Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change by Herbert Blumer

Author:Herbert Blumer [Blumer, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351328746
Google: -iNHDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-16T05:16:18+00:00

C. Summary Remarks

This lengthy chapter started with the observation that to treat industrialization as an agent of social change, it is necessary to view it in terms of its major lines of entry into group life. Merely to align industrialization alongside group life and then to jump from it to alleged social results shuts the door to realistic study and opens the door to arbitrary speculation. To avoid this, we considered what happens at each of the nine lines of entry that had been specified in the previous chapter. This consideration reveals a common picture. We noted the following important matters: (1) that the industrializing process introduces only a bare framework at each line of entry; (2) that a wide range of alternative social developments exists vis-a-vis the bare framework; and (3) that the industrializing process does not determine or explain the particular alternative that comes into being. Thus, we were forced to conclude that while the introduction of the industrializing process is highly productive of change, the process itself is neutral with regard to the form and nature of the change.

We have seen that there are four ways of attacking this conclusion. The first, which contends that differences between the alternatives are slight and inconsequential, must be dismissed as not true. The second, which holds that in the long run the industrializing process will produce definite and uniform social results, has been found to be seriously

inadequate. The third, which suggest that the different social responses to the industrializing process can be explained by reducing the process to a series of types, is purely presumptuous, without any body of empirical achievement to sustain it. We shall consider this contention in some detail later. The fourth, which contends that the inclusion of the social setting explains the variable social responses to industrialization, gives only a spurious refutation of our thesis. This will be shown in later discussion.

Up to this point our major concern has been with the new social arrangements that industrialization is presumed to introduce. Our discussion of the role of the industrializing process in developing new social forms and new social relations has been preliminary. We shall resume this discussion later. We wish now to consider two different areas of the effects of industrialization: (1) the effects of the industrializing process on the established or traditional order, and (2) the effects of this process on the developments during the transition to a so-called industrial order of life. These two areas of concern are different from the concern with the new social arrangements that industrialization is supposed to produce. They refer to the role of the industrializing process in undermining the existing social order, and to its role in the social happenings that precede the establishment of new social arrangements. In many ways these two concerns are of primary importance to scholars interested in industrialization as an agent of social change; they are certainly paramount in the study of early industrialization. We turn now to a consideration of these two areas of interest.

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