A Critical Dictionary of Sociology

Raymond Boudon, Francois Bourricaud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415861915
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134978984
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Unlike most other sociology or social science dictionaries, in this translation of the Critical Dictionary of Sociology, taken from the second French edition of the Dictionary and edited by the English sociologist Peter Hamilton, the critical value of this distinctive work is at last made available for a wider audience.

Each entry grapples directly with an issue, whether theoretical, epistemological, philosophical, political or empirical, and provides a strong statement of what the authors think about it. The discussions are considered but argumentative. By reaffirming that a non-marxist style of critique is still possible, Boudon and Bourricaud have presented a distinctive approach to the key issues which confront the societies of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries.

For some this work will be a textbook, for others an indispensable sourcebook of sociological concepts, and for most a way of opening our eyes to new dimensions in our understanding of the great ideas and theories of sociology.

S

Schumpeter, Joseph Alois

It is difficult to describe the works of Schumpeter (1883–1950). Business Cycles is the work of an economist, both theorist and historian. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy belongs to political science, and also to economics and sociology. As for the monumental History of Economic Analysis, it is a whole where the virtuosity of the historian, the philosopher, and the economist are all equally displayed. There is no author more truly interdisciplinary than Schumpeter. Fortunately, he understands interdisciplinarity very differently from those who claim to be its champions. Interdisciplinarity is not the confusion of all disciplines into a moderated syncretism; nor is it their subordination to one discipline (sociology, history) which would pretend to ensure their ‘integration’. The ‘interdisciplinarity’ in Schumpeter’s style organizes the recourse to specific ‘hypotheses’ to deal with problems not necessarily solvable by the disciplines which set them or in the terms in which they were constituted.

All his life, Schumpeter, attentive reader of Marx, Weber, and Schmoller, took an interest in the evolution of the capitalist economy. However, he cannot be described either as an evolutionist or as an historicist. His research turns on a set of heterogeneous relations (economic, social, and cultural) which do not develop in an abstract period of time, but in the history of three great capitalist countries: England, the United States, and Germany. In his Business Cycles, Schumpeter endeavours to restore the continuity of certain time-series data for these three countries: prices, quantities, costs, incomes, monetary aggregates.

Capitalist evolution presents itself as a succession of cycles, or at least of very pronounced fluctuations. Since Schumpeter, statistical information has spread. Moreover, today’s economists have more widely varying views on the nature of economic fluctuations than the economists of the 1930s. In the opinion of the more optimistic of the Keynesians, the existence of cycles would no longer be essential to the capitalist process, if it is true that, thanks to the control of demand, the political, fiscal, and monetary authorities were able to control deflation as well as inflation and to ensure at any time the full use of the factors of production.

However, even if the notion of cycle in its strict sense were to be abandoned, Schumpeter’s approach would still remain interesting. Fluctuation (and not only cyclic fluctuation) records a divergence between a theoretical state of the economic system (its position of equilibrium/stability according to Walras) and the behaviour through time of the observed variables. Schumpeter starts with the hypothesis that for the system there is a ‘state of equilibrium’ defined by what he calls a ‘theoretical norm’—that provided by the resolution of the equation systems. This norm makes it possible to attribute to the different variables (quantities, prices, costs, interest rates) values which mean they can be compared over time. This is helped if one can assume some data to be constant: size and structure of the population, techniques of production, rules of the institutional game, consumers’ tastes, etc.

But if Schumpeter starts from the Walrasian conception of equilibrium, hypotheses about the market of pure and perfect competition are in his opinion incapable of explaining the functioning of any actual economy. However, they form a kind of ‘ideal type’ which facilitates the comprehension and explanation of the phenomena under observation. Here a parallel between Weber’s ‘ideal type’ and Schumpeter’s ‘theoretical norm’ comes strongly to mind.

Weber, dealing with behaviour considered to be ‘irrational’, as for example a panic in the Stock Exchange, writes: ‘any explanation of “irrational” processes requires above all that one establishes how one would have acted in the borderline case…of an absolute rationality by reference to means-ends relationships, and accuracy.’ (Essays on the Theory of Science, Paris, Plon, 1965, p. 334). Likewise, Schumpeter, in explaining the fact of capitalist cycles, begins by stating the conditions of equilibrium to which the system is subjected if it reproduces itself identically.

In this way, the dilemma between ‘empiricism or theory’ is avoided. It is not a question of asserting that any interpretation of experience is impossible by arguing that facts do not occur as dictated by the ‘theory’. It is a question of working out hypotheses which, when paradoxical facts in relation to the ‘theoretical norm’ are recorded, account for these paradoxes. Schumpeter, unlike too many economic historians, takes care not to challenge the economic theory on the pretext that Walras’s model does not give an immediate and complete explanation of capitalist development. No more is he satisfied with a simple description of essentially institutional data which resist the analysis of ‘theoretical’ economics. Far from considering them as ‘residual’, he proposes a theory of institutional factors in terms meaningful to the economist himself.

This is the aim of his theory of innovation. Schumpeter starts from the fact that the ‘functions of production’ change through time. These functions link ‘factors’ of production (such as quantities of capital, labour, or land) to products (intermediate or final). They facilitate a comparison of the efficiency by which the different factors which are part of the composition of a given product can be combined. The ‘factors of production’ are substitutable for each other, but within certain limits: the capitalist can ‘arbitrate’ between a little more capital and a little less labour (or inversely) according to the increase or decrease of wages costs. But he cannot entirely substitute one of these factors for another.

These constraints, recorded by the function of production, can be observed in the case where the economic system ‘reproduces itself by a circular flow, and the individual exercises his freedom of choice while taking into consideration these constraints. In a stable economic system, consumers and producers choose, but according to constant constraints. Some of these constraints, for example those linked to the indivisibility of factors, generate imperfect equilibria, based on monopolistic competition or imperfect competition. The ‘theoretical norm’ of equilibrium does not therefore guarantee stable functioning of the economic system. But it helps us to understand its functioning and especially the tendency of the system to repeat and ‘reproduce’ its own characteristics.

The functions of reproduction diverge from the ‘theoretical norm’ in two ways. First, they express the distortions resulting from the imperfection of the markets, which in turn result, at least in part, from capitalists’ manipulations. Furthermore, they are likely to change. Schumpeter calls innovation the appearance of a ‘new function of production’ (Business Cycles, p. 87), that is, a new combination of factors.

Innovation is distinguishable from invention. At the beginning of the industrial era, the ‘inventor’ was the man who made a lucky discovery, largely by trial and error. Very often, the inventor’s discoveries were not viable. They disappeared without trace, except in the people’s imagination. On the contrary, because he radically changes the structure of costs and profits by introducing new ‘functions of production’, Schumpeter’s innovator propagates original techniques and opens new markets for his products. The example of the car is enough to illustrate this process of ‘creative destruction’ which destroys whole spheres of the productive system, opening the way for a new generation of captains of industry. Creation and destruction are only two sides of the same coin, and the innovator who launches new products thus hastens the disappearance of obsolete products and inefficient and backward producers.

The innovator-entrepreneur performs a great number of co-ordinated activities. He brings into contact technicians and potential consumers of the new product, the ‘organizers’ and the ‘traders’. He succeeds in doing it because he generates new sources or supplies of credit. In effect he ‘creates’ credit. The entrepreneur anticipates resources which do not yet exist and which bankers will make available to him. But the ‘creation of credit’ includes a risk of inflation, as the deferred payment of debts incurred at the beginning of the innovation process involves a risk of deflation for the future.

Capitalism can then be defined as ‘this form of economy based on private property in which innovation is realized by means of loans, which themselves result from the creation of credit’. And, a little further: ‘The recourse to… creation of instruments of credit characterizes an economy as capitalist, as the discovery of arms in a prehistoric economy would characterize it as warlike’ (Business Cycles, I, p. 223).

For a long time, many historians allowed themselves to confuse the birth of capitalism with the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Against this tendency, challenged today, Schumpeter points out that, if capitalism is characterized by the institutional possibility of ‘creating credit’, one can find examples of this practice in Italy or the Netherlands from the end of the Middle Ages. Thus, the debate about the relations between the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant ethic loses some of its relevance in Schumpeter’s opinion, since he understands capitalism not as a ‘spirit’ or ‘culture’, but as a technique of mobilization or creation of credit, without which there would be no room for the innovator.

Schumpeter is not interested only in the process of innovation, he is also interested in the social group of innovators’ entrepreneurs. In this respect, his analysis of economic cycles is opposed to that of the economists and historians like Simiand or Labrousse who try to explain such cyclical variations at the level of prices, employment, activity, profit, nominal and real salary by the alternation of ‘phases’ A (expansion) and ‘phases’ B (contraction). The ‘phases’ according to Simiand define a frame strictly constraining the activity of economic agents. With his stress on innovation, Schumpeter puts full attention on initiative, the ‘new combination’, the decisive weight of innovators and entrepreneurs in economic progress.

Extending his analysis of capitalism, Schumpeter outlined an analysis of the political regime with which this type of organization has been historically associated. He speculated about both the survival chances of the capitalist economy once it reached its ‘maturity’ and the likelihood of the ‘transition to socialism’. He also examined the congruence of the system of values recognized in western countries with the functioning of the capitalist economy. Such are the themes of his last book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. In his opinion, the conditions of the ‘transition to socialism’ are widely independent of the evolution of the capitalist economy. Schumpeter’s prophecy contains two propositions. As an economic system, capitalism as we have defined it can perfectly well continue to function. However, it is very unlikely that it will survive. According to Schumpeter, it is not the tendency for the rate of profit to decrease, as shown by Marx, or the excess of savings, as feared by Keynes, which condemns capitalism; it is the increasingly apparent discord between the requirements of the capitalist economy and those of the political regime and culture associated with it, especially with regard to initiative, responsibility, and innovation.

What we should remember is the care with which Schumpeter distinguishes the various dimensions of the social system. The economy has its logic which is that of profit through innovation. Politics in modern democracies tends to institutionalize competition between parties or coalitions of parties, which compete to seize power and hold it, before seeking compromises once they have succeeded. Culture and ideology constitute a process of questioning which subjects the various rules of the social game to an endless re-evaluation. The agreement of the three logics (economic, political, and cultural), obeying such different principles, is then neither necessary nor even very likely—nor very lasting once it has been realized.

Durkheim, Methodology, Socialization, Weber.

Bibliography

SCHUMPETER, J., Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot, 1912. Trans. The theory of economic development: an inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest and the business cycle, New York, Oxford University Press, 1961. —SCHUMPETER, J., Epochen der Dogmen- und Methodengeschichte (1924). Trans. Business cycles: a theoretical, historical and statistical analysis of the capitalist process, New York/London, McG raw-Hill, 1939, 2 vol.: abridged edition, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964. —SCHUMPETER, J., Capitalism, socialism and democracy, New York/London, Harper & Brothers, 1942; London, G.Allen & Unwin, 1976. —SCHUMPETER, J., Ten great economists. From Marx to Keynes, New York, Oxford University Press, 1951, 1965; —SCHUMPETER, J., History of economic analysis, ed. by E.Boody Schumpeter, New York, Oxford University Press, 1954, 1972. —HARRIS, S. (ed.), Schumpeter, social scientist, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1951. —HEERTJE, A.. et al., Schumpeter’s Vision. ‘Capitalism, socialism and democracy’ after 40years, New York/London, Praeger, 1981. —KEYNES, J.M., The general theory of employment, interest and money, London, Macmillan, 1936. —PERROUX, F., La pensée économique de Joseph Schumpeter. Les dynamiques du capitalisme, Geneva, Droz, 1965. —WALRAS, L., Elements d’économie politique pure ou théorie de la richesse sociale, Lausanne, L.Corbaz, 1874; —WEBER, M., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissensehaftslehre, Tübingen, Mohr, 1922, 1951.

Social Change

Philosophers, and after them sociologists, have for a long time been obsessed by the hypothesis that social change follows a privileged, even exclusive pattern: for Marx, who follows Hegel in that respect, and for Marxists, social change is the result of ‘contradictions’. The notion of contradictions has several meanings—often uncertain ones in the Marxist tradition (cf. ‘Dialectic’). For other authors, such as Nisbet, change results mainly from external causes. Some, following the Saint-Simonians and Comte, maintain that all societies are necessarily heading towards an ideal and better state. Others, following Rousseau, or at least a likely interpretation of Rousseau, tend, by contrast, to interpret change as a regression. Some wish to see in such or such aspects of social systems, or in such or such factors, the determining causes of change: for Montesquieu, the development of international commerce plays a considerable part in it, although less exclusively than does the economic organization of societies for Marx, scientific and technical development for Comte, or religion for Fustel de Coulanges.

In general, if one looks up social change in almost any sociology textbook (cf. for example, Rocher, Moore) on social change, one is likely to find a wide range of ‘theories’ making ambitious generalizations. Sometimes they search for the prime mover of change, which they identify either as the material conditions of production, technological development, or again in the ‘mutations’ of the value system. Sometimes they aim to describe the states necessary for the change, to which they implicitly attribute a direction by describing it as an evolution, a development, or a modernization. Other theories look for the driving force of the change (class struggles, conflicts between forward- or backward-looking groups, contradictions between productive forces and cultural models, etc.). Others still look for the forms of the change. Some see it as linear or ‘multilinear’ (Sahlins). Others see it as a cyclical process (Sorokin) unless it has to take ‘necessarily’ the form of a succession of blockages and crises. Some see it to be continuous and smooth, proceeding by a succession of progressive maladjustments and adjustments. Others see it to be discontinuous and marked with breaks or ‘mutations’—a far-fetched metaphor drawn from the misappropriation of a biological concept. Some theories see in the processes of social differentiation one of the essential forms of change (Parsons), while others insist on the antagonisms and conflicts (Garner). One could easily extend the list.

Modern sociology in its scientific forms tends, however, to repudiate the idea according to which there would be a dominant cause of social change. At the same time, it tends to recognize the plurality of types of change. Some processes of change are endogenous, i.e., determined by internal causes in a social system; others are exogenous; others are mixed. Some processes are linear, others oscillatory. Some processes can be foreseen, others less easily so, especially as they generate a demand for innovations at one stage of their development. As a matter of fact, one may wonder if the expression ‘social change theory’ still used in sociology is not outdated now because of the evolution of the science itself. To speak of social change, and even more of social change theory, is effectively to suggest either that one can distinguish the main causes of the change or that one can isolate the essential processes of change (for example, processes of differentiation or of class struggle), or else that one can come to a decision about its fundamentally exogenous or endogenous character, or again that one can determine its form (evolving, linear cyclic, continuous, or discontinuous). But that is precisely the whole question: can sociology maintain statements of such a general range? Should it not limit itself—at the risk of being used as a cover for ideological concerns—to the analysis of the process of historical and geographical change? This is, one will freely admit, a difficult subject which cannot be exhausted within such a brief entry as this.

So consequently, we shall only suggest that the evident diversity of social change processes is enough to legitimize the question of whether or not one can speak of a ‘theory of social changes’, and cast some doubts on the importance of theories which claim to discover the main forms, the fundamental processes, or the primordial causes of change. So as not to go back on questions dealt with in other entries (‘Historicism’, ‘Development’, etc.), we shall merely succinctly illustrate the diversity of processes while emphasizing the distinction between an endogenist theory and as exogenist one, and stressing that one should greet theories which tend to represent change (or non-change) as ineluctably governed by ‘structures’ cautiously.

For example, exogenous change is illustrated by Max Weber’s thesis: according to him, the Protestant Reformation would have played a determining role in the development of capitalism by creating a type of ethics congruent with the development of the behaviour of investment and savings, which form the condition of capitalist accumulation. On another level, some sociological studies of development, or studies of rural sociology, show that a change or a minor innovation (such as the introduction of hybrid maize in France, in Mendras’s work, or of the metal ploughshare, in Lynn White’s work) can induce chain reactions leading to a real transformation of the social system. Let us recall briefly Mendras’s analysis: the innovation (introduction of hybrid maize) was originally the result of an initiative from the French Ministry of Agriculture. Apparently innocent and introduced in order to increase productivity, it produced complex cumulative effects which could not easily have been foreseen in the initial stages of the process. Hybrid maize cultivation follows a somewhat different cycle from traditional maize cultivation. So it upsets the calendar of the cultivations associated with maize. Moreover, it requires more attentive care and involves different techniques. Thus it needs more fertilizers and insecticides. These differences, minor in themselves, affect however the management of the enterprise: the cost of fertilizers and insecticides is a heavy expense for the family enterprise. To make them profitable, the cultivated areas must be extended. The increase in the maize harvest allows for an increase of poultry. The cash returns increasing, the administration of the farm becomes consequently more complex. The farmer must take out a loan in order to buy a tract...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor's Foreword
• Introduction
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• K
• M
• N
• O
• P
• R
• S
• T
• U
• W
• Thematic Index