Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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      The events surrounding Snowden’s leaks reveal the relationship between us as individuals and the organizations and institutions that frame our lives, such as our local and national governments. These organizations cannot exist, at least for very long, without willing members. When groups of individuals begin to question the authority and rationality of the bureaucracies that govern them, they may voice concern about, seek to change, or even rebel against those bureaucracies. Social order cannot be maintained if citizens refuse to adhere to society’s shared laws and norms. How do governments, as institutions, react? Some believe that governments and institutions often overreact. Snowden continues to be wanted by the U.S. government for violating the Espionage Act.

      We have seen how technology and globalization facilitate the global flow of information, fundamentally altering the way in which we communicate. But this nearly instantaneous dissemination of ideas has become a bonanza for everyone, including whistle-blowers, revolutionaries, rioters, potential terrorists, and even elected governments. For instance, revelations that swiftly followed Snowden’s initial leak suggested that the United States had also been secretly conducting extensive monitoring of the communications of its European Union allies (including the prime minister of Germany). Some governments (e.g., the United Kingdom) have considered shutting down digital communication during public disturbances. Other countries, such as China, Syria, and Iran, routinely censor their citizens’ use of the internet. Such barriers to the flow of information, as well as efforts such as Snowden’s to overcome them, are of profound interest to sociologists, public figures, and social activists alike.

      Picking up where the previous chapter left off with groups, this chapter moves on to the more macroscopic levels of interest to sociologists: organizations, societies, and global relationships. These social structures are discussed here as if they were clearly distinct from one another. However, the fact is that they tend to blend together in many clear-cut ways, as well as in other almost imperceptible ones.

      The individuals, interaction, and groups of focal concern in Chapter 4 all exist within, affect, and are affected by the various macroscopic phenomena of concern here. In fact, neither microscopic nor macroscopic social phenomena make much sense without the other level. Individuals, interaction, and groups do not exist in isolation from macro-level phenomena, and organizations, societies, and global social relationships cannot exist without individuals, interaction, and groups. What is new in recent years is the emergence, largely because of the explosive growth of digital communication, of an increasingly networked social world where both micro-level and macro-level phenomena are ever more closely intertwined. And this contributes to the dramatic expansion of globalization as a process and of the growth of global relationships at every point in the continuum that runs from the most microscopic to the most macroscopic social phenomena. You are, of course, deeply implicated in all of this. In fact, if you are a young person, you are the most likely to participate in, and be affected by, these recent developments, especially those involving digitized interrelationships. For example, through our (micro-level) smartphones, we are able to access, participate in, and even influence everything from the most micro (our close friends) to the most macro (global) levels of the social world.

      Organizations

      The social world is awash in organizations, collectives purposely constructed to achieve particular ends. Examples include your college or university, which has the objective of educating you as well as your fellow students; corporations, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Walmart, whose objective is to earn profits; the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which seeks to stabilize currency exchanges throughout the world; and Greenpeace, which works to protect and conserve the global environment.

      A particularly long and deep body of work in sociology deals with organizations (Adler et al. 2016; Godwyn and Gittell 2011), much of it traceable to the thinking of Max Weber on a particular kind of organization, the bureaucracy. As you may recall, a bureaucracy is a highly rational organization, especially one that is very efficient. However, both Weber’s own thinking and later sociological research (see the following section) make it clear that bureaucracies are not always so rational and are even as irrational as you undoubtedly sometimes find them to be. Nevertheless, the bureaucracy is a key element of Weber’s theory of the rationalization of the Western world. In fact, along with capitalism, the bureaucracy best exemplifies what Weber meant by rationalization. For decades, the concept of bureaucracy dominated sociological thinking about organizations, and it led to many important insights about the social world.

      Bureaucracies

      Throughout his work, Weber created and used many “ideal types” as methodological tools with which to study the real world and conduct historical-comparative analysis (see Chapter 2). An ideal type greatly exaggerates the characteristics of a social phenomenon such as a bureaucracy. It is a model of how the social phenomenon is supposed to operate in some optimal sense but rarely does. Once the model has been created, we can compare it to the characteristics of any specific example of the social phenomenon anywhere in the world. It serves to identify the ways in which the ideal type differs from the way in which the social phenomenon actually operates.

      One of Weber’s most famous ideal types was the bureaucracy. The ideal type of bureaucracy is primarily a methodological tool used to study real-life bureaucracies. However, it also gives us a good sense of the advantages of bureaucracies over other types of organizations. The ideal-typical bureaucracy is a model of what most large-scale organizations throughout much of the twentieth century looked like or at least tried to resemble. Figure 5.1 is an organization chart for a typical bureaucracy. A bureaucracy has the following characteristics:

       A continuous series of offices, or positions, exist within the organization. Each office has official functions and is bound by a set of rules.

       Each office has a specified sphere of competence. Those who occupy the positions are responsible for specific tasks and have the authority to handle them. Those in other relevant offices are obligated to help with those tasks.

       The offices exist in a vertical hierarchy.

       The positions have technical requirements, and those who hold those offices must undergo the needed training.

       Those who occupy the positions do not own the things needed to do the job (computers, desks, and so on). The organization provides officeholders with what they need to get the job done.

       Those who occupy particular offices—chief executive officers, for example—cannot take the offices as their own; these remain part of the organization.

       Everything of formal importance—administrative acts, decisions, rules—is documented in writing.

      Description

      Figure 5.1 Organization Chart for a Typical Bureaucracy

      Source: Organization Chart for a Typical Bureaucracy, U.S. Department of Transportation.

      The development of the bureaucracy is one of the defining characteristics of Western society. In Weber’s view, it was a key source of the superiority of the West over other civilizations in the operation of society as a whole as well as of its major components, such as the military. Weber felt that in meeting the needs of large societies for mass administration, СКАЧАТЬ