Modern Social Theory

Ian Craib

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317325260
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The revised edition of this widely acclaimed textbook provides a clear, accessible and comprehensive introduction to modern social theory.As with the first edition, the book is based around the themes of structure and action. After the introductory chapters which examine the nature of theory and its role in the social world, the book then turns to theories of action and the inability of those theories to comprehend social structures in a coherent way.Part 1 covers: Parson's structural-functionalism and the development of conlict theory and neofunctionalism; rational choice theory; symbolic interactionism; ethnomethodology and structuration theory.Part 2 looks at structuralism, structuralist Marxism, and the development of post-structuralist and postmodernist theory.Part 3 examines Critical Theory and the work of Jurgen Habermas.In conclusion, Ian Craib discusses current trends in theory and what might be expected in the future.This second edition has been revised throughout. There are new chapters on rational choice theory and structuration theory and existing chapters have been extended to deal with the development of neofunctionalism, postmodernism and the recent works of Habermas as well as recent developments in other approaches.Throughout, the aim of the book is to demystify a diffcult subject area, emphasising the practical and everyday nature of theoretical thinking in the context of making sense of a rapidly changing world. The late Ian Craib was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex.

PART I

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INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

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WHAT’S WRONG WITH THEORY
AND WHY WE STILL NEED IT

INTRODUCTION

The very word ‘theory’ sometimes seems to scare people, and not without good reason. Much modern social theory is unintelligible, banal, or poindess. The reader does not feel that she is learning anything new or anything at all; there is certainly no excitement. Even for the specialist sociology student or teacher, it requires a lot of hard work, with the minimal result of simply being informed. Few people feel at home with theory or use it in a productive way.

When I prepared the first edition of this book, there had been an explosion of theoretical work in sociology; much of this has now subsided. Nevertheless, theory is always there. It might seem that this is the result of a highly developed society allowing people to earn sizeable incomes from playing complicated games, but it would not happen if there were not real problems which force people to turn to theory. Indeed, the problems that force people to theory do not belong solely to sociological research; they are problems we all face in our everyday lives, problems of making sense of what happens to us and the people around us, the problems involved in making moral and political choices.

So somewhere there are real reasons leading people to produce theoretical work, and there must also be reasons why the result is so often unhelpful. The journey between the problems and the results is undertaken on sociological theory courses as well as in producing theory, and it has the same pitfalls. It is not made any easier by the fact that in teaching theory, we start with the result. The nature of sociology is not such that we can move direcdy from the more practical and informative studies of the social world to social theory. Social theory is, by definition, general, it claims some relevance to all the separate areas studied by sociologists. We cannot move direcdy from, say, a study of workers’ attitudes to a theory, since any worthwhile theory must deal with much more than workers’ attitudes. We have to bring the two together, use our studies of the real world as the raw material of theory and use our theory to help us understand the results of our studies of the real world. But when we learn theory, we must start with theory, and that makes life difficult.

Other things make it difficult as well. Ours is not a culture that easily accepts theory in its more elaborate, worked-out form. Most of us learn, almost unconsciously, to distrust it, or we become convinced that it is beyond us. Social theory generates its own special prejudices. Most of us know little about the natural sciences, but we will, none the less, accept that theoretical physics is a ‘good thing’: it seems to have useful practical results, and even if we know in advance that we cannot understand it, those few clever souls who can ought to be encouraged. On the other hand, social theory appears to have no practical results. Worse, it takes something we know about already in intimate detail – our own social life – and makes of it unintelligible nonsense.

If this were not enough, the teaching and learning of social theory itself operates within, and helps to create, a peculiar mystique which in turn creates a disturbing environment in which to study. The teacher of theory who, for example, is concerned only or primarily with theory tends to receive from her colleagues a grudging respect combined with a barely veiled hostility. In departments where it is the researcher into the real world who attracts money and reputation, the theorist is a luxury, an amusement and a nuisance. On balance, she is lower rather than higher in the unofficial order. Many people who see themselves primarily as theorists react to this by building a protective arrogance, returning twofold any scorn they might receive. They refuse to compromise their concerns and, indeed, retreat perhaps even further into the obscure and the difficult. The process frequendy starts amongst postgraduate students, and it serves to make the necessary gap between teacher and student much wider than it need be at all levels. Amongst students themselves, because theory is so obviously difficult, the theorist takes on an aura that sets her apart from others; she is seen as somehow brighter, better, more able. I have no doubt that many students (and teachers) deliberately deploy this advantage, half-consciously seeking more obscure ways of expressing themselves, adopting the latest translations from Europe before anybody else, puffing out their theoretical feathers.

All these problems are there before we even start the journey. My guess is that most people start it because they have no choice – it comprises a compulsory course at some stage in their student career, and they grit their teeth and get on with it. What can be done about it? It is no use pretending that theory can be made easy, but it can be made easier.

THEORETICAL THINKING

The first step is to look again at the way we approach the subject. Because we start with the result, it is too easy for students and teachers to imagine that the whole process is a matter of learning what various theorists have said – of learning theories. It is that, of course, but in one sense that is the least important aspect. It is possible – in fact quite easy, once you get used to long words – to know what Talcott Parsons has to say and to reproduce it in acceptable form in essays and examination papers. And apart from the purpose of passing examinations, it is quite useless. Theory is a help only if we can learn from it, and we can learn from it only if we can use it.

Another way of putting this is that it is less a matter of learning theory than of learning to think theoretically. We could liken it to learning a new language in a particularly difficult way – not by gradually building up vocabulary and learning the various grammatical rules, but by listening to the language being spoken, in all its complexity, its slang, dialects, and so on. It is only just an exaggeration to liken it to being carried off to a very different society – a tribal village in New Guinea, say – where much of what happens is unfamiliar, and having to learn the language there by listening to people speak it.

Such a process can be made easier if we have some insight into the purposes of the inhabitants, and I said above that the problems which lead people to theory are problems we all face in our everyday lives. I think the truth is that we all think theoretically, but in a way of which we are not often aware. What we are not used to is thinking theoretically in a systematic manner, with all the various constraints and rigours that involves; when we do see such thinking, it is at first foreign to us.

What, then, are the problems in response to which we all think theoretically without realising it? Most of us are affected in some way by events over which we have no control and the causes of which are not immediately obvious. Some of these are unexpected, some happen at first in a slow and less noticeable way. A member of the family might be made unemployed, for example, or fail to gain an expected place at university or college; some product or service might suddenly become unavailable because of a strike, or because of government or local-authority economies; over a long period, an income – wage, social security benefit, unemployment pay, pension, student grant, or whatever – might buy less and less. We can do things to alleviate the effects of all these, but they happen whether we as individuals like it or not, and it is by no means clear why they happen. There are similar, more intimate events in our personal lives: the slow changes in the relationship between parents and children, or between lovers, which no one wills but which, none the less, happen. I might suddenly find that a friend has turned hostile for no obvious reason. On an even more personal level, I might fall in love at the most inconvenient and unexpected time, or find myself in the grip of some other violent emotion which comes from nowhere and seems to dominate my life. Or – an example I will continue to develop – I might find myself caught in something with a physical as well as a psychological manifestation: sexual impotence, perhaps.

In all these situations, we try to find some explanation. Often it takes the form of blaming somebody or something, frequently unfairly – I lose my job because of all the blacks coming over here; I’m unhappy because my mother dominates me; Pm impotent because my wife is frigid. Sometimes the blame is closer to the mark: I lose my job because of an economic situation largely created by government policy; Pm heading for a nervous breakdown because I cannot admit to certain feelings which I none the less have; I’m impotent because women – or a particular woman – scares me. Sometimes the explanations are more sophisticated, but my point is that as soon as we start thinking about and trying to explain something which happens to us, over which we have no control, we are beginning to think theoretically. When something happens over which we do have control, there is no need for an explanation; it happens because I want it to happen and do something to make it happen (or do not do something which would stop it happening). There is another way of putting this that takes us closer to ‘theory’ as it is presented in theory courses. Theory is an attempt to explain our everyday experience of the world, our ‘closest’ experience, in terms of something which is not so close – whether it be other people’s actions, our past experience, our repressed emotions, or whatever. Sometimes – and this, perhaps, is the most difficult – the explanation is in terms of something of which we do not and cannot have any direct experience at all, and it is at this level that theory really tells us something new about the world.

This will become clearer if we investigate this everyday theoretical thinking more closely. Pushing the sexual impotence example further: it might be something which happens to me unexpectedly, and perhaps I might not want to admit to it for a while. Eventually, however, I am forced to recognise it and begin thinking about it. Then I might have, as my first reference, some previous similar experience of my own or of a close friend who has found himself in the same position. I look for common features in the situation: perhaps it is a matter of being under particular pressure at work; perhaps it happens when my wife is particularly successful in her work or gets a wage increase; perhaps if I am very frightened by the experience, and need urgently to place the blame elsewhere, I might attribute it to some more intimate feature of her behaviour.

There is a second ‘resource’ for my explanation, which I will probably use anyway, and particularly if I have no previous experience of impotence – mine or anybody else’s. I can draw on some very general ideas about the world which do not come from my direct experience in anything like the same way. For example, I might assume that sexual potency – indeed, a permanent readiness to exploit any opportunity that presents itself- is a fundamental part of being a man; my impotence means that I am unmanned, I no longer fall into that category. This is not an idea that comes from my experience. I do not have knowledge of the sexual cycles of all men, or any man other than myself. I have not been taught the idea in any direct way, although it might be possible to identify situations in which I have unconsciously learnt it. My main point, however, is that in making sense of the world, I draw on experience and on ideas about the world that have no direct relation to experience. The two intertwine: my fear and shame at being unmanned might lead me to look for something about my wife that I can blame.

Social theory is employed for the same purposes: to explain and understand experience on the basis of other experiences and general ideas about the world. Given this, it is possible to look at some differences between everyday theoretical thinking and social theory. The first is that social theory attempts to be much more systematic about both experience and ideas. In sociology the real systematization of experience often takes place in the supposed absence of theory, and there is considerable debate about whether this is possible or desirable. I suspect that it would now be generally recognised that some simple ‘objectivity’ or completely ‘unbiased’ organisation of facts is not possible, but in any case, the steady and systematic attempt to gather knowledge about people’s experience can in itself produce knowledge which is, at first sight, strange. If I extend my concern about my impotence into a study of male sexuality even just in my own society, I might find that impotence is a ‘normal’ condition in that most men experience it at some time in their lives, and I will certainly find that all sorts of behaviour that I consider unmanly are engaged in by men. General ideas, on the other hand, are systematised through subjecting them to rules of logic – the ideas in a theory should follow from each other, not contradict each other: at the very least they should have clearly defined relationships to each other. It is important to realise that there is no conclusive end to this process on either level: we can always discover more about our world and organise it in different ways, according to different principles.

This brings us to the second difference. In the course of systematisation, what I will call ‘second order’ problems arise, problems about the best way of carrying on the systematisation, only indirectly connected with explaining our experience as such. An example would be debates about what we mean by ‘explanation’ – when is an explanation adequate, and when is it not?

The third difference has already been mentioned. The various processes of systematisation might lead us to the conclusion that things exist in the world of which we have no direct experience and, on occasion, that these things are the opposite of what we might expect from our experience of the world. It is perhaps more difficult to accept this in the case of the social world, but we already accept it about the natural world, and that should at least suggest that we should keep an open mind. If we believed only what we see by just looking, nobody would believe that the earth was round or that it travelled round the sun. For most of our history, nobody did believe it (as far as we know).

Returning to our example of sexual impotence, our various systematisations might lead us to the conclusions that in most societies female sexuality has been controlled by men, and that whatever men believe about themselves, women get the blame if those beliefs are disturbed. We might then be struck by the similarity between this situation and some of the abstract ideas put forward by Marx about the relationship between social classes, and set about refining and modifying Marx’s ideas so that they help us to make sense of the relationship between men and women. We might go further and integrate some general ideas taken from Freud, and end up with a theory of something called ‘patriarchy’ – a model of social organisation in which men systematically oppress women. This is the opposite of my experience of impotence: my experience – and my first reaction – is that my wife is exercising power over me by denying me something, she is making my life miserable. The theory of patriarchy enables me to reinterpret this reaction: what is really happening is that my wife is, in some way, threatening my power; perhaps she is too independent, perhaps she is simply fighting back with the weapons at hand. By blaming her, and particularly by trying to persuade her to accept responsibility, I am trying to reassert that power.

Whether or not you accept such an explanation (and there is plenty of room for debate), every social theory considered in this book makes some propositions which are counter to our immediate experiences and beliefs, and this is, in fact, the way in which we learn from theory. The punk might believe that she is in full rebellion against the culture of her parents and authority, yet for the functionalist theorist she is setting in motion a series of adjustments by means of which that culture and society continue to survive in a smoother-running way than before. The worker might believe she is getting a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, but for the Marxist she is being systematically exploited. When I fail a student’s examination paper, I might believe that I am applying a rule and upholding academic standards: she does not come up to some predetermined standard, in the same way that I might say a piece of wood is not long enough for my purpose. The symbolic interactionist and (in a different way) the ethnomethodologist would say that I am creating a failure. If we are honest, most of us would accept that there have been occasions on which we were really doing the opposite of what we thought we were doing; for this reason alone we should tolerate the apparent strangeness of social theory....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II THEORIES OF SOCIAL ACTION
• PART III FROM ACTION TO STRUCTURE
• Conclusion: Playing with ideas
• Index