Zaira Gutiérrez Vázquez

Comparative Sociology

CHAPTER 4: SOCIETIES
SOCIAL GROUPS:

Small collective, where people can identify and interact (face-to-face) with each other. It is not a
category of people. It is not a multitude.
Primary and secondary groups (Cooley)

Primary Secondary

Relatively small Relatively large

The group is an end in itself The group is an instrument to obtain other goals

Reciprocity norm: no evaluation of Reciprocity norm: evaluation of

costs and benefits (more “unconditional”) costs and benefits

Emotional commitment/attachment No emotional commitment

Relatively more time enduring/resilient Short-term history

Person to person relations Role to role relations

More extensive in its demands Less extensive

Dividing line: How are you doing today?

ROLES & STATUS:

ROLES: for example, a doctor in order to look reliable must wear specific things to perform a role
and satisfies the social expectations.

STATUS: Positions that people have in society can be acquired or ascriptive. Ascriptive are those
people have been born with (being women) acquired these are the ones who people acquiere through
their goals.

DOMINANT STATUS: you can be many things, but one is dominant, you are identified by this.
For ex: your profession.
THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION: THE CONTINUUM OF SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION
Society of primary groups
Society of secondary groups
Society of organizations
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Comparative Sociology

THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION: ORGANIZATIONS.

Organizations are large secondary groups with goals and formal structure (which fit together
isomorphism)

- Organizational goals: Ideally, we have a hierarchical structure of goals (the problem is to

identify those “original” goals –what people thought they could not accomplish by informal
means)
 Goal change (sometimes after goal succession)
 Goal displacement: The goal of the organization is to keep the organization
alive.
 Goal inversion: Doing exactly the opposite of what the goals were in the
beginning.
When there is no hierarchy of goals, we have priorization and sequentialization.
- Organizational structure:
 Informal structure: secondary groups that appear in a formal structure.
- Kinds of organizations (3).

OPEN CLOSED TOTAL

ENTRY: voluntary ENTRY: entry (ascriptive) ENTRY: non-voluntary
EXIT: voluntary EXIT: difficult EXIT: non-voluntary
EX: university EX: la ONCE EX: Prison, concentrat. camp

- TYPES OF SOCIETIES: social organization criteria.

Pre-modern Modern Post-modern

Group Group: decisions about Organizations have Organizations
who produces and how absorbed many of the Groups: do not
products going to be tasks of groups. require
distributed and made.
Identity/Role Fixed, ascriptive. There Adquired Membership Plastic identities
are no individuals, there where loyalty is experiment and choose
are members. expected. identities.
Individualization.
Ideally Closed social stratification Open social strat. Open liquid society

EVOLUTION OF SOCIETIES:
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Comparative Sociology

In the work of Lenskis, five kinds of society have been outlined to sociocultural evolution and
technology.

 The earliest Hunting and gathering societies were com posed of a small number of family-
centered nomads.
 Horticulture began as people devised hand tools for the cultivation of crops. Pastoral societies
domesticate animals and engage in extensive trade.
 Agriculture is large-scale cultivation traditionally using animal drawn. This technology
allows societies to grow into vast empires, making them more productive, more specialized
and more unequal.
 Industrial societies began in Europe as people harnessed advanced energy sources to power
sophisticated machinery.
 In post-industrial, information societies, enterprise shifts from the production of material
things to the creation and dissemination of information; computers and other information-
based technology replace the heavy machinery of the industrial era. This societies are also
called postmodern, post-history, late modern, liquid o late capitalism societies.

So, as we can see, society has been changing quite a lot. Nowadays, there are several ways to classify
the twenty-first-century world.

 nation-states or languages.
 economic fields “first, second, third and fourth worlds”, “high, law and middle income
societies” or “newly industrializing countries”.
 Human Development Index.
After having review this process, we can see that the different kinds of technology
well create a precondition for different kinds of society path, but there are four cautions that
need to be given before using the word “technological determinism”.

1. First, technology does not determine society. Actually, it is neutral: it is people who shape
technology and then, it takes people to decide how to use them.
2. Second, we must be wary of saying that these five societies ‘evolve’ from one to next as
nowadays all of these societies may be said to coexist.
3. Third, we must recognize the limits of technology.
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4. Finally, another social problem linked to technology involves humanity’s relation to the
physical environment.

SOCIOLOGICAL ACCOUNT FOR MODERN SOCIETIES:

A- KARL MARX (1818-1883):

HOW HAVE SOCIETIES CHANGE? Marx’s theoretical framework in technological

determinism was grounded in the perspective that changes in technology, and specifically productive
technology, are the primary influence on human social relations and organizational structure, and
that social relations and cultural practices ultimately revolve around the technological and economic
base of a given society. Karl Marx stressed historical in productive systems, yet pointed out the
persistence of social conflict throughout human history.

The key to Marx’s thinking is the idea of social conflict -struggle between segments of society over
valued resources. The most significant form of social conflict involves clashes between social classes
that arise from the way a society produces material goods. According to him, society was formed by
capitalists (people who own factories and other productive enterprises and whose goal is profit) and
proletariat (people who provide labor necessary to operate factories and other productive
enterprises). Moreover, all societies are composed by social institutions, defined as the major spheres
of social life, or society’s subsystems, organized to meet basic human needs. In this case, one
specific institution, the economy, dominated all the others, bringing about a shift in production which
is called capitalist system) which is going to play the difference in modern societies.

WHY DO SOCIETIES CHANGE? Marx’s approach pointed to the struggle between social classes
as the “engine of history”, pushing societies towards revolutionary reorganization.

Marx's approach to ideology was set forth in his theory of base and superstructure. According to
Marx, the superstructure of society, the realm of ideology, grows out of the base, the realm of
production, to reflect the interests of the ruling class and justify the status that keeps them in power
(dominant ideology). However, he viewed the relationship between base and superstructure as
dialectical in nature, meaning that each affects the other equally and that a change in one necessitates
a change in the other. This belief formed the basis for Marx's theory of revolution. Marx clearly
rejected capitalist common sense, therefore as false consciousness, explanations of social problems
grounded in the shortcomings of individuals rather than the flows in society. False consciousness
victimizes people by obscuring the real cause of their problem. Instead, what must replace false
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consciousness is class consciousness, the recognition by workers (in this case) of their unity as a
class in opposition to capitalists and, ultimately, to capitalism itself. In other words, when they
experienced a fundamental shift in ideology, industrial workers would inevitably rise up en masse to
destroy industrial capitalism. This revolution was feasible because of the weakness in the capitalist
armor. As capitalists fear the competition of other capitalists, they would be reluctant to band
together, even though they share common interests. Furthermore, capitalists keep employees’ wages
low to maximize profits and this strategy will help workers to forge an alliance against them.

WHAT HOLDS SOCIETIES TOGETHER? Marx spotlighted social division, not unity, treating
class conflict as the hallmark of human societies throughout history. Firstly, horticulture societies
introduced masters and slaves; agriculture brought feudalism and in middle Ages, the bourgeoisie
appeared in contrast to nobility. Industrialization finally brought about capitalists and proletariat.
From his point of view, elites may force an uneasy peace between the classes, but true social unity
would emerge only if production were to become a truly cooperative endeavor.

WHERE ARE SOCIETIES HEADING? For Marx, capitalism would generate the seeds of its own
destruction: revolutionary change should bring about a new communist social order. This new
organization would be a cooperative socialist society intended to meet the needs of all and which
enhance rather than undermine social ties between humans. All this information is collected in the
Manifiesto of Communist along with the explanation of class conflict performed by the dominant
people and the oppressed.

SOME OTHER IMPORTANT CONCEPTS:

Alienation  estrangement (distanciamiento) of the self: Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes
the estrangement of people from aspects of their essence as a consequence of living in a society of
stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a
social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity. In a capitalist society,
the worker's alienation from their humanity occurs because the worker can only express labor—a
fundamental social aspect of personal individuality—through a private system of industrial
production in which each worker is an instrument, a thing and not a person. Alienation is the
experience of isolation resulting from powerlessness. Marx cited four ways in which capitalism
alienates workers:
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- From the act of working: Capitalism denies workers a say in what they produce or how they
produce it. Furthermore, much work is tedious.
- From the products of work: The product of work belongs not to workers but to capitalists,
who dispose of it for profit. Thus, Marx reasoned that the more workers invest of themselves
into their work, the more they lose.
- From other workers: Capitalism makes work transform from the productive affirmation of
human community to a competitive one venture in which factories often provides little
chances for human companionship.
- From human potential: Industrial capitalism distorts an activity that should express the best
qualities in human beings into a dull and dehumanizing experience.

State  Marx defines the state as “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power
of one class for oppressing another”. Thus, we can say the state is the institution which bases itself
on the availability of forcible coercion by special agencies of society in order to maintain the
dominance of a ruling class, preserve the existing property relations from basic change and keep all
other classes in subjection. It does not promote, in no sense, the general interest.

Images of society  Karl Marx also claims that there are four basic images of society that guides
thinking and research: firstly, the structural/ functionalist perspective; secondly, the conflict
perspective: thirdly, the Symbolic-Interaction approach and finally:

Game Theory / Rational choice theory: It has an economic origin.

This theory claims that people always look for their self-interest. They do know their interests
because they have preferences and they behave according to them. So, sometimes, social institutions
emerge as solutions that counteract the effects of the paradoxes of rationality (vid. Religion e.g.).This
theory owns its name (game theory) to the fact that we are constantly playing a game in which we
have to take several decisions. The most famous “game” is the Prisoner’s one.

- If we focus in acting in a rational way, we would end

up confessing both, and then, spending 6 years on jail
when there is a better option. That is what is called,
hash equilibrium. In fact, this type of equilibrium is a
concept of game theory where the optimal outcome of
a game is one where no player has an incentive to
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deviate from his chosen strategy after considering an opponent's choice (in this case, self-
interests)

So, the paradox of the game is that by being rational and trying to maximize each one’s welfare,
people get in the wrong box. And then, how do we avoid “bad decisions” and push people to land in
the right box? One option would be thinking of years in jail as a group and not as an individual.
Putting a side your self-interest, the table would be 12 years, 10 years, 10 years or 2 years. The other
clear solution would be focusing on religion and moral values. So, strange though it may be,
sometimes religion is useful to achieve collective goals by claiming the abandon of the self-interest.

Collective good and the logic of collective action: In this situation, we have to imagine that the cost
of production of collective goods is fixed. Moreover, there is no way to prevent people who have not
contributed to produce it to benefit from it once it’s been produced (e.g.: cleanse of the air). We find
ourselves in the same situation of above: as we do not know what people are going to do, you have to
decide between paying the fixed costs and either achieving your goal or lose the money you have
invested or not paying and either benefiting yourself with other’s money or not experience any result.

B. MAX WEBER (1864-1920):

HOW HAVE SOCIETIES CHANGE? Max Weber looked at this question tracing evolving modes
of thought. He claimed that Pre-industrial societies are guided by tradition, while modern societies
espouse a rational world-view. Bureaucracies take on a key role.

Weber concluded that members of pre-industrial societies cling to tradition, while people in
industrial-capitalists societies endorse rationality. By tradition we understand sentiments and beliefs
passed from generation to generation. Thus, traditional societies are guided by the past. On the
contrary, modern societies embrace rationality, deliberate, matter-of-fact calculation of the most
efficient means to accomplish a particular goal. They are guided by the present and future. Weber
uses the phrase rationalization of society to denote the historical change from tradition to rationality
as the dominant mode of human thought.

Bureaucracy is another important concept concerning change. Bureaucracy is the clearest expression
of a ration world-view because its chief elements are intended to achieve specific goals as efficiently
as possible. Weber asserted that bureaucracy transformed all of society in the same way that
industrialization transformed the economy
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WHY DO SOCIETIES CHANGE? Weber’s idealist view argues that modes of thought contribute
to social change. He demonstrated how rational Calvinism bolstered the Industrial Revolution, which
in turn reshaped much of modern society.

Before starting to explain the Calvinism case, we should remark that Weber´s sociology is
sometimes called Comprehensive sociology. This type of sociology claims that there is a
sociological explanation when you put yourself in the historical/normative context of the individuals
whose behavior you want to understand. You will have to travel in time and space in order to
understand the society you want to study. For Weber, sociology must be comparative and
historically. One of the most known examples of Weber´s sociology is the following:

Weber contended that industrial capitalism was the legacy of Calvinism- a Christian religious
movement spawned by the Protestant Reformation. One of the main concepts of this doctrine was
predestination, the idea that an all-knowing God has preordained some people for salvation and other
for damnation and so the fate was set before birth to everyone. This rose a question for them: why
shouldn’t those chosen for glory in the next world, see signs of divine favor in this world? Such
conclusion lead them to interpret prosperity as a sign of God’s grace and poverty as a sign of God’s
rejection. In consequence they invested their profits for greater success in the next world, fact that
evidence the power of ideas to shape society.

WHAT HOLDS SOCIETIES TOGETHER? To Weber, members of a society share a distinctive

world-view. Modern societies have created rational, large-scale organizations with their own
organization cultures that fuse and guide people’s lives.

Modern societies are now regulated by rational social organizations, which are characterized by:

- Distinctive social institutions: Modern world has broken away from family life and different
sorts of institutions and its pertinent separation have appeared.
- Large-scale organizations.
- Specialized tasks.
- Personal discipline: Modern society puts a premium on self-directed discipline. Discipline is
still encouraged by cultural values such as achievement, success and efficiency.
- Awareness of time and scheduled events.
- Technical competence: While traditional societies evaluate one another on the basis of who
they are, modern rationality prompts us to judge people according to what they are (skills and
abilities).
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- Impersonality: Modern social life can be viewed as the interplay of specialists concerned with
particular tasks, rather than people broadly concerned with one another.

WHERE ARE SOCIETIES HEADING? For Weber, there was a strong pessimistic streak: he saw
the world as an Iron Cage, with growing rationality creating an ever-spreading disenchantment with
the world.

In here we should remark the concept of alienation. The primary problem of modern societies is the
regulation and dehumanization that comes with expanding bureaucracy, which treats people as series
of cases rather than a unique individual. Thus, he envisaged modern societies as a vast a growing
system of rules seeking to regulate everything and threatening to crush the human spirit. Bureaucracy
rather than serve humanity, enslaves it.

SOME OTHER IMPORTANT CONCEPTS:

Ideal type: It is an abstract, stylized concept whose precise contents you cannot see in all their
extension. They only show up in the world in an approximate fashion (e.g. previous capitalism idea).
Weber worked on the ideal of authority. He makes a distinction between power and authority.
Power is the capacity to make people do whatever you want to. Nonetheless, there is authority when
that person thinks that the orders you are giving to them are legitimate (Takes place when people
obey the orders/mandates that emanate from those in positions of power because they think those
mandates are legitimate). There are basically three ideal types of authority but in the real world, this
ideal types are completely mixed.

- Traditional authority: People obey the orders/mandates that emanate from those in positions
of power because they comply with norms of tradition. These norms state the limits of power,
succession rules. The tradition tells me who has the legitimacy to give orders and what types
of orders it can give me. E.g.: traditional monarchies. Administrative order: Patrimonial
- Rational-legal authority: People obey to the laws and legal rules that he orders/mandates that
emanate from those in positions of power because they have been properly enacted,
according to the rational-legislative system that governs a community norms. E.g.: advanced
democracies. Administrative order: Bureaucratic
- Charismatic authority: People obey to the person who dictates the laws and rules of the
community because of his cunning, his extraordinary (magical) skills. Legitimacy based on
devotion to the ruler, and recognition of his unusual skills. E.g.: Hitler. Franco.
Administrative order: Bureaucratic (chaotic): to emphasize the decision making abilities of
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the ruler. This sort of authority puts in the table the problem of succession, for which there
are several “solutions”. Firstly, we can say that the charisma has inhabited another person.
Secondly, that the ruler names his successor because it is impossible for him to go wrong.
Finally, Charisma can easily be hereditary.

C. EMILE DURHEIM:

HOW HAVE SOCIETIES CHANGE? For Emile Durkheim, traditional societies are characterized
by mechanical solidarity based on moral consensus. In industrial societies, mechanical solidarity
fives way to organic solidarity based on productive specialization.

- Mechanical solidarity: It means social bonds based on shared morality that unite members of
pre-industrial societies. It represents a simple society. Every simple society has a simple
technology. This type of technology is usually so easy to manage that everybody know how
to do everything. That means that everyone is replaceable as if someone dies, he would have
the same skills as everyone or that at least, everyone could learn. Thus, we can say that every
individual is expendable.

- Organic solidarity: It is defined as social bonds based on specialization that unite members of
industrial societies. It represents a complex society. A complex society has a more difficult
technology. Thus, in order to tackle every task, they will resort to the division of labor,
making people not easily replaceable. This fact brings up a sense of interdependence. They
have, hence, different views of the world: norm, religion and expectations.

WHY DO SOCIETIES CHANGE? Durkheim pointed to an expanding division of labor as the key
dimension of social change.

Émile Durkheim studies the importance of the social division of labor in forming a society. He wrote
the book “The Social Division of Labor” and it is defined as a specialized economic activity. It is
closely linked with organic solidarity.

WHAT HOLDS SOCIETIES TOGETHER? Durkheim made solidarity the focus of his work,
contrasting the morally-based mechanical solidarity of preindustrial societies with modern societies’
more practical organic solidarity.

In mechanical societies is the strong commitment to the community what makes society survive. As
they are so similar between each other, its glue is that they have a very strong sense of membership.
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Moreover, there is a strong collective identity so at the end, everyone ends doing the same thing. It is
called mechanical solidarity because every piece of the mechanism can be interchanged. On the
contrary, what holds organic solidarity societies is the interdependence related to the division of
work, as their collective identity is very weak.

WHERE ARE SOCIETIES HEADING? Durkheim held out hope for new form of association to
emerge that would bind people together though their differences and solve the problem of anomie.

Anomie concept 

Émile Durkheim asks himself what is the best way of making a society survive, taking into account
that both freedom and the sense of identity or collective commitment are both vital. In modern
societies, a problem has appeared when there is a clearly unresolved tension between the individual
and society, what we define as “anomie”. Individually, anomie is something that individual people
feel, usually when they don’t know what to do and they feel confused and overwhelmed with life, as
if they didn´t know yet the rules of the game, leading at times to suicides or even crime. E.g.:
working for a company for 20 years and being fired without a reasons. Nonetheless, anomie can be
also produced in a collective way. For example, when a social movement is created integrated by fed
up people who does not get what is going on in their country. It is, indeed, a reaction to hopelessness.
The best representation of anomie is suicide:

Suicide: Suicide is the outcome of an active or passive decision that has been taken and that result in
the death of that person.

 An Anomic suicide is the type of suicide that occurs on complex societies. People feel
disoriented, they find a lack of meaning and order in society as if there were no common
values, too many choices and too many confronting interest. They have difficulties to fit it
and they are constantly ruminating about their goals and aspirations. So, when those (feeble)
aspirations crash (economic downturn), or due to a sudden change in your status, they start to
feel too overwhelmed to begin again from square one.
 An Egoistic suicide is the action of people who feel they don’t belong to. Apparently, they are
not integrated in a small community so they find a feeling of apathy and meaningless. It is
usually produced because of an "excessive individuation”. This fact was discovered by
constricting suicide rates between, married/not-married; Protestants, Catholics and Jews;
people with children/childless people and men/women.
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 An Altruistic suicide is the opposite. There is “minimal individuation”: people feel that their
belonging to a group shapes their behavior and decisions in a critical manner. The group
limits their capacity to be their own.

With all this analysis, we conclude that the decision to commit suicide might look intimate, but it is
not entirely so: there are social variables that account for suicide rates. This leads us to the theory of
society according to Durkheim:

SOME OTHER IMPORTANT CONCEPTS:

Society’s structure is formed of patterns of human behavior, they are social facts that have an
objective reality beyond the lives and perceptions of particular individuals and have the power of
shaping our thoughts and actions. The significance of any social fact extends beyond individuals to
the operation of society itself (E.g. crime). But society is not just “beyond ourselves”, it is also “in
ourselves” because it builds a personality by internalizing social facts.

AUGUSTE COMTE (1789-1857):

August Comte follows the disciple of the Comte of Saint Simon (utopian socialist). He claims that a
new society is emerging, and this demands a new social order, a new social hierarchy. Let´s know
something about Saint Simon’s Parable:

- Let us suppose that France suddenly loses fifty of her first-class doctors, fifty first-class
chemists, fifty first-class physiologists, fifty first-class bankers two hundred of her best
merchants, six hundreds of her foremost agriculturists…., the nation will degenerate into a
mere soulless body and fall into a state of despicable weakness in the eyes of rival nations.
Let us take another supposition. Imagine that France has the misfortune to lose on the same
day the king's brother, the Duke of Angouleme, and all the other members of the royal
family; all the great officers of the Crown; all ministers of State… the cream of her nobility
… It would not cause the community the least inconvenience
- With this little story, we learn that in this new society, we can dispense of its non-productive
members. People have to be ranked according to the added value they produce to society and
it is this what calls for an egalitarian society (of opportunities, not results)

August Comte also sets the bases of his concept of society in two ideas:

- Order: Since current society was wavering directionless (seen in wars, revolutions, new
economic order and weakening of community ties), it needs a new direction, a new set of
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institutions. But violence is not going to provide for this, only reason will. Thus, he thought
we needed agreements based on rational thinking that avoid conflict and offer stability. We
need a introduce order in our consciousness, a positive education that helps recognize the
universal order of all phenomena.He also claims that in the same way that there are laws that
govern nature, there have to be laws that govern the functioning of society. This science will
reach to Continuum the universal ordering of things.
- Progress: August Comte organized the first law of progress in three stages. The first one is
the Theological stage. This stage includes the magical vision of the world animism (things
have will and power) and theologism (anthropomorphism: polytheism, monotheism –all
powerful gods/God govern the world). The second stage is the Metaphysical one. It makes
use of Philosophy: independent gods become concepts and ideas (e.g. Platonism). The last
stage is Positivism. In it, people explain things in their own terms –not in extramundane
terms). With this three stages, Comte defends the idea of Enlightment: concept of continuous
progress, idea that mankind can be reformed, people are rational and choose “the right way”.
Hence, history has a direction and it is the role of Sociology to show it.