The Forest and the Trees by Allan Johnson

Author:Allan Johnson [Johnson, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439911860
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2014-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

4

Population and Human Ecology

People, Space, and Place

Most sociologists see social life as a matter of culture, social structure, and the interaction through which people participate in systems. But this view leaves out the fact that social life always happens some place and involves some number of people.

We could describe an office where people work, for example, as a system having beliefs, values, norms, a role structure, distributions of power and income, and so on. And we could look at how people use language and behavior to interact and make the office system happen from one day to the next. Suppose, however, the company downsizes by cutting the number of workers by a third. What changes then, and how do we make sense of it?

The system’s structure is the same—the same roles to be performed and the same unequal distribution of power and rewards. The culture is also unchanged—same rules and goals as before. What has changed is the number of people who participate in the system, and, as anyone who survives a layoff knows, the effects of this change can be profound, as fewer people must do the work once done by many more, and usually with no increase in compensation. They may have a mix of feelings—lucky to have a job at all or guilty in relation to those who no longer do, followed by anxiety and depression over what might happen next, knowing that no job is secure. They may also be suspicious of management that seems to care more about stockholders and the bottom line than about people who have been with the company for many years. Such feelings, in turn, can affect the entire system, as cynicism, resentment, and fear emerge as prevailing attitudes in the worker subculture.

Numbers count, from the smallest level of social life to the largest. Every teacher and student knows how much it matters whether a class has five students or five hundred, how difficult discussion is in the latter, and how much pressure there is to participate in the former. And we are having to learn rapidly about the problems linked to an expanding global population, especially in parts of the world least equipped to clothe and feed the people who live there. Whether the numbers are figured in tens or in billions, we need tools to see how they affect social life and its consequences.

We also need ways to pay attention to the fact that systems and people exist not in the abstract but in a material world of space and objects. If five students in a seminar are seated around a small table, for example, the conversation will be much more productive than if they’re scattered about an auditorium where they have to shout to be heard. If they are seated in a circle of chairs with no desks or tables to separate them, the conversation is likely to be more personal, which is why I often use this arrangement to talk about sensitive topics, such as privilege and oppression, so that participants will be aware of how they feel as well as what they think.

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