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.

Hans L Zetterberg

Categories for Social Science Based in Language

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

1. Symbols^{^[1]}

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.

An Extraordinary Device

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.

Available on Any Occasion

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.

Dependent on Contexts

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.

Governed by Internal Codes

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.

Meadian and Saussurian Symbols

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.

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

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.

Saussurian Use of Meadian 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.

A Demanding and Worldly Pursuit Requiring More Than Understanding

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.

2. Categorization Problems in The Study of Society

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.

Classical and Evolutionary Categories

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.

Max Weber

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.

On Analysis

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.

On Systems

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.

AGIL

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.

The Choice Between Abstract or Concrete Terminology

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.

3. A Schema Evolves

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 Inspiration From Early Chemistry

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.

The Categories in a Library of Social Science

Which subjects ought to be found in the texts that best describe modern society? This was our chief concern when I and other social scientists together with a librarian were to list and classify the most important books in the social sciences that were to form part of the base of a new college library (White, 1964). I classified the sociology books on this list as follows:

Precursors of Systematic Sociology

Works that Made History

The Present State of Sociology

Theoretical Sociology

Social Psychology

Groups and Encounters

Organizations

Markets

Social Stratification

Institutional Realms

Topics of Sociology

Human and Non-human Resources

Family Sociology

Economic sociology

Political Sociology

Sociology of Science and Education

Sociology of Art

Sociology of Religion

Urban and Rural Life, Communities and Societies

Social Problems

Methods of Sociology

Under these headings I proposed a total of 210 book titles in sociology as a minimum for a new library for a college or ambitious junior college. To this a list was added a selection of journals.

The Categories of Social Statistics

What is important to learn from statistics describing a contemporary society? Which are the basic tables? This was the main problem of the editors of A Sociological Almanac for The United States (Zetterberg & Gendell 1961). The book contains a section that recounts how we solved the problem.

One should not pretend that there is complete agreement among social scientists as to the most relevant information that enters into a routine description of a society. However, as a rule, social scientists and historians, in dealing with total societies, begin by discussing:

1. Human resources
2. Material resources

Then they may process along many paths, but in the end they have usually described six interrelated but different realms of society. The latter are:

3. Polity                    6. Religion
4. Economy              7. Art
5. Science                 8. Ethics

Each of these realms has a dominant concern, that might be called its “institutional value.” In polity it is order, in the economy it is prosperity, in science, knowledge, in religion, sacredness, in art, beauty, and in ethics, virtue. In each of the institutional realms descriptive sociology collects information about (a) the amount of institutional values; (b) the suppliers, surveyors, and receivers of the institutional values; (c) the stratification of the population according to their control over institutional values; and, when relevant, (d) information about social movements attempting to change the distribution of the institutional values. We shall proceed by these form items in some detail for the first three institutional realms, recording information according to the following schema:

(a)

(b)

(c )

Institutional
Realm

Institutional
Value

Supplier   Purveyor   Receiver
of Institutional Value

Mode of
Stratification

Polity

Order

Ruler

Administrator

Subject

Power

Economy

Prosperity

Producer

Dealer

Consumer

Riches

Science

Knowledge

Scholar

Teacher

Student

Competence

In turning to the remaining realms of religion, art, and ethics, we cannot give the corresponding information in the same quantitative detail and will, therefore, at this time make far briefer notes that do not lend themselves to this organization. Finally (9), having dissected the society into these parts, we have to give attention to how they are integrated into an ongoing whole.

The tables of this almanac are numbered according to the above scheme. Thus, any table with a prefix ‘6’ will deal with religion, any table with the prefix ‘4’ will deal with the economy, etc. The same holds for the subheadings of the text (Zetterberg & Gendell 1961, pp. 31-32).

Here we use a table rather than a list of categories as in the library project. We designated the rows of the schema with numbers and columns with letters, a practice that continues in the present text. The idea is that the reader who knows the column and row of a phenomenon automatically shall know a great deal more about it, since everything in a column or in a row are in some respects similar.

The First Use of Categories of Language as a Basis for The Categories of Society

A recurrent goal in my work in theoretical sociology has been to pursue the efforts of my teacher, Torgny T Segerstedt, to derive the categories that best describe society from language. Segerstedt (1947, 1948) showed how useful grammatical imperatives (prescriptions, social norms) are for the definitions of social groups. I wanted to add the usefulness of descriptive and evaluative terms as a vocabulary for the study of society. I developed the core of these categories at Columbia University in the 1950s. The approach worked fine for micro-sociology, and terms such as attitude, position, role, group could be precisely defined. It was less certain for macro-sociology. When I published the categories (Zetterberg 1962, pp. 66-73) I was still so uncertain about them that I buried them in footnotes (pp. 68-69 and 71). They are shown in Figure 3:1.

Figure 3:1. The First Language-Based Categories Formulated

Symbolic Actions	Institu- tional Realm	Institu- tional Value	Supplier	Purveyor	Receiver	Mode of Stratif-ication	Organ- izations	Markets
Symbolic Actions	Institu- tional Realm	Institu- tional Value	of Institutional Values			Mode of Stratif-ication	Organ- izations	Markets
Executive
Description	Science	Knowledge	Scholar	Teacher	Student	Competence
Evaluation	Economy	Prosperity	Producer	Dealer	Consumer	Riches
Prescription	Polity	Order	Ruler	Administrator	Subject	Power
Emotive
Description	Art	Beauty	Artist	Performers	Art public	Taste
Evaluation	Religion	Sacredness	Prophets	Clegymen	Laymen	Holiness
Prescription	Etics	Virtue	Fountains of morals	Moralists	?	Rectitude

Today, forty years later, I still place these categories at the core of the schema. In a revised version of this text (Zetterberg 1997/98, p. 115) a new category of “Preservers” was added to the Creators, Purveyors and Receivers, and a new category "Media" was added to Organizations and Markets.

The Classification of Lifestyles

Which lifestyles do we find in modern society? This became a question for research in 1977 when I was to address the Confederation of Swedish Employers about the interests and activities that competed for their employees’ involvement in their work. Not everyone has a business-driven lifestyle with economic incentives.

I used some terms from the 1962 classification. It immediately became apparent that the schema needed to be enlarged with new categories to accommodate the large variations of lifestyles in Swedish society of the 1970s. A questionnaire with 310 questions – many formulated ad hoc – with lifestyles and personality items and some questions on general values provided the raw data. (Zetterberg 1977, p. 62) Computer-assisted classifications were at that time still in an experimental stage. I tried to find new categories by means of factor analysis. This provided the basis in the schema for lifestyles and some material about social personality types.

Figure 3:2. Some Empirically Identified Lifestyles and Social Personalities Placed in a Schema of Categories

Cardinal Values	Lifestyles
Knowledge	Wisdom seekers
Power	Politically-minded
Riches	Business driven
Beauty	Aesthetes
Holiness	Religious
etc
Social Personality →		Loners	Sociables	Organizational men	etc

The factor analysis made in 1977, however, did not offer a comprehensive list. Later my experience in market and media research revealed other lifestyles which could be fitted into typologies of actions.

The empirical methods of market research at that time did not separate lifestyles from personalities or characters. Such shortcomings are often the case when sociological or psychological categories are produced from raw interview data, in spite of the fact that sophisticated statistical methods are used such as factor analysis, correspondence analysis, or cluster analysis. The results are not wrong, but may benefit from cleansing by theoretical coding, and sometimes also from additions suggested by theory but obscured in the raw data.

The wisdom seeker may be a creative loner, or a sociable person working in a network, or an organizational champion in a research institute. We had to use our theory to separate lifestyles, i.e. what we enjoy most to do, from social personalities, i.e. the part of our makeup that is shaped by our position in the social structure. The former we eventually learned to record as columns and the latter as rows (Figure 3:2).

The Classification of Cultural Values

How is one to bring order into research results on cultural values? Many research reports on values resemble the tales told by explorers from an era when there was still no agreement on latitude and longitude. The explorers returned home with wondrous, exotic accounts. But one did not really grasp how the discoveries of the different explorers could be related to one another. It was not until agreement was reached on the earth’s latitudes, longitudes, and heights above and below sea level that a cumulative picture of the planet’s continents and oceans emerged.

During the 1980s and 1990s when I worked on the integration of values into opinion and market research I encountered a similar situation. I tested a number of approaches to value research before finally deciding on the three dimensions that were well established in classical works in the social sciences (Zetterberg 1997, 1998). I used a confirmatory factor analysis to calibrate them, but classical social theory had defined them.

The first dimension is found in many texts, for example, Vilfredo Pareto's two first so-called residues. In its deeper meaning this dimension stretches from "being" to "becoming," from traditionalism, with its emphasis on stability (to "be loyal and traditional") to modernism, which welcomes change in the form of new combinations ("to be open and modern"). The second dimension is important in Max Weber's analysis of the distinctive character of the Western world. Weber's analysis reaches from placing a priority on faithfulness to one's values, even to "dramatizing" them, to a prioritization of pragmatism or instrumentality, where one is prepared to "compromise one's values" in order to reach overarching goals. The third dimension is central for Pitirim Sorokin. It runs from a culture of the senses to a culture of ideas, between the polarities materialism ("gadgets and carnality") and humanism ("the human spirit and dignity").

Categories of Ideological Relevance

What Unique Aspects of European History Should Shape a Constitution for a European Union?

The debate on the organization of the European Union has to a large extent centered on the principle of "subsidiarity." This principle requires that the EU's political bodies should be subsidiary to the citizen's own initiatives and decisions. Their task is to facilitate these, not to replace them. Any decision on political intervention should accordingly be taken at the lowest possible efficient level.

Within the EU bureaucracies and ministerial councils the concept of subsidiarity has been interpreted as "vertical subsidiarity" meaning that the EU shall not decide anything – outside the topics defined in the Union treaties – that a regional body or a member state can decide with greater sensitivity, knowledge, or efficiency. Since the topics covered by treaties have become very extensive the sway of subsidiarity is limited indeed. In addition, it has been generally forgotten that there exists also a possibility of "horizontal subsidiarity" meaning that the public sector should not attempt to do anything that the private sector or institutions outside the body politic can do as well. In its ultimate form horizontal subsidiarity means that the realms of science, economy, art, religion, and morality should not be subsidiary to the body politic. For example, The European Science Foundation, which is run by the scientific community, should take precedence over – nay replace – the research programs of the EU which are run by politicians and civil servants.

Modern Europeans, living in many-splendored societies, are offered the opportunity to create self-chosen biographies in their quest for wealth, order, truth, salvation, virtue, and beauty. The success of the EU depends on finding a form that suits this mainstream of European structuration. The appropriate form to govern such peoples seems closer to the model of ancient Athens than that of the Roman Empire. I entered this debate in the early 1990s with a much repeated lecture “The Structuration of Europe” (Zetterberg 1991, also repeated in part in Section 7 below) using the 1962 schema with an expanded classification of societal realms.

What Would a Non-socialist Sweden Be Like?

This was the question we asked ourselves when the first conservative prime minister in seventy years assumed office in 1992. An answer that explicitly applies the schema of categories is to be found in a paper in Swedish, “Individualism, Justice, Hierarchy, and Equality” (Zetterberg 1992). It contains schematic representations of conservative features in four countries where I have lived and done some research: the United States under Eisenhower and Kennedy, Great Britain under Heath, Sweden under Palme and Carlsson, and Spain under Gonzalez.

It quickly became apparent that contemporary conservatism is far from uniform. With the aid of the schema I could show that Swedish conservatism of the late twentieth century had a chance of playing in a key of its own. It had an opening to reinforce those spheres of life that lie outside the political arena – for example, science, art, and ethics – and to develop the creative and conservative functions of the state, in addition to the socialist function of the welfare state as a redistributor of wealth.

My interventions on the EU constitution and on conservative visions of Sweden involve ideological uses of social science categories and have been drops in buckets^{^[2]}. Nevertheless I maintain – in the spirit of Aristotle – that we should be receptive to the fact that ideological and consulting endeavors can also add and develop categories for social science. And any social science category, developed inside or outside academe, may inspire both the political left and the political right by reminding them of the many-splendored nature of modern society.

Input-Output Analyses

Which are really the various parts of a modern society, and how are they connected? We need to know some of the answers if we are, in the spirit of Wassily Leontieff (1997), to write comprehensive analyses of the mutual input and output between parts that are not merely economic transactions.

I have done just one extended input-output analysis, showing the interaction between schools and the total society (Zetterberg 2001). The report contains the categorization schema for social science in about the same form as the one presented in this text. I doubt that I could have written the report on the school system without having completed the categorization schema, and I further doubt that I could write similar texts about other parts of society without the schema.

A process that began with a simple search for a classification of books about society and a search for the most essential statistical tables about the United States ended in a wide-ranging set of categories for social science. As I see it, the lessons from my first teacher of sociology, Torgny T Segerstedt, – to use categories of language as a basis for the categories of society – turned out to open a fruitful improvement on Max Weber’s Kategorielehre.

4. A Categorical Schema for a Many-Splendored Society

In half a century I have had opportunities to study modern society as a sociology teacher and scholar, as a publisher of social science books, as an executive of a large foundation supporting social science, as a pollster with involvement in market, media, and value research, as a consultant to business, as an ideologue for a political party, and as a newspaper editor and columnist. Nowhere did I find a schema of societal categories as elegant as that to be found in the periodic system of chemistry of my school days. But I did find categories that seem to encompass the major parts of society, and I could arrange them in a table. Some parallels and repetitions in the rows and columns of these societal categories became obvious. Affinities between certain cells of the schema were revealed. And this may be good enough, at least for the time being.

The Main Table

The columns of our Main Table of Categories for Social Science contain forms (structures) and processes (functions) in society. The rows contain their contents.

Figure 4. The Main Table. A Provisional Set of Categories for Social Science

ACTIONS

STRUCTURES

FUNCTIONS

LIFE-STYLES

TECH-NIQUES

CULT-URE

ACT-ORS

Mun-
dane

Communicative

Life Spheres

Posi-tions,
Roles,
etc

Orga-
nization

Net-
work

Media

G

H

I

J

K

Cardinal
Values
Stratifica- tion
Reward
System
Modern
rationality
Freedom

CREAT-
ING
cardinal value

PRE-
SERVING
cardinal
value

COMMUN-ICATING
cardinal value

RECEIV-ING
cardinal value

COMMUNICATIVE

DIFFERENTIATED

Executive

Digital IT
(Computers
internet,
etc)

Analog IT
(Telephone,
telegraf
radio etc)

Printing

Math-
emati-
zation

Alfabet-
ization

Becoming
vs
Being

Flex-
ible
vs
Firm

Human-
ism
vs
Mater-
ialism

Gender

Life
Cycle

Ethni-
city

Descriptive

Schools
Universities
Academies

Learned
societies
Seminars

Lectures
Textbooks
Journals
Scholarly
works

SCIENCE
Knowledge
  Competence
    Scientific method
       Academ freedm

Researchers
Inventors

Professionals

Teachers
Consultants
TechnocratsC

Students

Knowledge Seekers

Evaluative

Firms
Coops
Trade
organizations.
Unions
Cartels

Markets for
goods, services,
raw material,
money,
patents, etc

Marketing
Advertising

ECONOMY
Riches

   Purchase
     power (class)
    Market economy
       Free trade

Entrepreneurs

Bankers
Insurers

Tradesmen
Marketers
Advertisers

Consumers
Customers

Business-
minded

Prescriptive

Legislatures
Bureaucracies
Lobby groups

Juntas,
Parties
Election campaigns

Agitation
Propaganda

POLITY
Order
  Power
     Democracy
        Civil rights

Politicians
Legislators
Civic leaders

Police
Prosecutors
Judges
Lawyers

Officials
Buerocrats
Civic workers

Subjects
Citizens

Socially
involved

Emotive

Descriptive

Theatres
Museums
Cultural
institutions

Coteries for
dance, theatre visual arts,,
literature

Exhibits
Stages
Fiction

ART
Beauty
Taste
Artistic freedom

Creative
Artists
Authors

Critics

Actors
Entertainers
Exhibitors

Spectators,
Readers,
Listeners

Aesthetes

Musical
instruments

Evaluative

Synagogues
Churches
Mosques
Temples

Congregations

Sects
Fellow
believers

Sacred texts

Rites
Cults

RELIGION
Sacredness
Piety
Religious freedom

Prophets

Priests
Monks, nuns

Preachers
Missionaries

Believers
Seekers

Believers

Rosaries

Prescriptive

Welfare
institutions

MORALITY
Virtue
Rectitude
Freed of Conscience

Creators of
charities, etc

Ethicists

Moralist

Aspirants
of ethical
living

Do-gooders

Members

Public

Audience

Social capital

Ideologies

↨
Group assets

↨
Grid
assets

↨
Audience
assets

⁭
Individ-
ualism

⁭
Ortho
doxy

⁭
Univer-
salism

⁭
Equal-
ity

Social personalities

Organizational
loyalists

Gregarious
networkers

Media-
freaks

Makers

Keepers

Brokers

Takers

PHYSICAL

Executive

Moving about

HEALTH+
Fitness
Freedom of movement

Excercise
Buffs

Medicine
Transport

Providing
Hunt Fish Farm. Garden

Outdoor providers

Ploughs
Hunt-&
slaughter
tools

Handiwork

Do-it-
your-self

Motors
Explosives
Nonhuman
energy
(petroleum
steam, el,
water wind,
animal

Eating

Households

Gourmets

Dressing

Attire-conscious

Housing

House
Proud

Sleeping

Emotive

Violence

Violent gangs
Armed guards

Naked power

Hooligans

Weapons

Sexuality

Sex appeal

Erotically
Driven

Contra-ceptives

PRIMORDIAL

Undifferentiated
communicative
and physical actions

Families
Kinships

Rhythmically
shouting &
dancing
crowds

Totem

TRIBAL
COMMUN-
ITY

Primary
relations

Family-centered

⁭ Ideology: Particularism ⁭

NATURE

Robust

Tolerant within limits

Fragile

Nature
lovers

In the following sections there are comments on many of the columns, rows and cells of our Main Table. Since we set out to deal with categories for social science based on language, and not categories based on physical actions, the lower part of the schema, the domain of physical actions, contains only hints but is not developed. Whenever a term appears in ‘single quotes,’ a definition of the term is found in the same sentence.

Our schema does not assume that polity (or economy or religion) is the dominant sphere in society. It does not presuppose that humanism is better than materialism (or vice versa). It says nothing about which of the three powers believed to shape today’s society, namely the market (economic networks), or the bureaucracies (the organizations in the body politic), or the mass media, is most important. These are historical and empirical questions.

Autonomy and Alienation

One of the starting points in the construction of this schema was the observation that certain parts of every society can attain a coherence that can be manifested as an identity or autonomy. The history of the West has to a large extent been stamped by a struggle for freedom from the interference of a central potentate, be it a king or pope or other power. Max Weber called the relative freedom thus attained Eigengesetzlichkeit – autonomy of life spheres. A useful criterion for a schema for society is whether the cells show a measure of factual or potential autonomy signified by a name in everyday language. Then not only will social scientists be able to recognize the categories of the schema, but also the general public.

The back side of Eigengesetzlichkeit is what the young Karl Marx called Entfremdung – alienation. If you spend most of your life in a bordered part of society with relative autonomy you become a stranger to other parts of society. The scientist absorbed in his or her research becomes a foreigner in the worlds of politics, business, and art. The dedicated businessman becomes a stranger to politics. The full-time democratic politician loses touch with his voters who are devoted to other pursuits and becomes dependent on mass media and pollsters to know how they think.

The seemingly drab categorical schema of society is an essential part in education. It says in effect: Look up from your circumscribed life! You live in a many-splendored society!

5. Categories of Action

The bases for the rows in our schema of categories for the study of society are actions, communicative and physical. They are the basic building blocks of communal life. Types of action are also the basic terms of social theory; we accept no concepts in social theory that cannot be related to actions, a position known as “methodological individualism,” and formulated to keep us at a healthy distance from metaphysics.

Actions

Column A

Executive and Emotive Actions

A major classification of human actions is based on a fundamental fact of biology: human beings, like other vertebrates, have a central (cerebrospinal) and a peripheral (autonomic) nervous system, the former controlling primarily the skeletal muscles, the latter controlling primarily the smooth muscles and the glands. In common parlance, the duality is reflected by the distinction between head and heart, or, between skill and emotion. In sociological theory the distinction has been approximated by Max Weber’s separation of rational and traditional actions from affective ones.

I shall express this dichotomy in terms of 'executive actions' (e.g., driving a car, giving a scientific lecture, getting dressed for a football game) as opposed to 'emotive actions' (e.g., hand wringing, reading romantic poetry, cheering a team's victory at a football game).

The distinction is, of course, an analytic one: almost every concrete behavior contains both executive and emotive components.

In any sociological analysis of rhetoric and art, ideology and religion, this separation of executive and emotive components seems crucial. To take en example from Stevenson (1944, pp. 73-74):when we say with Shakespeare that "All the world's a stage" (an emotive description), this is distinct from an executive description such as "There is a routine in real life, each man going through a prearranged course"; or, "There is a good deal of trivial make-believe in each man's conduct."

Communicative Actions: Descriptions, Evaluations, and Prescriptions

Some symbols, for example words, combine into 'descriptions,' for example: "He is an MD"; "This is a paper on social science." Others are 'evaluations,' for example: "He is a good doctor." "This is a difficult paper." Still others constitute 'prescriptions,' for example: "See your doctor!"; "Read this paper!" The division of actions into descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions cuts across the previous classification of executive and emotive actions.

As noted, to classify a communication, we have to know something about the context in which it occurs. Given such knowledge, it is usually possible to place any communicative act in one of these three categories. If we say "It is raining," we may actually communicate "It is now raining" (description); "The weather is bad" (evaluation); or "Shut the window!" (prescription).

Figure 5:1. A Typology of Actions (Column A in Main Table)

Differentiated actions		Executive	Emotive
		Illustrative examples:
Communicative actions	Descriptive	"He is an MD"	"Ouch, I’ve been hit"
	Evaluative	"He is a good doctor"	"Oh, it’s dangerous"
	Prescriptive	"See your doctor!"	"For God’s sake, help!"
Physical actions		Moving about, Providing, Eating, Sleeping, Dressing, etc	Caressing, Sexuality, Violence, etc
Undifferentiated actions		Primordial living, shouting and dancing

Column A, Rows 10-18

Physical Actions

To the symbolic actions (or communicative actions) we must, of course, add physical actions. Physical actions are required for the sustenance of man: eating and drinking, making clothes, building shelters. Sexual acts are required for the survival of mankind.

Most of these physical activities are imbued with symbols. Many edible substances are, for example, not socially defined as “food” and some foodstuffs are taboo, facts that add tragedy to starvation. Many kinds of clothing and shelters may be reserved for people of a certain age, sex, or status. The physical actions that are the core of sports are likewise imbued with symbols; all sports depend on rules, i.e. prescriptions. However, in all these instances we classify the actions as physical rather than symbolic since they are entirely dependent on the physical aspects.

Column D, Row 18

Sociologists like Émile Durkheim (1912) and historians like William H. McNeil (1955) have studied what happens when a number of people are drawn together in shouting, singing, and rhythmic dancing. A warm feeling of togetherness spreads throughout the crowd, personal conflicts are forgotten, and the physical properties of the setting become loaded with a special charge that all share. McNeill asserts that the participants are later able to cooperate more easily and are better able to withstand the hardships involved in survival. Durkheim says that they may even develop a kind of elementary shared religion.

The behavior of shouting, singing, and rhythmic dancing is not limited to undifferentiated societies. Aspects of it appear in community singing, among cheering crowds at sports events, at rock galas, in street demonstrations, among marching, singing troops, and in many other settings.

Column C, Row 17

Of special interest to social sciences are the physical actions that constitute violence directed at other human beings. The legally prescribed violence in law enforcement is an integral part of our social order. The organized violence in the form of warfare is a central fact in human history.

Organized violence is a far graver problem than spontaneous acts of violence. A small organization that does not shirk from using violence can subdue a whole society that has lived peacefully and has learned to avoid violence as far as possible. Violence today has at its disposal cheap technical, chemical, and biological weapons that can effectively paralyze or kill people and which make prevention difficult and expensive.

6. Categories of Modest Structuration

The processes of structuration and the resulting structures is a very large field in the study of societies. It includes everything from simple encounters between two or more human beings to complex historical processes that differentiate and shape major arenas of societal life, such as the institutions of knowledge, religion, art, ethics, statecraft, law, and economy. In sociological thinking differentiation theory is associated primarily with Émile Durkheim (1893). The current state of the art in this field is shown in Alexander and Colomy (1990). The modern usage of the term "structuration" in sociology dates from the work of Anthony Giddens, (1984).

Mundane Structuration^{^[3]}

Column B

As language is used, some parts of it turn into elementary social forms defining, among other things, positions and roles. The process may be called “mundane structuration.”

A man who has done much fishing one day shows a young boy in his community how to fish. He tells him and demonstrates the ins and outs of fishing, saying ”Do this!” and “Do that!” Another day he shows another boy how to fish, and a third and a forth. In the course of these events he becomes known in the community as “fishing teacher.” The language in the community has in this way structured a position. Others may take on the position of “fishing teacher” along with him, or after him. Any talk about learning how to fish or any other action showing others how to fish is henceforth both enabled and constrained by this structuration.

Positions

When they are speaking generally, sociologists use the term ‘position’ (some say “status”, others “identity”) to include every capacity in which an individual can be expected to act. Typically, the grammatical subject of a prescription is a word that defines ‘position.’

Students shall go to class.
Gentlemen are requested to wear jackets in the dining room.
Drivers should proceed carefully.
The First Mate is responsible for loading the cargo.

The names at the left are descriptions of persons, not their proper names but designations of structured categories of actors. The crucial aspect of these descriptions is that they are subjects in prescriptions. Each one defines a position. The different evaluations (e.g, prestige) given to positions assign them to different 'ranks.'

When we ask “Who is she (or he)?” the first routine sociological answer is to mention one or more positions. “She is a student, lives in a suburban house, married, has a child, and has a part-time job downtown.” The list of positions a person currently holds is what Merton (1957, pp 380-384) called “status-set.” They represent his or her current ‘commitments.’

As a second answer to the question “Who is she?” we may add that when she finished high school she did not immediately start college. She held a couple of good jobs and started a family. When she later in life wanted a college education she took a part-time job and entered a School of General Studies at a nearby university. The list of her past positions constitutes what Merton calls her “status-sequence,” that which in everyday parlance is called her ‘career.’ (See Figure 6:1.)

Attributes of positions

It is natural to classify positions according to the bases used for describing the occupant: a characteristic of the person himself (male, genius, invalid) or his characteristic relation to other occupants of positions (mother, customer, guest), or his relation to a super-unit (citizen, subscriber, member). Cross-cutting this classification is one that designates positions in accordance with the degree to which they are based on stable characteristics of the occupant; this classification is carried out in terms of 'ascription.’ For example, sex, and place of birth (discussed in Section 13) and positions deriving from kinship are basically unchangeable characteristics; others such as religion and citizenship require efforts to change. Some positions such as those of the age cycle do change, but we have little control of such changes.

Roles

To identify a 'social relation' (or “role”) we mention two positions and hyphenate them: parent-child is one social relation; student-teacher is another; customer-dealer a third, and so on almost ad infinitum. Technically speaking, two positions define a social relation if the prescriptions addressed to one contain references to the other: "Children should obey their parents"; "Parents should guide their children." Occupants of the two positions that constitute a social relation are referred to as 'associates' and the prescriptions involved are 'role prescriptions' (some say role expectations). It is often useful to indicate which social relations a person can enter into by virtue of occupying a given position − e.g., student-professor, student-student, student-dean − and his or her associates in any social relation. Information in these areas, ‘the role-set’ in the terminology of Merton (1957, p 369), constitutes a third routine answer to the question, “Who is she?”

Figure 6:1. A Student in a US College for Adults

Two organizations that have identical organizational charts, i.e. have identical positions and roles, may perform differently because their members have different status-sets and different commitments outside the organization and because they bring experiences from different past careers. For example, a college for older persons may be located on the same campus as a college for person of conventional college age, have the same shared teachers and the same department rules. Yet their performances differ because the students have different status-sets and status-sequences.

Attributes of social relations

Perhaps the simplest classification is in terms of the time span of such a relation. Some are 'lasting,' like a marriage; some are not, like a flirtation, some are 'sporadic,' like voting every fourth year for the president.

More complex classifications can also be made. For example, a social relation is termed 'contingent' to the extent that the position (and rank) in which a person enters the relation can be altered by the actions of his associates.

It is clear that some relations, for instance, those involving ascribed positions, have practically zero contingency; for example, in a man-woman or an adult-child relation nothing the man, or the adult, does can alter the fact that his associate is a woman, or a child. Likewise, a relation between two doctors has fairly low contingency; virtually nothing one doctor does can revoke the doctorate held by the other.

Many relations have a one-way contingency. To illustrate, in a professor-student relation the student's status is in the hands of the professor, since the latter has the authority to flunk him out of school, but it is virtually impossible for the student to force the professor to give up his chair. Still other relations are completely contingent; for example, the buyer-seller relation is contingent on the price, credit, delivery conditions, et cetera.

A further measure applied to any social relation indicates its degree of familiarity: any relation of an individual is 'familiar' to the extent that his associates can describe and evaluate his past and present actions. In simple words, very familiar social relations are those in which the participants have little privacy: they know almost everything about each other. There are also social relations that are one-sidedly familiar; an instance is the psychiatrist-patient role, in which one party knows a great deal about the life of the other but the reverse is not true. Many urban social relations have a very low degree of familiarity; our landlords, merchants, bosses generally know little about our lives.

A related measure is the extent to which a social relation is specialized or not. Here the criterion is not how much our associate knows about us, but how much we actually do together. The greater the proportion of all our action that enters a social relation, the less 'specialized' it is. A young brother and sister do most everything together and have little specialization in their relation; as they grow older they do more and more with other people and relatively less with each other. Their relation becomes more specialized but may, of course, remain familiar.

Finally, we measure social relations in terms of how impersonal they are. A relation is most 'impersonal' when the prescriptions governing one associate are the same no matter who occupies the position. Modern occupational roles are very impersonal; a salesgirl is supposed to treat all customers alike. Family relations are not at all impersonal: The wife treats her own husband differently from the way she treats other husbands.

Some Observations:

The notion of a status-set gives theoretical relevance to the demographics included in every opinion poll. The first rule of thumb in opinion research is that people with the same status-set (age, sex, occupation, marital status, et cetera) have similar opinions. If some of them nevertheless do have different opinions, we use a second rule of thumb, namely that they have gone through different status-sequences. Here, class, ethnicity, religious affiliation, among other factors, make an impact. Here we also find the most important influence that education has on opinion. If people with similar status-sets and status-sequences still have widely different opinions, we apply a third rule of thumb that says it is likely that they have different role-sets, that is, they are influenced by associates representing different views of the world.

While these steps go a long way to account for variations in public opinion, they do not go all the way. There remains a large residual of purely personal opinion formation. This residual of role theory actually represents the most dynamic aspect of human living (Cicourel 1973), namely an active person’s constant search for cues, defining and redefining situations, all in an effort to elaborate his or her lifestyle and realize his or her cardinal and cultural values.

Communication Structures

Columns C-E

In the 1920s the Chicago School of sociology had begun to differentiate between different ways in which social interaction could be organized: the group, the audience, the public, the crowd (Park & Burgess 1924). These forms of interaction can be distinguished in part by the reciprocity of contacts and in part by the existence of a shared source of communication (leadership). Using these two dimensions we can define some communication structures. Our definitions observe not only the participants (like the Chicago sociologists) but also the attributes of the structures in which they are participating. Figure 6:2 shows these attributes graphically.

An organization has a common leadership with designated positions and other defined positions that are filled by coworkers (or staff) and members of different categories. Contact between the different positions is maintained through established channels. Typical examples are a government agency with department heads and their staffs, a business concern with a managing director, middle management, and other personnel, an association with a chairperson, functionaries, and rank-and files. The actors in organizations may all be called ‘members.’

A medium is a communications structure with a common source (pulpit, stage, editorial board) whose communication is usually one-way. The recipients of its communications can have reciprocal contacts with only a few other recipients or none at all. TV viewers, newspaper readers, theater audiences are typical examples. The actors served by media are ‘audience.’ The standard measures of a medium are ‘reach,' that is, how many persons are in its audience, and ‘frequency,' that is how often the persons are in contact with the medium.

In a network (some anthropologists say ‘grid’) people maintain contact with one another as in an informal discussion forum, but the network lacks a common and defined leadership position. During an election campaign many voters may build networks; residents in a building complex may join together to clean up their neighborhood. In the literature on democracy the word “marketplace” has become a common metaphor for the phenomenon. A free market consists of networks; they share no common leadership that decides what is to take place in the market. The actors in a network are ‘publics.’ The standard measure of a network is ‘size,' that is the number of persons involved and its ‘density,’ that is the ratio between actual contacts and potential contacts that exists between the persons.

If individuals are atomized without social contact with one another or with a leadership, we no longer speak of a genuine communications structure, but rather of a ‘mass,’ such as travelers in underground trains who do not speak with each. But a mass may give those involved common experiences, such as the discomfort of crowding, or generate common reactions, such as bursts of laughter or panic attacks.

Figure 6:2. Communication Structures (With Illustrations Given in the Main Table)

	C	D	E
Is there a common source of communication?	Yes	No	Yes	No
Are there mutual channels of contact?	Yes	Yes	No	No
Communication structures	Organization	Network	Medium	Masses
Communication structures
7. Participants	'Group members'	'Public'	'Audience'	'Crowd'
Illustrations from 1. SCIENCE	Schools Universities Academies	Learned societies Seminars	Lectures Textbooks, Journals Scholarly works
2. ECONOMY	Firms Coops, Trade organizations. Unions, Cartels	Markets for goods, services, raw material, money, patents, etc	Marketing Advertising
3. POLITY	Legislatures Bureaucracies Lobby groups	Juntas, Parties Election campaigns Demonstrations	Agitation Propaganda
4. ART	Theatres Museums Cultural institutions	Coteries for dance, theatre visual arts, literature	Exhibits Novels Stages
5. RELIGION	Synagogues Churches Mosques Temples Congregations	Sects Fellow believers	Sacred texts Rites Cults

Hardly anyone lives with exactly the same communications structures as someone else. We are therefore 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 resulting knowledge, opinions, and values that we have are, in fact, our own. 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 one’s own.

The Interplay of Organizations, Networks, and Media

Organizations, networks, and media impinge on the individual in different ways. For example, organizations define positions and identities in more clear-cut ways than networks. In an organization your 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 much dependent on combinations of their organizations, networks, and media. Only some of these combinations have so far been topics of research.

Crossing Organizations and Networks

The longstanding difference between the British chartered corporation (organization) and the market economy of the Manchester School (networks), inspired anthropologist Mary Douglas to formulate her so-called cultural theory. She shows that the structural differences between organization and network result in different cultures. Her cross-classification of group and grid has gone through several modifications. Figure 6:3 from Fardon (1999, p 225) shows some of the labels and synonyms used by Douglas between 1978 and 1996.

Figure 6:3. The Group-grid and Culture according to Mary Douglas

	───────────────────── Group ─────── ► ┼
│ │ │ │ │ G r i d │ │ ▼ ┼	ISOLATE = Atomized subordination Insulated Backwater isolation	HIERARCHIST = Strong group Bureaucracy Central community Ascribed hierarchy Conservative hierarchy Collectivism with structure
│ │ │ │ │ G r i d │ │ ▼ ┼	INDIVIDUALISTS = Competitive individualism Active individualism Market	ENCLAVIST = Dissident enclave Egalitarian enclave Sect Factionalism Egalitarian collectivism

Many consequences arise from this typology, a fact that has made it very useful in social science. However, some of the consequences may be more related to the typology of makers, keepers, brokers, and takers than to the group-grid schema (Columns L-O, Row 9).

Informal networks almost always arise in organizations. You get only a limited understanding of how an organization works by studying its formal plan of positions, departments, division of responsibility and accountability. Knowledge of its informal organization, its internal networks, is necessary for a full understanding of how things operate. A new, externally recruited executive needs time to get a good grasp of his new organization.

Crossing Media and Networks

Public opinions are linguistic expressions of two kinds: views that you must express to belong to a network, and views that you may express without becoming disliked by, isolated in, or exiled from your network.

People who are well integrated into their networks, be it colleagues in the informal conversations at lunchtime at their workplace, 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 to perhaps 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 the media.

Those who are poorly integrated into their network, and therefore lack knowledge of what are 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, i.e., which climate of opinion prevails. For them, the media alone define the nature of current conventional wisdom and teach them public opinion. From this perspective, the media teach the public not so much what to believe and think, but rather which opinions are acceptable in public intercourse. Thus media have their greatest impact where networks are weak.

When the public reach for their newspapers or other mass media, 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). In the struggle for survival among opinions, the media thus plays a decisive role.

Social Capital

Column C-E, Row 8

The bonds that people form are a social resource, a by-product of membership in families, organizations, and networks and of consumption of mass media.

An example: 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 social capital acquired at school can be important for the success or failure of undertakings later in life. The knowledge acquired in prestigious schools does not usually differ from that acquired in ordinary schools. However, prestigious schools can equip students with a network of friends who can provide openings in adult life that are not as available to students from other schools. Bourdieu has amply documented this “old-school-tie” effect in France (1989), and Coleman has described the phenomenon in the United States (1990, Chap. 12). Coleman also made the observation 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.

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

7. Life Spheres, Cardinal Values, and Stratification

Here are some observations hinting at a differentiation of life spheres:

Art, religion, and ethics differ from science, economy, and statecraft in their greater abundance of expressive actions. I believe the following hypotheses are valid but I cannot cite any formal research in their support:

Executive descriptions are particularly common in scientific discourse: definitions, laws, accounts of experimental apparatus.

Executive evaluations are particularly common in economic discourse: prices, wages, fees.

Executive prescriptions are particularly common in governmental discourse: laws, orders, decisions.

Emotive descriptions abound in artistic discourse: paintings, sculpture, fiction, poetry, dance and music. The emotive component is exceptionally pure in music and ballet.

Emotive evaluations are particularly common in religious discourse: the ultimate evaluation of lives cast upon this world and destined to die.

Emotive prescriptions abound in ethical discourse: exhortations about charity, uprightness, duty.

Grand Structuration

Column F

‘Grand structuration’ is the procedure whereby our differentiation of communicative actions turns into a structuration of life spheres in society.

Max Weber spoke of seven Lebensordnungen (life-orders ) and their corresponding Wertsphären (value spheres). They are the economic, political, intellectual (scientific), religious, familial, and erotic life-orders and spheres of values. Each has an internal, lawful autonomy, Eigengesetzlichkeit der Wertsphären. The political sphere is larger than what we normally call “politics,” which is why we refer to it as ‘polity’ or ‘body politic.’ It includes the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches.

You may argue about the number of life spheres and their delineation (Scaff 1989, pp. 94-96). In discussing Grand Structuration we must leave out the two micro-sociological spheres, the familial and erotic value spheres, from Weber's list. We also need to add an ethical realm to obtain the six value spheres that correspond to the action types in our scheme. This morality sphere may be underdeveloped in the Western world, but it is nevertheless a sphere.

Figure 7:1. Language Structuration and Grand Structuration

	A	F
	Common action type	Life Sphere
1	Symbol Excecutive Description	SCIENCE
2	Evaluation	ECONOMY
3	Prescription	POLITY
4	Symbol Emotive Description	ART
5	Evaluation	RELIGION
6	Prescription	MORALITY
	Physical actions

The History of Differentiation in Western Europe^{^[4]}

Grand structuration is an historical process. The European experience is summarized in Figure 7:2. The right side of this figure lists the coming and goings of empires. The tree to the left depicts the differentiation of society into distinct life spheres in Western Europe. It grows out of the period when the body politic of the Roman Empire reigned supreme and embraced all life areas.

Figure 7:2. The Grand Structuration of Europe

In medieval times, religion sought to liberate itself from all interference from worldly powers. Pope Gregory VII (1021-1085) established the authority and leadership of Rome as a reality in the West of the High Middle Ages. His manifest reads: "The Pope is the only human whose feet princes kiss." His opponent, Emperor Henry IV, who wanted his own government to appoint bishops, was once obliged to walk barefoot to Gregory in Canossa to get his excommunication annulled. This is the most well-known episode in the dramatic process of separating the state and church from one another.

The medieval church wanted, if possible, to control all other institutions. It saw economy, science, art, and ethics as subordinate to the church, and preferably government as well. In our day, we would call such religious hegemony over the other institutions of society "fundamentalism," and associate it with some variants of Islam. But in the Middle Ages it was the "Divine State." Medieval life was a creed: Credo in unum Deum Patrem omnipotentem. True, one worked in farming and animal husbandry, in handicrafts and trade, in tax and customs administration, in the duties and contests of a knight. But it was as a pilgrim in this world, seeking divine goals, that one engaged in these mundane pursuits. The liturgical year from Advent through Christmas, Lent, Pentecost and the long stretch – coinciding with the height of the agricultural season – to Doomsday and a new Advent was the rhythm of the medieval epoch. Architecture and sculpture were "Bibles in stone." Literature was pious; music was Gloria and Kyrie eleison; ethics and statutes were embroidery on the theme of the Ten Commandments; philosophy was theology; paintings showed Mary with the Infant Jesus and other scenes from the world of the Bible and the church. Wars were holy wars to the glory of God. The great cathedral enclosed everyone: its roof was high, accommodating not only priests and celestial beings but also inviting, and reflecting in its nave and transept, the world of the peasantry, bourgeoisie, nobility, and monarchy.

The medieval strife between church and state ended differently in Byzantine and Rome. In Eastern Europe the state became the victor, and the worldly ruler became also the head of the church. Thus, in most of Eastern Europe, one single sword prevailed. This "caesaropapism" i.e. the exercise of supreme authority over ecclesiastical matters by a secular ruler, meant that Eastern Europe became structured differently from Western Europe, a difference present to our day.

In Western Europe the struggle between church and state ended in a draw. The West-European idea expressed as "two swords," one worldly and one spiritual, prevailed. This abandonment of a single authority over human life is a most significant step in the structuration of Western Europe. Eventually we would come to see more independent swords ruling there.

In Florence a radical humanism emerged. Giovanni Pica della Mirandola (1463-1494) argued that human beings should be subject to no restraints: they are sufficient unto themselves, they are their own masters, freed from the "scale of nature." He signaled a process of liberation whose end we have not yet seen. Soon Machiavelli (1469-1527) taught that nobody could have built Sparta or Athens or the republican Rome and at the same time be morally good, least of all in a Christian sense. He showed how one could make political calculations without allowing moral considerations to intervene. Statecraft could then be seen as something separate from ethics and religion, an idea full of dynamite that it would take centuries for Europe to absorb.

In some medieval cities, such as Venice, Genoa, Siena, and Florence, representatives of government, religion, and the economy balanced one another and none achieved total hegemony. The visitor to Piazza San Marco can see how the church, the palace of the doge (chief magistrate), and the various trading houses are equally imposing and keep each other in balance. Two social innovations assisted the economy in becoming a separate life area: the limited liability company and double-entry bookkeeping. The shareholder enterprise separated business capital from family capital. Many families could now easily join in an economic venture without first intermarrying. The economy could grow independently of kinship. An entrepreneur, for example a ship captain, without sufficient fortune of his own could be financed and receive a share of the profit from a big trading expedition. The new art of bookkeeping in Northern Italy provided commerce and industry, with a system of rewards separate from those of the state and the church. Neither church nor state any longer determined who in the business community should receive honors. Honorary distinctions were, simply, linked to satisfactory annual accounts. Thus the economy began to gain autonomy from state and church.

It took several hundred years before the idea of an independent and decisive role for economic forces in society was accepted. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx shocked the world, not by his call for a proletarian revolution, but by his "historical materialism," i. e. the idea that the economy rather than the church or the state is the author of history.

The emancipation of science from religion was also a protracted process. After the death of Copernicus (1473-1543), his idea that the sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the universe was banned by the church. The great physicist and mathematician Galileo (1564-1642) was prevailed upon by the church to deny the testimony of his instruments. One significant step toward scientific autonomy was taken in London when the secretary of the Royal Society, formally founded in 1660, started to keep notes of correspondents and dates when discoveries and theories were submitted to the Society and published. Newton's Principia, for example, was registered on 5 July 1686. Anteriority of discovery became the scientists' criterion for honoring their own: those who first published something new were acclaimed. Those wishing to use another person's discovery for their own reasoning had to acknowledge the originator in a quotation or footnote. Thus, science obtained its own system of rewards distinct from those of the state, the church, and the economy.

Rembrandt (1606-1669) belonged to an early generation of painters who were neither church nor court painters. He could choose his subjects freely, without reference to religion or government. Art became more independent. Rembrant's famous breakthrough painting, executed at the age of 25, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp," proves not only the artist's freedom but also the new freedom of science. The church had long opposed public dissections, which were considered intrusions into the sanctity of death and sometimes the serenity of the grave. With obvious admiration Rembrandt painted his friend Doctor Tulp performing a dissection. The painting, showing the bright red of oxygenated blood, is very realistic, as realistic as a professor of anatomy could want.

Much later art freed itself from science as well. Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-1793), one of Goethe's friends and a professor in the theory of fine arts, broke with the conventional principle that a work of art is a depiction of reality. "True beauty consists in the fact of an object meaning only itself, designating only itself, containing only itself, being a whole, realized in itself.” In other words, beauty was to be separated from any external description and explanation. Art became demarcated and independent of any other worldly and holy pursuits and its cardinal value, beauty, was redefined from classical symmetry and realism to include any emotively engaging subjective representations.

The Problem of the Ethical Realm

The slow development of an independent ethics represents an apparent weakness in the modern European social order. One cannot claim that ethics in Europe is as well developed as art, science, religion, business and governance. In large measure ethics in Europe still exists within the confines of religion.

Europe is now trying to make up for this deficit of strong independent ethical institutions. Improvements such as ethical committees at hospitals and research institutions, ethical watchdogs at financial markets, ethical ombudsmen at corporations and the media, ethical codes for the professions - all are under way. But they are mini-ethics of other life areas, not a realm in its own right for the creation of virtue. In the growing concerns for welfare, environment, and peace we may, however, sense the emergence of an independent realm of ethics.

Cardinal Values

Column G

Each sphere of life has its cardinal value. In science it is knowledge, in politics, order, in the economy, riches, in art, beauty, in religion, holiness, in morality, virtue.

Figure 7:3. Cardinal Values in Different Life Spheres (details in the Main Table)

	F	G
	Life Spheres	Cardinal Values
1	SCIENCE	Knowledge
2	ECONOMY	Riches
3	POLITY	Order
4	ART	Beauty
5	RELIGION	Sacredness
6	MORALITY	Virtue
10	ATHLETICS etc	Health

Students of society long believed that riches consisted of things (or cattle, servants, or gold), but nowadays one accepts that wealth is the evaluation that society puts on goods and services. The idea that knowledge, beauty, and the sacred are yields of society was also hard to absorb. Émile Durkheim’s work Les formes élémentaire de la vie religieuse from 1912 paved the way for a new view, which firmly grounded both knowledge and sacredness in the structuration of society. Today we accept also the varieties of art, not only as individual showpieces, but as social products (Becker 1982) that are influenced by the structuration of the total society (Loewenthal 1963).

There seems to be a special quality to the cardinal values. It is generally accepted that wealth is preferable to poverty, that order is preferable to chaos, that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, that a life with transcendent or sacred meanings is preferable to a life devoid of meaning, that virtue is preferable to iniquity, that beauty is preferable to ugliness. In other words, to have more of a cardinal value is preferable to having less. So mankind copes rentlessly with all the cardinal values, not only with the pursuit of economic profit.

We can learn about the cardinal values by studying economic, political, and juridical history, the history of ideas and learning, the history of religion, of customs, and of art. Much of our knowledge of the cardinal values is embodied in the humanities, not in social science.

8. Stratifications and Reward Systems

Column H and I

The prevailing views of stratification in social science are Marxian and Weberian. Class is defined as a person’s or organization’s sway in the markets. The higher classes have greater purchasing ability, not only for their own consumption but for investments in production. In a straightforward Marxian sense they may own the means of production, a fact with many ramifications and with much power.

Weber separated class from power and status. Different individuals and groups – classes, parties, and vested interests – have differing visions of what the social order should look like. Power may be defined as the likelihood that the particular version of order that a person, organization, or network has will prevail. Status signifies the esteem in which persons and positions and lifestyles are held independently of their class or power.

Seven ladders

A fuller multi-dimensional view of stratification in a society sees separate stratifications in the different life spheres and stratifies according to their possession of their cardinal value. Stratification of a total society can be divided into competency, purchasing resources (class), power, taste, piety, moral rectitude, and physical vigor (Figure 8:1).

Figure 8:1. Stratification in Different Life Spheres (Details in the Main Table)

	F	G	H
	Life Spheres	Cardinal Values	Stratification
1	SCIENCE	Knowledge	Competence
2	ECONOMY	Riches	Class (Purchase ability)
3	POLITY	Order	Power
4	ART	Beauty	Taste
5	RELIGION	Sacredness	Piety
6	MORALITY	Virtue	Rectitude
10	ATHLETICS etc	Health	Fitness

In feudal society, the main dimension of stratification was power; in industrial society class emerged as a dominant aspect of stratification. With time, competence in different areas of knowledge has made considerable impact, but usually not as great an impact as political power and economic class. Taste, piety, moral rectitude, and physical vigor also influence a person’s social ranking, but they have nowhere near the same effect in Western societies as have class, political power, and competence.

Those who possess or control the largest shares of a cardinal value are the ‘élite’ of its life sphere. Pareto started a hundred years ago to use this term in a purely descriptive way, and in no way to imply that hr was referring to people of superior personal makeup, as is usually the case when the word élite appears in ordinary conversations.

The seven ladders of stratification in Table 7:3 cannot easily be reduced to a single one. When the dinner guests from various élites include a professor at a top university, a business tycoon, a parliamentarian, a prima ballerina, a bishop, a Red Cross official, and a winner of an Olympic medal, the hostess has an impossible job to place them in rank order at her dining table. To have a good party in the many-splendored society she better put those people whom she thinks will enjoy each other the most next to one another. She cannot construe a common hierarchy, but she can create exciting interaction in the central zone of her society.

The Central Zone

Every society has a ‘central zone’ (Shils 1982 Chap. 4). This zone is a common term for the institutions and networks in which the political order is welded, to which the wealth of business gravitates, the intellectual centers where research yields new knowledge, the islands of society where art and culture flourish. The central zone is where you find the developers and bearers of the greatest power, wealth, knowledge, culture, and spiritual authority, and where they can meet. In other words, the central zone is where the top strata, the élites, meet and interact. The rest of society is more or less peripheral.

The central zone has nothing to do with geometry, and does not lie in the center of a nation. Nor is it necessarily related to geography. In the United States the business and financial communities are mostly located in New York and Chicago, but the political scene is in Washington. In England, both politics and commerce are centered in the same city, London, while the seat of learning has traditionally been located in Oxford and Cambridge, and Canterbury has been the center for religion. The advances of information technology may, in time, lessen the geographic concentration of central zones.

The values of the central zone were previously limited to neighboring regions. Greater mobility and developments in audiovisual as well as print media have spread these values much farther. The penetration of the central zone has been aided by obligatory education and by the enlargement of the market and its effective commercial messages for mass-produced goods and services, including popular culture.

The historical evidence from Europe's biggest struggle for men's souls, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-reformation was summarized in the saying "cuius regio, eius religion," whoever holds power in the state decides which religion shall prevail. The central zone, the court of the sovereign at that time, set the tone for the sermons preached in the churches of sixteenth century Europe. Contemporary opinion researchers have shown that the opinions and values that normally prevail in a nation are those that have come to prevail in its central zone.

The central zone in a country may be extended by an international layer. The Vatican thus is (or has been) a part of the central zone of Roman Catholic countries. The Washington-New York axis is an obvious part of the central zone in most parts of the world in a period when the United States is the only superpower.

A central zone that sets the tone is a useful image in the study of power. It includes both an old-fashioned truth that authority is located, not primarily in persons, but in identifiable central social structures. And by focusing on the tone emanating from these central structures we can study the insidious – Foucault said “secret” – aspect of power. The power over the minds of people is set by symbols from a central zone that seeps into their lives.

9. Modern Rationalities and Freedoms

Columns J and K

Max Weber's main key to history is rationalization. Rationalization is a double star towards which development is heading: on the one hand, the multiplicity of human thought is arranged into systems, and on the other the great repertoire of action in human life is arranged in uniform institutions. The first star guides a rationalization that secularizes religions, demystifies nature, breaks the enchantment of art, lays bare magic in the pursuit of knowledge, and removes the sense of drama from power. The second star guides a rationalization that elucidates everyday life, organizes working life, ritualizes spiritual life, calculates the steps in business life, and bureaucratizes all parts of government.

These processes unfold unevenly and jerkily. They were first formulated, fairly naively, by thinkers during the Enlightenment, and they were developed further by social philosophers who wrote in Charles Darwin's spirit of optimism about progress. But it was first through Max Weber that these lines of thought became historically established and many-sided: this happened when he sought to report on the special nature of our civilization and describe the severe conflicts in our everyday life and our institutions that have been caused by Western rationalism.

The development of rationalism in its twin forms ─ systematization of ideas and organization of actions ─ results in a kind of triumph of reason, and in our culture a triumph of technocracy. Weber was not gladdened by this fate: as he saw it, development was moving towards a petrifaction, "an icy polar night.” Already in the first decade of the twentieth century, he was able in his study of Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism to outline the typical human being of the twentieth century: "an expert without a heart, a hedonist without moral stature.”

Most of his life Weber seems to perceive rationalism as a unitary phenomenon, as indeed was the typical view of the Enlightenment. (The same, incidentally, holds for the great formalizer of rational choice theory, von Neumann & Morgenstern (1944). In later writings Weber opens the door ajar to the idea of different rationalisms (Schluchter 1985). We will take the latter step in full and assume that different life spheres have different forms of rationality. In our schema we do not presume that the same kind of rationality is found in all spheres of life. It is open to the possibility – I would say strong likelihood – that the rationalities of science, economy, the polity, art, religion, and morality differ from one another and that dissonances exist between them. The issue of their communality is an empirical one and cannot be settled by fiat.

To repeat: The cardinal values are embedded in the major life spheres, i.e., in science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality. Science seeks and produces objective knowledge. The economy seeks and produces riches, the polity seeks and produces order. Art seeks and produces what in the old days were called beauty, and what we today recognize as any emotionally engaging subjective description. Religion seeks and produces sacred meanings. Morality seeks and produces virtue. Each life sphere develops ways to enhance its cardinal value. These ways may be more or less rational. And the criteria for rationality may differ between life spheres.

Scientific Rationalities

The rational pursuit of knowledge – at least in our civilization – rests on three principles (Berlin 1999, pp. 21-22). First, all real questions have an answer. You may not know the answer but wise men may know it (in the past, present, or future). And God knows all answers. Second, there are methods to discover and learn the answers. Third, all real answers are compatible and do not contradict one another.

Science emerged in the Enlightenment as a separate life sphere by sharpening these principles. The answers to our questions were not to be sought in revelations, not in dogmas, not in tradition, not in inner contemplations. The answers were to be sought in empirical studies and logical reasoning based on such studies. Rationality in the realm of knowledge became the scientific method as we know it.

Since this is a paper touching on fundamental issues of categories in social science we have already had occasion to allude to two major varieties of scientific rationality: analysis and systems (Section 2 above).

Economic Rationalities

The rational pursuit of riches can follow many paths, including systematic robbery and organized extortion. Two more peaceful avenues are the procedures of profit seeking and rent seeking. Rational profit seeking is the pursuit of long-term gains through continuous economic exchanges. Rational rent seeking is the pursuit of work-free income guaranteed for long periods (Tullock 1989). The former abounds in the market economy and the latter in the welfare economy.

Market Economy

A nascent social and economic order in Scotland and England based on profit seeking was codified by Adam Smith in his work The Wealth of Nations 1776. "The desire to improve our conditions, a desire that comes to us in the womb and never leaves us until we go to the grave" was what Smith saw as the source of economic progress. It gets a chance where "natural freedom" prevails, i.e. where every individual has the right and capacity – without fear of punishment from officials, priests, criminals, or Besserwissers – to do what seems best to him or her in the current situation. Individual interests are realized in a division of labor where anyone can establish his shop without restrictions and enjoy free competition with others. When everyone thus pursues self-interest, overall wealth and welfare are also promoted. Thus, society need not be held together by commands and threats from the government, as had been thought from Plato to Hobbes. In Smith's view, it can cohere through mutual self-interest. "It is not from the benevolence from the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" is a much quoted insight in The Wealth of Nations. In our terminology we would say that Smith sees the rational form of the economy, not as an organization, but as a network. It is not a state or a monopoly that runs – or grants permissions to others to run – industry and trade. It is a market of free agents and free exchanges.

Weber’s twentieth-century version of the market economy, rational capitalism, consists of firms (i.e. organizations) that operate as units in markets with many buyers and sellers, and themselves are traded on a stock market. Capitalism exists when most everyday needs of the population of society are covered by products and services from such firms. The factors of production (land, buildings, machinery, input goods, inventions, financial capital, raw materials, labor and finished products) are controlled by entrepreneurs in rational capitalism. The art of entrepreneurship lies in utilizing one's control of such factors of production, not to satisfy the lust for power, avarice, or private desires, but to gain a lasting rise in value of the company. Rational capitalism presupposes that all business events are entered in an accounting system in which data are registered, processed, calculated, and reported to facilitate business decisions. This enables firms to systematically work to retain or improve profits (according to the operating statement) for every business period, and to attain assets that exceed their liabilities (according to the balance sheet) at the end of each accounting period. Rational capitalism, in short, is the pursuit of good accounts for a firm.

Profit seeking has many expressions that are unrelated to the rationality of the economic life sphere. Weber rules out personal greed as useful in the definition of capitalism:

‘Acquisitiveness,' ‘striving for profit’ – for profit in terms of money, for the largest possible pecuniary gain – have, as such, nothing at all to do with capitalism. This endeavour has existed and exists in waiters, doctors, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, corrupt officials, soldiers, brigands, crusaders, gamblers, beggars, indeed one might say in all sorts and conditions of men, during all periods in all countries of the world in which the objective opportunity to do so has been or is in some way available. It is part of the ABC of cultural history that one should, once and for all, refrain from this naive definition of concepts. Unfettered acquisitiveness is in no way tantamount to capitalism, and even less with its ‘spirit’. Capitalism may quite simply be synonymous with the subjugating or at least the rational tempering of this irrational instinct. But capitalism is indeed tantamount to the quest for profit – in continuous, rational capitalist business operations; for constantly renewed profit; for remunerativeness – since this must be so. Within a capitalist order that embraces the whole economy, an individual capitalist company would be doomed to failure if it did not orient itself according to the chances of achieving remunerativeness. (Weber 1986, p. 31)

Profit seeking may be rational from the point of the total economy but not necessarily from the point of the individual. To be sure, the market economy produces great riches. But it is a “wealth of nations,” not necessarily a personal wealth. It carries no a guarantee against individual poverty and misfortune.

Welfare Economy

The guarantees against poverty are found in rent seeking. The workings of this phenomenon were observed and analyzed in Sweden by the economist Knut Wicksell in the early decades of the twentieth century. He actually called the pioneering Swedish welfare reform, the “Folk Pension” of 1913, “rent hysteria,” a choice of words indicating that he initially was opposed to the reform. This very original version of Social Security payments was delivered in roughly equal amounts by the state to all elderly Swedes regardless of their needs, whether they had been employed or not, and regardless of how much they had paid in taxes. The reform was originally conceived only for the first big generation of industrial workers, a generation with a rural background who had no farm to retire to in old age. The industrial employers of the period had a routine for paying wages but no routines for paying pensions. They argued that the state ought to run a pension scheme for industrial workers as it did for civil servants. The farmers then wanted the same cash pensions as the factory workers. The universal welfare state in Sweden was born by the joint rent seeking of workers, employers, and farmers (Zetterberg & Ljungberg, 1997, Chap 5).

Rent seeking in welfare states consists of systems to provide specified welfare populations with rents. The very young (or their parents) get child support, the ill get sick pay, the handicapped get benefits, the elderly get pensions, the destitute get welfare payments, and the unemployed get unemployment compensation.

If profit seeking is rational from the point of view of the total economy but not necessarily from the point of view of the individual, the opposite is the case for rent seeking. Rent seeking is essential and rational from the point of view of the receivers but it may assume a volume that makes it counterproductive in the total economy.

Rent seeking, like Weber’s case of profit seeking, has individual expressions that have nothing to do with the rationality of the economy. Peggy Hopkins Joyce (1893-1957) was a gregarious Virginia blond without education and money, married for the first of many times as a teenager. She acquired an insatiable taste for fine clothes, diamonds and a glamorous social life. She helped many millionaires separate from their money. She was the model for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the hit song Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend. The gossip columns of popular press of the 1920s tabbed her ”gold digger.” Rational economic welfare has nothing to do with such individual rent seeking.

Rationalities in the Polity

Max Weber took the nation-state as a self-evident unit for a rational organization of the modern world. We can no longer do so. A “mismatch of scales” (Bell 1976) has occurred that makes most nation-states too big for undertakings such as care for children and the elderly, and too small for other problems such as industrial production, currency, and environmental threats. The territorial borders of the nation-state have become less relevant with the expansion of science, which knows no borders, with global entertainment and news media, Internet communications and regional economic and political networks reaching into more than one country. Furthermore, the time seems to have passed when it took the resources of a state to destroy another state. With modern weapons of mass destruction a borderless international terror network can do what was once the exclusive power of a nation-state.

The rational pursuit of order in society is a very big topic that includes the military, legal, and administrative professions as well as politicians. It can be studied at several layers.

War, Diplomacy, Treaty Making, Constitutions

The first rationalities in the body politic are found in war, diplomacy, treaty making, and constitutions (see for example, Bobbitt 2002). Wars created the empires shown on our chart of European history (Figure 7:2). Peace conferences --Augsburg, Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, and Versailles – forged the outcomes of wars into constitutions for the princely state, the kingly state, and the nation-state. The emergence of the multicultural network state (or whatever it eventually will be called) is in process. World War II also gave us a UN charter for dealing with future interstate conflicts.

In this historical process some rational rules of diplomacy and warfare based on the principles of chivalry came into use. In the past century humanitarian principles have been added to the rules of warfare. Military personnel should refrain from employing any kind or degree of violence which is not actually necessary for military purposes. The protection of civilians and the wounded from combat, the proper treatment of prisoners of war, and restrictions on certain types of weapons became prescribed in the Geneva Convention and its later complements. All armed forces have, of course, their own rules of engagement. They may, for example, prescribe that soldiers cannot fire on suspected enemy positions without positive identification of the enemy – though being fired upon is by itself considered positive identification.

Democracy

Let us separate rise-to-occasion-politics from run-of-the-mill-politics.

Rise-to-occasion-politics occurs when “society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well-being of the collectivity.“ By contrast, run-of-the-mill-politics “refers to the legitimized and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity.” Rise-to-occasion-politics is “episodic, rare.” Run-of-the mill-politics is “continuous, ceaseless, and endless” (Wolin 1996, p. 31 who termed the former alternatives “the political” as opposed to the latter alternative of mere “politics”).

Rationality for both varieties of politics in contemporary society is provided by the rules of democracy.

In moments of rise-to-the-occasion-politics, leaders with new visions embodied in their party program may ascend to power after free elections in which at least two parties with different visions and versions of social order compete. In periods of run-of-the-mill-politics parties compete by promising and claiming political favors to their supporters. In both cases the democratic rule requires that the losing side leave the government after an election.

The democratic tenet “let the people decide” is dependent on the answer to the question “who are the people?” A standard answer is “those who are domiciled within our borders.” The borders are set by geography and history, and normally through what we just discussed, namely, war, diplomacy, treaties, and constitutions. A limitation of democracy to resolve conflicts is the fact that it presupposes borders that it cannot set by itself.

Excursus: The Central Zone and Democracy

Democracy can be viewed as a protest against the domination of the central zone. Democracy demands that the citizens, and only the citizens, be the ruling class. The rules of democracy concern political power: other parts of the central zone are not directly affected by election results. Political scientists today reject all alternatives to democracy. There may be post-modern societies and post-materialist societies and post-nation-state societies, but no post-democratic societies.

When Edward Shils, the inventor of the concept “central zone,” heard someone say “political science” he used to interject “science as in Christian Science.” (XXX 199X p. 00). In the church of democracy, political scientists were priests, per se an honorable calling. However, the theory of the central zone was science in the true sense of the word; it concerned a confirmed proposition, a law of nature. The practice of democracy must be modified if it is to survive when the force of nature called the central zone collides with the ideology of democracy. And this, in my view, is what has happened. Unanimity about democracy holds firm only so far as agreement that no one ought to rule against the will of the people. After that, opinions diverge.

The oldest line of thinking asserts that in a democracy governments ought to follow the will of a majority of the electorate. This is still stated in many schoolbooks. But political scientists are contemptuous of this view; they call it “Gallup democracy” or populism.

Political scientists’ first reframing of the idea of democracy as a realization of the will of the people follows this reasoning: society changes and is modernized; new classes, needs, and interest groups emerge; political activists in these groups form their own political demands; they organize into parties; democratically elected politicians then implement the activists’ ideas, through, for example, reorganizations, subsidies or benefits in legislation. The leader is not supposed to be a commander but rather a chairman who “listens to the party.” If the government has its own agenda, its issues must first receive consent in the party organization before they can be implemented. Many political scientists have abandoned this view of the democratic process, but when politicians also do so they can run into trouble, and the political activists may claim that “they no longer recognize their party.”

A second way of thinking about the functions of democracy was put forth by the economist Josef Schumpeter (1942). He saw democracy as a competition among élites, with the electorate acting as the jury. The main contents of politics are decided by the ideas of the élites, that is, the ideas of the central zone, not by the jury. This notion fitted particularly well in the European scene in the last century when a landed aristocracy defended their privileges, the clergy guarded moral values, agrarians advocated protectionism, industrial and business élites championed free trade, and strong labor movements demanded welfare rights and a greater share of the national patrimony. When a country becomes democratic, the public becomes the jury in these struggles and decides which élite is to rule.

A third line of thought has been developed by several current historians, political scientists, and sociologists. The title of the book Bringing The State Back In reveals the theme (Evans, Rueschemeyer, Skocpol, 1985). Research on mature democracies shows that the decisive élite is the politicians themselves together with government servants. The state, the staffs of governmental departments and the recruitment of their heads influence politics more than anything else. Political change would thus depend less on changes in popular will, or on how élites think, and more on how the government itself develops and influences the party apparatus and the situation of government employees. This is where concrete political innovation takes place. Democracy is redefined to mean an acceptance of this state of affairs, but with the requirement that the results of this innovation be submitted to the electorate in periodic general elections.

Even the minimal forms of democracy have some value. As Karl Popper (1997) has pointed out, they lead to peaceful transfers of power.

Freedoms

Column K

Our overview of the emergent life areas in Europe is, of course, sketchy in the extreme, but it would be entirely incomplete unless we paused to consider the consolidation of liberalism in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. This was a turbulent and violent period in England: in half a century, the country underwent two revolutions and two civil wars; one king was executed and another exiled; there was an experiment in parliamentary republican government, and another in rule by a military protectorate. But toward the end of the century liberal ideas had become established as a safety net for the individual against the government.

The West European structuration prior to The Glorious Revolution was exported to Latin America, and the structuration after the Glorious Revolution was exported to North America. Echoes of this difference remain in the two Americas to this day.

Civic Freedom

The Glorious Revolution meant that the king was no longer above the law. Taxes could not be imposed without the consent of parliament. None could be deprived of their freedom of movement and/or property without judicial proceedings under the law. No deprivation of freedom whatsoever was permitted for the purpose of stifling peaceful opposition. Freedom of the press and religious toleration were to prevail. Certain principles were to be inviolable, although from other points of view their violation might appear beneficial. Regulations prescribed by the authorities and law courts were thus to be maintained, even in cases where they favored Crown opponents and the accused. In other words, the main thrust was directed against all forms of arbitrary government. Emergent English liberalism stood for what we nowadays call the rule of law, civic rights, and freedoms.

Democracy specified the political freedoms. There must be freedom of information so that citizens can keep informed, and, through discussion and debate, be able to decide whether they want a change in government. In a democracy elections must therefore take place in an environment where there is freedom of speech, of assembly, and the right to demonstrate. Each adult is to have a vote and one vote only. The ballot is to be secret.

Freedom of Trade

The constitutional liberalism in the restored English monarchy in the seventeenth century paved the way for economic liberalism. In the latter, the thrust was directed against government intervention in economic life and against private monopolies as guilds, or companies with exclusive royal privileges. Emergent English liberalism thus stood for what we nowadays call the market economy and economic freedom. Slavery was outlawed and free labor becomes a hallmark of capitalism. Eventually the rights of the market place became recognized not only for nationals but also for foreigners. International capital became a fact.

Thus, the contours of modern European society are clear. A monolithic multifunctional structure dominated by the state or the church had become differentiated into a pluralistic society in the form of a few single-function structures, each with its own cardinal value, its own system of rewards, its specific variety of freedom, and its particular version of rationalism.

Figure 9:1. Types of Freedom in Different Life Spheres (Details in the Main Table)

	F	G	K
	Life Spheres	Cardinal Values	Type of Freedom
1	SCIENCE	Knowledge	Academic freedom
2	ECONOMY	Riches	Free trade
3	POLITY	Order	Civic liberties
4	ART	Beauty	Artistic freedom
5	RELIGION	Sacredness	Religious tolerance
6	MORALITY	Virtue	Freedom of conscience
10	ATHLETICS etc	Health	Freedom of movement

The consolidation of freedom in the various realms is a most important achievement. I wish to stress that a philosophical ideal of individual freedom is not enough. Freedom must have its frameworks and checks and become concrete in the form of enforceable civil liberties, free trade, academic freedom, religious tolerance, freedom of conscience, and artistic freedom. The achievement of such institutionalized freedoms is the silver lining among the dark clouds of European history.

10. The Grand Functions

Columns L-O

There are spurts and suppressions of knowledge, booms and busts in riches, changing balances between order and disorder, shifting styles of art, religion and ethics. The flow of knowledge, riches, orderliness, beauty, sacredness, and virtue through society is the history of society. To cope with the flow of cardinal values in a scholarly way we shall separate four functions. They are the functions to create, conserve, mediate, and receive cardinal values.

These functions are found in every life sphere. The same person may perform all these functions. But we normally observe a certain structuration of these functions, a division of labor among a number of persons into different “fields,” to use Pierre Bourdieu's vocabulary.

Makers, Keepers, Brokers, Takers

Column L-O, Row 9

In earlier generations most jobs were physical: farmer, fisherman, miller, butcher, blacksmith, carpenter, weaver, launderer, repairman, and so forth. Or, they were jobs with person-to-person service, such as hairdresser, tailor, waiter, nurse, et cetera. In the present generation we must include jobs involving the manipulation of symbols (Reich 1992). Many of these jobs are actually of very old standing, but many have grown in numbers and importance. Table 10:1 gives illustrations based on these fundamental observations:

· Knowledge is generated by scholars and scientists. It is conserved by librarians in learned publications and data bases and, as much as possible, by all “educated” people (or persons with "culture générale" or “Bildung”, as we say in Europe). Knowledge is mediated by teachers and textbook writers and is received by students.

· Order is spawned by our legislators, is maintained by the judges and functionaries of the judiciary, and is mediated to the people by administrators (bureaucrats). We thus have Montesquieu’s well-known division of power among the legislature, judiciary, and executive branches of government.

· Economic value is created by entrepreneurs, conserved in banks and insurance companies, is mediated by tradesmen, and, in the final stage, reaches consumers. We thus have the conventional division of business between industry, finance, and commerce.

· Art is created by artists, conserved by, among others, museum curators, is interpreted by critics and by other artists, and is received by the public.

· The sacred writings of the religions were formulated by prophets, conserved by priesthoods, mediated by proselytizers and magicians, and received by believers. Here we have the actors and roles in Weber’s analysis of religious development and struggles.

In this manner we fill in the societal division of labor by examples in The Main Table. When this is done we no longer talk about abstract functions of creating, conserving, mediating, and receiving cardinal values but about actual people doing the job of a many-splendored society. These people are the makers, keepers, brokers, and takers.

Table 10:1 Division of Labor among Workers Dealing with Symbols (Illustrations given in the Main Table)

	E	K	L	M	N
9		Makers	Keepers	Brokers	Takers
1	SCIENCE	Researchers Inventors	Professionals	Teachers Consultants Technocrats	Students
2	ECONOMY	Entrepreneurs	Bankers Insurers	Tradesmen Marketers Advertisers	Consumers Customers
3	POLITY	Politicians, Legislators, Civic leaders	Police, Prosecutors Judges, Lawyers	Officials Bureaucrats Civic workers	Subjects Citizens
4	ART	Creative Artists Authors	Critics	Actors, Entertainers Exhibitors	Spectators, Readers, Listeners
5	RELIGION	Prophets	Priests Monks, Nuns	Preachers, Zealots Missionaries Magicians	Believers Seekers
6	MORALITY	Creators of charity etc	Ethicists	Moralists	Aspirants of ethical living

I would like to claim that the cells in this table – as distinct from the specific illustrations we have placed in the cells – are “prepared” for generations of occupants by the actual or potential structuration of any society.

It was difficult to find general examples to Cells K6 and N6 in the Main Table, a fact indicating that modern societies are inadequately differentiated in the sphere of morality. This realm lacks an adequate terminology for the functions of creating and receiving virtue: it is as though Western societies have not yet discovered the elemental “particles” in this sphere. Or, have we simply forgotten how one speaks of good and evil after we ceased believing in angels and devils?

Excursus: Learning about Takers from Ortega y Gasset

As we entered a new century, the 1900s were called the “century of the common man.” Others have called them the “the century of democratic man,” and cite the many entitlements people have won as the principal sign of progress in our time. The advances of political democracy, women’s liberation, the solidarity of the welfare state with the weaker members of society, and aid to poor nations are usually cited as examples to back up this claim. In our terminology, the Makers and the Keepers (Weber’s capitalists and bureaucrats) may have dominated the first half of the twentieth century, but the Takers dominated the second half, particularly in the rich societies.

A first analysis of the progress of ordinary man was presented as early as 1929 by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset under the title La rebelión de las masas. Since the beginnings of agriculture mankind has known that as ye sow so shall ye reap. The first generations of Europeans who left their farms, built colonial empires, and introduced industrialism were energetic, individualistic spirits who took charge of their own destinies. But the majority of Europeans of the twentieth century turned out differently. They developed into what Ortega called “unqualified masses,” who did not demand much of themselves, but demanded all the more for themselves.

Ortega y Gasset asserts that these people have two characteristic traits. For one, they ignore what the creating, conserving, and mediating institutions have done for their societies. They usually exist in blissful ignorance of all the efforts, investments, and systems that have given us a life full of comforts and freedom of choice. They seldom recognize that these blessings of civilization are the fruits of enterprising spirits, of their knowledge, techniques, and social innovations, which in turn depend on the energy, foresight, and resoluteness of these forerunners. Instead, they demand priority in receiving such blessings, as if they were theirs by right. This is the other trait that is characteristic of people in the 1900s. The unqualified do not necessarily desire to become qualified; they only want the advantages of the qualified.

The unqualified masses consider that they have a natural right to receive the good things in life. The declaration of the rights of man of the United Nations (which was not in existence when Ortega y Gasset wrote) is a consummate catalogue of rights to the good things in life. But irrespective of whether rights are formalized or not, the unqualified masses insist that their comforts be provided, their wishes and impulses fulfilled.

Ortega y Gasset’s term “unqualified masses” has a negative connotation. Ortega alleges that they develop a psychology that is reminiscent of that of a spoiled child. I prefer to call them “takers.” They are, objectively speaking, the takers of the cardinal values of society.

The Cohesiveness of Modern Society

The emergence of the new order with six relatively independent realms at first seems to tear man and society apart. It is reflected in paintings of the Cubist movement in which artists such as Picasso and Braque broke down the subject they painted into a number of facets, simultaneously showing several aspects of one object. This vision may be seen in many European paintings after 1910.

The problem of keeping a differentiated society together was treated by the major twentieth century sociologists, such as Max Weber and Niklaus Luhmann in Germany, Emile Durkheim in France, and Talcott Parsons in The United States. Durkheim (1893) depicted the cohesiveness of the new order as solidarité organique. The division of labor between the life areas does not tear them apart, but actually makes them dependent on one another. The economy, for example, will prosper only if the body politic keeps the peace and enforces business contracts, and only if science and technology play a part in producing its products and services, and only if these products and services are designed and marketed with an aesthetic flair, and contribute to a meaningful life. The combination of Eigengesetzlichkeit and solidarité organique is not yet fully understood by social science, but perhaps it may be grasped intuitively and graphically:

Diagram 10:2. Embedding Serves Cohesion

Our theory in graphic form

Observations on Embedding of Life-spheres

All the concrete parts of a life sphere – a corporation in the economy, a government agency in the polity, a research institute in science, a church in the religious sphere – contain minor elements from other spheres of life (‘institutional embedding’). They cannot function well without them. Nothing in modern society seems to work really well without some of the money from the economy, some regulations from the polity, some commandments of morality, some of the knowledge of science. To achieve an optimum we may also need some result glimpses of artistic enhancement and some of the meaningfulness that is offered by religion.

This idea is perhaps best expressed as ‘organic collaboration,' a term akin to solidarité organique. It stands for a process in which relatively autonomous life spheres grow in different directions, but are nevertheless interdependent, and embed parts of one another to facilitate their core activities.

Organic collaboration does not make popular ideas such as “money is everything,” “all is politics,” “religion is the whole thing” less naïve as descriptions of a society. Nor does organic collaboration change the fact that a firm on High Street, a central government agency, a research institute, a church, or a museum is classified as belonging to the life sphere that dominates its activity. A university belongs to the realm of knowledge even when it is a state university. A budget officer in the capital who treats the university as another state agency cannot alter the fact that it is an institution of learning and research. In some instances, however, an organization may rightly be classified into more than one realm. For example, a university press uses scholarly criteria to select its titles and business criteria to sell them.

The fact that every life sphere always embeds “alien” elements from other life spheres limits the autopoiesis that some scholars attribute to them.

11. Categories of Many-Splendored Living

People develop not only different occupations, but also lifestyles, characters, and ideologies within the life spheres and their structures.

Lifestyles

Column P

A lifestyle is an enjoyable practice that its practitioners share with one another and for which they develop an affinity. We can match a lifestyle to each type of action.

Knowledge Seekers

They have dedicated their lives to learning ever more. Their self-image is shaped by how much they know. We find them in libraries, in study groups, at the bookstore shelf for non-fiction, in archives, and in laboratories. For them, learning is not a phase in life: it is a life-long mission. They are exceptionally eager to uncover facts and connections between them. Technical vocabularies, foreign languages, or mathematics are their instruments.

The Socially Concerned

They may turn up at demonstrations, for they believe it is important to manifest their views in order to try to influence events. Nor are they averse to working within their movement or party; they will readily plunge into committee work or act as chairperson. They prefer to associate with like-minded people; they are engrossed in politics and society, and have little time for small talk.

The Business-Minded

Producing or consuming, they know prices, and they can tell what is profitable or not. Quick to spot their own needs or the needs of others, they scan the horizon for quality, novelty, value for money, or outright bargains.

The Aesthetes

They need art in order to feel good about themselves and life, to reveal and tolerate the drabness and imperfections of everyday living. They may themselves be performing artists, but need not be. They visit art galleries and museums, frequent concerts, the theatre and the ballet, read the recipients of the Nobel Prize for literature, and have an eye for interesting architecture. When choosing a vacation destination they prefer Florence to the beach resort.

The Believers

They are concerned with the sacred and with the ultimate issues of existence, such as the existence of evil and suffering, with death, and the final evaluation of a person’s life. They are found not only around established religions but also among the followers of new belief systems that have gained ground in secularized parts of the world.

The Do-gooders

They are humanitarian reformers with ethics and virtue as their lodestars. Their self-image is that of a person who aims to act morally in all situations, and who, in return, has a clean conscience. Humanitarian movements, social welfare agencies, voluntary organizations and religious charities are the anvils for their good deeds.

The Exercise Buffs

They walk or bicycle to work when they can, take the stairs instead of the elevator, jog, workout, play at sports. Their vacations may be spent hiking, canoeing, biking, and skiing. Physical activity gives them a sense of emotional as well as physical well-being. Health is an important consideration for this group, but it is the bodily sensation of muscular tone and movement that is their elixir.

The Outdoor Providers

They go fishing as an escape from the routines of occupational or family life. They go hunting as a social affair. They garden and take a farmer’s satisfaction in seeing the crop grow. In former eras the requirements of living were tied up with hunting, fishing, and farming. Modern men and women engage in such activities as hobbies that fill their larders with foodstuffs and their minds with a sense of resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.

The Do-it-yourself Fixers

They are people who want to feel independent and find a challenge in creating something with their own hands. They may be handy at carpentry, gardening, upholstering furniture, or repairing the car, among many other projects. They take great pride in the fruits of their craftsmanship, which serve as concrete symbols of their skill and resourcefulness.

The Gourmets

They dote on good food and are willing to spend both time and money to satisfy their palates. The nutritional contents of a meal are less important than its taste, and the raw materials used in preparing it must be of good quality. Food is not just a means to satisfy hunger: it is also a way of feeding their self-image. When they prepare food they read recipes the way a musician reads a musical score before they orchestrate the ingredients at the stove.

The Attire-conscious

They strive to be “poets of clothes.” Styles of either timeless or novel quality offer them ways to express different aspects of their self-images, They do not simply aim to call attention to themselves through their choice in fashions, but neither do they want to look like “everybody else.”

The House Proud

They search ways to beautify their homes and make them more functional. A favorite armchair is not cherished for its market value but because it fits perfectly with the rest of the décor in the room. They are fond of getting new items for their homes, which they see as objects for constant improvements.

The Erotically Driven

They are always on the prowl for erotic conquests and experiences. Their deepest happiness lies in being appealing as a potential sex partner. Success is measured not only by scores of intercourses but by the emotional surrenders they force on their partners.

The Hooligans

They enjoy fighting for fighting’s own sake, and can sometimes provoke fights. Alcohol and drugs can further trigger their pugnacity. Their self-image is often bolstered by identification with like-minded gang members. Although pleasure in fighting is most often associated with testosterone-high young males, even the elderly and girls can get kicks out of violence.

The Family-centered

They have their family as the hub of their lives, uniting immediate family members and more distant relatives by the special bond of kinship. The members not only extol family values, they also live by them. Thriving in togetherness with their kin, they try to live close to one another when possible, and flock together on vacations and holidays. Their self-images are closely tied to their familial roles and identities.

Nature Lovers

They find an inner harmony in communion with nature, whether they wander through woodlands, sail a boat, hike along a mountain pass, or ride on horseback across wide plains. Some find pleasure in special aspects of nature, such as observing trees as they come into leaf in the spring or listening to birdsong. They try to get out into nature as often as they can; it represents a strong urge in their lives, not just an occasional form of recreation.

Socially Shaped Personalities

Column C-E, Row 9

‘Social personalities’ (often called "characters") are those human traits which are formed by functions and positions in the social structure. We match a socially shaped personality type with each communication structure.

The Organization Loyalists

They equate their self-image with that of the organization. They are always at its disposal, even during leisure hours. Their clothes, be they jeans or a suit, are chosen to represent the organization’s image. They readily accept transfers to other locations: home is where the organization is. (Cf. Whyte 1956)

The Gregarious Networkers

They swim among people in their networks like fish in water . They are friendly, and easily connect with others. Mingling in company seems to come naturally to them and is reinforced by networking. Their cheerful, outgoing manner attracts people, who seek out their companionship. This suits them perfectly, for it is in the company of others that they are in their true element.

The Media Freaks

They spend an enormous amount of time with dailies, weeklies, television and radio, movies, and/or surfing on the Internet. They get upset when the papers they have subscribed to do not appear; they feel deprived when the TV-set or computer does not work. They are informed, be it about soap operas or popular music or news, but they rarely find any use for all their information.

Ideologies

Column L-O, Row 9

To create, conserve, mediate, and receive the different cardinal values predetermine people to be governed by different ideological viewpoints when they speculate about their mission in society. These largely correspond to some generally accepted political ideologies.

Makers of cardinal values find new knowledge, new laws, new sources of wealth, new art, new morals, new meanings of sacredness. If all people were to be alike or think alike, there would be little or no possibility of creating something new. So makers tend to embrace individualism, in practice, if not always in theory.

Keepers of the cardinal values discriminate between knowledge and superstition, between wealth and poverty, between that which is lawful and that which is illegal, between the beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the profane, between that which is moral and immoral. They tend to promote society’s hierarchies.

Brokers of cardinal values develop another bias; you might say that these middlemen acquire a bias against bias. A teacher is not to have favorites, but to treat all students the same. A shopkeeper is not to have one price for his town’s residents and another for strangers. A government functionary is not to discriminate between people, but to treat all citizens equally. Theaters, concerts, art exhibitions, and museums are to be open to all, not just to élites. A universal religion offers salvation to all, not just to a chosen few. The precepts of any advanced ethics and morality make exceptions for no one. In short, the brokers of cardinal values tend to embrace the principle of equity or universalism.

Takers of society’s cardinal values do not want to be left out when knowledge, money, influence, or salvation are offered. They prefer that no one receive preferential treatment when society’s cardinal values are distributed. In the end, they prefer the view that all should receive about the same and embrace an ideology of radical equality.

These ideologies ─ individualism, hierarchy, universalism, and radical equality ─ are in opposition to the particularism or partiality that dominates in the primordial sector. In the family or clan, members have greater value than outsiders. Even modern society has significant elements of primordial partiality. Contemporary nationalism and chauvinism are replete with examples of partiality: “My country, right or wrong!” A milder form of partiality can be found in certain professions, even in those that subscribe to universalism, such as the medical, legal, and teaching professions. If at all possible, they support colleagues in conflicts with outsiders.

11. Techniques

Column Q

As we know, man is not only a supreme user of symbols but also of tools. We bring this in under the column for technology. We divide tools according to the actions they facilitate, from working with one's hands to working with symbols. This section remains to be written.

12. Cultural Values

Column R

A philosopher of religion, Charles Morris (1942), showed us that at least three dimensions are needed to classify the religions of the world, a Promethean, a Dionysian, and a Buddhist one. They also appear in different guises in the social science literature dealing with changes in the climate of values. From the latter, we shall choose three central themes: Modernity, Instrumentality, and Humanism. They pose three questions that can be asked about the content of every cell in our scheme: Is it old or new for those involved? Is it fixed or flexible? Does it concern material things or people?

Modernity: Choosing The Old or The New

In the history of ideas modernity originally took shape in catchwords of the Enlightenment such as “belief in reason” and “technology,” which became battering rams against the bulwarks of tradition. In the 1900s new catchwords carried the idea of modernity forward. Friedrich Nietzsche’s contribution was creative self-realization, the idea of a stellar super man who shapes himself and his world without the constraints of tradition. Josef Schumpeter’s contribution was an analysis of the key role of the entrepreneur as a creator of the new and abolitionist of the old in the economy. Modernity, however, is not just a question of economics; it also has a place in politics. It was, for example, present in the attitudes of the early labor movements, which named their publications “The Progressive,” “Avanti,” Vorwärts,” and “New Times.” Burgeoning modernity also reshaped Western art, opening for new art forms and new ideas about what is good and bad art. Sigmund Freud ushered modernity into our inner lives through his analyses of drives, which allowed man in the early 1900s to recognize his biological self and reject the traditional idea that suffering was good for one’s character. According to Alfred North Whitehead, the greatest innovation of the 1900s was “the invention of the method of invention,” a central theme of modernity.

The striving toward modernity is and has always been a movement without a definite end. Thus, to be modern means different things at different points in time. Today’s popular regional and nationalistic values that stress the importance of an individual’s roots are not modernistic but rather express a longing for tradition or stability. Social security was a modern value for the first generation in the welfare states, whereas today security is a traditional value in the established welfare states.

Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist and sociologist who lived between 1848 and 1932, formulated the common thread of modernity. He defined the forces of modernity as an openness for new combinations (“residue II”), and the forces of traditionalism as a consolidation of existing arrangements (“residue I”). To be modern is to be open for new combinations, “to become” rather than just “to be” (Pareto 1916, § 2057). In his discussion of this distinction in the political sphere Pareto referred to Machiavelli’s well- known political types, the “lion” and the “fox.” The first forcefully defends the social order and has implicit faith in his beliefs. The second advances the new with craftiness and cunning. When Pareto discussed economics these distinctions reappeared in the differences between a “rentier,” who invests in order to retain his capital and its yields and the “speculator,” who makes shrewd investments in order to augment his capital.

Instrumentality: Following Firm Principles or Accepting Compromises

Max Weber sought the distinctive character of the Western world, compared with other civilizations. Our culture has no monopoly on openness for new impulses and combinations. These were present not only in ancient Athens and Rome but also in the Indian and Chinese civilizations. Weber found that the distinction lies in our singular form of rational openness. Karl Marx had earlier made the observation that everything fixed is volatilized under capitalism: "all that is solid melts into air.” Weber’s observations were more specific.

He distinguished between wertrational acts, that is, those based on firm values, and zweckrational acts, that is, those based on instrumentality (Weber 1956, 12-13). Modern Western rationality is mostly of the latter kind. In other civilizations fixed values have prevailed to a greater extent, a fact we today see evidence of in the conflicts between Islamic nations and the West. In a culture that adheres to fixed values these are dramatized and norms of conduct are rooted in unconditional moral tenets and ethical principles. It orders: “Always follow the commandments!” In an instrumental culture one compromises about one’s values and norms of conduct are guided by the pursuit of happiness and an ethics of responsibility. It says: “Do what you want, but take responsibility for the consequences!” Value faithfulness – which is called idealism if you like its expressions and dogmatism if you don’t – has to do with values that you are not willing to compromise. These usually include matters of conscience such as loyalty to one’s own family, solidarity with the weak, compassion for the ill, the preservation of our planet for future generations. Instrumentality – which is called pragmatism if you like the value and opportunism if you don’t – includes values that you could experiment and compromise with in order to achieve an optimal result. They have to do with practical negotiations, calculations, and technical solutions, very common in the spheres of business or politics.

Humanism: Putting People or Things First

Many have distinguished between the material and the non-material. The Russian-American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968) was the first to succeed in measuring value changes as they have occurred in history. He classified the history of ideas according to a scale that ranged from materialistic (“sensate”) cultures of the senses to humanistic (“ideational”) cultures of ideas. In cultures of the senses most symbols are Meadian and clearly and closely associated with the evidence of the senses. In cultures of ideas most cultural manifestations are more divorced from sensual data and symbols are Saussurian and commonly refer to other symbols, often highly charged ones. In cultures of the senses human activity is outer-directed; in cultures of ideas it is inner-directed. Sorokin’s work shows how Western culture has fluctuated between cultures of the senses and cultures of ideas. Beginning with a culture of ideas in 600 B.C. it oscillated to a culture of the senses when the Roman Empire was at is peak, from there to a new culture of ideas in the late Middle Ages, then to a new culture of the senses in our time. As early as the 1930s Sorokin foresaw that the pattern would repeat itself with time and that the West would move toward a new culture of ideas.

When we study value changes in a much shorter perspective than Sorokin did, the most useful approach is to separate an interest in material and carnal phenomena from the glimmer of non-material values that manifests itself in an interest in human beings and their inner world.

Labels like materialism and humanism give rise to many associations, some of them misleading. Many other terms have been used. One has spoken of “the values of production” (materialistic ones), such as order, punctuality, ambition, efficiency, and other values that facilitate economic growth. These differ from the “values of reproduction” (humanistic ones), such as knowing oneself, empathy, sensitivity, and involvement in people, which facilitate personal growth and genuine understanding of others. Another way of expressing the difference is to be found in the terms “inner-directed people” and “outer-directed people.” Inner-directed people have humanistic values and are governed by cues from within themselves; outer-directed people have materialistic values and are governed by external cues. Here is one example from daily life: more materialistic outer-directed people diet and exercise primarily in order to look better in their own eyes and in the eyes of others, while the more humanistic inner-directed people diet and exercise in order to feel good. The former is governed by outer signals, the latter by inner signals.

Combinations of Cultural Values

All modern values question tradition and authority, but questioning leads to different end-stations.

A first path ends up in modernity, pragmatism, and materialism. This is a gathering station for those challengers of society who enjoy business transactions and plundering. They are not afraid of the complexities of life. Their liaisons to products, people, and associations are usually short-lived. When someone or something no longer generates pleasure or profit or is useful, they soon lose interest.

Another paths ends in modernism, pragmatism, and humanism. Here we find modern individuals who are minglers. They commonly dislike formal rules, but love informal get-togethers. They know what is "in" in respect to activities and fashion. They are open to international contacts. In contrast to the challengers of the first path, they are not pronounced materialists.

A third path ends in modernity, value-faithful principles, and a materialistic orientation. Here we find modern, principled individuals. They desire a comfortable life, but are not attracted to material posessions as status symbols. Many harbor a social conscience in respect to, for example, the Third World and the environment. They are convinced of the merit of their opinions, and want to change society in accordance with them.

A fourth path ends in modernity, value-faithfulness, and humanism. Here we find the modern seekers after truth. It is important for them to know themselves and to cultivate sympathy for their fellowman. They trust their feeling and their intuition. Today’s' issues that might concern them are equal rights for homosexuals and animal welfare.

Our three-dimensional values space thus provides several paths of social change leading to modernity.

We must also remember that a number of people flee from all forms of modernity and cling instead to tradition. If this flight leads to primordial ideas of Blut und Boden and to violence as a means of communication, we are faced with a Fascist reaction.

Some Observations on Value Change

Cultural values tend to swing between extremes. Nothing ever reverts to “normal.” Every balancing point between the extremes occupies a new and unique position. An individual’s values may mature and attain balance with age, but the climate of values in a society as a whole seldom seems to attain mature tranquility. The typical pattern of value change is to lurch first and learn later, according to Yankelovich (1997). As if all of mankind were adolescents taking exaggerated positions with abrupt switches between them!

If no historic events occur to disturb their course, the phases that values undergo have so-called immanent causes. Without external influences values swing because of factors that are built into the use of the expressions for the values. In their swift steps toward a consistent humanism the system of symbols they use becomes more Saussurian and loses contact with everyday realities. We then need to formulate more Meadian everyday priorities, and a more materialistic orientation gets a new chance. Swift steps back to an increasingly consistent materialism leads, in turn, to a loss of contact with human and non-material realities. The curve swings back to humanism, and so forth. In time, zealousness in expressions of value thus leads to its own defeat.

In addition to the immanent causes of value shifts there are almost always unique historic happenings and experiences that contribute to value changes. Some of these events color an entire society, others mostly a certain age group in society. Karl Mannheim (1952) argued that big historical events always make extra deep traces in the formative age group of 17-23 year-olds. The impact stays with them throughout adult life and gives a distinct value profile to the age cohort.

13. Actors

Column S

In a census you find the categories of sex, age, and country of origin. The numbers of men and women, young and old, and their division according to birth place are the demographic base of social science. It is understandable that demographics is placed at the beginning in most studies of society. But different societies define these categories differently in everyday parlance and behavior. To interpret demographics you need to know many other aspects of society. In our categorical scheme we have decided to emphasize this fact by placing the demographic categories, not in the first column, but in the last. We redefine the demographic categories of sex, age, and origin by using concepts such as ‘gender,' ‘life cycle,' and ‘ethnicity.’

Sexual varieties

The key terms are sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual relations. We are born female or male (i.e. sex) but in our symbol environment we become women and men (i.e. gender). We may prefer hetero-, bi-, or homosexual relations and may seek bodily pleasure in genital, oral, or anal sex, or, with larger areas of the body in s/m (i.e. sexuality). The partners may be adults, children, or animals (i.e. sexual relations).

It is today a common research strategy to focus, not primarily on the most common or “normal” outcomes of these choices, but on what is “queer.” This strategy may also be applied to other forms of opposition to mainstreams in society. There are queer schools of thought also in politics, art, religion and other realms. The queer protests in this broader sense represent both threats to the old and opportunities for the new. They open the possibility of a creative destruction of society.

Maturing and Ageing

The key terms are age, lifecycle, personality development.

[More text to come.]

Multi-backgrounds

The key terms are place of birth, nationality, ethnicity, and race.

[More text to come.]

14. Binary Classifications

The complexity of society has prompted many scholars – particularly in older generations – to group societal content into binary categories. It may seem archaic to resort to binary classifications of a many-splendored society. Some of these classifications have, however, been so useful that we probably would have had to invent them if these scholars had not introduced them to us. We shall reconstruct a few of them by dividing in various ways the many cells in our Main Table into only a few components.

In discussing stratification (in Section 7) we have found a major binary classification, the distinction between The Central Zone and The Periphery of society. This is a vertical classification – between the high and the low – and defines the character of contemporary class society.

There are also binary classifications of a horizontal nature.

Primitive and Modern Societies

The widespread assumption does not really hold that the family lays the ground for society, and that religion, politics, economics, etc. are added on. We cannot generalize about the history of society from the life course of the individual. The fact that the family, in whatever configuration, is the first group on hand to meet and care for newborns does not necessarily mean that the family is the first and fundamental institution that appears as a society is shaped. The oldest traces we have of kinship structures presuppose that economic, political, and religious institutions were already in place. The study of indigenous people in the contemporary world tells the same story.

This does not prevent us from classifying societies as more or less characterized by kinship, primary groups, household, dancing and singing crowds, ceremonies around totems, or similar arrangements. Such a classification is obtained by separating them (listed in the bottom rows of the Main Table) from the rest. We thus obtain an old distinction between “primitive” and “modern" societies. Both have religious, political, economic or other structures, but in the latter we see them more differentiated and distinct. The early ethnologists made primitive societies their topic of study, but when later generations of ethnologists and anthropologists turned their attention to modern societies they by and large abandoned the distinction between primitive and modern in their scholarship.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Ferdinand Tönnies’ (1887) distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft still finds users. In our terminology the two types of social arrangements are separated by different gross clusters of attributes of social relations (Section 6) and by different cultural values (Section 12).

In the Gemeinschaft our relations are with 'neighbors', that is, persons with whom we have more lasting, less sporadic, more familiar, less specialized and less impersonal relations. In the Gesellschaft our relations are more with 'strangers,’ that is, persons with whom we have less lasting, more sporadic, less familiar, more specialized, and more impersonal relations.

In the Gemeinschaft cultural values are marked by tradition, faithfulness, and humanism. In the Gemeinschaft the opposite is true; cultural values are modern, flexible, and materialistic.

The manifold scale from neighbor to stranger and the value dimensions of modernity, flexibility, and humanism that cluster in Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft have been useful as a first approximation when we separate the medieval from the modern, the rural from the urban, and the familistic from the bureaucratic. However, as we have seen in Section 12, there are other avenues of social change beside the road from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Destinations such as pacifism, environmentalism, and feminism belong in the modern world, but are not likely to be reached by setting out for a Gesellschaft.

Civil Society

The term ‘civil society’ has been widely used to mark something that is not the state – and this is the only thing the various usages of the term have in common

No room for a civil society exists in a totalitarian society (such as Lenin’s Soviet Union) in which no organization is allowed to exist without a commissar from the ruler’s party, and where all bureaucracies can be mobilized for an ideological cause chosen by the ruler. Authoritarian societies (such as Franco’s Spain) with a dictator governing through traditional bureaucracies leave only a small room for a civil society. The same is true of what Weber called “Sultanist societies” (such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) where the ruler with his domestic circle of ministers, officers, guards, judges, priests, professors, editors, and other “servants” is in control.

In all these instances civil society stands for opposition, or potential opposition, to the state. When the opposition is successful we may speak of “The Return of Civil Society” as Pérez-Diaz (1993) wrote about Spain after Franco’ death, when free markets, freely formed associations, a free press, and a free culture were encouraged. The result was a twofold society with a state sector (Row 3) and a civil sector (all other rows in our schema). This is the first and oldest definition of civil society; it dates from Hegel’s distinction between Staat and bürgerlische Gesellschaft.

Wherever capitalism is rooted in a society, the economic life sphere may grow so large and powerful that one begins to talk about a threefold structure: state, economy, and civil society. (Row 3, Row 2, versus all other rows in our schema). This is the second definition of civil society, common in affluent societies.

In both the twofold and threefold cases, civil society stands for a residual, not for a unitary social phenomenon. To further sort this residual, civil society may be divided into two parts.

The ‘household’ is where you have a domicile , i.e., where you normally sleep, eat, dress, and keep personal possessions (Column B, Rows 13 – 16). The ‘family’ is an organization of kinship, i.e., blood relations (Column C, Row 19). It partly overlaps with ‘primary relations’ (Column N, Row 19), that is to say, the family members, plus those neighbors and peers who are first on the stage to socialize the young (“primary” according to Cooley 1909).

Household, family, and all primary relations may be lumped together as the ‘small world.’ We now have a reduced residual that again travels under the name ‘civil society’ (Rows 1, 4 – 12). The resulting fourfold division (following Wijkström & Lundström 2002 p. 7) is depicted in Figure 14:1.

Figure 14:1 A Simple Sectoring of a Modern Society

The Political Sector	The Civil Society
The Business Sector	The Small World

In the civil society in this third sense we find the life areas of science, art, religion, moral concerns, and sports. They are very diverse, but they do have one thing in common. They cannot normally generate the money they need for their operations. They are dependent on volunteers without pay, or on donations from the general public, or on contributions from the political sector whose funds derive from taxation, or on sponsorship by and outright gifts from the business sector whose funds derive from the market.

In most advanced countries donations of money to the civil society are tax-deductible. However, this is not the case in Finland and Sweden. Such an attitude on part of the state does not promote a many-splendored society.

References

Ackhoff, Russell L., 19xx/1999. Ackoff's Best: His Classic Writings on Management, New York, Wiley, 1999

Alexander, Jeffrey C and Paul Colomy, 1990, editors. Differentiation Theory and Social Change, Columbia University Press, New York, NY

Anderson, Bo, 2000. Personal communication

Back, Kurt, 1950. ”Influence Through Social Communications”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol 46, 9-23

Becker, Howard S., 1982. Art Worlds, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Bell, Daniel, 1976. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Berlin, Isaiah, 1999. The Roots of Romanticism (edited by Henry Hardy), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Blau, Peter and Robert K. Merton. 1981. Continuities in Structural Inquiry, Sage, London.

Blalock, Hubert M., 1979. "Dilemmas and strategies of theory construction", in Snitzek, William E., Ellsworth R. Fuhrman, and Michael K. Miller (eds.), Contemporary Issues in Theory and Research: a Metasociological Perspective, Greenwood, Westport, CO, 119-135

Blumer, Herbert, 1966. "Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead", American Journal of Sociology, vol 71, 535-544.

-- , 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Bourdieu, Pierre, 1989. La noblesse d'État. Grandes Ecoles et esprrit de corps, Minuit, Paris.

Burke, Kenneth, 1945. A Grammar of Motives, Prentice Hall, New York, NY.

Chesterton, G. K. 19??. The Complete Father Brown, Penguin Books, London.

Cicourel, Aaron V. 1974. Cognitive Sociology : Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, New edition, Free Press, New York, NY.

Coleman, James S, 1990. Foundations of Social Theory, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Cooley, Charles H., 1909. Social organization. Scribners, New York, NY

Douglas, Mary, 1992. Risk and blame. Essays in Cultural Theory, Routledge, London.

Durkheim, Émile, 1893. De la division du travail social, Alcan, Paris.

-- , 1912. Les formes élémentaire de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie. Alcan, Paris.

Fardon, Richard, 1999. Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography, Routledge, London.

Festinger, Leon, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Bach, 1950. Social Pressures in Informal Groups, Harper and Bros., New York, NY-

Foucault, Michel, 1991. "Governmentality" in Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Harvester Wheatsheaf, London.

Gendell, Murray & Hans L Zetterberg (editors), 1961. A Sociological Almanac for the United States, Hardcover: Bedminster, New York. Paperback: Scribners, New York.

Giddens, Anthony, 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Goffman, Erving, 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior, Anchor Books, New York, NY.

Hyman, Herbert (with a chapter by Charles R. Wright), 1975. The Enduring Effects of Education, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Katz, Elihu & Paul F Lazarsfeldt, 1955. Personal Influece, The Free Press, Glecoe, IL.

Langer, Susanne K. 1948. Philosophy in a New Key, Penguin Books, New York, NY.

Leontief, Wassily W. 1997/19xx. Input-Output Economics, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford

Loewenthal, Leo, 1963. Literature and the Image of Man, Beacon, Boston, MA.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 1984. The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Mannheim, Karl. 1952. ”The Problem of Generations”, in his Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge, Routledge, London.

McNeill, William H. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Mead, George Herbert 1934. Mind, Self and Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure (Revised and enlarged edition), The Free Press, Glencoe, IL

Morris, Charles, 1942. Paths of Life. Preface to a World Religion, Harpers, NY.

von Neumann John & Oskar Morgenstern, 1944. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, 1980. Die Schweigespirale öffentliche Meinung - unsere soziale Haut, Piper, München & Zürich

Ortega y Gasset, José, 1929. La rebelión de las masas, Revista de Occidente, Madrid.

Pareto, Vilfredo, 1916. Trattato di sociologia generale (3 vols). Barbera, Florence.

Park, Robert E. and Ernst W. Burgess, 1924. Introduction to the Science of Sociology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Pérez-Diaz, Vicor M., 1993. The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Popper, Karl R., 1997. The Lessons of This Century: with Two Talks on Freedom and the Democratic State, (edited interviews by Giamcarlo Bosetti, translated by Patrick Camiller), Routledge, London.

Reich, Robert B. 1992. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, Vintage Books, New York ,NY.

Rosenblueth, A. & Norman Wiener, 19??. “Purposeful and Non-purposeful Systems,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 17, 318-326.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale, Paris. Translated as Course in General Linguistics, Philosophical Library, New York, NY, 1959

Scaff, Lawrence A, 1989. Fleeing the Iron Cage, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Schluchter, Wolfgang, 1985. The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber's Developmental History, Translated by Guenter Roth, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Segerstedt, Torgny T., 1944. Ordens makt: en studie i språkets psykologi, Stockholm.

---, 1948. Social Control as a Sociological Concept, Lundequistska, Uppsala.

Shils, Edward, 1982, The Constitution of Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

---, 1997. The Calling of Education. The Academic Ethic and other Essays on Higher Education, edited by Steven Crosby, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Sorokin Pitirim A., 1937-41. Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols., American Book Company, New York, NY.

Stevenson, Charles L., 1944. Ethics and Language, Yale University Press, New Haven, CN.

Thompson, Michael & Richard Ellis & Aaron Wildavsky, 1990. Cultural Theory, Westview Press, Boulder CO.

Tönnies, Ferdinand, 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Leipzig: Fues Verlag.

Tullock, Gordon. 1989. The Economics of Special Privilege and Rent Seeking, Kluwer Academic Publisher, Boston, MA

Weber, Max 1956. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1.Halbband, J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen.

White, C M. (editor) 1965. Sources of Information in the Social Sciences, Bedminster Press, Totowa, NJ.

Whitehead, Alfred N, 1925. Science and the Modern World, Macmillan, New York, NY.

Wijkström, Filip & Tommy Lundström, 2002. Den idéella sektorn, Sober förlag, Stockholm

Wolin, Sheldon, 1995. "Fugitive Democracy," in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, edited by Seyla, Benhabib, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Yankelovich, D, 1997. How Societies Learn, City University Press, Stockholm.

Zetterberg, Hans L., 1962. Social Theory and Social Practice, Bedminster Press, New York, NY.

---, 1965. On Theory and Verification in Sociology, Third edition, Bedminster Press, Totowa, NJ.

---, 1991. "The Structuration of Europe", International Journal of Public Opinion Research, vol 3, no 4, 309-32

---, 1992. "Individualism, rättvisa, hierarki och jämlikhet", in Erik Dahmén (red), Rätt och moral i ett modernt borgerligt Sverige, Ratio, Stockholm, 141-188.

---, 1997a. “On Symbols”, in Richard Swedberg & Emil Uddhammar (editors), Sociological Endeavor, Stockholm, City University Press, 15-23.

---, 1997b. “The Study of Values”, in Richard Swedberg & Emil Uddhammar (editors), Sociological Endeavor, Stockholm, City University Press, 191-219.

---, 1998. "Cultural Values in Market and Opinion Research" in Colin McDonald & Phyllis Vangelder (editors) ESOMAR Handbook of Marketing and Opinion Research, 4th edition, ESOMAR, Amsterdam 995-1013.

--- & Carl Johan Ljungberg, 1997. Vårt land: den svenska socialstaten, City University Press, Stockholm

[1] This section is slightly revised from Zetterberg (1997a).

[2] Giscard d'Estaing, the President of the Convention on the Future of Europe which is to conclude with a “Constitutional Treaty” for the EU, is credited with having formulated the doctrine of horizontal subsidiarity for the EU in the 1980s. The doctrine has been opposed by politicians and officials with socialist leanings as well as by old-fashioned conservatives anxious to preserve the centrality of political power.
In the main, the conservative ideas for a restructuring of Sweden in the first half of 1990s were also lost. Per Unckel, minister of higher education, gave universities and colleges the option to opt out of the state system and become independent foundations, but few did. After three years of managing a parliamentary minority status. an economic crisis, and some complex negotiations on the terms of Sweden’s entry into the EU, the non-socialist government was out of office, and the Social Democrats returned to their customary power.
[3] This section is slightly revised from Zetterberg (1962, pp 54-61).

[4] This section is abridged and slightly revised from Zetterberg (1991).

	(a)	(b)			(c )
Institutional Realm	Institutional Value	Supplier Purveyor Receiver of Institutional Value			Mode of Stratification
Polity	Order	Ruler	Administrator	Subject	Power
Economy	Prosperity	Producer	Dealer	Consumer	Riches
Science	Knowledge	Scholar	Teacher	Student	Competence