3.2 The Culture of Poverty
We noted earlier that, in the establishment of the social order, the structural dependency of Latin-American capitalism has given rise to a phenomenon of social marginalization. One of the ideas which others have emphasized is that marginalization is based on a particular culture, a culture which manifests through the psychological characteristics of the marginalized and whose propagation hinders their chances of integrating into the established system. This concept has acquired a particular notoriety under the name “the culture of poverty.” The poor, or at least a substantial portion of the poor, form a particular system with its own norms and values: the world of the poor. The culture of poverty is considered the chief way a marginalizing system is reproduced as such, maintaining a sector of poor people.
The chief proponent of this framework was the North-American anthropologist Oscar Lewis. According to Lewis (1959, 1966, 1969), in capitalist societies, which are strongly stratified into social classes and have a very individualist outlook, there is a large probability that a sector of the poor population develops a particular culture, the culture of poverty, which is passed on from generation to generation, perpetuating the traits which impede people from rising above their poverty. The main ideas of this view can be summarized into four points:
1. The struggle for survival brings the poor to develop a particular sub-world in which a lack of ambition and solidarity between people compensates for a lack of resources, while reciprocal networks of exchange between relatives and neighbors compensates for the inability and incapacity to compete in the established system. Thus, a separate system is developed, a marginal world, an economy of subsistence—the “penny economy.”
2. The culture of the poor differs immensely from the dominant culture in the established system, which is typified by the middle sectors. This culture is characterized by being “a disorganized, pathological, or incomplete version of major aspects of the middle class” (Valentine, 1972, p. 147).
3. The culture of poverty's principal characteristics appear as psychological traits expressed by individuals. It is a syndrome which includes symptoms of apathy, impotence, dependence, and inferiority; lack of self-control and difficulty in satisfying one’s own needs or thinking beyond the present to plan for the future; a sense of resignation and fatalism; a glaring machismo, a great tolerance for psychological pathology, and feebleness of ego itself.
4. The culture of poverty develops on its own, because it is transmitted through processes of socialization and assures its survival by passing on characteristics inherently opposed to the system (feeling of impotence, apathy, fatalism, incapacity to rise above the present). “Once it comes into existence, it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effects on children. By the time slum [marginalized] children are six or seven years old, they usually have absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime” (Lewis, 1969, p. 188).
Poor individuals learn to be poor and thus shape their personality through a peculiar process of socialization within the culture of poverty, guaranteeing permanent failure in the eyes of the established system. Rubén Ardila (1979) uses the concept of “learned helplessness,” coined by Seligman (1975), to explain the learning of impotence vital for characterizing the poor in relation to their conditions. A child learns from the start to fail at one point or another, to achieve nothing, and thus learns that it is not worth planning anything or pushing oneself to obtain something which will never come.
There are several studies which have tried to put the culture of poverty thesis to the test. Generally, it is safe to say that these studies have not been able to corroborate its fundamental points beyond a purely descriptive level. Thus, for example, L. Kriesberg (1970) found that contextual factors played a much more important role than cultural values in explaining the differences between poor and not-poor mothers in the North-American population of Syracuse. In another study about the North-American black population, Coward, Feagin, and Williams (1974) found that the only aspects of the culture of poverty confirmed by data were those which could be considered simple alternative indicators of poverty, not representations of a way of life belonging to a culture or a distinct psychological orientation.
Moreover, the empirical studies provide a strong case for seriously questioning that the poor’s sunken aspirations are the ideal mechanism for guaranteeing that they remain poor. In fact, there exists no clear proof that the poor’s presumed motivational deficiencies are central to their lack of economic mobility. In a series of studies on poor and not-poor people’s attitudes toward work, L. Goodwin did not find any significant differences, at least in what is called “work ethic.” Goodwin was thus able to conclude that all kinds of poor people “identify their own worth in their work as much as the not-poor. They express the same desire to prepare themselves for a job whether they have adequate income or cannot earn a living and find work. Moreover, they have life aspirations which are as high as those of the not-poor and desire the same things, such as a good education and nice place to live. This study shows that there are no differences between the poor and not-poor in terms of life objectives and desire to work” (Goodwin, 1972, p. 112). A similar conclusion can be drawn from a study carried out by Juana Olimpia Peña (1984) with 20 Salvadoran families displaced by the war who were found in a refugee camp near San Salvador. The most prominent need felt by these people was not that of continuing to receive help in whatever form it took, but obtaining paid work which would allow them to reconstruct their lives and, above all, their personal and social identities.
The culture of poverty claims to account for the reproduction of the marginalizing social order, or at least, the reproduction of the poor and marginalized sector. This explanation places the fundamental cause of poverty's persistence within the poor themselves and in the traits of their personality. In this way, it results in a psychologism which is quite favorable for the established order, since it acquits the order of a failure so grave as the incapacity to provide a huge sector of the population with a minimal satisfaction of their needs and integration into “normal” life. The system is considered healthy, and the defects are attributed to the poor themselves, even if those defects were learned.
Perhaps the most significant, contemporary form of psychologism typical for the culture of poverty is in the phrase coined by William Ryan: victim-blaming, in which fault is assigned to the victims themselves (Ryan, 1976). The idea that the victim is at fault or, in our case, that the poor are guilty for their own poverty, clearly appears in the view often held about the poor and which manifests in expressions like the following: “And why do they insist on living so promiscuously and all bunched up together, exposing their children to those situations and their bad examples?” “You see, as soon as they have some money, they spend it on alcohol or waste it on fancy or worthless things like the shop window TV instead of using it on something useful.”
The substance of this ideologized view consists of justifying existing discrimination and social injustice, pointing out the undeniable and visible defects of the victims of exploitative inequality and thus making them responsible for their own existential failure, for their own misery. The poor are said to suffer from the psychological effects of impoverishment, thus converting them into the makers and inheritors of their own problems. From this perspective, the obvious fact that poverty and marginalization are primarily and fundamentally a lack of money and other resources ends up being cast aside, or even forgotten.
Victim-blaming sometimes comes wrapped up in concern and paternalism, and it is covered in an aura of humanitarianism, which is quite typical of professions like that of the psychologist or the social worker. It claims to help “those poor people” escape their poverty, promoting their learning of habits useful for society with which they can integrate themselves as valuable members of the social system. There is a need, so they say, to change the attitudes of the poor—a stigma undoubtedly acquired in the environment, but a stigma which nevertheless marks the victim and engenders future victimization. Thus, the stigma, the defect is seen as something belonging to the poor from head to toe, even if it is due to environmental factors. With that in mind, the continuous “victimizing” or impoverishing effect of the social system itself, the impact of social forces on what the poor can or cannot do, is once again ignored.
It is wrong to attribute a sub-systemic autonomy, that is to say, an independence from forces shaped by the established social systems, to a “culture of poverty.” The fundamental forces and norms which mold the world of the poor create the dependence and impoverishment to which the system itself subjects them. The world of poverty is not a world molded by itself in the first instance, but by the broader determinants of the social system in which it is found. By forgetting this historical point and by attributing the poor’s poverty and marginalization to their own traits, the demand of change falls not on the society, but on its victim—not the system, but the marginalized. The survival and reproduction of the established system thus remains ideologically maintained.
Continue reading.
Friday, November 27, 2015
System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, An Order of Disorder 3.1
3.1 The Routine and its Rules
A routine is an activity or set of activities which, over a period of time, one performs without the need to reflect or make decisions, or in other words, which one carries out automatically. Routinization may occur in all spheres of human activity. Generally, people develop routines for going to bed and getting back out of it, for keeping themselves clean or preparing food, for completing tasks on the job or mingling with family or friends at home. Routines often form part of one’s existence in such a way that one loses awareness of them, especially when they are within the most basic spheres of daily life: diet and hygiene, work and leisure. Such daily routines are activities that are so institutionalized, they are accepted as “natural” occurrences; they become the background in front of which the unique events of each day stand out. Insofar as these routines become imperceptible in some way as a “natural background,” they are given as assumptions. When asked “Have you done anything today,” those who have not done more than their daily routines will nevertheless respond that they have not; it occurs to no one to mention that they have washed themselves in the morning, or to find any significance in having completed their normal tasks.
Harold Garfinkel (1967) asked his students to conduct a series of small “field experiments” in which daily assumptions were called into question, producing a substantial rupture in social interaction. In this way, a break with presupposed routines demonstrated their basic role in configuring social life and their reaffirming (reproductive) function for the needs of the established social system. Text Nine presents two of these experiments.
Simply questioning the routine ways by which people relate to others produces a rupture in social interaction. Garfinkel (1967, p. 76) talks about a common culture, meaning “the socially sanctioned grounds of inference and action which people use in their everyday affairs and which they assume others use in the same way.” This common culture is the privileged sphere of ideology, in other words, the “place” in which the primary interests which shape a social system are articulated and actualized. It is precisely its presupposed nature, its unquestioned and unquestionable normality, which the common culture converts into the fundamental basis for affirming the chief values of a social system. Its very nature as something implied defends the “common culture” from possible change, since it involves values which are not perceived as contingent, and in this sense, which are not even seen as independent, let alone as the products of history.
Straightforward questions regarding routinary forms of communication produce ruptures in social interaction. Garfinkel (1967, p. 76) talks about a common culture, referring to “the socially sanctioned grounds of inference and action that people use in their everyday affairs and which they assume others use in the same way.” This common culture is the privileged sphere of ideology, in other words, the “place” in which the primary interests which shape a social system are articulated and actualized. It is precisely its presupposed nature, its unquestioned and unquestionable naturalness, which the common culture converts into the fundamental basis for affirming the chief values of a social system. Its same nature as something implied defends the “common culture” from possible change, since it concerns values which are not perceived as contingent, and in this sense, not even seen as self-contained, let alone as the products of history.
Nevertheless, in that “common culture” of daily assumptions, there are some norms, or more precisely, norms of “common sense,” which, in classic terms, establishes one's familiarity with social knowledge and differentiates the citizen from the unfamiliar, the“idiot.” For that reason, Garfinkel discusses a “common-sense knowledge of social structures.” Those rules of common sense bond accepted routines to the core of a social system, thus more firmly accomplishing the reaffirmation and reproduction of that system as something left unnoticed, let alone as something contingent or questionable.
In this process of the system’s reproduction achieved through routines, daily language plays a crucial role, above all through daily, inconsequential conversation. For Berger and Luckmann (1968, p. 191), “the most important vehicle of reality-maintenance is conversation.” In conversation, each individual confirms the validity of his subjective world through the subjectivity of others, above all, of “significant others,” which implies a reaffirmation of an intersubjective objectivity, of a reality which has been transmitted to an individual through socialization. “The great part, if not all, of everyday conversation maintains subjective reality; indeed, its massivity is achieved by the accumulation and consistency of casual conversation—conversation that can afford to be casual precisely because it refers to the routines of a taken-for-granted world” (Berger and Luckmann, 1968, p. 192).
Berger and Luckmann provide a very timely example of the role of casual, everyday language. It is possible to imagine—they say—what effect an exchange of words like the following may have over the quality of conversation: “‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ ‘Okay, darling, don’t forget to take your gun with you.’” The assumption is that, in societies like the ones Berger and Luckmann write about, nobody goes around carrying a gun to their everyday job. However, such a conversation would not at all be surprising in the circumstances in which Salvadorans in 1988 now live. It is more than likely that many Salvadoran men of wealth are frequently reminded by their wives to bring their gun with them or to call their bodyguards. The dynamic character of “casual” (and thus “normal”), which may include carrying around a gun or not, demonstrates the bond between the reality one assumes and the society in which one lives.
In a study on the role of marriage in the formation and reproduction of reality, Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner (1970) state that marriage is one of the chief institutions on which the social system relies to validate its own structure, the configuration of the world which it puts forward. Berger and Kellner start from the assumption already indicated, in which the social world is a construction which must be continuously mediated and actualized in each individual, to the end that it becomes and remains that individual’s world: this mediation and actualization take place daily through the most routine interactions with the most significant people in our lives who confirm that reality is reality, especially through conversation concerning that reality, that world. For a husband and wife, the most important conversation of their lives occurs between them, establishing their own private sphere, perhaps one which is only possible in contemporary society. Thus, spouses mutually become part of their significant other par excellence and thus serve as each other’s chief point of reference for constructing and maintaining their own reality, which is continuously subjected to mutual validation. The permanent dialogue between spouses is not only the mechanism which objectifies present reality (sometimes, things do not acquire a definitive configuration or reality until they are “discussed”), but also what produces a reinterpretation of the past and a clearer projection of the future.
In this way, marriage produces a stability in married people's lives, a stability particularly reinforced by other social groups, above all, their own children. “The narrowing and stabilization of identity is functional in a society that, in its major public institutions, must insist on rigid controls over the individual’s conduct. At the same time, the narrow enclave of the nuclear family serves as a macrosocially innocuous “play area,” in which the individual can safely exercise his world-building proclivities without upsetting any of the important social, economic, and political applecarts” (Berger and Kellner, 1970, p. 65). Of course, these social functions of marriage are not conscious objectives, and for that reason, they remain hidden and even denied by the well-known ideology of marriage as love, sexual fulfillment, and social maturity.
The system is reproduced through the institution of the family: family members accept the chief imperatives socially operating in the daily rules to which they subject their lives, while they compensate for some of their ambitions and frustrated desires in the private space of marital intimacy. The stability obtained through marriage in such individuals, even those considered “immature” or “unstable,” is stable as far as the parameters required by the social system are concerned. People are formed in their work, in the completion of their familial and community duties, which brings them to accept even many of the most traditional moral norms against which they could have rebelled at some point in their youth. The political conservatism which often emerges around the time of marriage is no more than an ideological reflection of the system’s reproduction accomplished through the institution of the family (See Text Ten).
Nevertheless, it cannot be assumed that the reproduction of the social order is a mechanical process; if this were the case, societies would neither experience essential changes nor evolve, phenomena which indeed occur. In fact, there is often a bit of novelty in the process of reproduction. In most cases, such innovation necessary for the survival of the system coincides precisely with the well-known saying from The Leopard: “everything must change so that everything stays the same.” Some sociologists and psycho-sociologists, especially those with a symbolic-interactionist perspective, affirm that the social order is continually subject to a process of negotiation.
The fundamental idea of symbolic interactionism is that people transform themselves and their environment through interaction and, in particular, through processes of communication. This transformation entails the creation of symbols: things and acts acquire particular meanings, and those shared meanings reflect back onto their creators, who find themselves obligated to respond to the products of their own activity (See Text Eleven). However, we cannot simply talk about a continuous process of creation, but a continuous recreation, especially if one takes into account the fact that the majority of activities do not change the fundamental parameters of social life at all, but instead reaffirm them. In other words, the majority of the most important meanings and symbols in the life of each society are already established, and individuals do nothing more than assume them through socialization and confirm them in the fulfillment of their daily routines.
The concept of the social order’s negotiation has been chiefly expounded upon by the North-American sociologist Anselm Strauss (1978; Strauss et. al., 1963). Strauss studied the social order of hospitals, and he came to the conclusion that the hospital personnel developed different strategies of negotiation for resolving problems which emerged in the organization. Certainly, such negotiations were shaped by the formal structure of the hospital and by the objectives it held as an institution; nevertheless, Strauss emphasized the importance of the personnel’s negotiating procedures in deciding how to respond to problems arising day after day. A negotiation means, from this perspective, an affirmation of a certain social order (in this case study, the affirmation of the hospital’s order) which also subjects it to changes in order to respond to evolving circumstances and the particular interests of the actors involved in the system.
However, it is important to ask what the limits and boundaries of negotiation in daily interaction are. It would be naive to think that a social system allows its central values and interests to be negotiated; on the contrary, any given negotiation within the social order is precisely subjected to the demands of existing institutional structures themselves—current forms of thought, emotion, and behavior—and to all the mechanisms of power at play in the confrontation between the major social classes of each system. As we saw in the case of marriage, spouses can negotiate a private order to establish a sphere of intimacy between themselves which is constituted by their deepest desires—and even then, only partially, since the constitution of that world must begin from the most elementary conditions, such as space, disposable goods, and internalized attitudes. But what spouses cannot at any moment negotiate are the fundamental demands of the macrosocial order, beginning with the makeup of their own family structure, whether concerning their standards about relationships or the rearing of their children.
In sum, the chief way through which a social order is reproduced is through institutionalized routines, which configure the majority of people’s daily activity. Those routines sit upon the basic interests and values of the system, interests and values which are reaffirmed through the norms regulating routines and solidifying them into naturalized, unquestioned, and unquestionable assumptions. The reproduction of the system goes through minor modifications which are functional for the system, since they allow it to adapt to changing internal and external environmental conditions. These changes are realized above all through the negotiations which take place in social interaction, but most of the time, these negotiations reinforce ruling forces and, in the final stance, reform a part to conserve the whole.
Continue reading.
A routine is an activity or set of activities which, over a period of time, one performs without the need to reflect or make decisions, or in other words, which one carries out automatically. Routinization may occur in all spheres of human activity. Generally, people develop routines for going to bed and getting back out of it, for keeping themselves clean or preparing food, for completing tasks on the job or mingling with family or friends at home. Routines often form part of one’s existence in such a way that one loses awareness of them, especially when they are within the most basic spheres of daily life: diet and hygiene, work and leisure. Such daily routines are activities that are so institutionalized, they are accepted as “natural” occurrences; they become the background in front of which the unique events of each day stand out. Insofar as these routines become imperceptible in some way as a “natural background,” they are given as assumptions. When asked “Have you done anything today,” those who have not done more than their daily routines will nevertheless respond that they have not; it occurs to no one to mention that they have washed themselves in the morning, or to find any significance in having completed their normal tasks.
Harold Garfinkel (1967) asked his students to conduct a series of small “field experiments” in which daily assumptions were called into question, producing a substantial rupture in social interaction. In this way, a break with presupposed routines demonstrated their basic role in configuring social life and their reaffirming (reproductive) function for the needs of the established social system. Text Nine presents two of these experiments.
Simply questioning the routine ways by which people relate to others produces a rupture in social interaction. Garfinkel (1967, p. 76) talks about a common culture, meaning “the socially sanctioned grounds of inference and action which people use in their everyday affairs and which they assume others use in the same way.” This common culture is the privileged sphere of ideology, in other words, the “place” in which the primary interests which shape a social system are articulated and actualized. It is precisely its presupposed nature, its unquestioned and unquestionable normality, which the common culture converts into the fundamental basis for affirming the chief values of a social system. Its very nature as something implied defends the “common culture” from possible change, since it involves values which are not perceived as contingent, and in this sense, which are not even seen as independent, let alone as the products of history.
Straightforward questions regarding routinary forms of communication produce ruptures in social interaction. Garfinkel (1967, p. 76) talks about a common culture, referring to “the socially sanctioned grounds of inference and action that people use in their everyday affairs and which they assume others use in the same way.” This common culture is the privileged sphere of ideology, in other words, the “place” in which the primary interests which shape a social system are articulated and actualized. It is precisely its presupposed nature, its unquestioned and unquestionable naturalness, which the common culture converts into the fundamental basis for affirming the chief values of a social system. Its same nature as something implied defends the “common culture” from possible change, since it concerns values which are not perceived as contingent, and in this sense, not even seen as self-contained, let alone as the products of history.
Nevertheless, in that “common culture” of daily assumptions, there are some norms, or more precisely, norms of “common sense,” which, in classic terms, establishes one's familiarity with social knowledge and differentiates the citizen from the unfamiliar, the“idiot.” For that reason, Garfinkel discusses a “common-sense knowledge of social structures.” Those rules of common sense bond accepted routines to the core of a social system, thus more firmly accomplishing the reaffirmation and reproduction of that system as something left unnoticed, let alone as something contingent or questionable.
In this process of the system’s reproduction achieved through routines, daily language plays a crucial role, above all through daily, inconsequential conversation. For Berger and Luckmann (1968, p. 191), “the most important vehicle of reality-maintenance is conversation.” In conversation, each individual confirms the validity of his subjective world through the subjectivity of others, above all, of “significant others,” which implies a reaffirmation of an intersubjective objectivity, of a reality which has been transmitted to an individual through socialization. “The great part, if not all, of everyday conversation maintains subjective reality; indeed, its massivity is achieved by the accumulation and consistency of casual conversation—conversation that can afford to be casual precisely because it refers to the routines of a taken-for-granted world” (Berger and Luckmann, 1968, p. 192).
Berger and Luckmann provide a very timely example of the role of casual, everyday language. It is possible to imagine—they say—what effect an exchange of words like the following may have over the quality of conversation: “‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ ‘Okay, darling, don’t forget to take your gun with you.’” The assumption is that, in societies like the ones Berger and Luckmann write about, nobody goes around carrying a gun to their everyday job. However, such a conversation would not at all be surprising in the circumstances in which Salvadorans in 1988 now live. It is more than likely that many Salvadoran men of wealth are frequently reminded by their wives to bring their gun with them or to call their bodyguards. The dynamic character of “casual” (and thus “normal”), which may include carrying around a gun or not, demonstrates the bond between the reality one assumes and the society in which one lives.
In a study on the role of marriage in the formation and reproduction of reality, Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner (1970) state that marriage is one of the chief institutions on which the social system relies to validate its own structure, the configuration of the world which it puts forward. Berger and Kellner start from the assumption already indicated, in which the social world is a construction which must be continuously mediated and actualized in each individual, to the end that it becomes and remains that individual’s world: this mediation and actualization take place daily through the most routine interactions with the most significant people in our lives who confirm that reality is reality, especially through conversation concerning that reality, that world. For a husband and wife, the most important conversation of their lives occurs between them, establishing their own private sphere, perhaps one which is only possible in contemporary society. Thus, spouses mutually become part of their significant other par excellence and thus serve as each other’s chief point of reference for constructing and maintaining their own reality, which is continuously subjected to mutual validation. The permanent dialogue between spouses is not only the mechanism which objectifies present reality (sometimes, things do not acquire a definitive configuration or reality until they are “discussed”), but also what produces a reinterpretation of the past and a clearer projection of the future.
In this way, marriage produces a stability in married people's lives, a stability particularly reinforced by other social groups, above all, their own children. “The narrowing and stabilization of identity is functional in a society that, in its major public institutions, must insist on rigid controls over the individual’s conduct. At the same time, the narrow enclave of the nuclear family serves as a macrosocially innocuous “play area,” in which the individual can safely exercise his world-building proclivities without upsetting any of the important social, economic, and political applecarts” (Berger and Kellner, 1970, p. 65). Of course, these social functions of marriage are not conscious objectives, and for that reason, they remain hidden and even denied by the well-known ideology of marriage as love, sexual fulfillment, and social maturity.
The system is reproduced through the institution of the family: family members accept the chief imperatives socially operating in the daily rules to which they subject their lives, while they compensate for some of their ambitions and frustrated desires in the private space of marital intimacy. The stability obtained through marriage in such individuals, even those considered “immature” or “unstable,” is stable as far as the parameters required by the social system are concerned. People are formed in their work, in the completion of their familial and community duties, which brings them to accept even many of the most traditional moral norms against which they could have rebelled at some point in their youth. The political conservatism which often emerges around the time of marriage is no more than an ideological reflection of the system’s reproduction accomplished through the institution of the family (See Text Ten).
Nevertheless, it cannot be assumed that the reproduction of the social order is a mechanical process; if this were the case, societies would neither experience essential changes nor evolve, phenomena which indeed occur. In fact, there is often a bit of novelty in the process of reproduction. In most cases, such innovation necessary for the survival of the system coincides precisely with the well-known saying from The Leopard: “everything must change so that everything stays the same.” Some sociologists and psycho-sociologists, especially those with a symbolic-interactionist perspective, affirm that the social order is continually subject to a process of negotiation.
The fundamental idea of symbolic interactionism is that people transform themselves and their environment through interaction and, in particular, through processes of communication. This transformation entails the creation of symbols: things and acts acquire particular meanings, and those shared meanings reflect back onto their creators, who find themselves obligated to respond to the products of their own activity (See Text Eleven). However, we cannot simply talk about a continuous process of creation, but a continuous recreation, especially if one takes into account the fact that the majority of activities do not change the fundamental parameters of social life at all, but instead reaffirm them. In other words, the majority of the most important meanings and symbols in the life of each society are already established, and individuals do nothing more than assume them through socialization and confirm them in the fulfillment of their daily routines.
The concept of the social order’s negotiation has been chiefly expounded upon by the North-American sociologist Anselm Strauss (1978; Strauss et. al., 1963). Strauss studied the social order of hospitals, and he came to the conclusion that the hospital personnel developed different strategies of negotiation for resolving problems which emerged in the organization. Certainly, such negotiations were shaped by the formal structure of the hospital and by the objectives it held as an institution; nevertheless, Strauss emphasized the importance of the personnel’s negotiating procedures in deciding how to respond to problems arising day after day. A negotiation means, from this perspective, an affirmation of a certain social order (in this case study, the affirmation of the hospital’s order) which also subjects it to changes in order to respond to evolving circumstances and the particular interests of the actors involved in the system.
However, it is important to ask what the limits and boundaries of negotiation in daily interaction are. It would be naive to think that a social system allows its central values and interests to be negotiated; on the contrary, any given negotiation within the social order is precisely subjected to the demands of existing institutional structures themselves—current forms of thought, emotion, and behavior—and to all the mechanisms of power at play in the confrontation between the major social classes of each system. As we saw in the case of marriage, spouses can negotiate a private order to establish a sphere of intimacy between themselves which is constituted by their deepest desires—and even then, only partially, since the constitution of that world must begin from the most elementary conditions, such as space, disposable goods, and internalized attitudes. But what spouses cannot at any moment negotiate are the fundamental demands of the macrosocial order, beginning with the makeup of their own family structure, whether concerning their standards about relationships or the rearing of their children.
In sum, the chief way through which a social order is reproduced is through institutionalized routines, which configure the majority of people’s daily activity. Those routines sit upon the basic interests and values of the system, interests and values which are reaffirmed through the norms regulating routines and solidifying them into naturalized, unquestioned, and unquestionable assumptions. The reproduction of the system goes through minor modifications which are functional for the system, since they allow it to adapt to changing internal and external environmental conditions. These changes are realized above all through the negotiations which take place in social interaction, but most of the time, these negotiations reinforce ruling forces and, in the final stance, reform a part to conserve the whole.
Continue reading.
System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, Text Eleven
Symbolic Interactionism
1. Behavior depends on a named or classified world. The names or kind of terms assigned to aspects of the environment, both physical and social, impose their meaning through shared behavioral expectations which emerge from social interaction. By interacting with others, one learns to classify objects with which one comes into contact as well as the expectations regarding how one should act toward them.
2. Among the kinds of terms learned in interaction, one finds symbols used to designate “positions," which are the relatively stable morphological components of the social structure. These positions are what give rise to shared behavioral expectations conventionally called “roles.”
3. People who act according to organized forms of conduct, in other words, at the center of a social structure, define each other, mutually recognizing each other as the occupants of positions. Through mutual definition, they appeal to the expectations of one or another’s behavior.
4. People who act according to organized conduct also define themselves. These reflexive positional designations, which become part of the “I,” generate internalized expectations regarding one’s own conduct.
5. By entering into situations of interaction, people define the situation, describing it as well as the other participants, themselves, and unique aspects of the situation, and they utilize the resulting definitions to organize their own conduct for that situation.
6. Nevertheless, social conduct is not produced by those definitions, even when the initial definitions can limit possibilities from which other, alternative definitions can emerge in interaction. Behavior is the product of the process of shaping a role, which begins with the expectations activated in the process of defining situations, but which are developed through a tentative and sometimes subtle exchange between the actors who can modify the form and content of interaction.
7. The extent to which the roles are “constructed” more than “executed” and what constitutive elements enter into the construction of roles depend on the larger social structures in which the interactive situations occur. Some structures are “open” and others relatively “closed” with respect to innovation in roles and their fulfillment. Each structure imposes some limits on the kind of definitions which can be applied, and thus on the possibilities of interaction.
8. As long as roles are elaborated and not simply executed, changes in the character of the definitions can be produced, in the names and kinds of terms utilized in those definitions and in the possibilities of interaction; in turn, those changes can drive changes in the larger social structures in which interactions take place.
Stryker, 1980, p. 53-55.
1. Behavior depends on a named or classified world. The names or kind of terms assigned to aspects of the environment, both physical and social, impose their meaning through shared behavioral expectations which emerge from social interaction. By interacting with others, one learns to classify objects with which one comes into contact as well as the expectations regarding how one should act toward them.
2. Among the kinds of terms learned in interaction, one finds symbols used to designate “positions," which are the relatively stable morphological components of the social structure. These positions are what give rise to shared behavioral expectations conventionally called “roles.”
3. People who act according to organized forms of conduct, in other words, at the center of a social structure, define each other, mutually recognizing each other as the occupants of positions. Through mutual definition, they appeal to the expectations of one or another’s behavior.
4. People who act according to organized conduct also define themselves. These reflexive positional designations, which become part of the “I,” generate internalized expectations regarding one’s own conduct.
5. By entering into situations of interaction, people define the situation, describing it as well as the other participants, themselves, and unique aspects of the situation, and they utilize the resulting definitions to organize their own conduct for that situation.
6. Nevertheless, social conduct is not produced by those definitions, even when the initial definitions can limit possibilities from which other, alternative definitions can emerge in interaction. Behavior is the product of the process of shaping a role, which begins with the expectations activated in the process of defining situations, but which are developed through a tentative and sometimes subtle exchange between the actors who can modify the form and content of interaction.
7. The extent to which the roles are “constructed” more than “executed” and what constitutive elements enter into the construction of roles depend on the larger social structures in which the interactive situations occur. Some structures are “open” and others relatively “closed” with respect to innovation in roles and their fulfillment. Each structure imposes some limits on the kind of definitions which can be applied, and thus on the possibilities of interaction.
8. As long as roles are elaborated and not simply executed, changes in the character of the definitions can be produced, in the names and kinds of terms utilized in those definitions and in the possibilities of interaction; in turn, those changes can drive changes in the larger social structures in which interactions take place.
Stryker, 1980, p. 53-55.
System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, Text Ten
The Sacred Family
The nuclear family is the machine which constantly manufactures and reproduces workers, subject-consumers, cannon fodder, and all structures of obedience to power; it also makes young people conditioned in a way that turns them into new, stable couples who breed more children, create new families, and thus perpetuate the cycle. The family is not only a reproductive structure of the workforce; it is also its maintenance shop, its lottery, its place of rest, and the inner sanctum of its delusions. It is the factory of everyday fascism, of the oppression of women, of psychological terrorism against children and adolescents, of the values of selfishness, of the petite-bourgeois small-mindedness in the private sphere set against the values of the public and political spheres. Not only do the values of obedience to authority pass through the family, but also those of knowing how to get by; how to manipulate others; how to put on a mask; how to cleverly navigate power relations; how to subordinate oneself and how to command others; how to be efficient, productive, opportunistic, possessive, selfish, and tough: in a word, the family is the basic institution by which one comes to learn the dominant rationality.
But this learning is neither painless nor lacking in contradictions. The larger part of mental disorders are born precisely to these contradictions: when the contemporary family begins to dysfunction, it simultaneously produces and shapes the children who rebel against it; and those who don’t manage to rebel against it turn into neurotics or psychotics—good conforming citizens satisfied with their mortal obedience, mediocrity, and normality.
Jervis, 1979, p. 88.
The nuclear family is the machine which constantly manufactures and reproduces workers, subject-consumers, cannon fodder, and all structures of obedience to power; it also makes young people conditioned in a way that turns them into new, stable couples who breed more children, create new families, and thus perpetuate the cycle. The family is not only a reproductive structure of the workforce; it is also its maintenance shop, its lottery, its place of rest, and the inner sanctum of its delusions. It is the factory of everyday fascism, of the oppression of women, of psychological terrorism against children and adolescents, of the values of selfishness, of the petite-bourgeois small-mindedness in the private sphere set against the values of the public and political spheres. Not only do the values of obedience to authority pass through the family, but also those of knowing how to get by; how to manipulate others; how to put on a mask; how to cleverly navigate power relations; how to subordinate oneself and how to command others; how to be efficient, productive, opportunistic, possessive, selfish, and tough: in a word, the family is the basic institution by which one comes to learn the dominant rationality.
But this learning is neither painless nor lacking in contradictions. The larger part of mental disorders are born precisely to these contradictions: when the contemporary family begins to dysfunction, it simultaneously produces and shapes the children who rebel against it; and those who don’t manage to rebel against it turn into neurotics or psychotics—good conforming citizens satisfied with their mortal obedience, mediocrity, and normality.
Jervis, 1979, p. 88.
System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, Text Nine
Formalities Under Question
Case 1
Person: How’s it going, Ricardo. How is your girlfriend?
Experimenter: What do you mean “how is she”? Do you mean physically or mentally?
P: I mean how is she doing. What’s wrong with you? (He appeared bothered.)
E: Nothing. I’m just asking you to explain what you want to say a bit more clearly.
P: Forget it. How goes your admissions application to the College of Medicine?
E: What do you mean by “how goes?”
P: Oh, you know what I’m asking.
E: No, not really.
P: What’s wrong, then? Are you sick?
Case 2
The victim extended his hand cordially.
P: How are you?
E: How am I as far as what? My health, finances, my job at the university, my peace of mind, what?
P: (With flushed face and no self-control.) Listen! I was only trying to be polite. Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me how you are.
Garfinkel, 1967.
Case 1
Person: How’s it going, Ricardo. How is your girlfriend?
Experimenter: What do you mean “how is she”? Do you mean physically or mentally?
P: I mean how is she doing. What’s wrong with you? (He appeared bothered.)
E: Nothing. I’m just asking you to explain what you want to say a bit more clearly.
P: Forget it. How goes your admissions application to the College of Medicine?
E: What do you mean by “how goes?”
P: Oh, you know what I’m asking.
E: No, not really.
P: What’s wrong, then? Are you sick?
Case 2
The victim extended his hand cordially.
P: How are you?
E: How am I as far as what? My health, finances, my job at the university, my peace of mind, what?
P: (With flushed face and no self-control.) Listen! I was only trying to be polite. Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me how you are.
Garfinkel, 1967.
System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, An Order of Disorder Summary
Summary of the First Chapter
1. Every society can be understood as a system, that is to say, as a collection of parts related in an organized way to each other, forming a totality. It is in social psychology's interest to understand the behavior of people and groups as members of a system in order to examine what in behavior is systemic, or owed to being a member of a system.
2. The functionalist lens conceives systems as living organisms whose parts are determined among themselves within a unitary order. Not every social system is a society, but rather, a society is the ideal social system.
3. According to Parsons, every social system should satisfy four needs to which four functional subsystems correspond: (a) the economic subsystem, which completes an adaptive function by assigning roles; (b) the political subsystem, which is encharged with fulfilling the objectives of collectivities; (c) the community subsystem, which defines the norms for the stratified integration of its members; and (d) the cultural subsystem, which tries to maintain and transmit values as such.
4. The functionalist, Parsonsian framework is critiqued for its basic assumption that every society is fundamentally harmonious (like a living organism is), since it seems founded in the axiological consensus of its members. These assumptions are opposed by the reality of conflict in contemporary societies.
5. Conflict theory conceives society as a system whose order promotes the dominance of some groups or classes over others. Social unity is not defined as harmony, but as the articulation of dominant groups’ interests, which ideology tries to present as universal interests (in the interest of all the system’s members) and even as natural interests (in the interest of all human beings).
6. While, for functionalism, systemic action represents the exercise of functional roles, conflict theory supposes that it is the satisfaction of dominant interests or the struggle for voicing other social interests.
7. Every social order is historically derived from a prior context and does not simply emerge as a consequence of some universal needs or the immediate interaction of its members.
8. Every action and social interaction tends toward an order which makes it effective and efficient. Thus, interaction itself develops or modifies the norms which govern it. But in their emergence and modification, norms which regulate interaction fundamentally depend on the forces and interests on which the actors, whether groups or individuals, rely.
9. The emergence of a social order has three stages: (a) externalization or performance of activities, which gives rise to their habituation (activity as habit) and their institutionalization, or the “reciprocal typification of actions habitualized by kinds of actors;” (b) objectification, or the experience of institutionalized activity as something prescribed, external to each actor; and (c) internalization, or the assumption of institutionalized routines in a social system which each individual makes.
10. The three stages of a social order’s formation imply that: (a) society is a human product, not a “natural” one; (b) that society is an objective reality and not merely a subjective one; and (c) that the individual is a social product. These three affirmations are true, and each one clarifies and complements the others.
11. In Latin-American societies, there exist large sectors of the population which, at first glance, appear marginalized, or separated from the social system: they do not receive its benefits (passive participation), and they lack obligations and duties within it (active participation).
12. According to one framework, marginalization signifies psycho-social disintegration: the marginalized sectors lack the culture and attitudes necessary to integrate themselves into the modern social system. Thus, their integration requires their education and training. However, this focus tends toward psychologism, situating the immediate cause of people's marginalization in their own traits.
13. From the lens of dependency, marginalization is the consequence of principles operating in the ruling capitalist system in the first world and being imposed onto the third world in a partial and more primitive way, subordinating the social order to the needs of the metropoles, or the minority sectors tied to them. Thus, it is the system itself which develops and reinforces marginalization as part of its normal functioning. The marginalized are integrated into the social system, but marginally. The elimination of marginalization thus requires a change in the social system itself.
14. Daily routines are the most important way the order of a social system is reproduced. These routines tend to shape a certain “common sense,” or assumptions of life which groups and people take as part of nature. Everyday, casual conversation plays a fundamental role in maintaining this common sense as the proponent and reproducer of the social order.
15. According to one view, survival brings the marginalized to develop a culture of passivity and low aspirations and to establish exchange networks which allow survival in minimal conditions. This “culture of poverty” is transmitted from parents to children, making the victims responsible for their lack of progress and for thus perpetuating their poverty and marginalization. The studies at hand confirm the description of traits associated with the “culture of poverty,” but not its existence as a relatively autonomous “subculture” of the established social system which reproduces itself.
1. Every society can be understood as a system, that is to say, as a collection of parts related in an organized way to each other, forming a totality. It is in social psychology's interest to understand the behavior of people and groups as members of a system in order to examine what in behavior is systemic, or owed to being a member of a system.
2. The functionalist lens conceives systems as living organisms whose parts are determined among themselves within a unitary order. Not every social system is a society, but rather, a society is the ideal social system.
3. According to Parsons, every social system should satisfy four needs to which four functional subsystems correspond: (a) the economic subsystem, which completes an adaptive function by assigning roles; (b) the political subsystem, which is encharged with fulfilling the objectives of collectivities; (c) the community subsystem, which defines the norms for the stratified integration of its members; and (d) the cultural subsystem, which tries to maintain and transmit values as such.
4. The functionalist, Parsonsian framework is critiqued for its basic assumption that every society is fundamentally harmonious (like a living organism is), since it seems founded in the axiological consensus of its members. These assumptions are opposed by the reality of conflict in contemporary societies.
5. Conflict theory conceives society as a system whose order promotes the dominance of some groups or classes over others. Social unity is not defined as harmony, but as the articulation of dominant groups’ interests, which ideology tries to present as universal interests (in the interest of all the system’s members) and even as natural interests (in the interest of all human beings).
6. While, for functionalism, systemic action represents the exercise of functional roles, conflict theory supposes that it is the satisfaction of dominant interests or the struggle for voicing other social interests.
7. Every social order is historically derived from a prior context and does not simply emerge as a consequence of some universal needs or the immediate interaction of its members.
8. Every action and social interaction tends toward an order which makes it effective and efficient. Thus, interaction itself develops or modifies the norms which govern it. But in their emergence and modification, norms which regulate interaction fundamentally depend on the forces and interests on which the actors, whether groups or individuals, rely.
9. The emergence of a social order has three stages: (a) externalization or performance of activities, which gives rise to their habituation (activity as habit) and their institutionalization, or the “reciprocal typification of actions habitualized by kinds of actors;” (b) objectification, or the experience of institutionalized activity as something prescribed, external to each actor; and (c) internalization, or the assumption of institutionalized routines in a social system which each individual makes.
10. The three stages of a social order’s formation imply that: (a) society is a human product, not a “natural” one; (b) that society is an objective reality and not merely a subjective one; and (c) that the individual is a social product. These three affirmations are true, and each one clarifies and complements the others.
11. In Latin-American societies, there exist large sectors of the population which, at first glance, appear marginalized, or separated from the social system: they do not receive its benefits (passive participation), and they lack obligations and duties within it (active participation).
12. According to one framework, marginalization signifies psycho-social disintegration: the marginalized sectors lack the culture and attitudes necessary to integrate themselves into the modern social system. Thus, their integration requires their education and training. However, this focus tends toward psychologism, situating the immediate cause of people's marginalization in their own traits.
13. From the lens of dependency, marginalization is the consequence of principles operating in the ruling capitalist system in the first world and being imposed onto the third world in a partial and more primitive way, subordinating the social order to the needs of the metropoles, or the minority sectors tied to them. Thus, it is the system itself which develops and reinforces marginalization as part of its normal functioning. The marginalized are integrated into the social system, but marginally. The elimination of marginalization thus requires a change in the social system itself.
14. Daily routines are the most important way the order of a social system is reproduced. These routines tend to shape a certain “common sense,” or assumptions of life which groups and people take as part of nature. Everyday, casual conversation plays a fundamental role in maintaining this common sense as the proponent and reproducer of the social order.
15. According to one view, survival brings the marginalized to develop a culture of passivity and low aspirations and to establish exchange networks which allow survival in minimal conditions. This “culture of poverty” is transmitted from parents to children, making the victims responsible for their lack of progress and for thus perpetuating their poverty and marginalization. The studies at hand confirm the description of traits associated with the “culture of poverty,” but not its existence as a relatively autonomous “subculture” of the established social system which reproduces itself.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, An Order of Disorder 3
3. The Reproduction of the Social Order
Every social order seeks its own subsistence, if not its own development and expansion. The "national security" argument, used to justify all sorts of extra-legal endeavors, is simply the expression of every regime’s continued, systematic drive to guarantee its survival at critical moments. It is unnecessary to look for profound reasons to justify this pattern, at least in how it relates to the chief beneficiaries of every social order; it is logical that a class in power desires to maintain it.
Yet, the very fact that an order reflects a certain balance of social forces sets up a possible, internal source of its own instability; the social interests which find themselves inadequately represented or even rejected by a given order assume a perpetual role of questioning the regime and perhaps the system itself. Therefore, as Parsons emphasizes, every social system tries to secure its survival and reproduction, transmitting its demands to individuals so that they will internalize them as their own (the process of socialization) and make those modifications and changes which allow the system to survive (social evolution or differentiation).
Actions inherent in and coherent with the system are the most convenient channels for the system’s reproduction. In other words, the normal functioning of a social system is the chief process through which it is reproduced and assures its survival. The social order is strengthened and confirmed by the very act of ordering, in other words, by its members adhering to its demands and fulfilling its objectives, hence the social importance of daily routines, every more-or-less institutionalized act which people take as natural and do not question. Routines are perhaps the ideal mechanism for the reproduction of a social system, since the person governed by routines (the average person?) is the best promoter of the established order.
Continue reading.
Every social order seeks its own subsistence, if not its own development and expansion. The "national security" argument, used to justify all sorts of extra-legal endeavors, is simply the expression of every regime’s continued, systematic drive to guarantee its survival at critical moments. It is unnecessary to look for profound reasons to justify this pattern, at least in how it relates to the chief beneficiaries of every social order; it is logical that a class in power desires to maintain it.
Yet, the very fact that an order reflects a certain balance of social forces sets up a possible, internal source of its own instability; the social interests which find themselves inadequately represented or even rejected by a given order assume a perpetual role of questioning the regime and perhaps the system itself. Therefore, as Parsons emphasizes, every social system tries to secure its survival and reproduction, transmitting its demands to individuals so that they will internalize them as their own (the process of socialization) and make those modifications and changes which allow the system to survive (social evolution or differentiation).
Actions inherent in and coherent with the system are the most convenient channels for the system’s reproduction. In other words, the normal functioning of a social system is the chief process through which it is reproduced and assures its survival. The social order is strengthened and confirmed by the very act of ordering, in other words, by its members adhering to its demands and fulfilling its objectives, hence the social importance of daily routines, every more-or-less institutionalized act which people take as natural and do not question. Routines are perhaps the ideal mechanism for the reproduction of a social system, since the person governed by routines (the average person?) is the best promoter of the established order.
Continue reading.
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