Disadvantages Of Social Media Essay In Urdu

[Brian Bezdicek]

2] See Barnes and Kaase 1979. Social movements are not aberrations. Rather they are continuous with modern political culture. Social theorists like Alain Touraine and Amitai Etzioni define modern and postmodern societies by their responsiveness to social movements and social conflicts. Touraine makes social movements the constitutive element of modern and postmodern societies. See Touraine 1977, 1981; Etzioni 1968.

[6] Some, primarily Marxists, have interpreted these new social movements as the protests of the privileged, that is, as expressions of a new class or at least the new strata of an educated elite seeking to protect or to better its social standing against opponents in the old society, including both capital and labor. Alvin Gouldner's new class theory is a variation on this theme, as are the more traditional Marxist accounts of "proletarianization," "new working class theory," and the various attempts at structuralist class analysis, from Poulantzas to E. Wright.

[7] Let me be clear that this does not mean, except of course from a particular theoretical and political point of view, that they thus lost their mission or suffered embourgeoisment and the like. How one interprets this alteration, if it really was that, is a matter of preference, which I have discussed elsewhere (Eyerman 1981).

[8] Again, interpreting this development is a matter of preference and there are differences of opinion. Walter Korpi (1979), for example, sees this development as an expression of increased power and maturity. From a more radical Marxist point of view the opposite would be the case.

[9] This research, which is funded by the Swedish Humanities and Social Science Research Council (HSFR), compares the development of environmentalist movements in Sweden, Holland, and Denmark. For an example of another issue related to this discussion, see Cramer, Eyerman, and Jamison 1987.

[1] The ambiguity of our modern condition resides in this: On the one hand scientific and technological advances have become rationalized and institutionalized as an integral part of the modern order. On the other hand the meaning of that order for its actors, which is also an integral feature of the motivational dispositions of human beings in seeking and pursuing socially approved goals, is no longer assured, not even by scientific knowledge. At best the scientist replaces John Bunyan's "Christian" (in Pilgrim's Progress ) as the modern pilgrim. At worst the scientist, in the never-ending quest for empirical certitude as a substitute for the certitude of faith, continually undoes the meaning of the world.

[2] I refer here not simply to political institutions but to various other institutions in which political authority has lost its diffuse aura, including the nuclear family and educational institutions.

[4] Paulo Freire has broadly designated this orientation as the "magical level of consciousness" (Freire 1973, 44). The phrase is suggestive, but in terms of this analysis it is better to think of a "premodern" and "modern" magical consciousness. The premodern magical consciousness conceives the forces that alter the operations of the world as being ultimately beyond human control, albeit capable of being invoked by special human agents or by some rituals some of the time. The modern magical consciousness denies a transcendent reality but accepts that the world can be transformed (even radically, as in the case of millenarian and revolutionary movements) from its natural appearances and operations solely by human means.

[5] The long-neglected studies of Seillire (1907, 1908, 1911, 1918) on mystical and neo-romantic currents in the ideologies of imperialism, pan-Germanism, and Marxist socialism merit reconsideration in the present context.

[2] Poulantzas (1974) represents what must be regarded as a deviant Marxist view in this respect. His conceptualization of modern class structures would apparently require him to recognize, along with liberal theorists, a numerically declining working class, together with what he would regard as an expanding "new petty bourgeoisie." It is difficult to resist the conclusion that criticism by other Marxists of the position adopted by Poulantzas has been as much inspired by the uncongenial nature of its political implications as by preexisting theoretical disagreements. Thus, for example, Wright complains (1976, 23) "It is hard to imagine a viable socialist movement developing in an advanced capitalist society in which less than one in five people are workers." For an incisive critique of recent Marxist debates on class structure and action. see Lockwood (1981).

[3] This point could scarcely be better demonstrated than by the very extensive literature generated by British industrial sociologist under the affliction of "Bravermania." See, purely for purposes of illustration of the generally prevailing incoherence of theory and evidence, the recent contributions of Crompton and Jones (1984) and Penn and Scattergood (1985) and the earlier debates to which these authors refer. It must, moreover, be recognized, as argued elsewhere, that

even quite indisputable evidence of degrading derived from particular case-studies can be of little value in defending the degrading thesis against the upgrading thesis in so far as the argument is about class structures . Supporters of the latter thesis do not seek to deny that deskilling or other forms of degrading occur (although they might wish to see these as integral to the development of industrial, rather than of specifically capitalist, societies); but they would still maintain that the net result of technological and organisational change over the economy as a whole is an increase in skill levels and in proportion of the work-force in salaried or bureaucratic conditions of employment . In other words, macro-sociological arguments can only be adequately discussed on the basis of macro-sociological data. (Goldthorpe and Payne 1986, 23)

[6] Braverman appears (1974, 130) to sense the weakness in his argument here in citing Crozier's (1971) observation that "the proletarianization of white-collar employees does not have the same meaning at all if it is women, and not heads of family, who constitute the majority of the group." But rather than offering any serious response, he merely embarks on a diversionary attack on Crozier for being "pleased to use women as that category of the labor force for which any job is good enough."

[10] I draw here on the results of work currently being undertaken, in collaboration with Robert Erikson, as part of the CASMIN (Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations) project, based at the Institut fr Sozialwissenschaften of the University of Mannheim and supported by the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk. The data from national inquiries conducted in the early and mid-1970s have been systematically recoded in order to produce information of a generally high standard of comparability on rates and patterns of class mobility across a range of industrial societies. Reference in this paper is chiefly to findings for France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States. (For more detailed accounts, see Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1985a, 1985b, 1987).

[11] Results from the CASMIN project would indicate that for the men born into service-class families in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there was typically around a three-in-five probability that they would themselves "succeed" to service-class positions, while for men born into such families over the next two decades, this probability increased to around two-in-three.

[13] From this point of view, a welcome recent development is the growing interest in providing macrosociology with better "micro" foundations through the revival of rational choice theory. Especially encouraging is the fact that such an approach must begin from an acceptance of methodoligical individualism, which is in itself a powerful prophylactic against lapses into historicism, and that this approach has been taken up both by theorists with evident liberal commitments (for example, Boudon 1977; Olson 1982; Hechter 1983) and by others who would still apparently wish to be regarded as marxisant at least (for example, Elster 1982, 1985; Przeworski 1985).

[14] In this respect (as in others) sociologists interested in problems of long-term social change could, I believe, find useful guidance in the work of the "new" economic historians, whom they appear so far to have largely neglected.

[1] I make this observation despite the fact that Spencer articulated a wide-ranging historical classification of history as differentiation well before Durkheim's work appeared. Although Spencer had a significant influence on Durkheim, it is from Durkheim, not Spencer, that subsequent thinking about differentiation in the social sciences has drawn. Moreover, Spencer's approach to differentiation contrasts with Durkheim's in ways that are very significant for the problems and prospects of differentiation theory today. (See my discussion of Durkheim and Parson's neglect of war in this chapter.)

[4] Thus the indexes to the major works that Parsons (1966, 1971) devoted to history as differentiation include many more references to Weber than to Durkheim, and in the introduction to the second of these works he emphasizes that it "is written in the spirit of Weber's work" (1971, 2). Yet he immediately qualifies this in a telling way: "One important difference in perspective has been dictated by the link organic evolution and that of human society and culture." Parsons refers here to the evolutionary theory of adaptation and differentiation that he drew in the most immediate sense from Durkheim's work.

[5] It is revealing of the generic qualities shared by different approaches to change that important writers in this newer generation have criticized Marxism on the same grounds that I have criticized Parsons himself. Giddens (1986) argues, for example, that Marxism is too evolutionary in its history and that it ignores the centrality of war. Indeed, the fact that Marx and even Weber (but see Alexander 1987) ignored the centrality of war to social change indicates that the problem goes beyond difficulties with Durkheim's problem to very deeply rooted blinders of an ideological kind. For other parallels between the recent criticism of Marxist change theory and the critique of Parsons, see my discussion of Marx's change theory earlier in this chapter.

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