Industrial Society (Routledge Revivals)

Class, Cleavage and Control

Richard Scase

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317536963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Any study of contemporary industrial societies must take into account the role of power, ideology and class, and the degree to which these determine the development of social structures. This book, first published in 1977 and based on a selection of eleven papers given at a conference of the British Sociological Association, focuses upon aspects of continuity and change in modern society, comparing and contrasting dimensions of class, cleavage and control in capitalist and socialist societies.

This book is key reading for students of both sociology and business studies.

Part I
Continuities and Change

1
Continuities and Discontinuities in the Development of Industrial Societies

KRISHAN KUMAR

One cannot assume, and ought not to expect, that any theoretical or conceptual apparatus that fits the analysis of industrialisation will be equally appropriate for the study of the further development of societies already industrialised.
T. H. Marshall (1964, p. 141) summing up at the end of the 1964 British Sociological Association Conference on the Development of Industrial Societies

It is one of the most interesting of Joseph Schumpeter's many provocative suggestions that we consider the era of capitalist industrial society as a residual phase of transition between feudalism and socialism. He does not of course mean this in Marx's sense, as a social order which succeeds feudalism and precedes socialism. He literally wants to suggest that capitalist industrialism is a hybrid, a temporary period during which the forces and structures of European feudalism were gradually being overcome. But 'in breaking down the pre-capitalist framework of society, capitalism broke not only barriers that impeded its progress but also flying buttresses that prevented its collapse' (Schumpeter, 1947, p. 139). When the process was more or less completed, sometime in the earlier part of this century, not only had feudalism gone, but capitalism also. Seen in this light, capitalism appears as 'the last stage of the decomposition' of feudalism (ibid., p. 139).

What this perspective suggests is that there was something exceptional, aberrant almost, about the hundred years or so which followed the English Industrial Revolution, and which is generally regarded as the era of classic industrialism. And indeed this is a view which, looking back from the vantage point of the late 1970s, seems increasingly plausible; and is correspondingly being increasingly aired. So, for instance, George Steiner (1975), noting a widespread current alertness to and anxiety about violence and disorder, observes that 'when we lament safeties, courtesies, legalities now eroded, what we are in fact referring to is the belle epoque of middle-class hegemony, notably in Western Europe, from about the 1830s to the Second World War'. He cautions us against drawing topical comparisons on the basis of this 'nagging sense of "paradise lost"'. For 'far from being the historical rule, the stabilities, the general absence of violence, the law-abidingness, the sanctity of property and contract, the spaciousness of work and play which we associate, erroneously or not, with the epoch from Waterloo to the economic and social crises of the 1930s, were an exception, a rare and fragile entente between ruler and ruled. . . So far as Western history goes, the long peace of the nineteenth century . . . begins to look like a very special providence.'

In a similar vein Ernest Gellner (1975) also observes, apropos of contemporary debates about the 'free market' versus the planned (i.e. politicised) economy, that such an opposition is based on an illusion fostered by a too schematic view of nineteenth-century European history. The proponents believe that they are dealing in sociological and historical 'universals' — or, at any rate, categories which they can take to be roughly equivalent. But in fact the sociological norm, across time and place, is overwhelmingly 'politics in command'. What has led people to think otherwise is the fact that in the era of 'classical' capitalism there took place a separation of the economic and political realms that was 'highly eccentric, historically and sociologically speaking' (p. 135) and which gave rise to the unprecedented and erroneous belief in a 'natural' economy based on the operations of the untrammelled market. Such a separation could only take place in historical circumstances that were 'rather peculiar and highly specific' (p. 134), depending mainly on the existence of a state which for various reasons had neither the inclination nor the need to interfere with the economy. 'So the miracle occurred — a society in which, for once, wealth was mightier than the sword' (p. 140). These historical circumstances have now changed; the customary norm has reasserted itself; politics once more dominates economics. Clearly it is unwise to conduct debates about present political dilemmas on the basis of principles derived from a unique historical phenomenon.

These observations have more than the customary virtues in serving as a point of departure. They reveal an unfamiliar and illuminating perspective on a period of history hallowed by frequent sociological invocation (which is a poor substitute for actual investigation). Two features implied in these accounts are particularly relevant in any exercise in contemporary stock-taking. One is that the epoch of classic industrialism is, in broad terms, over. However we assess the present situation of the industrial societies, we would be ill-advised to cast our reflections in the categories appropriate to the developing industrial society of the nineteenth century. The second point emphasises the openness of the options available to the industrial societies at the present time. It warns us against relying on the schematisation of history that so often serves sociology as a shorthand for historical knowledge, and which leads us to expect social orders or epochs to succeed each other in orderly progression—as 'feudalism', 'capitalism', 'socialism', and so forth. If there was indeed something peculiar and exceptional, or at the least historically highly specific, about nineteenth-century industrial society, then we should not expect to discern any future state of that society either by a simple extrapolation of trends, or by conjecturing some sort of 'natural' or determined evolutionary supersession. The relationship between the past and the future of industrial society is likely to be far more disjunctive than is implied in either of these modes of procedure. If anything, as Gellner's argument suggests, it is the pre-industrial past of European societies that may well turn out to be the better guide to the future. That this might appear surprising is only an indication of how firmly we have become the prisoners of a progressivist, evolutionary tradition of thought.

The general lines of this Schumpeterian perspective seem to me correct; and in this chapter I want mainly to look at the prospect for the occurrence of fundamental discontinuities with the past development of industrial societies, and to contemplate the possibility of a future very different from what might be expected by an extrapolation of that development. But first it seems important to reflect a little on the alternative and more commonly held view, that the future of industrial society will be merely the past 'writ large', the result in the main of persistencies, continuities, intensifications and accelerations of past trends. The purpose here is not so much to question the evidence adduced for this view; for the main point of disagreement has less to do with the existence of particular trends than in the interpretation of them as still existing growths or as fossilised and decaying persistencies. Rather there is the need to reassess the frequently asserted conclusion that seems to follow from this view: that the traditional concepts and theoretical framework created for the analysis of nineteenth-century industrial society will still do for the analysis of present and future industrial society.¹

I

It is not difficult to see how a contemporary observer might build up a picture of current social realities that is both highly plausible and squares remarkably well with the expectations of nineteenth-century sociology.

Thus he would show the continuing process of urbanisation, so that, for instance, in this century the United States and France could be added to the list of 'urban-industrial' societies, and the percentage of the world urban population increased from 9.2 in 1900 to 28.1 in 1970. He would show the continuing trends towards the greater centralisation, 'rationalisation', and bureaucratisation of politics, commerce, communications and culture; in the transformation of national economies into one global economy, under the oligopolistic management of a small number of transnational regional economic groupings; in the concentration of wealth both within nations and between them, so that the gap between the industrial societies and the 'Third World' continues to grow. In the more local, immediate concerns of an individual's life, too, developments could be indicated which broadly conform to nineteenth-century expectations. Kinship ties, particularly in a residential and community context, have narrowed. The nuclear family becomes the effective norm. Stable residential communities are broken up, particularly among the working classes; 'substitute communities', of the occupational community or voluntary organisation kind, are thin and uninvolving, leaving the individual increasingly 'privatised', centring his existence on his home, family and leisure pursuits. This tendency is intensified by the increasing meaninglessness of work, as the fragmentation and bureaucratisation of the work process continues. As Marx expected, 'the worker feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless'. Nor are the consolations of the other world available to any effective degree. True to expectations, the process of secularisation of beliefs has continued, so that even if the motions of church-going are attended to, the meanings these have for the actor have been substantially altered in the direction of secularism.

There is not much here that would have perplexed a Saint-Simon, Marx, Durkheim or Weber. It was in these terms, more or less, that they marked out the destinies of the industrial societies. And who would seriously quarrel with Nisbet's forthright assertion that 'we are urban, democratic, industrial, bureaucratic, rationalised, large-scale, formal, secular, and technological' (1967, p. 317)?

What is curious and somewhat paradoxical is that theories which essentially insist on this version of contemporary realities are currently finding their strongest expression under the banner of 'post-industrialism'. The term suggests, as indeed its authors intend it to, that the industrial societies have now moved so far from their original base that they have undergone a qualitative transformation, giving birth to a new social order which is beyond industrialism. And yet when we examine the most influential accounts of the post-industrial idea, as in Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974), it becomes quite plain that what they are referring to are long-term continuities within the social order of industrialism.² Bell and Touraine point to the explosive expansion of the service sector in this century, the accelerating growth of the white-collar occupational groups, the increasing number and significance of scientific and technical personnel, above all the new pivotal role of knowledge itself as the crucial resource of present-day industrial society. All these, they claim, add up to structural forces so different in kind from those propelling the old industrial society that we must acknowledge the rise of a new order, post-industrial society.

But was not Marx in his Theories of Surplus Value already, in the 1860s, commenting on the growing white-collar army of 'the labour of superintendence', and reproaching Ricardo for ignoring 'the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other' (Harris, 1939)? And had not Saint-Simon, even earlier, singled out the scientist and the engineer as the most representative figures of the new order which he called industrialism; and called upon them to impose their expert rule on a society whose fundamental basis was scientific knowledge? The most obvious links with the classic order of industrialism are seen in Weber's account of the relentless process of 'rationalisation' in Western civilisation, marked by the constant bureaucratisation of all sectors of social life, and the spread of scientific or 'technical' reasons to problems of politics as well as those of production. If the post-industrial society is 'the knowledge society', then in the late nineteenth century Weber was already sketching its structure and pointing up its strains.

The impression of novelty created by the post-industrial idea comes from the selection of tendencies often overlooked in the historical and sociological analyses of industrialism: a neglect partly accounted for by a popular and powerful image of industrialism which overstresses the significance of factories and the industrial worker in the development of industrial society. One of the uses of the post-industrial idea is indeed to direct us back to the history of European industrialisation, on examining which it is not difficult to discover the growth and spread of most of the tendencies later characterised as 'post-industrial'. At this level of analysis, therefore, it seems fair to regard the 'post-industrial' label as a misnomer, and to suggest that it is simply a newer and glossier version of the general analyses of industrialism as a generic type which were common in the 1950s, and which we associate with the theses of 'convergence' and 'the end of ideology', and the names of Lipset (1960), Kerr (1960), Aron (1967), Galbraith (1967) and, of course, Bell himself (1961).

To put the matter thus is not necessarily to dismiss wholly the postindustrial analysis or its heuristic usefulness. It is incapable of sustaining its major claim that a new era, comparable in scope to that of industrialism, has been entered. But may its proponents not argue, more modestly, that although the features picked out are not novel to this century, they have reached such a prominence in the last twenty-five years (say) that we need to regard our current condition as in significant ways very different from that obtaining at the beginning of this century — not to mention nineteenth-century industrial society? Even at this level I do not think that the post-industrial theorists have selected the most interesting or significant tendencies to speculate upon. But the point does nicely raise the more general issue: the difficulty of analysing the present with the intellectual tools of nineteenth-century sociology. The problem is that the organising concepts which the sociological tradition offers us — such as 'capitalism', 'rationalisation', 'secularisation' — operate at too high a level of abstraction to be suitable for the kinds of distinctions which we need to make in the recent history of the industrial societies. As a consequence, every sociological theory that stresses continuity with past development is forced to suppress the recognition of some very important changes.

Consider, for instance, that in discussing the process of 'rationalisation' or 'secularisation' we need to go back at least to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century; perhaps even, as Saint-Simon would have us, to the outburst of scientific activities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Similarly with 'capitalism'. Its development can quite conventionally be traced from the sixteenth century or even earlier: E. P. Thompson (1965) speaks, without apparently any need of qualification, of 'the bourgeois revolution of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries' (p. 319). By the same token, with the capitalist system established, we are asked to consider a host of diverse twentieth-century phenomena — Fascism, Keynesianism, decolonisation — as 'essentially' capitalist. In this perspective, it is quite clear that we are still in the classical age both of sociology and of the industrial society.

The approach along these lines can be fertile, as Marx and Weber amply showed. But it is the long view, which for many important aspects of social change can become excessively so. Let us get nearer to the history of the societies in question. We are then struck forcibly by some very powerful contrasts. There is the whole decline and dissolution of the characteristic nineteenth-century system of the liberal polity and economy: the free market, the independent entrepreneur, the parliamentary assembly and the judiciary with some degree of real independence of and control over the executive. As against this we have since had the rise of large oligopolies and monopolies in the market, usually with some form of state backing, which virtually put an end to competition; the unification of the executive and the legislature through the rise of the mass political party with its extra-parliamentary organisation; the spread of 'administrative law' as a general phenomenon of increasing bureaucratic rule; the massive stimulus given to governmental power by the exigencies of organising for two world wars, a power further strengthened in peacetime by some startling developments in weapons technology, the spread of a centralised system of mass communications, and the extension of systems of public education and welfare to the point where they become potentially all-embracing agencies of social control of the population. No wonder a lord chief justice in the 1920s, seeking for historical parallels for the new legal developments that so concerned his profession, was forced to jump over the age of liberal constitutionalism and to come down finally in the age of the Star Chamber and 'Tudor despotism'.³ A nineteenth-century time-traveller, stepping into this brave new world, might surely be driven to speculate on what grand events, what spectacular revolution, had produced such a transformation in the life of society.

He would not have been entirely unprepared, of course, had he happened to read the gloomy prognostications of Mill, Tocqueville and Burckhardt. And, from the lofty heights of the sociological tradition, we could indicate to him the continuities with long-established processes in Western societies, the extent to which most of these changes can be seen as the maturing of some of the most basic principles of industrialism. But he would surely be right to think that it was a strange view of social change which buried these momentous changes so smoothly under general, all-purpose concepts, and which refused to treat this mass, corpo...