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2 Sociological Theory: Modern Life and Social Problems

Theoretical Perspectives on the Formation of Capitalist Society and Social Problems

T. Eaton Co. department store in 1901. Long description available.
Figure 4.14. Image of the T. Eaton Co. department store in Toronto, Canada from the back cover of the 1901 Eaton’s catalogue. [Long Description] (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

While sociological thinking can be traced through human history, the roots of contemporary sociology were planted firmly in the context of a particular societal form, early capitalism. Sociologists like Comte and Marx sought to formulate a rational, evidence-based response to the experience of massive social dislocation brought about by the transition from the European feudal era to capitalism. This was a period of unprecedented social problems, from the breakdown of local communities to the hyper-exploitation of industrial labourers. Whether the intention was to restore order to the chaotic disintegration of society, as in Comte’s case, or to provide the basis for a revolutionary transformation in Marx’s, a rational and scientifically comprehensive knowledge of society and its processes was required. It was in this context that “society” itself, in the modern sense of the word, became visible as a phenomenon to early investigators of the social condition.While each of the early sociologists reflected on the society they lived in and the social problems populations faced, three thinkers provide the basis of modern-day understanding of capitalist systems: Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. Below, we trace how each of these thinkers understood capitalism as a social, political and cultural system.

Émile Durkheim and Functionalism

Émile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) key focus in studying modern society was to understand the conditions under which social and moral cohesion could be reestablished.  He observed that European societies of the 19th century had undergone an unprecedented and fractious period of social change that threatened to dissolve society altogether.  In his book The Division of Labour in Society (1893/1960), Durkheim argued that as modern societies grew more populated, more complex, and more difficult to regulate, the underlying basis of solidarity or unity within the social order needed to evolve. His primary concern was that the cultural glue that held society together was failing, and that the divisions between people were becoming more conflictual and unmanageable. Therefore Durkheim developed his school of sociology to explain the principles of cohesiveness of societies (i.e., their forms of social solidarity) and how they change and survive over time. He thereby addressed one of the fundamental sociological questions: why do societies hold together rather than fall apart?

Two central components of social solidarity in traditional, premodern societies were the common collective conscience — the communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society shared by all — and high levels of social integration (also translated as social solidarity)— the number and strength of ties that people have to others and to their social groups. These societies were held together because most people performed similar tasks and shared values, language, and symbols. There was a low division of labour, a common religious system of social beliefs, and a low degree of individual autonomy. Society was held together on the basis of mechanical solidarity: a minimal division of labour and a shared collective consciousness with harsh punishment for deviation from the norms. Such societies permitted a low degree of individual autonomy. Essentially there was no distinction between the individual conscience and the collective conscience.

Societies with mechanical solidarity act in a mechanical fashion; things are done mostly because they have always been done that way. If anyone violated the collective conscience embodied in laws and taboos, punishment was swift and retributive. This type of thinking was common in preindustrial societies where strong bonds of kinship and a low division of labour created shared morals and values among people, such as among the feudal serfs. When people tend to do the same type of work, Durkheim argued, they tend to think and act alike.

Modern societies, according to Durkheim, were more complex. Collective consciousness was increasingly weak in individuals and the ties of social integration that bound them to others were increasingly few. Modern societies were characterized by an increasing diversity of experience and an increasing division of people into different occupations and specializations. They shared less and less commonalities that could bind them together.  However, as Durkheim observed, their ability to carry out their specific functions depended upon others being able to carry out theirs. Modern society was increasingly held together on the basis of a division of labour or organic solidarity: a complex system of interrelated parts, working together to maintain stability, i.e., like an organism (Durkheim, 1893/1960).

According to his theory, as the roles individuals in the division of labour become more specialized and unique, and people increasingly have less in common with one another, they also become increasingly interdependent on one another. Even though there is an increased level of individual autonomy — the development of unique  personalities and the opportunity to pursue individualized interests — society has a tendency to cohere because everyone depends on everyone else. The academic relies on the mechanic for the specialized skills required to fix his or her car, the mechanic sends his or her children to university to learn from the academic, and both rely on the baker to provide them with bread for their morning toast. Each member of society relies on the others. In premodern societies, the structures like religious practice that produce shared consciousness and harsh retribution for transgressions function to maintain the solidarity of society as a whole; whereas in modern societies, the occupational structure and its complex division of labour function to maintain solidarity through the creation of mutual interdependence.

While the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity is, in the long run, advantageous for a society, Durkheim noted that it creates periods of chaos and “normlessness.” One of the outcomes of the transition is social anomie. Anomie — literally, “without norms” — is a situation in which society no longer has the support of a firm collective consciousness. There are no clear norms or values to guide and regulate behaviour. Anomie was associated with the rise of industrial society, which removed ties to the land and shared labour; the rise of individualism, which removed limits on what individuals could desire; and the rise of secularism, which removed ritual or symbolic foci and traditional modes of moral regulation. During times of war or rapid economic development, the normative basis of society was also challenged. People isolated in their specialized tasks tend to become alienated from one another and from a sense of collective conscience. However, Durkheim felt that as societies reach an advanced stage of organic solidarity, they avoid anomie by redeveloping a set of shared norms. According to Durkheim, once a society achieves organic solidarity, it has finished its development.

Updating Durkheim: Postmodern Society and Neo-Tribalism

Durkheim predicted that there would be periods of anomie — normlessness, or a lack of common norms — as the small, isolated societies of mechanical solidarity were replaced by modern mass societies of organic solidarity. In the absence of a collective conscience and shared rituals, the complex division of labour in society would lead it to become increasingly divergent, heterogeneous and atomized. However, this anomie would be short-lived and temporary as the complex division of labour of organic societies stabilized. Eventually societies would emerge as cohesive, self-regulating systems of interdependent components and a new basis of social solidarity and social equilibrium would be established.

In the late 20th century, Jean Francois Lyotard (1924–1998), observing that the model of a unified, functionally cohesive society no longer described the way people actually connected with each other, suggested that Durkheim was right about anomie and the fragmentation of society but wrong about the nature of the social bond that was emerging (Lyotard, 1980). Rather than society operating as a cohesive interdependent whole, societies were discontinuous and institutions operated “in patches.” He described this tendency as postmodernPostmodern society had to be conceived as social heterogeneity without social solidarity.

Photo of a giant burning effigy of a man on top of a space ship like structure
Figure 4.24 The Burning Man festival held annually in Black Rock City, a temporary city built in northwestern Nevada. This event has many qualities of neo-tribalism, focused on a brief, intense gathering of a disperse community to celebrate artistic creation, self-expression, and self-reliance. (Image courtesy of Julia Wold/Flickr.) CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

New forms of social bond emerge in this context. While the division of labour into occupational specializations produces interdependence, such as the complex chains of social relationship in global supply chains, there is a parallel division of identities which produces fragmentation. In line with Durkheim’s analysis of premodern tribal affiliations, Maffesoli (1996) describes the formation of contemporary neo-tribesgroups of people bound together in communities of feeling who gather at particular times and places for specific reasons and then disband. These are communities of feeling in the sense that, instead of being based on ideologies or traditional sources of identity like class, locality, religion, occupation, education, or ethnicity, etc., otherwise geographically or socially disperse people come together in a bounded, usually public, space for a discrete time period to express emotional energies. They create a temporary haven based on shared feeling, ambience, sensibility, taste, or atmosphere. However, rather than forming a new, permanent basis of social solidarity, neo-tribal gatherings — “huge rallies, crowds of all kinds, collective trances, fusion through sport, ecstasy through music, religious or cultural effervescences” (Maffesoli, 2004) — represent only episodic, if intense, social attachments. They satisfy a desire for belonging, but only temporarily or as needed.

On the other hand, the contemporary experience of siloization through social media — the process by which groups become isolated in communication “silos” in ways that hinder their communication and cooperation with others — indicates the way in which social identities become fragmented, and societies themselves no longer share common universes of meaning or definitions of reality. The algorithms and social networking functions of social media platforms like Facebook enable the spread of conspiracy theories and alternate realities by creating “echo chambers” and conditions of confirmation bias that create strong in-group identities unhinged from outside input (Theocharis et al., 2021).

Part of Lyotard’s (1984) analysis of the postmodern condition is people’s “incredulity toward meta-narratives” as noted in Chapter 3. Culture. People become disaffected with modernity’s big unifying (meta) stories of social progress through scientific knowledge, enlightened morality, social emancipation, national destiny, etc. These present an image of modern society as having a historical direction, a systematicity and universality. Bauman (1991) argues instead that “the postmodern condition is a site of constant mobility and change, but no clear direction of development.” He suggests Durkheim’s anomie is a permanent condition of contemporary life. But rather than the breakdown of society into an aggregate of isolated individuals each pursuing their narrow self interest, as the term anomie sometimes suggests, the underlying desire of people to be together leads to the creation of new subcultures, communities of feeling and sources of identification and self-construction.

Karl Marx and Critical Sociology

For Marx, the creation of modern society was tied to the emergence of capitalism as a global economic system. In the mid-19th century, as industrialization was expanding, Karl Marx (1818–1883) observed that the conditions of labour became more and more exploitative. The large manufacturers of steel were particularly ruthless, and their facilities became popularly dubbed “satanic mills” based on a poem by William Blake. Marx’s colleague and friend, Frederick Engels, wrote The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, which described in detail the horrid conditions.

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Figure 4.15. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Figure 4.16) analyzed differences in social power between “have” and “have-not” groups. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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Figure 4.16. Friedrich Engels. (Photo courtesy of George Lester/Wikimedia Commons) 
Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world (1812).

Add to that the long hours, the use of child labour, and exposure to extreme conditions of heat, cold, and toxic chemicals, and it is no wonder that Marx referred to capital as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Marx, 1867/1995).

As we saw at the beginning of the chapter, Marx’s explanation of the exploitative nature of industrial society draws on a more comprehensive theory of the development of human societies from the earliest hunter-gatherers to the modern era: historical materialism. For Marx, the underlying structure of societies and of the forces of historical change was predicated on the relationship between the “base and superstructure” of societies.  In this model, society’s economic structure forms its base, on which the culture and other social institutions rest, forming its superstructure. For Marx, it is the base—the economic mode of production—that determines what a society’s culture, law, political system, family form, and, most importantly, its typical form of struggle or conflict will be like. Each type of society—hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agrarian, feudal, capitalist—could be characterized as the total way of life that forms around different economic bases.

A pyramid: the base is the economy, which supports government, religion, education, and culture
Figure 4.17. Karl Marx asserted that all elements of a society’s structure depend on its economic structure.

Marx saw economic conflict in society as the primary means of change. The base of each type of society in history — its economic mode of production — had its own characteristic form of economic struggle. This was because a mode of production is essentially two things: the means of production of a society — anything that is used in production to satisfy needs and maintain existence (e.g., land, animals, tools, machinery, factories, etc.) — and the relations of production of a society — the division of society into economic classes (the social roles allotted to individuals in production). Marx observed historically that in each epoch or type of society since the early “primitive communist” foraging societies, only one class of persons has owned or monopolized the means of production. Different epochs are characterized by different forms of ownership and different class structures: hunter-gatherer (classless/common ownership), agricultural (citizens/slaves), feudal (lords/peasants), and capitalism (capitalists/“free” labourers). As a result, the relations of production have been characterized by relations of domination since the emergence of private property in the early Agrarian societies. Throughout history, societies have been divided into classes with opposed or contradictory interests. These “class antagonisms,” as he called them, periodically lead to periods of social revolution in which it becomes possible for one type of society to replace another.

The most recent revolutionary transformation resulted in the end of feudalism. A new revolutionary class emerged from among the freemen, small property owners, and middle-class burghers of the medieval period to challenge and overthrow the privilege and power of the feudal aristocracy. The members of the bourgeoisie or capitalist class were revolutionary in the sense that they represented a radical change and redistribution of power in European society. Their power was based in the private ownership of industrial property, which they sought to protect through the struggle for property rights, notably in the English Civil War (1642–1651) and the French Revolution (1789–1799). The development of capitalism inaugurated a period of world transformation and incessant change through the destruction of the previous class structure, the ruthless competition for markets, the introduction of new technologies, and the globalization of economic activity.

As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation…. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society (1848/1977).

However, the rise of the bourgeoisie and the development of capitalism also brought into existence the class of “free” wage labourers, or the proletariat. The proletariat were made up largely of guild workers and serfs who were freed or expelled from their indentured labour in feudal guild and agricultural production and migrated to the emerging cities where industrial production was centred. They were “free” labour in the sense that they were no longer bound to feudal lords or guildmasters. The new labour relationship was based on a contract. However, as Marx pointed out, this meant in effect that workers could sell their labour as a commodity to whomever they wanted, but if they did not sell their labour they would starve. The capitalist had no obligations to provide them with security, livelihood, or a place to live as the feudal lords had done for their serfs. The source of a new class antagonism developed based on the contradiction of fundamental interests between the bourgeois owners and the wage labourers: where the owners sought to reduce the wages of labourers as far as possible to reduce the costs of production and remain competitive, the workers sought to retain a living wage that could provide for a family and secure living conditions. The outcome, in Marx and Engel’s words, was that “society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (1848/1977).

Making Connections: Sociological Concepts

Marx and the Theory of Alienation

People working on an assembly line clothed in white suits that only leave the eyes uncovered.
Figure 4.18. Assembly of notebook hard drives in Seagate’s “clean room.” Wuxi China (Photo courtesy of Robert Scoble/Twitter)

For Marx, what we do defines who we are. What it is to be “human” is defined by the capacity we have as a species to creatively transform the world in which we live to meet our needs for survival. Humanity at its core is Homo faber (“Man the Creator”). In historical terms, in spite of the persistent nature of one class dominating another, the element of humanity as creator existed. There was at least some connection between the worker and the product, augmented by the natural conditions of seasons and the rising and setting of the sun, such as we see in an agricultural society. But with the bourgeois revolution and the rise of industry and capitalism, workers now worked for wages alone. The essential elements of creativity and self-affirmation in the free disposition of their labour was replaced by compulsion. The relationship of workers to their efforts was no longer of a human nature, but based purely on animal needs. As Marx put it, the worker “only feels himself freely active in his animal functions of eating, drinking, and procreating, at most also in his dwelling and dress, and feels himself an animal in his human functions” (1932/1977).

Marx described the economic conditions of production under capitalism in terms of alienation. Alienation refers to the condition in which the individual is isolated and divorced from his or her society, work, or the sense of self and common humanity. Marx defined four specific types of alienation that arose with the development of wage labour under capitalism.

Alienation from the product of one’s labour. An industrial worker does not have the opportunity to relate to the product he or she is labouring on. The worker produces commodities, but at the end of the day the commodities not only belong to the capitalist, but serve to enrich the capitalist at the worker’s expense. In Marx’s language, the worker relates to the product of his or her labour “as an alien object that has power over him [or her]” (1932/1977). Workers do not care if they are making watches or cars; they care only that their jobs exist. In the same way, workers may not even know or care what products they are contributing to. A worker on a Ford assembly line may spend all day installing windows on car doors without ever seeing the rest of the car. A cannery worker can spend a lifetime cleaning fish without ever knowing what product they are used for.

Alienation from the process of one’s labour. Workers do not control the conditions of their jobs because they do not own the means of production. If someone is hired to work in a fast food restaurant, that person is expected to make the food exactly the way they are taught. All ingredients must be combined in a particular order and in a particular quantity; there is no room for creativity or change. An employee at Burger King cannot decide to change the spices used on the fries in the same way that an employee on a Ford assembly line cannot decide to place a car’s headlights in a different position. Everything is decided by the owners who then dictate orders to the workers. The workers relate to their own labour as an activity that does not belong to them.

Alienation from others. Workers compete, rather than cooperate. Employees vie for time slots, bonuses, and job security. Different industries and different geographical regions compete for investment. Even when a worker clocks out at night and goes home, the competition does not end. As Marx commented in The Communist Manifesto, “No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker” (1848/1977).

Alienation from one’s humanity. A final outcome of industrialization is a loss of connectivity between a worker and what makes them truly human. Humanity is defined for Marx by “conscious life-activity,” but under conditions of wage labour this is taken not as an end in itself — only a means of satisfying the most base, animal-like needs. The “species being” (i.e., conscious activity) is only confirmed when individuals can create and produce freely, not simply when they work to reproduce their existence and satisfy immediate needs like animals.

Taken as a whole, then, alienation in modern society means that individuals have no control over their lives. There is nothing that ties workers to their occupations. Instead of being able to take pride in an identity such as being a watchmaker, automobile builder, or chef, a person is simply a cog in the machine. Even in feudal societies, people controlled the manner of their labour as to when and how it was carried out. But why, then, does the modern working class not rise up and rebel?

In response to this problem, Marx developed the concept of false consciousness. False consciousness is a condition in which the beliefs, ideals, or ideology of a person are not in the person’s own best interest. In fact, it is the ideology of the dominant class (here, the bourgeoisie capitalists) that is imposed upon the proletariat. Ideas such as the emphasis of competition over cooperation, of hard work being its own reward, of individuals as being the isolated masters of their own fortunes and ruins, etc. clearly benefit the owners of industry. Therefore, to the degree that workers live in a state of false consciousness, they are less likely to question their place in society and assume individual responsibility for existing conditions.

Like other elements of the superstructure, “consciousness,” is a product of the underlying economic; Marx proposed that the workers’ false consciousness would eventually be replaced with class consciousness — the awareness of their actual material and political interests as members of a unified class. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote,

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians (1848/1977).

Capitalism developed the industrial means by which the problems of economic scarcity could be resolved and, at the same time, intensified the conditions of exploitation due to competition for markets and profits. Thus emerged the conditions for a successful working class revolution. Instead of existing as an unconscious “class in itself,” the proletariat would become a “class for itself” and act collectively to produce social change (Marx and Engels, 1848/1977). Instead of just being an inert strata of society, the class could become an advocate for social improvements. Only once society entered this state of political consciousness would it be ready for a social revolution. Indeed, Marx predicted that this would be the ultimate outcome and collapse of capitalism.

To summarise, for Marx, the development of capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was utterly revolutionary and unprecedented in the scope and scale of the societal transformation it brought about. In his analysis, capitalism is defined by a unique set of features that distinguish it from previous modes of production like feudalism or agrarianism:

  • The means of production (i.e., productive property or capital) are privately owned and controlled.
  • Capitalists purchase labour power from workers for a wage or salary.
  • The goal of production is to profit from selling commodities in a competitive-free market.
  • Profit from the sale of commodities is appropriated by the owners of capital. Part of this profit is reinvested as capital in the business enterprise to expand its profitability.
  • The competitive accumulation of capital and profit leads to capitalism’s dynamic qualities: constant expansion of markets, globalization of investment, growth and centralization of capital, boom and bust cycles, economic crises, class conflict, etc.

These features are structural, meaning that they are built-into, and reinforced by, the institutional organization of the economy. They are structures, or persistent patterns of social relationship that exist, in a sense, prior to individuals’ personal or voluntary choices and motives. As structures, they can be said to define the rules or internal logic that underlie the surface or observable characteristics of a capitalist society: its political, social, economic, and ideological formations. Some isolated cases may exist where some of these features do not apply, but they define the overall system that has come to govern the contemporary global economy.

Marx’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is historical and materialist because it focuses on the changes in the economic mode of production to explain the transformation of the social order. The expansion of the use of money, the development of commodity markets, the introduction of rents, the accumulation and investment of capital, the creation of new technologies of production, and the early stages of the manufactory system, etc. led to the formation of a new class structure (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat), a new political structure (the nation state), and a new ideological structure (science, human rights, individualism, rationalization, the belief in progress, etc.). The unprecedented transformations that created the modern era — urbanization, colonization, population growth, resource exploitation, social and geographical mobility, etc. — originated in the transformation of the mode of production from feudalism to capitalism. “Only the capitalist production of commodities revolutionizes … the entire economic structure of society in a manner eclipsing all previous epochs” (Marx, 1878). In the space of a couple of hundred years, human life on the planet was irremediably and radically altered. As Marx and Engels put it, capitalism had “create[d] a world after its own image” (1848/1977 ).

Updating Marx: Neoliberalism and the Post-Fordist Economy

One of the key arguments that sociologists draw from Marx’s analysis is to show that capitalism is not simply an economic system but a social system. The dynamics of capitalism are not a set of obscure economic concerns to be relegated to the business section of the newspaper, but the architecture that underlies the newspaper’s front page headlines; in fact, every headline in the paper. At the time when Marx was developing his analysis, capitalism was still a relatively new economic system, an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of goods and the means to produce them. It was also a system that was inherently unstable and prone to crisis, yet increasingly global in its reach. Today capitalism has left no place on earth and no aspect of daily life untouched.

As a social system, one of the main characteristics of capitalism is incessant change, which is why the culture of capitalism is often referred to as modernity. The cultural life of capitalist society can be described as a series of successive “presents,” each of which defines what is modern, new, or fashionable for a brief time before fading away into obscurity like the 78 rpm record, the 8-track tape, the CD, and even the DVD. As Marx and Engels put it, “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fast-frozen relations … are swept away, all new ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…” (1977/1848). From the ghost towns that dot the Canadian landscape to the expectation of having a lifetime career, every element of social life under capitalism has a limited duration.

Many of the aspects of social life that have been changing over the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been due to a change in the mode of regulation of capitalism (Lipietz, 1987). The mode of regulation refers to the ensemble of policies, rules, patterns of conduct, organizational forms, and institutions which stabilize capitalist accumulation of profits. Marx’s analysis can be updated to examine how the growth in inequality and the housing crisis, for example, are products of a shift in governmental policy from a welfare state model of redistribution of resources to a neoliberal model of free market distribution of resources (see Chapter 9. Social Inequality in Canada). This transition does not take place in a vacuum. Just as global capitalism is an economic system characterized by constant change, so too is the relationship between global capitalism and national modes of regulation and state policy.

Throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th century, the role of the state in the wealthy countries of the global north was typically limited to providing the legal mechanisms and enforcement to protect private property. Industrial capitalism itself was for the most part regulated solely by free market competition until stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was recognized that the capacity for producing commodities had far exceeded the ability of people earning low wages to buy them (Harvey, 1989).

A black and white photo of people working on a car assembly-line.
Figure 4.25 Today, the jobs of these assembly-line workers are increasingly being eliminated as new technology are introduced. (Photo courtesy of John Lloyd/Flickr.) CC BY 2.0

The economic model of Fordism, adopted in the wealthy Northern countries, offered a solution to the crisis by creating a system of intensive mass production (maximum use of machinery and minute divisions of labour), cheap standardized products, high wages, and mass consumption. This system required a disciplined work force and labour peace, however, because labour disruptions became increasingly costly.  This is one reason why states began to take a different role in the economy.

The Post-World War II labour-management compromise or “accord” involved the recognition and institutionalization of labour unions, the mediation of the state in capital/labour disputes, the use of taxes and Keynesian economic policy to address economic recessions, and the gradual roll out of social safety net provisions. This set of policies collectively became known as the welfare state. In a high wage/high consumption economy, the ability of individuals to continue to consume even when misfortune struck was paramount, so unemployment insurance, pensions, health care, and disability provisions were important components of the new accord. The accord also reaffirmed the rights of private property or capital to introduce new technology, to reorganize production as they saw fit, and to invest wherever they pleased. Therefore, it was not a system of economic democracy or socialism. Nevertheless, the claims of full employment, continued prosperity, and the creation of a “just society” appeared plausible within the confines of the capitalist economic system of the global North.

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Figure 4.26 Pierre Trudeau (shown here in a photo from 1975) was elected leader of the Liberal Party at the 1968 convention, where he stated, “Canada must be a just society” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) CC0 1.0

When Fordism and the welfare state system began to break down due to declining corporate productivity and profitability in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the relationship between the state and the economy started to change again. A new economic regime based on flexible accumulation began to emerge (Harvey, 1989). Flexible accumulation refers to the abandonment of large scale mass production to lean production and just-in-time inventory delivery systems which reduce times within the production system as well as response times from suppliers to customers. It replaced the focus on full-time, high wage, often unionized employment with full benefits to a system reliant on precarious employment, based on subcontracting, temporary contracts, outsourcing, and involuntary part-time work. With the globalization of production, workers in the Fordist economies of the 1st World also found themselves competing with low wage workers in the 3rd World. This lead to more flexibility for employers but a decline in job security, benefits, and real wages for the majority of workers.

Flexible accumulation also changed the model of mass production for mass markets by shifting to small batch production of consumer goods for niche markets. Niche market consumption replaced the one-size-fits-all model of consumer product in Fordism. Describing the production of Model-T cars, Henry Ford was quoted as saying “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black.” Instead of mass market products, with niche market consumption specialized products are increasingly tailored for specific market segments, product innovation accelerates and turn-over times for products decrease, and manufacturing becomes more responsive to quick-changing trends and fashions mobilized through the devices of focused advertising and marketing.

In step with the development of the post-Fordist economy of lean production, precarious employment, and niche market consumption, the state began to withdraw from its guarantee of providing universal social services and social security. Neoliberalism is the term used to define the new rationality of government, which abandons the interventionist model of the welfare state to emphasize the use of “free market” mechanisms to regulate society. As a global system, neoliberalism also involved the creation of free trade agreements and international organizations (like the G7, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) that imposed open “free” markets across national borders, the deregulation of trade and investment, and the privatization of public goods and services. Since the 1970s, capital accumulation has taken place less and less in the context of national economies, and more in the context of international flows of capital investment and disinvestment in an increasingly integrated world market. The globalization of investment and production means that capital is increasingly able to shift production around the world to where labour costs are cheapest and profit greatest.

Thus, neoliberalism is a mode of regulation or set of policies in which the state reduces its role in providing public services, regulating industry, redistributing wealth, and protecting “the commons” — i.e., the collective resources that exist for everyone to share (the environment, public infrastructure, public spaces, community facilities, airwaves, etc.). These policies are promoted by advocates as ways of addressing the “inefficiency of big government,” the “burden on the taxpayer,” the “need to cut red tape,” and the “culture of entitlement and welfare dependency.” In the place of “big” government, the virtues of the competitive marketplace are extolled. The market is said to promote more efficiency, lower costs, pragmatic decision making, non-favouritism, and a disciplined work ethic, etc.                                                                                                                                                                 Of course the facts often tell a different story. For example, government-funded health care in Canada costs far less per person than private health care in the United States (OECD, 2015). A country like Norway, which has a much higher rate of taxation than Canada, also has much lower unemployment, lower income inequality, lower inflation, better public services, a higher standard of living — and yet nevertheless has a globally competitive corporate sector with substantial state ownership and control, especially in the areas of oil and gas production which is 80% owned by the Norwegian state (Campbell, 2013). The policies of deregulation that caused the financial crisis of 2008, led even Alan Greenspan (b. 1926), the neoliberal economist and former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, to acknowledge that the model of free market “rationality” was flawed (CBC News, 2013). Since the financial crisis was a product of Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve, and a result of the neoliberal policy of tax cuts and market deregulation that he advocated, his acknowledgment of the failure of free market rationality is significant.

Zygmund Bauman‘s concept of liquid modernity captures the essence of contemporary life characterized by the sort of constant change and fluidity central to neoliberal economies. In contrast to the solidity and stability of earlier, “solid” modernity, one that is epitomized by the fordist compromise, liquid modernity is marked by a perpetual state of flux, where traditional social structures, norms, and institutions are increasingly unstable and ephemeral. Bauman argues that in this era, individuals face a world where relationships, career paths, and even personal identities are in a constant state of redefinition, driven by a relentless pace of change and uncertainty. This pervasive fluidity has profound implications for contemporary social problems. For instance, the erosion of stable employment has led to heightened economic insecurity, as people struggle to maintain stable careers in an environment where job markets are increasingly precarious and gig-based. Similarly, the weakening of traditional social bonds and community structures has exacerbated issues like loneliness and mental health crises, as individuals navigate relationships and social networks that are often transient and superficial. Furthermore, the rapid flow of information and cultural trends contributes to a sense of overwhelm and confusion, making it difficult for people to find grounding or meaning. In essence, Bauman’s idea of liquid modernity highlights a world where the very foundations of social stability and personal security are perpetually in flux, intensifying contemporary challenges related to identity, economic stability, and social cohesion. You might gather that while identifying as a marxist, Bauman did not believe in orthodoxy and in his work drew broadly from Weberian and Durkheimian concerns.

Max Weber and Interpretive Sociology

Like the other social thinkers discussed here, Max Weber (1864–1920) was concerned with the important changes taking place in Western society with the advent of capitalism. Arguably, the primary focus of Weber’s entire sociological oeuvre was to determine how and why Western civilization and capitalism developed, and where and when they developed. Why was the West the West? Why did the capitalist system develop in Europe and not elsewhere? Like Marx and Durkheim, he feared that capitalist industrialization would have negative effects on individuals but his analysis differed from theirs in significant respects. Key to the answer to his questions was the concept of rationalization. If other societies had failed to develop modern capitalist enterprise, modern science, and modern, efficient organizational structures, it was because in various ways they had impeded the development of rationalization. Weber’s question was: what are the consequences of rationality for everyday life, for the social order, and for the spiritual fate of humanity?

Unlike Durkheim’s functionalist emphasis on the sources of social solidarity and Marx’s critical emphasis on the materialist basis of class conflict, Weber’s interpretive perspective on modern society emphasizes the development of a rationalized worldview or stance, which he referred to as the disenchantment of the world: “principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (1919/1969). Rationalization refers to the general tendency in modern society for all institutions and most areas of life to be transformed by the application of rational principles of efficiency and calculation. It overcomes forms of magical thinking and replaces them with cold, objective calculations based on principles of technical efficiency. Older styles of social organization, based on traditional principles of religion, morality, or custom, cannot compete with the efficiency of rational styles of organization and are gradually replaced.

To Weber, capitalism itself became possible through the processes of rationalization. The emergence of capitalism in the West required the prior existence of rational, calculable procedures like double-entry bookkeeping, free labour contracts, free market exchange, and predictable application of law so that it could operate as a form of rational enterprise. Unlike Marx who defined capitalism in terms of the ownership of private property, Weber defined it in terms of its rational processes. For Weber, capitalism is as a form of continuous, calculated economic action in which every element is examined with respect to the logic of investment and return.  In such a ‘rational’ economic system there is no room for non-rational concerns such as abstract notions of justice or calls to tradition or beauty for all eyes are on continual improvements in efficiency that create profits.

It was not just capitalist enterprises that came to be organized around rationality and efficiency. Weber saw all aspects of modern society being governed by this logic. Modern science, law, music, art, bureaucracy, politics, and even spiritual life could only have become possible, according to Weber, through the systematic development of precise calculations and planning, technical procedures, and the dominance of “quantitative reckoning.”  He felt that other non-Western societies, however highly sophisticated, had impeded these developments by either missing some crucial element of rationality or by holding to non-rational organizational principles or some element of magical thinking. For example, Babylonian astronomy lacked mathematical foundations, Indian geometry lacked rational proofs, Mandarin bureaucracy remained tied to Confucian traditionalism and the Indian caste system lacked the common “brotherhood” necessary for modern citizenship.

Weber argued however that although the process of rationalization leads to efficiency and effective, calculated decision making, it is in the end an irrational system. The emphasis on rationality and efficiency ultimately has negative effects when taken to its conclusion. In modern societies, this is seen when rigid routines and strict adherence to performance-related goals lead to a mechanized work environment and a focus on efficiency for its own sake. To the degree that rational efficiency begins to undermine the substantial human values it was designed to serve (i.e., the ideals of the good life, ethical values, the integrity of human relationships, the enjoyment of beauty and relaxation) rationalization becomes irrational.

Charlie Chaplin plays a character that struggles to survive in a modern, industrialized world.
Figure 4.19. Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936). Has technology made this type of labour more or less alienating? (Photo courtesy of Insomnia Cured Here used under CC-BY-SA license)

An example of the extreme conditions of rationality can be found in Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times (1936). Chaplin’s character works on an assembly line twisting bolts into place over and over again. The work is paced by the unceasing rotation of the conveyor belt and the technical efficiency of the division of labour. When he has to stop to swat a fly on his nose all the tasks down the line from him are thrown into disarray. He performs his routine task to the point where he cannot stop his jerking motions even after the whistle blows for lunch. Indeed, today we even have a recognized medical condition that results from such tasks, known as “repetitive stress syndrome.”

For Weber, the culmination of industrialization and rationalization results in what he referred to as the iron cage, in which the individual is trapped by the systems of efficiency that were designed to enhance the well-being of humanity. We are trapped in a cage, or literally a “steel housing”(stahlhartes Gehäuse), of efficiently organized processes because rational forms of organization have become indispensable. We must continuously hurry and be efficient because there is no time to “waste.” Weber argued that even if there was a social revolution of the type that Marx envisioned, the bureaucratic and rational organizational structures would remain. There appears to be no alternative. The modern economic order “is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force” (Weber, 1904/1958).

A row of individual work cubicles.
Figure 4.20. Cubicles are used to maximize individual work space in an office. Such structures may be rational, but they are also isolating and dehumanizing. (Photo courtesy of Tim Patterson/flickr)

Updating Weber: Algorithmic Rationality, Digital Capitalism, and Technopopulism

Weber described rationalization as a key process in the formation of modern societies. Rationalization meant that every aspect of social organization was subject to calculation, technical innovation and ways of increasing efficiency. In the development of the information society, discussed earlier in the chapter, these processes have intensified. A premium is placed on ‘smart,’ innovative and responsive solutions to problems, aided by swift, decisive, and well-informed decision-making. But in many respects, as Weber proposed at the beginning of the 20th century, efficient systems and technologies meant to liberate humans end up creating new iron cages. Humans themselves become resources and tools within the systems they created.

One key site of 21st century rationalization has been the introduction of algorithms and artificial intelligence into decision making processes from social media search functions to financial transactions. Algorithms are sets of instructions used to solve a problem or perform a task (Milner and Traub, 2021).

They are used to aggregate data from different sources to build an increasingly detailed picture of personal habits and preferences, which companies feed into predictive tools that model future outcomes and produce categorizations, scores, and rankings. Big data is used not only to sell targeted advertising, but also to make an increasing array of high-stakes automated decisions around employment, investment, lending, and pricing in the private sphere and consequential government decisions in areas including criminal justice, education, and access to public benefits (Milner and Traub, 2021).

Advocates of algorithmic rationality present it as faster, technically superior, and more impartial than human decision making, in the same way Weber described the rationalized organization model of bureaucracy. For example, Johnson et al. (2013) described the transition to automated decision making in high frequency stock trading after 2006. This creates a new digital environment for trading in which algorithmic agents and automated cognition can make massive numbers of decisions more quickly than humans can comprehend. An investment analyst is quoted as saying “11% of all 2014 observable orders in the Canadian marketplace lasted less than one millisecond” (Peters, 2017).

Giant robotic face looking down on sitting robotic children
Figure 4.27 Images of a robotic future are common in science fiction. To what degree do algorithms and “deep learning” technologies allow human behaviour to become predictable and programmable? (Image courtesy of  Cristian Eslava/Flickr. ) CC BY-SA 2.0

However, as critics point out, the algorithmic decisions can only be as good as the input data they draw on and the assumptions made in the coding. Johnson et al. (2013) correlated the use of millisecond-scale stock market decision making with the financial collapse of 2008. In other applications such as credit assessments, insurance, policing, and public services delivery, algorithms are used in actuarial reasoning. Actuarialism is the use of historical data about social groups to calculate risk assessments about unknown individuals. What is new in this is the application of computing power to the huge quantitity of behavioral trace data collected from things users do on their “smart” devices (phones, fitbits, smart appliances, etc.). Choices people make on social media and digital services, such as clicking on links or “like,” and information collected about people by devices in the environment are captured, accumulated and analysed to build profiles of people’s behaviour. However, the key premise of actuarial decision-making is “the belief that patterns observed in the past provide useful information about activities and events that may take place in the future” (Gandy, 2016, cited in Burrell and Fourcade, 2021). Due to the unevenness of data collection and a context of historical social inequalities, even the most impartial automatic decision making to assess the credit, medical, or criminal risk of a particular individual threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, reproducing existing inequalities of treatment by institutions.

Algorithmic reason is one component of a broader array of issues posed by intensified processes of rationalization in the 21st century. Surveillance capitalism is based on surveilling, extracting, and commodifying the exchange of digital information over data networks including intimate personal details. Zuboff (2019) argues that the goal of surveillance capitalism is to extract behavioural detail from people’s use of free services like Google and Facebook to create predictions that effectively anticipate future behaviour. These can be used to automate behaviour by providing the knowledge to engineer the parameters or context around a particular activity or choice and direct change toward a desired outcome.  Similarly, data colonialism is the transformation of social life through apps, software platforms, and smart objects into the raw material of data as a new stage in the centuries long colonial process of seizing territory and extracting resources. All of social life around the globe is potentially disposessed from its “owners” and datified through the daily processes and interactions that use or require digital technologies (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). Finally, technopopulism represents a potentially new form of post-democratic political reconfiguration in which populist movements abandon “unresponsive” democratic procedures to unite “the people” against elites and common enemies. Governance is taken over by “problem-solving” technical elites who dispense with the perceived technical incompetence and social divisions of parliamentary democracy (Bickerton and Accetti, 2021). Indications of this model can be seen in the “New Labour” governments in the UK, the Macron government in France, the Five Star Movement in Italy and Donald Trump’s attempts to use business strategies — “the art of the deal” — in domestic conflicts and international diplomacy in the U.S.

Making Connections: Sociological Concepts

The McDonaldization of Society

In The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer, 1994), George Ritzer brings Weber’s ideas about the trajectory of modern life into the 20th Centurey.  Ritzer refers to the increasing presence of the fast-food business model in common social institutions — what started as a way to sell more hamburgers has been copied by private businesses, non-profits and government organizations of all types. This business model includes efficiency (the division of labour), predictability, calculability, and control (monitoring). For example, in your average chain grocery store, people at the cash register check out customers while stockers keep the shelves full of goods, and deli workers slice meats and cheese to order.  Each of these workers focuses on a small part of the larger task which ensures workers need little training and can accomplish there tasks quickly (efficiency). Whenever you enter a store within that grocery chain, you receive the same type of goods, see the same store organization, and find the same brands at the same prices (predictability). You will find that goods are sold by the kilogram, so that you can weigh your fruit and vegetable purchases rather than simply guessing at the price for that bag of onions, while the employees use a time card to calculate their hours and receive overtime pay (calculability). Finally, you will notice that all store employees are wearing a uniform (and usually a name tag) so that they can be easily identified. There are security cameras to monitor the store, and some parts of the store, such as the stockroom, are generally considered off-limits to customers (control).

While McDonaldization has resulted in improved profits, lowered prices and an increased availability of various goods and services to more people worldwide, it has also reduced the variety of goods available in the marketplace while rendering available products uniform, generic, and bland. Think of the difference between a mass-produced shoe and one made by a local cobbler, between a chicken from a family-owned farm versus a corporate grower, or a cup of coffee from the local roaster instead of one from a coffee-shop chain.

Ritzer also notes that the rational systems, as efficient as they are, are irrational in that the organization and it’s goals become more important than the people working within them, or the clients being served by them. “Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.” (Ritzer, 1994) While a McDonaldized organization might produce much product very efficiently, it also produces deskilled jobs and mountains of mass-produced, homogeneous products of mediocre quality.  Few aspire, unless they have no other options to work in such places and while safe, cheap and filling, few would consider a McDonald’s hamburger to be great food.  Moreover, as the namesake suggests, such organizations are concerned with efficiency even if what they produce causes other harms. 

Super Size Me - WikipediaSuper Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2017) - IMDb

In the documentaries, Super Size Me and Super Size Me 2, director Morgan Spurlock, examined the impact of our McDonaldized, industrial food systems on our health but also questioned the effects on workers, animals and the planet.

Feminist Sociology: The History of Gender Inequality

Missing in the classical theoretical accounts of modernity is an explanation of how the developments of modern society, industrialization, and capitalism have affected women differently from men. Despite the differences in Durkheim’s, Marx’s, and Weber’s main themes of analysis, they are equally androcentric to the degree that they cannot account for why women’s experience of modern society is structured differently from men’s, or why the implications of modernity are different for women than they are for men. They tell his-story but neglect her-story.

Recall from Chapter 3:  Androcentricism is a perspective in which male concerns, male attitudes, and male practices are presented as “normal” or define what is significant and valued in a culture. Women’s experiences, activities, and contributions to society and history are ignored, devalued, or marginalized.

For most of human history, men and women held more or less equal status in society. In hunter-gatherer societies gender inequality was minimal as these societies did not sustain institutionalized power differences. They were based on cooperation, sharing, and mutual support. There was often a gendered division of labour in that men are most frequently the hunters and women the gatherers and child care providers (although this division is not necessarily strict), but as women’s gathering accounted for up to 80% of the food, their economic power in the society was assured. Where headmen lead tribal life, their leadership is informal, based on influence rather than institutional power (Endicott, 1999). In prehistoric Europe from 7000 to 3500 BCE, archaeological evidence indicates that religious life was in fact focused on female deities and fertility, while family kinship was traced through matrilineal (female) descent (Lerner, 1986).

An 11.1 centimetre high statuette of a female figure.
Figure 4.22. The Venus of Willendorf discovered in Willendorf, Austria, is thought to be 25,000 years old. It is widely assumed to be a fertility goddess and indicative of the central role of women in Paleolithic society. (Photo courtesy of Matthias Kabel, Wikimedia Commons)

It was not until about 6,000 years ago that gender inequality emerged. With the transition to early agrarian and pastoral types of societies, food surpluses created the conditions for class divisions and power structures to develop. Property and resources passed from collective ownership to family ownership with a corresponding shift in the development of the monogamous, patriarchal (rule by the father) family structure. Women and children also became the property of the patriarch of the family. The invasions of old Europe by the Semites to the south, and the Kurgans to the northeast, led to the imposition of male-dominated hierarchical social structures and the worship of male warrior gods. As agricultural societies developed, so did the practice of slavery. Lerner (1986) argues that the first slaves were women and children.

The development of modern, industrial society has been a two-edged sword in terms of the status of women in society. Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884/1972) that the historical development of the male-dominated monogamous family originated with the development of private property. The family became the means through which property was inherited through the male line. This also led to the separation of a private domestic sphere and a public social sphere. “Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production” (1884/1972). Under the system of capitalist wage labour, women were doubly exploited. When they worked outside the home as wage labourers they were exploited in the workplace, often as cheaper labour than men. When they worked within the home, they were exploited as the unpaid source of labour needed to reproduce the capitalist workforce. The role of the proletarian housewife was tantamount to “open or concealed domestic slavery” as she had no independent source of income herself (Engels, 1884/1972). Early Canadian law, for example, was based on the idea that the wife’s labour belonged to the husband. This was the case even up to the famous divorce case of Irene Murdoch in 1973, who had worked the family farm in the Turner Valley, Alberta, side by side with her husband for 25 years. When she claimed 50% of the farm assets in the divorce, the judge ruled that the farm belonged to her husband, and she was awarded only $200 a month for a lifetime of work (CBC, 2001).

On the other hand, Engels noted that there was also an improvement in women’s condition when they began to work outside the home, suggesting that women’s oppression might, at least partially, be addressed by a struggle for equal rights to paid work.  Almost a century earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792/1997) were also able to see, in the discourses of rights and freedoms of the bourgeois revolutions and the Enlightenment, a general “promise” of universal emancipation that could be extended to include the rights of women. The focus of the Vindication of the Rights of Women was on the right of women to have an education, which would put them on the same footing as men with regard to the knowledge and rationality required for “enlightened” political participation and skilled work outside the home. Whereas property rights, the role of wage labour, and the law of modern society continued to be a source for gender inequality, the principles of universal rights became a powerful resource for women to use in order to press their claims for equality.

Such early feminist thinkers draw our attention to how problems faced by women are inextricably linked to both gender and economic exploitation, and that the development of capitalism can have contradictory effects on women’s position.  While working class men might see freedom in the struggle from work (ie. shorter work days), and at work (control over their work process), women can benefit from the struggle to (paid) work and the struggle from unpaid work in the home. The uniqueness of these gendered struggles presages more contemporary standpoint and intersectional feminist theory (see text box).

Dorothy Smith: Domination in Everyday Life

One of the keen sociological insights that emerged with the feminist perspective in sociology is that “the personal is political.” Many of the most immediate and fundamental experiences of social life—from childbirth to who washes the dishes to the experience of sexual violence—had simply been invisible or regarded as unimportant politically or socially. Canadian sociologist, Dorothy Smith’s development of standpoint theory was a key innovation in sociology that enabled these issues to be seen and addressed in a systematic way (Smith 1977). She recognized from the consciousness-raising exercises and encounter groups initiated by feminists in the 1960s and 1970s that many of the immediate concerns expressed by women about their personal lives had a commonality of themes. However, the language of sociology, like that of politics and law, was built by men and not able to capture or understand women’s lived experiences.

Part of the issue was sociology itself. Smith argued that instead of beginning sociological analysis from the abstract point of view of institutions or systems, women’s lives could be more effectively examined if one began from the “actualities” of their lived experience in the immediate local settings of “everyday/everynight” life. She asked, What are the common features of women’s everyday lives? From this standpoint, Smith observed that women’s position in modern society is acutely divided by the experience of dual consciousness. Every day women crossed a tangible dividing line when they went from the “particularizing work in relation to children, spouse, and household” to the institutional world of text-mediated, abstract concerns at work, or in their dealings with schools, medical systems, or government bureaucracies. In the abstract world of institutional life, the actualities of local consciousness and lived life are “obliterated” (Smith 1977). While the standpoint of women is grounded in bodily, localized, “here and now” relationships between people, due to their obligations in the domestic sphere, society is organized through “relations of ruling,” which translate the substance of actual lived experiences into abstract bureaucratic categories. Power and rule in society, especially the power and rule that constrain and coordinate the lives of women, that provide accounts of social life as if it were possible to stand outside of it. Smith argued that the abstract concepts of sociology, at least in the way that it was taught at the time, only contributed to the problem.

Smith’s work, drew heavily upon Marxism, especially Marx’s rejection of ‘objectivity’, the epistemological approach of understanding the world from the standpoint of the oppressed, and the understanding of the link between patriarchy and private ownership. Her critique of the experience of abstract, bureaucratic systems also bears the influence of Weber. This work, however, like contemporary feminism more broadly, is distinct and irreducible to these influences.
Smith introduces a new vantage for understanding social problems, one that that has been critiqued and extended by intersectional feminist theory – that social problems are experienced in everyday lived situations by individuals whose lives are shaped by intersecting forms of oppression (class, race, gender, sexuality etc.). As the experience of social problems is multiple, so too must be struggles for social justice and reform.

 

Key Terms

alienation: The condition in which an individual is isolated from his or her society, work, sense of self and/or common humanity.

anomie: A situation of uncertain norms and regulations in which society no longer has the support of a firm collective consciousness.

anthropocene:  The geological epoch defined by the impact of human activitieson the global ecosystem.

bourgeoisie: The owners of the means of production in a society.

class consciousness: Awareness of one’s class position and interests.

collective conscience: The communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society.

dialectic of culture:  The way in which the creation of culture is both constrained by limits given by the environment and a means to go beyond these natural limits.

disenchantment of the world: The replacement of magical thinking by technological rationality and calculation.

ethos:  A way of life or a way of conducting oneself in life.

false consciousness: When a person’s beliefs and ideology are in conflict with his or her best interests.

feudal societies: Agricultural societies that operate on a strict hierarchical system of power based around land ownership, protection and mutual obligations.

horticultural societies: Societies based around the cultivation of plants.

hunter-gatherer societies: Societies that depend on hunting wild animals and gathering uncultivated plants for survival.

industrial societies: Societies characterized by a reliance on mechanized labour to create material goods.

information societies: Societies based on the production of nonmaterial goods and services.

iron cage: A situation in which an individual is trapped by the rational and efficient processes of social institutions.

law of three stages: The three stages of evolution that societies develop through: theological, metaphysical, and positive.

mechanical solidarity: Social solidarity or cohesion through a shared collective consciousness with harsh punishment for deviation from the norms.

metaphysical stage: A stage of social evolution in which people explain events in terms of abstract or speculative ideas.

neolithic revolution:  The economic transition to sedentary, agriculture based societies beginning approximately 10,200 years.

organic solidarity:  Social solidarity or cohesion through a complex division of labour, mutual interdependence and restitutive law.

pastoral societies: Societies based around the domestication of animals.

proletariat: The wage labourers in capitalist society.

Protestant work ethic: The duty to work hard in one’s calling.

rationalization: The general tendency in modern society for all institutions and most areas of life to be transformed by the application of rationality and efficiency.

social class: A group defined by a distinct relationship to the means of production.

social integration: How strongly a person is connected to his or her social group.

social structure: General patterns of social behaviour and organization that persist through time.

theological stage: A stage of social evolution in which people explain events with respect to the will of God or gods.

Section Summary

4.1. Types of Societies
Societies are classified according to their development and use of technology. For most of human history, people lived in preindustrial societies characterized by limited technology and low production of goods. After the Industrial Revolution, many societies based their economies around mechanized labour, leading to greater profits and a trend toward greater social mobility. At the turn of the new millennium, a new type of society emerged. This postindustrial, or information, society is built on digital technology and nonmaterial goods.

4.2. Theoretical Perspectives on the Formation of Modern Society
Émile Durkheim believed that as societies advance, they make the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity. For Karl Marx, society exists in terms of class conflict. With the rise of capitalism, workers become alienated from themselves and others in society. Sociologist Max Weber noted that the rationalization of society can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Feminists note that the androcentric point of view of the classical theorists does not provide an adequate account of the difference in the way the genders experience modern society.

 

Section Quiz

4.1. Types of Societies
1. Which of the following fictional societies is an example of a pastoral society?

  1. The Deswan people, who live in small tribes and base their economy on the production and trade of textiles.
  2. The Rositian Clan, a small community of farmers who have lived on their family’s land for centuries.
  3. The Hunti, a wandering group of nomads who specialize in breeding and training horses.
  4. The Amaganda, an extended family of warriors who serve a single noble family.

2. Which of the following occupations is a person of power most likely to have in an information society?

  1. software engineer
  2. coal miner
  3. children’s book author
  4. sharecropper

3. Which of the following societies were the first to have permanent residents?

  1. industrial
  2. hunter-gatherer
  3. horticultural
  4. feudal

4.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Society
4. Organic solidarity is most likely to exist in which of the following types of societies?

  1. hunter-gatherer
  2. industrial
  3. agricultural
  4. feudal

5. According to Marx, the _____ own the means of production in a society.

  1. proletariat
  2. vassals
  3. bourgeoisie
  4. anomie

6. Which of the following best depicts Marx’s concept of alienation from the process of one’s labour?

  1. A supermarket cashier always scans store coupons before company coupons because she was taught to do it that way.
  2. A businessman feels that he deserves a raise, but is nervous to ask his manager for one; instead, he comforts himself with the idea that hard work is its own reward.
  3. An associate professor is afraid that she won’t be given tenure and starts spreading rumours about one of her associates to make herself look better.
  4. A construction worker is laid off and takes a job at a fast food restaurant temporarily, although he has never had an interest in preparing food before.

7. The Protestant work ethic is based on the concept of predestination, which states that ________.

  1. performing good deeds in life is the only way to secure a spot in Heaven.
  2. salvation is only achievable through obedience to God.
  3. no person can be saved before he or she accepts Jesus Christ as his or her saviour.
  4. God has already chosen those who will be saved and those who will be damned.

8. The concept of the iron cage was popularized by which of the following sociological thinkers?

  1. Max Weber
  2. Karl Marx
  3. Émile Durkheim
  4. Friedrich Engels

9. Émile Durkheim’s ideas about society can best be described as ________.

  1. functionalist.
  2. conflict theorist.
  3. symbolic interactionist.
  4. rationalist.

[Quiz answers at end of chapter]

Short Answer

4.1. Types of Societies

  1. How can the difference in the way societies relate to the environment be used to describe the different types of societies that have existed in world history?
  2. Is Gerhard Lenski right in classifying societies based on technological advances? What other criteria might be appropriate, based on what you have read?

4.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Society

  1. How might Durkheim, Marx, and Weber be used to explain a current social event such as the Occupy movement. Do their theories hold up under modern scrutiny? Are their theories necessarily androcentric?
  2. Think of the ways workers are alienated from the product and process of their jobs. How can these concepts be applied to students and their educations?

Further Research

4.1. Types of Societies
The Maasai are a modern pastoral society with an economy largely structured around herds of cattle. Read more about the Maasai people and see pictures of their daily lives: http://openstaxcollege.org/l/The-Maasai

4.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Society
One of the most influential pieces of writing in modern history was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. Visit this site to read the original document that spurred revolutions around the world: http://openstaxcollege.org/l/Communist-Party

References

4. Introduction to Society and Social Interaction
Maasai Association. (n.d.). Facing the lion: By Massai warriors. Retrieved January 4, 2012 (http://www.maasai-association.org/lion.html).

4.1. Types of Societies

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Clastres, Pierre. (1987). Society against the state: Essays in political anthropology. NY: Zone Books

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Diamond, Stanley. (1974). In search of the primitive. Chicago: Transaction Books

Haraway, Donna. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (Ch. 8). London: Free Association

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Kurzweil, Ray. (2009). Ray Kurzweil on the future of nanotechnology. Big think. Retrieved, Oct. 4, 2015, from http://bigthink.com/videos/ray-kurzweil-on-the-future-of-nanotechnology

Larson, Gregor. (2015). How wheat came to Britain. Science, Vol. 347 (6225): 945-946.

Lee, Richard. (1978). Politics, sexual and nonsexual, in an egalitarian society. Social science information, 17.

Marx, Karl. (1977). Preface to a critique of political economy. In D. McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (pp. 388–392). London, UK: Oxford University Press. (original work published 1859)

Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Smith, Oliver, Garry Momber, Richard Bates, Paul Garwood, Simon Fitch, Mark Pallen, Vincent Gaffney, Robin G. Allaby. (2015). Sedimentary DNA from a submerged site reveals wheat in the British Isles 8000 years ago. Science, Vol. 347 (6225): 998-1001 

Stavrianos, Leften. (1990). Lifelines from our past: A new world history.  NY: LB Taurus

Sterling, Bruce. (1996). Holy fire. New York: Bantam Spectra.

von Daniken, E. (1969). Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved mysteries of the past. London: Souvenir.

Wright, Ronald. (2004). A short history of progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

4.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Society

Bauman, Zygmunt. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

CBC. (2001). Equal under the law: Canadian women fight for equality as the country creates a charter of rights. Canada: A people’s history. Retrieved February 21, 2014 (http://www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP17CH2PA4LE.html).

Durkheim, Émile. (1960). The Division of labor in society. (George Simpson, Trans.). New York: Free Press. (original work published 1893).

Durkheim, Émile. (1982). The Rules of the Sociological Method. (W. D. Halls, Trans.). New York: Free Press. (original work published 1895)

Endicott, Karen. (1999). Gender relations in hunter-gatherer societies.  In R.B. Lee and R. Daly (Eds.), The Cambridge encyclopedia of hunters and gatherers (pp. 411–418). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Engels, Friedrich. (1972). The origin of the family, private property and the state. New York: International Publishers. (original work published 1884)

Engels, Friedrich. (1892). The Condition of the working-class in England in 1844. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.

Hess, Alexander. (2014, November 29). 10 Worst Countries For Women. Huffpost Business: Huffington Post. Retrieved Oct. 18, 2015 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/29/worst-countries-for-women_n_6241216.html

Lerner, Gerda. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. New York: Oxford Press.

Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri. (2016). Neoliberalism: Oversold? Finance and Development, June 2016, Vol. 53, No. 2

Marx, Karl. (1995). Capital: A critique of political economy. Marx/Engels Archive [Internet]. Retrieved February 18, 2014 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/). (original work published 1867)

Marx, Karl. (1977). Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In David McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected writings (pp. 75–112). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (original work published 1932)

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1977). The Communist manifesto (Selections).  In David McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected writings (pp. 221–247). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (original work published 1848)

Ritzer, George. (1994). The McDonaldization of society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.

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Weber, Max. (1969). Science as a Vocation. In H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 129-158). NY: Oxford University Press. (original work published 1919)

Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1997). A vindication of the rights of women. In D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Eds.), The vindications: The rights of men and the rights of woman. Toronto: Broadview Literary Texts. (original work published in 1792)

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Solutions to Section Quiz

1 C, | 2 A, | 3 C, | 4 B, | 5 C, | 6 A, | 7 D, | 8 A, | 9 A | [Return to quiz]

Media Attributions

Image Attributions

Figure 4.1. “Effigy of a Shaman from Haida Tribe, late 19th century” from Wellcome Library  (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Haida#/media/File:Effigy_of_a_Shaman_from_Haida_Tribe,_late_19th_century._Wellcome_L0007356.jpg) is licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 4.2.Ceremonial rattle in the form of the mythical thunder-bird” from the British Museum Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections (1910)  by Internet Archive Book Images (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Haida#/media/File:Handbook_to_the_ethnographical_collections_%281910%29_%2814596714720%29.jpg) is licensed under the rule that “no known copyright restrictions” exist (https://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/)

Figure 4.4. “Blackfoot Indians” from Library and Archives Canada (http://collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&rec_nbr=3193492&lang=eng) is in the public domain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain)

Figure 4.5. “The Salish Sea” by Arct (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Carte_populations_salish_de_la_cote.svg) is licenced under  CC-BY-SA 3.0  via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 4.6. “Maize-teosinte” by John Doebley (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maize-teosinte.jpg) is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.

Figure 4.7. “Roman Collared Slaves” from the  Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#/media/File:Roman_collared_slaves_-_Ashmolean_Museum.jpg) is licenced under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Figure 4.8. “Isla de Pascua – 628 .-“ by Alberto Beaudroit  (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isla_de_Pascua_-_628_.-.JPG#/media/File:Isla_de_Pascua_-_628_.-.JPG) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 4.9.  Bayeux Tapestry – Scene 23 by Myrabella (http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Bayeux_Tapestry_scene23_Harold_oath_William.jpg) is in the public domain (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)

Figure 4.10. “Women wrapping and packing bars of soap in the Colgate-Palmolive Canada plant on the northwest corner of Carlaw and Colgate Avenues in Toronto, Ontario, Canada” by Pringle & Booth, Toronto (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colgate-Palmolive_Canada_1919.jpg) is in the public domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain).

Figure 4.11. George Stephen, 1965 by William Notman (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Stephen_1865.jpg) is in the public domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain)

Figure 4.12. “The Desk” by Charlie Styr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/charlies/2169080948/in/photolist-4iF7co-fmDBN8-3pzKHj-e2csN-85Dpd2-4BqJnq-75xCjy-q7KdMT-51QJr6-5sju9H-fCxYb-6hGrSD-42cG24-48EdkK-4efHw-uXGV-fMf6tz-4m2KcX-4qMa6h-69EPSh-a1wJSS-72Tcj-6monK8-65bexe-2DEEG-ESpP9-6K4ZT-bx3waG-4UcxqQ-7qa26u-juiu4o-K43C-9w84j8-7cEtjU-a1cYj4-a8LLoY-Cvhkq-5xWXdu-7bWBVz-9DhQX-3sjha-9kYneT-u8WdY-2cnSAW-8dNu6-b1UmA-4TannF-4xYr78-6549S-238pk) used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)

Figure 4.13. “Dengue virus infection” by Sanofi Pasteur (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sanofi-pasteur/7413644166/in/photolist-ci7S89-5Vy3Ut-5Vyx2q-pCYRsM-4vxwP5-ci7S77-9gtqfe-93BsfE-b5g5E-93Bmkb-93Bu23-93yoH8-8r1Hp8-hiRYTp-8ctWbd-qoxb4p-93T2b2-ci7S4h-b6du8n-dPiDp3-9wkUwH-9WSppU-qbhZUY-r3TuCM-aronSf-93ym6K-ci7S5W-bm1us-8rnwZu-dSPMSp-o42Hvu-93BmPh-kxRVpH-rki4V2-6royED-yP2m87-r3qUcs-yQ1Wyk-tbEDj-xFECFi-9gP97o-9ApBzB-xbr3uW-jQvxq9-rEjNRU-2j1bum-8GSyC4-iK5pRZ-ae7RjF-atrmSD) used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)

Figure 4.14. Image of the T. Eaton Co. department store in Toronto, Ontario, Canada from the back cover of the 1901 Eaton’s catalogue  (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bird%27s_eye_view_of_the_store_and_factories_of_the_T._Eaton_Co._Limited_Toronto_Canada.jpg) is in the public domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain)

Figure 4.18. Seagate’s clean room by Robert Scoble (https://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/3010353308/) used under CC BY 2.0 licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Figure 4.19. Charlie Chaplin by Insomnia Cured Here (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tom-margie/1535417993/) used under CC BY SA 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

Figure 4.20. I Love Cubicles by Tim Patterson (https://www.flickr.com/photos/timpatterson/476098132/) used under CC BY 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Figure 4.21. Puritan soap packet by Paul Townsend (https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/19609916339) used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

Figure 4.22. Venus of Willendorf by MatthiasKabel (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venus_of_Willendorf_frontview_retouched_2.jpg) used under CC BY SA 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

Long Descriptions

Figure 4.14 Long Description: Pencil drawing of a large, multi-floor building and a tall smoke stack to the far right. People fill the surrounding sidewalk and street cars and horses move through the streets. [Return to Figure 4.14.]

 

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