smoothest and least disturbing to traditional values and practices. No five-year plan was required for the installation of public address systems and neon lights in temples, for the use of airplanes, railroads, and automobiles for religious pilgrimages, or for cooking the pilgrims' food in pressure cookers. If the incompatibility does not exist in the sacred core of the culture, it is not likely to be of great significance in other spheres. CONCLUSION The gist of the preceding argument can be put in more general form by emphasizing the goal of the transition rather than its points of departure. What is an "industrial tradition"? Some of the things it is not are fairly obvious by now; an industrial tradition is not the factory system as it developed in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some elements of this form of economic organization will be found in newly developing countries, but there is no inherent necessity for the English experience to be recapitulated, nor is there any inherent reason why a factory system cannot coexist with cottage and small-scale industries in dispersed units. An industrial tradition is not a specific complex of values providing the motive force for industrialization. Even preindustrial and nonindustrial societies that have some values that differ from those of industrialized societies may be able to industrialize without destroying their basic values. The values usually adduced as necessary conditions for industrialization have their counterparts in many nonindustrial and preindustrial societies.23 What differs is not the abstract values and motives, but the social and cultural contexts from which they have been abstracted. If these values have not propelled the newly developing countries into an advanced stage of industrialization, perhaps this only shows the limitations of values as motive forces in the absence of capital, skill, favorable government policy, and other concrete requirements of industrialization, rather than that the people of these countries need a different value system and "character." The massive, personified force of "industrialism" doing battle with 23 E. K. Francis, In Search of Utopia: The Mennonites in Manitoba (Glencoe: Free Press, 1955); Margaret Mead, ed., Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1947); see also Milton B. Singer, “Shame Cultures and Guilt Cultures,” in Gerhart Piers and Milton Singer, Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytical and Cultural Study (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1953). the equally massive, personified force of "traditionalism" is not an industrial tradition, nor is it equivalent to the more precise construct of "a functionally integrated industrial society," for that is a purely intellectual abstraction. Industrial traditions are "concrete" historical growths. While these growths in different parts of the world may have some elements in common, because of diffusion and mutual interaction, it is highly doubtful that this denominator will ever approximate an integrated, functioning society and culture. Industrial traditions are plural and distinctive because they are aspects of societies and civilizations which are plural and distinctive. French industrial traditions differ from the English, and both of these differ from the Japanese and the Russian. It may be possible to specify a particular industrial process or product in abstraction from national and regional cultures, but if a particular society adopts such a product or process, its function and significance inevitably will be shaped by the receiving culture and social organization. These in turn may be changed by the new element. The resultant will be new and distinctive, but it need not be sharply discontinuous with what existed before the change. New words will appear in the language; new techniques of communication will change the culture media into mass media; and new habits of work and leisure will be formed. Not all such changes will be harmonious with older social and cultural patterns. But to the extent that such changes result in the formation of industrial traditions, these will be as grafts on preindustrial and nonindustrial traditions rather than as completely new species of plants. The problems of economic development confronting the newly developing countries might be fruitfully considered problems in the formation of industrial traditions in different types of societies and cultures, tribal and peasant, as well as industrial. 15 COMPETING STATUS SYSTEMS Melvin M. Tumin Two major themes are found in several of the papers presented in this symposium. The first theme forcefully asserts that the processes by which modernization takes place are numerous and diverse and that our knowledge of these is still so limited that the time is not yet ripe to attempt any all-embracing generalizations. The second theme acknowledges the diversity of the experiences of various societies, but strains toward provisional generalizations about the evolutionary processes of change and about the proper model of a modernized society. The tension between these themes reminds us that we must view with suspicion any attempts to seal off questions by laying down propositions on what must take place in history, or what is sociologically unavoidable in the efficient arrangement of institutions. At the same time, the prolixity and incomparability of the data in the several papers remind us just as strongly that some genuine effort must be made to develop a more adequate comparative framework of concepts, and to attempt at least some provisional models of the relations among relevant variables. A second noteworthy feature of these papers is the apparent ease and responsibility with which persons trained in one social science have managed meaningfully to utilize and incorporate data gathered by students trained in other disciplines. It is, for instance, impressive to discover how effectively a cultural anthropologist can take account of numerous political and economic factors while keeping kinship a central variable in his model of transformation. Political scientists similarly manage to keep various aspects of the political system in focus while considering the bearing of economic and cultural factors on political organization and process. And economists have not been insensitive to the numerous cultural and political factors that affect economic organization and reorganization. That these different scholars have taken the data and concepts of other disciplines out of the matrix of their original formulation does not mean they have done injustice to or distorted the facts. RELEVANCE OF STRATIFICATION THEORY Considerations such as those sketched above make it easier to deal with a rather large body of political, economic, cultural, and social psy chological data within a framework of theory about social stratification and to try to apply these to the process of modernization. Two things must be said of any such theory: (1) Stratification is only one feature of any social system, and no approach through stratification theory can include or exhaust the phenomena relevant to the full analysis of a social system. (2) The study of stratification is primarily concerned with inequalities in the distribution and utilization of the good things in life. These are ordinarily subsumed under the rubrics of power, property, and prestige.1 Study of such inequalities is therefore concerned with political structure and process, economic forms and functions, the cultural arrangements by which persons are differently evaluated in regard to their worth and desirability, and the social psychological dynamics underlying these arrangements. The successful use of such diverse bodies of data requires the construction of some analytic apparatus that, while unavoidably compressing much detail, makes it easier to discern the interrelations of these materials. At this point in the development of our theory, no complicated or complex model of stratification that is relevant to modernization can be formulated. However, it is possible to list the aspects of social structure and action that are most pertinently involved in the recruitment of talent in any social system. With a schematic presentation of these aspects, it is possible to indicate the places at which political, economic, cultural, and sociological data may best be included, so that their more general relations can be analyzed.2 1 Certain problems are created by the use of only these three categories. For instance, only by stretching the common connotations of the term "property" can we include such a valued item as “job satisfaction.” Yet, in at least one theoretically possible major variant of stratification systems, job satisfaction must be considered a major "reward" in the system, and hence has to be allocated to one category of rewards. Other more complex matters, such as "style of life," similarly resist being subsumed by these rubrics. But for present purposes we assume that anything that does not refer primarily to the ability to get others to adopt one's own means and ends (power), or to a favorable position in some rank order of evaluation (prestige), is to be included under property. Thus property is used to mean “rights over goods and services, both tangible and intangible," and the term "goods" obviously refers to much more than is ordinarily connoted by it. 2 The traditional view of the function of stratification in the efficient recruitment of talent is best stated in Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore, "Some Principles of Stratification," American Sociological Review, 10:242-249 (April 1945). The sharpest difference of opinion is expressed in Melvin Tumin, "Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis," American Sociological Review, 18:387–394 (August 1953). Bernard Barber's version of Parsons' theory of stratification, as found in Social Although stratification is concerned with inequalities in power, property, and prestige, the focus of interest here is on the recruitment of labor and the development of its commitment to a new form of work and a new set of social relations. Our special interest, then, is with the recruitment of talent for the occupational sector of the society and the hierarchical distributions of occupations and incomes. We are concerned with the general questions that must be asked about any such system of recruitment and any such hierarchy of positions and rewards. These questions and the distinctions involved do not exhaust the relevant materials but are central to any case study and to any theory of stratification. In the following outline of variables relevant to the location of individuals on occupational and income ladders, nine features of stratification systems are listed. The major possible variations appear under each of these: 3 I. Degree of proliferation and specialization of statuses 1. Much specialization among many statuses 2. Division into only two or three major statuses II. Manner of entrance into statuses 1. Through competition (equal or unequal) 2. Through maturation or assumption 3. Through inheritance III. Fineness of measurement of role performance 1. Finely calibrated measures 2. Gross distinctions between the acceptable and unacceptable Stratification (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957), adds nothing to previous theoretical statements. Indeed, as Barber presents the case for the "inevitability" of stratification, it becomes clearer than in either Parsons' formulation or that of Davis and Moore that there is nothing inevitable at all about the need for unequal rewards for unequal work. Between the universal facts of differentiation of function and differential evaluation for moral conformity, on the one hand, and the "unavoidability" of unequal rewards for and invidious distinctions among such functions, on the other, there are no necessary and sufficient connections that have been described in any theoretical work. 3 Surely this list by no means exhausts the relevant variables. The limits of the paper do not permit me to give a variety of illustrations, even hypothetical ones, which would clarify the ways in which these variables are strategically relevant to analysis of the process of recruitment of labor. Numerous other questions that are ordinarily asked about any stratification system, viz., concerning the degree and types of mobility and the barriers to mobility, do not appear in this list. But most, if not all, of these are here considered as derivative consequences of the combined effects of the variables that are listed. Finally, the changes in the stratification systems that are described in the following pages are meant only to be illustrative. |