Science Fiction and Society

Soc. 49, Fall 2016

A conceptual guide to modernization

Modernization: the idea that societies progress (or have progressed) through stages based on increases in the complexity of technology and social organization.

• Many theorists would say that human social life has been organized in the following stages of development:
1. the hunter-gathering stage (hunting and gathering naturally occurring food in small bands)
2. the agricultural or agrarian stage (where the majority of food comes from cultivated crops and domesticated animals, and life tends to be more settled)
3. the feudal stage involves elaborate social hierarchies based on cast systems, agricultural economies with some market exchange, and pre-industrial, craft technologies.
4. industrial, modern, or industrial-capitalist societies (where ever more of life is mass produced in factories, life becomes more mobile and privatized, formal contractual relations replace relations of kinship, religion, and tradition, and reliance on complex technologies becomes ever more elaborate)
5. What's next? There is no consensus on what comes after industrial society: theories proposed include information society, postmodern society, late capitalism, communism.
• What happens during industrialization? (a question of much interest to both sociology and science fiction)
1. Industrial Revolution: the shift, at different times in different countries, from a traditional agriculturally based economy to one based on the mechanized production of manufactured goods in large-scale enterprises.
2. Division of labor: The division of labor is a basic tenet of industrialization. In division of labor, each worker is assigned to a different task, or step, in the manufacturing process, and as a result, total production increases. One person performing all five steps in the manufacture of a product can make one unit in a day. Five workers, each specializing in one of the five steps, can make 10 units in the same amount of time.
3. Impersonality of social relations: relations between people in modernized societies become increasingly abstract and impersonal. People are brought together, less by physical location or ties of kinship and tradition, and more by abstract categories like age, expertise, or profession. Communication is no longer exclusively face-to-face, and is frequently through print or other mass media.
4. Reliance on science: rational scientific ways of thinking become more of a presence in the lives of people in modernizing societies, whether or not people always subscribe to science.
5. Individualism: although it may not be inevitable, at least in Western developed countries, modernization has been accompanied by an increased emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals and individual freedoms, and a resistance to direct control by the state and other collectivities.
• Is modernization good or bad?
1. Optimists: most people see many good things in modernization, particularly the lessening of material deprivation. But some approaches more controversially see modernizing processes as the solution to most problems. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, tended to see modernization as an unequivocally good thing.
2. Pessimists: there have always been some who have expressed doubts about various aspects of modernization, like Henry David Thoreau, who advocated a life of simplicity and a closeness with nature, or various religious groups like the Amish, who feel that the modern world is spiritually bereft.
3. Marxism: Marx and Engels were very much in favor of modernization, but thought that the capitalist stage of development had some major flaws that needed to be changed by socialism. They saw technological and social progress as a product, not of individual human actions, but of the underlying "laws of motion of history." Under capitalism, however, the crises of capitalism were certain to manifest themselves in falling rates of profit, mounting hostility between workers and employers, ever more severe depressions, and the increasing immiseration of the working class. The outcome of class warfare was fated to be revolution and progress toward, first, socialism and ultimately communism. Lenin adopted the theory that, in the first stage a strong state would still be required in order to eliminate the remnants of capitalist opposition. Each person's work would be rewarded according to the value of his or her contribution. Once communism was achieved, the state, whose central purpose was class domination, would wither away, and each individual would in the utopian future be compensated according to need and free to pursue whatever interests they chose.
4. Emile Durkheim: Durkheim was against socialism, and saw modernization largely as the product of the increasing division of labor in society. He worried that the collapse of traditional social bonds in modernization might lead to anomie, a sense of rootlessness and despair peculiar to the modern era.
5. Max Weber: Weber disagreed with Marx’s prediction that capitalism would produce only chaos and misery; instead, Weber argued that modernization produced ever more "rationality" and order, sometimes at the expense of human freedom. (Weber is thought by some to have predicted the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.) In particular, Weber noted the modernization was characterized by increased emphasis on making all activities efficient by ensuring that they are calculable (measurable), uniform, and predictable. Applied to social life as a whole, these trends are sometimes called social engineering. Weber worried that modern rationalization might rob humanity of higher feelings and sensitivities, and that there were inevitably irrationalities of rationalization. Modern examples of trends predicted by Weber include Fordism (an industrial strategy of shorter hours and higher wages that fosters consumerism) and the general patterns Ritzer calls "McDonaldization."