Introduction: Building the Social Order

A Fishing Story

A man who has done a great deal of fishing one day encounters a young boy in his community and begins to show the young boy how to fish. He instructs him and demonstrates the ins and outs of fishing, prescribing: "Do this!" and "Do that!" Another day he shows another boy how to fish, and then a third and a fourth. In the course of these events, he becomes known and described in the community as the “fishing teacher.” And the youngsters take on the position of “fishing apprentices.” The community now has established the ‘social relation’ (the social role) of teacher-apprentice in fishing. Others may take on the position of "fishing teacher" along with the original teacher, or after him. As some teachers prove to be better than others are, they receive different ranks: master teacher and regular teacher. Henceforth, any talk about learning how to fish or any showing others how to fish is both enabled and constrained by these experiences. The joint process of enabling and constraining is the ‘linguistic mechanism of structuration.’ This process created the position of fishing teacher, as it has created most each and every position in the edifice we call human society. The process includes the pressures of convergence that we will discuss in the next volume of The Many-Splendored Society.

The linguistic mechanism of structuration is always ready to go to work. Listen to the talk in the fishing community! Parents say “The fishing teacher shall bring the children back for dinner." The priest says "Fishing teachers shall not work on religious holidays." The community chief rules: "The catch shall be divided equally among the apprentices, as among the members in our hunting teams." Moreover, the chief may come upon the idea: [p 173] "Every tenth fish shall be given to the chief as tax." The community thus establishes 'social norms' (prescriptions) for the new position.

The elementary processes of structuration by means of language result in 'positions,' 'relations,' and 'ranks.' More advanced processes of structuration take these concepts as building blocks. The fishing teachers in a community can form a 'network' to stay in touch with one another. They may establish a 'mass medium' that broadcasts weather and fishing conditions, for example, by visible hand signals or flag signals. A part of a network of fishermen may band together in a lasting fishing team with a common leadership and top rank, in short, what we call an 'organization.' To stay out fishing longer, a separate group may process the caught fish, thus engaging more people and having a division of labor. Moreover, and not to be forgotten, the fishermen will undoubtedly discover that they cannot, themselves, consume all of their catch. So they exchange some of it for utensils and firewood, for warm clothing to be able to fish in the cold season, et cetera. Therefore, 'markets,' networks for exchange of properties, become parts of their community. We, thus, have new positions in the social structure: producers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers of fish.

[TECH] Some of the producers were entrepreneurs who invented and put to use new technology and new organizations for fishing and its marketing. New tools helped fishermen to catch more fish in less time, and with less effort and labor. An innovation in cooking appeared: to preserve a concentrate of the fish in the form of a sauce, marketed under the name garum. Factories for its production were built along seashores. The factories had adjacent potteries to make the vessels in which to keep the product. A far-flung trade in garum came to light; and factory owners and tradesmen amassed fortunes. In other places, and with different climates, one learned to preserve fish by drying and here a [p 174] big trade in kabeljou (cod) developed. Fishing was now an important branch in the 'societal realm' of economy.

Eventually, in a recent generation, the efficiency of fishing raised concern about the reproduction of the fruits of the waters. Representatives of the realm of science spoke up about this. Then, another realm, called government, intervened, and used the language of diplomacy to work out a fishing 'treaty.' Since a great number of peoples shared the fishing waters, this became an international treaty. An 'intergovernmental institution' was created to reinforce ecologically-based restrictions on fishing. Excessive fishing continued. Certain countries initiated a discussion concerning the provision of private ‘property rights’ specified by GPS readings of fishing areas, so that owners would be better motivated to pursue sustainable fishing.

This is a fishing story about the major topic of a societal structuration, shaped by technology and ecology, but based on the linguistic mechanism of structuration. A large number of ordinary terms, referred to here in single quotes, await explication and definition. Let us first consider the term structuration.

Structuration as Taxonomy

Human beings, who interact over time, repeat and freeze certain of their activities, turning them into habitual and customary forms. A linguistic mechanism of structuration is at work to create a complex edifice. For the study of this social reality we use scholarly symbols stripped of magic, confabulation, and defensive bilge, to provide us with a set of general categories and dimensions, all based on the properties of language.

Structuration is a very large field in the study of societies. It includes everything from conversation routines in everyday life — such as saying “Hello” and “Goodbye” when we meet and depart — to the processes of establishing positions, roles, and organiza- [p 175]tions. Structuration also embraces complex historical processes differentiating and shaping major realms of societal life, such as the institutions of knowledge, religion, art, ethics, economy, statecraft, and law. We saw that in the opening Chapter in Volume 1 of this work when our topic was the differentiation of Europe, a special case of structuration.

In English, the awkward term for this is “structuration” To make matters worse, the results of structuration also receive the same label, “structuration.” A pioneering German sociologist, Georg Simmel, referred to the structuration phenomenon as Vergesellschaftung, an equally uncomfortable label. In spite of this, he managed to write with insight and beauty about this phenomenon in an introductory book, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesell-schaftung (Simmel 1908/1923).

“Taxonomy” is the name we give to the labeling and presenting characteristics. To provide the Latin names of every bone and tender of the human anatomy to the students of medicine is intrinsically tedious and, indeed, taxing. This is similar to exploring the details of a geographic territory and, at the same time, assimilating its foreign language. The same is true of the social edifice. In the Twenty-first Century, it seems impossible to write the taxonomy of social reality with Simmel’s elegance. Simmel actually worked more in the realm and reward system of a literary artist than that of a scientist¹. While he enjoyed people citing him, he never cited contemporary scholars, only classical texts. This made him an outsider at the University of Berlin, but not in the intellectual life of Berlin.

You are not necessarily talking about a leader when you describe how popular a person is, even that he or she is a model for others, takes time to listen to associates, and has clear values. If this wonderful person never tells and never shows others what to do or think, or how to do it, he or she is not an authorized or a full-fledged leader. A person may be an inspiration without being a leader in this formal sense of also being the boss. We expect a boss to tell and determine for others what to do, and to take responsibility for the consequences of such decisions.

The prescriptions issued from the boss may be individual instructions, but often they are social norms, i.e. prescriptions shared by others. In the latter case, leadership strengthens an existing social order.

The sine qua non of leadership, to repeat, remains an element of giving direction. When we use the term ‘leadership’ without qualifications, we refer to leadership as a source of prescriptions or at least of nudges, i.e. directions for others to consider and eventually obey; that may include a decision to do nothing. [p 236]

Instrumental and Expressive Leaderships

Returning to our Bi-section of language, we can fill positions with varying degrees of executive and of emotive contents.

Leaders who mainly communicate emotive messages and evolve emotively loaded responses, exercise what is called expressive leadership. Those that primarily stay with executive communications are instrumental leaders.

In Britain, the Queen or King is primarily an expressive leader and the Prime Minister an instrumental leader. The President of the United States has to be both, a tricky but powerful amalgamation combining engaging rhetoric with often tough and unavoidable decision-making. “The buck stops here,” was President Truman’s memorable formulation of the requirement to issue the decisive prescription of what shall be done.

Experiments in small groups, having tasks to solve, have shown that already after a meeting or two one can observe a certain division of labor in the discussions. An instrumental style of leadership that moves the work forward appears among the group members, and an expressive style that soothes the disagreements on the road forward also emerges. Parsons and Bales (1955) generalized this to the division of labor between the father and the mother in a nuclear family. The idea reflected American families of the mid-Twentieth Century, but fifty years later when executive women are no longer an exception; this concept becomes a vestige of the past.

That a division between an expressive and instrumental style of cooperation occurs in couples is unproblematic, but they are not generic to the sex of the partner. In circles where gender roles so demand, for example in Scandinavia in the Twenty-first Century, young fathers have become able and willing to engage in what the old called intensive “mothering.” They are nudged and encouraged, by a parental allowance from the welfare state which [p 237]compensates for any loss of income during the statutory parental leave from their work.

Nudging Leaders

In an ideal-type of a society entirely based on contracts instead of laws – something that does not exist in the real world – no leaders are needed. Each individual chooses for himself what to do, and, if need be, confirms this by entering into contracts. The ideology of libertarianism promotes steps toward this kind of society. Ayn Rand has celebrated its acute individualism in her philosophy and novels.

In practice, however, “free” choices are often construed to include a certain amount of support for one alternative over the others, a ‘favored choice.’ In the supermarket one brand is placed at eye level and is chosen more often than those brands on higher or lower shelves. In addition, in a situation where some choice is expected or statuary, such as choosing a school for your children, an alternative may be designated for those parents who avoid making any choice at all. This is called the ‘default choice.’ In a modern country this is usually a community school supported by public funds.

A special kind of leader emerges in societies in which contracts are legion. This type of leader also appears in welfare states that have discovered that one size does not fit all, for example, that a fixed age for retirement must be replaced by options to work beyond retirement age and options to retire early. The leaders here are called ‘choice architects’, a designation popularized by Thaler and Sunstein (2009). The choice architects do two things. First, they give structure to the options, that is, they formulate alternatives in choice situations. In providing schooling in a modern welfare state, the legislators are the choice architects. They may allow the citizens a pick between public and private schools. In a nation such as the United States, imbued with old-fashioned freedom, they may also give parents an option of teaching the [p 238] children at home. Second, choice architects select default and favored choices. Most probably, they will make public schools appear as the cheapest and easiest ones for the parents. (However, the politicians are not in the habit of telling parents that politicians want power over what goes on in schools by having the schools in the public sector, which is under the control of politicians.)

When politicians provide a real choice, but with default and favored alternatives, we may call these legislators ‘nudging leaders’. Instead of issuing outright prescriptions as other leaders do, they issue nudges, small pushes but nothing obligatory, in what they think is the best direction. Nudging leaders are found in all parts of a society, not only among politicians. They are often non-authoritarian and do not need much courage. But they do have convictions, and by nudging they get them realized – but only sometimes and in part.

Charismatic Leadership

“Charisma” is a term that has come into social science from theology, where it stood for God’s gift of grace to his messengers on earth. Max Weber (1922/1968, 141-171) took it outside the realm of religion. Any leader believed to have out-of-the ordinary abilities has charisma. Such a leader can break up the existing order. In several passages in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth quotes Mosaic laws. He follows each instance with the phrase “But I say unto you . . . .” and goes on to speak about his different version of order. Weber sensed that history was full of bursts of charisma that brought societal upheavals, and after the departure of the charismatic hero, the upheavals became new customs. The pulse of Weberian-type history is that exceptional individuals with charisma bring change to old routines, and that this once groundbreaking change in the post-hero days becomes new routines. After a Napoleon remained a Napoleonic Code of law, and a [p 239]French bureaucracy for dirigisme. We may also note that the geopolitical structure that Napoleon gave to Europe resulted in strong reactions, ultimately the unity of German and of Italy.

There is a great deal of excitement and hype about charismatic leadership. Many leaders have caliber and clout. Some also have charisma. Let us debunk the latter and unveil what it is, namely magic beliefs about a leader among his or her contemporaries, beliefs that may extend to later followers.

To obey the physically strongest leader may be an instinct in the reptilian brain¹⁵. Public views held by the followers about a leader become more decisive in leaderships when and where language brains play a larger role in a society. Then physical strength and the stature of leaders is only one attribute among many. The followers – and his or her promoters – use words and pictures to communicate an image of their leader. The followers may attribute magical attributes to a leader who is successful and/or lucky in his pursuits. He or she receives any or all of the five magical attributes that we have presented on pages 71-76 (Volume 1) to define magical thinking.

Park had studied in Germany, and his doctoral dissertation in 1904 at Bonn University had the title Masse und Publikum. A "mass," he said, is an agglomeration of people without contacts with one another, but which is exposed to a common source of information, e.g. the same newspaper. A "public" is a gathering in which people talk to one another and become aware of one another's viewpoints. The group, the public, the crowd was the beginning of a schema of different forms of social interaction that came to characterize early American teaching in sociology (Park and Burgess 1924).

To streamline this thinking for our use, we first note that terms referring to humans, such as "group," should be separate from terms that refer to the structures, such as "organization." Chicago sociologists usually ignored the latter requirement. The proper expression, thus, is “an organization with a group of members.” The latter are employees, volunteers, senior citizens, or occupants of any other positions. Second, we note that the old designations do not always fit current everyday usage. [p 246]

Figure 8.1. Overview of Communication Structures. A Revisited and Revised Chicago School of Sociology

	J	K	L
Is there a common symbolic environment?	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes or No
Is there a common sender of communications?	Yes	No	Yes		No
Are there mutual channels of contact?	Yes	Yes	No		No
Structure of communications	Organization	Network	Media		Mass
Participants	Group members	Publics	Audiences			Atomized crowds
Lifestyle	Organization loyalists	Gregarious networkers	Media freaks

The Editorial Office

An internal public opinion makes itself felt in the editorial offices and the studios of the mass media. It reverberates easily through the typically open landscape of news desks. It affects the process of news selection and presentation. The amount of self-censorship is considerable (Zetterberg 1992). More than anything, I can imagine that research into the opinion climate of editorial offices would illuminate the mechanisms of media power. What we have so far of penetrating insights into this milieu comes, not from research, but from thorough American court proceedings in connection with libel trials, such as Westmoreland versus the Columbia Broadcasting System and Sharon versus Time (R. Adler 1988). The title of Renata Adler's book is Reckless Disregard, an apt summary of the opinion climate in the editorial offices at the time of these events.

The editorial office is actually an organization coupled to a larger media structure. So is the media business office, with its managers and owners of the medium. The fact that "journalism is the writing on the back side of ads" indicates the importance of the latter. The Frankfurt School developed a critical theory that held that the owners set the tone of the media content (Adorno 1991). In the main, however, these scholars ignored the fact that media studies need to deal with so called autopoiesis²⁴. Media owners may disturb editors, but they cannot run the editors’ daily tasks. [p 281]

A medium such as an established newspaper, magazine, or TV-network provides a monopoly area for its functionaries. An ever so qualified MD cannot write about health issues in his morning paper; at best, a medical reporter interviews him. The same is the fate of a most cited environmental scientist. Not only are the elites in the realm of science kept out of the monopoly space of journalists, but also the elites from other realms. A powerful business executive is not allowed to write about his or her branch in a major paper. A business journalist does the writing. The latter may, if luck prevails, interview the most knowledgeable executives. The most knowledgeable military officers do not present the war news, a war reporter does. The public may write to the editorial dustbin of opinions called "Letters to the editor." Here readers can take the initiative to bring matters close to their hearts to public attention. However, also at the page, a journalist keeps the gate and admits some letters and keeps others out. The same is true for op-ed pages; journalists, not outside experts, are the gate keepers.

TECH The new media today and of the future have access to technologies of two-way communications. The monopoly of power by journalism over media space is at the time of this writing threatened by the “social media” in which non-journalists can post their videos and texts. The era in which the one-way mass media is a demon running the life of ordinary people, as shown in Figure 8.5, is apparently coming to an end. I think it is unlikely that one-way mass media of print and television ever again get the same power that they and their journalists had around the end of the Twentieth Century. At the time of this writing in 2010 we see journalists escape the old outlets of their editorial offices and studios to instead use the World Wide Net, at least for some of their products.

The lone bloggers on the Internet have become a force to reckon with. A few of them have obtained very large audiences at a very modest expense. However, if and when a blogger closes his [p 282]blog to comments from others or debates with others, he or she too has created a little monopoly.

Masses

All of the above communication structures presuppose a common symbolic environment. For a 'mass' this condition need not apply. However, the term "mass" has been used in so many ways in social science that it is virtually useless (Bell 1956). Park applied it to what we nowadays call media and their audiences. Ortega y Gasset used it about people who have incompetent judgments about the efforts required to have a rich modern life. Others have used it to characterize modern society. For example, the followers of Lewis Mumford or Jacques Ellul use the term to designate a dehumanized society based more on machines and attendants of machines than on free people. And Karl Mannheim applied it to the overly bureaucratic society.

‘Mass’ can perhaps still be a useful concept if we stick to the idea that it means undifferentiated encounters of many atomized persons with awareness of one another but without symbol-based communication with one another, without any common issues to focus on, without a leadership to guide and coordinate actions. One example would be milling travelers at a big international airport, a scene that is repeated day after day in a lasting structure but with different participants. Another example would be travelers in underground trains who see each other but do not speak with each other. However, a mass may give those involved common experiences, such as the discomfort of crowding, or generate common reactions, such as bursts of laughter or panics.

[BIO] The mass is a more essential concept to the epidemiologist than to the social scientist. Avian flues are diseases spread by birds that may mutate and spread contagiously from human to human. However, once a flue is in a locality where masses mill, such as in an airport, it spreads from there to all parts of the globe [p 283] on airplanes, and thus disseminates rapidly among new milling masses in far away cities.

Some Interplays of Organizations, Networks, and Media

Organizations, networks, and media impinge on the individual in different ways. In an organization, your position, and what is expected of you in this position, is defined by the organization. In a tight network of neighbors, this may also be true, but in a less dense network of relative strangers, you can define your identity with considerable discretion, and more easily present yourself in terms of past and present positions of your own choosing.

More important is the fact that the effect of communication on the individual is greatly dependent on the combinations of their organizations, networks, and media. Only some of these combinations have, to date, been the topic of penetrating research.

Crossing Organizations and Networks

Max Weber lectured and wrote that the bureaucracies and the markets, more than other structures, shaped European society of his day. He called them "forces of destiny," thus hard to change. They were not unknown in America where tradesman had the sayings: "You cannot fight city hall" and "The customer is always right." Mary Douglas, the British anthropologist, found such observations universally relevant for all societies.

Many consequences arise from the typology in Figure 8.7, which has made it useful in social science. Manuel Castells (1997) compiled significant evidence showing how individuals in weak organizations but able to exchange information over the growing Internet, have acquired the kind of personalities and culture that Douglas called "enclavists." They have formed the protest movements of their time, centered on localism, environmentalism, feminism, and sexual identity. [p 284]

Figure 8.7. Cultures in the Group-Grid according to Mary Douglas. From Fardon (1999).

The longstanding difference between the British chartered corporation (organization) and the market economy of the Manchester School (network) inspired Mary Douglas to formulate a general cultural theory. This theory shows that the structural differences between organization and network result in different cultures. Her cross-classification of "group and grid" (i.e. organization and network) has been tested on societies studied by anthropologists on several continents, and has gone through several modifications. Figure 8.7 from Fardon (1999) shows some of the labels and synonyms used by Douglas in her writings between 1978 and 1996.

In his subsequent work, Castells (1998) makes a dramatic comparison between the collapse of the Soviet Union, with its preference for organizations over networks, and the rise of the Pacific Rim, with its scarcity of organizations but growing presence of [p 285]networks. This is a profound lesson for mankind, one of the most important from the Twentieth Century.

Crossing Media and Networks

The recipients of media communications can have reciprocal contacts with only a few other recipients or none at all. An important form of social influence moves from a person with frequent and multiple media consumption to his networks of persons with much fewer contacts with the same media (Katz and Lazarsfeldt 1955).

People who are well integrated into their networks, be they composed of colleagues, neighbors, friends, relatives, et cetera, are, in all likelihood, adept at rapidly picking up what others think. This enables them to give candid expression to their version of public opinion and perhaps to a few odd aberrant personal opinions as well, without disturbing the others in the network. They know public opinion whether or not they have been exposed to it in the media.

Those who are poorly integrated into their network and, therefore, lack knowledge of what comprises serviceable opinions in conversation with relative strangers, run more of a risk of "putting their foot in it.” Newspapers, radio and TV, rather than personal contacts, become their principal source of information on what others believe and think. For them, the media, alone, defines the nature of current conventional wisdom and teaches them public opinion. From this perspective, the media teach the public, not so much what to believe and think, but rather the opinions which are acceptable in public intercourse. Media have their greatest impact where networks are weak.

The opinions we think that others hold comprise the 'climate of opinion', an important concept as systematically used by the pioneering German opinion researcher, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. When the public reach for their newspapers or other mass media, [p 286]seeking news, entertainment, and potential subjects of conversation for the day, support for their own interests and views is not always forthcoming. Instead, they find the journalists' selection of subjects and views. Failing to find their own opinions in the newspaper gives pause to many readers. They may even lose their self-confidence and withhold their own views in everyday conversations. What they really believe, then, falls into a "spiral of silence" (Noelle-Neumann 1980). Media are not at all omnipotent in creating public opinions, but in the struggle for survival among opinions, the media play a decisive role.

In all communication structures – encounters, social relations, organizations, networks, media – people are subject to the pressures of convergence that we will discuss in the next volume of The Many-Splendored Society. However, in the real world hardly anyone lives with exactly the same communications structure as someone else. We are, therefore, likely to be socially unique, not only biologically unique. An individual’s knowledge, attitudes, and values are never a direct replica of those of his/her primary group or organization, nor of what the media convey, nor of discussions within his/her networks. Each individual processes more or less actively the information he receives from all his communication structures. The more one processes one’s convictions by working through them, reflecting upon them, deliberating about them, discussing them, comparing them with one’s own experiences, the more they become truly one’s own.

Networks of Organizations (‘Netorgs’)

There is, as we have seen, a great deal of emphasis in the scholarly debate on the conflicts between organizations and networks. We have learned that networks are often contentious of the organizations, not least the powerful ones. We have also learned that small networks emerge inside organizations that upset the flow of communication and play havoc with the regular organizational channels. [p 287]

Organizations and networks also live in symbiosis, creating major arenas of a society. Networks, not of individuals but of organizations, were a much-neglected topic in the Chicago School of Sociology. Networking organizations became more of a concern among economists at Chicago, particularly as seen in R. H. Coase’s papers. (1988). In addition, the teaching in business schools around the world has come to emphasize that the consumer-to-consumer (individual-to-individual) market of the old textbooks, a pure network, is far from everything. The netorgs of the business-to-business market and the business-to-household market are the huge ones.

Networking organizations are probably one of the most sophisticated social structures that humankind has invented. This social structure deserves a name of its own, for example ‘netorg.’ Without a name of its own, there is an easy slip into a common belief that a networking organization is either a network or an organization, when it actually is both a full-fledged network and a full-fledged organization. See Figure 8.8.

We recognize this symbiosis of organization and network in the economy as corporations in a capitalist market, and in democratic politics as corporatism. We will find this symbiosis also in the realm of religion; Islam, for one, has a structure of netorgs of mosques. In science, competitive research programs among universities are netorgs. In our Table of Societal Realms (pages 404-405) examples of netorgs are to be placed in Row M. I trust that we will learn more about them in our Volumes 4 to 6 on societal realms. At this point, it seems that relative changes in transaction costs between firms and markets (organizations and networks) cannot fully account for their emergence and success. [p 288]

Figure 8.8. Networking Organizations ('Netorgs')

The power of netorgs on the societal scene is drawn from the Proposition about Realm Expansion, which we shall present in the next chapter. [p 289]

Social Capital: Assets Acquired in Organizations, Networks, and Media

In the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept “social capital” in social science. Social assets are byproducts of peoples’ membership and participation in organizations, networks and families. Most of these social assets are immaterial. The bonds that people form are a social resource, a byproduct of membership in families, organizations, and networks and of their consumption of mass media. However, presence with a mass of people does not produce any such byproduct.

For a more precise analysis, we divide social capital into organization-based assets, network-based assets, and media-based assets.

The mapping of people's status sequences provides a precise start to the study of social assets acquired in groups in the past. The majority of people acquire their basic social resources in the primary groups of their childhood and youth. It is perhaps easier to acquire friends when young than to form bonds of friendship in one’s adult years.

Schooldays provide us not only with knowledge, but also with certain bonds of friendship that usually include the give-and-take of favors and services. These bonds may extend well into adult life. The amount of social capital that you can bring from old schooldays may play a crucial role for your successes or failures in adulthood. Prestigious schools and ordinary schools do not differ much in the knowledge they impart. What differs is the network of schoolmates from prestigious schools, who can open more doors for you in adulthood, and this is less available to graduates from ordinary schools. This has been well documented in France by Bourdieu (1989) and in the United States by Coleman (1990, ch 10). By mapping a person's past positions (status sequences), page 224 above, we can make a first partial and approximate summary of his social assets. [p 290]

Coleman also observed that the networks of parents that commonly form around a local school become part of the parents’ own social capital, an indirect result of the school their children attend. Such social assets derive from present group or network memberships. The mapping of people's current commitments (status-sets), page 229 above, thus, gives the social researcher a second partial summary of social assets.

Media consumption also provides a person with assets. Gossip in the media gives the lonely a sense of having social assets. But knowledge gathered from media gives a person genuine social assets as an opinion leader to whom others turn for information and orientation. Books and papers, and the enormous expansion of electronic communications technology, have allowed people to acquire another kind of social capital, a media resource. This would include their access to printed matter, the radio, record player, TV, the Internet, and so forth. Their media consumption becomes a third partial summary of social assets.

Acquiring large amounts of these three forms of social assets creates a person who has more actual clout in modern society than is signaled by his or her income, academic degree, or occupation. [p 291]

9. A Road from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft

Encounters

When there is a high likelihood of awareness (cognitions) about another person's words or actions, we speak of a 'social encounter,’ or in context of this book ‘encounter’ for short. You may have a physical book by Plato in your bookshelf or you may notice one in a book store, but you do not have a socially significant encounter with Plato until you start reading him. Social encounters provide us with simple and easy structures of communication Erving Goffman, a master explorer of human encounters, sees them as any focused interaction (1961, 811).

Persons involved in a social encounter share, at least in some part, the same symbolic environment. The possibility of having encounters ceases (or is reduced to an exchange of gestures) when symbolic environments change into a different and incomprehensible language and no translation is available. It is striking, however, that ordinary transactions in a moneyed economy can take place over language barriers with a minimum of words. This is an advantage for the realm of economy, with no counterpart in the other societal realms. This also helps explain the failure of political globalization in the form of colonialism and the successes of globalization in the form of market economy.

Simple social arrangements emerge when people begin to talk to one another. Georg Simmel, in his exposition of sociology, (1908/1923) included many nontrivial insights about such forms. The plainest provide insight into numbers, distances, and distinctions among the participants in encounters. He noted, for example, as regards the number of people involved in interaction that there is a great difference between being two and being three. [p 292]

Very different outcomes are possible when two may be joined in cooperation or hostility against a third. About the distance between the people involved, he noted how conflicts actually bring people in close contact while, for example, keeping secrets from one another, keeps people apart. The high or low distinction of the interacting people has many ramifications. For example, an uncorrected concern over vertical distances (rank differences) results in a spread of horizontal equality among the low. This is one mechanism (of several) behind working-class solidarity.

Numbers in Face-to-Face Encounters

How many acquaintances can you have without confusing them? How many persons from face-to-face encounters do you remember and recognize over time when you meet them again?

[BIO] We can certainly agree that there is a "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships" (Dunbar 1992). This personal circle of stable face-to-face relations is popularly known as the Monkey-sphere, and in social science circles it is known as Dunbar's number. It correlates with brain size. It is smaller in monkeys than in humans because the former have smaller brains. Various methods point at a value around 150 as an upper limit for average adult humans. For example, 150 was the usual unit size of armies in the Roman Empire, and it remained the size of infantry companies in World War II. It also seems to be around that number at which rural villages compound, and zadrugas divide. My impression is that artistic and scientific coteries also tend to break up into fractions when they reach this limit.

Another number that has fascinated observers of social life reveals the limit of individuals whose movements and/or speech a person can simultaneously observe. Jesus selected twelve disciples, making a circle of 13 persons, including himself. Was that one too many since one, unbeknownst to the others, plotted to betray the group? In discussing such problems in other settings we usually [p 293] land on a range of seven to fifteen persons, the latter being a common number in a platoon in the military, i.e. a tenth of a company. In this range, we find the sizes of teams in ice hockey, soccer, and some other sports. The number of children in a functioning unstructured nursery group, the size of a genuinely interacting seminar or dinner table are in this range. This may also be the maximum size at which typical work groups in industry, construction, or research can function without formal hierarchy.

Let us, with this background, specify four constants in social science. This sounds like natural science, but any dramatist is familiar with them. The first one stands for the maximum size of an encounter in which each one knows the identity of the others. Those on the outside are strangers. The second one stands for the maximum size of an encounter in which each one knows not only the identity but also the actions of the others. The constants can only be approximated, which we signal by using the sign ≈ rather than =.

Figure 9.1. Constants in Face-to-face Human Encounters

• 150 persons ≈ Maximum size of encounters in which ordinary people know the identity of all others, this is the socially large world,' (Dunbar's number). There are probably some 1000 languages that are used by so few people that their total falls below Dunbar's number (Ostler 2005).
• 15 persons ≈ Maximum size of encounters in which ordinary people know the actions of the others, this is the 'socially small world.’
• 3 persons. Three individuals (Simmel’s triad) is the smallest number that can represent certain major social mechanisms, such as inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and competition, outsourcing. A triad is also implicitly necessary in most uses of game theory, for example in “the prisoners’ dilemma” that tests the trust between [p 294] two individuals. The third party is here required to administer the rewards and sanctions. A similar third party is needed to enforce a contract between two persons.
• 2 persons. Two individuals (Simmel’s dyad) are sufficient to represent relations such as love and hate, and superior and inferior.

Considering the third and fourth categories, it is remarkable what difference one person makes in the nature of encounters when dyads become triads and vice versa.

The above numbers refer to encounters unaided by any technology. Encounters on the Internet are at times different, just when and how is still subject of research.

The Socially Small World

Durable and close socially small worlds usually show strong resilience. American soldiers in World War II were asked: “Generally, in your combat experience, what was most important to you in making you want to keep going and do as well as you did.” The common answers dealt not with war aims, patriotism and democracy, nor to get the war over with and to go home, but "not to let your buddies down" (Stouffer, et al. 1949). Similar results were found in interviewing veterans of the German Wehrmacht who fought on in 1945 even as Berlin fell (Shils and Janowitz 1948). The soldiers on both sides had been subject to conscription to their armies, which meant that they had a relatively durable relation with their buddies. In a relation based on ascription, i.e. a relation that goes on whatever you do, such as a functioning family of origin where you are forever daughter or son, the resiliency may be even stronger.

So-called positive feedback processes tend to emerge in socially small groups of some duration. The more the participants are together, the more they like each other and the more they like each other, the more they are together. The best liked become [p 295]informal leaders and interact and initiate contacts with others. George Homans (1950) described this in his book The Human Group, and Kadushin (2005) further documented and explicated this and many of its consequences. Let's keep it simple here:

Proposition 9:1. Feedbacks in Durable Socially Small Worlds: In a durable, socially small world, the more any two participants interact with one another, the more favorable evaluation they give each other, and the more favorable evaluation they hold about one another, the more they interact.

Edmund Burke celebrates what he calls "the little platoons" as the origin of any larger solidarity in society and warns, as conservatives ever since have done, against any attempts to destroy them:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind. The interests of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage (E. Burke 1790/1986, para 2.1.75, 227-28).

The cohesion and solidarity of small groups does not necessarily and always work for the good. Their members may work as Boy Scouts or as Hells Angels.

Families and households are socially small worlds. They have many qualities apart from small size. We shall deal with them in Volume 7 of The Many-Splendored Society: Life and the Good Life.

During almost two centuries, Sweden has been engaged in a large-scale experiment to prove Burke wrong. This is described by Berggren and Trädgårdh (2006). A common theme in Swedish living is to foster people to become more independent of small encounters, such as marriage and family, as well as more inde- [p 296]pendent of traditional encounters in local communities. The advent of the advanced Swedish welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century formally organized such tendencies. The service bureaucracies and the payouts of the welfare state are attempts to take the place of the small platoons of cozy numbers; on a large scale they promise a good life for the lonely as well as the needy.

It is too early to tell whether this Swedish project will succeed. At the time of this writing (in the first decade of the Twenty-first Century) this project tilts toward failure. Encounters with government bureaucracies working nine to five according to rules of law cannot replace small worlds of kin, friends and neighbors accessible around the clock and working for love. A good society needs both government and civil society working in consort, and also a functioning welfare market (Zetterberg and Ljungberg 1997, ch 21). So called public welfare in our days is a stool on three legs; you need all these three to sustain it: government, market, and civil society.

Scanning in Encounters

A participant in an encounter is never totally idle but cognizant of others. Its participants get responsive "social skins," to use a concept from the German scholar Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1980). They scan the others to find out who they are and if they wear or express anything that is new or different from their own.

BIO. We can add the phenomenon of selective perception to the notion of scanning. In biology this means that we retain from a scan only or primarily what is relevant for the functioning and survival of an animal’s body. In social reality it means that publics scan primarily for news presenting opportunities or threats for them, for whatever or whoever is highly or lowly evaluated (consumer items, celebrities), and they scan for crimes and other deviations from norms. [p 297]

Selective scanning in encounters, including those communicated by mass media, can be expressed in a general proposition using our tripartite division of language:

Proposition 9:2. Selective Scanning in Encounters: In any social encounters, the participants (a) scan each other for the descriptive language in use, particularly utterances that present opportunities or threats for them, (b) scan others for the evaluative language in use, particularly opinions about individuals such as themselves, and (c) scan others for the prescriptive language in use, particularly for any norms that may apply to themselves.

This selective scanning occurs in all types of encounters. They may be direct encounters, that is, face-to-face, or indirect, that is, without the visible presence of others, such as in telephone contacts or radio or television. Indirect encounters may be contemporary or historical; they may even be present only in a participant's fantasies about the future and the people he will then meet.

Hi tech, Hi Touch? [TECH]

The modus vivendi of any face-to-face encounter is so-called "small talk." Many encounters through new technologies seem to consist of continued small talk with a party originally encountered face-to-face. Other encounters that originate in electronically concluded deals with strangers generate an urge to meet in person. At first look, it seems as if people do not have to live in cities any more to have low-cost contacts with one another!

In spite of the spread of indirect electronic encounters in the modern world, the face-to-face meeting retains its standing. In the community of futurologists of the 1970s, Kristine Shannon coined the phrase “High tech, high touch.” By this, she meant that the increased use of high technology is actually matched by an increased need of a human touch or contact. Her phrase received a resounding, affirmative response when I used it in a speech to the [p 298]Seventh Payment Systems International Conference, in September 1981 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Most participants were involved in SWIFT, the world's first computerized international payment system. They had left their high-tech mainframe computers used for the transfer of huge volumes of currencies, and they had spent many hours cramped in high-technology jets to fly to Phoenix to meet face-to-face. "In order to be fully able to deal with the most sophisticated payment networks the world has ever seen, you need to meet, look one another in the eye, and try out each others’ nicknames from the nametags. It would be total horror if we were only computer passwords to one another. Hi tech requires high touch." Later, John Naisbitt (1998) made the phrase "high tech/high touch" well known to numerous readers, as the label of one of the ten megatrends he thought would shape the future. It was one of the soon-to-be-forgotten fashionable notions of the chattering profiles of social science.

In fact, modern communication technology has not reduced our face-face meetings; it may even have fueled our appetite for face-to-face contacts. When someone turns up at a person’s funeral who has known the deceased only in the electronic Facebook we may glimpse something new.

The research in the area of electronic and indirect encounters, as far as I know it, has not yet settled on results that we can comfortably summarize among our numbered Propositions. The position of most experts in the first decade of the new millennium still seems to be: "Our empirical work suggests that telecommunications may be a complement or at least not a strong substitute for cities and face-to-face interactions" (Gaspar and Glaeser 1996).

Indirect and Electronic Encounters

A social encounter does not have to be conceived as an actual physical meeting. Some encounters with contemporaries are indirect, i.e. with invisible associates. In traditional kingdoms, the subjects may never have met or seen the king in whose name they [p 299]were regulated and taxed. In contemporary society, indirect encounters abound (Giddens 1990, 21-29). We do not meet the police officer who signed a parking ticket and affixed it to the windshield of our car. A person can rent an apartment without an appointment with the proprietor who signed his lease. You can get a credit card without ever seeing the person providing its authorization. You buy things by telephone, mail order, or Internet without meeting a salesperson.

In a meeting room, "the whisper" is a means to convey something confidentially to a chosen neighbor. With sms (Short Message Service over cell phones), a new generation of humans can do that voicelessly. To send sms across a big living room or to someone in another part of a restaurant or gym has the advantage of being able to see the receiver in the eyes, the traditional way of assessing trust. And trust we need, in order to enter more serious exchanges by indirect encounters.

We encounter Socrates by reading Plato's dialogues, centuries later and in translation. Christians encounter Jesus by listening to a sermon and understanding the Gospel. Such encounters become social when the words of Plato or the Evangelists are translated so that a shared symbolic environment is at hand. If we have any liberal education at all, we have had many encounters with the great intellectuals of the past through their written words.

[TECH] A new volume of encounters by letter writing opened up at the time when a mail service developed and postmen on their appointed rounds, rather than private servants, carried letters between the participants in encounters. Telegraph for script and telephone for voice brought new opportunities to keep in touch.

Encounters in Internet communities are as old as the net itself. After the millennium, encountering expanded enormously as Internet became populated with the inventions of electronic social networks, such as My Space, Facebook and Twitter. After connecting to them, users start "friending", i.e. inviting others to the [p 300]network. Even before they have become regular users, they may help to expand the circle of contacts by recommending others. In most cases, this can be done simply by one click on their computer to export their own mailing list to the social network. The persons on the list then receive automatic invitations to join. This means that the constants of 15 and 150 from face-to-face contacts do not apply any more. This has uncharted implications for humanity.

As nonprofessionals, we usually generalize experiences from our face-to-face encounters to the historical and indirect contacts. Is all what we can learn in face-to-face encounters about human rights, labeling, likes and dislikes, identities, inclusion and exclusion, jurisprudence, ostracism, redemption applicable also in the new electronic social networks? We think so, but await more evidence. As scholars of social science, we ought to proceed cautiously and test whether technologically mediated encounters actually do have the same consequences as face-to-face encounters at arm’s length. One of the first such tests was our reanalysis of Merton's 1946 study of a war bond drive presented in our next volume. The contents of the modern journals of communication research tell that this is a fertile field of scholarship.

The social encounter can, thus, span time and space, the visible associates and the invisible ones; it is the broadest of all terms of interpersonal contact. A high volume of encounters that used to be available only to city dwellers and restricted to city agoras is now available anywhere. This killing of distance by electronic communication is clearly changing the conditions of man. An apostle of this change is Manuel Castells who is also a specialist on urban structuration.

Truth in Descriptive Discourse

When the participants in encounters reach beyond Dunbar's number, a human being can no longer have knowledge of the [p 301]personal identities and motivations of all of the others, nor what happens to them. The participants in encounters with more members than Dunbar's number are not only self-interested and community-oriented in varying degrees, but have private information and private ambitions unknown to some of the others. The full knowledge required for arranging, scheduling, and forecasting is not known. In a paper from 1945 entitled "The Use of Knowledge in Society," that has become a minor classic, we read:

The economic problem of society is not merely a problem of how to allocate 'given' resources...It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. ...it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality (Hayek 1945).

So wrote a young Friedrich Hayek, later in life, a Nobel laureate in economy. The only addition we need to make to the core of his thesis concerning our limit of knowledge about others is that it begins to apply when Dunbar's number is reached:

Proposition 9:3. The Limit of Knowledge about Others: If Dunbar's number is surpassed in encounters and the members' relations to one another have a low degree of familiarity, then (a) actions of the members, particularly speech acts, tend to occur which are, not only unknown to, but unpredictable by other participants; and (b) the members' accounts and presentations of themselves and their situation have low barriers to dishonest editing.

A low degree of familiarity referred to in this proposition is typical among specialists working in a bureaucracy, and particularly by people who are active in a big market. It is an attribute of modern city living.

The Hayek thesis is clause (a) of the proposition of The Limit of Knowledge about Others. More concretely, it holds that the price [p 302]system in a market can aggregate vast amounts of information much more efficiently than a centralized bureaucracy can do.

It is often said with reference to Hayek's work that unplanned consequences of large-scale planned actions are a predictable curse of all social engineering of large systems. This unpredictability is enhanced by clause (b) in our proposition.

Oskar Lange, a socialist economist, had argued that there were no reasons to believe that anonymous market forces would make better allocations of investment capital than would highly trained central planners (Lange 1938). He became one of Hayek's adversaries. When he was a chief economic planner in Communist Poland, Lange discovered, however, that he regularly received beautified and doctored reports from the field that contained higher production figures and fewer problems with disturbances and inequalities than there were in reality. He started a vain search for mechanisms that could overcome dishonest reporting in national planning.

Clause (b) of the proposition on The Limit of Knowledge says, in effect, that deceits are endemic in large organizations and networks. This can be read between the lines in some of Hayek's writings, but became more explicit in the work of Leonid Hurwicz, also a Nobel laureate, when he proposed "design mechanisms" to make the economy more efficient. He had escaped from Hitler by moving from Poland to the United States. Here the Lange-type of problems of dishonesty was also familiar, but as a reporting a problem in capitalist corporations with many subsidiaries, such as General Electric, and in public administrations such as the FBI with many local branches. Local units of a central organization may not be in the habit of outright lying in their reporting to the top, but they may withhold relevant information and overly emphasize information favorable to their budgets, promotion, and remunerations.

Hurwicz' (1973) first postulate is that participants have direct information only about themselves, not about other persons. It is [p 303]worth noting that he studied designs for decentralization and honesty prior to the discovery of Dunbar's number. Several of his cases rest on an analysis of transactions between only two parties. Designs that overcome unpredictability and dishonesty might work well in durable small settings with few participants, what we called the small social worlds (N<≈15). Parents know that when two children are bickering over how to divide a cake you should rule that one child cuts and the second child chooses. Only if the first child cut as evenly as possible will he get a maximum share. The rule works among siblings who are very familiar with one another, and also with two children who are strangers to one another. This is a setting in a small social world, and the critical point is that both children have full information.

Problems of Lange's sort need something that would work in larger networks and groups (15<≈N>≈150), and also in the great populations beyond Dunbar's number (N>≈150). These three group sizes behave somewhat differently.

To be able to achieve designs for efficiency in complex and decentralized cases, Hurwicz must introduce restrictions on the number of messages to be exchanged, on the degree of diversity of the environment of the participants, and on the compatibility of the incentives of the participants. The construction of designs to improve the efficiency of imperfect markets can, then, be systematic and scientific. As these restrictions are applied, however, the success of the designs in terms of human honesty remains questionable. The shortcut conclusion is pessimistic: in large decentralized organizations and networks, no incentive scheme, no matter how intelligent, can assure that people always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

There is much evidence supporting this pessimism about the problem of dishonesty outside the equations of the economists, as well.

An American, who will never cheat at cards played in the socially small world, will without much ado accept unearned mon- [p 304]ey to which he is not entitled from a public crib known as the "Gover'ment" and located in the large world. A giant case of abuse in the United States affected the pension system introduced after the Civil War. It was originally designed for crippled soldier and for orphaned children. In 1890 a revision in the Federal pension law removed the link between pensions and service-related injuries, allowing any veteran who had served honorably to qualify for a pension, if at some time he had became too disabled to perform manual labor. By 1906 old age alone became sufficient justification to receive a pension. Shrewd work by pension lawyers could make virtually any male citizen eligible who had been a teenager or older during the war. Numerous still younger persons were found to claim fathers who had fought in the Civil War.

Fortunately, the abuse had a natural end in that the abusing generations died out. The United States, in the meantime, had received a vaccination, that lasted till the Obama presidency in 2009, against copying the big European government-run welfare systems (Skocpol 1992). The United States got very little of what Bismarck started in Germany in the 1890s and Lord Beaverbrook designed for Britain, which was enacted after World War II. Not to speak of the openings in Scandinavia toward governmental payments for non-work, which are beyond the horizon of American imagination; I like to call them “the gestation of a citizen's wage." They became common around the millennium in Sweden, providing work-free income to a substantial proportion of the population of working age.

Gunnar Myrdal (1978), another Nobel laureate, observed the dishonesty phenomenon in the tax system in Sweden. The large-scale Swedish welfare systems were paid for by exceptionally high taxes, and he concluded that this system had created “a nation of small crooks” who cheated on taxes. Later we have learned that the Swedes also cheat a great deal to get welfare benefits. [p 305]

At best, we can follow Hurwicz and find or create situations in which everyone has a main strategy to tell the truth. For example, in the realm of science, truth will emerge if research is conducted according to the scientific method in a field where all findings are checked and confirmed by other researchers. Truth telling in science is also supported by the knowledge that cheating in research is a sure way to end a career. Prior to the advent of science as a full-fledged realm of society, the beliefs within some religions in an almighty God who sees and knows everything and keeps track of it, could also promote strategies of truth-telling — but one could never be quite sure that some people had not been seduced by the devil to lie.

An ingenious design to cope with the problem of honesty in large systems is to test possible dishonest individuals in a socially small system. A great invention of Roman justice was the right to face your accuser in front of a judge. A court of justice may be a bureaucracy, but the courtroom is a socially small world of personally present persons. A court of law assesses truth by asking questions, listening, and watching answers face-to-face. Of course, courts also have sanctions to apply against those who commit perjury. Deceits that are endemic in larger organizations and networks are minimized in courts.

Honest Knowledge about Large Populations

You know that your neighbor will soon buy a new car. In the cold mornings, you hear that his old car takes a long time to start. You know from talking to him that he is fond of a car of this make, and he usually keeps his models as long as he can. So you assume that his new car will be of the same make. This you know, but how many people in the country are like your neighbor? You have no idea of how many will become repeat buyers of this make during the coming year. However, the car manufacturer has a marketing department that has a good estimate of how many new cars will be sold and how many of them will be sold to [p 306]repeat customers. They have market surveys and calculations that forecast the future annual sale. They have overcome Dunbar's limit and Hayek's restricted knowledge, but not necessarily the problem of dishonesty.

The father of quantitative social science and the standard setter for census bureaus, the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), found his safety in large numbers. Among 100,000 young Frenchmen appearing in front of draft boards, the individual measurements of their height grouped themselves in a bell-shaped curve, symmetrically around a stable mean. Armed with his mathematical curve, Quetelet could conclude that about 2,000 men had escaped service by somehow shortening themselves just below the minimum height required for a soldier.

In this instance, we needed large numbers to reach a reliable conclusion about the dishonesty in the presentations made by the recruits of their own height. However, in other contexts, such as in the number of interviews in a public opinion poll, there is no self-evident safety in very large numbers.

The sample survey is a modern method to cope with the limit of knowledge a decision-maker has as regards a number of people beyond Dunbar's number. The survey is used in a variety of fields, production controls in engineering, symptom diversion in medicine, satisfaction with government services, images of corporation, political public opinion polling, et cetera.

In the 1930s a well-established magazine in the United States, Literary Digest used to inform its readers how elections were going by mailing millions of questionnaires to subscribers and people in the phone books and automobile registry. (United States has never had a total population registry and its civil servants and researchers depend on other registers.) In the 1936 election, the Digest had reported that Roosevelt would lose, 56 percent to 44. Many pundits agreed: Roosevelt seemed helpless to stop the Great Depression, too free spending, too controversial, [p 307]not only in the business community, but in the broad middle classes.

George Gallup’s data in 1936 included questionnaires from three thousand people. Gallup's sample was not statistically ideal; he did not start using probability sampling until after the failure to forecast the 1948 election, when Truman unexpectedly beat Dewey. But his 1936 sample was more representative of the electorate as a whole than the one used by the Literary Digest. He had selected a small number of voting areas with names and addresses of voters drawn from election rolls when available, and otherwise from telephone directories. Similar to the Digest he mailed them questionnaires. More important, he asked the sample how they had voted in the election 1932 as well as how they would vote in the election 1936. His sample was hand counted in his small Princeton office by six employees; the first IBM card sorter did not arrive in the office until the following year. The questionnaires were sorted into piles to reflect the 1932 election outcome. The procedure was called “adjustment of the sample,” and it eventually became subsumed under the heading “poststratification” in the vocabulary of statisticians, a procedure that, under some assumptions, can improve results from samples.

The Digest did not reach all of the eligible voters, or a good sample of them. However, the gap between the presidential candidates was considerable, and the Literary Digest might have been able to call the right winner in the 1936 election, if they had made a similar adjustment of their sample as Gallup had done. On Election Day, Roosevelt's Republican opponent, Al Landon, won a total of two states. Roosevelt swept the rest of the nation, the greatest landslide, to that date, in presidential history. Literary Digest stopped publishing election forecasts; eventually it stopped publishing altogether.

A branch of mathematics, the theory of sampling, has become an intellectual basis to overcome the limitation set by Dunbar's number and Hayek's theorem. The general tenet of statistical [p 308]sampling is simple. By studying the responses in a randomly selected sample of the population we can, with known probability, estimate the responses of the entire population. We often use a similar approach in daily life. A cook need not consume an entire pan of sauce in order to know how it tastes. He need only stir the sauce (randomize) and taste a spoonful (sample) of it. If the sample has too little spice, the entire sauce has too little spice. We can conclude this with a known degree of conviction, expressed as statistical confidence limits or margins of error.

The statistical "margins of error" do not mean that researchers have done something in error, but rather that the readers or users of the findings would be wrong in assuming that the reported numbers are exact representations of reality, rather than indications of likely intervals. The measures obtained from correctly constructed samples apply to the entire population, with the allowance of the "margin of error." The deviations from the true value form the same kind of bell-.shaped distribution that Quetelet had worked with. The correct answer most probably lies within calculable margins.

We choose these margins somewhat differently, depending on the topic at hand, and on the use to be made of the research. An advertising agency testing the recall of copy about a brand may be satisfied with a lower margin of error than a court of law that is to rule on an alleged infringement of someone's established brand name. In a great deal of medical and social research, a tolerable minimum for a "statistically significant" component is a probability of 95 percent. In other words, if the survey samples were to be repeated over and over again until the entire population had been measured, 95 out of 100 results would lie within these margins. In the language of the experts, you then have a "statistical significance“ at the 5 percent level. At the level of 1 percent, they may say "high statistical significance."

One must never forget that the figures based on samples represent approximate values, not exact numbers, but the beauty [p 309]of correct sampling is that we can calculate the likely limits of the deviations. The proper use of these calculations is restricted to samples that do not deviate from the sampling plan of random, or known, selection in each step. If this deviation is large, the statistics no longer represent the population we want to study. The discrepancy between the planned sample and the achieved sample is, therefore, necessary information. It is usually called "completion rate" (or “response rate” in interview surveys) and can be expressed as a percentage.

The widespread use of the sample survey instrument in market research has led to an increasing reluctance to respond to questionnaires by the public. In the second half of the twentieth century, the response rate for opinion surveys in the advanced countries declined from 80-90 percent to 50-60 percent. In this way, surveys become ineffective as a provider of reliable statistics about the entire population. This means that public opinion polling cannot count on support from mathematical statistics. Unless the researcher knows in advance the correlation between non-responses and the topic studied, which is very rare, the present models for calculating confidence intervals require high response rates. Larger samples, or so called "poll of polls," cannot compensate for errors caused by the public's lack of cooperation in answering the pollsters' questions. It is a way of being wrong with confidence.

The calculations of margins of error in samples with poor response rates do not reveal the range in which the true value is found with 95 percent probability, as is often claimed in press releases of opinion polls. It does tell us that replications of the samples with the same inadequate response rate in 95 cases of 100 would render results within this range. In this way, we may understand why different polls differ slightly from one another in their results, but not how they differ from the true value in the population studied. [p 310]

Public Opinion Polls as a Social Innovation

A critical task in all public opinion polling on issues is the choice of topics for the questioning. It is important to ask questions revealing the public’s concerns, and not only questions that interest the pollsters or their editors or sponsors. Gallup solved this problem in the late 1930s by regularly asking: “What is the most important problem facing the country today?” He did not want to define all issues by himself, or to have his editors take all the initiatives. In the ideal issue poll, his respondents, the public, should have the main say in defining the issues! Without any filters or restrictions, mass media should, then, publish the views of the public to the public and to the leaders of the public. The full measure of Gallup’s contribution is not only a scientific application of sampling, interviewing, and calculation of percentages of responses into majorities and minorities. He also achieved a social innovation, that is, polling of the public, on the issues defined by the public, for the benefit of the public (Gallup and Rae 1940).

Gallup, himself, and other serious pollsters discovered, the hard way, the power of Hurwicz's thesis: that people's accounts of themselves and their achievements may be dishonest. This applies also to nationwide interviewing. No scheme can induce respondents in a short encounter with an interviewer to tell the truth at all times. Post-stratification based on party choice in a previous election is a tricky procedure that can easily result in wrong pre-election polls (Zetterberg and Busch 1976). There are times when people are not motivated to truthfully disclose how they voted in an election some years ago. Political trends, events, and scandals may make them embarrassed to tell how they voted. Or, if they recently have converted to a another party, they may, on the day the pollster calls, be tempted to present themselves as clever in the past as they are today, and say that voted for their new party in the previous election as well. [p 311]

Errors in interview surveys are not all sampling errors, non-response, or deficient memory recall from the interviewees. Incompetent question wordings cause faults in the measurement. Administrative failures in the recruitment and training of interviewers may leave room for bias or cheating. Mistakes may also occur in entering data to computers and in their processing. The reporting of polls in media often suffers from bias revealed in the chosen slant and headings by editors. Interactions occur among multiple error sources. The total survey error is difficult to grasp. One thing is certain: it is larger than the sampling error, i.e. the plus-minus number that sometimes is mentioned in poll releases.

This ends our review of the truth in descriptive discourse in organizations, networks, and markets. We will return to the problem of truthfulness when we deal with the societal realm of science in Volume 4 of The Many-Splendored Society: Knowledge and Beauty.

Two Propositions from Biology [BIO]

In this book project on The many-splendored Society we pursue, not the total society, but its social reality. Our idea is that social reality comes from the use of language to build a social edifice (structure) and other language to motivate us to live in this edifice. When our reasoning depends on a non-language biological base, we have promised in our opening pages 45 of The Many-Splendored Society, to flag the occasion by a special sign, [BIO], in the margin of the text or after a heading. It is time now for two instances where the [BIO] flag applies.

A certain biologically given upper limit or ceiling exists in the endeavors in which a human being can embark. It is clear from the complaining we do about the lack of time or energy, that everybody has had some personal experience with this limit. During [p 312]one single day, a person may be able to produce more speech acts than purely manual acts. I wish I could reproduce here the constants that measure these two, the maximum number of physical acts and the maximum number of symbolic acts per actor and time unit. We can only talk intuitively about this, as there is no agreement when one action ends and another begins.

The language brain seems to be constructed with more excess capacity than the pre-language brain. Orthodox Darwinists have had some difficulty in explaining why such excess capacity of the language brain could emerge in the early environments of Homo sapiens. A human brain that developed its biology to adapt to life millennia ago in a rustic, migratory tribe of ancestors can, after a few years of training, cope with cosmopolitan life, and with a vocabulary in a metropolitan area. Perhaps this is another sign of the enormous freedom that we have received with the language brain. (We discussed this freedom on pages 151-153 in Volume 1).

Yet, there is also a ceiling to the language capacity. Modern people know too well that one cannot be completely involved in a profession, and also in politics, business, art, and in the raising of a big family. That requires too many considerations and words.

Normally we live at levels far under the ceiling of action. However, there may be long-term changes. Most sleep researchers in Europe and North America agree that we spend less time sleeping than we did a century ago, a fact which signals that the customary average of actions per day has been elevated. [TECH] Edison, who invented of the light bulb, is sometimes blamed for this change.

There are obviously individual variations in the ceiling of action. Young babies spend most of their time sleeping, and the very old are capable of fewer actions, particularly physical actions, than are adults in their prime. It is also obvious that the healthy are capable of more than the sick, at any age. The concern with the physical and mental fitness and wellbeing of a population — what we now call "public health" — has been a serious [p 313]issue among rulers and social thinkers of all eras because, as a determinant of the ceiling of actions, it affects the degree of action their society can and cannot undertake.

The greater the physical and mental stamina of a population, the higher is the limit of actions per person. Such biological factors have consequences in history. The earliest (and best) forecasters of the collapse of the Soviet Union were not the military and political strategists, but demographers who early discovered the declining life expectancy among Russian males, and public health researchers who paid attention to the spread of alcoholism.

Mobilization [BIO]

There is, normally, a discrepancy between the actual number of actions and the potential limit and capacity of actions. The usefulness of the principle of the limit of action in predictions depends on our knowledge of this discrepancy. Let us define 'mobilization' as the ratio of actual to potential actions among a set of persons. It would be zero under conditions of complete idleness, e.g., during sleep, and approach unity when the individuals concerned are pressing themselves to the utmost of their resources. The ceiling of action is, thus, identical with capacity mobilization.

Most men at most times operate at a rather modest degree of mobilization. It takes a crisis to give us the startling demonstration that we can do a great deal more than we actually do. William James (1936, 7) is not merely a Puritan moralist when he says with some disapproval "as a rule men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they actually possess and which they might use under appropriate conditions." He backs up his statement by a string of samples and by reference to many commonsense experiences which indicate that extra energy, "a second wind," is a reality, and can be put to use when needed. [p 314]

The common sense approach taken by William James, suggests that each individual has an accustomed or usual level of human energy expenditure. From clinical literature, one obtains vivid impression of a high rate in the maniac and of a low rate in the depressed. In addition, in cases that are not pathological, one can assume a certain degree of intra-individual consistency in the level of energy expenditure. Our biological heritage of heart and lung capacity can only, in part, account for this; it is also affected by training and by environmental circumstances, such as tropical or temperate climate.

Our concern here is limited to the interplay between social structures and the levels of mobilization. We can summarize in the form of Figure 9.2 and Proposition 9:4.

The accustomed level of mobilization of individuals can, of course, be aggregated to a collective level. Where is the mobilization highest: in Houston or New Orleans? Is it true that the mobilization of the Chinese population is higher than that of India? We know stereotyped answers to such a question but lack reliable answers, as firm measurements are missing. We may fill out the lack of data on such issues with hypotheses from social theory.

In specifying what we may mean by an accustomed level of human mobilization of human energy, we should distinguish between long-term processes counted in months or years and short-term processes counted in days or weeks. A graph (see the middle part of Figure 9.2) might illustrate the simplest possible relation between the two. The long-term ratio of actions per person might be represented by a moving average, say, the average of the past hundred days. Around this the short-term weekly averages fluctuate around their average, and the still shorter daily activities and nightly rests swing around their average. [p 315]

Figure 9.2. Daily, Short and Long-term Shifts in Mobilization of Actions with Accustomed Mobilization Increasing, Stationary, and Decreasing.

When the short-range curve is higher than the long-range moving average we speak of "mobilization above par," and when it falls lower than the moving average we speak of "mobilization below par." From the values of the long-range curve and the limit of actions we can calculate the "accustomed level of mobilization." The latter is simply the percentage of capacity mobilization that is represented by the individual or collectivity we study. Periods of high and low mobilization oscillate, as indicated in an amateurish physiological regularity expressed in words here as Proposition 9:4, and seen as the curves in Figure 9.2.

Proposition 9:4. Accustomed Mobilization: All humans have a limit or ceiling of actions. Below this ceiling, an accustomed level of mobilization is established. Periods of mobilization above par of the accustomed level tend to be followed by mobilization below par, and vice versa.

It follows from the way we have defined our terms that a long-run increase in the number of actions per person leads to a higher accustomed level of mobilization. A long-run decrease has the opposite effect, i.e. leads to a lower accustomed level. This is the story of the lower graph in Figure 9.2. There is a built-in laziness in humanity, as well as a built-in exuberance; one is found above the accustomed level of mobilization and the other below it. The guardians of the social order must deal with both tendencies, because laziness is a potential danger, since it may keep essential tasks from being done, and exuberance is potentially dangerous, as it generates activity that may not fit into the established social fabric and may, consequently, cause physical strain to the organism.

Social rewards for diligence and workmanship counteract laziness. These measures are not always undertaken successfully. Parkinson (1955) aptly suggests that among civil servants "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," because the social incentives in a government bureaucracy are allied, rather than countervailing, forces to laziness. A bureaucrat gets [p 317]prestige and rank in proportion to the number of subordinates he can get to share his fixed volume of work.

By keeping ways open for legitimate activity, communities cope with excessive exuberance. Our experience in modern cities suggests a failure in providing enough channels for the exuberance of teenagers, with the resulting amount of nonsocial or antisocial behavior. No one who has talked extensively with juvenile delinquents can fail to observe how often they interpolate phrases such as "we had nothing to do" when discussing the reasons they may have got into difficulty.

An interesting paradox emerges when the accustomed level of mobilization declines: one does not get more done although one has more time. An Austrian worker in the Great Depression of the 1930s, who had been unemployed during a long period of time, compared what he did in the days when he was employed with the idle days of unemployment and said: "Ich habe früher weniger Zeit für mich gehabt, aber mehr für mich getan" (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 1933, 63). This paradox of "having more time, but accomplishing less" occurred because the accustomed level of mobilization of the workers had decreased during his prolonged unemployment. Commanders of armies must always attempt to keep everyone busy in peacetime, so that they shall retain an appropriate level of mobilization when called to battle. Contrariwise, in periods of increase of the accustomed level of mobilization, one may have less time for a task but accomplish more of it. In assigning tasks leaders are, thus, likely to find that it pays to somewhat overestimate, rather than underestimate, the energies of men.

Coping with the Large World: Vocabularies of Labeling

Faced with a limit on persons with whom we can have stable, familiar, and direct encounters, human beings tend to make a simple adjustment as regards all other persons. We cut down on the richness of our responses and behave, instead, in conventio- [p 318]nalized fashion. In effect, we substitute one stereotyped response for what, otherwise, would have been a variety of individualized responses.

The stereotyped patterning of a set of actions is the extent to which a smaller number of actions are repeatedly used in place of a larger variety of actions. As stereotyped actions take less of our time and energy than the ones adjusted to the details of the situation, they offer us means of economizing our limited encounter potential. Walter Lippmann, who brought the issue of stereotypes to general attention, says: "There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of question" (Lippmann 1922, Ch.6, sec.3).

Proposition 9:5. Theorem of Stereotypy: There is a tendency to invoke stereotype patterning when the number of persons in encounters reaches or exceeds Dunbar's number.

We call this our Theorem of Stereotypy. Again, turning to Lippmann’s description of busy men with too many encounters for illustrations:

There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead we notice a trait which marks a well-known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. He is an agitator . . . . He is an intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He is a foreigner. He is a ‘South European.’ He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard man. How different from the statement: He is a Yale man. He is a regular fellow. He is a West Pointer. He is an old army sergeant. He is a Greenwich Villager: what don’t we know about him then, and about her? He is an international banker. He is from Main Street. (ibid.)

A life of "idle curiosity," to borrow Veblen’s phrase, is conducive to fewer stereotypes than the life of busy affairs with its many encounters. People who cut through our existing web of  [p 319]stereotypes — be they artists, scientists, or leaders of nations — are more likely to do so during periods of seeming leisurely retreat: alone in the wilderness, during sabbatical years, on weekends away from it all. Likewise, new stereotypes are least likely to develop in our more leisurely social relations. We tend to hold few stereotypes about our friends and their doings, but many about those we do not associate with in leisure.

Satiation [BIO]

The process of satiation is a second idea that we shall borrow from (amateur) physiology of animals and move into a theory of human society that we otherwise base only on language. Satiation is a physiological regularity. If we repeat the same statement all the time, i.e. continually keep nagging about something, people pay less and less attention. Persistent asking the same thing with no variation gets people tired. Even glory may fail from sheer repetition. To keep listeners interested you must vary your message, vary your messengers, and vary your emotive tone. To get the listeners more and more interested, you yourself must be more and more excited about the topic. The following proposition is an approximation that we learn from physiology:

Proposition 9:6. Satiation in Encounters: The longer a continuous string of the very same stimulations (e.g. sentences) occurs in an encounter, the less attention the latter get, and vice versa, the longer a string of continuously novel stimulations (e.g. sentences), the more attention they get.

Johan Asplund (1967) has worked this out mathematically with several corroborative empirical research references. He has also explored many of the implications of this physiological regularity. One of his important conclusions is that repetition is the cause, not the result, of the processes of satiation. Charisma, we recall from page 230 et seq., is the followers' view of a leader that imbue [p 320]him or her with extraordinary abilities, or "grace." The charismatic leader — and a good follower of the charismatic leader — should never be boring, but remains passionate about his or her ideas and try to see new vistas for them. Charisma does not automatically fade into routines, as was the conclusion drawn by Max Weber (1922/1968, 246-251). It is the unchanging routines that make charisma fade (Asplund 1967, 88-90).

Stimulation to Mobilization in Networks

The causes behind the changes in level of mobilization may be medical, technological, demographic, or social. In an organization the approved communications between members are "the regular channels," same today as yesterday and the same tomorrow – unless it is a rare day when you are promoted or reassigned to another part of the organization. Networks and their participants provide unrivalled opportunities for varied exchanges. In other words, given the same density of contacts, there are more chances for repeated stimulations in organizations and more chances for novel stimulations in networks.

Let us stay with a social cause. The Proposition of Satiation in Encounters implies that a string of novel stimulations increases the level of activity in an encounter, while a string of repeated, same stimulations decreases activity in the encounter. Apply this insight on encounters in organizations compared to encounters in networks. Since novel stimulations are likelier to occur in networks (see page 258 above) than in organizations, a conclusion is close at hand that the diverse stimulation of a network raises mobilization more than the repeated stimulations inside an organization. Or in propositional form:

Proposition 9:7. Network Effects on Mobilization: If the ratio of networks to organizations increases, then the accustomed level of mobilization tends to increase, and vice versa. [p 321]

Similar increases of accustomed mobilization (but attenuated from derivation by probabilities) occur with changes of ratio of contracts to laws, and ratio of market places to legislatures. Count on increased mobilization with any lift in phenomena based on networks, for example, contracts, markets, and netorgs.

Rationality and Mobilization

The European way of structuring a society expanded successfully westwards from the Iberian Peninsula starting with the Columbus’ ship “Santa Maria.” At that time, two swords jointly ruled in Europe, a political one and a religious one. A second westwards expansion started from the British Isles and the Netherlands with the ship Mayflower. European society had then experienced a renaissance of ancient art and science, and a reformation had created religious diversity. Those on board “The Mayflower” were dissidents from the system of European rule by the joint political-religious swords. The Americas eventually became divided at the Rio Grande by the followers of these two streams of immigrants and colonizers.

In the section “Exporting European Differentiation” (pp 23-28) in the opening chapter of the first volume of The Many-Splendored Society we have sketched this development. We had little to say about any eastward move of European structuration; the East Rome was more stable than the West Rome and did not experiment with advanced structuration as the latter. We noted in passing (pages 102-104) that the Sung Dynasty in China in most every aspect was superior to its European counterparts of the time.

Europe’s contacts with the eastern part of the Eurasian landmass were long only over land. Trade, in the beginning mostly exports of silk and other luxuries from China, connected India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Europe by caravan grids of pack animals taking different routes that collectively became known as the Silk Road. It took many local political agreements and much reloading to keep the goods flowing. The routes were designed [p 322]for goods. They could spread diseases, but were not designed for streams of migrants, except slaves who were sometimes parts of the bargains. A significant effect was that the routes spread Buddhist scriptures from India to China.

In the Thirteenth Century, The Mongol Empire of Genghis Kahn and his sons reached to the boarder of Europe at Moscow. It was born on horsebacks. In the following century, Tamerlane’s similarly born counter-empire of Mongol-Persian origin was built on the wealth of the Silk Road. On the European front it reached Georgia, Armenia, and southern Russia. It conquered India. The empire started to establish its capital in Samarkand, near the birthplace of Tamerlane. He died on a carefully planned mission to conquer China. (In the history books he is often called Timur.)

The European reach into Asia is often said to start with the arrival of Vasco da Gama’s ship “São Gabriel” to India in 1498, a sort of eastward parallel to the westward endeavors with “Sancta Maria” and “Mayflower. But this, says John Darwin (2007, 13) is “a travesty of the facts.”

A dense mercantile network already linked ports and producers between the coast of East Africa and the South China Sea. Asian merchants were not passive victims of a European takeover. Whatever their shortcomings, Asian governments were more than the predatory despots of European mythology who crushed trade and agriculture by penal taxation and arbitrary seizure. In different parts of Asia, there were market economies where the division of labour, specialized trades and urban development (the hallmarks of growth as Adam Smith had described it) looked very similar to those found in Europe. In China, especially, the scale of commercial exchange, the sophistication of credit, the use of technology, and the volume of production (in textiles particularly) revealed a preindustrial economy at least as dynamic as contemporary Europe's. Indeed, before 1800 what really stood out was not the sharp economic contrast between Europe and Asia, but, on the contrary, a Eu- [p 323]rasian world of 'surprising resemblances' in which a number of regions, European and Asian, were at least theoretically capable of the great leap forward into the industrial age." (Darwin 2007, 13).

With this background we can enter a great intellectual debate that explores why the industrialization leaped forward in Europe but not in Asia. We know from our first volume of The Many-Splendored Society about The Master Trends of general bursts of language-based culture and rationality in the axial civilizations (pages 79-84). Looking at the reach of the trend toward rationality and the achieved customary level of mobilization at the dawn of the industrial age we get an impressionistic picture captured in Figure 9.3.

We see that Protestant Europe has both strong rationality and strong mobilization. Islam has good mobilization but not much rationality, trapped as it is by the idea that all the essential reasoning ended with the Prophets revelations in medieval Mecca and Medina. Hinduism has a much more impressive rationality but lacks in mobilization. The caste system allowed you to do well in your own caste, but you could not by your efforts enter higher castes, an effective ceiling to achieving mobilization. Buddhism sees salvation in mobilizing for religious contemplation rather than worldly achievements. Confucianism in China leaves a great heritage of rationality and meritocracy in the elites, but also room given to rituals and ancestor worship. Varieties of Buddhism are the mass religion in China.

Toward the end of the Tokugawa dynasty in Japan in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, Japanese religion was a mixture of influences from Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto. Robert N. Bellah (1957) has shown that it brought both rationality and a mobilizing work ethic to Japan. It resembled what Max Weber [p 324]had found in his classical study of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1904-1905)²⁵.