Social Policy in a Changing Society

Maurice Mullard, Paul Spicker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134708710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Prestazione di assistenza sanitaria

Social Policy in a Changing Society is a critical guide to theories about society, exploring the links between social theory and social policy. It considers a range of interpretations of changes in society, politics and the economy, and assesses their practical implications for social welfare. Social Policy in a Changing Society will be essential reading for undergraduates studying social policy and sociology.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Thinking about society

Theory and practice

Understanding society is mainly done in two ways. One is to begin with observations about society, and then to try to interpret those observations – identifying patterns, trends and relationships for the information which observation makes available. The second main way is to theorise about society, suggesting ideals and then seeing to what extent the social world can be interpreted in those terms. These methods are not really different; they are two sides of the same coin. There is a constant interplay between theory and observation; observations lead to changes in theory, while changes in theory alter what we look at, and how we do it.

Social science

The study of society is sometimes referred to as ‘social science’. Science tends, for many people, to conjure up a picture of people in white coats in laboratories who use computers a lot, and social scientists do not really conform to the image. Nor, for that matter, do people who tramp through the Amazon looking for new kinds of beetle, but they are scientists too. Some writers tend to talk about science as if it were founded on only one approach, the generation and testing of hypotheses. But science is based on a range of approaches: much of what happens in the life sciences is based in an ordered interpretation of discovered phenomena, and the basis of biology is taxonomy – the ordered classification of living organisms. Social science, similarly, rests as much on observation, classification and analysis as it does on generating and examining theory. Science is based in reasoned and methodical inquiry, and people who study society use many of the same approaches and techniques as people in the natural sciences. These approaches include observation – the collection of information about the world; the selection, ordering and classification of data; analysis, or the attempt to identify and explain relationships between phenomena; and the construction of theory, which consists of generalisations that can be applied to empirical phenomena.

Some views of science begin with the process of observation. They include induction, which is generalising from observations; objectivism, which searches for the ‘real’ truth among the facts; and puzzle-solving, a view of science as a search for the answer to problems. Others begin with theory. The most important are instrumentalism, which argues that theories are generated and held for as long as they are useful; and falsificationism, which means that scientists produce theories or ‘conjectures’ which can be tested, and use them until they are falsified. There is a constant interaction between theory and empirical data, which means that most of these accounts are plausible as a description of how scientists work, but falsificationism, developed by Karl Popper,¹ also explains the process of interaction. It involves forming theories about data, examining data further to see whether the theory still holds, changing the theory as necessary, and testing it again. This is the best expressed and reasoned account of scientific enquiry, and many social scientists apply its criteria.

The central requirement is that a theory has to be capable of falsification, which means that it needs to be put in a form that can be tested and shown to be wrong. A scientific approach sets out to disprove something, not to prove it. Many of the theories in this book, however, are not falsifiable. It is not possible to ‘prove’ that we are or are not individuals, that private enterprise increases freedom or the capitalist system exploits people, that mutual aid should be thought of as altruistic or that communities are important. These are matters of interpretation; the basis of the interpretation is at root a value-judgment, and depends on normative criteria – the application of moral codes to circumstances. This is a general problem in any attempt to apply social science to social policy. However, the study of social policy cannot avoid moral judgments, and the application of normative criteria is an accepted part of the study of the subject.

The uses of theory

Social policy is much more concerned with practicalities than it is with ideas, and the study of social policy has never been particularly taken with theorising as an exercise. There are good reasons why this should be so. It is not always necessary to understand a problem in order to do something about it and, whether or not we do understand why problems occur, the way into a problem is not always the way out of it. There is a strong pragmatic tradition in social policy, which says basically that one uses what works and drops what does not.

Social theory serves three main purposes. It helps, first, to describe what is happening in society by putting the material into some kind of classification or order. Second, theory makes analysis possible, by identifying the relationships between different factors and explaining what is happening. Third, theory makes it possible to work out principles for action.

The kinds of theory which this book is concerned with tend to be theory on the grand scale, and sometimes these theories seem remote from practical considerations. The discussion depends on a range of concepts, mainly drawn from politics, economics and sociology. We are discussing issues like the nature of a person, of society, social relationships and the influence of economic factors on social behaviour. This kind of concept sets the terms in which other kinds of argument are subsequently framed. As a preface to the discussion of broader social theory, then, it seems important to explain the terms which are used in discourse about society.

Social action

Theories about society have to begin from an understanding of what society is. Some writers have objected to the very idea of society: Oakeshott argues that the idea of ‘society’ assumes association or set of relationships between people within explaining what the relationships are,² a comment which is difficult to sustain after the most minimal reading in sociology. The problem of ‘social action’ lies in the attempt to explain how people come to act, not as individuals, but as groups, communities or societies.

The individual and the person

Many analyses of society start with the ‘individual’. An individual is, more or less, a human being, who can think, make decisions and act on them. Although most people in western society would recognise themselves as ‘individuals’, the term is very vague. If we mean by it that we have our own thoughts, feelings and actions, it is a half-truth. We are not born, and we do not live, in isolation from other people, and our ideas, feelings and actions reflect the ideas, feelings and actions of other people around us. The idea that we are individuals is not, then, particularly persuasive from a sociological viewpoint.

The value of the idea of the individual is twofold. The first part is political. Individualism argues that every person has to be treated distinctly from others, and that each person's wishes, feelings and thoughts have to be respected. When the idea came to the fore, in the period known as the ‘Enlightenment’, individualism was a radical doctrine, used to challenge the established world order. The effect of emphasising each person as an individual is to oppose systems that treat people as parts of a greater whole. This was true of feudal society; in the twentieth century, it was true of opposition to fascism. In recent times, the argument has been used by feminists to oppose the subordination of individual women within the household, and by civil rights campaigners wishing to oppose discrimination on the basis of race.

The second part is that, for the purposes of social science, we can analyse some issues by assuming that people are individuals. This is referred to as ‘methodological individualism’. Economists describe and predict economic behaviour by assuming that each individual acts independently, and that the actions of individuals can be aggregated to explain the behaviour of the whole. Although most economists would recognise that the assumptions are artificial, the differences in individual behaviour are largely unimportant when the aggregates are considered, and it becomes possible to make statements about the average person – ‘homo economicus’. This kind of generalisation can be dangerous, because this average person is not like real people: the average person in economics is not female, never undergoes major changes in his life, and never dies.³ This can obscure the implications of policy for people who are untypical, and social policy is particularly concerned with the situation of minorities.

In sociology, a ‘person’ is a different thing from an individual. A person is someone who occupies social roles in relation to other people. Roles are patterns of behaviour, which govern the relationships of people toward each other. Examples might include being a parent, a doctor, a daughter, a teacher, a patient, or a neighbour. These all describe relationships, but beyond that they convey expectations about the ways in which people will behave in a particular context. A role might be seen as a type of ‘performance’,⁴ or as a norm establishing rights and duties towards other people.

The statement that a person occupies roles may seem to say very little in itself; we all occupy roles as part of living in society. The central point is that the roles define the person. To a sociologist, Dahrendorf writes, the person is the sum of his roles.⁵ It is from our social relationships that our actions and our existence acquire meaning, both to others and to ourselves. This view of people has been criticised for its failure to take into account other aspects of human knowledge and experience,⁶ but it offers nevertheless an interesting insight into the nature of the ‘individual’; we are social animals in a sense which is much deeper than that of belonging to a collection of people.

Collective action

A group in society is not simply a number of people. Having common features or characteristics is not enough to make a ‘group’ in the sociological sense; people with false teeth, or people who eat muesli for breakfast, do not constitute ‘groups’ (except from the rather specialist point of view of dentists or people who sell breakfast cereal). There are two main types of social group. First, there are people who are linked to each other by a set of social relationships, like a family, a neighbourhood or a workforce. Second, there are people who occupy common positions in society, as defined by their social relationships: women, racial groups or poor people, for example, may be considered to be groups on this basis. A status group consists of people who have a common status – that is, a set of roles, which are associated with common expectations, rights and responsibilities.

Social action by the first kind of group can consist of common action: a family can move house, a neighbourhood can celebrate, a workforce can go on strike. However, people who occupy common social positions do not in general act in common – one of the great myths of radical politics has been that the whole working class would act as one, which even with very considerable organisation is exceedingly unlikely – although the effect of similar social relationships is often to produce similar patterns of behaviour. This is the basis, for example, of women's domestic role and the division of labour in the household – though it should be noted that women in different places have never had quite the same understanding of what the division of labour should be.

Collective action consists partly of common action, but also of mutual actions – actions which members of a group do to each other. As part of social relationships, people undertake duties and responsibilities, which alter the way they behave towards others. The behaviour of a family, or an organisation, generally consists not of everyone acting in the same way, but the outcome of different, interconnected actions in which each person has a role.

Social norms and deviance

Despite the limits to common action, within a society there may be considerable conformity in attitudes and behaviour. Our ideas are not formed in isolation; we are socialised into a range of beliefs, thoughts and patterns of behaviour. The principal mechanism by which this takes place – the unit of ‘primary socialisation’ – is the family; secondary socialisation takes place through contact with other people, including school and workplace; and tertiary socialisation, more remote than either of the others, is encouraged by the educational curriculum, the mass media or religious instruction.

This means that in any society, people learn how to behave, and absorb views, beliefs from a considerable common fund. People tend to ascribe them to ‘common sense’, a phrase which puts the situation fairly precisely; it is ‘common’ because it is held by many others, and drawn from them. These are views which people may not have thought about individually, but which have been learned almost unnoticed from others around them. Berger and Luckmann describe such views as ‘inter-subjective’; they are part of a shared set of experience.⁷ Edmund Burke referred to this kind of view as ‘prejudice’ – views where someone's mind is made up before considering the issue – but unlike most modern writers who write about prejudice, he argued that this was a necessary and desirable part of social life. Prejudice, Burke argued,

is of ready application in an emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating of decisions, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts.⁸

The negative side of prejudices is obvious, so it is important to note that it has a positive side as well. We cannot walk around in a state of perpetual moral turmoil, like someone in one of Sartre's novels, having to decide every time we go into a supermarket whether or not we should pay for the shopping or steal it. Parents try to teach children to choose the right things, but most also try to teach them do the right things without thinking.

Social norms are rules which are shared inter-subjectively by many people in a society – not necessarily everyone, but enough to make it a reasonable expectation that people in that society will conform to the rule. Most people do not steal when they shop for food; most people get dressed before going out. More than that, most people do not even think about stealing or going out without getting dressed, because the norm dictates the expectation.

Social norms are important not only for the effect which they have on behaviour, but for their impact when people breach the expectations. The breach of social norms is called ‘deviance’; a deviant act is not simply an act which is different, but one which breaks a rule.

Systems and structures

The previous section outlines briefly some of the elements from which sociological analysis is constructed. The next step is to move from these basic building blocks to understanding something about the relationship between them. The structure of a society depends on how these elements relate to each other, and what kinds of pattern they form. Structure can be seen as a metaphor, the imposition of a simplified way of thinking over a complex, shifting mass; it can also be seen as a form of social reality, true both because it reflects the dominant pattern of relationships and because relationships in turn are shaped by it.

Because societies are complex, any simple pattern cannot reflect the whole. Some theories of society, like Marxism or radical feminism, select key characteristics – respectively, class and patriarchy – and argue that these are fundamental in their importance and their impact. Others, such as the ‘organic’ view of society favoured by some conservatives, focus on the complexity of society in itself as the basis for an argument that society cannot be understood. In sociology, there is also a sceptical approach, called ‘phenomenology’. Phenomenology argues for viewing each part of social action as happens, without reading into it interpretations and meanings drawn from other social issues. Each phenomenon needed to be ‘bracketed off from those around it, and examined in its own terms. Phenomenology became important as a means of criticising models of the social order; many of the radicals who espoused it on that basis seemed not to realise that the method was just as destructive of grand theory, like Marxism. Phenomenology is currently out of fashion: the destructive dismissal of wider social relationships ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction Thinking about society
• Old paradigms: how we used to think of society
• Keynesian economics
• Marxism
• Liberal individualism
• Conservatism and the New Right
• Social democracy and socialism
• New paradigms: interpretations of a changingsociety
• Communities and society
• New views of the economy
• The global economy
• A new kind of society
• Explaining social divisions
• New challenges to social policy
• Society
• The economy
• The political framework
• Social welfare and social justice
• Notes
• Index