Social Process and social systems

1
Social Process and social systems

• How do individuals create society?

2
Classical and Contemporary theorists all stress
that I S

• Marx
• Durkheim
• Weber
• Parsons
• Mills
• Ch. 13 discusses Parsons (Sculli), Coleman,
  Habermas, Wallerstein and Tilly

3
Habermas

• The most widely read social theorist in Europe
• Combines sociology and philosophy
• Calls himself a Marxist
• Combines Marx with Parsons
• Main center of Critical theory, aka Frankfurt
  school theory, aka critical Marxism.
• Supporters currently trying to chance the name of
  the Marxist section of the ASA.

4
The ideal speech situation

• Critical theorists are, in general, democratic
  socialists, but they are not simply democrats
  because Nazis and fascists may have a majority.
• The ideal speech situation says that the truth is
  what people would agree too in an unconstrained
  situation of open discussion and access.
• They argue that issues of right and beauty are
  similar.
• Communicative ethics involves a complex
  development of these ideas.

5
Who said,

• Human beings have the ability to dream better
  futures than we have yet succeeded in dreaming.
  We have the ability to create much better
  societies than we have yet succeeded in
  creating.
• Joe Feagins Presidential ASA address 2001

6
How is society different from the solar system?

• In general, the solar system is a closed system
  that merely repeats a set of dynamic motions,
  indefinitely.
• From the knowledge of planets position and
  trajectory at any instant, positions can be
  predicted indefinitely into the past or future.
• Although even the solar system is subject to
  chaos and to external effects.

7
Chaos

• Lorentz showed that weather systems are not like
  this.
• A mathematical replication consisting of three
  simple equations never repeats,
• And, when entered into the computer again,
  produces a different trajectory,
• Due to deterministic chaos
• The butterfly effect.

8
The butterfly effect

• If a system contains many amplifiers, then a
  force as weak as the wave of a butterflys wing
  in Brazil may generate a force as strong as a
  hurricane in the North Atlantic a month later.
• Systems containing amplifiers (positive
  feedbacks) and dampers (negative feedbacks) will
  usually be chaotic.

9
Positive feedbacks

• It is positive feedbacks that tend especially to
  amplify the effects of individual action, and
  therefore to make outcomes open.
• Positive feedbacks often generate systems
  governed by the Matthew Principle that operate
  like a game of Monopoly, generating inequality
  and discontinuities.
• This is one of the insights of conflict theory.

10
Negative Feedbacks

• Negative feedbacks tend to act as controls and
  thermostats, fastening the system or parts of it
  into temporarily stable configurations.
• The pervasiveness of negative feedbacks is one of
  the insights of functional theory.

11
Positive feedbacks in Myrdals An American Dilemma

• cumulative causation

Minority deprivation

Majority racism



Minority deprivation
12
Negative feedback in Myrdal

Violation of the American Creed of equal
opportunity, etc
Institutionalized, systemic racism
-

• Myrdal believed that the conflict of the dynamics
  of cumulative causation with normative, moral
  development towards an open, universalistic
  society creates a dilemma

13
Interpretations of Myrdal

• In a complex system of feedbacks, one can get
  very different dynamics by emphasizing different
  causal influences.
• Feagin believes Myrdal overestimated the openness
  of the American Creed and underestimated the
  importance of struggles.
• I.e. it was the ghetto rebellions, not white
  liberals that generated Civil Rights.

14
Positive Feedbacks in Feagin
Unjust enrichment

Institutionalized racism and sexism



Unjust impoverishment
15
Negative feedbacks in Feagin
The dialectical process by which such structures
of oppression generate their own opposition and
nemesis

Institutionalized inequality
Struggle and opposition
-
16
Braithwaite and Wilson

• Both theories are represented as a causal model
  without significant feedbacks.
• Try to figure out in what ways they reflect the
  concerns of classical sociological theory
• and in what ways their actual dynamic is a
  feedback dynamic,
• leading to partially chaotic social process.

17
The Durkheimian core of Braithwaite

• The effects of being male, adolescent, unmarried,
  unemployed, or not hooked into a career are what
  Durkheim called egoism a lack of social bonds.
• The effects of urbanism and mobility are what
  Durkheim called anomie, or weakening of social
  norms.
• Social bonds and social norms reinforce each
  other.

18
The central positive feedbacks
Association with other criminals

Crime (and punishment)



Stigmatization and labeling
19
The central negative feedbacks


crime
Strict punishment
-

Stronger norms
20
Net effects

• The funny box in the lower left is Braithwaites
  attempt to get the best of both worlds.
• He believes that strict punishment is needed to
  re-establish norms (reducing crime) but at the
  same time it reinforces labeling and stigmatized
  identity.
• He thinks the Japanese criminal justice system is
  particularly good at punishing and then
  re-integrating, and that we need to learn from
  them.

21
The Marxian core of Wilson

• Its jobs, stupid!
• The underclass is generated by class.
• He believes that the structure of
  institutionalized, cumulative inequality has lead
  to job flight, which then generated a deviant
  subculture of broken families and social
  isolation from job skills.

22
Some positive feedbacks
Concentrated poverty and powerlessness

Creation of weak labor force attachment and
underclass culture.


Unemployment and job flight

23
Some negative feedbacks in A Bridge over the
Racial Divide

Opportunity to build an alliance around full
employment policies
Structures of class and race inequality