Paper presented to the Working Group on Sociological Categories and Classifications at the annual conference of the Swedish Sociological Association, January 30-31, 2003 at Örebro University, Sweden. Incomplete in several places, this text is found on www.zetterberg.org and is part of a manuscript in progress for a book entitled The Many-Splendored Society. Click here to see the development of this manuscript after January 20, 2003.
This paper sums up fifty years of my intellectual struggles using categories. I have thus expressed many of its ideas before, and sometimes in the same language as here.
Sections 1 – 3 are background that the reader may skip. Sections 4 - 14 (beginning on page 13) contain the proposed categories. I am grateful to Greta Frankel for translation of a number of passages originally written in Swedish, for editing the entire paper, and for stimulating discussions. /HLZ 2003-01-17
We are not born civilized: we become so by learning how to use symbols. Through symbols in speech, writing, drawing, music, dance, we tell each other what we have seen, heard or felt, what we like and dislike, and what we want to be done and want to avoid. Symbols acquaint us with a historical past we have not seen, distant people whom we have never met, and a universe through which we have never traveled. Thanks to symbols we can know something without personally having experienced it. Symbols codify societal orders, represent riches, summarize knowledge, embody beauty, define sacredness, and express virtues.
Speech gave our
ancestors a new ways of shaping their relations to one another. Speech was more
efficient than animal communication about relationships through fighting,
scratching, or grooming one another. A
symbol is a device by which we, on any occasion, can represent an image or a
notion, and use in interactions with others.
We have the capacity for speech, song, and dance because of our genetic equipment, and we learn to speak, sing, and dance as instinctively as a bird builds a nest. In learning to do so we also incorporate a new dimension into our repertoire: the symbol and the codes for its use. The genetic code is internal in the human being; symbols are both external and internalized. Changes in the genetic code occur at the moment of conception, when a new generation begins its journey to succeed its parents. Linguistic codes are more flexible than genetic codes and can more readily change within a lifetime.
This paper will begin to tell a story – a social theory – of how man's use of symbols creates a many-splendored society and provides a set of categories based on language for the study of society.
The efficient use of communication by symbols separates the child from the infant, and man from beast. Of course, babies and animals make use of a variety of sounds that relate their state of mind. For example, babies and animals express some version of "yum-yum" when they satisfy their appetites. But they hardly converse about the taste of the food once they are satisfied. Their sound "yum-yum" cannot on any occasion be used at will to represent food; mostly it occurs in direct contact with food and satisfaction of hunger (Langer 1948, p 85). And, babies and animals may readily express the pleasure of living and the agony of dying. However, the ability on any occasion to talk of and have foreknowledge of birth and death is the privilege of those who have learned to use symbols more efficiently than infants and animals.
In understanding symbols we are helped by knowing about the larger situation in which they occur. Everyone knows this, but an illustration by G. K. Chesterton (1981, p. 76) from the class society of old England brings it out in a way that social scientists may appreciate:
Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, "Is anybody staying with you?", the lady doesn't answer, "Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlor maid, and so on," though the parlor maid may be in the room or the butler behind her chair. She says: "There is nobody staying with us," meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, "Who is staying in the house?", then the lady will remember the butler, the parlor maid and the rest.
The lady’s answers are so-called indexical expressions. They cannot be understood without complementary situational or cultural information. In a series of essays Erving Goffman (1967) showed that we spend much of our time adding to and remedying such expressions.
The young Jürgen Habermas (1984) defined one context he calls Lebenswelt, "life-world.” The Life World of daily activities is imbued with the traditions from many generations in rendering accepted interpretations of gestures and symbols. In the Life World their meanings are self-evident. Not so in the Big World of modern institutions. Modernization reduces the sway of the shared meanings of the Life World. Mankind's present disorientation in the universe of meanings is a price paid for the diversity occurring when a modern Big World colonizes the life worlds. In later writings Habermas has explored the opportunities for democratic discourse to overcome such difficulties of diverse meanings.
Our understanding of symbols rests not only on what is manifest – the symbol-act and its context – but also on something that is absent from view or hearing. There are hidden semantic and syntactical codes embedded in symbols that are essential to an understanding of them. These are systemic rather than concrete. They are la langue rather than la parole, to use Ferdinand de Saussure's classical distinction.
A system of symbols (la langue) is known only from the study of the actual use of its symbols (la parole). But the use of symbols (la parole) is efficient communication only if it conforms, however roughly, to the system of symbols (la langue). Langue and parole presuppose one another.
The rules of the system of symbols, la langue, are its codes. The rules may be hidden or "unconscious.” You may follow them without being aware of them.
In a few years anyone who wants, and can pay for it, can get a copy of parts of his genetic code recorded on a CD-rom or similar device. There is no doubt but that the current climate of opinion includes a growing awareness of the influence of our genetic code on our life cycle. But our forebears lived without being aware of their genetic codes. They knew only that children tended to resemble their parents.
It is the same with linguistic codes. Millions of people speak in perfectly understandable ways without any knowledge of the rules of grammar. It is interesting to note that even people who have no knowledge of grammatical rules may become dismayed (or amused) when someone breaks the rules in his speech.
Man’s conscious codification of his existence is only a part of the sociocultural codes that govern us. The commandments were there before the stone tablets. Some commandments were obeyed even before they had been formulated in words; it can then be said that the rule precedes its decree.
Language codes are not universal. There are some 5,000 known languages. Gestures, the language of the body, are more universal, but not entirely so. Japanese delivering a mournful message ("Your father has passed away") may have a smile on his face, a gesture seen by Europeans and Americans as entirely misplaced, since a smile to them is a gesture accompanying a joyful message.
A symbol, we said, is that device by which we on any one occasion can represent an image and/or a notion and use in conversation with others. This definition hints that there are two kinds of symbols: those related to images and those unrelated to images but found in other notions used in social interactions. I shall call them Meadian and Saussaurian to honor two great scholars of the study of symbols.
Symbols that represent images are the easiest to deal with. In the spirit of young Wittgenstein we can say that such symbols depict something in the same way as pictures do. A symbol may in this way depict reality or fantasy, something present or absent, something in the past or in the future. Its meaning is the image it conveys.
A major analysis of the use of symbols in human affairs by George Herbert Mead was recorded in a posthumous book Mind, Self and Society from 1934. His analysis of symbols and their meaning leads us to the first part of our definition: a symbol is a device that on any occasion represents an image. Mead, a philosopher, is seen as a father of a school of thought about society called “symbolic interactionism” (Blumer 1969).
Mead distinguishes between gestures and significant symbols. A gesture is a part of a behavior sequence that signals the total sequence, for example, a dog baring his teeth and assuming a certain posture is a gesture meaning "fight" to another dog.
A symbol can be a gesture that evokes the same meaning in the receiver as it does in the transmitter: "in this case we have a symbol which answers to a meaning in the experience of the first individual and which also calls out that meaning in the second individual.” The person who cries "fire!" to his neighbor shares images of what is going on within him. In fact, both the one who has seen the actual fire and the one who has only heard the shout of "fire!" react in similar ways; for example, by escaping or by starting rescue work. Mead tries to remain a behaviorist and prefers to talk about their common behavior rather than their common image. We need not put such restrictions on our terminology.
Symbols are abundant among men, rare among animals. Gestures abound among both humans and among animals. Everyday communication depends heavily on body language, i.e. gestures. A verbatim account of the words used in an ordinary conversation may be unclear, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible, to an outsider who cannot watch the body language of the participants. A transcript of a conversation or of an ad lib speech usually needs "editing" to be understood, although to the participants it was clear as a bell. The editing replaces gestures with symbols and incomplete (“indexical”) expressions with complete sentences.
Some symbols do not evoke fixed images. All symbols do not have to refer to something fixed outside them. This is a fact that G. H. Mead tended to overlook. The very relations between the symbols can also define their meaning. This way to define "the meaning of meaning" was launched in 1916 in a classical book by Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale. His analysis of symbols and their meaning leads us to the second part of our definition: a symbol is a device that on any occasion represents a notion.
Three types of symbols unrelated to images may serve as examples (there are many others):
Abstract symbols do not normally evoke images. If we say "Come here" or "Go away" to a baby who just has learned to walk and talk, he or she may not understand. The words “here” and “away” are too abstract. If we say "Go to Mommy" the meaning is clear. “Mommy” evokes a stable image, “here” and “away” do not.
Pronouns do not by themselves evoke images; the image evoked by "he" or "she" varies by the context. Words such as "that" or "which" do not refer to images but to other words. Some of the latter might, of course, evoke stable images.
Question openings − what? who? how? where? when? and why? − do not evoke stable images. Each of them prompts us to describe an aspect of a social event: the acts, the actors, the means, the scene, the time, the motivation.
In all these instances the difference between how symbols are used can define their meaning. It does, of course, make a difference if we say "Come here" or "Go away." Likewise, "Here in New York" is different from "Away in Dixie." The meaning of “here” and of “away” is given by the differences these words make in presentations. What? who? how? where? when? and why? give different responses about the same event. Hence their meanings are different.
Symbols that can replace one another in a number of presentations (some say “arguments”) have the same meaning; symbols that are irreplaceable in presentations have unique meanings. I shall call such meanings "Saussurian.” They are established by testing the interchangeability of symbols.
Ferdinand de Saussure inspired a school of thought called "structuralism.” Claude Lévy-Strauss became its leading social scientist. In his theory of society and culture, symbols are the active agents engaged in a great struggle of survival. In such a theory, man is incidental. Man becomes a mere accessory that helps certain symbols in their struggle for survival and hinders others. Such a theory may claim to know the future of culture and society by predicting which symbols will survive. This may sound like science fiction. But Lévi-Strauss' structuralism shows (or holds, some skeptics would say) that the webs of symbols he called “myths” actually do the thinking in man's mind; man does not think in terms of the myths, as is usually assumed (Lévy-Stauss 1967).
A group of leading French scholars in the late twentieth twentieth century trained in structuralism turned against it.
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) studied the consequences of the absence of a common language in differentiated societies. Nowadays no person needs to understand very much about areas in society other than his or her own. Our words and meanings are determined by the contexts of different life situations and cannot be adequately understood outside of them. Research, politics, economics, sports, art, literature, all have their own symbols and languages. No area in life commands a pan-language. In Lyotard’s words, a modern man must maintain an “incredulity towards metanarratives.” My experience as an editor-in-chief of a metropolitan newspaper confirmed his view. Our many-splendored society is like a newspaper. In its different pages or sections, a big daily paper mirrors and helps define and redefine society. The pages or sections have different editors, affectionately known as “space barons”, by a far from sovereign editor-in-chief. Each section of the paper has its own criteria and makes its own evaluations about what is worth publishing. No space baron possess criteria that are applicable to all the others.
Jacques Derrida and other “deconstructionalists” drew the ultimate conclusion of an exclusive use of Saussurian meanings and their iterability. If symbols get their meaning only from their place in presentations, meanings may shift from time to time in an arbitrary way. Language, literature, legislation, education, and everything else involving symbols, are then mere games: chaotic games of ever-shifting rules.
Michel Foucault also used this conclusion to deny that there were any objective truths. What people talk about as true statements do not tell us how things really are but about who is in charge and has the power to establish the meanings of our symbols.
Outside of France such views were called “post-structuralism.” It has elements that are empirically grounded. It cannot be rejected simply by denouncing it as a fitting ideology for nihilists and anarchists. The search for Saussurian meanings is at the bottom of much scholarship in contemporary social science and cultural and literary criticism.
A more viable critique of poststructuralist views focuses on the fact that all societies also have meanings in the form of shared and stable images. George Herbert Mead is needed to rescue us from a chaotic abyss of post-structuralism in which social scientists, journalists, and critics of culture lose all bearings.
Shall social scientists and humanists follow the lead of George Herbert Mead and the symbolic interactionists and see meaning as a device to evoke images? Or, shall they follow the lead of Ferdinand de Saussure and the structuralists and see meaning in the exchangeability of parts in presentations?
The obvious answer is that we shall use both. In language – and probably also in other systems of symbols such as the ballet and music – we find both meanings. That is why we define a symbol as that device by which we on any occasion can represent an image and/or a notion used in a presentation. This definition accepts and requires both Meadian and Saussurian meanings.
All symbols that have a Meadian meaning can also be used in presentations. Eventually they may acquire also a Saussurian meaning. It is interesting to note that in such instances the original Meadian meaning seems fresher and more vivid than the Saussurian. In good writing and speaking we avoid misplaced metaphors, that is, improper Saussurian use of Meadian meanings.
Here is an example from the training of journalists (by Bo Strömstedt, a legendary Swedish editor) taken from an article on public support to culture:
A slice of the pie for new subsidies to cultural activity is summarized under the heading State Support for Literature. Last spring, after making some remarkable rounds prior to the Parliament's decisions, it did not get an entirely favorable start. The main point is, of course, that the motion was in essence swept under the carpet.
(Or in Swedish: "Den kaka inom den nya svenska kulturpolitiken som kan sammanfattas under rubriken statligt litteraturstöd fick efter ganska märkliga turer en inte helt lyckad start i riksdagsbeslutet i våras. Det viktiga var naturligtvis att propositionen i allt väsentligt sopades under mattan." )
A slice of pie, summarized as a heading, makes some remarkable rounds, before it gets a failed start, and "in essence" is swept under the carpet. In this text just about every word has lost its original Meadian meaning and, thus diluted, it is used in Saussurian ways. Pie does not mean pie, a round does not mean round, a start does not mean a start, point does not mean point, sweep does not mean sweep, and carpet does not mean carpet. At best, we can retain an image – in this case a misleading image – that a few crumbs are left and then hidden. Such is the nature of dead writing and diluted speech. A good journalist does not rely solely on Saussurian meaning.
It is difficult to write a questionnaire for interviews with the general public. You must know the rules of questionnaire structuring. You must also have a vocabulary loaded with words that have untarnished Meadian meanings. A questionnaire of Saussurian meanings delivers too many haphazard results. A rule of thumb is: Never trust the results of a public opinion poll unless you have read its questions.
To understand what is going on, the observer, the reader, the historian, the anthropologist, the interviewer, in short, all the practitioners of social science must share the hidden code of their symbol-using subjects of study. This simple fact has led a score of authors in specialties such as symbolic interactionism, ethno-methodology, hermeneutics, semiotics, and conversation analysis to rewrite social science, rejecting everything unrelated to the notion that students of social life and those persons participating in social life must share a common code.
Now, there is much more to social science than understanding what the other fellow means. True, without that understanding we do not get very far. Therefore, social scientists should know languages – particularly the vocabularies and idiosyncrasies used by the subjects of their study. They must immerse themselves in the social contexts relevant to their study; social science is normally not an armchair pursuit.
This does not mean that we must abandon the use of statistics and other tools of science. Once meanings are established they can be treated by all ordinary scholarly and scientific means that ensure objective analysis. The language of the sources is translated into the more general terminology of social science. And that language lends itself to the usual arsenal of scientific tools: logic, mathematics, and statistics.
Communicative actions such as descriptions, evaluations and prescriptions can in an initial phase of research be established as understood. Then they can be used either by biographers and psychologists with a focus on the individual, or by historians and sociologists (or anthropologists) with a focus on collectivities. Different logical or mathematical operations then produce precise scholarly vocabularies.
As a first operation consider any procedure used to find a ‘central tendency.’ Central tendencies of descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions within one individual thus became defined as his ‘cognitions,’ ‘attitudes,’ and ‘expectations.’ Central tendencies of the same action types among an aggregate of individuals become their ‘social beliefs,’ ‘social valuations,’ and ‘social norms.’ Any other operation can be used to manipulate the primitives; the outcome is other derived terms. For example, if we select the operation of ‘dispersion’ of the action types within one individual we get a definition of his ‘rigidity’; if ‘dispersion’ is applied to actions in the aggregate of individuals we obtain a definition of their ‘consensus.’ We might also apply an operation finding ‘proportions’ to the primitives. An individual with a high proportion of prescriptions among his actions might be defined as ‘dominant.’ As the economic geographer divides the earth into production areas, so the sociologist can divide society into realms according to the proportion of actions of a certain type. The realm of society with a high proportion of prescriptions (laws, ordinances, executive orders, platforms, decisions, programs, commands, etc.) might then be defined as its ‘body politic.’ (Zetterberg 1965, pp 54-55)
Ours is a very worldly and demanding pursuit; we one must be at home with many tongues and places and also with an arsenal of intellectual and methodological skills.
Aristotle is the greatest all-round scholar of antiquity. He is more than a philosopher; he is an explorer of nature and society using scientific methods. He systematized and preserved his knowledge in books. He founded an Academy and imparted his knowledge to students. He conveyed his knowledge in his lessons and consultations with the Macedonian prince who was to become Alexander the Great.
The modern scholarly enterprise rests on the same four activities. First and foremost is the scientific method, the accepted rules for the development and formalization of knowledge. Second, there is publishing and librarianship, i.e. methods of the orderly distribution and storage of this knowledge in scholarly journals, books, and databases. Third, there is pedagogy, methods to mediate knowledge in a series of lessons, explorations, audiovisual aids, exercises, and tests. This includes the task of popularizing science for the general public. Fourth, there is practice, applying the established knowledge to concrete problems.
Aristotle had superbly tried all four endeavors of the scholarly enterprise. One secret of his success lies in the fact that all four methods have one aspect in common, a kategoriai. A basic categorical schema allows a scientist to ask the most profound questions, a librarian to provide the most efficient organization of research findings, a teacher to cover an entire field without the bias of omission, and a practitioner to be relevant and stop wandering all over the place in search of solutions. Note that contributions to categorical schemes are made by librarians and other data base operators, by teachers, and by consultants, not only by academic social theorists.
In this paper I will draw on my experience as social scientist, publisher/publicist, teacher, and consultant to present a formal categorical schema for contemporary social science grounded in the view of symbols presented in the previous section.
First, however, let us learn something from some attempts to write categorical schemas for the study of society that are not explicitly based on human usage of symbols.
In Athens at the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, one had discovered that human reason could create a world that was clearer than that found in everyday reality. The white color of the Athenians’ dwellings was speckled with gray nuances and spots. But the idea of whiteness contained only white. In reality, the good human being did have some shortcomings. But the idea of goodness contained only white. The world of ideas, the universe of reason, seemed to represent a higher and purer reality than that which was commonplace in ancient Greece.
Descartes, the great philosopher of reason after the Renaissance, went still further in his conception of reason. To him and his followers reason is something that joins all intellects. They held that all human beings, although varying in their customs and desires, are alike in one crucial respect: they are equipped with reason.
These philosophers may have admitted that reason may not be the strongest voice in human affairs, but they held that when reason is used men and women of all times and all civilization would arrive at the same conclusions.
This faith in universalism is found in all varieties of classicism. For example, the classicists believed that there is one universally valid taste based on reason. Thus the artists in the classical tradition disregard individual differences and create general types, universally valid forms. The scientists in the same tradition seek a small number of types, e.g. a periodic system of matter, and eternal laws of nature. The politicians in this tradition strive for a clean-cut social order with the universal application of law emanating from a central government believed to embody the best of reason. Seen in this same classical tradition, businessmen are engaged in pursuit of high numbers on the bottom line of their balance sheets. Regardless of their type of business, these balance sheets have the same layout and can be analyzed for good or weak points by the same methods.
Generalized conceptions of man like these are found in all classical categories. They often lead to static and sometimes inhuman conceptions of men and societies.
Darwin disproved the rationalist dogma of Descartes about the consistency and permanence of reason. Man has developed, unfolded and enriched his person, including his reasoning, and he is able to grow to further heights and levels. (He is also able to regress to incredible lows and make himself extinct.) This has led to new classifications in which we find categories in the form of stages rather than states of reality. We may call them evolutionary categories.
The framework of the categorical schema presented here is classic. Everything that a society contains – in the past, present, or future, in the Western world or the Eastern, in the southern hemisphere or the northern – everything will fit into the categories. However, the categories themselves contain a number of evolutionary typologies. An example would be the transformation of societies with undifferentiated spheres of activity into more complex societies that differentiate special spheres such as knowledge, wealth, order, aesthetics, holiness, virtue. Or, emergent divisions of labor that give different assignments to those who create, sustain, mediate, and receive knowledge, wealth, order, etc. Man's developmental stages, from childhood, to adulthood, to old age, and the growth of populations, technological development, the clashes of lifestyles and class struggles naturally also give rise to developmental categories.
The dominance of developmental typologies in serious societal theorizing has led to the recognition that the body of knowledge of the social sciences is not as universal as that of physics. The theses that social scientists hold to be valid are, in truth, limited to the place and time which they can overview and grasp.
The very learned German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) did
not allow for any abstractions in the social sciences that cannot be derived from
actions that we can see or understand. This so-called “methodological individualism”
has been widely accepted, and this exposition also adheres to it. His Exposition
of Categories, or Kategorielehre, (Weber
1922/1956, Chap. 1) is a list of terms and their definitions in which also the
most complex ones can be reduced to observable and understandable behavior. I
consider it the most profound effort to date to establish categories for social
science. A long array of his concepts – soziale Beziehung, Lebensordnungen,
Wertssphären, Klassen, Macht, Stände, Beruf, Bürokratie, Verband, Markt, wertrational, zweckrational – to
mention only a few, will reappear in our exposition.
It has proven difficult to improve on Weber’s categories. Social
science theorists have attempted to do so in two respects: they have tried to replace
Weber’s analysis with systems, and they have tried to replace the easy-to-grasp
designations of his ideal types with more abstract terminology. The first is the
most important issue and needs to be addressed.
The world, nature, life, technology, culture are, as always,
a complicated diversity, which the scholarly mind has tried to bring some order
into. But the ways that have been devised to bring order out of this chaos have
varied throughout history.
The different eras in the history of ideas can be distinguished
by bringing together those that were used to wrest order out of chaos during the
same periods of time. We have had a somewhat homogeneous period from the time of
Francs Bacon (1561-1626) to Albert Einstein (1879-1955). During this era, “modern
times,” the sharpest thinkers were of the opinion that man was capable of fully
understanding the world, and that the method to attain that understanding was analytical
thinking. Max Weber, who has inspired our categories, was a man of those times.
But he also bridged and ushered in emerging systems thinking. I will follow Russell
Ackhoff’s (1999) views on the difference between the analysis
and the systems approaches.
Analytical thinking passes through several steps.
Reductionism. We “go to the bottom,” pulverize and divide
complicated phenomena into their components. We can carry this step of the analysis
as far as it will go and reach components that do not seem useful to break down
further. These were the elements in chemistry, the cells in biology, the particles
in physics, the phonemes in linguistics, the genes in the study of heredity, natural
laws in certain judicial systems, “one man, one vote” in the tenets of democracy.
Determinism. We seek the underlying causes behind
the elements. Analytical thinking holds that everything happens for a reason,
and that nothing occurs by pure chance. The causal chain may be complicated, but
it can be unraveled and mapped. One must be absolutely definite when describing
reality and seek to uncover rules that do not allow for exceptions.
Causes that have been charted in the study of the elements are
held to be necessary and sufficient to explain everything. There is no need to turn
to circumstantial factors as causes. The purest illustration of cause and effect
is a laboratory situation, an innovation of modern times where all factors can be
controlled. Laboratory experiments let us study how one variable at a time can affect
the result.
Deduction. The understanding of complicated phenomena
can be attained by assembling what we have learned about their component parts.
The aim is to find a pattern in the causal chains between the elements in order
that we may construct a general explanation, a theory, about the components. A
theory captures the most important characteristics of the components and summarizes
all the instances of cause and effect that we have observed into the most general
and informative propositions, i.e. laws of nature. Such laws describe future observations
as well as those already made. The theory is usually constructed and reported as
a hierarchy of propositions.
During the modern era, the patterns of thought described here
were applied, more or less consciously, not only to science but also to forms of
government, legislation and constitutional issues, organizations and business, and
even to the fine arts. Their success was formidable.
A certain distrust of analytical thought has emerged in today’s
cultural climate. It is nourished by ideas from Gödel, Heisenberg and quantum physics,
ideas to be found in hermeneutics and ecology, among other sources. Eastern intellectuals,
who have seen Western analytical thought make inroads into their culture as well,
would like to see alternatives that are more congenial to Eastern traditions.
Analytical thinking aims to shape order out of chaos. The alternative
with the same aim is usually called systems approach, but other names are also in
use, for example, holism. This is a brief summary:
Holism. The whole has characteristics that cannot be found
in the parts. It acquires these characteristics through the interaction of its parts,
not by the influence that each part has on the whole. No discrete part can do
the job of the whole; the sail that has not been hoisted cannot transport us over
water, nor can the hull without the sail suffice for the task. The characteristics
of a sailboat are not the sum of the characteristics of the hull plus the characteristics
of the sail. They are created by the interaction of sail and hull, not by the action
of the sail and hull taken separately. As a system, a sailboat cannot be understood
– or at least cannot be defined in an understandable way – by an analysis of the
conventional method of deconstruction. Understanding begins with the whole and ends
with its component parts.
Teleology. Events are governed not only by cause and effect
but also by means and ends. Aristotle identified three causal connections in analytic
thinking: a material one (“there is a sail”), a formal one (“the sail is turned
toward the wind”), and the effective cause (“the wind transfers its force to the
sail”). He also included a cause that was contingent on purpose (“we sail because
we want to cross over the water”). The latter was banned from analytical thinking,
but returned in holistic thinking. Even in respect to machines, the triumph of analytic
thinking, it has been difficult to completely exclude teleological ideas (Cf. Rosenblueth & Wiener 1950).
Unique historical and geographic circumstances. Sailing
requires a specific environment: water of a certain depth and wind of a certain
force. Control of the environment, which is so obedient in laboratory situations,
is replaced in holistic thinking by a full appreciation of the unique situation
that makes some things possible and others not.
There are many other things to be said about contemporary holistic
thought, some of which reveal rather fuzzy thinking. The above account will be sufficient.
Max Weber was a scientist of the era of analytical thinking,
but accepted some parts of systems thought. He firmly held that there were unique
historical situations that make possible a certain development. He made intention
a part of the understanding of peoples’ actions, but he did not believe that all
wholes found in society were systems with common characteristics.
Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, who as scholars and translators had delved deeply into Weber’s work, assumed that the various wholes in society were systems. They identified a paradigmatic system that eventually became known as "AGIL" as constituent to all parts of society as well as to society as a whole.
The “A” stands for adaptation. It is the focus of any economic
organization. The “G” stands for goal attainment. This is the focus of the political
organization of societies. The “I” stands for integration of economic, political
and other relatively independent societal units into a whole that can maintain its
boundaries. The “L” stands for latency, the maintenance of the patterns of a society
and its parts. The latter they located in the expressive symbolism of society such
as religious ritual, art, recreation, and in the adherence to common values. According
to Parsons and Shils, all four, A, G, I, and L, enter
into any and all concrete social phenomena in various forms and proportions. The
total society has its AGIL and so does all its parts.
For example, a household has its A in the form of earning money and buying essentials
of housing, food, and clothing. Its G appears in the form of its rules for childrearing,
sleeping hours, and decisions about common property. The I in the household takes
the form of fences and admission restrictions for outsiders and strangers. Its L
takes the form of an honored name and family rituals.
Unlike Weber's terms, AGIL are more
than abstract names of actions or clusters of actions. AGIL
is a system, and “A”, “G”, “I”, and “L” are thus assumed to be interrelated in predictable
ways.
To say that AGIL is a system with all
the properties of a system is not an innocent proposition that can be accepted in
advance of proof. There is danger in borrowing the concept “system” from biological
science and engineering. The danger was once identified when social science borrowed
the term “force” from physics (Zetterberg 1965, pp 38-40):
Often we are drawn into truth-asserting by the use of analogous terms. In social science it has been common to draw analogies from physical science. An example is found in the definition of group ”cohesiveness.” Cohesiveness has been defined as the sum total or resultant of all forces that keep a member of a group (Festinger et al. 1950, p 164). Borrowing from the field of physics of the term ”force” might seem innocent enough were it not for the fact that usage of the term implies at least two propositions. In Newton´s days these propositions were grand discoveries, but since then they have become so self-evident that we take them for granted. One of these hypotheses is that whatever the origins of the forces − whether from the moon or from an apple − they have the same consequences. Now, the forces keeping a member in a group may vary greatly. He may stay in the group because of the prestige the group offers him, because of the friends he has there, because of his need to be punished by an authoritarian leader, and so on. To assume without testing, that all these forces have the same consequences would indeed be presumptuous (Back 1950). The second assumption involved in the use of the term ”force” in the definition of cohesiveness, is that whenever several sources of cohesiveness are present their effects are cumulative. This principle has proved to be immensely useful in physics: when several forces act simultaneously, the effect is the same as if they had acted in turn. This hypothesis is much less likely to be successfully maintained in social science than in physical science. The consequences of family cohesiveness deriving from both adequate communication and adequate sexual adjustment during one year of marriage are likely to be very different from the consequences of a family cohesiveness based on one year of adequate sexual adjustment and poor communication, followed by one year of adequate communication but poor sexual adjustment. Thus, we see how the person who borrows a term from another science runs the risk of borrowing more than a word: inadvertently he may borrow also some propositions of this science. Clearly, definitions in the form of analogous terms deserve an extra careful examination prior to their use in social theory.
It is not very likely that “A”, “G”, “I”, and “L” acting simultaneously
in an institution have the same effect as if they acted sequentially, i.e. one after
the other in some specific order.
The assumption that AGIL is an inclusive
system of society is problematic. A fair amount of the content of society seems
in fact unrelated to most everything. Parsons’ teacher, Pitirim
Sorokin (1941, vol 4 p 147), had actually called attention
to the amount of debris in society, the heaps of which he called “congeries”:
.... there is no difficulty in finding congeries in many a small combination of culture elements. A car and a bunch of flowers in or on it, a writing desk on which stands a shoe, a copy of Plato's Republic with a photograph of the latest movie star between its pages - these "complexes" are evidently congeries in which flowers, shoe, or photograph can easily be separated from car, writing desk, and Plato's book, without destroying either one of the elements, and each element can change without involving a change of the other. More difficult is the diagnosis of vaster and more complex conglomerations of cultural objects and elements. In regard, for instance, to the totality of the cultural elements found in Boston, or in the United States of America, or in Ancient Greece, the difficulty in diagnosis is to decide whether all these elements are a part of one system; if not, which are systems and which are congeries; which elements belong to which systems; and how close is the integration of the elements of the system, and is it the same for all the elements. ... In diagnosing such vast cultural conglomerations from this standpoint there is a strong possibility of error in taking for congeries what is a system, and vice versa.
Our starting point in this paper is to present categories for an analytic action theory, not an action system theory. How various actions relate to one another is an empirical question; they may form a system, or they may not form a system.
Niklas Luhmann (1995) assumes that society consists of tight, self-defining, self-evaluating and self-regulating systems that certainly can produce disturbances for one another, but that no system (e.g. the economy) can successfully intervene in the running of another (e.g. science). How much two systems interfere with one another is in practice a worldly problem for institutional élites in the central zone of society. For social scientists, the question whether an attempt of intervention by one into another system is a success or not ought to be a subject for research.
One may be skeptical to much social engineering, i.e. attempts by politicians to change life outside the strictly political area, but one cannot rule out the possibility of social engineering by fiat. In passing Lyndon Johnson’s so-called Great Society legislation, Congress requested evaluation research for each of its welfare reforms. The researchers found both successes and failures (See XXXX 19XX). A common but by no means universal observation was that administrators and recipients of the various welfare programs redefined the intent of the legislation to better suit their own needs. The existence of reported distortions and shortcomings in some programs made it easier for Ronald Reagan to ask Congress to cancel many of the welfare programs.
Max Weber usually used the same term to designate both a pure
ideal-type – for example, “the economy” – and a concrete societal phenomenon – for
example “the Prussian agricultural economy in the 1890s” with its special political
rules, kinship structures, aristocratic ethos, etc.
In my work on categories I have not been much bothered by the
dilemma that the same terms may stand for both the abstractly pure and the messily
concrete. Normally one can easily figure out the usage from the context. In communicating
social science to laymen, I have rather appreciated Weber’s praxis of using the
language of the sources, but at the same time giving the key terms a more formal
or ideal-typical meaning.
For the time being I think it is more practical and quite sufficient
to speak of the elements of polity, economy, science, ethics, religion, and art
embedded in a concrete societal phenomenon rather than speaking of A, G, I, and
L. The AGIL categories may belong to the scientific advances
that suffer from a premature closure (Anderson 2000).
Weber arranged most of his terms in a list. I have arranged my version in a table. Its key is that knowledge of the position of a phenomenon in the rows and columns of the table gives us considerable information about that phenomenon, always about its definition, and sometimes also about its empirical regularities.
In modern scientific articles one presents only results. In earlier
scholarly writings that took the form of more paradigmatic essays it was customary
to include also the trials and tribulations that preceded the emergence of the results.
I will here follow the old-fashioned path.
The categorical schema in this paper has not evolved in an armchair.
It is a product of picking and choosing in response to actual needs during a lifetime
in social science research, teaching, and practice. And it is still evolving. Treat
this text as a progress report.
There was a time when I attended high school in the 1940s when
I wanted to become a chemist. When friends and relatives wondered "What do
you want to do with chemistry?" I could answer by telling them about the periodic
system. This was a classification of all the elements in a table where columns and
rows pointed to common characteristics of the elements. In 1869 Dimitri I Mendelévy had created a
first version of chemistry's periodic system by classifying the elements, seven
to a column, according to their atomic weight.
My excellent chemistry teacher made it clear that although there
are about 100 elements, they can form over a million combinations. If you know where
in the table an element is located you have already got a lot of information about
its characteristics and its ability to unite with other elements. Blanks in the
table meant that the elements had not yet been discovered. This was a lot for a
budding chemist to work on, and perhaps a chance to discover something new!
When I became a social scientist I often missed the elegance
of chemistry's periodic system, especially when confronted with the question "What
constitutes a modern society?" I was forced to ponder this question on many
occasions.
Which subjects ought to be found in the texts that best describe
modern society? This was our chief concern when I and other social scientists together
with a librarian were to list and classify the most important books in the social
sciences that were to form part of the base of a new college library (White, 1964).
I classified the sociology books on this list as follows:
Precursors of Systematic Sociology
Works that Made History
The
Theoretical Sociology
Social Psychology
Groups and Encounters
Organizations
Markets
Social Stratification
Institutional Realms
Topics of Sociology
Human and Non-human Resources
Family Sociology
Economic sociology
Political Sociology
Sociology of Science and Education
Sociology of Art
Sociology of Religion
Urban and Rural Life, Communities
and Societies
Social Problems
Methods of Sociology
Under these headings I proposed a total of 210 book titles in
sociology as a minimum for a new library for a college or ambitious junior college.
To this a list was added a selection of journals.
What is important to learn from statistics describing a contemporary
society? Which are the basic tables? This was the main problem of the editors of
A Sociological Almanac for The United States
(Zetterberg & Gendell 1961). The book contains a section
that recounts how we solved the problem.