Abstract
The previous chapter concerned itself with the difficulties inherent in theories that try to bridge the gap between micro- and macro-sociology without seriously taking into account the crucial role played by social hierarchies in the constitution of complex social orders. In this chapter I shall be more specific and constructive, and examine social hierarchies in relation to key concepts already discussed. In other words, I shall summarise as well as pull together the various threads of the argument, and show in more systematic manner the connections between social hierarchies, the concepts of social- and system-integration, and those of duality and dualism on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels.
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Notes
As already argued in Chapter 2 one problem with Giddens’ definition of structure as rules and resources existing outside space and time is that when we consider such allocative resources as land, it is very difficult to conceptualise it as existing in a ‘virtual’, spaceless state. (For a critique of Giddens’ structuration theory on this point see M. Archer, ‘Morphognesis versus structuration: on combining structure and action’, British Journal of Sociology, December 1982). Given this difficulty, whenever in this volume I refer to the paradigmatic dimension, I mean it as entailing actors’ orientations to rules only. These rules, of course, as embodied in social positions, often enable the occupants of such positions to mobilise role-relevant resources. (See above, Chapter 3, section 2.)
See F. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Norton, 1967, pp. 36 ff.
See on this point M. Nadwomy, Scientific Management and the Unions: 1900–1932, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955.
For an exposition and critique of the Human Relations School of Management see N. Mouzeilis, Organisation and Bureaucracy: an Analysis of Modern Theories, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.
See E. Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Patients and Other Inmates, New York: Anchor Books, 1961.
For a classical empirical study focussing on the formal-informal dialectic within bureaucratic organisations see A. Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, New York: Free Press, 1954, and his Wildcat Strike, Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1954.
See N. Mouzelis, Politics in the Semi-Periphery: Early Parliamentarism and Late Industrialisation in the Balkans and Latin America, London: Macmillan, 1986, ch. 2.
For instance, in Greece, as well as in other Mediterranean countries, local politicians, in order to obtain their clients’ support, become best men (koumbc roi) or godfathers (nônoi) to these clients’ children. See for instance J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
See P. Bourdieu, ‘Men and Machines’, in K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel, Advances in Social Theory and Methodology, Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 305 ff. For Bourdieu, social practices result from an encounter between positions and disposition, between ‘objectified or externalised history’ as it manifests itself in the structure of positions of a formal organisation for instance, and ‘internalized or embodied history’ manifested in the habitus, the socio-psychological dispositions of an actor. See also his Outline of a Theory of Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Although the idea of closure as a basis of class formation can be found in Weber’s work, it has been systematically developed in F. Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory, London: Tavistock, 1979.
For a review and critical analysis of Parkin’s and other closure theories see R. Murphy, ‘The structure of closure: a critique and development of the theories of Weber, Collins and Parkin’, British Journal of Sociology, December 1984; and see also his Social Closure: The Theory of Monopolisation and Exclusion, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
See T. Parsons, The Social System, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951, p. 98. For a more systematic account of social reality as a complex of interlocking systems ranging from the individual personality and small groups to whole societies
see T. Parsons, R. F. Bales and E. A. Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action, New York: Free Press, 1967, pp. 109–129.
See also N. J. Smelser and W. T. Smelser (eds), Personality and Social Systems, New York: John Wiley, 1970.
For a discussion of such difficulties see M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, ch. 1.
See T. Parsons and N. Smelser, Economy and Society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956;
and C. Morse, ‘The functional imperatives’, in M. Black (ed.), The Social Theories of T. Parsons, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963.
For a discussion of issues related to the decentralising tendencies of partimonial empires see M. Weber, Economy and Society (edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich), London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, vol. 2, pp. 1038–41 and 1051–9.
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© 1991 Nicos P. Mouzelis
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Mouzelis, N.P. (1991). Hierarchies: Social and System Integration, Duality and Dualism. In: Back to Sociological Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23181-2_6
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