- Sorokin,
P. 1959. Social and cultural mobility. Glencoe, Ill., Free Press. Chapters I -
III; VI – IX; XIV-XVII.
- Polanyi
K 1944. The great transformation. New York, Toronto, Farrar & Rinehart,
Inc. Part II.
- Young,
M. 1958. The rise of the meritocracy. London: Thames and Hudson. Chapters I,
IV, V and VII.
These three works were chosen because Sorokin
(1959[1927]) , Polanyi (1944), and Young (1958) document and propose a set of
ideas which can be taken as foundations of social stratification studies,
especially those which aim at understanding (social) mobility in contemporary
societies. Evidently, analyses of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel are a must
in the foundation of any current sociological topic. However, a stronger
foundation to deeply comprehend some of the key concepts behind social mobility
research can be built from the former three authors, especially Sorokin’s Social and cultural mobility. Furthermore,
and for the purpose of this memo, the contributions of Polanyi and Young can be
respectively associated to the emergence of self-regulated markets as opposed
to systems which are coordinated in reference to mechanism of collaboration and
cooperation, and the prevalence of intelligence as an individual trait that can
break individual stagnation.
There are several common ideas which these three
authors share, for the purpose of this memo only three will be briefly
highlighted: a) a criticism to the notion of progress, b) drawing from Weber,
the ontological position of “culture” in the shaping of society and how
rationalization takes places, and c) a broad methodological consideration for
the measurement of social mobility.
Progress was a pervasive concept for the 18th
and 19th century thinkers. The notion that societies move, in many cases inevitably, towards
a better state, is perhaps one
fundamental idea of stratification. This dynamic furthermore can be applied, as
Sorokin brilliantly operationalizes, to populations (countries), groups and individuals
(p.5). In other words, the notion of progress is inherent to mobility studies
since a “positive” movement can be captured in each of these three units of
analysis. Nevertheless, it is hard to agree on what better really means since the movement from tradition to modernity,
savage to civil, or ascription to achievement needs to be clearly addressed.
Even though each pair of these six concepts can be aligned into three different
continuums and therefore can potentially become such indexes, there arise evident
problems in order to propose a parsimonious methodology. Furthermore, each of these
concepts is heavily loaded with political values.
Sorokin in a more open criticism to Marx and other
economists, documents a goalless fluctuation of income as an indicator that
progress is not per se a hallmark of
human societies, and therefore equality is not likely to be achieved (p.25-26).
Perpetual prosperity is something that
actually has not been proved and it is hard to even project, Sorokin argues.
There are periods indeed where vertical mobility can be assessed but these
dynamics usually end. Even though, there have been important changes in
political and economic dimensions (i.e. democracy and industrial revolution), this
author also points out that the belief that there will be an eternal increase
of vertical mobility is essentially misplaced. By vertical mobility Sorokin means
“the relations involved in a transition of an individual (or a social object)
from one social stratum to another” (p.133). According to this author, obstacles
that impede vertical mobility are always present, but what changes is their
influence, in other words there are obstacles which prevent individuals to move
from strata to other but their impact fluctuates. Furthermore, mobility is not
necessarily associated to whether a society is primitive of modern, since the
distribution of assets (being those social, political or economic) might not be
assorted of how technologically advanced a given society is.
Polanyi also criticizes the notion of progress,
defended by those economists, whereby the supremacy of market as a
self-regulated institution is conceived as the appropriate mechanism to
regulate society fairly. Unlike
Sorokin, Polanyi relies in anthropological studies in order to document how
artificial the economic man defended by Smith is, but also how markets had to
rely in a direct intervention of several actors (i.e. social movements,
parties, guilds or social classes) whose interests shape the forms of
distribution of commodities.[1]
The metaphor of the economic man is used by Polanyi
to contrast the principles of reciprocity and collaboration which regulated communities
and therefore markets, rather than competition, previous to the emergence of
capitalist societies. Polanyi points out that “it would be rash to assert that
local markets ever developed form individual acts of barter” (p.65). Exchanges of
goods were heavily regulated by ritual and ceremonies, and as soon as the state
commenced to intervene, it did in reference to avoid either the formation of
monopolies or competition. Both regulations aimed at protecting communities
(i.e. towns) from behaviours which could invert the role of the existent institutions
and therefore attempt to overturn enshrined values of cooperation. As Sorokin,
Polanyi points out that, even though there were primitive practices of
collaboration to promote specific type of communities, stratification is still
an important characteristic of these social groups. In other words inequality
or difference among individual is regarded as inevitable, because resources are
never equally distributed. However, what is a stake is the degree of exclusion
which certain communities or societies can display once they invert their
values, from cooperation to competition for instance, or once accumulation of
goods moves from social to self-interest.
For Polanyi the emergence of poverty, at the end of
the 18th century in Europe particularly in England, not only shakes
the assumption of progress which was sustained by liberal economists, but also
helps to identify the pitfalls of the notion of self-regulated markets as the
mechanism which distributes assets in the most efficient manner. In other
words, the existence of a group of individuals who do not benefit from the
advances fostered by the industrial revolution, whereby population’s average
starts to heavily increase, questions the economic assumption that self-interests
could regulate society, particularly the idea that once one “let[s] the market
be given charge of the poor, (…) things will look after themselves” (p.122).
Polanyi cleverly identifies within the liberal
economic thought the tendency of regarding the self-regulated market as a natural system, in other words subject
to unchangeable and universal laws. This conceptualization was the main
reasoning behind the opposition of introducing human laws which ultimately foster the decrease of poverty, not
because poverty was something unachievable but rather because the march of
progress ultimately was only going to face (human) obstacles and therefore
delaying its last stage. This type of logical reasoning promoted the notion
that no intervention is the appropriate mechanism to distribute goods, and for
instance state involvement is noxious to the development of society. Since a
nil state involvement is something that currently is hard to fulfill, liberal
economists can always bring the unfalsifiable statement that “society will
never face the complete absence of poverty since some degree of state
intervention will avoid this outcome to be materialized”.
Progress in Young has a satirical meaning. His Rise of the Meritocracy toys with the
notion that in the future, meritocracy—a well-established procedure of
assortment, whereby individuals compete for the available occupational
positions and are selected according to their objective abilities—is actually
fulfilled. In other words, the notion of progress lies behind the overcoming of
loyalty by reason, since elements such as the influence of family or seniority
lose their prevalence in the shaping of society. One important result of this
sorting mechanism can be understood in how the lower class of England is
composed of. On the one had, “the majority who are second-generation of
lower-class parents” (p.77) and on the other “[t]he minority who are
first-generation lower class. These are the stupid offspring of upper-class
parents” (ibid). While it is indeed comical to see the word stupid in the text,
this concept denotes the existence of intelligence as the main attribute which
individuals have and therefore can be assessed. Young argues that tests to
measure intelligence are the adequate tools to sort individual in different
position throughout their lives; these tests are key for the individuals’
entrance to institutions such as armies, schools, private and public companies
among others. Under this dynamic, Young argues, revolts, riots, or revolutions
were no longer necessary since the achieved position of every individual was
assumed as fair. The mechanism of allocation thus reproduces a form of
inequality whereby everyone’s (socioeconomic) position fulfils a bigger social
objective which everyone has agreed to be part of. Particularly, those who were
intelligent, and never had the opportunity to rule, are finally responsible of
also guiding the country, and therefore, are no longer source of disruption
which can make the social system instable.
In these three authors the shadow of Weberian
thought is quite prevalent. Particularly the presence of power, in Sorokin, the
formation of laws in Polanyi or the introduction of social arrangements which
consolidate notions of achievement over adscription—that is merit—in Young, are
all elements which consolidate the understanding of society and its changes
from variations occurred in the cultural dimension.
Sorokin’s initial analysis of economic, political
and occupational stratification heavily resembles Marx’s conceptualization of
class since he accepts a theoretical correlation of these three dimensions, and
therefore departing from Weber’s classical distinction of class and status.
However, Sorokin’s brief analysis of democratic versus autocratic regimes (pp.
133-160) sides with Weber’s notion of how vertical mobility can have different
forms for each of these political systems. In other words, since it is the
political arrangement of the society which can be associated to a given distribution
of resources being those symbolic or material, Sorokin’s conceptualization
echoes Weber’s theory of how culture shapes society.
Another concept which has an important parallel with
Weber is the distribution of power between and within occupational strata. Particularly
once he analyzes the different layers between strata (p.104-107) it is
noteworthy how prestige is implicitly distributed within these groups. It is
important to acknowledge that Sorokin argues that both the survival of a larger
group and intelligence are conceived of as the two main functions which sort
individuals in whatever occupations a society might have. These definitions ultimately
absorb the Marxian conceptualization of who owns the means of production as the
ultimate category which sorts individuals in classes. In other words, control
is actually associated to types of knowledge which foster the survival of the
group, and therefore the notion of means of production has at best a
complementary character.
In Polanyi, the notion of how the construction and
implementation of laws (i.e the Speenhamland law) are associated to both the
emergence of a new type of society, and the formation of a new intelligentsia
whose knowledge had an ad-hoc character. This type of causal reasoning has also an important Weberian influence since on
the one hand the Speenhamland once it was consolidated it was conceived as an
obstacle to the economic system that members of the middle class regarded as
morally necessary. Particularly, under the notion of the economic man “nobody
would work for a wage if he could make a living by doing nothing (or not much
more than nothing)” (p.82), and therefore, the mechanism to transform society
was the paradoxical intervention of deregulating economy. On the other hand, regarding
the birth and evolution of economics, a jump towards nature was a necessary
step in order to explain the paradox of how the new economy was emerging once
paternalistic regulation was also set in place. In this regard functionalist explanations
reigned economy, for instance the emergence of pestilence or wars were
conceived as natural responses of the system in order to find its equilibrium.
In Young the presence of Weber is less prevalent;
however, I would argue that the process of selection via the introduction of
intelligence tests can be regarded as one indicator of the (ideal)
rationalization of the English society. As Weber suggests the movement from
less rational sources of legitimacy (i.e. charismatic figures) towards a more rational
ones (i.e laws) is one of the dimensions of rationalization. In this case, there
is a departure from loyalties—which is expressed in family relations, whereby
sons (and daughters) are subjects of benefits of adscription—towards a system
where the state, as “the guardian of collective efficiency” (p.25), promotes
merit as the sorting mechanism of individuals. The assessment of merit
configures the raking position which a given individual occupies in order to
contribute to the functioning of society.
Lastly, these three authors offer different
methodological elements for the study of both stratification and social
mobility. Firstly, Sorokin and Young at the individual level suggest analyzing
how the movement of an individual can be assessed by comparing the position of
his/her father. Secondly, Sorokin extends the analysis of occupational mobility
to economic and political dimensions; in other words, analysis of mobility can
also be associated to income or political membership. Nonetheless regarding political
membership it seems to be more intuitive to assess more properly tradition
rather than change. Sorting mechanisms have different options in theses authors
since each of them study different unit of analysis. In Polanyi, competition
and collaboration are both mechanisms which at the macro level can shed light
on the degree of inequality which a society might display, particularly by
operationalizing levels of poverty. In Sorokin the unit of analysis will
condition the understanding of the type of mechanism that sorts individuals,
groups or countries in certain positions. For instance demographic variables,
crime factors and revolutions are associated to vertical mobility of society,
whereas intelligence, or differences between parents and offspring. In both
Sorokin and Young the measurement of intelligence is also a characteristic that
can be considered in order to assess the position and the movement of this
position in a given individual. Both approaches can be for instance applied to
the study of educational mobility if grades of academic tests are available.
Sorokin proposal however goes beyond academic achievement since families,
churches and occupations are also other channels whereby individuals move.
The following table presents some of the most
important points discussed in this memo.
Table
1 Summary of some important concepts in Sorokin, Polanyi and Young.
|
|
Progress
|
Ontology
|
Stratification
|
Unit
of analysis
|
Sorting mechanism
|
|
Sorokin
|
Criticism
|
Cultural
|
Permanent
but varies according to the values of the system
|
Different
types
|
Several
(merit, loyalty, intelligence, etc.)
|
|
Polanyi
|
Countries
|
Collaboration
and competence
|
|||
|
Young
|
Individuals
|
Competence
(via assesment of merit)
|
[1] I am using the word commodity in
Polanyi’s sense, that is, whereby not only goods are considered but also,
money, land and labor.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario