2.2 The Production of the Social Order
Ana Estela is a 35 year-old Salvadoran woman, the wife of a lawyer who works with a financing company in the capital. Their marriage has produced four children, to whom Ana Estela dedicates most of her time. A normal day for her begins early in the morning: she must get up at 5, at the same hour as a maid who works for them. While the maid prepares breakfast for the whole family, Ana Estela begins her daily routine. Today, she puts on a black dress, since she must attend a funeral. She then waits for her husband and children, whom she helps get ready for the day. While they eat breakfast, she gives the maid her domestic chores. Afterward, she takes one of the family cars and drives her children to their respective schools, encountering some traffic on the way. After dropping off her children, she takes herself to a shopping center, where she does the shopping needed for her home and family. She stays there for a long time, seeing some familiar friends with whom she converses for a bit. She takes the time to call the maid at home in order to give her new instructions. Then, she goes to the funeral, where she reunites with her husband, who is also in attendance. At the end of the funeral, the husband goes back to the office while she goes on to make other purchases. Finally, she picks up her children from their schools and returns home for lunch.
A morning experience like the one described above is a routine which, with more or fewer differences, many women of the Salvadoran middle sectors such as Ana Estela observe. Much of this routine, or others like it, makes the life of social norms clear. What stands out most from this behavior is the type of activity described, which exhibits a social division of labor based on sexual differentiation: it is the responsibility of the wife to tend to the house and the children, while it is the responsibility of the husband to find work which could support the family. Yet, there is nothing in the nature of sexual difference which entails this social division of work: it could just as well be the case that the husband is charged with taking care of the home and the kids while the wife goes out to find support for the family. Ana Estela’s morning activity also demonstrates other social rules whose operation is not tied to sexual differentiation, but to cultural formalities (the black dress for the funeral), demands of urban life (vehicular transportation according to traffic norms), and a lifestyle appropriate for a class or social sector (taking children to a private school and not a public one, using the services of a maid for certain household chores, etc.). In this way, Ana Estela’s routine reveals her active membership to a social system whose norms she follows and on which she bases and develops a sense of meaning for her entire behavior.
However, this description of some of these regulatory norms in Ana Estela’s morning routine demonstrates a certain conventionality. One means by this term something founded on social agreement, but which is not the same as arbitrarity, since that expresses something unjustified. As a child, I occasionally insisted on walking on the left side of my hometown’s streets to the subsequent annoyance of other passers-by who nearly collided with me and yelled: “I’m walking on the right side!” to which I would respond, “And me on the left!” Generally, adults knew no more to add than, “What a naughty, rude child!” Indeed, I was a “rude” boy who did not yet respect the socially recognized rule which stipulated that traffic should advance on the right-hand side. From my childish perspective, I could not distinguish between conventional and arbitrary. Nevertheless, it is obvious that an orderly and generally accepted way of moving on a defined side is a justified demand which avoids collisions and accidents. But this is a conventional norm, since it would, in principle, function the same way whether traffic flowed right or left, as occurs in England. This brings us to ask how these more or less justified and more or less conventional agreements, which are norms of communal human life in each society, arise. How did the norms which regulate the social division of labor along sexual lines or the norms which demand the Salvadoran middle sectors to maintain a certain lifestyle—including ownership of one or more vehicles, reliance on the services of a maid for household chores, and attendance of children at private schools instead of public schools—develop?
This question involves a more profound concern than that of facilitating social life. What is at play in the phenomenon of social convention is the activation or inhibition of a certain behavior through the presence of other people, who in some way actualize the meaning of that behavior in a society, social group, or particular situation. However, the problem of norms is rooted in the emergence or assignment of that meaning itself: How does an act or kind of act come to be valued in one way or another, such that the valuation is converted into a normative demand to realize it in some form or another, in a particular context or another? The question is not simply what drives Ana Estela to get up at 5 in the morning, to dress herself in black, or to charge herself with shopping for her home; clearly, one can respond to that question in a simplistic way, saying that it involves a routine regulated by socially accepted norms. The question is why and how these norms structure that routine for Ana Estela rather than her husband, or why and how they determine what that routine is instead of another. How, when, and why does a certain act or kind of act become a demand or social transgression, that is to say, become obligatory or forbidden, good or bad?
2.2.1 Sherif’s Experiments
Around the middle of the century, a North-American social psychologist, Muzafer Sherif, attempted to examine the emergence of social norms with a series of experimental studies in a laboratory setting (Sherif, 1933/1966; Sherif and Sherif, 1975). To that end, he needed to design a situation which, in the first instance, did not demand people to act in a pre-determined way, that is to say, he needed a situation which was not socially structured, at least in terms of interaction; this would allow him to observe the process of gradual structuration developing through personal interaction and the consolidation of a behavioral demand or norm. The autokinetic effect was offered to match these conditions.
The autokinetic effect is the perception of movement one has when viewing a point of light in otherwise total darkness. The person who gazes at a continually presented, fixed point of light in darkness may perceive the point as if it were situated in several places in a room at the same time or moving erratically, even though it in fact always remains in the same place. The effect is more vivid the less clearly a person is able to perceive their actual position; for example, when one is seated in a room with which one is not familiar or in a chair without a back or support. It is important to note that the autokinetic effect is produced even when the person knows that the point of light is indeed permanently fixed.
Thus, the autokinetic effect offered an ambiguous situation without structure in which there was no clear indication on how to proceed—in this case, with the perception of a point of light’s movement. In other words, there was an absence of norms regarding the perception of movement, and it thus opened the door to a variety of possibilities of structured interaction. The hypothesis Sherif put forward was that the lack of a reference point in the field of external stimuli would lead to the establishment of an internal reference point as the temporal sequence of stimuli was produced (Sherif, 1936/1966, p. 90). That is to say, as the situation did not impose a clear norm regarding the proper response to it, such a norm would become established by the subjects through their interaction.
Sherif defined two experimental situations: one, in which a lone individual was subjected to the autokinetic effect; a second, in which the effect was presented to a group. He also established two procedures: one, in which the person first went through the individual test and then the group test; and in the second, the opposite case—the group test carried out first and then the individual test. The results of the experiments could be summarized in the following way (See Sherif, 1936/1966, p. 104-105; Sherif, 1975, p. 195-196):
1. In both the individual test and the group test, there was a tendency to establish a range of values and a final decision on the point of light’s movement. This range and judgment can vary between individuals, which demonstrates, according to Sherif, that the tendency toward a stabilized response does not depend on interaction, but is first established in basic psychological processes. Nevertheless, the range of values and the conclusion which came from the group test were common to all individuals of the group, which demonstrates the force of interaction.
2. When people from the individual experimental test go to the group test, the range and judgment which each had developed on their own tend to converge, even when they do not initially appear for the first time until the group test.
3. People who begin with the experimental group test and then go to the individual test continue perceiving the point of light according to the range of values and the conclusion established in the group test. In other words, “the norm formed from interaction with others is converted into the individual’s own perspective” (Sherif and Sherif, 1975, p. 196).
Sherif’s experiments are thought to show how a norm, that is to say, the expectation of behaving (here, perceiving) in a certain way, develops, a norm which can be a product of individual character as much as the nature of a group, whether the individual norm either ultimately resembles the group norm or is a minor variant of it. For Sherif, the emergence of the norm shows the human need to rely on an “anchor,” or point of stabilization for one’s experience. In other words, human behavior, in its broadest sense, requires a structure, an order; and it crystallizes in the formation of norms.
Sherif (1936/1966, p. IX) turns to Durkheim's tradition in order to account for this human need to rely on an order to survive. In short, this brings us to understand the emergence of the social order as an essential part of human nature: as long as human beings search for the satisfaction of their needs and must interact with each other and with nature toward that end, a normative order of their course of action becomes an essential condition.
However, setting aside Sherif’s theoretical contributions for now, we shall turn to his experiments. An important note is that the perceived “norm” which emerges in any of his experimental situations, whether individual or of a group, is a totally conventional norm. Since the point of light itself does not move, any range of values or judgment which defines its movement is of a subjective or intersubjective order. This norm thus lacks an objective reference, a datum of reality “in itself” which allows one to think about the adaptation of the established norm. One thus cannot properly speak of a true or false, of an incorrect or correct approach taken by the subjects in this situation (Sherif 1936/1966, p. 107 and following pages). This lack of an objective reference point is not a common characteristic of social norms, for which one can bring facts to mind which put limits on normative possibilities. Thus, for example, the traffic norm which imposes a speed limit on cars is not purely conventional or subjective: there is a limit beyond it at which, given available technology, it is impossible to control a vehicle or respect the signs necessary for maintaining order. However, with the autokinetic effect, any guess regarding movement, any position regarding the distance covered by the point of light is in principle valid, in the sense that it depends on individuals and groups and not on an external stimulus.
2.2.2 The Genesis of a Social Order
There is a large gap in theory and experience between the emergence of a perceptive norm about autokinetic movement in Sherif’s laboratory and the emergence of an entire social order in contemporary society. If we compare, for example, the social reality of Nicaragua in 1988 with that in 1978, when the country was still under the Somoza regime, we can appreciate both the novelties in the present social order and what has stayed the same from yesterday to today. It is true that in this lapse of time, new social norms have appeared, along with norms important to Nicaraguan life in the vital areas of labor, political participation, and personal development. In this sense, a comparison of past and present involves tracing the emergence of new social norms and their gradual institutionalization in society.
Berger and Luckmann (1968) emphasized that the formation of a social order is a historical process which never ends, since it responds to a permanent need in human nature. Against the fatedness of the animal world, where instinct fundamentally provides adequate forms of adaptation, the human being is instead born unfinished and aimless, and closure is produced in the process of one’s social development. Thus, human beings will live on largely as a product of their own work, but their work will consist of forging their world, their social reality, from an already-existing order and from the mold in which they were cast. For that reason, according to Berger and Luckmann, human beings are both the products and the producers of a social order: they originate from a social order in their historical manifestation as individuals, but the history of their externalization as human beings is their production, maintenance, and transformation of the social order.
A social order’s process of formation in an objective reality occurs in three stages, according to Berger and Luckmann: (a) a stage of externalization, (b) a stage of objectification, and (c) a stage of internalization (See Berger and Luckmann, 1968, p. 74-91).
(a) Externalization
Human beings are continually externalizing themselves in activity, that is to say, they find themselves in the continual process of transforming their environment. In this process of performing their tasks, habituation—the conversion of an action into a habit—occurs. A habit consists of activity performed continually, such that its repetition becomes automatic. Habit implies decreased effort, since it is performed without the need of prior deliberation and without demanding particularly conscious attention for its realization.
A habit maintains the sense of the original action, even though that sense becomes implied and can be assumed. It is precisely the assumptions of habitual routines in human life which allow it to efficiently confront basic, daily demands without squandering energy. Habituating oneself to acting in a certain way in a situation—such as tending to personal hygiene, scheduling for a day, performing a task—“narrows” the individual's aperture of potential, removing choices which, in principle, are open; nevertheless, habituation allows one to carry out necessary work with minimal energy, thus freeing time for other efforts. The habituation of personal hygiene or work allows the person to reflect over other matters while completing habitual tasks: “the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation” (Berger and Luckmann, 1968, p. 75).
The habituation of an activity is the preliminary step toward its institutionalization. “Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of actions habitualized by types of actors” (Berger and Luckmann, 1968, p. 76). Stated more plainly, the habit of one is connected with the habit of others, and those with the habit are not agents in their own right as different people, but are actors fulfilling a certain part or role. The typification of correlated activities is likewise the typification of correlated actors.
Let us examine an important activity in its institutional form. A given person feels ill and visits a doctor. Once he meets with the doctor (also an institutionalized process, but we will not consider it at present), the medical examination proceeds according to a series of acts characteristic of the doctor and the patient. It likely begins with a series of questions regarding the patient’s details and prior health; it follows with an explanation of the symptoms and, generally, with a physical examination, perhaps the collection of additional data, and ends with a diagnosis and prescription for treatment. There is a routinization not only of the doctor’s actions, but also of the patient’s. Or in a more straightforward way, each one knows exactly what the other must do and hopes that the other will act in that way. This correlation of actions—asking questions and answering them, examining symptoms and demonstrating them, prescribing the prescription and completing it—is certainly part of the institution of medicine as a social service in which individuals participate not as such, but as typified actors: doctor and patient. So much so, that when one of the actors does not perform to the corresponding role, it can confuse the other: “Is the doctor not going to examine me? Is he not going to give me any medication?”
The typification of reciprocal actions emerges from a history, and in this sense,it is the product of individuals’ activity in each particular circumstance. Thus, action is habitualized, correlating habits institutionalize, and institutions determine the way in which individuals should behave as actors, as members of a social system. However, individuals are born already engaging a society with institutions to which we are indeed socialized. Individuals perceive such institutions as having an objective character, which brings us to discuss the second stage of the the social order’s production.
(b) Objectification
The objectivity of social institutions is also produced by human action. The externalized product of human activity is experienced by people as something external, something which is "out there," something which, in Durkheim’s terms, acquires the character of fact and even of a “thing.” The doctor’s behavior toward the patient is converted into a routine which acquires a wholeness of its own: a “medical examination,” which is not conflated with the other acts the doctor performs (even if they are also within the sphere of medical practice, such as a surgery) and much less with those of the actor as a particular “individual.”
As long as the activity is objectified as a habit, it acquires fixed forms which can be described as routines following certain norms. Institutionalized activity does not quite depend on the subjectivity of each individual, but on the fact that the individual experiences the routine as something prescribed, something to which one must be subjected, and as a set of objective procedures which one simply cannot change. In this way, the doctor feels that the medical examination is an institutional routine which he must learn and perform, respecting the social “rules of the game,” that is to say, maintaining his role as doctor and meeting the objective demands which are socially imposed on him. The institutional world precedes people as individuals and is experienced as part of an objective reality. But the objectification of habitualized activities has been a constitutive stage in the historical institutionalization of those activities. The same can be said about the objectification of new routines which are introduced in a society, social system, or institution, such as having to carry out additional tests (of blood, urine, etc.) before arriving at a clinical diagnosis, a part of the institutionalized activity which the medical examination has become, which is broader today than ever before.
(c) Internalization
Now we turn to the process by which individuals adopt the institutionalized routines in a given social system as their own. The world, externalized and objectified through activity, returns to the person as a fact of objective reality. This process of internalization fundamentally takes place through socialization (See Martín-Baró, 1983b, Chapter 4). In a study by Haas and Shaffir (1977) on the behavior of medical students toward their first patients, it was observed that the students’ chief concerns were performing routines unique to their role as doctor and appearing as authentic professionals. The feeling of incompetence which the students experienced was fundamentally the product of difficulty faced when assuming their role, in other words, to adequately perform habits expected of a doctor.
Looking at a social order’s process of formation as a whole, one could say that the stage of externalization, despite being bound to a world already internalized by individuals in a given historical situation, is the stage most open to innovation; the stage of internalization, although not experienced in an entirely passive way, since it puts the individuality of people, their cognitive schemata, their already-developed judgments, and the circumstances in which such judgments occur into play, is fundamentally a moment of consolidation and reproduction; the stage of objectification is the point of transition between the individual and the social, the stage in which activities obtain their substance as social reality.
In summary, externalization implies that society is a historical product of human action, a point which is often ignored by North-American sociology and, in general, by positivist frameworks, which leads to reifying givens as absolutes, or in other words, to accepting the existing social system as a natural, unquestionable assumption; objectification implies that society is an objective reality, not a purely subjective or intersubjective reality and, consequently, it is a reality which cannot be reduced to the sum of individual behaviors or psychological processes; finally, internalization implies that the human being is a social product, and that each person is thus the product of a history in a given circumstance under very specific conditioning. These three affirmations, “society is a human product, society is an objective reality, and man is a social product,” are not only evident, but ought to be understood with mutual conceptual reference (Berger and Luckmann, 1968, p. 84).
We have used the medical examination as an example of a social institution, above all to avoid the conception of an institution as merely an organization such as a ministry, hospital, or school, which might otherwise have touched upon material structures without touching upon a collection of socially typified actions, first and foremost. Yet, it is useful to apply the scheme laid out above to social institutions which are more important than a medical examination, such as the family, the school, or the police. This obliges us to reflect, for example, on the fundamental fact that the family is also a social product of a history, or at least, the family as institutionalized in our Central-American countries. The matrimonial structure, which involves the formalization of relations between a man and woman, and the parental structure, which defines the relations between parents and children, are the crystallization of a particular history. This becomes clear when one observes that, even in a population as contracted as can be in El Salvador, one indeed finds diverse kinds of family which differ more or less in the way they are consecrated by the law and acted upon by state apparatuses. It also becomes clear when one analyzes the role of subordination and confinement assigned to the woman in a family, a role fiercely questioned today by the gradual demand of progress and female empowerment, which primarily depends on its “liberation” (See Martín-Baró, 1988b).
2.2.3 Dynamics of the Social Order’s Formation
Sherif’s experiments on the formation of norms occurred under “abstract” conditions, contexts abstracted from reality in which an objective point of reference did not even exist, given that a point of light undergoing the autokinetic effect remains permanently fixed. Thus, there is the danger of extrapolating on the assumption that norms emerge from the dynamics of each situation, that is to say, the dynamics of the people who, individually or as groups, find themselves confronted with a new situation lacking any other factor. Under this view, one runs the risk of concluding that the social norm can be sufficiently explained from the elements composing the present situation, a danger especially run by the study of systems and which, in social psychology, pervades most studies labeled “group dynamics.” As will be seen later, this is one of the factors which brought Serge Moscovici, a French social psychologist, to break from the traditional explanation given by Solomon Asch and his followers for the conformist behavior of individuals with correctly dissenting views in a small group which otherwise had unanimity of bad judgment. According to Moscovici (Moscovici and Faucheux, 1972), what Asch and others seemed to assume was that individuals begin to exist, as it were, in the context of the experimental group, rather than believe that they bring along a prevailing norm from the external, broader society, and that they could contrast that social norm (“common sense”?) with the apparent norm emerging in the laboratory (See Doise, Deschamps and Mugny, 1980).
Although Berger and Luckmann consider the need for a social order as part of human nature itself, they discuss the process of its particular genesis in historical terms. Thus, the crucial fact is that these processes do not start from a hypothetical ground zero, but from interwoven events emerging from some preceding conditions instead of others. Every new order necessarily arises from a previous order, however much one imagines it as a break or sees it as a negation in itself. But this obliges one to recognize the genesis of some new norm or new social order as part of the determinants and conditions which the preceding social order imposes. This means above all that, in the appearance of a new norm or new institutional order, one must seriously take into account the reality of social power. Habituation and institutionalization are neither abstract processes nor processes which spontaneously arise from interpersonal interaction; they are processes which emerge from and are subjected to mechanisms of power and conflicts between the existing forces of each society.
Every social institution is thus the product of the exercise of social power, but this does not mean that they are merely the results of those social sectors which hold what is traditionally called “power,” even though they play some determining role. Thus, the definition of a social institution is understood as “the place in which the forms adopted by the determinants of social relations are articulated, are discussed” (Lapassade and Lourau, 1974, p. 199). An institution is the “form assumed by the reproduction and production of social relations in a given mode of production” (Lapassade and Lourau, 1974, p. 198). Activity, or a conjunction of institutionalized activities, is the product of social forces found in a given moment of a society, and in turn, it serves to maintain and reproduce that balance of forces which translate and channel the social interests they promote.
The family, as a particular institution, is thus not the expression of natural, universal, or abstract demands, but the expression of particular demands made by the dominant social groups in our countries’ history, and a very concrete form of promoting their interests—for example, through the defense and transmission of certain values or ways of life. This does not mean that the institution of the family could not nevertheless serve other, worthier functions not tied to dominant class interests, but that its institutionalization articulates some social interests. One can understand resistance to change in the institution of the family in this way, even in the small cases related to the particular status and role of the woman, for example. This resistance appears strongest in those groups which are the gatekeepers of the dominant culture, such as the higher middle sectors, which contrasts with other groups less committed to prevailing cultural norms, such as marginalized urban groups. One can also understand the persistence of more or less latent forms of “machismo" in this way, even in those families which have now accepted women’s integration into the university system or professional work (Martín-Baró, 1987d).
We previously mentioned the case of Nicaragua 10 years since the Sandinista regime’s rise to power. It is possible that much of the failure of the new regime to introduce substantial changes in the social order can be attributed to the systematic war which Ronald Reagan’s government has waged in all spheres of life: economic, political, martial, and ideological (even religious!). But the failure itself is sufficient evidence that not even the concerted efforts of a substantial number of a country’s social forces are sufficient, at least in the short term, to achieve a social order’s radical transformation. There are many factors which interlock in the genesis and configuration of a social order, both those internal to a regime and those (actually or apparently) external to it. Consequently, the genesis of a new social order cannot simply be explained by the systematic appearance of multiple social norms from personal and group interactions. Putting aside minor historical asynchronies for now, a social order is the result of class conflict at a particular moment, its stability being necessarily provisional in the confrontation of social forces within a particular historical context. This is why the social order at a given moment tends to be the product and tool of the interests of the class or group in power.
Continue reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment