disciplines, including from management
scholars who have deemed Taylorism morally in-
defensible. Nevertheless, contemporary manage-
ment theorists broadly regard Taylor’s work as a
classic of management theory, and consultancy.
Taylor himself lectured and consulted widely
with managers and academics and was respon-
sible for the early spread and uptake of a range
of methods of scientific management. A N N V O G E L
sect
– see church–sect typology.
secularization
This term is conceptualized differently by differ-
ent scholars but for the most part refers to the
constellation of historical and modern social pro-
cesses that allegedly bring about the declining
significance of religion in social institutions,
public culture, and individual lives. The secular-
ization thesis has its roots in the classical theori-
zing of both Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. Most
notably, Weber argued that the increased ration-
alization of society – bureaucratization, scientific
and technical progress, and the expanding perva-
siveness of instrumental reason in all domains of
everyday life – would substantively attenuate the
scope of religion, both through the increased spe-
cialization of institutional spheres (of family,
economy, law, politics) and as a result of disen-
chantment in the face of competing rationalized
value spheres. Durkheim, although a strong pro-
ponent of the centrality of the sacred to society,
nonetheless predicted that the integrative func-
tions performed by church religion in traditional
societies would increasingly be displaced in modern
societies by the emergence of differentiated profes-
sional and scientific membership communities
(see sacred and profane dichotomy). The seculariza-
tion thesis, especially its Weberian understanding,
was highly influential in the paradigm of social
secularization
change articulated by modernization theorists in
the 1960s. These theorists argued that among the
inevitable and linear societal processes associated
with modernization – including urbanization, in-
dustrialization, the expansion of education and
mass communication (see mass media and commu-
nications), and the increased autonomy of law and
politics from traditional authority – religion would
no longer have the authority that it allegedly com-
manded in traditional societies; it would become
socially invisible (Thomas Luckmann) and lose
plausibility (Peter L. Berger).
The modernization–secularization thesis was
widely accepted by western sociologists and,
though there were some exceptions (for example
A. Greeley, Unsecular Man, 1972), many assumed a
priori that religion had lost its significance in
modern societies; whatever empirical evidence
suggested otherwise was largely a vestige of a
cultural lag that would soon disappear. Various
societal factors, such as the increased public visi-
bility of religious social movements in the United
States, Iran, and Poland and intradisciplinary
theoretical challenges to modernization theory,
converged in the late 1970s and resulted in more
complex and nuanced approaches to the study of
secularization. Sociologists have been particu-
larly vigorous in debating its meaning and meas-
urement and investigating evidence for and
against various indicators of secularization. The
application of rational choice theory to religion
has resulted in an intense debate about the ways
in which competitive religious environments
(religious economies) produce religious vitality
and church growth. This paradigm rejects the
assumptions of secularization theory as being
more appropriate for the historically monopol-
ized religious markets found in Europe but at
odds with the American context of religious plur-
alism (R. S. Warner, “Work in Progress Toward a
New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Reli-
gion in the United States,” 1993, American Journal
of Sociology). Philip S. Gorski argues that credible
empirical claims for either secularization or
religious vitality need to be grounded in longer
historical and broader geographical perspec-
tives in assessing changes in religion over time
(“Historicizing the Secularization Debate,” in
M. Dillon [ed.], Handbook of the Sociology of Religion,
2003).
Secularization today, then, should be understood
in terms of a balance between extensive empirical
evidence in favor of the continuing sociological
significance of religion in the public domain and
in individual lives, and the coexistence of these
541
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950– )
trends with equally valid empirical evidence indi-
cating selectivity in the acceptance of religion’s
theological, moral, and political authority. Both
sets of trends must necessarily be interpreted
with a cautious and differentiated understanding
of the nature and place of religion in earlier socio-
historical contexts, and with greater attentiveness
to how the contextual meanings of religion and
religious commitment change over time. Given
the importance of religion, especially in political
life, some sociologists, such as Berger, have
argued against the secularization thesis that con-
temporary societies are going through a process of
“resacralization.” MICHELE DILLON
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950– )
A theorist who has made a major contribution to
the understanding of the theoretical, conceptual,
and emotional scaffolding of modern sexual sens-
ibilities, Sedgwick was educated at undergraduate
level at Cornell University and received her PhD
from Yale University. Working from within the
discipline of literary studies, Sedgwick’s early
work Between Men: English Literature and Male Homo-
social Desire (1985) establishes the complexity of
men’s relationships in the Victorian era and fo-
cuses on the structured limits of homosocial rela-
tionships and homosexual desires. For example,
Sedgwick highlights how male-to-male desire
became channeled into a competing love triangle
for the love of women. Sedgwick argues that in-
creasing social circumscription of the expression
of desire led to a reshaping of gender and sexual
relations, something that is explored in greater
depth in Epistemology of the Closet (1990). In this
book, Sedgwick delivers an analysis of how the
male homosexual–heterosexual binary has ope-
rated to authorize the possibilities of sexual iden-
tities. Central to this binary is a tension between a
“minoritizing view” in which gay identity is part
of an identifiable minority and a “universalizing
view” in which same-sex desire is inherent in all
men. Thus the “closet” is emblematic of gay iden-
tity operating to “haunt” and police an already
fractured contemporary male heterosexuality. De-
construction of the binaries that fail to hold
sexual and gendered categories is explored fur-
ther in her collection of essays, Tendencies (1994).
More recently, her autobiographical work A Dia-
logue on Love (1999) is a more personal exploration
of the tensions and incoherency of gender/sexual
categories in her own everyday life and her hidden
desires and fantasies.
MAIRTIN MAC-AN-GHAILL AND CHRIS HAYWOOD
542
segregation
segregation
This is a naturally occurring practice whereby
groups or social classes in a dominant position
enforce the social isolation of groups or classes
stigmatized as inferior. The isolation is imposed
to limit or deny access to basic social needs, in-
cluding housing, jobs, voting, public accommoda-
tions, or the right to travel outside the segregated
region or ghetto. The stigmata are arbitrarily
made with reference to social differences such as
race, gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity,
or politics, or position in the world-system. Segre-
gation is ubiquitous, occurring in virtually any
social arrangement where there are identifiable
marks of differences that can be used by those in
power to enforce their social, economic, or polit-
ical advantages or to limit their contact with the
disadvantaged; such marks include physical or
mental disability, age, and body weight. The prac-
tice is commonly de facto (for example social
avoidance of persons with discrediting physical
deformities), but more often is de jure (for in-
stance, codes excluding children from neighbor-
hoods reserved for the elderly).
The structural cause of segregation is the scar-
city of social goods – for instance, income, social
status, political power. The social goods may be
material needs necessary to survival (for example
water, food, shelter, health care) or immaterial
desires (for example, status, respect, recognition,
or club memberships). There is no known endu-
ring social structure without scarcities of one or
many kinds. Segregation is, therefore, a social
means for organizing social inequality which, in
academic sociology, is commonly referred to as
the stratification system. In the modern era, seg-
regation was thought to be a practice internal to
discrete nation-states, but as globalization became
more salient sociologists have come to understand
segregation as a global practice (e.g., the economic
and social segregation of impoverished, debtor
nations in the global periphery by creditors in
the core of the world-system).
The most notorious instances of segregation in
the modern world were based on official policies
of racial discrimination, for example in Zimbabwe
(until 1980), South Africa (until 1991), and the
American South (until after 1964). Racial segrega-
tion has its structural roots in the colonial system
of the de facto or de jure slave economies ex-
tracting wealth and labor power from the colon-
ized regions. Historically, de jure segregation has
been ended by political, legislative, or judicial
action (for example the independence of Rhodesia
snowball sample
with criticism that this grossly exaggerated dis-
continuities in social change, Smelser, in Social
Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), proposed
that the idea of social differentiation allowed a
more nuanced way of analyzing gradual and com-
plex patterns of change. The idea of social differ-
entiation and related challenges of integration or
fragmentation remain a major theoretical theme
in postmodernism and neofunctionalism, without
any current sense of an emerging consensus.
A further important theme running throughout
Smelser’s life and work is that of the articulation
of psychoanalysis with sociological inquiry. In The
Social Edges of Psychoanalysis (1998), he notes that a
range of theorists from critical theory, through
feminism, to postmodernism have looked to psy-
choanalysis. This has been in part to link issues of
personality more closely with social analysis. In
this manner Smelser continues the Parsonian
interest in an integrated social theory, capable of
bridging the macro–micro divide. R O B E R T H O L T O N
snowball sample
– see sampling.
social action
All forms of human behavior other than physio-
logical reflexes are profoundly influenced by the
cultural settings and the social circumstances in
which they occur. Sociologists conceive the social
qualities of action from several different points of
view. The oldest sociological accounts of social
action hinge on subjective meaning. Utilitarians,
and subsequently in rational choice theory, em-
phasize action subjectively motivated by actors
to maximize their interests or advantages and/or
to minimize their losses or discomfort. Max
Weber, who was influenced by neo-Kantian phil-
osophy, defined as social action only behavior that
involves the attachment of existential meaning by
an actor when she orients to other actors past,
present, or future.
Émile Durkheim made a point of emphasizing
how cultural conditions shape the form and con-
tent of social action. For Durkheim, our everyday
actions, such as speaking a certain language or
exchanging currency in certain ways, are struc-
tured by collectively shared ways of life. The col-
lectivist aspect of Durkheim’s take on action
influenced the thought of Talcott Parsons and is
implicitly reconstructed by certain French post-
structuralist thinkers, including Pierre Bourdieu
and Michel Foucault.
During the twentieth century, sociological ac-
counts of social action took a new, praxiological
social capital
turn. Unlike philosophy, where praxis takes on
normative and political connotations, in sociology
praxis refers simply to enacted social conduct.
Hence, instead of questions about the subjective
meaning or motivation of action, praxis-oriented
sociologists ask how social action is produced
or performed. The pragmatist philosophers John
Dewey (1859–1952) and George Herbert Mead
exerted a strong praxiological influence on soci-
ology through the symbolic interactionist school.
Dewey emphasized the significance of routinely
enacted behavior and behavior involving thought
that occurs when routines are disrupted. Mead,
more ambitiously, saw social action in terms of
interactive patterns of sociality. For Mead, actors
produce interaction by emitting and reacting
to symbolic gestures. Symbolic gestures and the
learned responses they evoke are channeled
through the human mind where some greater or
lesser degree of personal autonomy is introduced.
The shift towards praxis-oriented accounts of
social action acquired both inspiration and mo-
mentum in the works of Erving Goffman and
Harold Garfinkel. Goffman was influenced by
Durkheim. For Goffman, the social actions that
matter occur as rituals during interaction. These
rituals exhibit moral meaning and create small-
scale local systems of moral order. Goffman’s prax-
iological attention to the subtle, tacit perform-
ance of small but ritually significant gestures is a
highlight of his accounts.
Garfinkel took the praxiological turn about as
far as it could go. For him, action is always locally
situated, reflexively taking its meaning from the
unfolding context produced in a given setting and
thereby sustaining or redirecting the nature of
that setting. His research demonstrates the great
significance of the moment-by-moment produc-
tion of all kinds of social action, from sorting
bureaucratic files to making new discoveries in
the natural sciences. Anthony Giddens’s structura-
tion theory combines the Durkheimian with the
praxis-oriented accounts of social action. A logical
step that has yet to be taken is to combine the
subjective and the praxis-oriented accounts.
IRA COHEN
social administration
– see social policy.
social capital
This form of capital arises from relationships be-
tween individuals, families, groups, or commu-
nities that provide access to valuable benefits
and/or resources. It is one of several forms of
557
social capital
in his Foundations of Social Theory (1990). While
Coleman’s and Bourdieu’s definitions of social
capital are similar at the most general level –
they both believe that social capital exists in the
relations between actors and that these relation-
ships facilitate the achievement of ends that
would be otherwise unattainable – they focus on
very different aspects of these relations. Instead of
viewing social capital as a resource, Coleman’s
model views social capital in terms of social struc-
ture. It is primarily concerned with analyzing the
relationships between social capital and the posi-
tive outcomes that result from dense family and
community networks. The key innovation of the
Coleman model is the role of social trust in these
relationships. Coleman emphasized the important
role that social capital plays in the creation of
human capital – investments, such as education,
training, and other forms of skills and knowledge,
that increase the productive potential of individ-
uals. Coleman argues that social capital within
the family (for example, strong relations between
children and parents that provide children access
to the parents’ human capital), and within the
community (for example, parents’ relationship
with the institutions of the community), are crit-
ical types of social capital resources.
Two distinct lines of empirical research have
grown out of Coleman’s model of social capital.
Both examine close-knit groups or communities
and their outcomes. The first of these approaches
emphasizes the value of intrafamilial social capi-
tal for children. This type of social capital mani-
fests itself in the development of human capital
mentioned above. Specifically, the more of their
own human capital that parents invest in their
children through the time and attention they
give them, the better the development of human
capital (that is, educational attainment and per-
sonality advancement) in their children. A series
of studies in this area has demonstrated, for exam-
ple, that the outcomes for children of families
with higher amounts of this type of social capital
(two-parent households, parents who spend a
lot of time with their children, and families with
fewer children) tend to do better in terms of,
among other things, success at school, avoiding
teenage pregnancy, and emotional adjustment.
A second strand of research that has grown out
of Coleman’s conception of social capital empha-
sizes the value of dense social networks outside
the family. These networks produce relationships
of trust and reciprocity among their members
that, especially in smaller networks, enmesh
members in mutual and mutually beneficial
social change
obligations and provide a powerful form of infor-
mal social control. High degrees of this type of
social capital, for example, foster contexts of trust
in which children are felt to be safe when they are
not with their parents, or valuable goods can be
exchanged without expensive security measures.
Coleman and later analysts used such explan-
ations to account for why children in Catholic
schools tend to outperform their state school
peers in the United States.
Subsequent research in the Coleman tradition,
most notably that of Robert Putnam, has genera-
lized the concept of social capital to large commu-
nities, regions, and even nations. Putnam sees
social capital as a public good which is not zero-
sum (one person’s use does not diminish an-
other’s). Like other public goods, such as national
defense, water supply, and public education, that
benefit the entire community, social capital con-
tributes to overall well-being. According to Put-
nam, participation in community groups and
civic associations enhances collective norms and
trust and this in turn has positive effects on demo-
cratic participation and collective well-being.
Using large-scale survey data on individuals’ feel-
ings of trust and participation in groups and other
public activities (such as voluntary associations
and, most famously, bowling leagues), Putnam
argues that the reserve of social capital in the
United States has become depleted in recent years.
This argument has been applied widely to explain
such phenomena as declining political participa-
tion, neighborhood involvement, and parental
participation in schools, as well as falling church
attendance. Some later analysts have been critical
of this popular treatment of social capital, argu-
ing, for example, that Putnam conflates key con-
cepts such as trust, association membership, and
social networks, and that his explanation is often
tautological and provides a weak account of how
social capital is generated. Putnam’s perspective
has nonetheless been a lively source of research
and debate about the broader impacts of social
capital. JEFF MANZA
social change
All societies recognize social change. Three ques-
tions arise: is this change natural and normal?;
what is its source?; and what is its tempo?
Premodern societies regard change as external
and problematic. The way things have been done
in the past is a powerful indicator as to how they
should be done in the present, and this sense of
continuity is understandable. To venerate others
in the contemporary world, one needs to venerate
559
social change
their ancestors, since each of us is a product of the
past – our parents and grandparents, and so on,
physically and culturally produced us – and there-
fore disrespect to them is also disrespect for their
progeny.
Such a position, despite its valid and valuable
features, runs the risk of idealizing the past, and it
leads to a paralyzing relativism (whatever happened
in the past was good) and an authoritarian absolut-
ism (the past reflected a timeless truth that con-
temporary society foolishly disregards). It is
important not to take these attitudes at face value,
for veneration of the past is linked to the needs of
the present, and traditionalists may distort the
past in order to justify present practices. Change
is seen as either the tragic disintegration of a
golden age or at best a cyclical process. “There is
nothing new under the sun” and new social forms
replace one another in merry-go-round fashion.
The modern age takes a much less hostile view of
change. Change is seen as natural and necessary –
something that is positive rather than negative.
Each generation faces new and different chal-
lenges to those of the previous one, so that it
seems implausible to imagine that continuity
with the past is all-important. With the European
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, liberals
begin to postulate a doctrine of progress – change
is celebrated and admired. This doctrine of pro-
gress is contradicted by perfectionism, which
ascribes animating change to a timeless creator,
so that inevitably at some point in the future the
perfect society will arrive. Some conservatives
reject the notion of progress itself as though the
idea is an inherently perfectionist one. It is im-
portant to subject the argument about progress
to an internal critique: it is not that the notion of
progress is problematic, but rather the idea
that this progress has a beginning and an end –
concepts which undermine the dynamism of
change.
The conservative condemns change as a bad
thing, the radical sees it as good, but each position
betrays a numbing one-sidedness. Change to be
meaningful must be expressed through continu-
ity with the past so that newness can be critically
appraised. Change must be tied to absolute as
well as relative standpoints – do new ideas and
practices help us to govern our own lives in a
more satisfactory fashion? The concepts of self-
government and autonomy express a longstan-
ding aspiration – inherent in all systems of mora-
lity – and they enable us to decide whether change
is positive and developmental, or negative and
self-destructive.
560
social change
It is also important to tackle the question of the
source of change. Why do societies change? It is
perfectly true that people develop new ideas and
attitudes – but why? The idealists treat ideas as
autonomous agents with an origin in mystical
genius – either of the outstanding individual or
of a supernatural creator. Materialists rightly
insist that change derives from forces outside the
consciousness of people – that is, change occurs
whether people like it or not. But the problem
with this position is that it is sometimes inter-
preted as an idealism turned inside out. Ideas,
from being the source of change, become irrele-
vant – change is rooted in technology or physi-
ology. It is clear that cultural and political
institutions are themselves important agents of
change, but it is also true that what we think is
happening is never identical to what is going on.
Ideas and institutions express this change, but we
should never assume that what the creators of
change intend is the same as the actual outcome.
This is as true as regards changes in the law (see
law and society) as it is for changes in technology
and the forces of production.
But, flexibly and concretely used, the materia-
list argument is a powerful one, for it seeks to
locate change in circumstances that operate struc-
turally, that is, in collective “forces” that people
can never wholly control. Thus, the demand by
women for social as well as political equality arises
not simply because greater equality is a “good
idea.” More and more women work outside the
home and undertake occupations of a nontradi-
tional kind. This breaks down patriarchal stereo-
types, although it also provokes fundamentalist
backlashes. The point is that, although the change
is expressed in debate and argument, these new
ideas (and new language) cannot simply be under-
stood on their own terms. They seem plausible
because they correspond to changing realities in
society itself.
What of the tempo of change? Changes are
always incremental in the sense that society is
always evolving. In modern societies this change
is built into structures so that it is seen as natural
and normal: new ideas; new institutions; new
practices. Is this change revolutionary or gradual
in character? This is in a dualism that we need to
overcome, for change is both. Each change is in a
particular area, and affects the operation of soci-
ety as a whole. The development of the internet in
contemporary society has enormous implications
for other institutions and ideas – it affects psych-
ology, ideology, the political system, industry,
education, and the media. It is a revolutionary
social class
force, but it builds upon previous developments so
that it is both gradual and insurrectionary. It is a
mistake to identify revolutions with transform-
ations of the state – although these occur as well.
Social change is apparently accidental in pre-
modern societies, but it is seen as normal in
modern orders. The notion that this change is
governed by higher powers (which are timeless)
is contradictory and seeks to impose limits on
change. Change occurs at every level in society
and those who create change never see the full
implications of the process they instigate. Change
is neither simply evolutionary nor revolutionary:
it is always both. JOHN HOFFMAN
social class
All complex societies are characterized by some
kind of structured social inequality (or stratifica-
tion system). The totality of social stratification
will be made up of a number of different elements
that will vary in their importance between diffe-
rent societies – for example, old age is accorded
more respect in some societies than others. Class
makes a significant contribution to structured
social inequality in contemporary societies. How-
ever, it is a multifaceted concept with a variety of
different meanings. There is no correct definition
of the concept, nor any single correct way of meas-
uring it. Nevertheless, questions of both definition
and measurement have been endlessly contested
over the years. Broadly, three dimensions of class
may be identified. These are the economic, the
cultural, and the political. The economic dimen-
sion has a focus on patterns and explanations of
material inequality; the cultural dimension a
focus on lifestyle, social behavior, and hierarchies
of prestige; and the political dimension addresses
the role of classes, and class action, in political,
social, and economic change. Common to all
sociological conceptions of class is the argument
that social and economic inequalities are not nat-
ural or divinely ordained, but rather emerge as a
consequence of human behaviors.
Modern ideas of class are inextricably associated
with the development of capitalist industrialism
(or industrial society). The development of capit-
alism was accompanied by the emergence of the
“two great classes” identified by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto, 1848
[trans. 1968]) as the bourgeoisie (the owners and
controllers of capital or the means of production)
and the industrial working class or proletariat
(those without capital or access to productive re-
sources who were forced to sell their labor in
order to survive). This does not mean that indus-
social class
trial capitalism was ever a two-class society, as
many other groupings, distinguished by a variety
of relationships to both production and the
market, have always existed in capitalist societies.
For example, in the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852
[trans. 1934]), Marx identifies (in addition to the
proletariat) finance, landholding, and industrial
capital (different fractions of the capitalist class),
as well as the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie
(shopkeepers and small owner of private capital),
and the lumpenproletariat. Thus Marx defined
class in economic and political terms, and cultures
and ideologies were held to be largely determined
by class processes.
A key issue relating to class (deriving largely,
but not entirely, from the work of Marx) is that
of class identity or consciousness. Marx argued
that, as different classes had conflicting interests,
deriving from their position in relation to produc-
tion and markets, these interests would find their
expression in political action. Indeed, Marx saw
class conflict as the major driving force of social
change. In preindustrial (feudal) societies, the
dominant class was the feudal aristocracy, whose
power and authority was challenged by the rise of
the industrial bourgeoisie. The conflict between
these classes resulted in the emergence of capita-
lism. In capitalist society, Marx argued, the prole-
tariat (or working class) assumed the role of the
revolutionary class. He argued that the bour-
geoisie exploited the proletariat via the extraction
of the surplus value created by their labor. Marx
predicted that the conflict brought about by
growth of class consciousness and action amongst
the proletariat (its becoming a “class for itself ”),
together with the weaknesses engendered by suc-
cessive crises of capitalism, would eventually lead
to the victory of the proletariat and their allies
and transformative social change. These changes
would usher in first communism, then socialism.
The work of Max Weber has also been influen-
tial (Class, Status and Party [trans. 1940]). Like Marx,
Weber emphasized the economic dimension of
class. However, besides property ownership (Marx’s
major axis of class differentiation), Weber also em-
phasized the significance of market situations.
These included individual skills and qualifications,
the possession of which will result in enhanced life
chances as compared with those groups possess-
ing neither property nor skills. Weber’s account of
class, however, was radically different from that of
Marx in that it was not linked to any theory of
history and, although Weber recognized the likeli-
hood and persistence of class conflict, he did not
see such conflicts as necessarily leading to radical
561
social class
social change. Weber also identified the independ-
ent significance of social status (social honor or
prestige), that is, hierarchical systems of cultural
differentiation that identify particular persons,
behaviors, and lifestyles as superior or inferior,
more or less worthy. Weber identified class and
social status as different bases for claims to ma-
terial resources. Subsequently, many sociologists
have insisted on the analytical separation of the
two concepts. The class concept, it is argued, de-
scribes the relationships giving rise to inequa-
lities; it is a relational concept. Hierarchies of
prestige or status, on the other hand, only de-
scribe the outcomes of underlying class processes,
as described in gradational class schemes. How-
ever, as we shall see, although, analytically, class
and status are distinct concepts, there are difficul-
ties in separating them empirically.
From the nineteenth century onwards, different
class interests, reflecting ownership and market
position, were increasingly represented by a range
of different bodies including the political parties
of left and right, as well as trade unions and em-
ployers’ organizations. Thus, there were good
reasons to argue that the interest groupings rep-
resenting different classes could be broadly
mapped onto the material groupings identified
by the classic theorists of class – owners and non-
owners of the means of different elements of pro-
duction, as well as occupational groupings. By the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(albeit to varying degrees), the greater majority
of the population in industrial capitalist societies
had come to rely on paid employment of some
kind. Official statisticians (as well as social investi-
gators) sought to classify these populations in
some kind of meaningful fashion. Increasingly,
the occupational order began to emerge as a
useful axis of classification that gave a summary
indication of standard of life as well as life
chances. In all such schemes, managerial and pro-
fessional employees are located at the apex, and
unskilled workers in the lower-level groupings.
Thus the convention developed of describing
the different occupational groupings created by
the application of classificatory schemes as social
classes (for example, the Registrar-General’s six-
fold social-class classification in Britain). Such clas-
sifications were often criticized as atheoretical.
The Registrar-General’s classification, which was
at its inception a scale of social standing, was
held to be a commonsense status scale rather
than a measure of class relations. However, it
proved to be remarkably robust in policy-oriented
research and in the mapping and investigation of
562
social class
inequalities of various kinds (for example, in
health).
Thus, for many investigators, the occupational
order became synonymous with the class struc-
ture. This assumption did not go unchallenged
and alternative bases of classification were pro-
posed. John Rex and R. Moore (Race, Community
and Conflict, 1967), for example, developed the
notion of housing classes deriving from variations
in house ownership and tenure, giving rise to
conflicting (housing) class interests. This approach
to class was taken up by a number of urban soci-
ologists (for example, P. Saunders in Social Theory
and the Urban Question, 1986).
Despite the sociological insistence on the ana-
lytical separation of class and status, material
differences and cultural and social distinctions
are, invariably, intertwined (P. Bourdieu, Distinc-
tion, 1979 [trans. 1984]). This has been recognized
in a number of classic case studies focusing on
particular localities (for example, M. Stacey, Tradi-
tion and Change, 1960), and in the “ affluent
worker” series, an influential British study carried
out in the 1960s (John Goldthorpe, David Lock-
wood, F. Bechhofer, and J. Platt, The Affluent Worker
in the Class Structure, 1969). The affluent-worker
thesis had argued that, with rising prosperity in
the years after World War II, the wages of
“working-class” employees were now at the same
levels of those of the middle classes (that is, those
around the middle of the occupational structure),
thus a process of embourgeoisement (or “the
worker turning middle class) was held to be
underway. Goldthorpe and his colleagues identi-
fied three dimensions of class, the economic, the
normative, and the relational. They demonstrated
that, although manual workers might have
achieved incomes equal to those of some middle-
class occupations, this was achieved by working
longer hours. Furthermore, patterns of associa-
tion and aspirations (for promotion) continued
to differentiate middle-class and working-class
employees; thus their research rejected the
embourgeoisement thesis.
From the 1970s, class theory and research were
affected by a number of different, and sometimes
contradictory, influences. In particular, debates in
class theory became increasingly characterized by
a separation between economic and culturalist
approaches. Theoretical discussions also became
distanced from empirical research, which from
the 1970s was dominated by quantitative class
analysis focusing on occupational aggregates (or
classes) as revealed in large datasets. This employ-
ment aggregate approach was dominated by two
social class
major crossnational projects, the CASMIN (Com-
parative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial
Societies) project, led by Robert Erikson and Gold-
thorpe, and the Comparative Project on Class
Structure and Class Consciousness, coordinated
by Erik Olin Wright.
The revival of interest in Marxism in the 1960s
and 1970s generated highly abstract theoretical
debates, often with a focus on the contested
middle class. For writers influenced by Marx’s
work (N. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capit-
alism, 1975), a key issue lay in the identification of
the actual interests (or location within the class
structure) of the middle classes. As propertyless
employees, they had features in common with
the proletariat, but their labor did not directly
create a surplus (so how could they be exploited?),
and both their levels of material reward, and the
power and authority associated with their employ-
ment situation, served to differentiate them from
the working class. Did their interests, therefore,
lie with the bourgeoisie or with the proletariat?
One reason why this question appeared, to some,
to be crucial was the manifest failure of a unitary
proletarian or working-class consciousness to ma-
terialize in any sustained form in western indus-
trial societies. Some writers (often influenced by
the upsurge of political activism in France in 1968)
identified elements of the middle classes (for
example, scientific and technical workers) as a
new working class that might assume the revolu-
tionary vanguard. Others argued that both the
interests and politics of the middle classes lay
closer to those of the employers. Rather than
being in the middle, this class was described as
the service class, rewarded for faithful service to
employers by career progression and material
benefits.
The identification of class with employment
and property relationships emphasizes the eco-
nomic dimension of the class concept. However,
throughout much of the twentieth century, ex-
plorations of the economic and the cultural di-
mensions of class were linked via a continuing
interest in class consciousness or identity. In the
nineteenth century, Engels had identified the
presence in Britain of an aristocracy of labor,
that is, the better-paid elements of the (skilled)
working class who were thereby induced to dis-
identify with the proletariat. In a similar vein, the
failure of a unitary working-class consciousness to
emerge as capitalism developed was widely attri-
buted to the fragmentation of class identities de-
pendent on diverse community and employment
experiences or cultures (Lockwood, “Sources of
social class
Variation in Working-Class Images of Society,”
1966, Sociological Review). For example, the rela-
tional proximity of some employees (such as agri-
cultural workers) to their employers was held to
generate a “deferential” class identity, whereas
the employment and community experiences of,
say, miners were more likely to generate a “trad-
itional proletarian” consciousness. The protagon-
ists in these debates were not necessarily Marxists,
but in respect of consciousness, these kinds of
arguments implicitly employ a structure → con-
sciousness → action model of social behavior, in
which structure (that is, material circumstance) is
assumed to be causally dominant.
This broadly materialist approach to class and
the generation of identities was buttressed by
H. Braverman’s influential Labor and Monopoly
Capital (1974). Although Braverman was explicit
that he was describing a class in itself rather
than a class for itself, nevertheless, his account
of the inexorable deskilling of work in the circum-
stances of monopoly (large-scale) capitalism appar-
ently seemed to resolve a number of issues for
materialist, Marxist-influenced approaches, which
were enthusiastically taken up by a number of
authors (R. Crompton and G. Jones, White-Collar
Proletariat, 1984). The processes of deskilling were
seen to be leading to the potential homogeniza-
tion of proletarian employment, thus removing
the barriers to working-class unity. Moreover,
the deskilling of clerical (conventionally assigned
to “middle” occupational categories) employ-
ment would increase the ranks of the proletariat
itself. Nevertheless, the question of actually
existing class consciousness remained problem-
atic. Some writers (notably social historians; see
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class, 1963) had never subscribed to the distinction
between classes in and for themselves. For these
authors, classes were called into being by the gen-
eration of consciousness itself, rather than any
deterministic structural factors. Besides the ap-
parent failure of consciousness to materialize,
however, during the 1970s wider social changes
were calling into question the utility of the class
concept in sociology.
The origins of many critiques of class as an ana-
lytical tool lay in the global economic and political
transformations that followed successive economic
crises from the 1960s onwards. C. Crouch (Social
Change in Western Europe, 1999) has described the
period after the end of World War II as the “mid
[twentieth] century social compromise.” This was in
a broad sense a class “compromise.” Governments
of left and right supported social protections and
563
social class
increasing welfare, and left-wing (“working-class”)
parties and their representatives did not seek to
destabilize existing social arrangement in any rad-
ical way. An important argument that captures the
prevailing mood of these times is expressed in
Thomas H. Marshall’s (Citizenship and Social Class
and Other Essays, 1950) identification of the rise of
“social citizenship,” that is, those rights which
enable the citizen “to share to the full in the social
heritage and to live the life of a civilized being
according to the standards prevailing in the soci-
ety.” In an oft-quoted phrase, Marshall described
the ideals of citizenship as being at war with the
class system.
These arrangements may be described as char-
acteristic of Fordism, a term that has been widely
employed to describe the industrial and social
order that emerged in many advanced capitalist
societies after World War II. Fordism was charac-
terized by mass production, full employment (at
least as far as men were concerned), the develop-
ment of state welfare, and rising standards of
consumption. However, no sooner had it been
identified than western Fordism began to unravel.
Rising prices (in particular for oil) and inflation in
the West were accompanied by rapid industrial-
ization in South East Asia and an influx of cheaper
goods to the West. Pressures on government re-
venues as well as a sharp increase in unemployment
(associated with deindustrialization) put consider-
able strains on welfare spending. In the West, the
election of Ronald Reagan’s administration (1981–9)
and Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–90)
signaled a turn to economic neoliberalism, while,
in the eastern bloc, state socialist regimes began to
collapse from the end of the 1980s.
These political developments were accompan-
ied by the shift of academic Marxism in a more
culturalist direction. Post-Marxists E. Laclau and
C. Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985), for
example, rejected the notion of objective (that is,
structurally determined) class interests and em-
phasized the variable and discursive construction
of such interests. Indeed, this turn to culture was
reflected in sociology more generally. In any case,
the utility of class for the analysis of postmodern
societies (in which, it was argued, consumption
had assumed greater significance than produc-
tion) had already been challenged. Following
from the identification of housing classes in the
1970s, a developing strand of argument took
the position that consumption had become a
more useful axis than class via which to explore
group cleavages and patterns of identity in con-
temporary societies. J. Pakulski and M. Walters
564
social class
(The Death of Class, 1996), for example, argue that
culture and its consumption constitute the major
axis of stratification in postmodern societies. Indi-
vidual wants and desires, it is suggested, are in the
process of replacing past collective solidarities.
The current emphasis on individualism and its
consequences for class theory and analysis is an
issue to which I will return later, but first the
implications for class analysis of changes in the
occupational structure will be examined.
Deindustrialization in the West was associated
with a dramatic decline in what had been viewed
as unambiguously working-class occupations – in
steel-working, manufacturing, mining, and so
on. Lower-level jobs in the service sector (for
example, in retail, fast food, and caring occupa-
tions) have expanded, but so have the number of
professional and managerial occupations – by
convention, service-class occupations. The nu-
merical decline in the working class was also
associated with the erosion of locality and com-
munity structures that had been argued to gen-
erate the collective proletarian identities of the
structure → consciousness → action model. More
importantly, the expansion of women’s employ-
ment raised important questions as to how
women, as employees, should be located within
the occupational (class) structure.
Both the CASMIN and Comparative Class Struc-
ture projects had devised alternative, sociologic-
ally informed class schemes for the analyses of
their data (large-scale, random-sample surveys
conducted in a number of different countries).
Both of these occupational classifications are
argued to reflect patterns of economic class rela-
tions, and both sets of authors distinguish their
classifications from commonsense status scales
such as those of the Registrar-General. Erikson
and Goldthorpe’s scheme (CASMIN) has been
described as “neo-Weberian,” although this is per-
haps a somewhat misleading description, as Gold-
thorpe’s (On Sociology, 2000) post-hoc account of the
theoretical underpinnings of his class scheme,
grounded in employment relations, can be seen
as drawing insights from both Weber and Marx.
However, Wright’s occupational class classifica-
tion (Comparative Class Structure) was unambigu-
ously Marxist in its inspiration. There are two
versions of Wright’s class scheme. The first version
is structured around ownership, as well as author-
ity and control in employment. The second ver-
sion of the scheme, deriving from game-theoretic
Marxism, is based on relations of exploitation de-
riving from the possession of different assets, in-
cluding capital, organization assets, and skill or
social class
credential assets. As many critics have noted, this
second version of Wright’s scheme has many par-
allels with Weber’s account of class.
The major objective of the CASMIN project was
the investigation of social mobility. In the United
States, Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan’s
research (The American Occupational Structure, 1967)
had apparently demonstrated that educational
background and early work experiences were
more important than social origin (class) in deter-
mining mobility chances. These findings con-
firmed the positive industrial-society thesis (C.
Kerr et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man, 1960).
This thesis argued that industrial development
would be associated with rising living standards,
middle-class expansion, and the triumph of
achievement over ascription. All of these factors,
it was argued, would lead to a less polarized class
structure and a decline in class conflict. However,
Goldthorpe and his colleagues (R. Erikson and J.
Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux, 1992) demonstrated
that, although rates of absolute social mobility
had increased, this was largely due to changes in
the occupational structure, as the expansion of
professional and managerial occupations (to-
gether with the decline in working-class occupa-
tions) will mean that an increasing proportion of
higher-level jobs will have to be filled from below.
However, relative rates of social mobility, that is,
the relative chances of achieving a service-class
occupation depending on class of origin, had
remained remarkably stable. Thus, despite out-
ward appearances, the class structure of industrial
societies had not become more open.
Wright’s original research objectives differed
considerably from those of Goldthorpe and his col-
leagues. One of the major issues explored was the
characteristics of and variations in the class struc-
ture itself (Goldthorpe and his colleagues took the
occupational structure as largely given, and the
statistical techniques employed controlled for
structural variations between countries). Inspired
by Marx’s analysis, Wright examined the question
of whether the class structure was, in fact, becom-
ing increasingly proletarian. In fact, Wright found
that, in the United States, the working class
was actually declining as a proportion of the
labor force, apparently confirming aspects of
the industrial-society thesis. However, the compos-
ition of the working class has changed in that
women, and members of ethnic minorities, are
now in the majority. Wright also investigated the
interaction between sex and class, as well as the
question of class consciousness, which showed con-
siderable variation across different societies
social class
(Wright, Class Counts, 1997). In general, this expli-
citly Marxist class project has not served to dem-
onstrate the robustness of Marx’s predictions, but
Wright nevertheless continues to argue that
Marx’s analytical framework provides the theoret-
ically most coherent account of capitalism.
It might be suggested that both the CASMIN
project and Wright’s Comparative Project were
from the beginning relatively limited in what
they were able to achieve given their chosen
methods, for there are problems with the opera-
tionalization of class via an occupational measure.
Most obviously, occupation gives no indication
of wealth holdings; thus the owners of capital
are lost to sight. The occupational structure is
also stratified by gender, race and ethnicity, and
age; that is, the occupational structure is shaped
by status as well as class. Indeed, the same occupa-
tion may be associated with different life chances
depending on whether the employee is male or
female, old or young, black or white. There will be
an inescapable arbitrariness in the allocation of
groups to particular categories – for example, the
owner of an enterprise with fewer than twenty-six
employees would be placed in a different class to
the owner of a firm with twenty-six or more in
Goldthorpe’s scheme. A further problem lies in
the class allocation of individuals without an
occupation – for example, the long-term un-
employed, or women carrying out domestic work
in the home. It must be stressed that these kinds
of difficulties do not invalidate the employment-
aggregate approach to class analysis, but they
impose limitations on its scope.
However, one negative outcome of the domin-
ance of quantitative class analysis during the
1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s was that debates
within this strand became increasingly focused on
measurement issues. As Mike Savage argues, “The
‘point’ of class analysis was rarely discussed,
rather attention focused on how best to define
class in occupational terms” (Class Analysis and
Social Transformation, 2000). In fact, occupational
measures of class (including status scales) inter-
correlate quite highly and, for the individual re-
searcher, the best measure may be a pragmatic
rather than a theoretical choice. One point that
should be emphasized, however, is that, despite
the many criticisms that have been directed at
occupational class schemes, they remain one
of the most effective tools available for the map-
ping and exploration of social and economic
inequalities.
Debates within employment-aggregate class
analysis tended to be rather self-contained (and
565
social class
self-referential), although they ran parallel with
broader arguments as to the significance of class
in contemporary societies (see Rosemary Cromp-
ton, Class and Stratification, 1998). The general
tenor of these wider debates (for example, C. Clark
and S. M. Lipset, “Are Social Classes Dying?” 1991,
and Ulrich Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim, Individual-
ization, 2002) has been to argue that, although the
class concept might have had some value as far as
the analysis of earlier phases of capitalist develop-
ment was concerned, it had lost its cutting edge in
relation to the understanding of postmodern, late
modern, or postindustrial societies. These argu-
ments might be summarized as follows: first, class
no longer serves as a basis for the organization of
politics or social protest more generally; rather,
social movements with a focus on particular
issues (ecology and the environment, antiwar,
antinuclear, and antiglobalization) had taken
their place. Second, it was argued that class no
longer made a significant contribution to the con-
struction of collective and individual identities.
Rather, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity (and age)
have become more important in defining the indi-
vidual as well as in providing a focus for collective
belonging. Finally, it is argued that class is no
longer relevant as societies have become increa-
singly “individualized.” Thus Beck states that: “In-
dividualization is a concept which describes a
structural, sociological transformation of social
institutions and the relationship of the individual
to society . . . Individualization liberates people
from traditional roles and constraints . . . individ-
uals are removed from status-based classes . . .
Social classes have been detraditionalized.”
It might seem paradoxical that social theorists
were arguing for the redundancy of the class
concept at precisely the same moment as mater-
ial and social inequalities were expanding very
rapidly, in part as a consequence of the adoption
of neoliberal economic and social policies by
national governments and international institu-
tions. The erosion of the “mid [twentieth] century
social compromise” was accompanied by increas-
ing pressures on welfare benefits. Indeed, neolib-
eral commentators (C. Murray, Losing Ground,
1984) argued that the collective welfare provi-
sions developed during the period after World
War II had contributed to the undermining of
individual capacities and thus the emergence
of a welfare-dependent “underclass.” Welfare
reforms, it was argued, had taken away the incen-
tive to work, giving rise to marginal groupings
(lone mothers, the long-term unemployed, and
people living off fraud and crime) who lived in a
566
social class
different world from that of mainstream society.
Trapped in poverty and with no incentive to
work, the attitudes and behavior of these group-
ings simply serve to reproduce disadvantage
across the generations.
Right-wing commentators, therefore, have em-
phasized the moral and cultural deficiencies of
underclass groupings, which are seen as having
been brought into being by the excessive genero-
sity of postwar welfare states. Critics of the under-
class thesis, however, have emphasized the
structural developments that have served to in-
crease the numbers of those in poverty, as well
as being highly critical of the underclass concept
itself. In the United States (where the “underclass”
is overwhelmingly black), W. J. Wilson (The Truly
Disadvantaged, 1987) argued that economic restruc-
turing and the decline in manufacturing employ-
ment had a particularly significant effect on the
inner city. Lacking in job opportunities, inner
cities in the United States became black ghettoes,
deprived of a resident ethnic middle class which,
taking advantage of the opportunities offered by
equal opportunity and affirmative action pro-
grams, had moved out to the suburbs. More ge-
nerally, the underclass concept has been criticized
for its overemphasis on the moral deficiencies of
the very poor. This reflects the political differences
between the protagonists in the underclass
debate. It is often argued controversially that an
important justification for persisting inequality is
that the more successful and better-rewarded are
actually intrinsically and individually superior to
the less successful, and thus deserving of their
good fortune. However, critics of the underclass
thesis argue that the identification of a (morally
deficient) underclass effectively does no more
than blame the victims. In fact, survey evidence
has demonstrated that people without employ-
ment are no less committed to the idea of work,
and no more fatalistic in their attitudes, than
those in employment.
In my concluding arguments, it may be sug-
gested that many contemporary criticisms of the
utility of class analysis may be seen as deriving,
ultimately, from the failure to establish a consist-
ent and enduring link between structure and
action, class and consciousness. The rapid increase
in inequality since the 1970s, for example, was not
accompanied by any sustained class action or re-
sistance. Survey data suggest that the majority of
the population does not consciously locate itself
in class terms. The position taken here is that,
while there may be numerous examples whereby
a link between structure and action might be
social class
demonstrated (most would want to argue that
capitalists have been remarkably effective in fur-
thering their own interests, for example), this
linkage is contingent upon circumstance, and
the absence of such a link should not be assumed
to undermine the validity of class analysis in all
of its many aspects.
The insistence on a rigid separation of class and
status or culture runs the risk of inadequately
acknowledging the role of cultural and status
hierarchies in the creation and reproduction of
class inequalities. Recent work on class has em-
phasized the intertwining of these two dimen-
sions, rather than their separation. The work of
Bourdieu has been developed to demonstrate how
cultural processes are embedded within specific
socioeconomic practices. Socioeconomic locations
are themselves accompanied by fields within
which classed agents operate, guided by habitus
(see habitus and field), that is, mental structures
and dispositions that are socially inculcated
and go largely unremarked. These practices (for
example, the middle-class consciousness of the
benefits of education and practical awareness of
the competitive system) serve to ensure the repro-
duction of class advantage (F. Devine, Class Prac-
tices, 2004). Savage has reworked the thesis of
individualization to argue that the increasing
dominance in contemporary societies of middle-
class, individualized culture lies behind the ab-
sence of collective expressions of class; that is,
class practices have themselves become indivi-
dualized. However, in emphasizing the interde-
pendence of class and social differentiation more
generally, there is a danger that class is simply
conflated with the diffuse practices of social
hierarchy.
A reemphasis on cultural class practices is in
part a reaction to the growing influence of the
cultural turn within the social sciences. However,
the turn to culture, with its emphasis on indivi-
dualized identities and the politics of recognition,
resonates positively with neoliberal defenses of
the market and the importance of individual
rights. Furthermore, a stress on the primacy of
recognition may effectively sideline issues of re-
distribution, which have always been central to
class analysis. Moreover, there are important on-
tological issues that have implications for recent
culturalist discussions of class. In particular, if
it is argued that culture and the economy cannot
be separated (or if class is conflated with hier-
archy), then how can the different elements that
contribute to structures of social inequality be
identified?
social closure
N. Fraser (“Rethinking Recognition,” 2000, New
Left Review; see also J. Scott, Stratification and Power,
1996) has recently suggested a resolution to these
problems that returns to the Weberian distinction
between class and status. Her argument rests on
the analytic separation of culture and economy.
She suggests that class and status reflect two,
analytically distinct, dimensions of social justice.
Class relates to the distribution of disposable re-
sources, status the allocation of recognition. The
cultural definition of different categories of social
actors (status groups) can result in social subor-
dination and thus a lack of full partnership in
social interaction. Fraser argued that claims for
both economic redistribution and cultural re-
cognition can be appraised against the same
evaluative standard of participatory parity, that
is, the social arrangements that permit all adult
members of society to interact with one another
as peers (it may be noted that this argument im-
plicitly resurrects Marshall’s idea of citizenship).
In conclusion, recent debates in class theory
and analysis suggest a continuing need to re-
cognize both that stratification systems are multi-
stranded and that social class is a vital component
of these systems. The way ahead for class analy-
sis is to recognize the increasing complexity of
inequalities in modern societies, without either
beating a retreat in the face of this complexity, or
attempting to resolve the issue by dissolving the
boundaries between the contributory elements.
ROSEMARY CROMPTON
social closure
The terminology of closure and the closely related
language of exclusion and monopolization ap-
pears first in Max Weber’s Economy and Society
(1922 [trans. 1968]). A relationship that is closed
against outsiders is one in which the “participa-
tion of certain persons is excluded, limited, or
subjected to conditions.” Weber noted that many
relationships, including the exclusive erotic mon-
opoly of marriage, membership of sects, personal
relations of loyalty, the caste system, exclusive
clubs, guilds, monastic orders, and various kinds
of hereditary groups which asserted rights also
used the means of closure. In the context of the
economy, the idea of closure as monopolization
is related to the concept in economics of rent-
seeking, and Weber noted that there was a ten-
dency for the economically successful to preserve
their position by closure. The concept of closure,
however, had little impact until it was revived
in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was applied and
elaborated in two different ways.
567
social closure
The first of these uses arose in a specific histo-
rical situation, in which the traditional Marxian
criterion of class membership no longer corres-
ponded to the distribution of wealth and life
chances, and where social position was trans-
mitted and preserved between generations by
means other than the inheritance of wealth.
Among the intellectual sources of the idea of
social closure as a solution to this and related
problems about the nature of power was a book
by Randall Collins entitled The Credential Society: An
Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification
(1979), which suggested that modern society was
a “credential society,” in which such credentials
as academic and professional certification, which
were more accessible to the children of the suc-
cessful, had become primary determinants of
income and social power. Another early source
was Frank Parkin’s Marxism and Class Theory
(1979), in which he argued, against the Marxian
concept of exploitation, that exclusion from
the work force rather than the exploitation of
the employed was the major determinant of life
chances. Raymond Murphy in Social Closure: The
Theory of Monopolization and Exclusion (1988) later
developed these ideas by arguing that the power
to exclude or monopolize better explained the
phenomenon of economic power than Marxian
notions and avoided their difficulties, notably
with the labor theory of value. Murphy also argued
that many social conflicts could be understood in
terms of the creation and defense of monopolies,
which were then contested by those who were
excluded, who attempted to gain access to their
benefits, or, in Murphy’s terms, to “usurp them.”
The second major use is associated with James
S. Coleman, in Public and Private High Schools: The
Impact of Communities (1987), who applied the
notion of closure to informal processes of social
contact, to explain an important and anomalous
empirical finding in the study of American
schools. He had discovered that students in Cath-
olic schools did significantly better than state-
school students on standardized tests, and that
controlling for differences in the students and
the schools did not explain the discrepancy. He
argued that the relatively closed social relations
between parents in Catholic schools enabled the
development of norms for student behavior, and
that this was a valuable form of social capital that
raised and enforced expectations, leading to im-
proved life chances. He later applied this insight
to norm-generation in general.
STEPHEN P. TURNER
568
social conflict
social conflict
The contrast between conflict and consensus as
interpretations of society was at one stage fashio-
nable as a criterion for classifying sociological
theories. For example it was argued that an em-
phasis on social conflict was the defining char-
acteristic of Marxism, whereas an emphasis on
social consensus was the defining characteristic
of structural functionalism. More specifically,
this classification contrasted the legacy of Karl
Marx and class analysis with the influence of
Talcott Parsons who allegedly ignored or neg-
lected conflict in favor of the study of how shared
values underpin social order. This simple classi-
fication is now regarded as inadequate because
any theory of conflict will imply a theory of con-
sensus, and therefore sociologists will inevitably
have to address both aspects of social life. As
David Lockwood argued in Solidarity and Schism
(1992), whereas consensus theory overstated the
normative integration of society, conflict theory
depended too heavily on a utilitarian model of
social action and could not explain how norms
were important in the explanation of social
conflict.
Marx’s theory of social class conflict continues
to be a foundation of any general analysis of
conflict in capitalism. Whereas classical econo-
mists had recognized that a major source of con-
flict in society was the struggle over resources,
and hence scarcity is the principal driving force
behind conflict over access to goods in a competi-
tive market, Marx concentrated on the emergence
of social classes in capitalist societies, where
there is a structural contradiction between the
interests of workers, who want higher wages,
and those of capitalists, who want higher profits.
Conflict in modern societies, according to this
theory, is primarily economic conflict. Marx’s
analysis of capitalism was modified by Ralph
Dahrendorf in his Class and Class Conflict in an In-
dustrial Society (1959) who argued that in modern
industrial relations policy there had been an insti-
tutionalization of conflict because industrial dis-
putes were often settled by negotiation between
trade union officials and the managers of firms.
In the early stages of capitalism, disputes between
workers and capitalists could always escalate
into strikes, social disruption, or revolution. In
advanced capitalist societies, such disputes were
managed through bargaining processes that avoi-
ded the revolutionary potential of industrial
conflict, but such industrial settlements, when
they resulted in a wages spiral, often resulted in
social conflict
inflation. As a result, postwar British society was
characterized by industrial disruption, wage infla-
tion, and low productivity that, in policy terms,
resulted in classic “stop-go” economic crises. Infla-
tion can be seen therefore as an alternative to
class conflict. In more general terms, it is often
claimed that the growth of social citizenship – as
described, for example, by Thomas H. Marshall
(1963) in his Sociology at the Cross Roads – brings
about a reform of capitalism by the inclusion
of workers in society, and thereby reduces their
propensity for social conflict.
In contrast with Marxism, Max Weber’s socio-
logy was seen to provide a more flexible and
subtle understanding of conflict over power.
Resources in human societies are diverse; they
include economic, cultural, and honorific or
status resources. In Weber’s conflict sociology,
groups attempt to monopolize access to resources
through various strategies of power that involve
some form of social closure. One example of social
closure involves credentialism as an aspect of
professional closure: that is, occupational groups
will seek to protect their advantages in the mar-
ketplace by preventing competition from groups
who are deemed to be unqualified. The historical
competition between barbers and surgeons, and
between homeopaths and allopaths, in the history
of medicine is a classical illustration of social
closure. The professional conflicts between regis-
tered doctors, bone setters, apothecaries, and
quacks was brilliantly described by Roy Porter
in his Bodies Politic. Disease. Death and Doctors in
Britain 1650–1900 (2001). The idea that conflict can
occur over any resource has been developed, in
differing forms of social capital theory, by Robert
Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) and by Pierre
Bourdieu in Distinction (1979 [trans. 1984]), in
which he distinguished between cultural, eco-
nomic, social, and symbolic capitals. Conflict will
occur in every field of the distribution of capital in
society where groups struggle to gain competitive
advantage. Bourdieu saw intellectual disagree-
ments between academic traditions as conflicts
over the control of symbolic and cultural capital
in the academy in his Homo Academicus (1984
[trans. 1988]).
In the study of race and ethnicity, Weber’s
conflict sociology was employed by John Rex to
develop a conflict theory of the competition be-
tween ethnic communities over resources. While
Rex drew inspiration from Weber in the develop-
ment of his Social Conflict. A Conceptual and Theoret-
ical Analysis (1981), he also followed the British
colonial administrator John Furnivall who, in
social constructionism
his Colonial Policy and Practice (1968: 304), wrote
that there is a “medley” of different ethnic com-
munities in the market, but socially they “mix
but don’t combine.” Race relations theorists have
subsequently argued that in a plural society social
conflict will be along racial rather than class lines.
This argument raises serious questions therefore
about the possibility of multiculturalism. Contem-
porary societies are consequently characterized
by various forms of conflict in terms of ethnicity,
class, and gender. These contemporary conflicts
are, in plural or multicultural societies, seen to
be conflicts over identity, especially in societies
where religion comes to dominate politics, giving
rise to identity politics. These conflicts, insofar
as they appear to involve major conflicts between
civilizations, have been described by Samuel
Huntington in a famous article in Foreign Affairs
(1993) as the “clash of civilizations”. Because con-
flict is ubiquitous, it is assumed that a special
theory of social conflict is redundant.
BRYAN S. TURNER
social constructionism
A set of theories and concepts in sociology and
other disciplines that seek to explore and explain
social phenomena and occurrences on the basis
of their historical context and social framing,
constructionism thereby traces how seemingly
natural occurrences are constructed through a
history of human actions and interactions. It re-
futes assumptions of essentialism and realism,
namely that an external, objective world exists
outside our categories of perception and inter-
pretation. Social constructionism is thus part of a
relativist turn in social sciences in which categor-
ies and forms of knowledge are contextualized,
debunking myths of their transcendental quality.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s Social
Construction of Reality (1965), generally recognized
as the major social constructionist work of
modern sociology, explores the social construc-
tion of reality as the basic category of human
perception and interaction. While they do not
argue that the material world is in itself con-
structed, our realities within this world are. Sub-
sequent case studies identify instances of social
constructionism across the spectrum of social
classifications, identities, and material objects,
including nationalism, physical and mental ill-
ness, moral panics, social class, taste, technology,
sexuality, gender, and knowledge.
In the sociology of science, studies focusing
on the construction of scientific knowledge in
disciplines such as mathematics (for example
569
social integration
appear (for example, rising crime rates, falling
educational test scores, or rising levels of teenage
pregnancy).
Social indicators are frequently misused, mis-
understood, or manipulated in a variety of ways.
Short-term trends may indicate a larger long-term
pattern of change, or they may merely reflect
“trendless” fluctuation. Mistaking the latter for
a true long-term trend is a common misuse of
such indicators. Critical scrutiny of claims about
trends based on social indicators by social scien-
tists and policy activists is thus an important
part of the larger dialogue over public policies
designed to address social problems. J E F F M A N Z A
social integration
One of the central postulates of functionalism is
that the very idea of a society means that there is
a tendency towards integration among its parts.
Since the different parts of a society are main-
tained by human action, this was frequently inter-
preted to mean the integration of the subjective
meanings and motives of actors. Functionalists,
such as Talcott Parsons, argued that actors ope-
rated within a common culture that both gener-
ated the definition of role expectations and
provided them with internalized need dispos-
itions that served to define wants. Actors respond
not only to positive rewards, but also to internal-
ized feelings of guilt, anxiety, and the need for
approval; a functioning social system is also a
normative order.
For conflict theorists, such as Ralph Dahrendorf
and John Rex, functionalism was too one-sided. It
gave greater emphasis to values and norms, than
to power and social conflict. For Dahrendorf, it
was a “consensus” model. Its emphasis on social
processes tending towards integration was part
of a longstanding conservative tradition in social
theory going back to Plato. It was also unreali-
stic and utopian in proposing a model of society
from which change is absent; social conflict was
more typical of society than social integration.
These criticisms struck a chord, but the position
was unstable for a number of reasons. Parsons
had sought to account for both power and con-
sensus in his model. It was difficult to argue that
the two models could be kept entirely apart and
used separately for different purposes, as Dahren-
dorf and Rex argued, while expressing a prefer-
ence for the conflict model. The issues of conflict
and cooperation, and power and legitimation,
are intertwined.
David Lockwood went further. He argued that
conflict theorists were too concerned with overt
576
social mobility
conflict between actors. Drawing on Karl Marx’s
analysis of capitalism, Lockwood suggested that
what was missing was a concept of system con-
tradiction. Simply put, functionalism had no
place for the idea that the parts of a social system
may contain tendencies towards malintegration,
or contradiction (the exception, perhaps, is Robert
K. Merton’s idea of dysfunction). According to
Lockwood, those tendencies may eventually come
to the surface in the form of oppositional inter-
ests and conflicts among actors. These conflicts
may or may not be contained by the norma-
tive order (for Lockwood, this is an empirical
question).
Rather than proposing two separate models,
Lockwood argued that it is necessary to consider
the question of cooperation, conflict, and social
change in terms of two distinct, but interrelated,
sets of processes. One concerned normative pro-
cesses of social integration, the other concerned
material processes of system integration. The
problem with functionalism was that it conflated
the two and emphasized the mutual operation
of both sets of processes. Lockwood’s ideas have
been taken further in Jürgen Habermas’s develop-
ment of the concepts of system and lifeworld.
JOHN HOLMWOOD
social keynesianism
– see John Maynard Keynes.
social mobility
The movement of individuals and groups within a
stratification order, the comparative study of
social mobility, especially in industrial societies,
is a major area of empirical sociology. Part of the
ideological legitimacy of industrial societies has
been that they are open and meritocratic and the
study of social mobility has been central to the
evaluation of this claim.
Social mobility was first examined systematic-
ally by Pitirim Sorokin in his book Social Mobility
(1927). His fundamental concern was with the
social structure within which movements take
place, and he conceived it to be a structure of
classes. Mobility might be a matter of the rise
and decline of whole classes or other large social
groups (as, for example, in caste mobility), or of
the relative openness of classes to movements
across their boundaries. Before Sorokin, Max
Weber had defined social class in Economy and
Society (1968: 302) as the “totality of those class
situations in which individual and generational
mobility is easy and typical,” while Vilfredo Pareto
social mobility
had written on the circulation of elites in The Rise
and Fall of the Elites (1968).
Within advanced industrial societies, the study
of social mobility is more usually concerned
with a structure of occupations, ranked in terms
of their relative advantages and disadvantages.
Intergenerational mobility compares children’s
occupational achievements with those of their
parents, while intragenerational mobility is con-
cerned with an individual’s movement within
their own lifetime. The greater the mobility
between generations or over the life-course, the
more open the society is regarded to be, and the
less durable its system inequality.
According to Robert Erikson (1938– ) and John
Goldthorpe in The Constant Flux (1992), the liberal
theory of industrialism (which they associate
with functionalism) proposes that industrial soci-
eties, when compared with preindustrial ones,
are characterized by high rates of social mobility;
upward mobility predominates over downward
mobility, mobility opportunities are more equal
across groups, and rates of mobility and the
degree of equality of opportunity increase over
time. Social positions in preindustrial society are
largely ascribed, whereas in industrial society they
are increasingly achieved through meritocratic
selection.
Feminists have criticized the emphasis on
male heads of household and father-to-son mo-
bility, arguing that it misses the performance of
gender-ascribed roles in the household and their
impact on the wider stratification order.
Social mobility raises serious issues of concep-
tualization and measurement. Peter M. Blau and
Otis Dudley Duncan analyzed mobility in terms
of occupations ranked in a continuous hierarchy
of socioeconomic standing. In contrast, Marxist
and Weberian class theorists, such as Erik Wright
and Goldthorpe, argue that what should be stud-
ied is movement between bounded groups defined
in class terms. Class theorists downplay the idea
of movement within a hierarchy, though there
are undoubted implications of a continuous
hierarchy of positions in the way in which occupa-
tions are assigned to “classes” on the basis of
“more or less” income or authority. In this con-
ceptualization, there is interclass mobility as
well as intraclass mobility.
The occupational structure itself has changed
with the development of industrial society (for
example, there has been a decline in the number
of manual jobs and a corresponding rise in the
number of white-collar jobs). Some mobility
would necessarily follow from changes in the
social mobility
occupational structure, if there were an increase
in the number of higher-class locations compared
with lower-class occupations. This seems to have
taken place, despite attempts by some Marxists to
assert a general thesis of the proletarianization
of occupations. Increased measurement sophisti-
cation, with the development of log-linear model-
ing, has enabled the analysis of rates of relative
mobility as a more appropriate measure of open-
ness; that is, the chances of an individual with
origins in one class finishing up in a particular
destination class rather than another, when com-
pared with individuals from a different class of
origin. Equally, the comparison could be with
relative positions in a hierarchy.
Class theorists suggest that high rates of social
mobility in industrial societies are largely an
artifact of changes in the class structure. Mobility
opportunities became more equal relatively early
on in the process of industrialism, but for much
of the twentieth century they have remained
stable and rates of relative mobility have re-
mained unchanged. Critics of class-based schemes
have argued that they tend to overemphasize ri-
gidities and that, while inequality is very durable
and the early thesis of industrial society was
overstated, there is a secular weakening of family
influence that continues through the twentieth
century.
The argument that meritocratic selection
should be the basis of achievement in industrial
societies is also strongly associated with the view
that education is a vehicle of selection. In 1960,
Ralph H. Turner suggested two ideal types of
sponsored versus contest mobility for considering
differences between the British and American
educational systems, respectively, though with
wider application beyond those two systems. In
sponsored mobility, there is early selection by
the elite of promising candidates from lower
echelons, while in contest mobility candidates
self-select themselves through effort and compete
on an equal footing for available elite positions.
The difference reflects the greater role of trad-
itional, status aspects within the British system
(for example, in selective schools, the role of
Oxford and Cambridge Universities), compared
with that of the United States.
In contest mobility, the availability of elite
positions places no restriction on the provision
of educational qualifications or their pursuit;
other sociologists, most notably Randall Collins,
have identified the tendency towards credential-
ism in the American educational system and
have attributed this to competition among ethnic
577
social movement theory
groups. Turner draws attention to the psycholo-
gical consequences of the two systems in terms of
their impact on feelings of worth and “phantasy
aspirations.” While Turner’s types are overstated –
he calls them ideal types – they draw attention to
cultural elements in the reproduction of social
inequality and its hidden injuries. These themes
were developed by the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu and his idea of the habitus of social
classes; the unequal social order determines the
experiences and ways of thinking of those diffe-
rently located within it, such that their attitudes
and behavior serve to reproduce inequalities and
thus limit mobility. JOHN HOLMWOOD
social movement theory
– see social movements.
social movements
These are relatively spontaneous forms of col-
lective political action which break everyday rou-
tines and challenge established political norms;
the term originated in the circle around Claude
Henri Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon in the after-
math of the French Revolution. From the middle
of the nineteenth century, it became associated
with the working class and the labor movement.
In their Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels identified the working class
and the labor movement as the prime historical
agents of social change in modern society. It was
Lorenz von Stein who, in the mid-1840s, coined
the German phrase which later translated into the
English “social movement” and Werner Sombart
who established its study as a legitimate object
of research.
Max Weber and Émile Durkheim conceptual-
ized social movements in relation to problems
of social integration, as forms of behavior asso-
ciated with periods of societal transition. The cen-
tral concern was with integrating the working
class and creating a new social order within the
nation-state. Social movements, conceived in
terms of social classes or masses, were forces
demanding to be recognized by and integrated
into the institutional framework of the nation.
This set a pattern for later interpretations.
The rise of fascism as a mass movement pro-
vided the next phase in the conceptualization of
social movements. Rather than seeking integra-
tion, these movements presented a threat to estab-
lished political institutions. Knowledge of them
was considered essential not to the promotion
of social integration but to prevent societal
578
social movements
disintegration. Influenced by theories of crowd
behavior developed by Gustav Le Bon, social move-
ments were interpreted as a form of collective
behavior and understood on a scale of rationality,
from the irrational behavior of the crowd to the
more rational social movement. Opposed to Le
Bon, this approach called for a social rather
than psychological explanation of group behavior.
While displaying similar characteristics to a
crowd, a social movement was considered more
rational because of an underlying goal-orientation
and the potential for new norms to emerge as it
developed. Herbert Blumer, who was closely asso-
ciated with symbolic interactionism, was a signifi-
cant figure in this theoretical development.
Blumer attributed a degree of creativity and social
learning to social movements.
Also significant in the development of the col-
lective behavior perspective, Talcott Parsons’s art-
icle “Sociological Aspects of Fascist Movements,”
in Social Forces (1942) made use of classical social
theory to explain the emergence of contentious
collective behavior as due to “strains” relating to
the rationalization of society which accompanied
modernization. Social movements were concep-
tualized from a macro-perspective as collective
behavior caused by the strain stemming from
rapid social change, which both marginalized
and then constituted certain groups.
The collective behavior perspective focused
on the strains of societal transition and the alien-
ation and marginalization of groups in relation
to them. The social movements of the 1960s called
this into question, given the number of middle-
class college students involved in them. What
came to be called the resource mobilization perspec-
tive emerged with an organizational and institu-
tional focus. Far from marginal and irrational
crowd behavior, social movements were concep-
tualized as structured, purposive–rational action.
As the name indicates, resource mobilization called
attention to the efficient and effective mobilization
of resources as the prime indicator of success in
social movement. Key actors in this process were
called “movement entrepreneurs,” whose role was
the management of resources within social move-
ment organizations (M. N. Zald and J. D. McCarthy,
Social Movements in an Organizational Society, 1987).
As opposed to collective behavior, resource mobi-
lization conceptualized social movements in
structured settings and as themselves already
structured. Besides forms of organization, central
issues concerned leadership and the management
and effective use of available recourses, including
ideas as well as the traditional money and people.
social psychology
crime, drug abuse, poverty, HIV/AIDS, racism, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Erich Fromm, and
sexism, legal immigration, urban decay and gang Paul Lazarsfeld. Sociological social psychology
violence. J A C Q U E L I N E S C H N E I D E R eschews the individualism of the experimental
social psychology
Existing as a sub-discipline within both sociology
and psychology since the early twentieth century,
the first textbooks on social psychology were pub-
lished independently in 1908 by a sociologist,
Edward Ross (1866–1951) (Social Psychology: An Out-
line and Source Book), and a psychologist, William
McDougall (1871–1938) (Introduction to Social Psycho-
logy). Social psychology continues to straddle the
border between sociology and psychology. How-
ever, despite a number of theoretical concerns in
common, sociological social psychology and psy-
chological social psychology remain largely inde-
pendent endeavors.
Psychological and sociological social psycho-
logy are distinct in scope and focus. Contem-
porary work in social psychology is dominated by
American research in the area of social cognition,
which draws heavily on the experimental method,
and applies instruments such as attitude scales to
such topics as stereotyping and prejudice, cogni-
tive dissonance, and relative deprivation. In con-
trast, sociological social psychology has been
historically influenced by phenomenology and
symbolic interactionism, and has investigated the
impact of social structural variables on human
behavior and/or personality. Sociological social
psychology employs a range of non-experimental
methods such as surveys and fieldwork methods,
including participant observation.
Psychological social psychology acquired legiti-
macy as a science through the application of
the experimental method during the 1930s, and
was influenced by the tenets of behaviorism, in
which experimental manipulations were used to
effect and measure changes in attitudes and be-
havior. Although foundational studies in the field
would be considered unethical by modern stand-
ards – for instance Stanley Milgram’s studies of
authority in 1961, and Philip Zimbardo’s prison
experiments of 1971 – a more conservative variant
of this laboratory-based research tradition con-
tinues to exemplify American social psychology.
Sociological social psychology is marked by its
rejection of experimental laboratory methods
in favor of naturalistic fieldwork and survey
methods. This tradition encompasses the founda-
tional work of Erving Goffman, George Caspar
Homans, and George Herbert Mead, as well as
the Frankfurt School’s amalgamation of Marxism
and psychoanalysis, especially as realized by
social role
tradition to focus on the study of social behavior
from an interactional perspective, such as in work
in ethnomethodology on the intersubjective ac-
complishment of identity, or the investigation of
the dynamics of groups and organizations. While
the social psychology of authoritarianism was of
common concern to both sub-disciplines between
the 1930s and the 1960s, the epistemological con-
flict between the two psychologies came to the
fore in the 1970s, in what was known as the
“crisis.” During this time, the laboratory-based ex-
perimental methods of psychological social psych-
ology became the subject of sustained critique.
More recently, discursive social psychology,
with roots in ethnomethodology and conversa-
tional analysis, and the work of Harold Garfinkel
and Harvey Sacks, has introduced sociological
concerns into psychological social psychology. In
turn, research methods employed by discursive
social psychologists – such as discourse analysis
and the study of interpretative repertoires – have
since been adopted within sociology. The social
constructionism movement provides a middle
ground for the development of communication
between sociological and psychological social
psychology. MARK RAPLEY AND SUSAN HANSEN
social rights
– see rights.
social role
The concept social role refers to the repertoire of
possible behaviors associated with social position
in cooperative relations, that is social standing
or social status. The terms role and status are
associated, on the one hand, with functionalism
in sociology, put forward by Talcott Parsons and
Robert K. Merton, and, on the other hand, with
symbolic interactionism, associated with George
Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. Whereas the
functionalist notion of role emphasizes socially
prescribed behavioral and attitudinal expect-
ations that attach to a particular status, symbolic
interactionist understandings of role focus on
the elaboration of practices available to a role
incumbent. Neither approach has much currency
in sociology today. Indeed, the term role is more
likely to be used in everyday conversation than
in sociological writing. There are a number of
reasons for this. First, the co-relative concept of
status has been diminished since the mid twenti-
eth century. If it survives at all it refers to
583
social sciences
position in a scheme of social stratification, and
the associated conditions are unequal distribu-
tions of resources not roles. Also, in a social cli-
mate of supposed individual autonomy, the
concept of role has come to suggest a much higher
degree of plasticity than the notion of social status
itself could permit. In late capitalist society, roles
appear to be freely chosen, and their performance
determined solely by the personal interpret-
ations their incumbents invent. Here the social
character of status is almost totally lost through
the highly ideological connotations that have
attached themselves to the role concept.
JACK BARBALET
social sciences
Theoretically, methodologically, and institutio-
nally broad-ranging and diverse in character, the
social sciences aim at nothing less than the analysis
and understanding of human society. In pursuit of
this goal, social scientists have studied the struc-
tures, practices, and processes of many elements of
society including, inter alia, its economy, religion,
law (see law and society), politics, language, and
beliefs; how these are manifested in the daily lives
of people, in both their mentality and their social
actions; and how individuals are socialized into the
ways of acting and believing which enable them
to be competent members of that society. This
breadth has given rise to the study of a multitude
of specific phenomena, ranging from broad large-
scale issues such as the class structure of societies
and patterns of advantage and disadvantage, to
very specific detailed matters such as how conver-
sationalists organize their turns at speaking in a
conversation.
Some social science disciplines are motivated by
specific fields of interest, for example, in the case of
politics and economics, while others are driven by a
more synthetic approach, as in the case of anthro-
pology or sociology. While some of its disciplines
are comparatively new as distinct perspectives, for
example, social psychology, all of them can trace
the origins of their ideas and investigative practices
to much earlier periods. Every discipline can find a
classical precursor when necessary, and many lay
claim to the same figures even though nowadays
they are often seen to be quite distinct. While
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is most often seen as
a figure of importance within the field of politics, it
is quite easy to see within his work many psycho-
logical and sociological claims that are reflected in
contemporary work. More recently, Karl Marx is
seen as a precursor for more or less every social
science discipline, according to some.
584
social status
The disciplinary specialization we see nowadays
is very much a phenomenon of the period from
the late nineteenth century onwards. It is often
decried as inhibiting the proper study of social
phenomena, and interdisciplinarity repeatedly
comes into vogue. However, the institutional, pro-
fessional, and theoretical positions of many social
scientists ensure that the disciplines have be-
come a fixed and enduring fact of life. This will
continue to be the case as long as the social sci-
ences do not have an agreed position on what
constitutes secure knowledge and how it might
be acquired, as is to be found within the natural
sciences. The comparative success of the latter
has led some to success by imitating its practices.
Others, in contrast, have sought to prove on
a-priori grounds that any such project for the
discovery of secure social scientific knowledge
is bound to fail. These led to one British govern-
ment minister requiring the United Kingdom
Social Science Research Council to change its
name on the grounds that there could be no
such thing as a social science. Ironically, the idea
of evidence-based policy is very much in favor in
the United Kingdom nowadays, but the name has
not been changed back again.
Specifying the boundaries of the social sciences
can also be problematic. On the one hand, many
disciplines have components that clearly sit
within and without, for example, psychology, his-
tory, and law. Some of these have elsewhere been
characterized as more properly called the “human
sciences.” On the other hand, other disciplines,
most notably biology, have sought to arrogate to
themselves the explanation of social phenomena
such as violence, aggression, and competition,
and thereby deny a role for the social sciences.
Ultimately, the quintessential social sciences
are synthetic disciplines such as sociology and
anthropology, but it is quite clear that many of
the phenomena they seek to explain are in part
dependent on biological and other phenomena
that currently lie outside their remit. A successful
social science will be one that finds the basis of
a felicitous integration of cultural, historical, and
biological accounts. DAVID GOOD
social status
This term is used in three analytical contexts
with quite different meanings. In the analysis of
social structure and differentiation, social status
refers to (1) a position in social relations (for
example student, parent, or priest) that is socially
recognized and normatively regulated. This gen-
eric usage is often contrasted with a more specific
social status
one, associated with sociological studies of in-
equalities, and meaning, (2) a hierarchical pos-
ition in a vertical social order, an overall social
rank, standing, and social worth. In this context,
individual statuses are associated with privileges
and discriminations. Finally, in contemporary
studies of social stratification, especially those
inspired by Max Weber, social status refers to
(3) an aspect of hierarchical location in the social
order derived from established cultural conven-
tions (traditional beliefs and popular creeds). It
is contrasted with class (market position in the
economic order) and party (authority or command
position in the political/organizational order). In
this Weberian context, hierarchical status pos-
itions reflect the unequal conventional distribu-
tion of honor (esteem) and the accompanying life
chances, while class positions reflect unequal dis-
tribution of market endowments and the accom-
panying lifechances. The occupants of these
positions form status groups characterized by
common lifestyles, tastes, social proximity, and
intermarriage. Traditional aristocracies, ethno-
racial groups, and lifestyle communities, such as
“yuppies,” are all examples of status groups. In
Edward Shils’s view (Center and Periphery, 1975),
all societies engender status inequalities, and
these inequalities reflect distance from the center
which represents the shared value standards. This
echoes Émile Durkheim’s proposition that status
represents a distance from “the sacred” – the sym-
bolic representations of society (see sacred and
profane dichotomy). This link with the sacred
gives strong legitimacy to status distinctions.
Status group members reinforce these distinc-
tions by claiming monopolies over certain privil-
eges, titles, occupational roles, and styles of dress.
The penetration of traditional status distinc-
tions into the fabric of modern society was the
main theme of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the
Leisure Class (1899). Social esteem enjoyed by the
upper strata, argued Veblen, did not depend on
their wealth or power; it had to be earned through
conventional social practices, in particular the
avoidance of vulgar forms of labor, especially ser-
vices, engagement in “vicarious leisure,” and con-
spicuous consumption. Earning and cultivating
esteem was a task pursued by families, rather
than individuals. While the paterfamilias led and
provided, his wife and children cultivated social
networks.
The processes of modernization have weakened
status conventions and undermined established
status hierarchies. The social distance scores –
the most popular sociological measures of status
social status
divisions between ethno-racial categories – have
been showing a steady decline since they were
first applied in the 1920s. However, new status
hierarchies and divisions emerge around occupa-
tions, citizenship (or lack of it), and civic activism,
as well as cultural consumption, tastes, and life-
styles. Thus the occupational status rankings and
occupational prestige scales, constructed mainly
by American sociologists, show a change, rather
than a decline. The old arguments about the sali-
ence of race and ethnicity, and gender as the key
determinants of social status were supplemented
by new arguments about the importance of edu-
cation, civic/citizenship status, consumption, and
taste. New theories of status, principally in the
work of European sociologists, such as Bryan S.
Turner in Status (1988), re-opened the issue of the
role of the modern state in managing status in-
equalities by granting citizenship rights to all
its members. Turner followed in the footsteps of
Thomas H. Marshall in exploring the expansion
of citizenship rights, and he pointed to an ex-
pansion of more universalistic human rights in
the context of globalizing trends. Efforts to iden-
tify the new status hierarchies of consumption
and taste were fueled by Pierre Bourdieu, espe-
cially in Distinction (1979 [trans. 1984]). Bourdieu
purposefully fused (some critics say conflated)
status and class, and highlighted the importance
of gender, race and ethnicity as core status distinc-
tions. His book on masculinities (Masculine Domina-
tion, 1998 [trans. 2000]) carries indelibly the
signature of his distinguished predecessor and
countryman, Durkheim. Bourdieu, like Durkheim,
saw status inequalities as constituted hierarchic-
ally through collective representations and sym-
bolic classifications in relation to the “legitimate
culture” – a close equivalent to the sacred in clas-
sic Durkheimian analyses. While popular, studies
of taste and consumption illustrate the numerous
difficulties in constructing synthetic status hierar-
chies with more than local scope and applicability.
There seems to be an agreement among con-
temporary sociologists that the key determinants
of social status (standing, esteem, and prestige) in
advanced societies are occupation/class, educa-
tion/skill, race/ethnicity, gender, citizenship, and
cultural consumption. They show quite different
dynamics. While the ascribed and traditional
sources of status distinction (primarily race and
gender) decline in importance, the status-leveling
impact of citizenship continues, and the status-
stratifying impact of education and cultural con-
sumption have been increasing. There also seems
to be an agreement that postmodern trends
585
social stratification
weaken further traditional status distinctions and
blur status hierarchies. The hierarchies of con-
sumption and taste, in particular, seem to frag-
ment and decompose. They show less clarity,
stability, and anchoring in “communal norms
and values” than the old status divisions. Life-
styles are so diverse and fickle that they defy at-
tempts at a clear status ordering – the point made
by all students of postmodernization. The new
status hierarchies based on consumption and life-
style are fragmenting under the impact of value
polytheism, rampant consumerism, and increas-
ing commercial pressures. Intense social mobility,
combined with the increased interpenetration of
diverse value systems (and tastes) that accompan-
ies globalization, also contribute to blurring and
fragmentation of status hierarchies in advanced
societies. JAN PAKULSKI
social stratification
Social stratification is usually contrasted with
social differentiation. Differentiation involves
the formation of horizontal social divisions; stra-
tification involves vertical (hierarchical) ranking
of social strata. Some sociologists also contrast
stratification, which implies gradation, with
social class divisions, which are seen as polar
and antagonistic. Stratification implies persistent
gradation of social classes, occupational groups,
and ethno-racial categories. Strata may be nom-
inal, constructed by sociologists, or real, reflecting
actual social distances. Real strata are divided
by social distances and systematic exclusions.
Sociologists also distinguish closed stratification
systems, such as the Hindu caste system, from
open ones, such as modern occupational/class
systems. In the former, social mobility is discour-
aged and restricted by traditional conventions.
In the latter, mobility is typical, intense, and so-
cially approved. In the functional theory of stra-
tification, sociologists portray stratification as
socially beneficial and consensual. Conflict theor-
ists perceive stratification as contested and ac-
companied by domination. Marxists see it as an
outcome of economic exploitation engendered
in class relations, while Weberians treat it as
an outcome of multifaceted domination in
combination with socioeconomic class, sociocul-
tural status and sociopolitical power/authority
hierarchies.
Modern stratification systems are open – social
mobility is frequent and expected – and they
emphasize achieved characteristics, such as
education/knowledge, skills, performance, and
experience. They are also increasingly complex,
586
social stratification
with various criteria and dimensions of stratifica-
tion interacting and cross-cutting each other. The
rankings of individuals and groups in various di-
mensions of social hierarchies seldom coincide,
thus resulting in status inconsistency. The most
popular representation of modern stratification
systems is in the form of national occupational
status gradations, often scaled. Such status
schemes prove most popular in the United States;
European sociologists seem to prefer synthetic
occupational class maps. While there is a wide
consensus that occupational and employment sta-
tuses form the backbone of modern stratification,
it is accepted that social strata may also develop
around other assets and locations:
• political influence, authority (as in Ralph
Dahrendorf );
• ethno-racial status, prestige (as in W. Lloyd
Warner or Edward A. Shils);
• education, skills, human capital, expert know-
ledge (as in Gary Becker and Daniel Bell);
• social networks, ties, social capital (as in
James S. Coleman);
• “cultural capital,” taste, lifestyle, gender (as
in Pierre Bourdieu);
• rights, entitlements, privileges (as in Bryan S.
Turner).
Contemporary students of social stratification
typically combine class, occupational status, and
authority dimensions into synthetic gradations
(stratification schemes and class maps). Anthony
Giddens (The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies,
1973) and Ralph Dahrendorf (The Modern Social
Conflict, 1988), for example, draw stratification
maps that include occupational classes, elites,
and socially marginalized strata (underclasses).
Similarly, John Goldthorpe (Social Mobility and
Class Structure in Modern Britain, 1987) synthesizes
class and occupational schemes into an eleven-
class map. Erik Olin Wright (Class Counts, 1997), in
turn, juxtaposes class analysis to a study of race
and gender stratification. His class/stratification
schemes also incorporate the dimensions of man-
agerial control and skill/expertise. Finally, Bell
(The Coming of Post Industrial Society, 1973) and
Gøsta Esping-Anderson (Changing Classes, 1993) ac-
commodate in their postindustrial class maps
the dimension of power/authority (elite or polit-
ical directorate), economic integration, and citi-
zenship rights (outsiders and underclass). With
advancing globalization, many sociologists see
the whole world as stratified, typically along the
economic/developmental and power dimensions.
Thus the dependency and world-system theorists
distinguish the global power strata between
social structure
countries of the core, semi-periphery, and
periphery. JAN PAKULSKI
social structure
The product of human agency, social structures
express the fact that what people intend should
never be confused with what results.
Premodern thought is basically structural in
character. People act through social roles that
determine their action, and great stress is laid
upon executing a particular role according to the
norms governing it. A male feudal lord is expected
to act quite differently from, say, a female servant.
These structures are seen as timeless, and are
usually ascribed to the creative interventions of a
higher divinity.
With the onset of modernity, all this dramatic-
ally changes. People are presented as individuals
who can choose which role they play and change
from one role to another. Structures seemingly
dissolve into agency, so that what matters is the
will of individuals to alter the world in which they
find themselves. The problem with this position
is that not only is agency presented abstractly –
that is, as outside society – but the same abstract
force that enables some to be actors condemns
others to passivity. Hence the classical liberals
limited the notion of the individual to men who
owned property, were Protestants, and had the
correct ethnicity. Timeless structures had not dis-
appeared – they were merely assigned to others.
The emphasis upon agency and the individual
is important, but it needs to be linked dynamic-
ally and historically to the notion of structure.
People became conscious actors not simply be-
cause they had changed their ideas, but because
they acquired through the market the wealth
that enabled them to command the services of
others. They may have imagined that social struc-
tures simply affected others – women, the poor,
the residents of the colonies, and so forth. But
this is an illusion. The market is itself a social
structure and, as such, dictates to beneficiaries
and victims alike how they are to conduct them-
selves. Social structures are the product of agency.
Without conscious action, there would be no
structures. But what makes a practice structural
is that the patterning which results has implica-
tions and imposes constraints that correspond
only imperfectly to the intentions of those who
created them.
The structural argument that people enter
into social relations independent of their will
cannot mean that these relations are the product
of automatons – creatures without intention
social systems theory
and purpose. What it means is that the result of
activities undertaken is never the same as the
intention of those who undertook those activities:
it is this gap between intention and consequence
that creates the structural character of activity.
It is not that these structures are brought about
by the will of some higher power: they are cre-
ations of human activity, but human activity in
which intention and result never coincide.
Being aware of this makes it possible to try and
organize our activities with greater consideration
of their likely consequences. It is, however, a mis-
take to imagine that any society, no matter how
enlightened and well regulated, can extinguish
the gulf between intention and result, since
the fallibility of humans and the complexity of
social practices make it inevitable that agency
and structure will remain distinct. J O H N H O F F M A N
social systems
– see social systems theory.
social systems theory
The theory of social systems was strongly influ-
enced by systems theory in other fields, especially
cybernetics, engineering, and biology. General
system theory was particularly influential in the
1950s and 1960s. It was proposed by the biologist
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–72) as the basis of
a unified science, avoiding the older mechanistic
view of physical science under which it had
proven difficult to include the human sciences.
The basic postulate of any systems theory is
that the particular phenomenon under investi-
gation is made up of elements and parts that are
organized and interdependent. This organized
interdependence is what constitutes a system,
and it operates as a relatively bounded entity in
interaction with an environment. System theorists
are interested both in the organization of the
system and in the organization of its relations
with its environment. Emphasis is upon self-
regulation and the processing of information
and learning via feedback mechanisms.
The functionalist sociologist, Talcott Parsons,
developed a theory of the social system in the
1950s; from the 1960s onwards, he increasingly
used the language of cybernetics and biological
systems theory. In “Some Problems of General
Theory in Sociology,” in Edward Tiryakian (ed.),
Theoretical Sociology (1970: 230), Parsons describes
the social system as a structurally differentiated
system of social roles and expectations that is
maintained by four functional imperatives (adap-
tation, goal-attainment, integration, and latency)
587
socialist feminism
socialism remains a significant theory and prac-
tice, and arguably will continue as long as a
capitalist society exists. JOHN HOFFMAN
socialist feminism
This term is used to describe the western feminism
of the 1970s onward, which maintained a commit-
ment to social class, as much as gender, divisions
in the social world. The history of socialist femi-
nism is, however, much longer than a part of the
twentieth century, since, from the early nine-
teenth century, women had organized collectively
as part of working-class movements. In Britain,
Sheila Rowbotham (in Hidden from History, 1971)
had argued that the history of working-
class women had been largely ignored; that com-
ment encouraged the work of feminist historians
such as Barbara Taylor, Sally Alexander, and
Anna Davin. In the work of all these authors there
was a determination to show that class is as much
a part of social identity as gender and that social
change is not merely accomplished by the renego-
tiation of gender norms.
Other feminist writers (for example, Sonia
Kruks) have outlined the transformation of
women’s situation by socialist regimes (such as
Cuba and China) while still others (for example,
Barbara Einhorn) have suggested that state so-
cialism gave women advantages not known by
women in capitalist societies. The fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disappearance of
the command economies of state socialist regi-
mes have marginalized the position of socialist
feminism as a major theoretical position within
feminism, as have significant changes in the struc-
ture of western labor markets, which have seen
the eradication of traditional workplace divisions
of gender, together with related – and deeply gen-
dered – trade unions. In the United States, debates
about social class and gender have emerged in
the exchanges between Nancy Fraser and Judith
Butler, the former arguing that a crucial element
of any discussion of gender has to be a recognition
of the existence of capitalist social relations.
MARY EVANS
socialization
Historically both sociology, for example Charles
Horton Cooley in Human Nature and the Social
Order (1902), and psychology — for example
Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id (1923 [trans.
1927]), reissued in The Standard Edition (1961:
3–66) — have been preoccupied with the question
of “human nature,” and, more specifically, with
the manner in which, and process whereby,
socialization
neonates come to be recognized as more-or-less
competent members of a shared social order.
The term socialization has, most usually, been
employed to refer to this (developmental) process
(sometimes referred to as primary socialization). It
has been used to examine the social roles of
parents, peers, and social institutions such as the
school as agents of socialization. The term has also
focused on locally specific issues such as work,
occupation, social role (such as parenthood), or
political socialization (often referred to as second-
ary socialization). Similarly, socialization is now
increasingly understood to be not a one-off, once-
and-for-all, matter, but rather, via the differentia-
tion of the concept, issues such as anticipatory
socialization or re-socialization (the anticipatory
rehearsal, or instantiation of new, patterns of con-
duct [re-socialization], when circumstances change
as persons move through the life-course) have been
explored. Erving Goffman’s early work (such as
Asylums, 1961) on “degradation ceremonies” had a
major influence on these developments.
The problem of socialization has been under-
stood in two essentially different ways. The first,
and dominant, way has been concerned to concep-
tualize socialization by asking how it is that per-
sons come to learn, or to internalize, the values,
attitudes, and norms of the culture or society (or
local setting such as a workplace in which they
live) and how it is that they come to be able to
enact culturally congruent social roles and cultur-
ally appropriate practices. This approach has
tended to see socialization as a something that
happens to people, rather than understanding so-
cialization as a process which (even young) people
take part in as active agents. A second approach to
socialization, often associated with the work of
George Herbert Mead in Mind, Self, and Society
(1934) and the symbolic interactionist tradition,
has been to see socialization as being a matter of
the development of a linguistically mediated re-
flexive self(-concept). This tradition, and more
recent developments drawing from it, such as
ethnomethodology and discursive psychology, rep-
resent an interesting recapitulation of Cooley’s
notion (1902: 2) that societies and their members
are “collective and distributive aspects of the
same thing.” This tradition rejects the idea that
“self ” and “society,” or “identity” and “culture,”
are separate or separable things and dismisses the
commonsense assumption that they are binary
contrasts. Instead each informs and co-produces
the other.
Most mainstream sociological and psycho-
logical work on socialization has, however, begun
591
society
from the presumption that the process of produ-
cing recognizably human beings out of infants
(or new versions out of extant adults) is a deeply
puzzling matter, especially given the hugely
variable detail of the experience of individual
members of any given society. The work of Harvey
Sacks (namely Lectures on Conversation, 1995) has
recently become important in questioning this
assumption. Conventional work has most usually
adopted an approach which has sought to separ-
ate out (and often to quantify) the relative im-
portance of individual and environmental factors
or variables for human development and patterns
of sociality (a binary frequently referred to as
the nature versus nurture debate) – hence psycho-
logical work since Freud on socio-cognitive devel-
opment (for example The Language and Thought of
the Child, 1923 [trans. 1926], by Jean Piaget (1886–
1980), moral development (such as Lawrence
Kohlberg’s The Meaning and Measurement of Moral
Development, 1981), or identity development (for
instance Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society,
1950); sociological / social psychological work on
structural variables such as social class (for
example A. H. Halsey, Anthony Heath, and John
Ridge Halsey on Origins and Destinations, 1980) or
institutional forms (such as Phillip Zimbardo’s The
Power and Pathology of Imprisonment, 1971) or on
social conduct, the life-course, and social out-
comes; and, more recently, the highly contentious
studies in sociobiology and evolutionary psych-
ology by Edward O. Wilson (Sociobiology, 1975) and
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, 2002), which at-
tempt to demonstrate the hardwired nature of
human sociality. M A R K R A P L E Y A N D S U S A N H A N S E N
society
Human beings are social animals and organize
their activities in groups. The term “society” is
used to describe a level of organization of groups
that is relatively self-contained. However, the
boundedness of groups is always relative and so
sociologists may refer to human society, where
the reference is to the interdependencies among
all social groups, or to subgroups such as family
society, where the reference is to the typical inter-
actions among the individuals making up a
grouping of close kin. Equally, the term society
may be used to indicate the wider activities of
those under the authority of a particular state,
for example, French society or Indian society.
The term society came into usage in the eight-
eenth century with the rise of European modern-
ity and its distinctive public sphere of civil society
and state. Here the relative openness of association
592
society
and the range of cultivated activities available
created a space for social intercourse among the
better-off, who would go out into “society,” mean-
ing “high society.” This period coincided with the
emergence of social theory and its differentiation
from political theory, as writers became interested
in the distinctiveness of modernity and its insti-
tutions. With the development of disciplinary
social science and the formation of sociology
as a distinct discipline, sociation and its differen-
tiated forms were seen as the special object of
sociology.
The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies pro-
posed a highly influential distinction between
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (usually translated as
“community” and “association”) to capture the dif-
ference between premodern and traditional types
of societies. The former are characterized by ties of
reciprocity and mutuality; custom predominates
and they are largely rural. The latter are charac-
terized by voluntary association and exchange
relationships; rational calculation predominates
and such societies are urban and cosmopolitan.
Functionalist and associated structurally orien-
ted sociologies provide an analytical definition
of society. It is associated with the level of the
social system. Each social system must meet func-
tional imperatives (or structural principles) and
societies are classified according to the degree
of specialized institutional development around
each function. Modern society is characterized by
specialized and separated institutions of economy,
polity, legal system, and societal community (of
voluntary association); each is a subsystem and
the ensemble of subsystems makes up modern
society.
In Marxism, where the mode of economic pro-
duction is held to dominate, other institutions of
law, politics, and ideology are sometimes charac-
terized as the social formation. The term society
is rejected as obscuring the real determinations
at work. In liberalism, which also gives priority to
the market economy, albeit seeing this as positive,
there is also suspicion of the term society, on
whose behalf the state might act in order to
restrict the market.
Feminists and postcolonial theorists have criti-
cized the dominant sociological representations
of society. For the former, the sociological concept
of modern society neglects gendered relationships
within the family household and how these struc-
ture other social institutions. For the latter, the
idea of society as a relatively self-sufficient entity
has meant the neglect of the colonial relation-
ships integral to modernity. JOHN HOLMWOOD
strikes
demystified the hospital as a place of work and
showed that physicians, like other workers, were
subject to the vagaries of interaction settings,
including endless negotiations.
Strauss remains influential through his analysis
of trajectories, in which social relations involve
a series of biographical transformations of identity
through distinctive status passages. These con-
cepts were elaborated in influential empirical
studies of death and dying with Glaser, such as
Awareness of Dying (1965) and Time for Dying (1967).
Different conditions or diseases have different
trajectories, involving different forms of expres-
sive and instrumental work. A lingering dying
trajectory was described in the case study pub-
lished as Anguish (1970). Their empirical work
on these trajectories was partly summarized in
a formal theory on Status Passage (Glaser and
Strauss, 1971). BRYAN S. TURNER
strikes
– see industrial relations.
structuralism
A theoretical tradition whose formation and in-
fluence can be seen as much in the fields of
linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure), literature
(Roland Barthes), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan),
history (Fernand Braudel), anthropology (Claude
Lévi-Strauss), and philosophy (Louis Althusser)
as it can in sociology. It is associated with the
search for deep and relatively abiding structures
that lie beneath the flux and change of surface
events and apparent contingencies. In sociology
the work of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss
is often associated with structuralism, as is the
work of later writers such as Pierre Bourdieu,
Anthony Giddens, and Stuart Hall, who are all
clearly marked by the tradition.
Most commentators relate the founding of
structuralism as a distinctive tradition to the
Course in General Linguistics (1916 [trans. 1974])
written by the Swiss linguist Saussure and pub-
lished posthumously in 1916. Saussure argued
that, instead of focusing on language change,
linguistics should concentrate on the language
system which endured through the surface
changes. To this end he distinguished between
the diachronic and the synchronic axes of lan-
guage. The diachronic was the historical, whereas
the synchronic pointed to those aspects of a lan-
guage that existed as a system at any one point
in time. By suspending time and taking a snap-
shot of a language system, one could examine
the internal relations between the various
612
structuralism
grammatical, functional, and meaningful elem-
ents of a language. The distinction between
“langue” (the stock or system of language as a
whole) and “parole” (instances of speech) takes
this further. Any one instance of speech (“parole”)
is generated by the language system that both
provides its conditions of possibility and places
limits on what can intelligibly be said.
For Saussure, and for later structuralists such as
Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, language is a system in
which each term relies on its relations with other
terms. The distinction between the signifier (the
written word, image, or sound) and the signified
(the meaning carried by the signifier) as joint
components of the sign is central, as is the fact
that neither term involves the referent (the real
object referred to). The signification system is
markedly autonomous from the world of refe-
rents. Meaning, as for example within a chess
game, relies on differences between arbitrary sig-
nifiers (for example, a queen shape and a rook
shape) which are in turn converted into differ-
ences between signifieds (for example, what they
allow the player to do on the basis of underlying
generative or paradigmatic rules).
The sense of an underlying system with its
own generative rules is central to the investi-
gations of the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss into
kinship structures, art, totemism, ritual, and
myth. Just as Saussure divided language up into
its component parts on both the systemic and
speech-event levels, Lévi-Strauss divided myths
up into their surface constituent elements or
“mythemes,” each with their own deeper function
within the myth. His conclusion is that there are
a limited number of patterns and types of trans-
formations within myths. In his Tristes Tropiques
(1955 [trans. 1968]) he suggested that, from an
inventory of all cultural customs either observed
or imagined, one could distill a limited number
of elements and form a periodic table akin to the
one used for chemical elements. Diversity could
be reduced to a limited number of possible com-
binations of enduring elements. His analysis
of Caduveo body-painting in this account is also
typically structuralist in being built upon core
sets of differences or binary oppositions – men/
women, carving/painting, representationalism/
abstraction, angles/curves, symmetry/asymmetry –
which underlie the surface variety.
Barthes’s treatment of the popular Mythologies
(1957) of contemporary French life likewise in-
vokes the signifier and signified distinction to
reveal how the surface meanings of phenomena
as diverse as washing powder, wrestling, wine,
structuration
and the face of Greta Garbo all share a similar
underlying structure. Signification works in each
case to suggest the kind of inexorability associated
with nature rather than the transient construc-
tions of culture. Barthes famously discusses a
cover of Paris Match from the 1950s in which the
relational signifiers are those of a black soldier in
French uniform saluting the flag. Placed together
like this, the associations conjured up by the elem-
ents signify that all Frenchmen, regardless of race,
are loyal subjects ready to serve and die for their
country. Alongside these mythical connotations,
binary oppositions are also created between loyal-
ty and disloyalty, friend and enemy, insider and
outsider. ROB STONES
structuration
This is the process whereby enduring structural
properties and relational patterns of social groups
and cultures are either reproduced or altered
during the enactment of social practices. Though
the term was coined for other purposes by
Georges Gurvitch, it is now ubiquitously defined
with reference to Anthony Giddens’s structuration
theory. Giddens most extensively develops struc-
turation theory in The Constitution of Society (1984).
Giddens’s theory is explored in Ira Cohen’s Struc-
turation Theory (1989), and it is criticized by J. Clark
et al., Anthony Giddens (1990).
The concept of structuration rejects the notion
that social structure and social action are two
ontologically distinct aspects of social reality. If
it is true that all social realities are generated in
social practices and through the consequences of
these practices, as leading contemporary theorists
of social action and everyday life maintain, then
it must be true that social structures and patterns
are somehow generated in and through social
practices as well. But one must also recognize
the lesson taught by structuralists that the endu-
ring structural properties of groups and cultures
shape the generation of action on any given occa-
sion. Finding means to take these two points into
account is known as the problem of agency and
structure.
Giddens’s notion of structuration solves this
problem by regarding the competencies to per-
form actions, as well as the competencies to
recognize actions performed by others, as reposi-
tories of the structural aspects of social reality.
However, it is not until actors draw upon those
competencies to perform instances of conduct
that structure becomes real. For example, as I
write these words, I reproduce the structured
elements of academic prose as well as more
subculture
generic elements of the grammatical and syntac-
tical structure of the English language. Of course,
the English language would survive very nicely
if I never wrote at all. But matters would be
otherwise if all Anglophone actors left their
competencies unused and began speaking other
languages. English would be a dead language
when it was seldom reproduced at all. One can
make analogous points about the reproduction
of bureaucratic procedure, capitalist trade, artis-
tic genre, or legal codes. In order for any of these
social realities to endure, they must be repro-
duced. The same holds true for networks, systems,
and other patterns of social relations. All rela-
tional patterns are structured by the practices
through which – in the language of network an-
alysis – nodes are linked together. Structuration
adds an original and much-needed twist to the
reproduction of relational patterns by insisting
that the links between nodes be conceived as
bridging time and space.
Structuration can refer to social change as well
as reproduction. Indeed, some degree of variation
is found in every instance of structuration. How-
ever, when processes of structuration change
across large groups of practices over extended
periods of time, then all associated structural
properties and relational patterns will change as
well.
Structuration theory also includes a sophisti-
cated theory of power that synthesizes modes of
domination and a dialectic of control between the
dominant and the dominated. IRA COHEN
subculture
This concept was first employed by anthropolo-
gists. In this traditional conception, subcultures
refer to subgroups of local cultures; in a more
critical perspective, they refer to symbolic repre-
sentations of social contradictions and offer a
symbolic eschewing of the established order. In
the area of delinquency, subcultures refers to
distinctive sets of values and behavior.
Two early American sociological studies by
Albert Cohen (Delinquent Boys, 1955) and Richard
Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (Delinquency and Opportun-
ity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs, 1961) were influ-
ential in directing attention to the idea of a
deviant subculture of juveniles as an adaptation
to the problems of alienation and marginalization
thrown up by social, structural, and economic
arrangements in society.
Cohen saw the gang as a subculture with a
value system different from that of mainstream
American culture. He viewed it as a working-class
613
tradition
differences compares professional and white-collar
associations with manual workers’ unions. Their
unionateness is assessed on such criteria as en-
gagement in collective bargaining, strike action,
and alliances with labor parties, which are seen
as characteristic of manual workers’ unions.
However, how far such differences coincide closely
with occupational hierarchies has remained
contentious, as debated in contributions to R.
Hyman and P. Price (eds.) The New Working Class?
White-Collar Workers and Their Organizations (1983).
Another approach argues that trade unions face
persistent dilemmas in their organization and
mobilization of workers, in terms of their orienta-
tion to market bargaining or class mobilization or
as actors in civil society. Unions can then be
mapped in terms of their responses to such di-
lemmas, to illuminate the controversies that arise
within and between unions and the range of
different union traditions found within and be-
tween societies, as in R. Hyman, Understanding
European Trade Unionism (2001).
Contemporary social changes, such as the de-
cline of traditionally unionized sectors, labor
market flexibilization, and new international div-
isions of labor, have also prompted recent debates
on the merits of newer forms of unionism
that may depart from earlier union traditions. In
particular, discussions of organizing unionism
and social-movement unionism give fresh em-
phasis to the active mobilization of new constitu-
encies of workers, but also recognize that unions
continue to face major challenges and dilemmas.
TONY ELGER
tradition
A comprehensive treatment of this topic can be
found readily available under “Tradition” in the
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences (2001, ed. Neil Smelser and Paul B Bates),
where there are several separate essays by R.
Bauman, Edward Tiryakian, and S. Langlois. Under-
stood generically as customary ways and beliefs
handed down (usually by oral communication,
ritual, and/or imitation) from the past for present
action, tradition is an integral component of every
family, group, organization, and nation. It is an
important legacy of the past to the present, albeit
on many occasions and in many historical settings,
the present may reconstruct the customary past as
illustrated in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,
The Invention of Tradition (1984). While tradition
carries with it a positive evaluation in everyday
life and in marketing (as in “prime ribs are a trad-
ition at Simpson’s”), it can also appear to be a
636
tradition
burden for innovation by devaluating the present.
In any event, the transmission of tradition is
ubiquitous if tacit in all processes of socialization.
While an old tradition may be lost as a result of
social change and the dispersal of members of
a community that observed it, new traditions
emerge, even unwittingly, as Sumner realized
long ago, in the passage of folk ways into mores.
Sociologists have dealt with traditions, includ-
ing their own, in several ways. With some ambi-
valence, the early sociologists noted a vast
transformation in the West with a modern ethos
(first grasped by the writer Charles Beaudelaire
(1821–67) and sociologically analyzed by Ferdinand
Tönnies in his classic Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,
1887 [trans. 1957]). Processes (including the rise of
large urban agglomerations, rural exodus, rise of
crime rates) involved in the search for and the
transformation to a new social order to replace
or renovate the premodern one became a rich
terrain of inquiry for conservatives of the Le Play
school, liberals such as Auguste Comte and Émile
Durkheim, and radicals such as the Marxists. The
ambivalence of sociologists and other intellectuals
regarding tradition is brought out in the import-
ant study on Tradition (1981) by Edward Shils, who
himself emphasized the functional importance of
tradition in societal integration.
The theoretical analysis of tradition owes
much to Max Weber’s seminal ideal-type discus-
sion of traditional domination or traditionalism
(well discussed by Reinhard Bendix in Max Weber,
An Intellectual Portrait, 1977) as one mode of the
legitimation of power “legitime Herschaft”. Argu-
ably, Weber saw traditionalism, especially that
borne by a sacred tradition, as vestigial in the
rationalization process of modernity. This post-
Enlightenment perspective (common to liberal
and radical positions) carried over into the
1950s and 1960s in sociological and economic
approaches to growth and development which
saw tradition as providing non-rational obstacles
to the development of new nations and to the
development of a modern mentality. Illustrative
here is the classical modernization study of the
Middle East, Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Trad-
itional Society (1958), which stressed the diversity
of the Arab-Islamic world but in retrospect under-
estimated the unifying potency of religious trad-
itions (for example pilgrimage to Mecca) and
collective memories (of western domination).
In the current period of globalization, however,
a more balanced view is emerging, one that
stresses the multiple paths to, and modes of mod-
ernity, with a place in the sun given to tradition as
trajectories of dying
a vital cog in the process of modernization (for
instance S. N. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization,
1996). Further research will entail studying
the new traditions of immigrant communities in
different regions of the world, and the utilization
of traditions to legitimate domestic and inter-
national practices in seemingly modern societies.
EDWARD TIRYAKIAN
trajectories of dying
– see death and dying.
transnational corporations
This term came into general use in the 1960s to
refer to firms engaged in crossborder economic
activities. The use of the term and interest in
such activities were prompted by the growing
penetration of western European economies by
United-States-owned companies. This process was
hard to assimilate to earlier forms of imperialism
and colonialism based on relations of economic
and political dependence between expanding
European powers and the rest of the world. The
seemingly novel operations of American multi-
national corporations (MNCs) led to fears that
the American challenge would undermine the
economic autonomy and political sovereignty of
host states and create a new form of imperialism.
Critics argued that MNCs induced technological
dependence, destroyed local jobs, and deprived
national states of their capacity to set interest
rates, levy taxes, and plan their economies. Their
defenders replied that MNCs could benefit their
hosts through transferring technology, raising
productivity, improving managerial skills, and re-
investing profits in expanding markets. However,
with the later expansion of MNCs with their ori-
ginal headquarters in Europe, East Asia, Latin
America, India, and China, discussion about their
activities and impact has been integrated into
more general debates about globalization.
The precursors of what are now termed MNCs
originated in long-distance trade even before
market forces became the dominant form of eco-
nomic organization and national territorial states
became the dominant form of political organiza-
tion. A major expansion of MNC activities coin-
cided with the rise of a capitalist world-system in
the sixteenth century as charter companies (such
as the East India Company) were granted commer-
cial monopolies by a European state. MNC activ-
ities continued to expand in trade, extraction of
raw materials, and indirect foreign investment
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
both within and beyond the borders of empires,
trauma
peaking before World War I. A further major
expansion of MNC activities occurred following
postwar reconstruction and the institution of a
more open international economic regime after
1945. More recently still, with a further round of
international deregulation and liberalization and
the collapse of the Soviet bloc, further waves
of MNC expansion have occurred, involving stra-
tegic alliances, joint ventures, and networked
enterprises.
MNCs now comprise a mix of private, public,
and hybrid economic agents that vary in size,
home bases, fields of activities, and business strat-
egies. They include merchant companies, buying
cheap and selling dear; extractive enterprises;
manufacturing firms; investment companies and
banks; consumer service firms; and international
producer service suppliers. As MNC activities have
expanded, national territorial states have become
less important in the economic organization and
regulation of the world market. There is also in-
creasing competition between cities, regions, and
states to attract and retain MNCs, either through a
deregulatory “race to the bottom,” that is eco-
nomic competition that results in low wages, low
technology, and cheap goods produced by un-
skilled workers, or by providing high-tech, highly
skilled, and infrastructurally well-equipped oper-
ating bases. This competition coexists with new
fears that MNC activities are a threat to global
economic stability and require new forms of inter-
national regulation and global governance.
BOB JESSOP
trauma
From the Greek word for “wound,” trauma most
commonly refers to an emotional shock that pro-
duces inescapable and enduring affects. Sigmund
Freud introduced the concept to the social sci-
ences in the 1890s, using it in connection to a
theory of hysteria. More generally in the body of
his writings, Freud discussed three forms of
trauma in relation to the human condition: the
first related to the awareness of the insignificance
of the earth relative to the vastness of the uni-
verse; the second, to the awareness stemming
from evolutionary theory that humanity was not
descended from God; and third, following psycho-
analytic theory, to the awareness that the ego was
entirely in control.
Contemporary discussions of trauma have
added a wider social focus to Freud’s account,
applying the concept to studies of collective
memory and collective identity. The Holocaust,
its meaning and its memory, has been the
637
urban social movements
that are primarily responsive to the needs of pri-
vate capital and usually reinforce, rather than
mitigate, market inequalities.
At the same time, Harvey locates these develop-
ments within a broader analysis of capital accumu-
lation, and also highlights their contradictory and
potentially contested character. Thus, the urban
entrepreneurialism thesis is compatible with the
weak version of Pahl’s argument, especially in sug-
gesting that such policy priorities and coalitions
may shift across time and space, but it is integrated
into a more fully developed and more critical
political economy of urban restructuring.
TONY ELGER
urban social movements
– see social movements.
urban way of life
– see Louis Wirth.
urbanization
While often defined as the increasing proportion
of people living in cities, urbanization is best de-
fined as the process by which cities – described as,
following Louis Wirth in “Urbanism as a Way of
Life” (1938, American Journal of Sociology), relatively
heterogeneous, dense, and sizable settlements –
emerge as concentrated control and command
centers. As such, it is appropriate to talk about
urbanization of labor as well as of different forms
of capital – economic, social, cultural, or symbolic
(for example, in David Harvey, The Urbanization of
Capital, 1985). When understood as a process, the
typical quantitative numbers given to indicate
levels of urbanization, such as the proportion of
those who live in cities, appear less defining than
a measure that tells us about the concentration of
different forms of capital and of labor. While we
know that, sometime soon in the twenty-first cen-
tury, for the first time, the majority of the world’s
population will live in cities, the importance of
cities in economy, society, and culture well
predates this particular benchmark. It can be
argued that, since their emergence around about
7,000 to 9,000 years ago, cities have been at the
center-stage of economy, society, and culture. If
we understand the birth, enlargement, and multi-
plication of cities as the process of urbanization
through which different forms of capital were
concentrated, the oft-cited benchmarks such as
1851 in England, when the majority of the popu-
lation became urban, must be seen against this
longer historical background.
646
utilitarianism
As well, what the measure of urbanization –
understood as a proportion of population living
in cities – cannot capture is the size and distribu-
tion of cities constituting this process. In the
twentieth century, urbanization mostly took the
form of megacities, defined as cities with popula-
tions of more than 10 million inhabitants, with a
disproportionate number of people living in them
compared to mid-size and large cities. In 2000,
Tokyo (26 million), Mexico City (18.4 million),
Bombay (18 million), São Paulo (17.8 million),
New York (16.6 million), Lagos (13.4 million), Los
Angeles (13.1 million), Calcutta (12.9 million),
Shanghai (12.9 million), and Buenos Aires (12.6
million) dominated their respective states. This
overconcentration of different forms of capital and
of labor in megacities as the predominant form
of urbanization raises questions about the long-
term sustainability and the ecological footprint of
human habitation of the world. ENGIN ISIN
utilitarianism
This refers to a tradition in ethical theory that
links rightness to happiness.
The theory was classically formulated by Jeremy
Bentham (1748–1832), who argued that acts are
right if they promote happiness or pleasure, and
wrong if they lead to misery and pain. Bentham
developed a felicity calculus so that pleasures and
pains could be assessed according to their inten-
sity, duration, and proximity. Bentham also argued
that desirable policies were those that produced
the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
John Stuart Mill sought to modify Bentham’s
theory by making a distinction between different
kinds of pleasure and arguing that individuals who
had experienced both higher as well as lower pleas-
ures would always choose the former over the
latter. Mill sought to link utilitarianism to develop-
ment, so that individuals could change their pref-
erences as they changed their experiences.
Two criticisms are invariably made of utilita-
rianism. The first is that, by basing goodness
upon happiness, utilitarians reject the idea that
ethics has to be based upon innate or natural
rights. Critics worry that, without a conception
of natural rights, Bentham’s formula of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number would
lead to the oppression of the minority by the
majority. The answer to this problem requires
not the notion of god-given or natural (in the
sense of timeless) rights, but a view of the individ-
ual that stresses the formation of identity (and
thus the pursuit of pleasures) through relation-
ships with others. This would enable rightness to
value neutrality
own values. Of course, if they happen to share
these values with others, then their value-relevant
interests in the subject to be studied become all
the more important. Notice, investigators make
no hard and fast value judgment here. After they
have raised a value-relevant issue, then they must
follow the facts wherever they lead. To be scien-
tific, after all, is to entertain all evidence, inclu-
ding evidence that Weber terms “inconvenient” to
the values or ideologies we hold dear.
Frequently, the facts will turn up morally am-
biguous results. Imagine that my humanitarian
values judge public policies as good or bad
depending on whether they help or hurt children
in need. Therefore my values motivate my value-
relevant interest in a study of policies towards
children in western welfare states. I now collect
a wide range of empirical evidence. But the data
are morally ambiguous. On the one hand, I find
empirical evidence that state subsidies secure
food, shelter and health care for needy children.
On the other hand I find little empirical evidence
that states offer social support for caregivers to
help nurture these children. Now I must reframe
the issue in an empirically more complicated way:
why do welfare states extend material aid to poor
children but not social aid to their caregivers? Any
empirical answer inevitably will be too complex to
permit a pure judgment that state policies are
good or bad based upon my original values.
The principle of value freedom stands on two
assumptions, one psychological and the other
philosophical. Psychologically, it assumes that
moral values are central to human interest in
any given issue (whether sociological or not).
Philosophically, it assumes that, with very few
exceptions (for example the perpetrators of the
Holocaust), the empirical reality of the social
world is morally too ambiguous for value judg-
ments to be found valid on empirical grounds.
Though Weber championed value freedom
methodologically, Isaiah Berlin’s accounts of
value pluralism and Karl Popper’s accounts of
falsificationism offer two means (among others)
to reformulate the philosophical foundations of
value freedom in keeping with more recent dis-
cussions in social thought and social scientific
methodology. IRA COHEN
value neutrality
– see value freedom.
value relevance
– see value freedom.
values
value spheres
– see values.
values
Values refer to moral principles or other judg-
ments of worth. The term is used by sociologists
in a number of different ways. First, they are dis-
cussed at an epistemological and methodological
level as in Max Weber’s notion of value-relevance.
Second, there is the further issue of morality and
the good life, which is linked to debates over
value-neutrality. Third, sociology is concerned to
identify and analyze the values held by people in
particular epochs, nations, societies, subcultures,
or spheres of life. Values are regarded as deep or
intense commitments embedded in taken-for-
granted dispositions and can be contrasted with
attitudes, which are thought of as more superfi-
cial and weakly held views and opinions.
Two themes can be distinguished here, one of
socially differentiated value spheres and the other
of degrees of homogeneity or plurality, either in
general or within the spheres of life. Regarding
the first, Weber noted the tendency of modernity
to fragment social relations into different spheres
of value – economics, politics, and science being
the decisive orders within modernity, while the
aesthetic, the ethical, the erotic, and the intellec-
tual were increasingly restricted to the realms of
the personal and the consolatory. Each of these
spheres was subject to the processes of rational-
ization whereby beliefs and actions are slowly
dominated by the need to achieve defined ends
or goals by the most efficient means possible
(zweckrationalität). Jürgen Habermas has extended
Weber’s insights, most intensively in the Theory of
Communicative Action (1981 [trans. 1984]), by argu-
ing that the instrumental form of rationalization,
most appropriate to the value spheres of science
and technology, has indeed made radical inroads
into virtually all value spheres. This is most dis-
torting in spheres where moral–practical and aes-
thetic–expressive interests and forms of reasoning
should be significant. These stretch from art and
literature through education and morality to law
and politics. Distortion has meant that the liber-
ating potential of reason within modernity has
been impoverished and unduly narrowed.
The second theme concerns questions regarding
the extent to which the values held in various
societal groupings and spheres are homogeneous
or plural and perhaps conflictual. In The Structure
of Social Action (1937) Talcott Parsons distinguished
between general cultural values, norms, and in-
ternalized values. The first two are closely linked.
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