The Application of Theory to Practice

1
The Application of Theory to Practice

• Theory is the formulation of thought about a
  specific discipline or subject
• Social theory is the formulation of thought in
  the social sciences
• Theory is made up of hypotheses or theses about
  specific aspects of a discipline
• Hypotheses (sing. hypothesis) or theses (sing.
  thesis) are the theoretical basis of research and
  teaching

2
Five examples

• Karl Marx
• Max Weber
• Emile Durkheim
• Alexandrov Vasilevich Chayanov
• de Haan et al. 2000

3
Sociology and Anthropology

• Sociology is the study of society
• (Latin societas (society) Greek logos (study
  or word)
• Anthropology is the study of man
• (Greek anthropos (man) Greek logos
• In the social scienes we talk about these and
  other disciplines
• Psychology the study of the mind
• (Greek Psyche (mind) Greek logos
• Demography the study of populations
• (Greek Demos (people) and graphos (writing or
  study)

4
Sociology

• Sociology is mainly the study of post-industrial
  society
• Sociologists study both rural and urban society
• They use both quantitative and qualitative
  research methods
• They study
• either systems and sub-systems of a particular
  society, or
• systems, such as farm households, which are
  common in all societies

5
Anthropology

• Anthropology is divided into
• physical anthropology, including forensic
  anthropology
• Social anthropology
• Cultural anthropology.
• In this course we are mainly concerned with
  social anthropology (the study of social man)

6
Social Anthropology

• In the social sciences anthropology has as its
  subject matter either
• simple or tribal societies in which the whole of
  society can be studied at the level of a village
  or
• a sub-system of such a society, such as kinship
  and marriage or the rural household
• or a sub-systems of an industrial society which
  can similarly be studied as a whole, for example
  a hospital or a factory, urban households or
  social networks.
• Anthropologists use mainly qualitative research
  but may also use quantitative methods such as
  socio-economic survey, household income and
  expenditure survey or labour use survey

7
Methods or Methodology

• Methods are the tools or instruments, such as
  socio-economic survey, which a social scientist
  uses in research
• A methodology is the combination of a hypothesis
  or thesis with a statement of the researchers
  methods and approach
• In explaining a methodology the researcher may
  refer to his or her assumptions or underlying
  assumptions

8
Corporate bodies

• Corporate bodies are social institutions which
• have a membership with known rights and
  obligations
• have authority which can be inherited unchanged
  when their membership changes
• maintain specific relationships with individuals
  or other corporate bodies
• Examples of corporate bodies are households,
  clans or tribal groups, cities and bureaucracies.

9
Households

• households are a form of corporate body based on
  kinship and economics
• the members of the household share a common set
  of resources including shelter (a house) and a
  source of livelihood such as a farm or a job or
  jobs
• they are under the authority of a household head
  who is usually the husband and father
• About one third of households in Cambodia are
  female headed households

10
Families

• In ordinary speech we speak about my family as
  having the same meaning as my household
• In sociology we say that a family is not a
  corporate group that it is a system or a network
  but that the family may provide the basis of a
  household
• Most often a household is a nuclear family,
  consisting of father mother and children
• A compound family is one with more than two
  generations, including grandparents, or including
  the spouse and children of a sibling or of
  affines, people related by marriage

11
City and State

• Maitland
• Plato The Republic
• Urbanism
• Metropolitanism
• Citizenship majorities and minorities

12
Status

• Status is a bundle of rights and obligations
  which society confers on and recognises in an
  individual
• Examples of status are
• father, mother, son, daughter
• bank manager
• student, teacher, professor

13
Role

• A role is the position occupied by a person or
  institution for specific purposes which may not
  be permanent.
• For example, we can say that
• when someone is buying a car he or she is
  performing the role of customer
• when someone is suffering from opression or
  persecution he or she is in the role of victim.
• However, role and status are often used
  interchangeably in sociology

14
Patron Client Relationships

• A patron client role relationship is one in which
  the dominant role is played by a patron who has
  power and resources to provide benefits and
  security to groups and individuals who attach
  themselves to him
• the client, such as a villager or a party member,
  is in a subordinate role, supports the patron and
  in turn receives protection and benefits from him.

15
The history of social theory 1. Comte

• Auguste Comte (1789-1857), who we think of as the
  founder of sociology, was concerned in his
  writing with statics (order) and dynamics in
  society. He studied the foundations of social
  stability. He thought of society as being like
  an organism in biology such as the human body.
• Comte stated that the statical study of
  sociology consists in the investigation of the
  laws of action and reaction of different parts of
  the social system. A lack of harmony between
  the whole and the parts of the social system was
  pathological.

16
Herbert Spencer

• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) wrote that the social
  system had evolved by differentiation. By
  differentiation Spencer meant the mutual
  dependence of unlike parts of the system, which
  he thought was brought about inevitably by an
  increase in the size of society. He taught that
  this evolution in the structure of society was
  brought about by psychological forces through the
  individuals search for happiness.

17
Emile Durkheim

• Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is the most important
  forerunner of modern sociology and of
  functionalism. This is because of his major
  contribution not only to social theory but also
  to sociological research method. He taught that
  society should be studied comme une chose as
  social facts. He was concerned with the
  integration of people in society in what he
  called social solidarity, as the way in which
  social equilibrium is maintained.
• Durkheim said that social facts include laws,
  morals, customs, fashions, religious beliefs and
  practices and trends. Certain of these social
  facts are institutons, by which he meant
  beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the
  collectivity.

18
Emile Durkheim (continued)

• Durkheim defined sociology as the science of
  institutions, their genesis and their
  functioning
• In The Rules of the Sociological Method
  Durkheim describes functions as general needs of
  the social organism. He says that social facts
  have to be explained by social rather than
  non-social causes.
• He used this approach in his great work
  Suicide, in which he made use of social
  statistics, on the suicide rates of catholics and
  non-catholics in Switzerland, to explain the
  causes of suicide that is basing his
  conclusions on social facts rather than on
  individual causes of suicide

19
Emile Durkheim (continued)

• Durkheims The Elementary Forms of the Religious
  Life analyses religion in tribal societies as
  acting to integrate people into society through
  its institution of common values and
  identification of membership of society and
  social groups with a god or gods or religious
  spirits.
• Durkheim relates religious beliefs and practice
  with an explanation of widely shared conceptions
  of the good or beliefs that legitimize the
  existence and importance of specific social
  structures and the kinds of behaviour that
  transpire in social structure. This is now
  thought of as a functionalist explanation,
  followed in the work of social anthropologists
  such as Malinowksi and Radcliffe-Brown and to
  sociologists such as Talcott Parsons and Merton.

20
Karl Marx

• Karl Marx is regarded as the founder of a
  theoretical approach to social organisation
  referred to a conflict theory and which assumes a
  conflict between an upper ruling capitalist class
  or elite and a lower class of workers and
  peasants. He is also the author of a theory of
  dialectical process (an unavoidable conflict
  between opposed social forces) which will be
  enacted in the course of the industrialisation of
  nations, in which this struggle will inevitably
  lead to the victory of the workers and the fading
  away of the State. He and other conflict
  theorists are also noted for their ideological
  commitment to the class struggle, the struggle
  of the masses against capitalism, and for their
  belief that their sociology is a weapon which
  should be used in this struggle. Marx was, in
  keeping with this belief, also the author with
  Engels of the Communist Manifesto, which was the
  basis of the failed German revolution of 1848 and
  more lastingly of the Soviet Communist Revolution
  of 1917. Both his theoretical and his poltical
  influence continue to be importance throughout
  the world.

21
Max Weber (1861 to 1920)

• Max Weber shared with Marx a theoretical position
  founded on the belief that there is an economic
  or material foundation for social differentiation
  and social structure. However, he argued,
  especially in The Spirit of Capitalism and the
  Protestant Ethic that religious and other social
  and historical influences are equally if not more
  powerful in shaping social systems. He also
  conducted wide ranging and continuous research
  into social structures, including far-reaching
  research on bureaucracies and on authority
  systems, which still influence sociology into the
  21st Century. His analysis of the function of
  legitimacy in the structure and conduct of
  bureaucracies, and on charismatic, traditional
  and routinised sources of authority continues to
  be relevant to the work of sociologist in every
  society, including current research in Cambodia.

22
Alexander Vasilevich Chayanov (1888-1939)

• Chayanov is known not as a sociologist or
  anthropologist but as an agricultural scientist,
  but his Peasant Farm Organisation (1925, in
  Thorner ed. 1962) is a work of great importance
  in linking macro-economic theories of
  agricultural production with peasant farm
  economics and with the social determinants of
  Russian peasant farm production and household
  organisation. In it he demonstrated on the
  basis of socio-economic surveys conducted in a
  number of provinces of the Soviet Union that
  sustainability of livelihoods in the
  non-capitalised peasant farm household and the
  sustainability of the household itself were vital
  factors in their production systems. His work
  showed that in village surveys households could
  be seen to be at every stage of a developmental
  cycle in which the household was continuously
  renewed through social and economic systems in
  the community, regardless of profitability. He
  also showed that the productivity of the peasant
  household was based on its understanding and
  management of widely differing environmental,
  social and market conditions. His analysis of
  the developmental cycle in domestic groups
  predates that of UK anthropologists by thirty
  years.

23
(No Transcript)
24
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

• Malinowskis great contribution to the social
  sciences, and particularly to social
  anthropology, was his dedication to ethnography
  as an anthropological method. The depth and
  quality of his ethnographic material is such that
  anyone can read it and reach differing conclusion
  as to analyses of the social system and
  institutions which he describes. Malinowski
  first used the term functional for this kind of
  analysis of social institutions, which he
  borrowed from Durkheim.

25
Bronislaw Malinowski (continued)

• Malinowski described ritual exchanges of rare sea
  shells and other rare objects of the Trobriand
  Islanders which they undertook through long sea
  voyages to each others islands, visiting each
  neighbouring society over hundreds of miles.
  During these vists they exchanged these objects
  in what he described as the Kula Ring. He
  distinguished between ritual exchange, kula,
  and economic exchange, gimwali. The boats
  which they used were war canoes.
  Anthropologists describe this kind of ritual
  exchange as prestations, and see them as having a
  social function. The Kula Ring has been
  interpreted as a surrogate for war, as a way of
  social communication and exchange between
  otherwise distant peoples, and thus as a way of
  keeping the peace and avoiding war raids.

26
Marcel Mauss

• Marcel Mauss made an important contribution to
  social theory mainly through his book The Gift
  (Essai sur le Don 1950), which describes ritual
  exchanges, or prestation, in a number of
  societies, establishing the wide occurence of
  such exchanges as social institutions in
  societies all over the world. He analysed
  Malinowskis descripton of the Kula Ring among
  the Trobriand Islanders, but also the Potlach
  among American Indians, in which canoes, blankets
  and other valuable objects are given to or burnt
  in front of neighbouring chiefs, or as part of
  marriage or initiation ceremonies. Modern
  sociologists have similarly described birthday
  and Christmas, flower giving on St. Valentines
  Day, or other gift exchange events and ceremonies
  in modern industrial society as having a similar
  function.

27
Van Gennep

• Van Gennep is similarly mainly known for one
  major work, The Rites of Passage, in which he
  described and analysed ritual and ceremonial
  processes which universally mark changes of
  status in different societies. He describes how
  by means of ceremony and gifts baptism or other
  birth ceremonies change a newly born infant into
  becoming a socially acknowledged human being and
  member of the family how initiation changes a
  pubescent child into an adult how marriage
  changes a single man and woman into a married
  couple and unites their families and how a
  funeral changes a corpse into an ancestor. Van
  Genneps and Mausss work use ethnographic
  material from different societies to illustrate
  Durkheims functional analysis of religion as a
  universal process by which societies achieve
  cohesion and integration.

28
Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody

• Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody are Cambridge based
  social anthropologists whose contribution to
  social theory rests mainly on their analysis (in
  The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups
  1957), independently of Chayanovs work thirty
  years earlier, of the cyclical dimension in
  peasant or tribal agricultural households. This
  work was founded on Meyer Fortes analysis of
  Ashanti family systems in an article called Time
  and Social Structure, in which he showed that
  social time, the cyclical recreating of the
  kin-based social group through marriages,
  initiation ceremonies and funerals (establishing
  the dead as ancestral members of the group)
  should be understood as a basic principle on
  which the society maintains its continuity. In
  related work other anthropologists have shown how
  such a cycle is important in relating the
  economic and social continuity of the social
  group to the ways in which it maintains and
  protects its environment.

29
Example 1 of a methodology

• World Bank 2006 Justice for Peace study of
  Collective Grievances over Land and Local
  Governance in Cambodia, Annex F, section 1.2
• Diverse disciplines address the J4P teams
  underlying assumptions....this paper will draw on
  multiple bodies of literature. Anthropological
  texts, particularly field-based ethnographic
  research, have been used to achieve a level of
  depth and an understanding of village dynamics
  over time.....

30
Example 1 continued

• Sociological research has been used to examine
  disparities across geography and within various
  Cambodian regions. Political analyses, which
  themselves draw heavily from journalistic sources
  and key informant interviews, have been used to
  gauge the distribution of power over time and to
  better understand the post-Khmer Rouge era
  patronage system.

31
Example 1 continued

• Because this paper takes as its starting point
  the J4P teams initial analysis, it is restricted
  to an examination of primarily social phenomena
  macroeconomic issues and geopolitics, although
  they have undoubtedly played a role in Cambodias
  development process, are outside the scope of the
  study.

32
Example 1 continued

• Economic analysis, including the Banks own
  policy reports, have been used to contextualise
  findings evaluative reports by various
  development actors, including the Banks own
  monitoring and evaluation work, have been used to
  determine the effect of development assistance on
  social dynamics within the country. Finally
  historical sources have been used to illuminate
  changes in Cambodian society over time, with
  particular reference to power structures.

33
Social Theory Section 2 Major Theories
Structural Functional Theory

• Social Structure
• Societies are structured through
• Institutions and institutional relationships
• Personal statuses and inter-personal role
  relationships
• Corporate structures and corporate relationships

34
Social Institutions

• Social institutions include
• Political institutions
• Legal institutions
• Ritual or religious institutions
• Economic institutions
• Kinship and marriage institutions
• Educational institutions

35
Function

• Structural Functional theory states that
  institutions, corporate structures and statuses
  have functions in social systems
• the State is a corporate structure which
  functions to maintain government and citizenship
• marriage is an institution which functions to
  provide legitimacy to conjugal unions, children
  and nuclear families
• the status of father functions to confer
  authority over children.

36
Reciprocity

• Social relationships are said to be reciprocal,
  that is to have a two-way function.
• For example
• the role of father is reciprocated by the
  behaviour, rights and obligations of a son or
  daughter
• the role of husband is reciprocated by the
  behaviour, rights and obligations of a wife
• the role of salesman is reciprocated by the
  behaviour, rights and obligations of a customer

37
Social Theory of Religion

• Durkheim Suicide
• Max Weber The Protestant Ethic
• Marcel Mauss The Gift
• Van Gennep Rites of Passage
• Durkheim Elementary forms of the religious
  life
• Levi-Strausse Myth
• Tambiah

38
Prestation and economic exchange

• Bronislaw Malinowski The Kula Ring
• Potlatch
• Souy
• Fredrik Barth Spheres of Economic Exchange in
  Southern Dafur
• Raymond Firth Economic Anthropology

39
Time and Social Structure

• Max Weber
• A.V. Chayanov
• Meyer Fortes
• J.R. Goody (ed)

40
Conflict and Dialectical Theory

• Fredrik Barth
• Karl Marx

41
Social Theory 3 Contemporary Issues Applying
Social Theory

• Applied Sociology and Applied Anthropology
• Applied sociology and anthropology deal with
  problems rather than theoretical issues
• Because problems, e.g. in rural development or
  health care, are often outside the box and
  inter-disciplinary, they may challenge existing
  method and theory
• In doing so they may advance the science

42
Poverty and Social Exclusion

• Defining poverty internationally and in
  Cambodia
• Defining social exclusion
• Poverty reduction
• Means of escape from poverty

43
Bureaucracies

• One form of corporate body which has an important
  function in modern industrial society is a
  bureaucracy
• Bureaucracies as described by Max Weber are
• directed by explicit rules impersonally
  applied, staffed by full-time, life-time,
  professionals, who do not own the means of
  administration, or their jobs, or the sources of
  their funds, and live off a salary, not from
  income derived directly from the performance of
  their job (Kilcullen 1996)

44
Why bureaucracies matter

• Bureaucracies, such as banks and civil service
  departments or the police force, matter because
  they function, fairly and impartially, to
  administer legally created systems on which a
  modern social system and a modern economy depend

45
Why they matter in Cambodia

• A recent study of disputes over land acquisition
  in Cambodia has argued that the senior government
  officials concerned and thus the departments they
  represented do not conform to the model of a
  modern bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber
• they are part-time officials on very small
  salaries, dependent for their income on other
  sources, which affects the way they conduct their
  jobs, they operate as if owning the means of
  administration, and do so in a way which is not
  explicit or impersonally applied
• as a result they do not administer land disputes
  in accordance with the land law
• (World Bank and Centre for Advanced Study
  October 2006)

46

• Policies should be sensitive to informal
  institutions that structure migration processes,
  because they may provide an opportunity for
  policies that aim to support livelihoods. For
  example, by providing information about migration
  opportunities, facilitating remittances, and
  enhancing their productive impact.
• Often-large spatial dimensions underly many
  livelihoods, though usually less so for poorer
  households.
• 1 summarised in Arjan de Haan et al. 2000