The Many-Splendored Society. Draft of appendices
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To understand what is going
on, the observer, the reader, the historian, the anthropologist, the
interviewer, in short, all the practitioners of social science,
must share the hidden code of their symbol-using subjects of study. This simple
fact has led a score of authors in specialties such as symbolic interactionism,
ethno-methodology, hermeneutics, semiotics, and conversation analysis to
rewrite social science, rejecting everything unrelated to the notion that
students of social life and those persons participating in social life must
share a common code.
Now, there is much more
to social science than understanding what the other fellow means. True, without
that understanding we do not get very far. Therefore, social scientists and
historians should know languages – particularly the vocabularies and
idiosyncrasies used by the subjects of their study. They must immerse
themselves in the social contexts relevant to their study; social science is
normally not an armchair pursuit. We must learn how other people actually
think, and not rely on how we would think in their shoes.
This does not mean that
we must abandon the use of statistics and other tools of science. Once meanings
are established they can be treated by all ordinary scholarly and scientific
means that ensure objective analysis. The language of the sources is translated
into the more general terminology of social science. And that language lends
itself to the usual arsenal of scientific tools: logic, mathematics, and
statistics. Ours is a very worldly and demanding pursuit; we must be at home
with many tongues and places and also with an arsenal of intellectual and
methodological skills.
Societies and their
symbolic environments are not necessarily so
incomprehensible as laymen think. Buildings are many and varied but the first
fact is that the kinds of building blocks are very few. A child playing
with building blocks can build a large number of scenes and structures
notwithstanding the small number of different kinds of blocks: brick-like,
board-like, and a few more forms.
And the second fact is
that the number of rules for joining building blocks is still smaller. In the
popular toy of Lego there is actually only one rule, namely that the cones from
one block shall fit into the spaces between the cones of another block. Here we
will find inspiration in the approach toward a Universal Grammar of the
linguists. Its rules seem less complex than the sum of school grammars of the
various languages.
To Descartes, the great
philosopher of reason after the Renaissance, and his followers, reason is
something that joins all intellects. They held that all human beings, although
varying in their customs and desires, are alike in one crucial respect: they
are equipped with reason.
These philosophers may
have admitted that reason may not be the strongest voice in human affairs, but
they held that when reason is used men and women of all times and all
civilizations would arrive at the same conclusions.
This faith in a
universal reason is found in all varieties of classicism. For example, the
classicists believed that reason provided one universally valid taste. Thus the
artists in the classical tradition disregard individual differences and create
general types, universally valid forms. The scientists in the same tradition
seek a small number of types, e.g. a periodic system of elements, and eternal
laws of nature. The politicians in this tradition strive for a clean-cut social
order with the universal application of law emanating from a central government
believed to embody the best of reason. Seen in this same classical tradition,
businessmen are engaged in pursuit of high numbers on the bottom line of their
balance sheets. Regardless of their type of business, these balance sheets have
the same layout and can be analyzed for good or weak points by the same
methods.
Generalized conceptions
of man and his activities like these are found in all classical categories.
They often lead to static and sometimes inhuman conceptions of human life.
Darwin disproved the
rationalist dogma of Descartes about the consistency and permanence of reason.
Man has developed, unfolded and enriched his person, including his reasoning,
and he is able to grow to further heights and levels. (He is also able to
regress to incredible lows and make himself extinct.) This has led to new
classifications in which we find categories in the form of stages rather
than states of reality. We may call them emerging categories.
The outside framework
of a categorical schema for social science may be classic. Everything that a
society contains – in the past, present, or future, in the Western world or the
Eastern, in the southern hemisphere or the northern – everything should fit
into the outside frame of a table of society. However, inside this framework we
may have a number of emerging sub-typologies. An example would be the
transformation of societies with undifferentiated spheres of activity into more
complex societies that differentiate special life areas dealing with knowledge,
wealth, order, aesthetics, holiness, virtue. Or, emergent divisions of labor
that give different assignments to those who create, sustain, mediate, and
receive knowledge, wealth, order, etc. Man's developmental stages,
from childhood, to adulthood and old age is, of course, a developmental
classification. Likewise our thinking about the growth of populations,
technological advances, the clashes of lifestyles and class struggles, all give
rise to developmental categories.
[To signal that we deal
with emerging rather than classical categories I will try to avoid the usual
lines around the cells in the final editing of the tables in this text.]
The dominance of
developmental typologies in serious societal theorizing has led to the
recognition that the body of knowledge of the social sciences is not as
universal as that of physics. Many theses that social scientists hold to be
valid are, in truth, limited to the place and time which they can overview and
grasp.
In general, social
sciences resemble the biological sciences more than the physical sciences.
Darwin's work on the evolution of species is a better model for social sciences
than Newton's or Einstein's work on the behavior of matter (Lieberson
& Lynn, 2002). Darwin, like the social scientist, was faced with the task
of drawing conclusions based on series of observations rather than controlled
experiments. Darwin, like the social scientist had to condense volumes of
diverse data into a relatively simple system with few independent variables.
Darwin, like the social scientist, had to use and publish theory that often was
incomplete in respect to both evidence and development.
The Choice Between Abstract or Concrete Terminology
In presenting thoughts
and evidence from other authors I have tried to cite or mention those who
formulated them first or, at least at an early stage, and, at the same
time, gave evidence that they fully understood their importance. This is why you
will find more old references in this text than in most others that profess to
be up to date in the 21st century. I have not bothered to present the great
number of other supporting statements and additional evidence discovered at
later date. I hope this practice will convince readers that there has been much
accumulation of knowledge in the social sciences, sometimes obfuscated by the
delight that some prominent colleagues have taken in refreshing their
enterprise by simply changing their terminology from time to time without
adding much to knowledge.
Max Weber usually used
the same term to designate both a pure ideal-type – for example, “the economy”
– and a concrete societal phenomenon – for example “the Prussian agricultural
economy in the 1890s” with its special political rules, kinship structures,
aristocratic ethos, etc. He wanted precision in his study of society. Most of the time he achieved this by sharpening ordinary language,
not by using unusual words.
In my work on
categories I have not been much bothered by the dilemma that the same terms may
stand for both the abstractly pure and the messily concrete. Normally one can
easily figure out the usage from the context. In communicating social science
to laymen, I have rather appreciated Weber’s praxis of using the language of
the sources, but at the same time giving the key terms a more formal or
ideal-typical meaning. However, his written language has an unfortunate
distance from direct and easily accessible every-day sentences. In this sense Weber
is a poor model for social science.
To sum up: Our program
is to search for a universal structure of all human societies, an empty form
into which all present, past and future societies fit. The structure should
include emerging categories, not only classical ones. It should be conceived in
terms a system only when this is empirically proven. It will be presented in a
concrete terminology understandable by laymen, but their everyday terms should
also have a more precise scholarly meaning.
The best proof of such
a rich pudding, perhaps the only genuine proof, is found in the eating, i.e. in
a pragmatic test of the fit between our text and known social realities, and a
logical test of the fragments of consensus of among great social scientists of
the past and in the present.
"Basic
classification (categories) are used to sort out
reality, and they guide our observations. At the same time they are building
blocks in the construction of theories, models, and explanations. Thus
categories and classifications are primary in relation to theory and empirical
research."
Thomas Brante
in the 2002 invitation of the Swedish Sociological Association to the
"Workgroup on Sociological Categories and Classifications."
The adjective
"many-splendored" in the title of this multi-volume work dates from
the 1950s. It was invented and spelled "many-splendoured"
by Han Sugin, a Chinese-born author and physician
writing in English and French. One of her novels was turned into the 1955 film
"Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," set in Hong Kong, starring
Jennifer Jones and William Holden. Their many-splendored love in the film
struggles to overcome the ingrown distrust of a racially and ethnically
different couple and their families. The most memorable scenes in the film are
set on the high and windy hills of Hong Kong where the lovers first meet.
Love
is a many-splendored thing,
It's the April rose that only grows in the early spring,
Love is nature's way of giving a reason to be living,
The golden crown that makes a man a king.
The song won an Oscar
but is since forgotten. I felt that the adjective in its title,
"many-splendored," deserved a longer life. So here it stands for a
society with personal freedom and a differentiation of six self-governing
realms: economy, politics, science, art, religion, and morality. When these
realms are joined in a voluntary cooperation we have a many-splendored society,
in my view, a good one.
Early in my
professional life I decided to specialize in the study of advanced societies whose
history could be shown in surviving buildings (or ruins), in cleverly invented
tools, and above all, in pictures and written stories. This was not a
self-evident choice in the middle of the twentieth century when a new
generation of young academics had discovered the excitement of what was then
called "underdeveloped societies." The present work, The
Many-Splendored Society, is thin on that topic. To be a many-splendored
society may actually require some over-development rather than
under-development by today's standards.
The Many-Splendored
Society is not a typical collection of essays of
theoretical relevance, more or less revised and integrated, as are many works
of Max Weber (1920, 1921), Robert K Merton (1957), Herbert Blumer
(1969), Clifford Geertz (1973), Edward Shils (1982),
Daniel Bell (19xx), and YY (xx), all of whom that
have greatly inspired me. The Many-Splendored Society certainly has
material from my older essays but it is reworked into a whole cloth and
everything is presented in English. Actually, my native tongue, Swedish, is not
well suited to this topic since the people and intellectuals who speak Swedish
use the same word, "samhället," for both
state and society, an anathema of being many-splendored (1: xx).
In modern scientific
articles and monographs one presents only results. In earlier scholarly
writings that took the form of more paradigmatic essays it was customary to
include also the trials and tribulations that preceded the emergence of the
results. I will in this Appendix to The Many-Splendored Society follow
the old-fashioned path and describe an intellectual process that began
in 1950 with the writing of my MA-thesis, A Semantic Role Theory, at
University of Minnesota (Zetterberg 1951) and ended with the present text more
than fifty years later.
The categorical schema
publicized in the Many-Splendored Society
has not evolved in an armchair. It is a product of picking and choosing in
response to actual needs during a lifetime in social science research,
teaching, and practice. And it is still evolving. Treat this text as a progress
report.
There was a time when
I attended high school in the 1940s in Sweden when I wanted to become a
chemist. When friends and relatives wondered "What do
you want to do with chemistry? I could answer by telling them about the
periodic system. This was a classification of all the elements in a table where
columns and lines pointed to common characteristics of the elements. In 1869 Dimitri I Mendelévy had created a
first version of chemistry's periodic system by classifying the elements, seven
to a column, according to their atomic weight.
My excellent chemistry
teacher made it clear that although there were at that time nearly 100
elements, they can form over a million combinations. If you know where in the
table an element is located you have already got a great deal of information
about its characteristics and its ability to unite with other elements. Blanks
in the table meant that the elements had not yet been discovered. This was a
something for a budding chemist to work on, and perhaps a chance to discover
something new!
When I became a social
scientist I often missed the elegance of chemistry's periodic system,
especially when confronted with the question "What constitutes a
society?" I was forced to ponder this question on many occasions. For half
a century I have had opportunities to study modern society as a sociology
teacher and scholar, as a publisher of social science books, as a pollster with
involvement in market, media, and value research, as a consultant to
businesses, voluntary associations, and museums, as an ideologue for a
political party, and as a newspaper editor and columnist. Nowhere did I find a
classification for this study as elegant as that to be found in my school days’
periodic system of chemical elements and their valence.
Torgny Segerstedt
I was fortunate to
have as my first teacher of sociology Torgny T. Segerstedt, a Swede who had been a professor of
philosophy. His intellectual roots were in the Scottish Enlightenment,
his main interest was the study of the role of language in society. His first
book after the doctoral dissertation was called Verklighet
och värde (1938)
addressed the issue of "reality and value," and his second major
book with the title Ordens makt (1944) was a study in the psychology of "the
power of words", also available in German (Segeratwdt
19xx). These books led me to two names that seemed to have celebrated ideas:
the great European linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure and the great American
philosopher of language, George Herbert Mead. However, it was not until 1949
when I had entered graduate school at the University of Minnesota that I read Cours de linguistique générale (1916) and Mind, Self and Society (1934)
in their full original shape. The impression was lasting and to honor them I
have in Chapter 2 labeled two types of symbols with their names, although my
definitions of these concepts are not particularly orthodox.
Both these pioneering
books were edited by their students from lecture notes, and they are not
particularly easy reading. I decided to check also some writings by their
editors. How had the editors handled and elaborated the heritage of their great
masters?
Mead’s editor, and
author of the long introduction, was Charles W Morris, a semiotician
and a philosopher in the American pragmatic tradition. In his 1946 book, Signs,
Language and Behavior, he divided the actual use of language into a
universal classification. "These usages may be called in order the informative,
the valuative, the incitive,
and the systemic uses of signs. These are the most general sign usages;
other usages are subdivisions and specializations of these four. "(Morris 1946, p 95, italics in original).
I became overwhelmed
by the scope and usefulness of these distinctions. However, I developed two
small objections to Morris. His fourth category, the systemic use of language,
is not separate from the three others. Nothing can be systemic that is not
originally informative, and/or valuative, and/or incitive. The systemic is an attribute of the other three
basic usages of communication. It is the attribute of rationalism. The second
objection was that Morris immediately obfuscated his big discovery by trying to
cross-classify his universal uses of language with the structure of the
school grammar of language (Morris 1946, p. 125f ).
This produced a confusing 16-fold classification that few except some students
of rhetoric have appreciated.
de
Saussure's editor and collaborator was Charles
Bally and in his book La langage et la vie
from 1913 I found a wonderful comment on the meanings of the phrase "It is
raining." In my MA-thesis (Zetterberg 1951, p??)
I recited his discovery:
If we make some slight changes in his
illustrations we can put the phrase into all Morris’ categories. It may, for
instance, stand for:
It has now started to rain
(informative)
The
weather is bad (valuative)
Shut the window! (incitive)
Here then emerged the
Tri-section
of Languge that became so fundamental in The
Many-Splendored Society. But the terminology was changed into descriptions,
evaluations, and prescriptions. They turned out to be fundamental in the
discourses that create economy, politics, science, art, religion, and morality.
Charles Stevenson, an
American philosopher of the same period as Charles W. Morris and in the same
tradition of pragmatism, (1944), clarified an attribute of language by
penetrating its emotive component. When we say with Shakespeare that
"All the world's a stage" this emotive
description is distinct, Stevenson argues, from an executive description such
as "There is a routine in real life, each man going through a prearranged
course"; or, "There is a good deal of trivial make-believe in each
man's conduct." When the very words rather then what they stand for convey
emotions -- such as "Long live the King" -- Stevenson talks about
their ‘independent emotive meaning.’
The background of my
systematic use of a Bi-section of communication, its instrumental and
expressive forms is also from my student years in Uppsala. On European soil,
independent emotive components of opinions, attitudes, and behavior received a
first systematic study in Uppsala by Ulf Himmelstrand (1960), my fellow student
of sociology. In retrospect, Himmelstrand’s work,
billed as attitude research, stands out as the first major treatise that both
in data and theory challenged the seminal rational choice theory of von Neumann
and Morgenstern (1945).
In Paris, the
sophisticated axiomatic theory of signs and symbols of Greimas
(1966) eventually also added emotive intensity (Greimas
& Fontanille 1991), which I took as a welcome
confirmation of the need for the Bi-section.
The intellectual
efforts behind the distinction in the Bi-section are impressive. But using it
appeared self-evident: a duality between head and heart, or between skill and
emotion. Eventually I began to express this dichotomy in terms of 'executive
actions,' e.g., issuing instructions, giving a scientific lecture, driving a
car, getting dressed for a football game, as opposed to 'emotive actions' e.g.,
applauding a team's victory in a football game, reading romantic poetry,
hand-wringing. In any analysis of rhetoric and art, ideology and religion, the
separation of executive and emotive components seemed crucial.
Arnold M Rose
My second influential
teacher of sociology was Arnold M Rose at the University of Minnesota. I
was his research assistant in the academic year 1950-51. He had his
intellectual roots in “symbolic interactions” as developed in the Chicago
School of Sociology. He introduced me to teachings of Ezra Park and Herbert Blumer. Symbolic interactionism has been the longest
continuing school of sociology. It has been easy for me to merge the ideas I
had picked up from and philosophy of language and linguistics with symbolic
interactionism.
Which subjects ought to
be found in the texts that best describe modern society? This was our chief
concern when I and other social scientists together with a librarian were to
list and classify the most important books in the social sciences that were to
form part of the base of a new college library (White, 1964). I classified the
sociology books on this list as follows:
·
Precursors
of Systematic Sociology
·
Works
that Made History
·
The
Present State of Sociology
·
Theoretical
Sociology
·
Social
Psychology
·
Groups
and Encounters
·
Organizations
·
Markets
·
Social
Stratification
·
Institutional
Realms
·
Topics
of Sociology
·
Human
and Non-human Resources
·
Family
Sociology
·
Economic
sociology
·
Political
Sociology
·
Sociology
of Science and Education
·
Sociology
of Art
·
Sociology
of Religion
·
Urban
and Rural Life, Communities and Societies
·
Social
Problems
·
Methods
of Sociology
Under these headings I
proposed a total of 210 book titles in sociology as a minimum for a new library
for a college or ambitious junior college. To this a list was added a selection
of journals.
Behind the list hides
bits and pieces of a widely used Exposition of Categories for social sciences,
a Kategorielehre, provided by the very learned
German sociologist Max Weber (1922, Chap. 1). It is a list of terms and their
definitions in which also the most complex ones can be reduced to observable
and understandable behavior. Weber did not allow for any abstractions in the
social sciences that cannot be derived from actions that we can see or
understand. This so-called “methodological individualism” has been widely
accepted.
What is important to
learn from statistics describing a contemporary society? Which are the basic
tables? This was the main problem of the editors of A Sociological Almanac
for The United States (Zetterberg & Gendell
1961). The book contains a section that recounts how we solved the problem.
One
should not pretend that there is complete agreement among social scientists as to
the most relevant information that enters into a routine description of a
society. However, as a rule, social scientists and historians, in dealing with
total societies, begin by discussing:
1.
Human resources
2. Material resources
Then
they may process along many paths, but in the end they have usually described
six interrelated but different realms of society. The latter are:
3.
Polity
6. Religion
4. Economy
7.
Art
5. Science
8. Ethics
Each
of these realms has a dominant concern, that might be
called its “institutional value.” In polity it is order, in the economy
it is prosperity, in science, knowledge, in religion, sacredness,
in art, beauty, and in ethics, virtue. In each of the
institutional descriptive sociology collects information about (a) the amount
of institutional values; (b) the suppliers, surveyors, and receivers of the
institutional values; (c) the stratification of the population according to
their control over institutional values; and, when relevant, (d) information
about social movements attempting to change the distribution of the
institutional values. We shall proceed by these four items in some detail for
the first three institutional realms, recording information according to the
following schema:
|
|
(a)
|
(b)
|
(c
)
|
|
Institutional
Realm
|
Institutional
Value
|
Supplier
Purveyor Receiver
of Institutional Value
|
Mode
of
Stratification
|
|
Polity
|
Order
|
Ruler
|
Administrator
|
Subject
|
Power
|
|
Economy
|
Prosperity
|
Producer
|
Dealer
|
Consumer
|
Riches
|
|
Science
|
Knowledge
|
Scholar
|
Teacher
|
Student
|
Competence
|
In
turning to the remaining realms of religion, art, and ethics, we cannot give
the corresponding information in the same quantitative detail and will, therefore,
at this time make far briefer notes that do not lend themselves to this
organization. Finally (9), having dissected the society into these parts, we
have to give attention to how they are integrated into an ongoing whole.
The
tables of this almanac are numbered according to the above scheme. Thus, any
table with a prefix ‘6’ will deal with religion, any table with the prefix ‘4’
will deal with the economy, etc. The same holds for the subheadings of the text
(Zetterberg & Gendell 1961, pp. 31-32).
Here we use a table
rather than a list of categories as in the library project. We designated the
rows of the schema with numbers and columns with letters, a practice that
continues in the present text. The idea is that the reader who knows the column
and row of a phenomenon automatically shall know a great deal more about it,
since everything in the same column or in a row are in some respects similar.
A recurrent goal in my
work in theoretical sociology has been to pursue the efforts of my teacher, Torgny T Segerstedt, to derive
the categories that best describe society from language. Segerstedt
(1947, 1948) showed how useful grammatical imperatives (prescriptions, social
norms) are for the definitions of social groups. I wanted to add the usefulness
of descriptive and evaluative terms as a vocabulary for the study of society. I
developed the core of these categories at Columbia University in the 1950s. The
approach worked fine for micro-sociology and terms such as attitude, position,
role, group could be precisely defined. It was less certain for
macro-sociology. When I published them (Zetterberg 1962, pp. 66-73) I was still
so uncertain about them that I buried them in footnotes (pp. 68-69 and 71).
They are shown in Figure 20:1 below.
|
Symbolic
Actions
|
Institu- tional Realm
|
Institu-
tional
Value
|
Supplier
|
Purveyor
|
Receiver
|
Mode
of Stratif-ication
|
Organ-
izations
|
Markets
|
|
of
Institutional Values
|
|
Executive
|
|
Description
|
Science
|
Knowledge
|
Scholar
|
Teacher
|
Student
|
Competence
|
|
|
|
Evaluation
|
Economy
|
Prosperity
|
Producer
|
Dealer
|
Consumer
|
Riches
|
|
|
|
Prescription
|
Polity
|
Order
|
Ruler
|
Administrator
|
Subject
|
Power
|
|
|
|
Emotive
|
|
Description
|
Art
|
Beauty
|
Artist
|
Performers
|
Art
public
|
Taste
|
|
|
|
Evaluation
|
Religion
|
Sacredness
|
Prophets
|
Clergymen
|
Laymen
|
Holiness
|
|
|
|
Prescription
|
Ethics
|
Virtue
|
Fountains
of morals
|
Moralists
|
?
|
Rectitude
|
|
|
Forty years later, I
still place these categories at the core of the schema. In a revised version of
this text (Zetterberg 1997/98, p. 115) a new category of “Keepers” was added to
the Creators, Purveyors and Receivers, and a new category "Media" was
added to Organizations and Markets.
In an essay "On
the Theme: 'My Life as a Sociologist' I have told about an intellectual
struggle that made me put sociological theorizing on the back burner for a long
period. I discovered that my own theory had a serious weakness.
At Columbia University
my theory course was called “Group and Institutional Dynamics”. The starting
point was a common minimum terminology that would apply both to microsociology
(e.g. group dynamics) and macrosociology (e.g. institutional dynamics). The
minimum terminology was taken from the Indo-European languages. These make a
distinction in their grammars between evaluations (adjectives), prescriptions
(imperatives), and descriptions (indicatives). Segerstedt
had already developed a prescriptive mode for sociology in his concept of
social norms, linguistic expressions with an imperative function. Segerstedt’s concept of social norms led to his definition
of a social group, i.e. those persons who share the same source of norms. I
developed this type of reasoning further for the whole array of the microsociological vocabulary. I had thought that the
institutional realms of society, their stratification and division of labor,
would grow out of the same basic terms. In the sketch of the conceptual scheme
in Social Theory and Social Practice I glossed over this issue with a
reference to Festinger’s concept of social
dissonance, and I thought I could work out the details later.
To demonstrate that micro- and macrosociology have the same basic terms of
symbolic actions (such as prescriptions, evaluations, and descriptions) would
be a tight and strict way of solving in one stroke two problems that plague
social science literature: the “micro-macro-link” and “methodological
individualism.” So far as I know, I was the only one in the world who tried to
tackle these issues in this way. I spent many days and nights thinking about it
and covered many writing pads in search of a solution. To fail in solving a
scientific problem that I myself had invented took quite a mental toll. I had
been foolish enough to announce a book with the brave title Sociology in a
New Key, a centerpiece of which would be the solution of this problem, and
I had to withdraw this title from publication. In 1991 I returned briefly to
the same theoretical problem without being able to come any further, but now I
confessed to the failure in a short Zwischenbetrachtung
(Zetterberg 1996c, pp 371-372.)
My hope at that time
was that a system theorist who works from the macro-level down to the
micro-level instead of my way of going from micro to macro would find a right
and tight solution.
The possible solution
turned out to be different and much simpler. An aha-experience came when I
worked on an entirely different problem, the issue of rationality in society.
Here I had to give up Max Weber's idea of an all-embracing rationality, and
instead emphasize that each life area had its own distinct rationality. By this
rationality the cardinal values of the language-produced life areas could be
constructed: we arrived at the critical terms of knowledge, riches, order,
beauty, sacredness, and virtue. Thereby the division of labor between the creators preservers, conveyors and receivers of each
cardinal value could also be elaborated. I suppose a reader of The
Many-Splendored Society would not notice that the whole work on societal realms
was held up for many years because I had barked up the wrong trees.
The
AGIL of Parsons and Shils
My categories were a
conscious effort to find something simpler but as
inclusive as the dominant theory of the days. When I started to teach social
theory in the 1950s, the engaging ideas in the field came from Talcott Parsons
and Edward Shils (1951. As scholars and translators
they had delved deeply into Weber’s work. In opposition to Weber, they assumed
that the whole of society and its various subgroups were systems. They
identified four elements that eventually became known as "AGIL" as constituent elements of all parts of society
as well as of society as a whole.
The
“A” stands for adaptation. It is the focus of
any economic organization. The “G” stands for goal attainment. This is the
focus of the political organization of societies. The “I” stands for
integration of economic, political and other relatively independent societal
units into a whole that can maintain its boundaries. The “L” stands for
latency, the maintenance of the patterns of a society and its parts. The latter
they located in the expressive symbolism of society such as religious ritual,
art, recreation, and in the adherence to common values. According to Parsons
and Shils, all four, A, G, I, and L, enter into any
and all concrete social phenomena in various forms and proportions. The total
society has its AGIL and so does all its parts. For
example, a household has its A in the form of earning money and buying
essentials of housing, food, and clothing. Its G appears in the form of its
rules for childrearing and decisions about common property. The I in the
household takes the form of fences and admission
restrictions for outsiders and strangers. Its L takes the form of an honored
name and family rituals.
Unlike Weber's terms, AGIL are more than abstract names of actions or clusters of
actions. AGIL is a system, and “A”, “G”, “I”, and “L”
are thus assumed to be interrelated in predictable ways.
To say that AGIL is a system with all the properties of a system is not
an innocent proposition that can be accepted in advance of proof. There is
danger in borrowing the concept “system” from biological science and
engineering. The danger was once identified when social science borrowed the
term “force” from physics (Zetterberg 1965, pp
38-40):
Often
we are drawn into truth-asserting by the use of analogous terms. In social
science it has been common to draw analogies from physical science. An example
is found in the definition of group ”cohesiveness.”
Cohesiveness has been defined as the sum total or resultant of all forces that
keep a member of a group (Festinger et al. 1950, p
164). Borrowing from the field of physics of the term ”force”
might seem innocent enough were it not for the fact that usage of the term
implies at least two propositions. In Newton´s days these propositions were
grand discoveries, but since then they have become so self-evident that we take
them for granted. One of these hypotheses is that whatever the origins of the
forces − whether from the moon or from
an apple − they have the same
consequences. Now, the forces keeping a member in a group may vary greatly. He
may stay in the group because of the prestige the group offers him, because of
the friends he has there, because of his need to be punished by an
authoritarian leader, and so on. To assume without testing, that all these
forces have the same consequences would indeed be presumptuous (Back 1950). The
second assumption involved in the use of the term ”force”
in the definition of cohesiveness, is that whenever several sources of
cohesiveness are present their effects are cumulative. This principle has
proved to be immensely useful in physics: when several forces act
simultaneously, the effect is the same as if they had acted in turn. This
hypothesis is much less likely to be successfully maintained in social science
than in physical science. The consequences of family cohesiveness deriving from
both adequate communication and adequate sexual adjustment during one year of
marriage are likely to be very different from the consequences of a family
cohesiveness based on one year of adequate sexual adjustment and poor
communication, followed by one year of adequate communication but poor sexual
adjustment. Thus, we see how the person who borrows a term from another science
runs the risk of borrowing more than a word: inadvertently he may borrow also
some propositions of this science. Clearly, definitions in the form of
analogous terms deserve an extra careful examination prior to their use in
social theory.
It is not very likely
that “A”, “G”, “I”, and “L” acting simultaneously in an institution have the
same effect as if they acted sequentially, i.e. one after the other in some
historical order.
The assumption that AGIL is an inclusive system of society I also fund
problematic. A fair amount of the content of society seems in fact unrelated to
most everything. Parsons’ teacher, Pitirim Sorokin
(1941, vol 4 p 147), had actually called attention to
the amount of fragments and debris in society, the heaps of which he called
“congeries”:
....
there is no difficulty in finding congeries in many a
small combination of culture elements. A car and a bunch of flowers in or on
it, a writing desk on which stands a shoe, a copy of Plato's Republic with a
photograph of the latest movie star between its pages - these
"complexes" are evidently congeries in which flowers, shoe, or
photograph can easily be separated from car, writing desk, and Plato's book,
without destroying either one of the elements, and each element can change
without involving a change of the other. More difficult is the diagnosis of
vaster and more complex conglomerations of cultural objects and elements. In
regard, for instance, to the totality of the cultural elements found in Boston,
or in the United States of America, or in Ancient Greece, the difficulty in
diagnosis is to decide whether all these elements are a part of one system; if
not, which are systems and which are congeries; which elements belong to which systems;
and how close is the integration of the elements of the system, and is it the
same for all the elements. ... In diagnosing such vast cultural conglomerations
from this standpoint there is a strong possibility of error in taking for
congeries what is a system, and vice versa.
How various actions or
communications relate to one another is an empirical question; they may form a
system, or they may not form a system.
I think it is more
practical and quite sufficient to speak of the elements of polity, economy,
science, ethics, religion, and art embedded in a concrete societal phenomenon
rather than speaking of A, G, I, and L. The AGIL
categories may belong to the scientific advances that suffer from a premature
closure (Anderson 2000).
Which lifestyles do we
find in modern society? This became a question for research in 1977 when I was
to address the Confederation of Swedish Employers about the interests and activities
that competed for their employees’ involvement in their work. Not everyone has
a business-driven lifestyle with economic incentives.
I used some terms from
the 1962 classification. It immediately became apparent that the schema needed
to be enlarged with new categories to accommodate the large variations of lifestyles in Swedish society of the 1970s. A
questionnaire with 310 questions −
many formulated ad hoc − with lifestyles and personality items and some questions
on general values provided the raw data. (Zetterberg 1977, p. 62)
Computer-assisted classifications were at that time still in an experimental
stage. I tried to find new categories by means of factor analysis. This
provided the basis in the schema for lifestyles and some material about social
personality types.
|
Cardinal Values
|
Lifestyles
|
|
Knowledge
|
Wisdom seekers
|
|
Power
|
Politically-minded
|
|
Riches
|
Business driven
|
|
Beauty
|
Aesthetes
|
|
Holiness
|
Religious
|
|
etc
|
|
Social Personality →
|
Loners
|
Sociables
|
Organizational
men
|
etc
|
The factor analysis in
1977, however, did not offer a comprehensive list. Later my experience in market
and media research revealed other lifestyles which could be fitted into
typologies of actions.
The empirical methods
of market research at that time did not separate lifestyles from personalities
or characters. Such shortcomings are often the case when sociological or
psychological categories are produced from raw interview data, in spite of the
fact that sophisticated statistical methods are used such as factor analysis,
correspondence analysis, or cluster analysis. The results are not wrong, but may
benefit from cleansing by theoretical coding, and sometimes also from additions
suggested by theory but obscured in the raw data.
The wisdom seeker may
be a creative loner, or a sociable person working in a network, or an
organizational champion in a research institute. We had to use our theory to
separate 'lifestyles', i.e. what we most enjoy to do, from 'social
personalities', i.e. the part of our makeup that is shaped by our position in
the social structure. The former we eventually learned to record as columns and
the latter as rows (Figure 20:2).
How is one to bring
order into research results on cultural values? Many research reports on values
resemble the tales told by explorers from an era when there was still no agreement
on latitude and longitude. The explorers returned home with wondrous, exotic
accounts. But one did not really grasp how the discoveries of the different
explorers could be related to one another. It was not until agreement was
reached on the earth’s latitudes, longitudes, and heights above and below sea
level that a cumulative picture of the planet’s continents and oceans emerged.
During the 1980s and
1990s when I worked on the integration of values into opinion and market
research I encountered a similar situation. I tested a number of approaches to
value research before finally deciding on the three dimensions that were well
established in classic works in the social sciences (Zetterberg 1997, 1998). I
used a confirmatory factor analysis to calibrate them, but classical
social theory had defined them.
The first dimension is
found in many texts, for example, Vilfredo Pareto's
two first so-called residues. In its deeper meaning this dimension stretches
from "being" to "becoming," from traditionalism, with its
emphasis on stability (to "be loyal and traditional") to modernism,
which welcomes change in the form of new combinations (to "be open and
modern"). The second dimension is important in Max Weber's analysis of the
distinctive character of the Western world. Weber's analysis reaches from
placing a priority on faithfulness to one's values, even to
"dramatizing" them, to a prioritization of pragmatism or
instrumentality, where one is prepared to "compromise one's values"
in order to reach overarching goals. The third dimension is central for Pitirim Sorokin. It runs from a culture of the senses to a
culture of ideas, between the polarities materialism ("gadgets and
carnality") and humanism ("the human spirit and dignity").
Which are really the
various parts of a modern society, and how are they connected? We need to know
some of the answers if we are, in the spirit of Wassily
Leontieff (1997/19xx), to write comprehensive
analyses of the mutual input and output between parts that are not merely
economic transactions.
I have done just one
extended input-output analysis, showing the interaction between schools and the
total society (Zetterberg 2001). The report contains the categorization schema
for social science in about the same form as the one presented in this text.
Input and output from various cells to the ones containing the school system is
described. I doubt that I could have written the report on the school system
without having completed the categorization schema, and I further doubt that I
could write similar texts about other parts of society without the schema.
As I became fully
active in public opinion research in the 1970s my interest in politics
increased. My views on the possibilities and limits of politics developed, and
I was aided in this by the theories of the German sociologist Nicklas Luhmann.
Niklas
Luhmann takes fuller advantage of the advances in
systems theory than his teacher Talcott Parsons. He sees society as an endless
exchange of communications and the endless effort to interpret them. His
constituent parts of society are, not actions, but communications. They form autopoietic subsystems. The
latter have an autonomy that gives a new and added precision to Weber's Eigengesetzlichkeit, for these systems are
not only a bounded autonomy but are also self-defining, self-evaluating,
self-regulating and self-reproducing. Jointly, the systems shape the whole
global society. The individual is not part of society but part of its
environment (Luhmann 1984/1995).
An interesting point
in Luhmann's theory is that the various subsystems of
society certainly can produce disturbances for one another, but that no system,
e.g. the economy or the body politic, can successfully intervene in the
internal running of another, e.g. science or welfare. Courts belong to the body
politic, and legislators can intervene and change the practice of a judge, but
only if their proposals respect judicial procedures and traditions. A
legislator or an adjuster from a private insurance company cannot dictate to a
doctor whether a patient is sick or well, nor how a
patient should be diagnosed and treated. At best, they can make arrangements to
pay the doctor’s bill without undo arguments. Legislators, employees in
insurance companies, and doctors work in different life spheres. Luhmann's version of Eigengesetzlichkeit
thus sets limits for social engineering in which political decisions run
details inside a non-political sphere of society. It set similar limits for
priests to run the subsystems of entire societies by religious dogma. Likewise,
science cannot be run by business considerations.
In passing Lyndon
Johnson’s so-called Great Society legislation, Congress requested evaluation
research for each of its welfare reforms. The researchers of these and other
similar programs found both successes and failures. (See the twelve volumes of Evaluation Studies Review Annual 1976-87.)
A common but by no means universal observation was that administrators and
recipients of the various welfare programs redefined the intent of the
legislation to better suit their own needs. Such modifications could, of
course, result in cost overruns. The existence of reported distortions and
shortcomings in some programs made it easier for Ronald Reagan to ask Congress
to cancel many of the welfare programs an d for Bill Clinton to "abandon
social welfare as we know it.".
How much any two or
more systems interfere with one another is in practice a worldly problem for
institutional elites in the central zone of society. For social scientists, the
question whether an attempt at intervention by one system into another is a
success or not ought to be a subject for research, not speculation, faith, or
ideology. One may be skeptical to much social engineering, i.e. attempts by
politicians to change life outside the strictly political area, but one cannot
rule out the possibility of social engineering by the fiat of invoking the word
"system."
Two illustrations of
my involvement in political debates illustrates my convictions about Eigengesetzlichkeit, i.e. bounded autonomy..
The debate on the organization
of European Union has to a large extent centered on the principle of
"subsidiarity." This principle requires that the EU's political
bodies should be subsidiary to the citizen's own initiatives and decisions.
Their task is to facilitate these, not to replace them. Any decision on
political intervention should accordingly be taken at the lowest possible
efficient level.
Within the EU
bureaucracies and ministerial councils the concept of subsidiarity has been
interpreted as "vertical subsidiarity," meaning that the EU shall not
decide anything − outside the topics
defined in the Union treaties − that a
regional body or a member state can decide with greater sensitivity, knowledge,
or efficiency. Since the topics covered by treaties have become very extensive
the sway of subsidiarity is limited indeed. In addition, it has been generally
forgotten that there exists also a possibility of "horizontal
subsidiarity," meaning that the public sector should not attempt to do
anything that the private sector or institutions outside the body politic can
do as well. In its ultimate form horizontal subsidiarity should mean that the
realms of science, economy, art, religion, and morality should not be
subsidiary to the body politic. For example, The European Science Foundation
which is run by the scientific community should take precedence over, nay
replace, the research financing of the EU which is run by politicians and civil
servants.
Modern Europeans,
living in many-splendored societies, are offered the opportunity to create
self-chosen biographies in their quest for wealth, order, truth, salvation,
virtue, and beauty. The success of the EU depends on finding a form that suits
this mainstream of European structuration. The appropriate form to govern such
peoples seems closer to the model of ancient Athens than that of the Roman
Empire. I entered this debate in the early 1990s with a much repeated lecture
“The Structuration of Europe” (Zetterberg 1991) using the 1962 schema with an
expanded classification of societal realms.
The idea of horizontal
subsidiarity in the EU constitution became a lost cause. Valerie Giscard
d'Estaing, the President of the Convention on the Future of Europe which was to
conclude with a “Constitutional Treaty” for the EU, is credited with having
formulated the doctrine of horizontal subsidiarity for the EU in the 1980s. The
doctrine has been opposed by politicians and officials with socialist leanings
as well as by old-fashioned conservatives anxious to preserve the centrality of
political power. Horizontal subsidiarity is totally forgotten in the
Constitutional Treaty!
This was the question
we asked ourselves when the first conservative government in seventy years
assumed office in 1992. An answer that explicitly applies the schema of
categories is to be found in a paper in Swedish, “Individualism, Justice,
Hierarchy, and Equality” (Zetterberg 1992). It contains schematic
representations of conservative features in four countries where I have lived
and done some research: the United States under Eisenhower and Kennedy, Great
Britain under Heath, Sweden under Palme, and Spain under Gonzalez.
It quickly became
apparent that contemporary conservatism is far from uniform. With the aid of
the schema I could show that Swedish conservatism of the late 20th
century had a chance of playing in a key of its own. It had an opening to
reinforce those life areas that lie outside the political arena - for example,
science, art, and ethics - and of developing the creative and conservative
functions of the state, in addition to the socialist function of the welfare
state as a redistributor of wealth to the Takers.
In the main, these
conservative ideas for a restructuring of Sweden in the first half of 1990s
were lost. Per Unckel,
minister of higher education, gave universities and colleges an opportunity to
opt out of the state system and become independent foundations. But few did.
After three years of managing a parliamentary minority status. an economic
crisis, and some complex negotiations on the terms of Sweden’s entry into the
EU, the non-socialist government of Carl Bildt was
out of office, and the Social Democrats returned to their customary power.
My heart rose in 1988
at the 900th anniversary of the founding of the University of Bologna. Then
more than 400 European university presidents signed the Magna Charta Universitatum, a reaffirmation of
the ideals of Humboldt's university amended with programs of exchanges
of faculty members and students between the various universities in Europe. It
was their initiative, and a pure and serene voice of the life area of knowledge
reaffirming its place as a partner with Eigengesetzlichkeit
and full voice in a many-splendored society. My only complaint would be that the
university presidents did not want to squarely face the mish match of
curriculum content that the modern universities exhibit. Particularly the
social science disciplines are full of overlaps and inconsistent terminology.
But my heart sank eleven
years later in 1999 when the initiative of Magna Charta Universitatum
was taken over by 30 ministers of Education with a political agenda
formulated by the EU Commission called The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and The European Research Area (ERA). The latter
documents speak with the voice of a hegemonic body politic, not science. It
subordinates universities to the so called Lisbon process to achieve economic
leadership for Europe. I am sad to conclude that the European Union acts in
dissonance with the the unique and promising trends
of institutional differentiation in European history.
My interventions on
the EU constitution and on conservative visions of Sweden involve an
ideological use of social science categories. They have been drops in buckets.
However, inspired by Aristotle, we should be receptive to the fact that also
ideological and consulting endeavors can add and develop categories for social
science. And any social science category, developed inside or outside academe,
may inspire both the political left and the political right by reminding them
of the many-splendored nature of modern society.
Personally I prefer
the joy of living with the present world to the blessings of a future
utopia. This leaves you with the choice of tackling social problems
piecemeal, as pragmatic conservatives, or not at all, as do the nihilists. I
belong to a breed of non-utopian intellectuals. The book you are reading is
intended to be a substitute for an utopia. Its vision
of a Many-Splendored Society, is shaped by
pragmatism and restrictions coming from some scholarly knowledge of societies.
It is primarily shaped by an awareness of the one-sidedness of the existing
utopias.
Friedrich Hayek’s
(1945) seminal article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” showed the
impossibility of large scale central economic planning due to inherent limits
of knowledge. However, unlike Hayek I will not say that we must let the market
and its spontaneous order solve all problems since our economic knowledge is
insufficient for good social engineering, The market economy is a good logic
for the world of affairs, but the worlds of politics and legislation, not to
speak of the worlds of religion, art, and morality, have, as we have seen,
other forms of rationality. In addition, I actually believe that theoretical
programs of the kind presented in this book can reduce the uncertainties of
applying social science knowledge to practical problems. We have come some way
since 1945. At best, Hayek's thesis applies to complex structures with a
membership higher than Dunbar's number.
Social scientists who
enter the border territory between science and politics should state their
political creed.
With their different
freedoms, different rewards, and different rationalities, the various realms in
a modern society form a many-splendored whole, a society freely pursuing
knowledge, money, power, artistry, holiness, and moral rectitude. All these
pursuits seem essential to individuals who want to live rich and full lives and
to communities that claim to be advanced and civilized. Yet the pursuits are
often dissonant and sometimes incompatible. Often the different rewards and
rationalities get in the way of one another. It is a basic fact of the human
condition that the societal realms have aspects that are incommensurate.
A threefold stance for
coping with this dilemma in the twenty-first century might be:
·
First, we should be very restrictive in
promoting the ideals of the market economy outside the realm of business.
·
Second, we should be very restrictive
in promoting the ideals of democracy outside the realm of politics.
·
Third, we should see to it that
science, art, religion, and ethics get a concrete chance to develop their core
activities on their own merits, undisturbed by one another, and by business and
politics.
Needless to say, in
the beginning of the twenty-first century, these rules of thumb are not common
wisdom among the general public. Nor are they endorsed by the leading social
scientists. They have merely become my personal credo in applying social
science to practical problems.