Sociology by Steve Bruce

Author:Steve Bruce [Bruce, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192555809
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Unintended consequences

An important element of the sociological perspective is the irony of unintended consequences. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns succinctly put it: ‘the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay’; or, in English, ‘often go wrong’. We set out to do one thing. Because we lack complete knowledge of the forces at play and because we cannot always anticipate how our actions will be received by others, we end up achieving something very different. I will illustrate the point with two examples that concern the links between ideas and the organizations that people create to promote those ideas.

Robert Michels, a student of Weber who was active in left-wing politics in Germany in the first decade of the 20th century, was struck by a common pattern of evolution in left-wing trade unions and political parties. They began as radical attempts to reconstruct the world but became increasingly conservative and at peace with the status quo. They began as primitive democracies but gradually evolved hierarchies. In an apparently different arena—the world of conservative Protestant sects—H. Richard Niebuhr identified a similar pattern. The Methodist movement in the late 18th century was radical. Like the contemporary Muslim fundamentalist who wishes to rid Islam of its blasphemous compromises, Methodists broke from the Church of England because they wished to return to a more pristine Christianity. Initially they preached the restructuring of the world but gradually became socially conservative. Initially they argued against a professional clergy (because it relieved ordinary people of the obligation to be personally pious), but gradually Methodist Church officials came to exercise the same power as did the clergy of the Church of England.

That a similar pattern is repeated suggests that it is not accidental and can be explained by reference to some general social processes. That the consequences were so different from what those involved desired suggests that we cannot explain them simply by obvious intentions and motives.

The explanation Michels proposed went as follows. Any kind of group activity requires organization. But that creates a division between the organized and the organizers; the latter acquire knowledge and expertise that set them apart and give them power over ordinary members. The officials begin to derive personal satisfaction from their place in the organization and seek ways of consolidating it. They acquire an interest in the organization’s continued prosperity. For ordinary trade unionists, the union is just one interest in which they have a small stake; for the paid officials it is their employer. Preserving the organization becomes more important than achieving its goals. As radical action may bring government repression, the apparatchiks moderate.

At the same time as material interests dispose them to compromise their once radical credentials, the officials are drawn into new perspectives because they acquire a new reference group. They come to see that they share more in common with officials of other political parties than with their own rank and file. Like servants discussing their masters, Labour and Conservative party activists swap stories about the idiocies of the people they represent and they exchange recipes for organizational efficiency.

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