Abstract
One of the main threads of the argument in this chapter is that in complex differentiated societies it is impossible to understand how micro-situations are linked with macro-structures and actors, unless the analysis centres on the notion of social hierarchy. This might seem fairly obvious to laypersons, but it is definitely not so for most of the social theorists involved in the long drawn-out debates on methodological individualism versus holism, or on attempts to establish linkages between micro- and macro-sociology. In these writings (as I am about to show), regardless of whether they stress the impact that macro-structures or ‘Society’ have on individuals or vice versa (that is, focussing on individual actors or interactional situations and their relationships to macro-phenomena), hierarchies are either completely ignored or at best remain peripheral to the analysis.1
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Notes
A good indication of this is that in a volume that has brought together most of the important texts on the ‘methodological individualism versus holism’ debate, the word hierarchy does not even figure in the index. See John O’Neill (ed.), Modes of Individualism and Collectivism, London: Heinemann, 1973.
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. I, A History of Social Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
See on this point Don Parker and Nigel Shift, Times, Spaces and Places, Chichester: Wiley, 1980;
T. Hägerstrand, Innovation as a Spatial Process, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967;
and T. Carlstein et al., Timing Space and Spacing Time, London: Arnold, 1978.
See on this S. Verba, The Civic Culture, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963.
See T. Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966; and his ‘Evolutionary universals’, American Sociological Review, 1964.
A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 199 ff.
P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 1967.
P. L. Berger. The Social Reality of Religion, London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
See on this point A. Cutler et al., Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, vol. I, p. 287.
See R. Collins, ‘Micro-translation as a theory-building strategy’, in K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel (eds), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, Boston, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 81 ff.
R. Collins, ‘On the microfoundations of macro-sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 86, 1981, p. 998.
R. Collins, ‘Interaction ritual chains, power and property: the micro-macro connection as an empirically-based theoretical problem’, in J. Alexander et al. (eds), The Micro-Macro Link, Berkley: University of California Press, 1987, p. 195.
For a theoretical elaboration of the concept of the means of political and cultural production see N. Mouzelis, Post-Marxist Alternatives: The Construction of Social Orders, London: Macmillan, 1990.
See J. G. March and H. A. Simon, Organizations, New York: John Wiley, 1958;
H. A. Simon, Administrative Behaviour, New York: Macmillan, 1961;
and N. P. Mouzelis, Organisation and Bureaucracy: an Analysis of Modern Theories, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 123–45.
See Karin Knorr-Cetina, ‘The micro social order: towards a recon-ceptualisation’, in N. C. Fielding (ed.), Actions and Structure: Research Methods and Social Theory, London: Sage, 1988, p. 39. See also her ‘The micro-sociological challenge of macro-sociology’, in K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel (eds), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Towards an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociologies, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.
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© 1991 Nicos P. Mouzelis
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Mouzelis, N.P. (1991). Social Hierarchies and Some Sociological Theories of Micro/Macro Integration. In: Back to Sociological Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21760-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21760-1_5
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