There’s No Such Thing as Society
Everything around us from our devices and gadgets we cannot live without to factories and corporations is our society. Peoples’ behavior, interactions, and choices form, or construct, the society. At the same time, the society through the social structure with norms and regulations has its own significant effect on people. It means that society forms the way people think, determine their role in society, the way people imagine themselves and the way they are perceived and understood by others. Actually, people don't usually ask how works society and do not question their behavior and choices they made every day, thinking it is just natural until they face other societies with different rules and norms. Erickson et al., (2009) explain that people’s not questioning the processes that take place within society because, first of all, the society is so deeply embedded in people’s minds that it is very difficult to confront the reality, and, secondly, confronting the reality means challenging the sense of security (Erickson et al., 2009).
Thus, people don't think about which type of society they live in, simply taking it for granted. However, different sociologists to explain how the things work and interact created social typologies to categorize different societies. To pictures societies and categorize the social scientists tried to find central characteristics or features and find out how they differ. For instance, Marx classified societies based on the organization of the production systems within societies, and Durkheim categorized them based on such features as social cohesion. Basically, they both used different but equally valid approaches to compare and categorize societies (Understanding societies: from capitalism to post-modernism, 2009).
In fact, the societies have been classified into three types: 1) traditional with farmers and peasants as core workers; 2) industrial with core male factory workers; 3) post-industrial core workers female service-sector workers (Understanding societies: from capitalism to post-modernism, 2009).
It should be highlighted that the way people organize their working relationships has always been paid attention to by social scientists. People tend to perceive the world of work and business as something that is rooted only in the economic activities and something that has its own rationality and logic. However, if to go deeper, it will appear that it is not a separate sphere with its own mechanisms. The world of business and work is structured by social forces that are external to it, and at the same time, this world is responsible for structuring and constructing the great part of the surrounding society (Erickson et al., 2009).
It is worth mentioning some contributions made by social scientists as the concepts they offered definitely influenced our understanding of the society functions.
One of the most famous social scientists is Marx, who actually was the first to investigate the social aspect, not economic, of consequences of capitalism. He divided the society into two great classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and Marx characterized the society by a conflict between the two competing above-mentioned classes. Actually, one may say that we can divide our society into other categories such as the upper, middle and working classes, the self-employed and professionals. However, these categories have descriptive nature and even today anyone falls in into one or other greater social class (the bourgeoisie or the proletariat) based on their position in the society (Erickson et al., 2009).
As it was already mentioned, Marx categorized societies based on the production systems. He determined any object before us as material production. According to Marx, the producing individual is not only “a social animal” but an “animal that can be individuated only within society”, and, generally, “production by an isolated individual outside the society is a rare event”. That’s why we can say that everything around us, including our devices, is our society (Marx, 1976).
Moving to the Durkheim's concept, it also has an organization of work and employment as a key component to understanding the society. Durkheim's sociological text "The Division of Labour" describes the transformation of the simple agrarian societies into much more complex industrial societies. Basically, Durkheim put consensus at the heart of the society, not the process like Marx did. Durkheim believed that the society is based on the shared moral order, in the center of which the division of labor, according to which each member of the society has their own task (Erickson et al., 2009).
Durkheim paid attention to the fact that division of labor is not only about economic life, as it has the influence on different areas of the society. For example, in the political, judicial, administrative spheres, as well as in the sphere of art and sciences the functions has become more and more specialized. Generally, Durkheim saw society in the collective and organic solidarity (Durkheim, Coser, and Hall, 1984).
Max Weber’s interpretive sociology worth paying attention to either. He just sees people in terms of how they do things, as they all do them in different ways. In other words, he pays attention to the meaning of people’s action and tries to understand the values people believe in. According to Weber, the actor attaches a certain meaning to their actions. Therefore, Weber analyses the meaning of human social actions, or, in other words, anything that takes place in the social context has attached meaning. Thus, he breaks sown human social actions into four ideal types: 1) rational action in relation to a goal, i.e. there's a goal and a person chooses a rational means to achieve it; 2) rational action in relation to value, i.e. that person may not choose the most rational means to achieve the goal, but will choose a means that won't confront the system of values he belongs to; 3) affective of emotional action, i.e. non-rational actions; 4) traditional actions, i.e. that actions have always been carried out this way like habits and customs. In a nutshell, Weber's theory means that the society is made up of all types of human social action, and people act and think in certain ways, the most obvious of which is rationality and rationalization, which in turn make social classes, legal systems, governments, etc. (Erickson et al., 2009).
These are three fundamental frameworks explaining how our society works from different angles. They are different, and one cannot say that one theory is correct and the other two is not, simply just because they are equally valid. Moreover, there are other theories that explain some processes and phenomenon in our societies like feminism, for example, or new postmodern sociological theories focus on individuals, consumption, discourse and language which, according to postmodernists, constructs the world around us and it cannot be understood in the same way in all places and times, as words change their meanings and connotations depending where, when and by whom they are used.
All above mentioned theories demonstrate indeed how complex is our society and highlight the fact that people are not likely to analyze their behavior patterns and question why they do in this or that way. However, they perfectly show that everything can be explained and categorized, as society is so deeply embedded in our minds.
Moreover, there are of course, other processes that influence and cause changes in the societies as our world is developing and is an ever-lasting progress. Today, there’s hardly a person who will say that our world hasn’t changed and there’s no influence of globalization. It goes without saying, that globalization, first of all, causes changes in the world of work and business, moving social relationships from a national to international level. Together with globalization go alongside such concepts as neoliberalism and knowledge-based economy, feminization and migration.
Neo-liberalism is worth paying attention to. Generally, the main idea rooted in this concept is market economy. Obviously, there are other key elements in theses concept.
The concept has three aspects: political, social and economic. The problem of this concept is not rooted in the idea of how to contrive a free space of the market within the given political society. The actual problem of neo-liberalism is projecting principles of a market economy on to a general art of government. It should be mentioned that issue of the social policy within the context of neo-liberalism is limited to the economic growth. As only economic growth should enable individuals to reach the needed level of income to afford themselves to have the insurance, access to the private property and “individual or familial capitalization” to absorb risks (Foucault and Burchell, 2008).
As for globalization, social scientists describe globalization as shrinking time and space as there appear free movement of products, goods and labor among countries. Of course, globalization has brought many issues such as how national cultures can confront mass culture? what migration will bring? how states can preserve maximum control on their economies?, etc. These issues can be explained by the fear of change, as now we can watch the process of change in our society, as people construct now new society expanding their social relationships and actions to the international level, and at the same time the changed society influences us making us choose and act in a particular way, that 20 years ago or even more was hardly imaginable (Societies and change: globalization and the knowledge-based economy, 2009).
Actually, but for the obliteration of the indigenous cultures there are other concerns related to globalization such as destruction of the environment and exploitation of the week. The cause of these consequences is unbridled capitalism, which representatives of the Left views stick too. There also the Right has rather xenophobic view highlighting the negative side of migration. Economists, of course, see the nice face of globalization in terms of the development in the technological and, as consequence, economic sphere. Today, the key elements of globalization are free market, privatization, “less government” and the like. Globalization tries to promote corporate profit-making and political power as normal affairs.
In general, the last two decades of globalization didn’t show great success in terms of convergence between rich and poor countries. The attempt to explain divergence by eliminating countries carrying out “bad policies” and focusing on those with “good policies” failed, as the successful countries like China, in fact did not follow the economic advice (Milanovic, 2003).
References
Durkheim, É., Coser, L.A. and Hall, W.D. (1984) The division of labour in society. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Erickson, M., Stephenson, C., Bradley, H. and Williams, S. (2009) Business in society: People, work and organizations. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Erickson, M., Stephenson, C., Bradley, H. and Williams, S. (2009) 'Societies and change: globalization and the knowledge-based economy', in Business in society: People, work and organizations. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Erickson, M., Stephenson, C., Bradley, H. and Williams, S. (2009) ‘Understanding societies: from capitalism to post-modernism’, in Business in society: People, work and organizations. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Foucault, M. and Burchell, G. (2008) The birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the college de France, 1978-1979. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson and Michel Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marx, K. (1976) Preface and introduction to a contribution to the critique of political economy. Available at: http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/PI.html#s1 (Accessed: 8 May 2016).
Milanovic, B. (2003) ‘The two face of Globalization: Against as we know it’, World Development, 31(4), pp. 667–683.
