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Principles of Macrosociology
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. — martin h. fischer
Modern macrosociologists still tend to be deeply rooted in the clas- sical social theories of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Herbert Spencer.^1 While many specialists in social theory like to emphasize the differences among macrosociological perspectives, the various theories actually share much common ground. They agree, for example, that the sociological world view differs from psychology, which puts great emphasis upon early socialization, indi- vidual motivation, and personal control over behaviour. It differs from the biological and medical views of human behaviour, which stress physiological and genetic predisposition. All of these factors are important, most sociologists would concede, but there is some- thing more. Human behaviour, attitudes, and beliefs are profoundly affected by the groups and organizations in which people interact and the sociocultural system in which they are embedded. But the theories of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Spencer—as refi ned and elaborated by many contemporary macro theorists—share a good
8 Sociocultural Systems
deal more common ground than even this; they overlap in ways that have until now been minimized or ignored. Macrosociology is the study of large-scale organizations, socio- cultural systems, or the world system of societies. All four of the classical sociologists named above began from a macro perspec- tive. Macrosociology should not be considered just another spe- cialty within sociology. It is not a specialty; it is the holistic view of a sociologist’s subject matter, the overall framework within which the specialties exist. Macro social theory seeks to unite numerous empirical observations and middle-range theories into a single, test- able, explanatory framework. It is important that the field not be taken over by specialists, that macrosociology retain its role as an integrating mechanism to organize and inform the world view of all sociologists. There is a pull toward almost inevitable specialization in the modern world. As knowledge and techniques proliferate, soci- ety responds by breaking them up into supposedly discrete fields, encouraging individuals to specialize and ignore the whole. This is a disaster for the social sciences since so many of the disciplines them- selves are based upon the influence of the sociocultural system on various parts of that system, and ultimately on individual behaviour and beliefs. A reading of introductory sociology textbooks reveals the curious state of the discipline. The books usually mention the founders of the discipline. Each was a macro-level theorist, concerned with whole sociocultural systems—their origin, maintenance, and change—and how they affected human behaviours and beliefs. Our introductory texts briefly paraphrase these theories, mention how they differ from one another (confl ict, functionalism, symbolic interaction, etc.), and then largely ignore them as the focus shifts to individual special- ties—stratification, deviance, organizations, medical—within the discipline. What is lost in these textbooks, what has been lost in the discipline itself, is the fact that these macro theories actually have much in common. A close reading of the classical literature, as well as the more recent literature in that tradition, reveals that there is substantial overlap in their analyses, considerable agreement on the
10 Sociocultural Systems
between the two tasks. Even social theorists themselves are guilty of this. Most authors are attempting to convince readers of the right- ness of their own views and to make unique contributions to the theoretical literature. Consequently, they have a tendency to gloss over the fi ner points of rival theorists and then critique them on fail- ing to recognize these points. Marvin Harris, a fierce advocate for his brand of cultural materialism, was often accused of doing this, and he received much return fi re from critics who would similarly misrepresent his theories through oversimplification. The need to be unique may also explain the tendency of many theorists to coin their own terms, thus making common language between different theoretical schools more difficult. The fact that the classical theorists (as well as some contemporaries) are over-fond of coining their own terminology is a significant factor in the seeming incompatibility of social theories. Social theories, then, are often portrayed (and criticized) as mere caricatures of themselves: Karl Marx is overstated to the point where he denies the importance of all non-economic factors in explain- ing social life; Max Weber portrayed as a hopeless idealist in which the Protestant ethic is the sole cause of capitalism; Marvin Harris represented as a “vulgar materialist” who failed to recognize any role for social structure or ideology in social life; T. Robert Malthus depicted as a near idiot who failed to realize that agricultural produc- tion could expand with improvements in technology; and Gerhard Lenski described as a technological determinist who failed to con- sider population pressure and structural and cultural factors in his theories. Consequently, the predominant view within the discipline is that these macro theories are mutually exclusive; that sociology is a “multi-paradigm” enterprise consisting of several contradictory and competing perspectives about the nature of the social world. However, if one reads macro social theory with an eye toward integration and synthesis, one fi nds few areas in which the classical theorists contradict one another; their differences are more matters of emphasis and focus, and they are, in fact, perfectly compatible with one another. Furthermore, many of their theories have much
Principles of Macrosociology 11
in common. C. Wright Mills (1959, 6–7) outlines three broad ques- tions addressed by classically rooted sociological analysis: (1) What is the overall structure of the society and its component parts? How are these parts interrelated? And how does this structure and dynamic differ from those of other societies? (2) How is this soci- ety rooted in history? What are its major mechanisms of change? (3) What kinds of men and women are coming to prevail in this society? “In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted?” Macrosociology is guided by seven principles in seeking to address Mills’s excellent questions: (1) a pronounced systemic/functional analysis; (2) a view that empha- sizes a strong materialist-behavioural influence on social structure; (3) an evolutionary view of change; (4) an emphasis upon the impact of social structure (groups and organizations) on human beliefs, values, and attitudes; (5) true to systems theory form, the reciprocal influence of these cultural ideals on structures and material culture; (6) a concern with the endemic inequality within structures; and (7) a rich tradition of comparative historical data that are used to test its generalizations.
SYSTEMIC / FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS
Although it is often overlooked, downplayed, or so ubiquitous as to go unobserved, the systemic character of all macrosociology simply cannot be denied. It is, indeed, the very defi nition of the sociological enterprise itself. Years ago, I wrote a book that attempted to apply the anthropological theory of cultural materialism as propounded by Marvin Harris (1979) to contemporary American society. The book fi rst outlined Harris’s “universal structure” of sociocultural systems—infrastructure (production and population), structure (primary and secondary groups, with some modification of Harris’s perspective), and superstructure (knowledge base, ideas, religious beliefs, ideologies)—and then explained the dynamics of recent cultural change in terms of the theory. For a variety of reasons,
Principles of Macrosociology 13
the interests and needs of individuals or constituent groups—some of whom have more social, political, and economic power than others. Therefore, not all needs are addressed equally. The fact that society is an imperfect system also means that confl ict is a normal feature of all societies. However, it is still a sociocultural system , and as such there must be enough co-operation among the members of the soci- ety for the system to maintain itself. Sociocultural systems consist of three types of phenomena: mate- rial, structural, and ideational. Material phenomena have a physical presence that can be readily observed: they consist of such observ- able facts as the physical environment, population and its charac- teristics (size, age and sex ratios, birth and death rates), and the technologies used to exploit the physical environment or to control population growth and level. Social structural phenomena refer to all human groups and organizations. At a broad level of abstrac- tion, examples of social structure include government, economic, and family systems. At a level closer to home, social structure refers to observable groups such as families, corporations, educational institutions, the military, and community organizations. Finally, ide- ational components of the sociocultural system comprise the values, norms, ideologies, religious beliefs, and other symbolic items present in all societies. I often think of such cultural items as the (mostly) shared sense of reality that members of a sociocultural system have about the world and their role in it. The basics of this symbolic map of reality that each of us carries in our head are developed in our early socialization and are continually refi ned and shaped throughout our lives in interaction with others. All human societ- ies—prehistorically, historically, and in the present—are made up of these three components. All three affect one another as well as the overall sociocultural system. Functional analysis is a natural consequence of thinking of soci- ety as a system. It is simply the analysis of sociocultural phenomena for their effects on other phenomena and on the sociocultural system as a whole. The functional orientation has long been implicit in biol- ogy and physiology, whose practitioners also see their subject matter
14 Sociocultural Systems
in systemic terms. Within biology, for example, part of the study of an individual animal species includes its function in the entire ecological system—its impact on the environment, competing spe- cies, and predators. Social scientists as seemingly diverse as Malthus, Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber have also engaged in func- tional analysis in describing the interrelationships among sociocul- tural phenomena. Malthus wrote of the relationship of sexual mores and marriage patterns to population pressures; Marx, of the control of production resources and its relationship to exploitation, domi- nant ideologies, and eventual revolution; Weber, of the relationship between the rise of the Protestant ethic and the origins of capital- ism; 3 and Durkheim, of the overall functions of criminal behaviour. Spencer ([1876] 1967, 8) was clearest about the necessity of functional analysis in the opening lines of his Principles of Sociology : “There can be no true conception of a structure without a true conception of its function. To understand how an organization originated and devel- oped, it is requisite to understand the need subserved at the outset and afterwards.” Contemporary macro theorists continue to write in functional terms, exploring ways in which social phenomena affect one another and the whole. Contemporary functional analysis does not hold that all preva- lent activities relate positively to the social whole.^4 Many cultural items can have positive functions for some groups within a socio- cultural system and negative functions (called “dysfunctions”) for others. There are power differentials in all societies, and sociocul- tural forms that benefit powerful groups (or elites) may well have dysfunctions for other groups within the system—or even negative consequences on the system as a whole. In practice, many items have multiple consequences—both negative and positive—for the system as a whole and for groups within the system. While it is likely that all widespread and persisting sociocultural phenomena have a net balance of positive functions for the whole or for elite groups, this is an empirical question and not a theoretical given. In functional analysis, it is important to specify the groups for which a given sociocultural item is functional.
16 Sociocultural Systems
babies, population pressure, or the relaxation of society’s condemna- tion but rather with her pride in who and what she was. Harris was speaking the language of functions; the young lady was speaking of personal motives. Several other points of interest about Harris’s example touch upon the nature of functional analysis. By discussing the relationship between population pressure and attitudes and laws regarding homo- sexuality, Harris was not commenting on the morality of homosexu- ality or on the fairness of the laws condemning the practice; rather, he was claiming only that there is a functional relationship between population level and prohibitions against homosexuality. Nor was Harris saying that population pressure was the only cultural item affecting attitudes and laws regarding homosexuality. As a systems theorist, he was well aware of multiple relationships within sociocul- tural systems that included material, structural, and ideational forces. Nor was Harris saying that population pressure was uppermost in the minds of opinion makers in motivating them to ease up on restrictions on and condemnation of homosexuality; he was simply arguing that the functional relationship between population pressure and homo- sexuality created a climate in which a relaxation of the prohibitions fit with other system changes. Finally, it should be noted that while attitudes and laws condemning homosexuality were once functional for the entire sociocultural system in the West, they were dysfunc- tional to a significant portion of the population, thus creating strain (tension, contradictions), and ultimately overt confl ict, within the system. Population pressure, then, had little to do with the motiva- tion of homosexuals to come out of the closet and openly advocate for equal rights, but it had much to do with the success of this movement. It was when the prohibition was no longer functional for the system as a whole—no longer in the interest of elites to promote population growth or for the masses to have large numbers of children—that the conflict became active and the relaxation of the prohibitions began.^5 There are times, however, when functions and motives are one and the same, and this seems especially true when government is consciously considering reform. Manifest functions are those
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objective consequences that are intended by the participants in the system. Latent functions are those consequences that are unintended and often unrecognized by participants. It is through the concept of latent functions that one can begin to understand the seemingly irrational and non-rational qualities of many social practices. Robert Merton ([1948] 1968, 118) uses the Hopi rain dance as an example in this regard. From all outward appearances, the rain dance is a non- rational ceremony whose manifest function, to bring rain to a given area, is clearly not achieved.
Thus, the Hopi ceremonials designed to produce abundant rainfall may be labeled a superstitious practice of primitive folk and that is assumed to conclude the matter. It should be noted that this in no sense accounts for the group behavior. It is simply a case of name- calling; it substitutes the epithet “superstition” for an analysis of the actual role of this behavior in the life of the group. Given the concept of latent function, however, we are reminded that this behavior may perform a function for the group, although this func- tion may be quite remote from the avowed purpose of the behavior.
If the ceremony is unconnected to its avowed purpose of bringing rain, why then does it persist in Hopi culture? What latent func- tions does it serve for the group? Merton answers (in the tradition of Émile Durkheim) that the dance serves group unity: it fulfi lls “the latent function of reinforcing the group identity by providing occa- sion on which the scattered members of a group assemble to engage in common activity” (118–19). In chapter 2 of this book, we will examine the functions of a growing gross domestic product in a society. The two primary mani- fest functions, of course, are to provide ever greater material wealth to the elites in a society and, through the presumed “trickle down” process, creature comforts to the masses. The latent functions and dysfunctions, as we will see, are legion. The most important advantage to the distinction between latent and manifest functions is that it encourages systemic thinking. Most
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are promoting, and others resisting, changes through direct coercion on politicians who would institute the changes or through indirect persuasion of these government officials via advertising and other forms of propaganda. As of this writing, it is unclear whether sub- stantial change will be achieved; much depends on the weight of evi- dence behind the functional analysis of health care, but even more depends on the political and economic power of the groups who are promoting and opposing the reforms.
MATERIAL / BEHAVIOURAL CONDITIONS
The fact that almost all macrosociologists root their analyses in ma- terial conditions is often overlooked. While their theories frequently focus on stability and change in social structures, as well as on the in- fluence of social structure on ideas and behaviour, the founders gen- erally view social structure and changes in that structure as ultimate- ly the product of material circumstances. For example, Durkheim ([1893] 1997, 336–37) argues that cultural advancement (“civiliza- tion”) results from the increased specialization made possible by the division of labour, which is itself caused by changes in the “volume” and “density” of societies—that is, by population pressure:
Civilization is itself the necessary consequence of the changes which are produced in the volume and in the density of societies. If science, art, and economic activity develop, it is in accord- ance with a necessity which is imposed upon men. It is because there is, for them, no other way of living in the new conditions in which they have been placed. From the time that the number of individuals among whom social relations are established begins to increase, they can maintain themselves only by greater specializa- tion, harder work, and intensification of their faculties. From this general stimulation, there inevitably results a much higher degree of culture. From this point of view, civilization appears, not as an end which moves people by its attractions for them, not as a good
20 Sociocultural Systems
foreseen and desired in advance, of which they seek to assure themselves the largest possible part, but as the effect of a cause, as the necessary resultant of a given state. It is not the pole towards which historic development is moving and to which men seek to get nearer in order to be happier or better, for neither happiness nor morality necessarily increases with the intensity of life. They move because they must move, and what determines the speed of this march is the more or less strong pressure which they exercise upon one another, according to their number.
Herbert Spencer, of course, built most of his evolutionary theory around increases in population level through either natural popula- tion growth or conquest. Marx’s historical materialism is also widely known in the sociological literature, as expressed in his well-known maxim: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” (Marx [1859] 1911, 11–12). Marx’s primary causal variables are subsumed under his concept of “mode of pro- duction,” which appears to include both the “forces” of production (technology and division of labour, which are material factors) and “relations” of production (economic relations, such as feudalism or capitalism, which are structural). With few exceptions, macrosociol- ogists very quickly recognized that material factors are the necessary foundations of sociocultural systems. Max Weber is, unfortunately, often perceived to be one of the exceptions. Weber is known as an idealist in many quarters, since he asserts that ideas (such as the Protestant ethic and rationalization) are pri- mary causes of structural and material changes. This, however, is misleading, for Weber is a systems theorist who always traces a web of multiple causation, giving significant weight in his historical analysis to institutional, ideational, and material factors, depending upon the particular phenomenon under study. For example, in Weber’s analy- sis of the origins of capitalism, he gives significant weight to such technological factors as transportation, communications, coinage, writing, and record keeping. These technological factors, he argues,
22 Sociocultural Systems
cultural superstructures are in constant interaction. With regard to the origin of capitalism, these factors would include the geographical conditions of Western Europe; the dissolution of feudalism; the rise of the nation-state; the division of political authority among church, nobility, king, and merchants; the plunder of the Americas; and Weber’s Protestant ethic and the rise of rationalism. But while the full exploration of sociocultural system interactions makes for good ethnography and history, it makes for poor social theory. The goal of social theory is not to detail every conceivable relationship but to provide a concise world view that summarizes, orders, and weighs what appear to be the most important relation- ships among sociocultural phenomenon. Part of the futility of the debate between materialists and idealists is that material and ideal conditions are in constant interaction with one another and it is therefore extremely difficult to demonstrate causal priority. In addi- tion, our concepts and measures of social processes simply are not precise enough to establish clear priority—a necessary precondi- tion for establishing causality. Terms like industrialism , bureaucracy , capitalism , Industrial Revolution , democracy , rationalization , and the Protestant ethic are all treated as things or singular events when in fact the terms are abstractions of social processes with only a tenuous reference to reality. The Industrial Revolution, for example, is an arbitrary construct used by social scientists, journalists, and lay people alike. There is no one event that marks its beginning or ending except as defi ned by social consensus: it is not a thing but an abstraction that we use to break the continuous world of reality into pieces that we can manip- ulate. Like other forms of technology, these abstractions have a totalitarian character: they tend to simplify by arbitrarily leaving out complexity. For example, many argue that the acceleration of indus- trial activity started well before the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury (the beginning date cited by most); some mark the beginning of the revolution as the mid–sixteenth century or even earlier (Nolan and Lenski 2011, 188–94). However, most continue to associate its beginning with inventions such as the steam engine, mechanization
Principles of Macrosociology 23
of textile manufacturing, and innovation and expansion of the iron industry—the technological changes, in other words, that brought on the fundamental transformation to modern industrial forms. While we mark the initial phase as beginning in the mid–eighteenth century, it is important to keep in mind that we are dealing with a gradually intensifying process that occurred over generations (and is still ongoing), not with a discrete event. Technological innovations (such seemingly simple devices and practices as horse collars and three-field rotation) were producing food surpluses (and stimulating population growth) as early as the ninth century. These new methods affected structures and cultural values—and were affected by them— long before what we generally call the Industrial Revolution. By rei- fying the Industrial Revolution—that is, by considering the term as a thing in social reality rather than understanding it as a construct that arbitrarily labels a part of a continuous process of technological development—we are seriously misleading ourselves. The arbitrary nature of our abstractions of social phenomena prevent the type of testable precision called for by this theoretical disagreement. Since materialist theory cannot be conclusively demonstrated empirically, the strongest argument of the materialist can only be one of logic. Why should material conditions be given priority over social structure and cultural elements? The reason rests on the fact that we are physical beings who depend on obtaining food, clothing, and shelter from the environment in order to survive. It is through regu- lating population level (by means of Malthusian preventive and posi- tive checks, which lower the birth rate and increase the death rate, respectively) and through production technologies and practices that all societies manipulate their environments in order to regulate the amount and type of energy needed for survival. The aim of social science, Marvin Harris (1979, 57) tells us, is to discover the “maxi- mum amount of order.” The environment places severe constraints on human societies. It is population and production that are most directly affected by these constraints, and it is also through popula- tion and production that these constraints are stretched or modi- fied. To say that ideas and ideologies are central in explaining human
Principles of Macrosociology 25
cumulative change is a process that combines elements of continuity with elements of change; many parts of the system are preserved for extended periods while new parts are added and other parts are either replaced or transformed. Cumulative change is also a process in which the characteristics of a system at any single point in time have a significant impact on the system and its characteristics at successive times.” External stimulus for change in a sociocultural system stems from change in its natural and social environments. Internal stimulus for change stems from the cumulative process of change itself. New technologies or structural or cultural elements are added to old; rarely are old elements discarded completely, although they are often modi- fied to accommodate innovation in other parts of the system. Rather than relying on genetic change to encode and pass on adaptations to future generations, human populations have evolved culture. This has proven to be a much more rapid and broader trans- mission process, and it has had significant effects upon the speed and direction of sociocultural change.^6 Thus, macrosociological theory is both material and historical in character: sociocultural systems exist within the contexts of the natural and social environments and within the sweep of history; macro theory views sociocultural change as cumulative and transmitted through culture. Macrosociological theory is therefore evolutionary theory. This is not to say that all macro social theory is the type of formal social evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer or, in the modern day, Gerhard Lenski. Spencer (1891) very explicitly considers social evolution as a part of natural evolution. For example, he states, “There can be no complete accep- tance of sociology as a science, so long as the belief in a social order not conforming to natural law survives” (394). Lenski (2005, 5) is even more forthright: “Thus, stellar evolution laid the foundation for chemical evolution, which, in turn, laid the foundation for bio- logical evolution, which, eventually, led to the evolution of human societies. In other words, one of the basic principles of modern evo- lutionary theory is that the evolutionary process itself evolves ” (emphasis in the original). All macro theory worthy of the name is based on systemic and therefore cumulative and historical change and gives a
26 Sociocultural Systems
prominent causal role to material components of that system; this is highly compatible with formal social evolutionary theory. Marx posited that societies go through evolutionary stages. Beginning as communal systems, they move through ancient, feudal, capitalist, and, fi nally, socialist phases. While Marx’s evolutionary view is widely known, it is rarely acknowledged or emphasized; the revolution at the end seems to get all of the attention. However, look- ing at the entire sweep of prehistoric and historic societies, it is clear that Marx saw this revolution as occurring only after a long social evolutionary process: “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the mate- rial conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society” ([1859] 1911, 12). The evolutionary character of Durkheim’s theory is expressed in the lengthy quotation in the previous section, particularly in his assertion that civilization develops from the pressure exerted by increasing numbers of people competing for sustenance (an asser- tion that owes much to Malthus, Spencer, and Darwin). It has often been claimed that Weber saw society as evolving toward an ever more bureaucratized, rationalized state. Weber was evolutionary in terms of his systemic view, his functional perspective, and his emphasis upon cumulative change. That he integrated such an evolutionary perspective into his social theory is evidenced by the fact that he uses the term “evolution” forty-three times in his classic Economy and Society , and thirty-three times in General Economic History (twice in chapter headings).^7 To say that macrosociology is evolutionary does not mean all macro theorists claim that society is going through set stages or that all societies are evolving toward a common system. These are hoary old theories that are too often used as straw men to entirely dismiss social evolutionary theory. 8 The common ground of macrosociology is only that societies are historical systems undergo- ing cumulative change and that this change often begins in a sys- tem’s material infrastructure (population and production processes) in response to changes in its natural and social environments.
