Socio Session 7 à 12 PDF

Maelys BORY Session 7 : The City History as urban history The City is the oldest and most complex material artefact ever created and built by mankind. Humans completely transformed their environment while living. ▪ The Neolithic revolution (generally conside...

Maelys BORY Session 7 : The City History as urban history The City is the oldest and most complex material artefact ever created and built by mankind. Humans completely transformed their environment while living. ▪ The Neolithic revolution (generally considered as starting circa 10,500 BCE). Gradual process. Polycentric organization. Humans domesticated animals and plants and moved from being a preeminent social organization about hunting to form a centered agriculture and animal raising one. À completer. 8000 B.C.: apparition of agriculture in Mesopotamia. ▪ The urban/State/literacy revolution (circa 3100 BCE, in Uruk, Sumer). Invention of markets, cities, money: turning point with the city of Uruk in Iraq identified as the main first city. First cities were organized in Egypt and Mesopotamia (material resources, slavery, fertile lands). Tripartition in organization of labor: peasant, priest, warrior. Against the Grain (Scott, 2017): emergence of the state in cities linked to the culture of grain (because they are easy to tax) ▪ The medieval city in Europe and its specificities (Max Weber). Middle Ages as key moment in urbanization process. Before: cities built around places of market/place of craftmanship that led to two models: political and economic centers; cities as places of exchanges. Cities began to organize themselves internally in democratic ways: rights for the bourgeoisie, local citizenship, local councils. This transformed organization of the city enabled some market places to extract themselves from feudal order and acquire political importance. Renaissance: cities developed less autonomously and against the main political organization as it’s a period of nation-state/kingdom-state consolidating (France, UK, Spain, Germany, …). Cities were growing into political capitals, where important infrastructures were centralized. ▪ First globalization and State formation in (Western) Europe. Some say that globalization actually started at the time of Marco Polo and his trip to China that informed us about how much China was expanding. Decrease in political autonomy and increase in control of the city. ▪ Industrial revolution (begins in Great Britain, industrial cities). THE key moment: growth was related to new modalities of mass production, cities were coming closer together and extracted even more natural resources. Birth of many major cities especially in England and then in Europe. ▪ Post-industrial revolution, metropolization dynamics, global cities (Sassen, 1991) and the urban rise of Asia. Expansion of territories of cities. Giant movement of urbanization across the world linked to Asia’s urbanization: among the 50 largest cities in the world, only 3 are in the US and 4 in Europe. From the Neolithic revolution to the first cities and States (timeline) - 400,000 domestication of fire Maelys BORY - 200,000 appearance of anatomically modern human - 60,000 Homo sapiens disperse from Africa - 12,000 scattered evidence of sedentism (beginning of the Neolithic) - 9,000 scattered evidence of domesticated plants and livestock - 6,000 evidence of permanent towns - 5,000 strong evidence of agrarian villages relying primarily on planted crops and livestock - 3,200 proto-cuneiform for record keeping - 3,100 walled, territorial statelets - 2,600 cuneiform used to represent speech From the Neolithic revolution to the first cities and States (dynamics) The domestication of fire allowed the domestication of formerly indigestible plants, including the domestication of the main “founder crops” (grain, rice, corn or millet), and animals’ domestication created new species through selection and long-term symbiosis. For the majority, agrarian life was more stable but also more labor- intensive and monotonous than it was for hunter-gatherers. It was also largely based on coercion, taxation, rationing and division of labor to the advantage of an emergent elite class......and was an epidemiological hazard, especially at the beginning, because of demographic and animal concentrations, and the recurring risks of zoonosis. Therefore, because they needed to counterbalance these disadvantages and to satisfy their demand in manpower, city-states became expansionist, raiding and slavery-based empires and multiplied the forms of domination. What does urban sociology study? ▪ A sociology of the spatial dimension of social life: urban morphology (how cities are shaped and organized), the effects of density, the symbolic oppositions indoor/outdoor, city/countryside, … ▪ The modes of production and governance of the city: residential norms and choices, the roles of specific professions in producing the city as a material setting and a political entity, how to study local power and urban politics and policies. City as material artefact: how we are governed. ▪ Interactions in urban spaces, patterns and norms of urbanity. For instance, in Western cities (Lofland, 1998): 1 Cooperative mobility: the necessity to move through public place without bumping into one another, how to walk in a side walk 2 Civil inattention: the necessity to respect everyone’s privacy in a context of close physical distance, not supposed to interfere in stranger’s conversation Maelys BORY 3 Restrained helpfulness: the necessity to give small services without engaging oneself beyond the immediate interaction, empathy, showing that you are ready to help. (it has to do with the complicated relationship with bystanderism / diffusion of responsibility. people will help other city residents with small tasks but will restrain themselves when it comes to taking bigger actions like intervening in a robbery). 4 Audience role prominence: the necessity to behave as a spectator of a public scene without interfering with it 5 Civility towards diversity: the necessity not to discriminate according to categories such as race, ethnicity, age or gender cf. debate on hijab and Islam.  Lofland distinguishes thereby 5 main dimensions in the norms of how to interact with adequality in public spaces. ▪ Urban cultures and the role of the social organization of the cities in the processes of cultural production and transformation: the urban dimension of art worlds, the city as facilitating the loosening of social control, the multicultural dimension. Cf. Alan Scott: you cannot understand Hollywood without considering it as a system of production of movies, linked to the organization of the city of LA: the way people organize themselves is inscribed in the city’s structure. Loosening of social control. ▪ A sociology of housing and housing policies: at the intersection of urban sociology and the sociology of the family. Urban sociology and the Chicago School ▪ Chicago and Hyde Park as a laboratory of urbanization. First US department of sociology (1892). Crucial role of Robert E. Park (who arrived at the University of Chicago in 1914): he questioned the impact of the urban and metropolitan life on the everyday experience on new inhabitants. Using the city as “social laboratory” (R. Park and E. Burgess, The City, 1925): the city as the departure point for a general sociology; urban ecology is the social organization of urban space; anthropological methods applied to the modern city (urban ethnography). Opposition of mechanic and organic solidarity by Durkheim (do research) ▪ The heritage of Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903): wanted to study the interactions between individuals in the city especially the ability to interact with ≠ role repertoire (and concluded that people adapt their role depending on the situation and the person they interact with). In large cities, there is a capacity to disconnect this repertoire if wanted. He further analyzed the effect of this dissolution and fragmentation of your social persona in large metropolitan surroundings. ▪ Two great American issues: how to make an American from a migrant? How to implement actual equality between whites and blacks? + focus on urban segregation. Park was an Afro-American activist, involved in the studying the experience of poor Europeans who decided to move away to the US. Those questions give evidence of the Maelys BORY persistent inequalities in the US: regional inequalities created by the slavery system that seems to persist in American fabric. These two questions also took a spatial dimension, translated into urban space cf. residential concentration of migrants and black minorities → good or bad: ethnic neighborhood can be great because of transitory space, people interact with people who are close to your values. ▪ The human “ecology paradigm”: local social ecosystem in which groups collaborate with each other (when groups move from one space to another: can encounter some resistance or competition with other group). This ecology tried to describe the evolution of the city in this way at macro level: describing the arrival of Germans in Chicago who move to wealthier neighborhoods. ▪ The concentric zone model of Ernest Burgess to describe American cities: progressive move towards the suburbs related to acquiring more wealth and being more integrated in the American city: process of suburbanization in the US. Main ≠ between US and Europe: gentrification happened in both cases, but in the US upper classes tend to live in the suburbs (movement that starts by the end of 70s) while in Europe, upper classes stick to the city center. ▪ Ethnography and the mix of qualitative and quantitative methods: statistics to describe cities, mas to describe geographic and ethnographic movement. ➔ German: main ethnic origin of immigrant Americans, before Blacks → but barely anyone identifies as people of German-American origin due to WWII as to avoid forms of aggressivity from the rest of the population. The Marxian analysis of the city ▪ The industrial revolution and the debates about urban pauperization. Problems of sickness and hygiene; recurrent in cities but, because of Pasteurian revolution, upper Maelys BORY class realized there were microbes. Social reformers such as Engels or Booth. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845: from his experience as factory worker in Liverpool. Social reformer Charles Booth, Life and Labor of the People in London, 1889-1903: realized that we couldn’t understand the working classes and poverty without studying how and where people lived. Need strong workers in good health to be productive. End of 19th century in UK: more and more concern about life conditions of working classes. ▪ Capital accumulation, reorganization of labor and the transformation of the city? Marx focuses on economic dimension, where the transformation is the most extreme. But need to address both economic and political transformation and the specific effects on the working class. ▪ Spatial and urban relations as the spatial dimension of class relations and conflicts (Francis Godard, Manuel Castells, 1970s): tried to fully apply the Marxist approach to study the city by digging into the idea that spatial and urban relations are the specialization of class relations and conflicts. Studying the conflicts between inhabitants of ≠ parts of a city as any class conflicts: focus on the control of space or real estate as a mean of production. Concessions made by bourgeoisie in class conflicts are explained by the wish to make productive means of prod. ▪ Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city (1968): there should be a right to have a high quality of life when living in the city. new dimension of Marxist analysis cf. “right to the city”: idea that in a democracy, all should have the right to access all the resources provided by the city and the public spaces; all have the right to express their pov, participate, and take part in deliberation. Public spaces should be re-appropriated by all according to their class norms. Bourgeoisie should not keep telling how to behave in the public space. ▪ The critique of David Harvey to Thomas Piketty: is real estate always economic capital, even if such capital is very often non-convertible? In the past years, Harvey has been famous for proposing one of the sharpest comments and critique of Piketty challenging the fact it was appropriate to consider real estates as capital because the dimension of capital imply a dimension of convertibility. And a real estate as such is non-convertible because you cannot get rid of your house if you have one. You do need a place to live. The only thing you can do with a certain amount of money when selling your house is getting another house. The underlying critique is the fact that real estate should not be considered as capital: the differences in wealth inequality are even much higher when you considered them as capital. ▪ Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot: the necessity to focus of the four main types of capital described by Bourdieu, and the bourgeoisie as a mobilized class in the city. They built an empirical sociological work: study about upper classes, inheritance, self-made men → sociologists of the wealthy. They are largely Bourdieusian as they apply a capital analysis to the four forms of capital defined by Bourdieu. Urban strategy of upper class to manage and reproduce all their capital and fight social integration at the lower level. Urban bourgeoisie is the only class per se, class in itself that coordinate and strategize at the collective level to defend their capital. Marxist approach: conscious Maelys BORY of who they are and who their homologues are, class consciousness, strategies to mobilize. Urban political economy ▪ Focus on the interactions and complementarity between political and economic institutions to produce the city: what causes urbanization, who governs the city and how these two processes are linked with each other; i.e. the interactions between material production/building of (and within) the city, and institutions of exchange, decision and regulation. Developers have strategies of making certain neighborhoods poorer and poorer to buy the buildings and redevelop them. ▪ Model of the growth-machine coalitions (Logan & Molotch 1987): in order to understand the main dynamics between local powers and developers, you have to understand that both actors have a strong common basic interest in the city being developed. ▪ Governing the city through instruments (P. Lascoumes & P. Le Galès): don’t govern cities through decisions only but through instruments. Governance is not simply deciding favors against somebody: it’s implementing the proper tools to govern. Need to have the possibility of bottom-up initiatives. The debate about the black ghetto in the United States ▪ The explanation through a “culture of poverty” (Oscar Lewis, D.P. Moynihan, The Negro Family, 1965): concept in social theory that asserts that the values of people experiencing poverty play a significant role in perpetuating their impoverished condition, sustaining a cycle of poverty across generations ▪ Bill Wilson and the apparent paradox of the pauperization of the ghetto after the extension of civil rights ▪ American Apartheid (Massey & Denton, 1993) and the many ways in which discrimination and structural racism (re)produce racial segregation and inequality: residential segregation as the “missing link” to analyze the persistence of racial inequality in the US. Segregation = physical separation between different groups. Measure of segregation: dissimilarity index: the percentage of people from the group who would have to move in order to produce an even distribution if the whole population in the given zone. They came up with different indexes: Isolation index: measures probability of having neighbors belonging to one’s own group; likelihood a member of a minority group will encounter a member of that minority when interacting in his/her neighborhood; the greater the index, the less isolated you are. Concentration index: refers to the proportion of city space occupied by a given minority group. ▪ Measuring the neighborhood effect (Rob Sampson) Maelys BORY ▪ Recontextualizing the hyperghetto (L. Wacquant) and complexifying its analysis by focusing on specific spatial configurations, populations and/or dynamics (S. Venkatesh, Pattillo, M. Small, etc.) The methodological debates about urban segregation ▪ Definition and non-intentionality of the phenomenon ▪ The different segregation indices ▪ Social area analysis and factorial ecology ▪ Choosing the right categories to describe the population analyzed ▪ The complementarity between quantitative and qualitative approaches The gentrification debate(s) ▪ The original definition of Ruth Glass (1963) and gentrification as a multi-step process Gentrification: a process of renovating deteriorated urban neighborhoods by means of the influx of more affluent residents ▪ Towards a most extensive definition of gentrification as local social upgrading? ▪ Neil Smith and the explanation of gentrification by the rent-gap theory (and more generally as a process led by capital): the rent-gap = the difference between the current rent and the potentially achievable income (the bigger it is, the most investors are interested) ▪ The options of urban policies to regulate gentrification processes ▪ Is gentrification a Western-centric conceptualization? Session 8: Religion How do sociology studies religion today? ▪ Through non-normative approaches ▪ Explaining (and not judging) people’s religious beliefs and practices, and analyzing their consequences in everyday life ▪ On a more macro-level and in a diachronic perspective, explaining the transformations of the forms and roles of religion in society How did the classics address religion? Maelys BORY August Comte (1798-1857): religion as a pre-modern stage of society ▪ Three “ages of knowledge” (three steps of a rationalization process): religious, metaphysical, and finally positive ▪ Religion as an initial mistake (challenged by modern philosophers and the French Revolution). However, acknowledgment of the link between religion and social order ▪ Sociology as the new, more genuine, form of truth to reform humankind and lead it towards progress. For him, sociology has also this role of social engineering. ▪ A project to create a positivist/humanistic religion that would replace the current religion. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859): American religion ad religiosity (being the set of religious practices) as one of the causes of democracy. ▪ In Democracy in America (1835/1840), he highlights the social and political importance of religion in the United States, in particular through the congregationalist organization of many Puritan churches, and its compatibility with democracy. One of the main points made is that one of the characteristics of the puritan church was the fact they were congregations with a form of internal democracy (deliberations, discussions: the relation with God was an individual relation but was also a sort of relation being the one of the communities). ▪ Religion as a cause of equality (organization) and liberty (puritan approach insisting on the specific individual relations they had with God) in the US: has the effect of stabilizing society, fosters collective trusts (which protect against the risk of tyranny), fosters individual responsibility (a base for equality and civil liberty). ▪ However, for Tocqueville (as a Catholic), Providence is still an immanent and historical force (which explains why his writings, among the first ones to theorize American exceptionalism, were compatible with the “Manifest Destiny” ideology). He still believes in divine interventions in history. The country itself has a specific destiny: chosen by God to be the place where exceptional things happen: American exceptionalism. James George Frazer (1854-1941): comparison and the mythogenetical approach ▪ In The Golden Bough (1890), Frazer (like Comte) adopts an evolutionist paradigm, by describing three historical stages of human belief: primitive magic, religion, science. ▪ But he also lays down the foundations of the comparative (and non-ethnocentric) approach to myths, rituals and religions, including by suggesting a mythogenesis of Christian narratives. Frazer showed that the story of Jesus, a lot of the parables in the Bible, were very similar to other forms of stories, myths, of ways to speak about redemption, that existed in the Roman Empire, in the Middle East and at the intersection of Western Mediterranean influence and Indian-Asian influences. He showed the story of Jesus itself is simply the variation of a story told in other mythologies: relativization of the specificity of the Christian religion. Today, contemporary social sciences analyze the history of religions as a mix of: Maelys BORY - Collective memorization of actual facts: comparative studies between different sets of believes across the world showed that some myths existed in other cultures. - Iterative reinterpretation by (variously motivated) social actors: idea that the myths are used to tell the story of a group and when the group evolved, every time the story is told, some elements of the story are changed because the organization itself changes. There is a reinterpretation of some stories. - Symbolic structuration (cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss): if you change one element of the story, you have to change other cements because of the system of representation having a coherence. Karl Marx on religion ▪ Religion must be understood in relation to its social and economic context ▪ Religion as part of superstructure: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”. (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859) ≠ Comte and his normative approach ▪ Organization of the means of production → relations of production → political and legal institutions, religion, culture, norms... ▪ Religion has an ideological function in a system of capitalist exploitation: it disguises exploitation and makes it seem natural and acceptable ▪ It thus contributes to the alienation of the working class: it “is the opium of the people” (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843) ▪ But, for Marx and Engels’ dialectical materialism, the only real causes of social change are infrastructural relations and contradictions, and religion and rationalization are therefore not directly historical forces Emile Durkheim on The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) ▪ The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) starts with the study of totemic religion among Aboriginal Australians ▪ A de facto functionalist perspective ▪ Religion as a system of beliefs (that define ideals) and rituals (that define practices) that relies on an institution. Durkheim does not only look at beliefs but at religiosity and in particular to rituals. Maelys BORY ▪ The sacred/profane opposition established by religion as a distinctive feature of Durkheim’s definition: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things which are set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite, into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (p. 47). He insists on the role of religion being setting rules and practices + a way to instore norms in a group of people. ▪ The role of rituals (see also Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 1909) and collective “effervescence” (= moment of communion that is a moment of feeling and sharing emotions, a condition for creation and incorporation of a set of beliefs) in the creation and incorporation of collective beliefs ▪ “the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: this power exists, it is society. When the Australian is carried outside himself and feels a new life flowing within him whose intensity surprises him, he is not the dupe of an illusion; this exaltation is real and it is really the effect of forces outside of and superior to the individual.” (p. 225) ▪ “Thus, religion acquires a meaning and a reasonableness that the most intransigent rationalist cannot misunderstand. [...] Before all, it is a system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it. This is its primary function; and though metaphorical and symbolic, this representation is not unfaithful. [...] it is an eternal truth that outside of us there exists something greater than us, with which we enter into communion. That is why we can rest assured in advance that the practices of the cult, whatever they may be, are something more than movements without importance and gestures without efficacy. By the mere fact that their apparent function is to strengthen the bonds attaching the believer to his god, they at the same time really strengthen the bonds attaching the individual to the society of which he is a member, since the god is only a figurative expression of the society” Max Weber on Protestantism and capitalism ▪ The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) analyzes religion as a source of modern life ethic, and several other books foster a comparative analysis of world religions. ▪ The Sociology of Religions is a comparative analysis of world religions: socio-historical book that compares religions and their evolution across continents and through time. ▪ “spirit capitalism” = Set of explications and world views leading the people to get involved on the dynamics of capitalism ▪ Weber is interested in the evolution towards disenchantment and rationalization, and by an organizational focus on religion: the disenchantment of the world = a great historic process of elimination of magic from the world cf. rationalization: increasing primacy of calculation behavior and rational ways of acting Maelys BORY ▪ Distinguishes two kinds of religions that can generate specific social conducts (or ethos)  extramundane religions promote a mystic ethos  intramundane religions (ex. Protestantism) promote an ascetic ethos ▪ Protestant Ethic: worldly ascetism, methodic rationalization of daily life, valorization of hard work ▪ What is explanatory in religion? Not dogmas but the more general life ethic ▪ How is this ethic enforced? In the case of Protestantism (and Calvinism), by the doctrine of predestination ▪ Elective affinity (process through which two cultural forms enter in a relationship of mutual reinforcement) of capitalism with the protestant ethic: austerity, abnegation, work performed in a systematic matter, accumulation as signs of “being chosen” then modern capitalism as an “iron cage” of rationality How do contemporary sociologists address religion? Through non-normative approaches Explaining (and not judging) people’s religious beliefs and practices, and analyzing their consequences in everyday life On a more macro-level and in a diachronic perspective, explaining the transformations of the forms and roles of religion in society Towards an anthropology of nature and religion? Philippe Descola, in Beyond Nature and Culture (2005), describes four ontologies to account for the different ways “we” relate ourselves to nature, and explains worldviews generally seen as “religious” by analyzing these relations. To build the typology, two criteria = interiority and physicality: - Animism: the attribution by humans to nonhumans of an interiority and subjectivity identical to one’s own. Plants and animals are like “persons” have a social life similar to that of humans but differs in the body. - Totemism (same interiority, same physicality): groups of humans and non-humans share interior as well as physical attributes. An ontology in which the identification of the group to his animal ancestor, the totem, is both spiritual (moral) and physical. - Naturalism (same physicality, but different interiority): postulates the uniqueness of nature on which unfolds the diversity of cultures. Only humans have subjectivity. - Analogism (different interiority, different physicality): humans and non-humans are made up of fragmented essences. Analogism poses an infinite set of singularities interrelated by analogies. Astrology for instance links the movements and positions of distant planets to an individual destiny. Some more recent sociological outlooks on religion: Secularization process Maelys BORY Definitions:  “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols” (Peter Berger, The sacred canopy, 1967)  “the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose their social significance” (Bryan Wilson, Religion in secular society, 1966)  a decline in the institutional and cultural role of religion (Willaime, 1955) A process with several dimensions:  Social, political and legal institutions and fields gain autonomy from religious authority through a process of differentiation  Social representations gain autonomy from the hold of religious references  Bodies of knowledge and cultural productions gradually emancipate themselves from religion: arts, sciences, etc.  Ordinary individual behaviors and beliefs become increasingly autonomous from religious prescriptions: decline in cult-related activities (ex. church-going); decline of the hold of religious norms on social behavior (ex. premarital cohabitation), new religious movements Maelys BORY Study of religious organizations drawing on Weber’s focus on the organizational dimension of the church the church as a work organization: the example of recent research on the “stained-glass ceiling” in religious organizations cf. women’s access to religious career (Béatrice de Gasquet, 2009) Religion as meaning-making: the symbolic dimension of religious beliefs Clifford Geertz:  religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (The Interpretation of Cultures, 1993) 1 a system of symbols…  symbol: “anything which signifies something else” – a vehicle for a conception, a formulation that embodies a set of pictures, feelings, representations, experiences Maelys BORY  culture patterns are systems of symbols: they lie outside the individual, they shape people’s behavior, they are models for social events (like genes for animals: they make the beaver build a dam) and models of social events (they give a representation of what a dam is)  religion is worth studying in itself (and not for the impact it has on the social system) 2 … establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations…  religion induces a certain set of dispositions: the probability of having certain behaviors, practices, but also feelings, desires, etc.  there are 2 kind of dispositions: moods and motivations, both generated by religion ❖ motivations: tendencies, “made meaningful” with reference to their ends ❖ moods: feelings, “made meaningful” with reference to their conditions of emergence 3 … formulating conceptions of a general order of existence…  religion makes people think they are part of a “cosmic framework” they can understand  religion brings an answer to the lack of consistency, of interpretability of the world: ❖ the limits of the analytic capacities: unexplained facts like the weird mushroom ❖ the limit of men’s power of endurance: how to react facing suffering ❖ the limits of men’s moral insight: the issue of evil  religion helps the world to make sense for people 4 …an aura of factuality…  Geertz tries to answer the question: why do people believe?  Because there is a prior acceptance of authority which transforms their experience. They see the world through a “religious perspective”.  This authority, this conviction that religious conceptions are veridical, is transmitted through rituals  There are other perspectives: ❖ common-sensical: simple acceptance of the world, it is as it seems; acting to master the world or to adapt to it ❖ scientific:disinterested observation, the world must be rationally explained, beyond what it seems. ❖ Aesthetic: disengagement from the beliefs in reality; contemplation of sensory qualities Maelys BORY ❖ Religious: moving beyond reality while accepting it 5 … the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic  the consequence of those rituals = expansion and “normalization” of the religious perspective: ❖ dispositions and world views reinforce one another ❖ the more elaborate and more public ones are the most important ❖ dispositions and worldview experiences during the rituals become part of the common sense  “movement back and forth between the religious perspective and the common- sense perspective”  a cultural analysis of religion: he uses the concepts of the study of culture to understand religion. culture: “a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, […] by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life”  example of the ritual of Rangda and Barong:  the dynamic aspect of the ritual: it transforms individuals  the performing aspect of the ritual: it looks like a theatrical performance  they create a concrete and effective encounter with the “conceptions” and their symbolic representations  they induce an ethos and a world view, “by means of a single set of symbols”  anthropological study of religions as a two-stage process  analyzing the systems of meanings embodied in the symbols – strong emphasis on this step  relating those systems to social-structural and psychological processes D. Snow & R. Machalek (1983) analyze the forms of conversion rhetoric, and show a radical change in the convert’s universe of discourse:  biographical reconstruction  adoption of a master attribution frame  suspension of analogical reasoning  embracement of a master role Is religion (still) everywhere? The religious dimension of political life and Robert Bellah’s notion of “civil religion”: “the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious Maelys BORY dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion” ("Civil religion in America." Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96(1): 1-21, 1967) Religion and sport: Robert Coles on football as a “surrogate” religion (1975) Thomas Luckmann’s Invisible religion (1967): from “how religious are people?” to “how are people religious?”. Religion as the “transcendence of biological nature by the human organism”, that can take on other forms that institutionalize religion: self- expression self-realization, autonomy, … (i.e. a lower degree of transcendence) Session 9: The Family Is there such thing as a traditonal family? Picture => Demonstration of the Institut Civitas (Paris, 2012) in which write wing activists defended the traditional family model (1 father, 1 mother and children) opposing to same sex mariage. Who are mothers, fathers and siblings? (Lewis H. Morgan’s classification) => identified 6 models of family entitled models of Kinship (Hawaiian - Iroquois - Sudanese - Crow - Eskimo - Omaha). The Western European model is majority the Eskimo one. In many of those models, there is no conception/ representation of a biological parenting (many models in which the society does not represent of a human being as being the combination of a masculine and feminine gene => no genetic, blood question, some of them might be linked to spiritual dimension…). A principle to keep in mind : the 1st cousin on the lineage you are considered as belonging to are generally considered as your brothers and sisters. Another principle makes your uncle and aunts on your line of lineage are considered as your parents. Also in some case, a Principle of gender identity, the sister of the mother seen as a 2nd mother and the brother of the father a 2nd Maelys BORY mother. To keep in mind : ppl you consider as siblings or those you consider as parents vary a lot. I/ The family as a social institution: the anthropological study of kinship and alliance − Family: a group of individuals related to one another by ties of kinship and alliance, whose definition varies across societies − Kinship: social rules which define who are parents and children, brothers and sisters − Alliance norms: social rules which define who can or should marry whom − Descent group: a group of individuals used to refer to common ancestry (e.g. lineages, houses) − Forms of households and rules of residence: where and with whom married individual live = a larger group that generally includes the father lineage and also the persons that are allied with women in the house in question if those men belong to lineage are less prestigious than the one of the house. Ex : House of Medicis for ex, way British crown defined the royal household…)  The definition of these rules varies between societies hence the family is a social institution, not a fact of nature. This idea of a traditional family is thus totally anachronistic and in opposition with reality. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) ▪ One of the major figures of social sciences in the 20th century (active in the sociological debate for almost 8 decades). ▪ Among other major works: The elementary structures of kinship (1949): identifies several metarules/underlying logics organizing the systems of kinship and alliance around the world. ▪ Tristes tropiques (1955): a reflexive memoir about his (earlier) fieldwork and travels, cultural differences, and the role of anthropology in the contemporary world. ▪ The founding father of structural anthropology ❖ Structuralism: “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity”: relations are more important than the terms they relate ❖ Relativism: social forms, social institutions are relative; there is no intrinsic superiority of one form over the others ❖ There is no natural, biological explanation of the family or gender Social rules governing alliance ▪ The prohibition of incest: “The universal prohibition of incest specifies, as a general rule, that people considered as parents and children, or brother and sister, even if only Maelys BORY by name, cannot have sexual relations and even less marry each other. […] the prohibition of incest establishes a mutual dependency between families, compelling them, in order to perpetuate themselves, to give rise to new families” (C. Lévi-Strauss, “The family”, 1960). The prohibition of incest marks the passage from the state of nature to the state of culture. It clearly states that the prohibition is universal and that however, people defined as being incestuous can change according to the societies we are looking at => valid in kinship new and modern post-industrial societies. Ex of these norms and how they evolved : 19th century France => it was not unusual at all to have men marrying their nieces in the upper classes (Rothschild family) which would totally be considered as incestuous by the majority of ppl today (even if not illegal) considering today norms. Case of the US society : some places where marrying your first cousin is considered as the most valuable form of marriage while for others it is incestuous. Rudy Giuliani run for the US elections => bad reputation bc had married his nieces. See work of Maurice Godlier (see interview in Le monde) => reminded that there were in several societies some forms of exceptions against the prohibition of incest based on religious beliefs and mythological representations that see the world as a product of incest (gods of the pantheon are married & sibling, in Greek mythology it is majority lateral incest but also vertical in other myths). In ancient Egypt: alliance between siblings seen as the best one. Elementary structures of kinship (Lévi-Strauss, 1949): the rules of kinship define the group of people within which one should marry (ex. cross-cousins marriage). ▪ Elementary structures of kinship (C. Lévi-Strauss, 1949): the rules of kinship define the group of people within which one should marry (ex. cross-cousins marriage). Some societies are bind to Semi-complex structures of kinship and others are bind to complex ones. ▪ Semi-complex structures of kinship (Françoise Héritier, 1981, L’exercice de la parenté): the rules of kinship define the people with whom one cannot get married, according to conceptualizations of the compatibility/incompatibility of body fluids. ▪ Complex structures of kinship: the rules of kinship define a smaller group of people whom one cannot marry, and the norms of alliance are more flexible (incest prohibition in contemporary western societies) ▪ see also at the level of the ethnic/social group(s), the cases of rules of endogamy (marrying within the group) or exogamy (marrying outside the group) – C. Lévi-Strauss, 1949, The Elementary structures of kinship Social rules governing kinship/descent ▪ Who transmits what to their offspring? whose kinship group are children part of? ▪ Unilineal kinship systems: a child can be attached to the mother’s or the father’s family o patrilineal descent o matrilineal descent Maelys BORY ▪ Generally, more complex systems, i.e. forms of ambilineality and double descent: “many societies are interested in clearly establishing the relations of the offspring with the father’s group on the one hand, and with the mother’s group on the other, but they do it by differentiating strongly the two kinds of relationships. Territorial rights may be inherited through one line, and religious privileges and obligations through the other. Or else, status from one side, magical techniques from the other” (Lévi-Strauss, “The family”) => Still today, the name is very often transmitted in a patrilineal way (even those combing the names, at some point bc too many names, will drop the matrilineal one). The traditional functions of the family ▪ Social organization: the rules of kinship and filiation as means of social organization and classification mechanisms (can play a role in the organization of age classes, cycles of vendetta, etc.) ▪ Social ties: the prohibition of incest as the basis for establishing ties (via exchange in women) between social groups: “it is the groups which are important, not the temporary aggregate of the individual representatives of the group” (C. Lévi-Strauss, “The family”, 1960) => very debated quote in which he defines traditional marriage not as an alliance between a man and a woman but one in which a man gives a woman to another man thus strengthening the ties of the groups (in a patriarchal view). ▪ Economic (production, consumption, reciprocity) ▪ Demographic (reproduction) ▪ Care provision => parents care for their young children and adults for their elders ▪ Reproduction of social inequalities (gender, class, race) Why is the conjugal (restricted) family so frequent across societies? The conjugal or nuclear family: criticism of other theories Biological theories and natural foundation of the family, marriage and of the gender division of labor: marriage is not linked to biological reproduction. Biological reproduction does not need a legal form to exist Biological evolutionism: restricted families are not specific to “modern” societies + there is not group marriage in primitive societies the idea of the conjugal family as a “universal” model: many other forms of families exist (polygamous, joint or extended). Conjugal family is fairly frequent (over time and space) but not universal. Definition of family Maelys BORY It finds its origin in marriage It consists of a husband, wife and children born out of their wedlock, though it can be conceived that other relatives may find their place close to that nuclear group The family members are united together by a. legal bonds b. economic, religious and other kinds of rights and obligations c. a precise network of sexual rights and prohibitions, and a varying and diversified amount of psychological feelings such as love, affection, respect, awe, etc. It’s a social institution. The form of the family depends on the cultural and social context: restricted family or joint family. It has a functional value: it helps individuals to survive and establishes a mutual dependency. Marriage Is a “legal, group-sanctioned bond between a man and a woman”: it can involve exchange, purchase, free-choice to be imposed by the family The married status is highly valorized “Marriage binds the groups before and above the individuals”: it makes groups and sexes mutually independent II/ History of the family as an institution: contemporary transformations/ongoing evolutions in family forms The example of the French case: The Catholic church gradually defines marriage as one of the sacraments (11th-13th centuries) => exerted and controlled by the Church. But before the 11th, for almost one thousand years, ppl did not really care about who was marrying who = marriage not institutionalized by the canon law and religion giving to the wedding spiritual dimension. Paul Ariès (1960) about the Ancien Régime rural family and household organization => tendency for grand-parents, children and great children all living together (sharing meals and even sleeping in the same room in poor households) => transgenerational organization. Nobody was almost never living alone, women being moved from their households to the one of their husband when they married (the whole family having a word to say in the alliance). This model lasted until the French Revolution. The nuclear turn of the 17th and 18th century => something you can see by looking at marriage or both certificate. 200 y ago => ppl come w/ their parents to declare the birth of their kids but declare different adresses = tendency for young parents to live in their own household. Beginning of the tradition that ppl married bc they loved each other based on a mutual Maelys BORY consensus between 2 people. The mutual dimension of the relation was becoming more important. French Revolution: divorce by mutual consent (1792-1804) The Napoleonic Code civil (1804) Conservative reaction and the abolition of divorce (1816-1884) => will last for almost 70 years The emergence of privacy = idea that ppl have their pwn space even when living in the same household. Relation of modesty w/ adults avoiding to be seen naked by children, habits of sleeping in several norms because the norms (give privacy to sexually active couples) The gradual emancipation of women (1884, 1938, 1944, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1990…) => extremely gradual and slow. 1884 : divorce reinstated in France. 1938 (just before WWII) : women do not have to be obedient to their husbands. 1944 : right to vote (a consequence of WWII bc worked a lot during the war but also one of the 38 law = can have a political opinion of their own). 1965 (less than 50 y ago) : women have the right to exert control of their own properties in marriage/ no need for the consent of their husband to work. 1970 : father authority transformed into parental authority (woman only a substitute of the father authority in the house legally). 1975 : abortion legal/ possibility of divorce by mutual consent. 1990 : year in which legal possibility of domestic rape was considered => woman could not accused her husband of rape before that. The gradual emancipation of youngsters => in particular the right to physically punish children has been gradually more and more limited by the law. Viviana Zelizer – Pricing the priceless child. The changing social value of children (1985) => socio-historical analysis of the way children has valued by their parents both emotionally and economically have evolved since the past decades. At the beginning of industrialization, child factory labor was a normal, rationalized economic convention: - working class children worked in factories as soon as they were physically able to do so - no legal ban on child labor - life insurance conceived as a way to replace children’s income in case of their death, and courts compensated parents of children killed in factory accidents for the child’s lost wages - foster parents favored older boys (better income) Between 1870 and 1930, we observe a gradual shift in the meaning of childhood, pressed by children’s advocates and social reformers: legal ban on child labor; life insurance and compensations awarded by courts conceived as compensation for parents’ emotional loss; foster parents favored baby girls (emotional bonding => refrain the child parent relationship which is now much more emotion based than economic) Consequences: ban on children’s factory labor as a new economic convention; shift in the perception of children, from economics to emotions; shift in the economic meaning of childhood > children as a long-term investment (through education) rather than an immediate Maelys BORY source of income (through factory work) => situation that refrain the way how children are seen particularly in the working class. Critique: she studied largely a legal setting that was imposed on children (people might want to claim compensation for child loss but the system made them looking more economically- interested). Graph: In France: fact that the majority of children are actually born outside marriage which is very different than in the US where the marriage is much more promoted (by religion, romantic representations in movies => all maintaining a high level of marriage within the country). As a result, majority of kids born within marriage. See other figures on the other graphs. History of the family as an institution (II) The ongoing evolutions: Early adulthood as a new age of life (Louis Chauvel) => moment in which ppl are economically independent, start of their professional careers w/ first steps having very long- lasting effects on the rest of your professional life. Also, steps of entry into adulthood happening in a very different standard order according to the country you are looking to. 4 or 5 dimensions : De - cohabiting (leaving households of parents) - re-cohabiting - acquiring economic independence - getting married - having children => happens in a diff order and can be explained by the role the market, the family and the state play. Classical French model : ppl leaving very early their household but living depending on their parental resources. Other countries in which the state = very strong roles. Scandinavian countries like Sweden/ Danemark = many students have kids while being students bc uni is free, state will supply you with housing helps and when having a kid you got even more of these ressources (student life can even be seen as a more favorable age to have kids than later). The UK is very -//- => 1st step is often the economic independence. Italy at the opposite of France w/ couples relying much more on family w/ majority of people moving out of their parent houses when married or in couple and even when move out => do not go far away (bc often same time than having kids and need grand parents near). Freedom of love and alliance? (Bozon & Héran, Eva Illouz, Marie Bergström) => way to look at the sociology of the family while looking at the sociology of alliances and the one of love as an emotion. Bozon & Eran => analyzed the way in which ppl choose their partners (where do they meet, what are they looking for, who de they set w/) = process of couple composition. Show that raise in education and % of women working => situation in which ppl meet less & less locally and much more often at school (college) or at work (places where they were traditionally not meeting). Shows that still forms of feminine hyper => tends to put themselves in couple with men being a bit higher than them on social ladder. Effect : groups having problems w/ finding a match (men w/ too low education) and women too much qualified w/ too much education = hard time finding a match (hypergamie rule ??). Result : ppl marry with people from the same social groups but as a result => even more important social segregation including intergenerational social segregation. Eva Illouz : the problems within masculine/ feminine narratives: emotional & economic market of couple => norm of equality but in the same time, norm of initiative considered as being the Maelys BORY capacity of men so women have the conflicting injunction of being more selecting within the offer but in the same time, no clear rule of how are they supposed to stop to do so (who is the good guy) + still a form of dialectal responsibility bc new trend is to tell themselves that they need to take initiate to make themselves happy. Marie Bergström : tinder = incrementally reinforcing algorithm that will attribute you an aura of desirability (if desirable people find you desirable, then you will be seen as desirable). If not seen as desirable since the beginning = already too late. Study the way in which algorithm systems plays a role un matching ppl and the way/ online flirting culture works => class-framing much more quicker (allowing people to identify the class you belong to even more than in any other places). A more equalitarian couple (as we saw) The access to marriage by same-sex couples The transformation of family norms: general trends ▪ XIXth-XXth centuries: shift from extended to nuclear family cf. Durkheim, Parsons ▪ Non-linear change ▪ Recent trends (1970s onwards):  increase in divorces and reconstituted families  increase in single-motherhood  increase in unmarried couples and children born from unmarried couples  postponement of the average age of marriage and for having the 1st child III/ The family and the (re)production of gender and class inequalities Family as a nexus for women’s oppression ▪ Kinship systems and “The Traffic in Women” (1975). Gayle Rubin reading Lévi- Strauss with a gender lens: “It is of interest to carry this kind of deductive enterprise even further than Lévi-Strauss does, and to explicate the logical structure which underlies his entire analysis of kinship. At the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality and the constraint of female sexuality. Gender asymmetry and women’s objectification in the kinship systems described by Lévi-Strauss: 2 illustrations from “The Family” (1960):  Polygyny and polyandry: “the word polygamy, it should be recalled, refers to polygyny, that is, a system where a man is entitled to several wives, as well as to Maelys BORY polyandry, which is the complementary system where several husbands share one wife”  Levirate and sororate: “When the husband dies, the levirate provides that his unmarried brothers have a preferential claim on his widow (or, as is sometimes differently put, share in their deceased brother’s duty to support his wife and children), while the sororate permits a man to marry preferentially in polygamous marriage his wife’s sisters, or – when marriage is monogamous – to get a sister to replace the wife in case the latter remains childless, has to be divorced on account of bad conduct, or dies” ▪ The gendered division of labor:  a social phenomenon (and not a natural one): “like the form of the family, the division of labor stems more from social and cultural considerations than from natural ones. […] there is a great deal of difference between the Nambikwara father nursing his baby and cleaning it when it soils itself, and the European nobleman of not long ago to whom his children were formally presented from time to time, being otherwise confined to the women’s quarters until the boys were old enough to be taught riding and fencing. […] therefore, we should be careful to distinguish between the fact of the division of labor between the sexes which is practically universal, from the way according to which different tasks are attributed to one or the other sex, where we should recognize the same paramount influence of cultural factors, let us say the same artificiality which presides over the organization of the family itself” (C. Lévi-Strauss, “The family”, 1960)  a powerful leverage of gender inequality  different symbolic and economic values assigned to the tasks performed respectively by men and women (Kergoat, “Division sexuelle du travail et rapports sociaux de sexe”, 2000)  men’s exploitation of women’s labor within the heterosexual couple (Delphy, L’ennemi principal)  women’s assignment to unpaid labor in the private sphere impedes their participation in paid employment  the gendered division of labor influences the way women’s work is valued on the labor market ▪ Domestic violence:  Sexual violence within the family analyzed in the 2006 INED survey on sexual violence. Overall, 6.8% of women and 1.5% if men report having been the victims of sexual assault. First attempt before age 18 for 59% of these women and 67% of these men.  Questioning the common vision of the family as a shelter and as a unity of common interests Maelys BORY Family and the (re)production of social inequality ▪ An effect increased by social homogamy (Girard, Le choix du conjoint, 2012): people mostly marry people coming from the same socio-professional group. The choice of the partner is a social fact. ▪ Transmission of different forms of patrimony, assets ▪ Transmission of cultural capital (Bourdieu) cf. lecture 7 on education ▪ On the book Le gendre du Capital (Céline Bessière & Sybille Golac) => even today in a context where men & women inherit the same from their parents (no gender-based difference) BUT, the more productive part of capital or the share of the family wealth that is the most likely to see its value increases tend to be much more often transmitted to men. Women tend to receive cash or share that do not reproduce so in the end = men receive more in a way or another. Giver tend to favorite men explicitly or on the value or the nature of the share (implicitly). ▪ About the role of socialization, see for instance Annette Laureau’s Unequal childhoods (2003): different types of parenting, depending on social class (middle-class concerted cultivation vs. working-class accomplishment of natural growth), and the effects of these differences on children’s sense of entitlement and future opportunities facing institutions. o “unlike middle-class parents, [working-class] adults do not consider the concerted development of children, particularly through organized leisure activities, an essential aspect of good parenting. Unlike [middle-class parents], these mothers and fathers do not focus on concerted cultivation. For them, the crucial responsibilities of parenthood do not lie in eliciting their children’s feelings, opinions, and thoughts. Rather, they see a clear boundary between adults and children. Parents tend to use directives: they tell their children what to do rather than persuading them with reasoning. Unlike their middle-class counterparts, who have a steady diet of adult organized activities, the working- class and poor children have more control over the character of their leisure activities. Most children are free to go out and play with friends and relatives who typically live close by. Their parents and guardians facilitate the accomplishment of natural growth. Yet these children and their parents interact with central institutions in the society, such as schools, which firmly and decisively promote strategies of concerted cultivation in child rearing. For working- class and poor families, the cultural logic of child rearing at home is out of synch with the standards of institutions. As a result, while children whose parents adopt strategies of concerted cultivation appear to gain a sense of entitlement, [working-class children] appear to gain an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint in their institutional experiences” Idea = model of authority and way family interact w/ other institutions play a role in producing what will be a future middle-class individual that will be a good fit into middle-class Maelys BORY environment and occupations. We do not talk about the kind of capital they receive but the fact of receiving a kind of personality and a way to relate to authority that is also class-based. Session 10: Capitalism Capitalism ▪ As a market-based economic system (system of production, exchange and consumption) ▪ Based on private ownership of the means of production ▪ And strategies of capital accumulation; therefore, its immediate goal is profit for the sake of profit (end in itself, not a means to an end). System in which capital accumulation is both the goal and a useful mean. How do we analyze it? ▪ In a non-normative way: we do not try to define the best economic system but rather to explain why the economy is organized as it is, and what are the social consequences of this organization. ▪ Developing a perspective different from the ones of economics, and particularly form the ones of neoclassical economics based on the homo economicus model ▪ Viewing capitalism as a historical system, dependent upon specific social conditions (e.g. a certain level of economic development and division of labor, a legally secured private-ownership of the means of production, a stable and predictable institutional environment, a « capitalist spirit » = expression of Weber…) ▪ Analyzing the role of the economy (or the economic dimension) in various social organizations and relations ▪ Analyzing all « economic behaviors » as social behavior ❖ Economic sociology: Economic sociology is « the application of the frames of reference, variables and explanatory models of sociology to that complex of activities which is concerned with the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of scarce goods and services » (Smelser & Swedberg, 2005). Puts a direct strong focus on the role of social institutions play in the economy. Here, when Swedberg say social and market institutions, he is implying relations in institutions ad the market relations. It puts a « direct and strong focus on the role that social relations and social institutions play in the economy » (Swedberg, 2003). Objective of economic sociology: “the patterns of social interaction and the institutions that people create and use in their attempts to make a living and a profit” (Swedberg, 2003). Maelys BORY The origins of capitalism Capitalist economy has an offering, an historical one that is strongly related tot eh history of modernity and it is useful and necessary for us to understand what are the main first steps of these dynamics and how capitalism happened to be. ▪ Fernand Braudel (The Wheel of Commerce) insists on the distinction between market economy and capitalism: the former preexists the latter, with fairs and regulated proximity markets and (mainly) short circuit economy. The cities were the physical places of such markets and what we have seen in lecture 8 → right to exist as market with heir own logic independently from the ruler order was one of the main specificity of the cities and a driving force of their development. The idea ere is that market economy was local market economy based on fairs. Flow of goods/services exchanged but there was not a necessity of capitalization, of accumulation as a condition for such economic activity. While capitalism is historically based on long circuit economy, non-transparency and the circumvention of rules to maximize profit. As we might remember from the history class in S1, with the discovery of Americas, the opening of ship routes to Africa at the beginning of the modern era, the most profitable of the economic development started to be a long-range exchange → kind of trade most profitable: start to have rich families having investments on several continents. You need to invest in ships to make profits. The relation between capitalism and globalization and the analysis of the rise of a unified economic world-system. Globalization as the expansion of a coordinated geographical division of labor, fostered by capitalistic ventures. Historical sociologists identify several moments that we can relate to centuries. - 18th century: main circuit of goods around sugar with slavery as an extensive producer of it; - 19th century: empire of cotton: textile revolution and revolution of global systems to export cotton: main good of capitalism. - 20th century: global circuit around oil as the most capitalized sector: source of energy whose extraction was almost impossible to stop with strikes: oil is a field which is not vulnerable to social mobilization. The origins of capitalism - Extensive phase of development of industrial capitalism: product of some technical revolutions, mechanization of production, technical inventions. First phase of extension of the number of factories. There is an organization of different forms of production. The capitalistic class was the driving force (Bourgeoisie). They are able to offer, force into accepting certain jobs to decreasing class, progressive replacement of a certain n number of occupations by industrials. - Intensive phase of development of industrial capitalism: implementation of Taylorism inventions. The workers themselves are also approached and conceived by the capitalist class as potential consumers. Creation of a situation in favor of the renegotiation of the Maelys BORY wage and the working conditions for the workers. Favorable division of the profits between the owners of the means and the workers themselves. - Fragmented phase of development of post-industrial capitalism: characterized by the fact that in many countries there is a decrease in the number of industrial jobs, service job increased. Forms of displacement and delocalization of factories in other countries. Globalization opens the possibility of lowering the coasts. Situation in which there is an increase of the fragmentation of the working conditions: internal shocks, more competition, … situation in which there is automatization, the possibility to replce people with robots and programs. Development of oil as the main form of energy. Globally a situation which is much less favorable to workers and to an improvement of their living conditions. With globalization, the capacity of the owner of the means of the production to play the workers against each other has increased while the capacity of the workers to use the competition at their advantage is almost nonexistent because capital is much more mobile than labor. Sociology’s « founding fathers » on capitalism and economic change: ▪ They write to understand better their own historical context: the industrial revolution and its social consequences. ▪ They do social science before the institutionalization of the disciplinary division between sociology and economics. ▪ Marx, Durkheim, and Weber respectively approach the issue through different perspectives (related with their own theoretical constructions). Marx & Engels ▪ Capitalism as an economic system, or a particular “mode of production”. ▪ Relations of production are organized as followed: Means of production owned by a small number of people who don’t need to work to earn a living: the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must sell their labor force in order to earn a living ▪ Transition from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode, where accumulation dynamics are less constrained. ▪ Relation between capitalism and industrialization which allowed an unprecedented increase of the forces of production and of individual productivity. ▪ Capitalism as a relation of exploitation of formally free workers: surplus value appropriation ▪ A system destined to be collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and to be replaced (through a proletarian revolution) by a socialist and then communist mode of production Maelys BORY Durkheim Industrialization and the rise of capitalism linked to the development of organic solidarity (and functional complementarity). Instead of focusing on antagonistic logics, actually industrialization dev division of labor which becomes at the level of the country. Increasing in labor specialization => creates “organic solidarity” (solidarity btw ppl with diff specializations) The perception of this solidarity can act // cement of societies. The role and responsibility of the state in organizing this economic solidarity (links with the “solidarisme” of Léon Bourgeois). State cannot be anymore an authoritarian identity that ppl don’t interact with. Need to be more present in the social life // can promote and dev solidarity and a feeling of belonging within a nation in which there is the division of labor. The division of labor in society (1893) Addresses two major preoccupations common among the 1sts sociologists; Social order: what holds society together? (“solidarity” in Durkheimian terms) cf. role and responsibility of the state in organizing this economic solidarity (links with the “solidarisme” of Léon Bourgeois) Meaning of history: are societies going in a particular direction? Division of labor and industrialization with rise of capitalism: change in the basis of “solidarity”, from “mechanical” to “organic” solidarity Mechanical solidarity: low differentiation and individualization; individuals all share the same beliefs and “collective consciousness”; individuals perceive themselves as part of the collective body, not as individuals. Solidarity based on belonging and sharing the same collective consciousness. Organic solidarity: characteristic of differentiated, individualized societies; individuals are different from one another (jobs, functions, personalities) and perceive themselves as such. Solidarity based on functional complementarity. Weber The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism Weber’s methodology: 1. A historical analysis Aim: establishing a link between certain aspects of the protestant dogma and the “spirit” (a way of behaving in life) of modern capitalism The 2 phenomena are defined in an ideal-typical way: the selection and accentuation of certain traits attested by historical documents 2. Importance of people’s representations Both macro (explain a massive transformation of western civilization) Maelys BORY And micro: reconstruct the logic of Puritan’s inner action Sociology is a “science that proposes to understand by interpretation the social action and thereby to explain causally its course and its effects” Economy and Society Weber: father of methodological individualism because he uses micro level analysis in order to explain macro level phenomena ▪ Capitalism as the 1st economic system entirely organized by the rationalized pursuit of profit ▪ Modern capitalism is also characterized by a certain type of action, as summed up in the idea of « capitalist spirit » ▪ Protestant Ethic: “the mental and spiritual peculiarities acquired from the environment, here the type of education favored by the religious atmosphere of the home community and the parental home, have determined the choice of occupation, and through it the professional career” ▪ “the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious belief” ▪ The Protestant Ethic 1. Worldly ascetism The relationship to the world of affairs ≠ world-rejecting (extramundane) religious ethics The relationship to God: ascetic feelings refer to the believer who considers himself as “a tool of God’s power” ≠ mystic feelings refer to the believer who considers himself “as a vessel in which he receives God”. Weber points to Luther’s “passivity” and contrasts that with Calvin’s relentless “activity” 2. Methodic rationalization of daily life Systematization of good actions and religious actions Maelys BORY Religious actions are everywhere in daily life: rationalization of daily actions Especially for the choices between pleasure and stringency 3. Valorization of hard work Work as a vocation (beruf) is a sacred task, a duty of the highest moral value Saving instead of spending, working instead of lazing, being useful are at the basis of the Protestant ethic ▪ Elective affinity (process through which two cultural forms enter in a relationship of mutual reinforcement) of capitalism with the protestant ethic: austerity, abnegation, work performed in a systematic matter, accumulation as signs of “being chosen” => Protestantism allowed capitalism to prosper, and then capitalism kept going even with the with the decline of Protestantism ▪ From the impulse of a religious ethic to a self-sustained system: the « iron cage » of goal-oriented rationality Albert Hirschman on The Passions and the Interests (1977) - He challenges Weber’s thinking. - How did an activity barely tolerated by morals became a vocation, a legitimate calling (Beruf)? - According to Hirschman, the change in attitude was political and not primarily religious - And the motivations of involvement into capitalism were not psychological but political... - 17th and 18th centuries’ elites favored the lure of economic profit to contain the other passions and reframed it as “interest”. The idea here is the fact that all societies (liberal ones like England, Netherlands or less liberal ones lie France and Germany) were actually trying to contain what they identify as political passions. One of the ways was to keep limited this political passion by giving freedom to trade. This capacity to reframe and limit economic interest at the heart of the political order was a strategy to continue to limit the political rights. - “interests” at the heart of the political order long before it was theorized by economists. The idea is that this focus on individual interests and economism is tat the basis of ideology as a discipline was not originally a product of economists, it was more a political product of the attention and attempt to try to limit political freedom by giving leeway in terms of economic freedom. - Second phase during which economic thinkers will “demonstrate” the social virtue and efficiency of a world driven by individual interest - Finally, Adam Smith will affirm the precedence of economic interest over all other passions - In these phases, philosophical ideas play an important role. We have an attempt by Hirschman as a political sociologist to challenge both the Weberian narrative and main stream narrative presented by economists about their own economic history. Maelys BORY From a sociology of capitalism to the economic sociology of capitalist societies The birth of a sociological field: how “embedded” is the economy? 1/ Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), The great transformation (1944) Analyzes the transformation of 19th century England as the decline of the hold of outside (political and religious) authorities over the market: economy becomes « disembedded » Capitalism: “instead of the economic system being embedded in social relationships, these relationships were now embedded in the economic system” The emergence of the self-regulating market: “[…] never before our own time were markets more that accessories of economic life. As a rule, the economic system was absorbed in the social system, and whatever principle of behavior predominated in the economy, the presence of the market pattern was found to be compatible with it. […] Where markets were most highly developed, as under the mercantile system, they throve under the control of a centralized administration […]. Regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together. The self-regulating market was unknown; indeed the emergence of the idea of self-regulation was a complete reversal of the trend of development. It is in the light of these facts that the extraordinary assumptions underlying a market economy can alone be fully comprehended. A market economy is an economic system controlled, regulated and directed by markets alone; order in the production and distribution of goods in entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism. An economy of this kind derives from the expectation that human beings behave in such a way as to achieve maximum money gains. It assumes markets in which the supply of goods (including services) available at a definite price will equal the demand at that price. It assumes the presence of money, which functions as purchasing power in the hands of its owners […]”. K. Polanyi, The great transformation, 1944, p.68. He sees the disembeddedness of the economy as the main cause of the collapse of the world of the 19th century during and between the two World Wars This world was based on four institutions: a geopolitical balance between the European powers, the gold standard, the self-regulating market and the liberal state The abandon/suspension of the gold standard in Europe is described as the trigger of the collapse of the system, but its main (and weakest) pillar was the “self-regulating” market, which Polanyi analyzed as utopistic and inherently destructive for social institutions and human relations The New Deal in the US, the Front Populaire in France, the totalitarian regimes are all analyzed as attempts to re-embed economy and society with each other, and WW2 is analyzed as a consequence of the general instability originally caused by market- fundamentalism 2/ Mark Granovetter and the “new economic sociology” – Economic sociology and social structure, AJS, 1985 A critique of sociologists’ reluctance to study modern markets Maelys BORY A different notion of “embeddedness” from Polanyi’s: all economies are embedded, not only pre-capitalist ones A strong attack on micro-economics: a critique of the assumption of “atomized” decision-making by “under socialized” individuals New economic sociology: four examples of research Mark Granovetter, Getting a job (1974): structural sociology and networks Based on a survey of 273 men (professional, technical and managerial workers) about how they found employment Granovetter showed that a majority of people find their jobs through personal contacts and that – in the US – the most useful contacts were not the closest/strongest ties, which tend to provide overlapping information but the weak ties Neil Fligstein, The transformation of corporate control (1990): organization theory Against an analysis of the transformations of economy and of the forms taken by economic organizations as market-driven How managers of large corporations in the US define ‘conceptions of control’ which influence their economic strategies and thereby shape the market and the economy Four successive dominant conceptions of control: 1. direct control 2. through an emphasis on manufacturing 3. through sales and marketing 4. 4. through finance Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the priceless child (1985) (cf. lecture 9): cultural sociology Frank Dobbin, Forging industrial policy (1994): historical and comparative sociology Comparison of railroad development during the 19th century in the US, Britain and France How each country’s political culture influenced industrial policy ▪ In France: pre-industrial absolutism fostered a centralized railroad network promoted and regulated by State bureaucrats ▪ In Britain: minimal gov’t intervention and promotion of “small-scale entrepreneurial capitalism” ▪ In the US: promotion of railroads by the federal state and local gov’ts Maelys BORY The rise of a global super-bourgeoisie? ▪ How the rise of inequality causes both national divergences and transnational convergence between certain fractions of the better off ▪ Internationalization as rise of international connections between individuals and between organizations ▪ Internationalization as sharing common cultural and ideological references, and maybe even a collective identity or class-consciousness ▪ Internationalization as multi-territoriality and geographical mobility ▪ How global and globalizing cities shape and segregate in a specific way the groups (including the upper classes) that inhabit them Session 11: The State From political theory to the sociology of state ▪ Governing as an art combining strength, strategy and cunning (Machiavelli) ▪ For political philosophers, the State as the Leviathan able to put an end to the war of all against all (Hobbes) or the result of the social contract (Rousseau). ▪ For Durkheim, the State is the “cerebro-spinal organ” of society (The Division of Labor in Society, 1893). Progressive movement from something that’s normative to more explanatory → form of thought originally based on case studies at the identification of good/efficient practices, moving to a form of political philosophy which adopts a historical approach, then moving to something more positivist in addressing sociologically the state which tries to build a body of knowledge in a similar way to biological or hard science ▪ How does contemporary sociology address the subject of the State? ▪ By analyzing how states were built: a gradual monopolization of sovereign functions, control over territories and populations. Modernal states have histories. Idea that the way to explain the difference int terms of state structure across the world is to look at the fact that this process did not happened at the same time an in the same way: look at the differences and similarities. ▪ By analyzing how states were/are organized: implementation and transformation of laws, norms and bureaucratic logics. Here, to focus on the state as an organization and to address it in fact as a large organization. ▪ By analyzing the action of the state: public (inter)action, policies, and politics. Here the idea is to understand the way in which the state works, you need to focus on its different actions, various on scales, at the center of decisions (what happen in the Elysée). You have Bruno Latour that has studied the Conseil Maelys BORY d’Etat. Sociology of diplomacy. + Dominique Schnapper (Conseil Constitutionel) and Marc Abélès. I/ Classical sociology and the modern state Socio-genesis of the State The State = the affirmation of a sovereign political authority on a delimited area ▪ It is not something universal, it has not always existed in history and it does not exist in every society ▪ In Occident, the State appeared at the end of the 15th century with the crisis of the feudal system ▪ It exists and acts through people, “agents of the State” Pierre Clastre, Society Against the State, 1972: the state is not universal ▪ There is no society without political power ▪ But there are some societies without a State (as a coercive power). ▪ When the State appears, the society is divided in two classes: the governing and the governed Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 1939: the state is a historical construction ▪ The State appears progressively in the Occident from the feudal seigneurial system until the Enlightenment ▪ The modern state is shaped by a triple process of monopolization: territorial monopolization, fiscal monopolization and monopolization of violence. In France, the process of monopolization took place gradually from the XIIth to the XVIIth century. ▪ The court society: the court as an embodiment of the state as a “configuration” of interrelated and competing social actors, and therefore generating the unity and centralization of the state. The court as a social apparatus generating the pacification and submission of the aristocracy, through its implication in a new symbolic competition. Correlation between the complexity of the division of (public) labor within a society and the monopoly of violence. Max Weber and the power of the state: Economy and Society, 1921 The State: an institution “that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given territory”. Nowadays, according to Weber, we generally obey to the State because we consider its power legitimate, and this power is mainly implemented by the administration. Difference between Maelys BORY coercive potency (Macht) and legitimate domination or authority (Herrschaft) (see Economy and Society). It applies rules on a population and a territory, especially through an administration. 3 ideal-typical kinds of legitimacy of the political power: - Traditional: the authority of “day-to-day belief in the sanctity of the traditions” (customs, beliefs). It derives from the belief in the sacred character of given traditions, the customs associated with them and the leaders designated following them. External origin that explains why somebody has authority. Rely on the fact that the domination is exerted on a similar way as in the past. - Charismatic: the authority of a chief and his special ability. Based on the capacity to appear as potentially powerful, attractive. Founded on the belief that the origin of greatness of the leader lies in the specific achievements of the leader in question. - Rational-legal (or bureaucratic legitimacy): the authority of rational and legal rules and procedures; legitimacy based on the fact that the leader and the rules attached to the political order have been designated and defined following a legal procedure. The origin of domination does not rely on the fact you are obeying a person in particular, but obeying a set of rules proven as legitimate. People are recognizing the authority of the form of the organization itself. Criticized because: - It has an evolutionist approach: His insistence on the rational-legal as the most efficient form, tends to be normative and suggests an evolution towards it - It has an Eurocentric approach: people insist on the point that by making an idea-typical distinction, the approach tends to lead us to try to identify what is the unique/prominent form of domination associated with somebody or with a form of organization of the state. While what we see is the fact that the three types are combined with each other. ❖ Bureaucracy: the form of domination in modern societies. There is a specific ethos of civil servants: they embody the general interest and participate in occidental rationalism. What is an ideal-type? “an ideal-type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view” according to which “concrete individual phenomena […] are arranged into a unified analytical construct”; in its purely fictional nature, it is a methodological “utopia [that] cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality” (Weber, 1904) An ideal-type is not empirical data, it is an analytical tool defined by the sociologist in order to help better understand and interpret the empirical world. As a consequence, it makes no sense to criticize an ideal-type for being a distortion of empirical reality – it is precisely what it is supposed to be. This analytical construct is defined by means of the “one-sided accentuation” of a limited number of (generally correlated) characteristics of the empirical, concrete phenomenon Maelys BORY  An ideal-type is defined drawing on the observation/comparison of empirical facts  The traits that are accentuated are selected in relation with each other and with the sociologist’s viewpoint/analytical focus of interest An ideal-type is not an ideal (it is an analytical, not normative concept) Weber on bureaucracy in the legal-rational mode of domination From patrimonialism to the modern (impersonal) bureaucracy… Bureaucracy as a form of administrative organization characteristic of the modern state (legal- rational authority) High division of labor and specialization of tasks Formal, impersonal rules and procedures defining:  the jurisdiction of each office  its modes of operation  the recruitment and promotion of bureaucrats A rational and impersonal definition of hierarchy (loyalty to the institution, the function, not the person) Reliance on specialized, technical expertise, and paperwork Recruitment based on formal qualifications, clear-cut separation btw public/private II/ A few sociological analyses of the State On bureaucracies (1) Bernard Silberman, Cages of Reason: focus on bureaucracies and tries to understand national differences between bureaucracies. State bureaucracies implemented new (supposedly) competence-based and standardized ways to access public positions, ending the traditional ways to access these positions (inheriting them, buying them, etc.) but there are differences between: - France and Japan: well-defined organizational boundaries, more strictly regulated allocation of information, creation of a “meritocratic” public administration more autonomous from the political competition. The idea here is that in France and in Japan, the development of the state bureaucracy happened in a way that was relying ore on processes of self-selection of the more people by the bureaucracy itself + form of organization in which the state bureaucracies have defined themselves and build themselves in parti in opposition/autonomy from the political field. The political realm is something that can interfere in a negative way with the efficacy of the state bureaucracy, therefore there is the need of a bureaucracy made up of non-politicized Maelys BORY actors. France went throughs several regime changes → changes in political personnel: moment in which p