The Annals of The International Institute os Sociology: Societies, Corporations and the Nation State (International Institute of Sociology) (International Institute of Sociology)

264 Pages·2000·14.41 MB·English

by  E. K. Scheuch

THE ANNALS
OF
THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE
OF SOCIOLOGY
NEW SERIES - VOLUME 7
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE
OF SOCIOLOGY
The International Institute of Sociology is the oldest continuous sociological asso-
ciation in existence. It was founded in 1893 in Paris by Rene Worms. Early distin-
guished members included scholars such as Max Weber, Lujo Brentano, Enrico
Ferri, Franklin Giddings, Ludwig Gumplowicz, Achille Loria, Alfred Marshall,
Carl Menger, Edward A. Ross, Gustav Schmoller, Georg Simmel, Albion Small,
Gabriel Tarde, Edward B. Tylor, Ferdinand Tonnies, Alexandre Tchouprov,
Thorstein Veblen, Lester Ward, Sidney and Beatrix Webb, and Wilhelm Wundt.
Executive Board 1993-1997
President ERWIN K. SCHEUCH (Germany)
Past President WILLIAM V D'ANTONIO (U.S.A.)
Vice Presidents R. ALAN HEDLEY (Canada)
MASAMIcHI SASAKI (Japan)
VLADIMIR YADOW (Russia)
Councillors KAREN S. COOK (U.S.A.)
FATIMAH BAUD (Malaysia)
ALBERTO GASPARINI (Italy)
WERNER GEPHART (Germany)
ELKE KOCH-WESER AMMASSARI (Italy)
Auditor RENZO GUBERT (Italy)
THE ANNALS
OF
THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE
OF SOCIOLOGY
SOCIETIES, CORPORATIONS
AND THE NATION STATE
NEW SERIES - VOLUME 7
EDITED BY
E.K. SCHEUCH AND D. SCIULLI
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON • KOLN
2000
Gedruckt mit Unterstutzung der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft
Printed with support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Societies, corporations and the nation state / ed. by E.K. Scheuch
and D. Sciulli. - Leiden ; Boston ; Koln : Brill, 2000
ISBN 90-04-11664-8
ISBN 90 04 116648
© Copyright 2000 by the International Institute of Sociology / Koninklijke Brill NV,
Leiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal
use is granted by Brill provided that
the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright
Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910
Danvers MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
CONTENTS
1. ERWIN K. SCHEUCH, Societies, Corporations, and the Nation
State 1
2. RAYMOND BOUDON, Values in a Polytheistic World 24
3. PIERPAOLO DONATI, Freedom vs. Control in Post-Modern
Society: A Relational Approach 47
4. MARGARET S. ARCHER, The Universality of Freedom and
Control 77
5. S.N. EISENSTADT, The Contemporary Scene—Multiple
Modernities 97
6. WILLIAM V. D'ANTONIO, Communitarianism and the
Privatization of Belief: The Case of U.S. Catholics 109
7. SASKIA SASSEN, Beyond Sovereignty: De-Facto Transnationalism
in Immigration Policy 128
8. NIKOLAI GENOV, Transition to Democracy and Nation-State in
Eastern Europe 149
9. EUGEEN ROOSENS, National Identity, Social Order and Political
System in Western Europe: Primordial Autochthony 162
10. MATTEI DOGAN, Nationalism in Europe: Decline in the West,
Revival in the East 181
11. MASAYUKI MUNAKATA, A Speculation on Some Features of
Japanese Production Practices: 8 Points of Discussion 201
12. ERICH WEEDE, Law and Liberty, Capitalism and Democracy in
China and the West 207
VI CONTENTS
13. GISELA TROMMSDORFF, Psychological Factors Limiting
Institutional Rehabilitation 216
14. FRIEDRICH FURSTENBERG, Social Regression and the Decline of
Competence 236
15. TAKASHI Usui, Cultural Diversity or Cultural Confusion? The
Viewpoint of Decentralization and Network 244
List of Editors and Contributors 255
1. SOCIETIES, CORPORATIONS, AND THE NATION STATE
Erwin K. Scheuch
I
Usually, titles of congresses addressing a whole discipline do not mean very
much. Each general congress in sociology is a kind of test how much cohe-
sion remains in a discipline that is most alive in its many specializations.
To require adherance to just one topic would be unreasonable.
In planning for this congress we followed nevertheless one Leitmotiv: The
return to the classices. This cannot possibly mean that we turn into unde-
tached Durkheimians or Rossians, Spencerians or Weberians.
What this was meant to signal is the usefulness in reconsidering the con-
cerns of the classics, their topics and not their answers. In this way sociol-
ogy might regain some of its societal usefulness as a science of orientation.
For us today it is hard to believe that at the turn of the century the New
York Times sent journalists to cover the Yale lectures of Ross, or that a soci-
ologist such as Tonnies could write a bestseller that had fourteen editions,
or that Simmel was the star of intellectual salons.
Sociology has since become quite useful in many applied fields, and there
is nothing to be said against sociotechnics as it is one way to test the use-
fulness of codified knowledge. However, the dramatic changes that we expe-
rienced in the last decade or so appear to increase in momentum. The
intellectual public must gain the impression that sociologists in their empha-
sis on micro sociology become as irrelevant for intellectual orientation in
our time as the models of micro economics are for the understanding of
modern economies.
There is one very good reason why many sociologists—probably the great
majority—feel uncomfortable with macro sociology and the events it has to
deal with. The metaphor of a train is apt here. Those in a speeding train
looking backwards see the unfolding of an orderly landscape, but those look-
ing out of the window as the landscape slides by witness an unconnected
plurality of pictures that do not seem to be part of a coherent whole. That
is the core of the difficulty in practicing macro sociology in rapidly chang-
ing societies.
True, at any one time the mass of details tends to overwhelm comprehen-
sion. However, for the historian the passing of time has served as a sorting
2, ERWIN K. SCHEUGH
out of what is of longterm significance, and what was of merely peripheral
importance. The sociologist needs to opt for one of several perspectives, a
perspective that guides his attention in the hope that what is ignored is of
far less importance than what is at the center of his attention.
Emphasizing social change is a promising priority, especially if one makes
the right choice in understanding this change as modernization. There is
an often ignored central aspect to the kind of social change that we christen
"modernity." To contemporaries in such societies the present is experienced
as a transitory situation moving to a new and more agreeable equilibrium.
This is historically a quite ununsual way in living with the disarrangements
of the day, but in the West this has been taken for granted ever since the
last two centuries. There are many varieties in identifying what is central
to the process of modernisation or the state of modernity. We ourselves
maintain that modernization has no telos, and that only further change and
no new equilibrium can be expected.
The revolution in transport and communication, the world-wide market-
ing of goods and services, the breakdown of the bipolar world order lead-
ing to a fluid political pattern with (currently) 27 small scale wars—all of
this rapidly increases the interdependence between cultures and states. Un-
avoidably this leads to strains and destabilization—in addition to opening
opportunities. Sociology is called upon to help the interested public to under-
stand better these processes of change.
To the classics of our discipline, the processes of disintegration were more
tangible than the elements of cohesion. "Would the confused change of the
day lead to a new order?" was the common theme around the fin de siecle.
The discipline is once again called upon to choose "big topics" and avoid
being drowned in a mass of small studies.
In our time we live with a perplexing disintegration of seemingly mono-
lithic orders side by side with the reemergence of cultures and ethnic iden-
tities long believed to have been submerged. Obviously, there is both less
stability in large scale systems and more stability in smaller entities than
had been assumed by intellectuals. And equally obvious, we have to take
long-term views and include a historical dimension in our analysis of cur-
rent affairs. This is a situation where sociology could regain the centrality
for an intellectual discussion of the large issues that it had in several advanced
countries around the turn of the century.
The organization of societies into states is vastly more complicated than
earlier assumed, given that much of the thinking has been based on Western
Experience. We are now realizing that the penetration of the state into soci-
ety is not as deep nor as lasting as was originally expected by the elites
SOCIETIES, CORPORATIONS, AND THE NATION STATE 5
who imposed these changes. The units that once constituted the USSR offer
important lessons in this regard. Furthermore, conditions are even more
complicated if the physical space of societies and of states do not coincide,
as is the case in most of Africa. And yet the existence of the state is by
now virtually indispensable for modern institutions.
In the social sciences evidence has accumulated that "mediating institu-
tions," the units and organizations between the private worlds of daily liv-
ing and the institutions and groupings at the level of the collectivity (such
as local bureaucracies, corporations, voluntary associations), are of crucial
importance for an understanding of the relations between society and the
State. Mediating institutions appear also to be the carriers of traditions, and
a minimum of traditional stability—compare also non-Western experiences—
is the condition for successful modernizations.
Given sociology's emphasis on processes of social differentiation, we have
not concentrated equally on the forces of social cohesion. While earlier socio-
logists thought that societies rested on social control (Ross) and normative
consent (Parsons), we discarded these notions when we began to explain
processes of diversification and decay, emphasizing microsociology (e.g. "ratio-
nal choice"). However, by redirecting our attention to a "middie level" of
social organization, i.e. mediating institutions, we can perhaps gain a bet-
ter view of the tension and balance between both the centrifugal and cen-
tripetal forces in societies.
There are two ways to miss the intellectual challenge. One way is the
flight into specialization. This is not a rejection of specialization—as it affords
concrete insights—but a critique of specialization that fails to ask what is
in it for the discipline at large. And there is the even more misguided reac-
tion to the turmoils of the day by appealing to kind feelings and uplifting
thoughts. Problems of cultural clashes and conflicts of interest need to be
viewed as realities. In much of the 19th century economics was called the
"dark science" because it was very often the bearer of bleak tidings. At the
end of the century sociology must not be afraid to be the "dark science"
if it is that what needs to be reported. But sociology would also fail if it
were to neglect the counterveiling forces of stability in a situation of turmoil.
The International Institute of Sociology needs to be the forum for the
large issues at a time when other fori are being submerged by the routines
of what Kuhn christened "normal science".