Sociology Notes | B.A. LL.B. (Five Year Course) Semester 3 | Mumbai University | munotes

Definitions built on social action. Max Weber defined sociology as the science which seeks the interpretive understanding of social action, in order to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and its effects. This is the most demanding of the four, because it says that explaining what people do is not enough. You have to understand what they meant by it.

Definitions built on social institutions. Durkheim described sociology as the science of social institutions, their genesis and their functioning, which puts marriage, family, religion, law and property at the centre.

The safest answer in an exam gives one definition from each of two or three of these families, names the author of each, and then says what they have in common: all of them treat the social, rather than the individual, as the thing to be explained.

What makes it sociological: the four marks

A question can be asked about human beings without being a sociological question. Four things mark out the ones that are.

It is about the social, not the individual. Why one particular person ended their life is a question for a psychiatrist. Why the suicide rate is higher in one district than another, year after year, whoever happens to be living there, is a sociological question, because the answer cannot lie in any one person.

It looks for patterns, not for single events. A sociologist is interested in a riot only as an instance of collective behaviour, in a marriage only as an instance of an institution.

It is empirical. Its claims are meant to be checked against evidence that somebody else could collect. This is what Module III is about.

It treats the familiar as strange. This is the hardest habit and the most valuable one. Everything a society does looks natural from inside it. Sociology begins when you ask why it is done that way and not another way, and discover that other societies do it another way.

A worked example

Rehan and Ayesha are in the same Semester III class at a Mumbai law college. Both are asked why so few women appear as advocates in the criminal courts of the city.

Rehan answers individually. Women who are not there chose something else; some found it unsafe; some wanted regular hours. Each of his answers is about a decision taken by a person.

Ayesha answers sociologically. She asks what proportion of law graduates in the city are women, and finds it is close to half. She asks who briefs an advocate, and finds it is usually a solicitor or a client who has come through a personal contact. She asks who holds those contacts, when court work is done, and what a family expects of a daughter at that hour. She finds a pattern that does not depend on any individual woman's choice: the same outcome appears year after year, with entirely different women each year.

The point of the example is not that Ayesha is right and Rehan is wrong. It is that Rehan's answer, however true of each person, cannot explain a pattern that outlives all of them. That gap is where sociology lives, and it is the single idea a first-year student most needs to take from this chapter.

Sociology and the subjects it sits next to

Students lose marks here more often than anywhere else in Module I, because the differences are real but narrow.

A note on the last row that matters for this course. Sociology is not social work, and it is not social reform. A sociologist studying dowry deaths is not, in that capacity, campaigning against dowry. The discipline is often criticised for this detachment, and the criticism is dealt with in [Social Research: Nature and Purpose].

What sociology is NOT

It is not common sense written out at length. Common sense says people of the same background marry each other because they have more in common. Sociology asks how often that actually happens, finds the figure, discovers that it is far higher than shared interests would predict, and looks for the mechanism. Where common sense and evidence disagree, the evidence wins, and it frequently does disagree.

It is not the study of social problems. Poverty, crime and addiction are studied by sociologists, but so are marriage, religion, sport, queues and conversation. A society with no problems at all would still have a sociology.

It is not a collection of opinions about society. Everybody has those. What separates sociology from them is method, which is why a quarter of this syllabus is about method.

It is not about telling people how to live. Sociology can tell you that a law will be widely disobeyed, and why. Whether it should be passed is a different kind of question.

The structural vocabulary, defined once here

These words are used in every chapter that follows. Each gets a chapter of its own later; what matters now is that a reader is never stopped by one.

Society. The largest grouping within which people live their whole lives together and which is more or less self-sufficient. Not the same as a country. Fully in [Society: Meaning, Characteristics and Types].

Social group. Two or more people who are aware of one another, interact, and share some sense of belonging together. Fully in [Social Groups: Meaning and Characteristics].

Social institution. Not a building and not an organisation. An established pattern of rules and practices by which a society deals with one of its permanent needs: marriage and the family for reproduction and child-rearing, religion for the sacred, law for order, the economy for subsistence. Fully in [Community, Association and Institution].

Social structure. The arrangement of the parts of a society into a stable pattern: the positions people occupy and the relations between them. Fully in [Social Structure and Social System].

Norm. A rule about how one ought to behave in a given situation. Law is one kind of norm and not the only kind, which is where this subject and yours begin to meet. Fully in [Norms and Values].

Status and role. A status is a position in a social structure; a role is the behaviour expected of whoever occupies it. Fully in [Status and Role].

Social fact. Durkheim's term for a way of acting, thinking or feeling that is external to any individual and exercises a power of constraint over them. The rate of marriage in a state is a social fact; so is the rule that you queue. It is the thing sociology studies.

Limits and criticism

Objectivity is hard here. A sociologist studying caste belongs to a caste. In physics the observer is outside the experiment; in sociology the observer is inside the society. The discipline's answer is method rather than denial, and Module III is that answer.

Prediction is weak. Sociology can say that a pattern exists and identify its conditions. It rarely predicts a particular event, and its failures to do so have been public and embarrassing.

Terminology is disputed. Ordinary words carry technical meanings that vary between writers. This is why an exam answer that names the author of every definition it gives scores better than one that does not.

A hybrid word. Sociology is built from a Latin root and a Greek one, and purists objected to it from the beginning. Comte knew and used it anyway. The objection is worth one line in an answer and no more.

Quick revision

1. Sociology is the scientific study of society, of social relationships, and of the institutions and processes through which people live together.
2. The word was coined by Auguste Comte in 1838, volume four of the Cours de philosophie positive, from Latin socius and Greek logos.
3. Comte had meant to call it social physics, and changed the name after Quetelet used that term in 1835.
4. Definitions cluster into five families: society, social relationships, groups, social action (Weber), and institutions (Durkheim).
5. Weber: sociology is the interpretive understanding of social action, in order to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.
6. MacIver and Page: sociology is about social relationships, the network of which we call society.
7. Four marks of a sociological question: it is social not individual, it seeks patterns, it is empirical, and it makes the familiar strange.
8. Comte's two halves, social statics (order) and social dynamics (change), still organise this syllabus.

Test yourself

1. Define sociology and name the person who coined the word, with the year and the book. Sociology is the scientific study of society, of social relationships and of the institutions through which human beings live together. The word was coined by Auguste Comte in 1838, in the fourth volume of the Cours de philosophie positive, from the Latin socius (companion) and the Greek logos (study).

2. Why did Comte not call the subject social physics? That was his own first choice of name. He gave it up after Adolphe Quetelet used the phrase for his statistical work in 1835, and coined sociologie instead so that the new science would have a name of its own.

3. A student says sociology is just common sense. Answer them. Common sense is unchecked, varies from person to person and from place to place, and is often wrong about the size and direction of social patterns. Sociology tests such claims against evidence somebody else can collect, and frequently contradicts them. Common sense also cannot explain why a rate stays stable when every individual in the population has changed.

4. Distinguish sociology from psychology with an example. Psychology explains the individual; sociology explains the pattern individuals form. Why one person takes their own life is psychological. Why a district's suicide rate stays higher than its neighbour's for twenty years, with different people living there, is sociological, because no fact about any single person can account for it.

5. What is a social fact? Durkheim's term for a way of acting, thinking or feeling which is external to the individual and which exercises a power of constraint over them. Examples: a marriage rate, a language, the rule that one queues. It is external because it exists before any particular person and outlives them, and constraining because a person who defies it meets resistance.

6. Name the two halves into which Comte divided the subject, and say what each studies. Social statics, the study of order, of what holds a society together at a given moment; and social dynamics, the study of progress, of how societies change over time. This syllabus keeps the division: Module I is largely statics, Module III largely dynamics.

The seven characteristics of its nature

MU's own reading list follows the standard list, and an examiner expects most of it.

1. An independent science. It is not a branch of political science, of history or of philosophy. It has its own subject matter, its own method and its own body of theory.
2. A social science, not a physical science.
3. A categorical, not a normative, science. It says what is, not what ought to be. It can establish that a dowry prohibition is widely evaded; whether dowry is wrong is a question of ethics.
4. A pure science, not an applied one. Its object is knowledge of society. Applying that knowledge is social work, administration or law reform.
5. An abstract science, not a concrete one. It studies the forms and patterns of human interaction, not the particular events history records.
6. A generalising science, not a particularising one. It seeks general statements about classes of case.
7. Both a rational and an empirical science. Empirical because it insists on observation and evidence; rational because it insists that the evidence be organised by theory and by logic. Sociology needs both, and a body of facts with no theory is as useless to it as a theory with no facts.

The scope of sociology, and the two schools

Every subject has to answer the question: where do you stop? For sociology the question is sharp, because everything human beings do together is arguably social. Two answers were given, and MU examines both.

The specialistic or formalistic school

The claim. Sociology is a specific, pure and independent social science with a limited subject matter of its own: the forms of social relationships, considered apart from their content.

Georg Simmel (1858 to 1918) is the school's leading name and its clearest statement. His analogy is geometry. Geometry studies the form of objects, the sphere or the cube, without caring whether the object is made of wood or of iron. In the same way, sociology should study the forms of social relationships, cooperation, competition, conflict, subordination, superordination, division of labour, without caring whether they occur in a factory, a temple or an army. The content belongs to economics, to religion, to political science. The form belongs to sociology.

Its other adherents.

• Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished two forms of association, Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), and made that formal distinction the centre of the subject.
• Max Weber held that sociology should interpret social action and analyse the forms of social relationship, and that it must be kept distinct from history, which deals with the particular.
• Leopold von Wiese limited the scope to the forms of social process and social relationship, and set about classifying them exhaustively.
• Alfred Vierkandt held that sociology should deal with the ultimate forms of mental or psychic relationship binding people together.

Criticism of the specialistic school.

1. Form cannot be separated from content. Competition between two shopkeepers and competition between two states are the same form and nothing alike. Studying the form alone tells you little about either.
2. The forms are not exclusively sociological. Conflict and cooperation are studied by economists and political scientists too, so the boundary does not do the work claimed for it.
3. No agreed list. Von Wiese counted some six hundred and fifty forms of human relationship. Simmel's list is quite different. A science whose subject matter cannot be enumerated has not really been delimited.
4. It makes sociology too narrow, and cuts it off from exactly the concrete problems, caste, poverty, crime, that make people study it.

The synthetic school

The claim. Sociology is a general science of society which synthesises the findings of the special social sciences. The other social sciences each take a slice of social life, economics the economic slice, political science the political; sociology studies the whole and the relations between the slices.

Emile Durkheim is the leading name. He divided the scope into three parts, and the division is worth memorising because it is the easiest way to reproduce his position.

• Social morphology. The material substratum of society: population, its density and distribution, the geographical setting, the arrangement of people over territory.
• Social physiology. The functioning of society, taken up by its branches: the sociology of religion, of law and morals, of the economy, of language.
• General sociology. The philosophical part, seeking the general social laws that the branches yield.

Its other adherents.

• Morris Ginsberg set the scope as social morphology, social control, social processes and social pathology. The last is worth noting for Module II: social pathology is where crime and disorganisation belong.
• Pitirim A. Sorokin held that sociology studies the relationships between the different classes of social phenomena, the relationship between social and non-social phenomena, and the general characteristics common to all classes of social phenomena.
• L. T. Hobhouse treated sociology as a synthesis of the numerous social sciences.
• Karl Mannheim divided it into systematic and general sociology on the one hand, and historical sociology on the other.

Criticism of the synthetic school.

1. It makes sociology too wide. If it studies everything social, it has no subject of its own and becomes a name for the social sciences collectively.
2. A synthesis needs specialists. No one worker can master economics, politics, religion and law well enough to synthesise them honestly.
3. It risks superficiality, since breadth is bought with depth.

The two schools compared

A worked example

A researcher studies why the residents of a Mumbai housing society and the workers who service it rarely mix socially.

A formalistic sociologist studies the relationship as a form. This is superordination and subordination, with distance maintained by ritual avoidance. The same form appears between an army officer and a jawan and between a landlord and a tenant farmer. The interest lies in what is common to all three.

A synthetic sociologist studies the whole situation. What are the incomes involved, which is economics; what does caste contribute, which is social structure; what do the society's by-laws provide about the use of the lift, which is law; what has migration to the city done to both groups, which is demography. The interest lies in how these fit together in this case.

Neither is wrong. The formalist produces a general proposition that applies widely and explains this case thinly. The synthesist explains this case richly and generalises weakly. The honest conclusion, and the one that scores, is that the schools are complementary rather than contradictory, and that modern sociology in practice does both: it studies particular institutions concretely, and it uses general concepts of form to compare them.

What this does NOT mean

"Pure science" does not mean useless. It means the discipline's own object is knowledge rather than application. Sociological knowledge is applied constantly, in policy, in planning and in law reform, but the applying is a different activity.

"Categorical, not normative" does not mean sociologists have no values. It means that a value judgment is not a finding, and that the two must be kept visibly apart in a piece of work.

"Abstract" does not mean vague. It means the subject studies patterns rather than particular events, and abstraction is the price of generality.

Quick revision

1. Nature: sociology is an independent, social, categorical, pure, abstract, generalising science, both rational and empirical.
2. It is a science in method, but experiment, objectivity, prediction and terminology are permanently harder here than in physics.
3. Scope: two schools. Specialistic or formalistic, and synthetic.
4. Specialistic: Simmel, Tonnies, Weber, von Wiese, Vierkandt. Sociology studies the forms of social relationships alone. Simmel's analogy is geometry.
5. Synthetic: Durkheim, Ginsberg, Sorokin, Hobhouse, Mannheim. Sociology is a general science synthesising the social sciences.
6. Durkheim's three divisions: social morphology, social physiology, general sociology.
7. Ginsberg's four: social morphology, social control, social processes, social pathology.
8. Formalistic is criticised as too narrow, synthetic as too wide. The schools are complementary.

Test yourself

1. Is sociology a science? Give both sides. In method and aim, yes: it observes systematically, gathers data, frames and tests hypotheses, and states checkable general propositions, as Durkheim's study of suicide shows. But it is a social science, and four difficulties are permanent: controlled experiment is mostly impossible, the observer belongs to the society observed, prediction of particular events is weak, and its terminology is not agreed. The correct answer names both sides and concludes that it is a science of a distinctive kind.

2. State the position of the formalistic school and its leading analogy. Sociology is a specific and independent science whose subject matter is the forms of social relationships, studied apart from their content. Simmel's analogy is geometry: as geometry studies the sphere without regard to whether it is wooden or iron, sociology studies competition, conflict, subordination and division of labour without regard to whether they occur in a factory or a temple.

3. State Durkheim's threefold division of the scope of sociology. Social morphology, the material substratum, population, its density and its distribution over territory; social physiology, the functioning of society studied through its branches, the sociology of religion, of law and morals, of the economy; and general sociology, the philosophical part which seeks the general laws the branches yield.

4. Give two criticisms of each school. Formalistic: form cannot be separated from content, since competition between shopkeepers and between states is one form and two different things; and its forms are not exclusively sociological, being studied by economists and political scientists too. Synthetic: it makes sociology so wide that it has no subject of its own; and a genuine synthesis would require a mastery of every social science that no single worker has.

5. Which school do you find more convincing, and why? Either answer earns marks if it is argued. The strongest answer says they are complementary: the formalist supplies the general concepts by which cases are compared, the synthesist supplies the concrete study without which the concepts are empty, and sociology as actually practised uses both.

The historical school of jurisprudence, and Savigny in particular, made this its central claim: law grows out of the spirit and the history of a people, and cannot be transplanted from one society to another without regard to either. Whether that is entirely true is one of the questions [Law and Social Change] examines, but nobody now denies that law has social roots.

3. Society is not one thing, so neither is the law's reception

India is plural in language, religion, region and culture, as [The Pluralistic Nature of Indian Society] sets out with figures. A single central statute lands in many different social settings at once and is received differently in each.

A lawyer who has been taught that a statute means the same thing everywhere will be surprised by their own practice. A lawyer who has been taught to ask which social groups a rule bears on, and how each will hear it, will not.

4. Legal categories are built from social ones

Open any bare Act and count the social concepts the draftsman has borrowed. Family, marriage, custom, reasonable person, public order, decency, cruelty, custom having the force of law, dependant, household. Not one of those is defined by law alone; each imports a social meaning, and when the social meaning shifts, the legal category shifts under the same words.

This is where the vocabulary in this book earns its keep. A student who knows the sociological difference between a family and a household, or between a caste and a class, reads such a provision more accurately than one who does not.

5. The effectiveness of law is an empirical question

Whether a statute achieves what it was passed for is not a question of interpretation. It is a question of fact, and the methods for answering it are the methods in Module III of this syllabus: survey, interview, documentary work, sampling, the analysis of official statistics.

This is the point at which the two halves of the syllabus meet. A student who has read Module III can, in principle, design an enquiry into whether a legal aid scheme reaches the people it was meant for. That is a socio-legal research design, and it is exactly what law reform bodies commission.

6. Law reform needs a picture of society before it needs a draft

Every Law Commission report begins with a description of a social situation and only then proposes words. If the description is wrong the words will be wrong, however elegantly drafted.

7. The daily work of a lawyer is social work in the literal sense

Taking instructions from a frightened client, judging whether a witness will hold up, advising on whether a family will honour a settlement, assessing what a bench will find reasonable: all of it is applied social understanding. It is learned by experience, but it is learned faster by someone who has a vocabulary for it.

A worked example

A statute requires that every workplace with ten or more employees constitute an internal complaints committee, and that a complaint be disposed of within ninety days.

A purely legal reading is short. There is an obligation, a threshold, a time limit, and a penalty for non-compliance.

A sociological reading asks different questions, and each one is answerable by the methods in Module III.

• How many workplaces in the city actually have ten or more employees on the books? In an economy where much employment is informal, the threshold may exclude most of the workers it was meant to protect. That is a question about the structure of the labour market.
• Who sits on such a committee? If its members depend on the employer for their livelihood, the group's own dynamics, and not its legal powers, will decide what it does. That is a question about primary and secondary groups and about authority.
• What does a complainant risk? Not only her job. Her standing among colleagues, her family's view of her, her marriage prospects in some communities. Those are informal social controls, and they are stronger than the statute.
• Does anyone know the committee exists? Knowledge of a right is unevenly distributed by education, language and access to media.

A lawyer who can only give the first reading will advise an employer how to comply on paper. A lawyer who can give the second will know why compliance on paper is common and why the complaints do not come, and will be far more useful to a client on either side.

Sociology of law and sociological jurisprudence

Two neighbouring terms are worth keeping apart, because MU's Module IV uses both.

Eugen Ehrlich is the bridge between them, and his idea of the living law is worth carrying into Module IV: the rules that actually govern life in a society are often not the rules in the statute book, and the gap between the two is the sociologist's subject.

What this does NOT mean

It does not mean law is nothing but sociology. Law has its own logic, its own techniques of interpretation and its own institutional authority. A sociological explanation of why a rule exists is not a legal argument about what it means, and offering one to a court is a mistake.

It does not mean an unenforced law is worthless. A rule widely disobeyed may still be doing work: stating a public standard, protecting the few who invoke it, providing a lever for change. Sociology measures the gap; it does not automatically condemn the rule.

It does not mean sociology can tell you what the law ought to be. It is a categorical and not a normative science, as [The Nature and Scope of Sociology] explains. It can tell you what a rule will cost and who will bear the cost. The decision remains a political and moral one.

Quick revision

1. Law is one instrument of social control among many, and the smallest of them.
2. Law is a social product: made, interpreted and enforced by socially situated people.
3. India's plurality means one statute is received in many social settings at once.
4. Legal categories, family, cruelty, reasonable, public order, borrow social meanings.
5. Whether a law is effective is an empirical question, answered by Module III's methods.
6. Law reform needs an accurate picture of society before it needs a draft.
7. Ehrlich's living law: the rules that actually govern a society may not be the rules in the statute book.
8. Distinguish sociology of law (descriptive, a branch of sociology) from sociological jurisprudence (prescriptive, a school of legal theory, Pound).

Test yourself

1. Give four reasons why a law student should study sociology. Law is only one instrument of social control and works best when custom, morality and opinion run with it; law is itself a social product, made and applied by socially situated people; legal categories such as family, cruelty and reasonableness borrow their content from social life; and whether a statute achieves its purpose is an empirical question answerable only by social research.

2. What is the living law, and who used the phrase? Eugen Ehrlich's phrase for the rules that actually govern conduct in a society, which are often not the rules recorded in the statute book. Its importance is that it directs attention to the gap between formal law and observed behaviour, and makes that gap something to be investigated rather than deplored.

3. Distinguish the sociology of law from sociological jurisprudence. The sociology of law is a branch of sociology; it describes how law works as a social institution, from outside, without prescribing. Sociological jurisprudence, associated with Roscoe Pound, is a school of legal theory; it addresses lawyers and judges from inside the system and prescribes how law should be made and applied to serve social ends.

4. A new statute is widely disobeyed. What would a sociologist ask? Whether the rule runs with or against existing custom, religion and public opinion; whether the people it binds know of it; what disobedience costs and what obedience costs, in money and in standing; whether the enforcing agency has the resources and the will; and which social groups gain and lose by it. The answers are gathered by the methods in Module III.

5. Does sociology tell us what the law ought to be? No. Sociology is categorical, not normative: it establishes what is the case, including what a proposed rule is likely to cost and who will bear that cost. Whether the cost is worth paying is a moral and political judgment, which the discipline cannot make for us, though it can make it better informed.

Lewis Henry Morgan: savagery, barbarism, civilization

Morgan arranged human history in three great ethnical periods, savagery, barbarism and civilization, each with lower, middle and upper subdivisions, and tied the passage between them to technology: the bow, pottery, the domestication of animals, iron smelting, the phonetic alphabet.

Morgan matters for this syllabus beyond his scheme. He connected each stage to a form of family and a form of property, and Friedrich Engels took Morgan's scheme as the basis of his own account of the origin of the family. That is why he returns in [Theories of the Origin of the Family].

The common shape

Strip the three of their detail and the same skeleton appears in all evolutionary theories, and it is what an answer should identify.

1. Change has a direction. It is not random.
2. The stages are successive. A society passes through them in order.
3. The movement is from simple to complex, from homogeneous to differentiated.
4. The process is universal. All societies travel the same road, though at different speeds.
5. In the classical versions, later means better. This last assumption is separable from the others, and modern versions drop it.

The perspective applied to law

Each perspective in this module is tested here on the same subject, so that the six can be compared.

An evolutionist looks at law and sees a sequence. Custom, unwritten and enforced by the group, comes first. Then custom recognised and declared by an authority. Then codes: written, public, applying to a whole territory. Then legislation, a standing machinery for making new law deliberately. Then specialised courts, professions, procedures.

Sir Henry Maine's proposition that the movement of progressive societies has been a movement from status to contract, from a condition in which a person's rights and duties are fixed by the group they are born into towards one in which they are fixed by agreements they enter into freely, is the best-known evolutionary account of law, and it is the one to cite. Durkheim's account of law moving from repressive to restitutive, in [Durkheim: Division of Labour and Social Solidarity], is another, though Durkheim is a functionalist and not an evolutionist in the classical sense.

A worked example

Take one village in the Konkan and ask an evolutionist's question about it.

Ramrao's grandfather cultivated land held by his family, made most of what the household used, settled quarrels before the village elders, and knew nothing written down about his rights. Ramrao cultivates the same land under a recorded title, sells his crop into a market whose prices are set elsewhere, banks with a cooperative, and took a boundary dispute to the civil court.

An evolutionist reads this as a stage transition. The society has moved from the simple towards the complex and the differentiated: functions once performed by the household and the village are now performed by specialised institutions, the bank, the registry, the court. Maine's formula fits the change exactly: Ramrao's position rests on a recorded title and a set of contracts, where his grandfather's rested on his standing in a family and a village. That is the movement from status to contract, visible in two generations of one household.

Now apply the criticisms to the same case, which is why the example is here. Nothing about this was inevitable: neighbouring districts with the same technology did not develop the same institutions, which is the objection to unilinear evolution. It is not obviously progress: Ramrao has a title his grandfather lacked and no elders who will settle his dispute in a week. And the direction was not produced by internal development alone but by legislation, land settlement and a market, which are external causes the perspective's mechanism does not name. The example supports the description and undermines the explanation, which is the fair verdict on this perspective.

Criticism

The perspective is examined as much for its faults as for its content, and there are five.

1. Unilinear evolution is not supported by evidence. Societies do not all travel one road. Some skip stages, some reverse, some remain stable for centuries with no sign of the predicted development.
2. It is ethnocentric. The ladder was invariably drawn with nineteenth century industrial Europe at the top, and every other society was ranked by how closely it approached that. The words savagery and barbarism are not neutral descriptions.
3. It confuses change with progress. That a society is later and more complex does not make it better. Industrial societies produced industrial warfare.
4. It was used to justify domination. Social Darwinism, and the claim that some peoples were at an earlier stage and needed to be governed by those at a later one, supplied a scientific vocabulary for colonial rule. This is not an incidental misuse; it was a mainstream application at the time.
5. It explains too little about mechanism. Saying that societies become more complex does not say why, or what makes a particular society change at a particular moment.

Neo-evolutionism, associated with Leslie White and Julian Steward in the mid twentieth century, revived the perspective by giving up the worst assumptions: it dropped the single ladder in favour of multilinear evolution, in which different societies follow different lines of development, and it dropped progress in favour of a measurable criterion such as energy use or technological capacity. Mention it and the answer looks current rather than antiquarian.

What this perspective is NOT

It is not the same as social change. Social change is any alteration in social structure or culture, however small and in whatever direction, and is the subject of [Social Change: Meaning and Characteristics]. Evolution is a particular theory about the shape of long-run change.

It is not biological evolution applied to society. Some evolutionists borrowed the language, but societies pass on culture by learning, not genetically, and cultural transmission is far faster and can move backwards.

It is not extinct. Its assumptions survive, often unexamined, in words such as developed, developing and backward, which arrange societies on exactly the old ladder with new labels.

Distinctions worth having

Both reappear as theories of social change in [Theories of Social Change], where the cyclical school is treated in full.

Quick revision

1. Societies pass through successive stages, simple to complex, homogeneous to differentiated.
2. Comte: theological, metaphysical, positive.
3. Spencer: society as an organism; from indefinite incoherent homogeneity to definite coherent heterogeneity; militant to industrial.
4. Morgan: savagery, barbarism, civilization, each in three subdivisions, driven by technology.
5. Maine on law: from status to contract.
6. Five common assumptions: direction, succession, simple to complex, universality, and (classically) progress.
7. Criticisms: unilinear evolution is unsupported, ethnocentric, confuses change with progress, served colonial justification, and is thin on mechanism.
8. Neo-evolutionism (White, Steward) keeps the idea but goes multilinear and drops progress.

Test yourself

1. State the central claim of the evolutionary perspective. That human societies develop through definite and successive stages, moving from the simple, small and homogeneous towards the complex, large and differentiated, and that this movement has an identifiable direction and is broadly the same for all societies.

2. Give Spencer's formula for social evolution and his two-fold typology. Evolution is the movement from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity. His typology contrasts militant societies, organised for defence and resting on compulsory cooperation, with industrial societies, organised for production and resting on voluntary cooperation.

3. What did Maine say about the movement of progressive societies? That it has been a movement from status to contract: from a condition in which a person's rights and duties are fixed by the family or group into which they are born, to one in which they are fixed by agreements the person enters into voluntarily.

4. Give three criticisms of the perspective. That unilinear evolution is not borne out by the evidence, since societies skip, reverse and stagnate; that it is ethnocentric, ranking every society by its distance from nineteenth century industrial Europe; and that it confuses change with progress and so supplied a justification for colonial rule.

5. How does neo-evolutionism differ from the classical version? It abandons the single ladder for multilinear evolution, allowing different societies to follow different lines of development, and it abandons the assumption of progress, substituting a measurable criterion such as technological capacity or the amount of energy a society can harness.

Merton's three corrections

Robert K. Merton accepted the perspective and repaired three faults in it, and his repairs are the most examinable part of the chapter.

Manifest and latent functions. A manifest function is the consequence that is intended and recognised by the participants. A latent function is the consequence that is neither intended nor recognised. A religious festival's manifest function is worship; its latent function may be to reassert the standing of the families who fund it. The distinction is valuable precisely because latent functions are what social research discovers and participants cannot report.

Dysfunction. Earlier functionalists wrote as though every persisting practice must be doing good. Merton insisted that a part may have consequences that reduce the adaptation of the system, and that whether a given practice is functional or dysfunctional is a question to be investigated rather than assumed.

Functional alternatives. The old argument that an institution exists because it performs a necessary function assumes that only that institution could perform it. Merton pointed out that the same need may be met in different ways in different societies, so the existence of the need does not explain the existence of the particular institution.

Parsons and the four functional prerequisites

Talcott Parsons argued that every social system must solve four problems if it is to survive, usually remembered as AGIL: adaptation to the environment, largely the work of the economy; goal attainment, largely of the political system; integration, the coordination of the parts and the management of conflict, largely of law and social control; and latency or pattern maintenance, the transmission and renewal of values, largely of the family, religion and education.

For a law student the third is the one to remember: on this scheme, law's primary function is integration, keeping the parts of a differentiated society working together.

The perspective applied to law

A functionalist asks what law does for the social system, and gives a list.

• It integrates a society whose members are otherwise unlike one another, by supplying rules that apply across group boundaries.
• It resolves disputes in a way that ends them, so that conflict does not accumulate.
• It maintains order by defining and sanctioning deviance, which is developed in [Social Control: Meaning and Purpose].
• It expresses shared values, and Durkheim's insight was that punishment is less about correcting the offender than about reaffirming the collective sentiments the offence outraged.
• It adapts the system, since legislation lets a society adjust deliberately rather than only by drift.

Durkheim's most striking functionalist claim about law belongs here. Crime, he argued, is normal, found in every society; and the punishment of crime performs the function of drawing the community together in a shared reaction. That claim is taken up in [Crime and Social Deviance].

A worked example

In a village in Konkan, families of a particular community pool money each year for a temple festival that costs far more than any of them would spend alone.

The historical question asks how the festival started. The functionalist question asks what it now does, and produces four answers.

Its manifest function is religious observance. Its latent functions are several: it brings back migrants working in Mumbai, so that ties are renewed and marriages arranged; it redistributes some wealth from the better-off families who contribute most; it reasserts the community's claim to a place in the local order.

Its dysfunctions are visible too: the expenditure is heavy for poor households; the pressure to contribute can indebt a family; and the ranking of contributors publicly displays inequality that daily life leaves tactfully unstated.

The point of the example is that all four questions are empirical. Functionalism does not settle whether the festival is good. It tells you where to look.

Criticism

1. It is conservative. By explaining institutions through their contribution to stability, it makes whatever exists look necessary. Applied to caste or to the sexual division of labour, this becomes a justification, and functionalist accounts of both have been attacked for exactly that.
2. It cannot explain change well. A model whose central idea is equilibrium struggles with a society in upheaval. Change tends to be treated as disturbance rather than as normal.
3. It underrates conflict, power and coercion. It assumes value consensus. Whose values, and who is in a position to make them count, are the questions the next chapter asks.
4. It is teleological. Explaining a practice by its beneficial consequences comes close to saying that the consequence caused the practice, which reverses the order of time.
5. It gives the individual no room. People appear as occupants of roles doing what the system requires, which is the objection symbolic interactionism presses.

Quick revision

1. Society is a system of interdependent parts, each with a function for the whole; the model tends to equilibrium and rests on value consensus.
2. Organic analogy: institutions are to society what organs are to a body.
3. Durkheim: social solidarity, collective conscience, and the function of punishment.
4. Malinowski: institutions meet needs. Radcliffe-Brown: function is the contribution to structural continuity.
5. Merton: manifest and latent functions, dysfunction, and functional alternatives.
6. Parsons AGIL: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, latency. Law's chief job is integration.
7. Criticisms: conservative, weak on change, blind to conflict and power, teleological, and leaves no room for the individual.

Test yourself

1. State the functionalist view of society in three sentences. Society is a system of interdependent parts. Each part performs a function that contributes to the maintenance of the whole, and a change in one part produces changes in the others. Order rests on agreement about shared values rather than on force, and the system tends to return to equilibrium after a disturbance.

2. Distinguish manifest from latent functions, with an example. A manifest function is a consequence that is both intended and recognised by the participants; a latent function is neither intended nor recognised. The manifest function of a village festival is worship; its latent functions may include bringing migrants home so that marriages can be arranged, and publicly reasserting the standing of the families who pay for it.

3. What are functional alternatives, and what argument do they defeat? They are different institutions capable of performing the same function in different societies. They defeat the argument that an institution exists because its function is necessary: if the need can be met in several ways, the necessity of the need does not explain the presence of that particular institution.

4. Name Parsons's four functional prerequisites and say which one law chiefly serves. Adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency or pattern maintenance. Law chiefly serves integration: coordinating the differentiated parts of a society and managing the conflicts between them so that the system holds together.

5. Why is functionalism called conservative? Because it explains an institution by the contribution it makes to stability, so that whatever exists tends to appear necessary and beneficial. Applied to unequal arrangements such as caste or the sexual division of labour, the explanation slides easily into a justification, and it gives no natural account of why an arrangement should be changed.

Weber: conflict on three dimensions, not one

Weber accepted that conflict is central and denied that it is only economic. Stratification, he argued, has three separable dimensions: class, an economic position; status, social honour or prestige; and party, organised power. A group may be high on one and low on another, which is why a poor Brahmin priest and a wealthy trader of low ritual rank can each be advantaged and disadvantaged at once.

Weber's correction matters enormously in India, where ritual status and economic class do not line up, and where an answer that reduces everything to class misdescribes the society. It is developed in [Class].

Dahrendorf: conflict over authority

Ralf Dahrendorf argued that in modern industrial societies ownership and control have separated, so class in Marx's sense no longer identifies the conflict groups. The real division is between those who have authority in an association and those subject to it. Conflict is therefore permanent and general, arising in every organisation, but it is also institutionalised: modern societies have machinery, collective bargaining, courts, tribunals, elections, that regulates conflict instead of suppressing it.

That last idea is the most useful one in this chapter for a law student. On Dahrendorf's account the function of a great deal of law is not to abolish conflict but to channel it into forms that do not destroy the society.

Mills: the power elite

C. Wright Mills argued that key decisions in a modern society are taken by a small, interlocking elite drawn from the top of the political, economic and military hierarchies, whose members share background, outlook and interest.

The perspective applied to law

The conflict reading of law has four propositions, and they are worth learning as a set because they make an entire essay.

1. Law reflects the interests of dominant groups. Not necessarily by conspiracy: those who draft, legislate and adjudicate are drawn from particular sections of society and their assumptions travel with them.
2. Law is a resource used unequally. Formal equality before the law coexists with sharp inequality in the ability to use it. A right without the means to enforce it advantages whoever can afford enforcement.
3. Enforcement is selective. What is policed, and against whom, follows the distribution of power rather than the seriousness of the harm.
4. Law is also a site of struggle, and this is where the perspective becomes something other than despair. Subordinate groups have won real changes through law: abolition of untouchability, land reform, minimum wages, reservation, protection against workplace harassment. E. P. Thompson's point is the balanced one: a legal system that is nothing but an instrument of the powerful cannot even look legitimate, and to look legitimate it must sometimes actually restrain them.

Functionalism and conflict compared

A worked example

A state passes a law requiring every private school to reserve a quarter of its entry-level seats for children from disadvantaged groups, with the state reimbursing fees.

The functionalist reading: education is the institution that allocates people to positions and transmits shared values; extending access improves the system's integration and its adaptation, since talent otherwise wasted is used.

The conflict reading asks who gains and who resists. It notes which groups lobbied for the measure and which against; that reimbursement rates were set at a level that made compliance unattractive to expensive schools; that families with resources responded by moving to schools outside the scheme; and that the measure was fought through the courts by the institutions it bound. It concludes that the law is a battleground, and that the outcome will be settled by the relative strength of the contending groups rather than by the statute's words alone.

Both readings are informative. The conflict reading predicts the litigation.

Criticism

1. It overstates conflict and cannot explain cooperation. Most social life, most days, is not a struggle. People queue, keep appointments, help strangers.
2. It cannot explain stability. If interests are genuinely opposed, the puzzle is why societies hold together for centuries.
3. In its Marxist form it is economically reductive. Weber's three dimensions are the standing answer.
4. It can be unfalsifiable. If visible conflict proves the theory and visible harmony proves successful ideological domination, no observation can count against it.
5. It is value-laden. The perspective is often held by people who wish to change what they describe, which is not a fault in itself but requires the guard that Module III's chapter on objectivity discusses.

Quick revision

1. Society is an arena of groups with opposed interests competing for scarce resources.
2. Conflict is normal; order rests on power and ideology, not consensus.
3. Marx: class conflict, base and superstructure, law in the superstructure.
4. Weber: three dimensions, class, status and party; conflict is not only economic.
5. Dahrendorf: conflict is over authority, is universal, and is institutionalised in modern societies.
6. Mills: the power elite.
7. On law: it reflects dominant interests, is used unequally, is enforced selectively, and is also a site of struggle that subordinate groups have sometimes won.
8. Criticism: overstates conflict, cannot explain stability or cooperation, economically reductive in Marx, sometimes unfalsifiable.

Test yourself

1. State the central claims of the conflict perspective. That resources are scarce and unequally distributed; that groups are defined by their position in that distribution and therefore have opposed interests; that conflict rather than consensus is the normal condition of society; that order is maintained by power and by ideology; and that change comes from conflict between groups.

2. How does Weber modify Marx's account of conflict? By denying that conflict is only economic. Weber distinguishes three dimensions of stratification: class, an economic position; status, social honour; and party, organised power. A group can rank high on one and low on another, which is why Indian society, where ritual status and wealth frequently do not coincide, cannot be described by class alone.

3. What did Dahrendorf say conflict is really about, and what did he mean by institutionalising it? He argued that in modern industrial society ownership and control have separated, so the real division is between those who exercise authority in an association and those subject to it; conflict of this kind arises in every organisation. Institutionalisation means providing regular machinery, collective bargaining, tribunals, courts and elections, through which conflict is expressed and regulated rather than suppressed.

4. Give the conflict reading of law in four propositions. Law reflects the interests of dominant groups, because those who make and apply it are drawn from particular sections of society; formal equality before the law coexists with unequal capacity to use it; enforcement is selective, following power rather than harm; and yet law is also a site of struggle in which subordinate groups have won real gains, and a legal order that never restrained the powerful could not sustain its own legitimacy.

5. Give two criticisms of the perspective. That it overstates conflict and cannot account for the cooperation and routine order that make up most of social life; and that in its stronger forms it becomes unfalsifiable, since visible conflict is taken to confirm it while visible harmony is explained as successful ideological domination.

This yields a genuinely useful account of power, and one that suggests how it can be resisted. A person who cannot get elsewhere what they need has little bargaining strength; a person with alternatives has more. It explains why a worker in a labour market with many employers is in a different position from one in a single-industry town, and why exclusivity, whether of an employer, a moneylender or a landlord, converts into power.

Blau: from exchange to structure

Homans stayed at the level of face-to-face behaviour. Peter Blau tried to build outwards, arguing that repeated unequal exchanges harden into stable structures: a person who consistently gives more than they receive, and cannot reciprocate, ends by giving compliance instead. Unreturnable obligation is thus one origin of authority, and if those subject to it come to regard the arrangement as legitimate, it becomes an institution.

Blau also distinguished social from economic exchange, and the distinction is examinable. In an economic exchange the obligations are specified, the terms are stated and the transaction closes. In a social exchange the obligations are unspecified, the timing and form of the return are left to the giver, nothing is bargained for, and the exchange therefore requires and generates trust.

Distributive justice

Homans added that people expect the rewards of an exchange to be proportionate to what they have invested. When they are not, the party who feels short-changed responds with anger, and the party who is over-rewarded with guilt. The theory thus predicts not only withdrawal from unprofitable relationships but resentment within unfair ones.

A worked example

Meera rents a flat in Andheri from Mr Shah, through a broker, Farid.

The economic exchange is easy to read: rent for possession, brokerage for introduction, terms specified in an agreement, obligations closed on performance.

The social exchange running alongside it is the interesting part. Farid gives Meera advice she has not paid for. She refers two colleagues to him. Neither transaction is bargained; each relies on the norm of reciprocity, and each builds trust that makes the next one cheaper.

The power in the relationship follows dependence. In a market with many vacant flats, Mr Shah's power is low: Meera's alternatives are good. In a locality where flats are scarce and landlords prefer particular kinds of tenant, her alternatives shrink and his power rises, without a word of the agreement changing. This is Emerson's proposition doing real work, and it explains why the same lease means different things in different markets.

Distributive justice appears when Meera learns that a neighbour in an identical flat pays less. Nothing in her own bargain has changed and her profit is what it was, but her sense of the fairness of the exchange collapses, and the theory predicts precisely the anger that follows.

The perspective applied to law

• Contract is the legal recognition of exchange, and consideration is the doctrine that most closely tracks the reciprocity norm.
• Bargaining power is a legal concept that exchange theory explains: unequal bargaining power is unequal dependence, and doctrines about unconscionable terms and standard form contracts are attempts to correct for it.
• Settlement and negotiation, where most disputes actually end, are exchanges under the shadow of the law, and the parties' alternatives, which is to say what each gets if no agreement is reached, decide the outcome.
• Corruption can be read as social exchange displacing economic and legal norms: a favour given, an unspecified obligation created, a return expected later, and trust rather than a contract holding it together.

Criticism

1. It assumes a calculating individual, which fits some cultures and settings better than others, and fits market societies best of all. Critics say it universalises the assumptions of the society that produced it.
2. It is close to tautology. If whatever a person does is called rewarding because they did it, the theory explains nothing. Avoiding this requires that rewards be identified independently of the behaviour they explain, which is difficult.
3. It cannot easily explain genuine altruism, self-sacrifice, or acts done for people who can never return them, except by stretching reward to cover the satisfaction of having acted well.
4. It is weak on large structures. Blau's attempt to build institutions from exchanges is impressive but few think it fully succeeds; caste and class are not readily reduced to accumulated bargains.
5. It neglects meaning. The same act, a gift, an invitation, means different things in different cultures, and what counts as a reward is itself socially defined. That is the objection symbolic interactionism presses, and it is taken up in the next chapter.

Quick revision

1. Interaction is an exchange of rewards and costs; relationships persist where they are profitable.
2. Rewards are mostly non-material: approval, respect, information, company.
3. Homans: behavioural propositions, and distributive justice, reward proportionate to investment.
4. Gouldner: the norm of reciprocity, found in all societies; the social basis of consideration in contract.
5. Emerson: the power of A over B equals the dependence of B on A; dependence falls as alternatives rise.
6. Blau: unreturnable obligation becomes compliance, then authority, then institution; social exchange has unspecified obligations and requires trust, unlike economic exchange.
7. Criticism: assumes a calculator, risks tautology, cannot explain altruism, weak on macro structure, neglects meaning.

Test yourself

1. State the basic proposition of social exchange theory. That social interaction is an exchange in which each party gives what the other values and receives something in return; that people seek to maximise reward and minimise cost; and that a relationship continues so long as both parties find the exchange profitable and broadly fair.

2. State Emerson's proposition about power and apply it. The power of A over B equals the dependence of B on A, and that dependence rises with the value B places on what A supplies and falls with the availability of the same resource elsewhere. Applied to a tenancy: where vacant flats are plentiful the landlord's power is small, and where they are scarce his power grows, though the lease is unchanged.

3. Distinguish social exchange from economic exchange. In economic exchange the obligations are specified in advance, the terms are bargained, and performance closes the transaction. In social exchange the obligation to return is real but unspecified in kind, amount and timing, nothing is bargained, and the exchange therefore depends on trust and generates it.

4. What is the norm of reciprocity and why does it matter to a lawyer? Gouldner's proposition that every society has a rule obliging people to return benefits received. It matters because it is the informal counterpart of consideration: the legal doctrine formalises, for a limited class of promises, an expectation of return that operates without any contract across the whole of social life.

5. Give two criticisms of the theory. That it verges on tautology, since anything a person does can be relabelled a reward and the explanation then explains nothing unless rewards are identified independently; and that it neglects meaning, because what counts as a reward is itself culturally defined, so the calculation the theory describes cannot be specified without the interpretation it leaves out.

Mead divided the self into the I and the me. The me is the self as object, the organised attitudes of others taken over into oneself; the I is the self as subject, the spontaneous and unpredictable response. Conduct is a conversation between them, which is why people are socialised without being automata.

Cooley: the looking-glass self

Charles Horton Cooley put the same insight more memorably. A person's sense of self is formed as though in a mirror held up by other people, in three moments: we imagine how we appear to another; we imagine their judgment of that appearance; and we experience a self-feeling, pride or mortification, in consequence.

The important and often missed point is that what does the work is the imagined judgment, not the real one. A student who believes the class thinks them foolish behaves accordingly, whether or not the class thinks anything at all.

W. I. Thomas: the definition of the situation

Thomas's theorem is the perspective's most quoted line and its most useful export: if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

A rumour that a bank is failing is false; the queue outside it is not, and the bank may fail because of the queue. A community that believes the police will not help does not call them, and the belief is confirmed by the absence of help. This is the mechanism behind the self-fulfilling prophecy, a term Merton later coined for it, and behind labelling theory in Module II.

Goffman: the dramaturgical approach

Erving Goffman analysed interaction as theatre. People give performances, manage the impressions others form of them, work in teams, and use props and costume. He distinguished the front stage, where the performance is given, from the back stage, where it is prepared and dropped.

The courtroom is the standing illustration and one every law student can check. Robes, forms of address, seating, the ritual of rising: all of it is front-stage staging that produces authority rather than merely displaying it. The advocates' room is back stage, where opponents who were adversaries five minutes earlier discuss the listing amicably.

A worked example

A court summons is a piece of paper. Nothing in the paper explains what happens when one arrives.

For a company's legal department it means a file to be opened and a date to be diarised. For a first-time recipient in a village it may mean shame: neighbours see the process server arrive, and the meaning attached is that this household is in trouble with the state. The consequences differ completely, and neither follows from the paper.

Now apply Thomas. If the recipient defines the summons as a catastrophe, they may borrow money at ruinous interest to settle a claim they would have won. The definition, not the legal position, has produced the outcome.

Now apply Cooley. Much of the distress is not the litigation but the imagined judgment of neighbours, and it operates whether or not the neighbours have given it a thought.

Now apply Goffman. Both parties will perform when they reach court: dress, demeanour, the studied confidence of a client who is not confident. A lawyer who does not understand that they are staging a performance stages a poor one.

The perspective applied to law

• Labelling. The central application, and the whole of the labelling theory of deviance: a person becomes a criminal in the sociological sense partly through being processed and named as one. Developed in [Explaining Deviance: The Sociological Theories].
• Legal meaning is made in interaction. Whether conduct is cruelty, provocation or reasonable care is settled by interpretation in a courtroom, not read off the facts.
• Discretion. What a police officer, a prosecutor or a magistrate does depends heavily on how they define the situation and the person in front of them, which is where the perspective meets the conflict perspective's point about selective enforcement.
• Legal ritual. The staging of legal proceedings is not decoration; it produces the authority the proceedings claim.

Criticism

1. It neglects social structure. Studying interaction closely, it says little about class, caste, gender or the state, which set the terms on which people meet. A meeting between an employer and a worker is not two people freely negotiating meaning.
2. It neglects power. Whose definition of the situation prevails is a question about power, and the perspective describes the process without explaining the outcome.
3. Its method is hard to check. It relies on participant observation and on interpretation, so findings are difficult to replicate and open to the observer's own reading.
4. It cannot explain large-scale change. There is no account of why whole societies transform.
5. The concepts are imprecise. The self, the I and the me are difficult to define operationally.

The fair conclusion is that the perspective answers a question the macro perspectives do not ask, and vice versa. Macro theories explain the framework, symbolic interactionism explains what happens inside it, and a good answer says that rather than declaring a winner.

Micro and macro compared

Quick revision

1. Blumer's three premises: people act on meanings; meanings arise in interaction; meanings are handled through interpretation.
2. Mead: the self develops through play and game stages to the generalized other; the self is divided into the I and the me.
3. Cooley: the looking-glass self, imagined appearance, imagined judgment, self-feeling. What matters is the imagined judgment.
4. Thomas: if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
5. Goffman: dramaturgy, impression management, front stage and back stage.
6. It is a micro perspective, and its great application is labelling theory in Module II.
7. Criticism: neglects structure and power, hard to verify, cannot explain macro change.

Test yourself

1. State Blumer's three premises. People act towards things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them; those meanings arise out of social interaction with others; and meanings are handled and modified through an interpretive process that the person uses in dealing with what they encounter.

2. Explain the looking-glass self. Cooley's account of how self-conception is formed: we imagine how we appear to another person, we imagine the judgment they make of that appearance, and we then feel pride or mortification accordingly. The judgment that shapes us is the one we imagine, which need not be the one actually made.

3. State the Thomas theorem and give a legal illustration. If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. A litigant who defines a summons as a catastrophe may borrow at ruinous rates to settle a claim they would have won; the definition, not the legal merits, produces the outcome.

4. What did Mead mean by the generalized other? The internalised attitude of the community as a whole, acquired in the game stage when a child must hold the roles of all the other participants in mind at once. Once acquired, the person can regulate their own conduct by reference to what the community in general expects, without any particular person being present.

5. Give two criticisms of symbolic interactionism. That it neglects social structure, saying little about class, caste, gender or the state, which set the terms on which people meet; and that it neglects power, since it describes how definitions of a situation are negotiated without explaining whose definition prevails, which is a question about resources and authority.

Foucault: power, knowledge and discipline

Michel Foucault is the most useful of the three for this syllabus, because his subject is very close to yours.

Power and knowledge are joined. What counts as knowledge in a society is not separate from its power relations. To define madness, criminality or sexuality is to exercise power, and the professions that hold the right to define, medicine, psychiatry, law, criminology, exercise it.

Discourse. A discourse is a way of speaking about a subject that fixes what can be said, what counts as evidence, and who is qualified to speak. Discourse shapes what a society can even think about a matter.

Disciplinary power. Foucault argued that modern power works differently from the old kind. Sovereign power was visible, occasional and violent: public execution. Disciplinary power is continuous, detailed and productive: it works through timetables, examinations, records, classification and observation, in schools, hospitals, factories, barracks and prisons.

His image for it is the panopticon, Bentham's design for a prison in which a central tower can observe every cell while the inmates cannot see whether they are being watched. Because they may be watched at any moment, they behave as if always watched, and the discipline is finally exercised by the inmates upon themselves. Foucault took the panopticon as the model of modern society at large.

For a law student this is a serious argument and not a metaphor. It suggests that the effective regulation of behaviour in a modern society is done less by criminal prohibition than by registration, licensing, inspection, credit scoring, attendance records and surveillance, and that a lawyer who watches only the statute book is watching the smaller half.

The post modern account of contemporary society

Six claims recur, and together they make an answer.

1. Identity is fragmented and chosen. Class, occupation and community used to be given and to last. Identity is now assembled and revised, and expressed heavily through what one consumes.
2. Consumption displaces production. People are placed by what they buy and display more than by what they make.
3. Culture is dominated by media and image.
4. Diversity and difference are asserted rather than assimilated: identities organised around gender, sexuality, region, religion and ethnicity make claims of their own.
5. Truth is plural and local. No single vantage point, science included, can pronounce for everyone.
6. The nation state weakens from above by globalisation and from below by identity claims.

The perspective applied to law

• Legal pluralism. If there is no single authoritative story, there is no reason to expect one legal order. This connects directly to [Legal Pluralism] in Module IV, and India, with personal laws, customary law and statutory law operating together, is an unusually clear instance.
• Surveillance rather than prohibition. Foucault's disciplinary power describes identification systems, databases, monitoring and data protection questions better than the traditional model of command and sanction.
• Who defines? Post modern criminology asks not why people commit crime but who has the power to define conduct as criminal, and what interests that definition serves.
• Rights talk fragmented. Universal human rights are themselves a metanarrative, and the post modern challenge to them, that they carry a particular culture's assumptions while claiming universality, is one a law student will meet again.

A worked example

Priya is twenty-two, lives in a flat in Andheri, and works for a firm whose clients are in three countries.

Identity as the perspective describes it. Her grandmother's identity was given: village, caste, family, and the occupation attached to them. Priya's is assembled: she describes herself by what she does, what she watches, what she eats, the causes she supports and the places she has been, and she revises the description. Almost every element of it is expressed through something she consumes, which is Baudrillard's point about the image and Lyotard's about the absence of a single story that would place her.

Foucault as the perspective's most useful half. Priya is governed very little by prohibition and very extensively by record. Her attendance is logged, her work is measured, her creditworthiness is scored, her movement is traced by the phone she carries, her building records her entry, and her employer can read what she writes. No rule forbids her to do anything unusual; she simply never does, because she is aware that all of it is recorded. That is the panopticon working exactly as Foucault described, and it regulates her far more effectively than the criminal law does.

And the criticism, in the same example. The woman who cleans Priya's office is in the same city and almost none of this describes her: her identity is not assembled through consumption, her work is not surveilled by software, and her constraints are material rather than discursive. Both women live in Mumbai in the same year. The perspective describes one of them well and the other hardly at all, which is the unevenness that any Indian answer on post modernism must state.

Criticism

1. It is self-refuting. The claim that no grand narrative is credible is itself a grand narrative about the condition of the whole world.
2. Relativism disarms criticism. If no account of the world is better founded than another, there is no ground from which to condemn an atrocity, and the perspective cannot support the political claims its adherents often make.
3. It is obscure. Much of the writing is difficult in ways that do not obviously repay the difficulty, and that obscurity has been the target of well-known parodies.
4. It exaggerates the break. Critics reply that we are not in a new epoch at all: this is late modernity, or modernity accelerated. Poverty, class and material production have not stopped mattering because images have started to.
5. It is weak on evidence. Sweeping claims about the whole of contemporary society are offered with far less empirical support than the perspectives it criticises brought to bear.
6. It applies unevenly outside the West. In a society where a large part of the population is occupied with subsistence, describing identity as chosen through consumption fits some parts and not others. In India both conditions exist at once, which makes the perspective useful in the metros and thin elsewhere, and saying so is a strong point in an answer.

The six perspectives, side by side

Quick revision

1. Lyotard: post modernism is incredulity towards metanarratives.
2. Baudrillard: simulacra and hyperreality; the image detached from the real.
3. Foucault: power and knowledge are inseparable; discourse fixes what can be said; disciplinary power works through observation and record; the panopticon.
4. Contemporary society: fragmented and chosen identity, consumption over production, image, difference, plural truth, weakened nation state.
5. For law: legal pluralism, surveillance over prohibition, who has the power to define, and the challenge to universal rights.
6. Criticism: self-refuting, relativist, obscure, exaggerates the break, thin on evidence, and uneven outside the West.

Test yourself

1. What is a metanarrative, and what is Lyotard's claim about it? A grand story that claims to explain history as a whole and to justify a way of organising society, such as the Enlightenment story of reason liberating humanity or the Marxist story of class struggle ending in emancipation. Lyotard's claim is that such stories are no longer believed, and that knowledge has fragmented into local narratives with nothing to arbitrate between them.

2. Explain hyperreality with an example. Baudrillard's term for a condition in which representations become more real to people than what they represent, so that the distinction ceases to matter. A televised event is experienced by millions who were not present and is remembered in the form in which it was broadcast rather than as it occurred; the broadcast, not the event, becomes the reality people act on.

3. What is disciplinary power, and how does it differ from sovereign power? Sovereign power is visible, occasional and violent, exemplified by public punishment. Disciplinary power is continuous, detailed and productive, working through timetables, examinations, records, classification and observation in schools, hospitals, factories and prisons. Its model is the panopticon, in which the possibility of being watched leads the watched to regulate themselves.

4. Why do critics say post modernism is self-refuting? Because the proposition that no grand narrative about the world can be credible is itself a sweeping claim about the condition of the whole world, and so is a grand narrative of the kind it declares incredible. A related objection is that its relativism removes any ground from which to criticise anything.

5. How well does the perspective fit Indian society? Unevenly, and saying so is the strongest answer. Its account of identity chosen and expressed through consumption, of media saturation and of assertive difference describes urban middle-class India closely. It describes far less well the large part of the population for whom material production and subsistence remain the organising facts of life, and for whom identity is given rather than selected.

Types of society

MU does not print one classification, so the answer should give the main ones and say what each is based on.

By subsistence: the standard evolutionary sequence

The most used classification, associated with Gerhard Lenski, arranges societies by how they get their living, on the ground that this shapes almost everything else.

The great advantage of this classification is that it explains the pattern rather than only naming it: inequality is slight in hunting and gathering societies because there is no storable surplus to accumulate, and it becomes sharp in agrarian societies because there is.

By solidarity: Durkheim

Mechanical solidarity in small undifferentiated societies, where people are alike and held together by shared belief. Organic solidarity in complex societies, where people are unlike and held together by interdependence. Worked in [Durkheim: Division of Labour and Social Solidarity].

By type of association: Tonnies

Gemeinschaft, community, where relationships are personal, permanent, based on kinship and locality, and valued for themselves. Gesellschaft, association, where relationships are impersonal, contractual, specialised and entered into for a purpose. Tonnies held that modern history is a movement from the first to the second, and this is the classification that speaks most directly to law, because contract belongs to Gesellschaft.

By openness: open and closed

A closed society fixes a person's position at birth and permits little movement; a caste society is the type case. An open society permits movement on the basis of what a person does; a class society approximates it. Real societies are always mixtures, and this is developed in [Social Stratification].

Other bases

By size and settlement: rural, urban, tribal. By political form: tribal, feudal, capitalist, socialist.

A worked example

An old person can no longer work. Who supports them?

In an agrarian society, the joint family does, and the arrangement is enforced by custom, by the fact that the family holds the land, and by the certainty of public disgrace. No law is needed.

In an industrial society, adult children have migrated for work, the household is nuclear, and neighbours are strangers. The customary machinery has gone, and what appears in its place is legal and administrative: a pension, a maintenance obligation, a tribunal to enforce it.

In a post-industrial society the machinery becomes more formal still: insurance, savings instruments, care institutions, and rules regulating each.

The example is worth keeping because it shows the whole logic of this subject in one page. The need did not change; the social structure changed, and law appeared exactly where the informal arrangement withdrew. That is a proposition an examiner rewards, and it is the theme of [Formal and Informal Social Control].

What society is NOT

Not a group. A group is any set of interacting people with a sense of belonging, and a society contains thousands of them. Society is the widest system within which the groups sit.

Not a community. A community is a group of people living in a particular locality with a sense of belonging to it. A society may contain many communities, as [Community, Association and Institution] explains.

Not the state. The state is one institution within a society, a political one.

Not a physical thing. Society is a system of relationships, and therefore abstract.

Quick revision

1. Society is the web of social relationships (MacIver and Page), not a collection of people and not a country.
2. Characteristics: people, mutual awareness and interaction, likeness, difference, interdependence, cooperation and conflict, abstractness, shared culture, dynamism, social control, territory and continuity.
3. Likeness is primary, difference is necessary.
4. Types by subsistence: hunting and gathering, pastoral, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, post-industrial (Lenski).
5. Types by solidarity: mechanical and organic (Durkheim).
6. Types by association: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Tonnies).
7. Types by openness: closed (caste) and open (class).
8. As societies move from agrarian to industrial, informal supports weaken and law appears in their place.

Test yourself

1. Define society and say why it is not the same as its members. Society is the web of social relationships among people living a common life, in MacIver and Page's phrase. It is not the same as its members because what constitutes it is the pattern of relationships rather than the persons occupying them: every member of a society is replaced within a century, and the society continues.

2. Distinguish society from the state. The state is a political institution with a government, a defined territory and coercive authority. Society is the entire web of social relationships within which such an institution exists. Societies existed long before states, one state may contain several societies, and a society may extend across state boundaries.

3. Give six characteristics of society. It consists of people; its members are mutually aware and interact; it rests on likeness, which MacIver called the primary basis of social life, and equally on difference, without which there could be no division of labour; its members are interdependent; it contains both cooperation and conflict as permanent processes; and it is abstract, dynamic and maintained by social control.

4. Distinguish Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft. Tonnies's pair. In Gemeinschaft, or community, relationships are personal, enduring, based on kinship and locality, and valued for their own sake. In Gesellschaft, or association, they are impersonal, specialised, contractual and entered into as a means to an end. Modern history, on his account, is the movement from the first towards the second.

5. Why is inequality slight in hunting and gathering societies and sharp in agrarian ones? Because inequality requires something that can be accumulated. Foraging produces little that can be stored, so there is no durable surplus to concentrate and no basis for hereditary advantage. Agriculture produces a storable surplus and fixes people to land that can be owned and inherited, and the surplus supports rulers, priests and armies, so rank hardens into caste and class.

Regional pluralism

Region overlaps language but is not the same thing. It is the attachment to a territory with its own history, economy and cultural style, and it operates at several scales at once: the state, the sub-region within a state, the metropolitan city.

Its bases. Distinct pre-colonial political histories; sharp differences in economic development, which generate grievances about the sharing of resources, of river waters and of central revenues; distinct cuisines, dress, festivals and literatures; and geography itself.

Its expressions. State-level political parties with no national presence, which is one of the most striking features of Indian politics; demands for new states, several of which have succeeded; movements for autonomy; and hostility to migrants from other regions, which has appeared repeatedly in Indian cities including Mumbai.

The institutional response. A federal constitution with a division of legislative powers; the ability of Parliament to form new states; special provisions for particular states and areas; and the Fifth and Sixth Schedules for the administration of Scheduled Areas and tribal areas.

Ethnic pluralism

The word MU prints is "Ethic", which is a printing slip for ethnic. An ethnic group is a group whose members share a sense of common descent, history and culture, and are recognised by themselves and others as distinct. Ethnicity is dealt with fully in [Race and Ethnicity]; here it is one axis of Indian plurality.

The tribal dimension. The Constitution provides for the specification of Scheduled Tribes, and the 2011 Census returned Scheduled Tribes at a little over eight per cent of the population, with several hundred communities notified. They are concentrated in central India and the North East, they speak languages of families quite different from those around them, and their relation to land and forest differs fundamentally from that of the surrounding peasant society.

The North East. The region contains a large number of distinct communities within a small population, which is why the Sixth Schedule provides for autonomous district councils rather than the ordinary pattern of administration.

Ethnicity is not race. Race, so far as it means a biological classification of humanity, is not a useful category and is dealt with as a social construct in [Race and Ethnicity]. Ethnicity is about descent as socially understood, culture and identification.

Cultural pluralism

Culture is the widest of the four axes and includes the others, so an answer should treat it as the general case.

Religion. The 2011 Census returned Hindus at a little under eighty per cent of the population and Muslims at a little over fourteen per cent, with Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains making up most of the remainder. Each of those figures conceals internal plurality: there is no single Hindu or Muslim practice across the country.

Caste. Caste is a form of cultural and social plurality peculiar to South Asia, and is treated in [Caste].

Custom and personal law. India's most striking institutional recognition of cultural pluralism is that family relations are governed by different bodies of law for different communities, alongside a secular alternative. This is legal pluralism in the strict sense, and it is taken up in [Legal Pluralism].

Everyday culture. Food, dress, kinship terminology, marriage rules, inheritance practice, festivals and calendars all vary sharply, and none of it is uniform even within a single state.

The institutional response, gathered

For an examiner, the list of arrangements is what turns a description into an answer.

A worked example

A central law makes registration of marriages compulsory and provides a single form and a single registering authority.

• Linguistically, the form exists in a limited number of languages, and a couple who read none of them depends on an intermediary, which is where cost and misdescription enter.
• Regionally, the registering machinery is dense in some states and thin in others, so a formally uniform obligation produces very different real burdens.
• Ethnically, communities whose marriage is constituted by a ceremony recognised by the community and by no document at all must now translate that event into a category on a form.
• Culturally, the definitions in the form, of marriage, of the date of marriage, of who may attest, fit some communities' practice closely and others' badly.

The law is the same everywhere. Its social meaning and its practical cost are not, and predicting that is the professional value of this chapter.

The criticisms and the debates

1. Does recognition entrench division? The standing objection to accommodating groups is that it makes group identity more, not less, salient in public life. The standing reply is that difference does not disappear when it is ignored, and that unrecognised minorities fare worse.
2. Uniformity against pluralism. The debate over a uniform civil code is the sharpest instance, and it is a genuine conflict between two goods, equality of citizens and respect for communities, not a conflict between right and wrong. [Legal Pluralism] treats it.
3. Plurality within groups. Every group named here is itself plural, and speaking of the interests of a community can conceal the subordination of women and of lower-status members within it.
4. Composite culture. Against every account of India as a set of separate blocks stands the observable fact of shared practice, common festivals, syncretic traditions and constant borrowing, and an answer that describes only separation describes the country badly.

Quick revision

1. Pluralism is organised, persisting group difference within one political society, not mere diversity and not assimilation.
2. Linguistic: 22 Eighth Schedule languages; 121 languages with 10,000 or more speakers in the 2011 Census; no language is spoken by a majority; states reorganised on language from 1956.
3. Regional: distinct histories, uneven development, strong state parties, demands for new states, hostility to migrants.
4. Ethnic: Scheduled Tribes a little over eight per cent in 2011; the North East; Fifth and Sixth Schedules. MU prints "Ethic", meaning ethnic.
5. Cultural: religion (Hindus a little under 80 per cent, Muslims a little over 14 per cent in 2011), caste, custom, personal laws.
6. The institutional response runs through federalism, language provisions, protective schedules and separate personal laws.
7. Debates: does recognition entrench division; uniformity against pluralism; plurality inside groups; the composite culture reply.

Test yourself

1. What is pluralism, and how does it differ from diversity and from assimilation? Pluralism is the coexistence within one political society of distinct groups that persist as groups, carrying their own institutions and acting collectively in public life. Diversity is the mere fact of difference among individuals; assimilation is the process by which difference dissolves into a common identity. Pluralism is organised difference that endures rather than dissolving.

2. Describe India's linguistic plurality and the arrangements made for it. Twenty-two languages are listed in the Eighth Schedule and the 2011 Census recorded 121 languages with at least ten thousand speakers; no single language is spoken by a majority. The arrangements include Hindi as the official language of the Union with English continuing in use, the reorganisation of states on linguistic lines from 1956, the power of a state to adopt its own official language, and safeguards for instruction in the mother tongue for linguistic minority children.

3. Why does regional pluralism produce demands for new states? Because region combines a distinct history and cultural style with uneven economic development, so a sub-region that believes it is neglected within a larger state has both an identity to appeal to and a grievance to mobilise around. The constitutional power of Parliament to form new states makes the demand a realistic one, and several such demands have succeeded.

4. How does India's law recognise cultural plurality, and what is the objection? Chiefly by governing family relations through different bodies of personal law for different communities, alongside a secular alternative, and by guaranteeing religious freedom and minority educational rights. The objection is that differential treatment entrenches group identity and can leave individuals, especially women, subject to internal norms less favourable than the general law would give them.

5. Give one criticism of describing India as a plural society. That an account built entirely out of separate blocks misses the composite culture: shared festivals, syncretic religious traditions, common languages of exchange and constant cultural borrowing are as much a part of the observable record as separation is, and a description that omits them misdescribes the country.

Group, aggregate and category: the distinction that carries marks

This is where beginners go wrong and examiners look.

The example worth remembering. The passengers in a local train compartment are an aggregate. If the train stops for two hours in the middle of nowhere, they begin to talk, organise, share water, appoint someone to speak to the guard, and develop expectations of one another. They have become a group, and the transformation shows exactly what the elements are.

Why the difference has legal consequences. A social category can be a legal category: legislation frequently addresses all persons of a certain description, who need never have met. A group can act, hold a common intention and be represented; an aggregate and a category cannot, without machinery that converts them into associations. That machinery, registration, incorporation, representative proceedings, is a large part of what law does about groups.

A worked example

In a court building on a Monday morning:

The people queuing at the filing counter are an aggregate. They are together, they interact minimally, and if the counter opens on time they will disperse having formed no relationship.

The bar association is a group. Its members interact repeatedly, know one another, share interests, have norms about how a member behaves towards another, have offices and roles, and enforce their expectations by approval and disapproval long before any formal machinery is invoked.

All the litigants in the building are a category. They share a characteristic, having a matter listed, but they do not interact as such, have no consciousness of kind and no norms.

Now watch the aggregate become a group. If the counter stays closed for three hours, the queue starts talking, someone drafts a complaint, someone else collects signatures, and by noon there is a spokesperson. Interaction has produced awareness, awareness has produced we-feeling, and a common goal has produced a rudimentary structure. That is the process in miniature, and it is also how a great many associations and unions actually begin.

The importance of groups

• Socialisation. The group is where a person learns language, norms, values and roles, which is [Socialization].
• Identity. Membership tells a person who they are, and Cooley's looking-glass self in [Symbolic Interactionism] shows the mechanism.
• Control. The group's approval and disapproval do more to regulate conduct than any statute.
• Achievement. Almost nothing large is done by individuals; groups pool effort and divide labour.
• Security and support. Emotional and material, which is why isolation is a serious social condition and not merely an unhappy one.

What a group is NOT

Not merely a number of people. Without interaction there is no group.

Not necessarily an organisation. An organisation is a group with a formal structure, written rules and offices. Every organisation is a group; most groups are not organisations. This is the next distinction, in [Organized and Unorganized Groups].

Not necessarily a physical gathering. Members of a family living in three cities remain a group; a hundred strangers in a lift are not.

Not always beneficial. Groups produce conformity, exclusion and hostility to outsiders as readily as support, which is what [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups] examines.

Quick revision

1. A social group is two or more people who interact, are mutually aware, and share a sense of belonging.
2. Characteristics: individuals, interaction, mutual awareness, we-feeling, common interests, norms, statuses and roles, similarity of behaviour, stability, dynamism, control over members.
3. Group against aggregate against category: interaction and we-feeling are the tests. Train passengers are an aggregate; all women are a category; a family is a group.
4. An aggregate becomes a group when interaction begins and a common goal appears.
5. Groups matter because they socialise, confer identity, control conduct, achieve what individuals cannot, and provide security.
6. A group is not necessarily an organisation, and is not necessarily benign.

Test yourself

1. Define a social group and give four of its characteristics. Two or more individuals in reciprocal interaction who are mutually aware, share common interests, and possess a sense of belonging together. Characteristics include regular interaction; mutual awareness; a we-feeling or consciousness of kind; common interests or goals; norms governing members' conduct; and a structure of statuses and roles.

2. Distinguish a social group from an aggregate and from a category, with examples. A group interacts regularly and has a we-feeling: a family, a trade union branch. An aggregate is people physically together without regular interaction or belonging: a crowd on a railway platform. A category is people sharing a characteristic who need not ever meet: all left-handed people, all citizens over sixty. Interaction and we-feeling are the two tests.

3. How does an aggregate become a group? Through interaction produced by a shared situation. Passengers stranded on a stopped train begin to talk, discover a common problem, cooperate, develop expectations of one another and appoint someone to act for them. Interaction produces mutual awareness, awareness produces a sense of belonging, and a common goal produces a rudimentary structure of roles.

4. Why does the group matter to a lawyer? Because legal rules address individuals but operate on people embedded in groups whose norms usually decide whether the rule is obeyed; because a group can form a common intention and act, while an aggregate and a category cannot without legal machinery such as registration or representative proceedings; and because group pressure is a stronger regulator of conduct than the sanction attached to most statutes.

5. Is every group an organisation? No. An organisation is a group that has acquired a formal structure with written rules, defined offices and explicit procedures. Every organisation is a group, but most groups, a family or a circle of friends, are not organisations, though they still have norms and roles.

Secondary groups

Characteristics

1. Large size, often very large, so that most members never meet.
2. Impersonal, indirect relationships, frequently conducted through writing, forms and intermediaries.
3. Formal organisation: written rules, offices, procedures, records.
4. Specialisation. The relationship covers one function only. A bank knows a customer as an account.
5. Relationships are means to ends. One joins to obtain something.
6. Voluntary and easily ended. Membership is entered and left by choice, usually by a procedure.
7. Status depends on role, and roles are transferable: the office survives the officer.
8. Formal social control, through rules, penalties, dismissal, and ultimately law.
9. Goal-oriented and often self-interested.
10. Weak we-feeling, or a we-feeling attached to the organisation as an abstraction.

What they do

They accomplish what small groups cannot: production, administration, education at scale, justice. They allow specialisation, which is the source of modern productivity. They widen horizons beyond the accident of birth, and they provide mobility: a person's position in a secondary group depends on what they can do rather than on who they are, at least in principle.

The comparison

A worked example

Anjali is a junior advocate.

In her chambers, four people work together daily, know each other's families, cover for each other's illnesses, and quarrel and make it up. Nobody has written down what is expected. This is a primary group inside a professional setting, and it shows that the two types are not sorted by subject matter.

In the Bar Council she is a membership number. Her relationship with it is conducted by form and by post, governed by written rules, and would continue unchanged if every officer were replaced tomorrow. That is secondary.

When the two conflict, the interesting question appears. If a chamber colleague behaves in a way the professional rules forbid, Anjali is caught between a primary group's demand for loyalty and a secondary group's formal duty. This conflict is one of the central problems of professional regulation and reappears in [Sociology of the Legal Profession]. It also explains a great deal of failure to report misconduct in institutions generally: the formal rule is competing with a primary bond, and primary bonds usually win.

Primary groups inside secondary ones

The most useful modern development of the distinction is the discovery that primary groups form spontaneously inside large organisations, and that they largely determine how those organisations actually work.

Industrial research from the 1920s and 1930s onward found that the informal work group, the handful of people who take their breaks together, sets the real pace of work, protects its members, and enforces its own norms against management's expectations. The formal organisation chart describes the secondary structure; the informal groups describe how the place runs. Any lawyer advising on workplace policy who ignores this will draft rules that are quietly nullified.

Criticism and limits

1. The distinction is a continuum, not two boxes. Many groups sit between: a small firm, a village panchayat, a college class. The right treatment is to say a group is more or less primary.
2. Face-to-face contact is no longer necessary. Sustained intimacy at a distance is now ordinary, and a friendship maintained across cities can be more primary than a neighbour one nods at. The requirement should be read as intimacy rather than proximity.
3. Primary groups are idealised. The family is also the commonest site of violence, and the play group of bullying. Cooley's warmth about them does not survive the evidence intact.
4. Tertiary relationships. Some writers add a third category for wholly impersonal, transitory contacts, with a shopkeeper or a call centre, where even the specialised relationship of a secondary group is absent.

Quick revision

1. Cooley coined primary group; they are primary because they form human nature, not because they come first.
2. His three near-universal instances: the family, the children's play group, the neighbourhood group of elders.
3. Primary: small, face-to-face, intimate, an end in itself, durable, unspecialised, non-transferable, informally controlled.
4. Secondary: large, impersonal, formally organised, specialised, a means to an end, voluntary, transferable, formally controlled.
5. Primary groups socialise; secondary groups achieve at scale.
6. Primary groups form inside secondary ones and largely determine how organisations actually work.
7. Criticisms: it is a continuum; face-to-face contact is not essential now; primary groups are idealised; some add a tertiary category.

Test yourself

1. Define a primary group and say why Cooley called it primary. A group marked by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation, in which members' personalities fuse into a common whole and the individual identifies their own self with the life and purposes of the group. Cooley called it primary because it is fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual, not because it comes first in time.

2. Give six points of difference between primary and secondary groups. Size, small against large; contact, face-to-face against indirect; relationship, personal and whole-person against impersonal and specialised; purpose, an end in itself against a means to an end; structure and control, informal through affection and shame against formal through written rules and penalties; and substitutability, members irreplaceable against members interchangeable so that the office outlives the holder.

3. Give an example of a primary group inside a secondary group and say why it matters. The small set of workers who take their breaks together inside a large factory. It matters because such informal groups set the real pace of work and enforce their own norms, so the organisation's formal rules are mediated through them; a policy drafted without regard to them is likely to be quietly nullified.

4. Why is the distinction better treated as a continuum? Because many real groups have features of both. A village panchayat, a small firm or a college class combines personal knowledge of members with formal roles and written procedures. Treating the two as exclusive boxes forces a misdescription, whereas asking how far a group is primary describes it accurately.

5. What is the standing criticism of Cooley's account of primary groups? That it idealises them. The family is described as the nursery of human nature, and it is also the commonest setting for violence and coercion; the play group teaches cooperation and also bullying and exclusion. The category is sound but the warmth attached to it does not survive the evidence.

Discrimination in employment, housing and admission is out-group treatment.

Selective enforcement follows the same lines: the same conduct is read as a lapse in an in-group member and as a character trait in an out-group member. This is where the mechanism of prejudice meets the conflict perspective's point in [The Conflict Perspective].

Jury and bench composition, wherever it arises, is a question about whose in-group is judging whom.

Reference groups

Merton's account

A reference group is the group a person uses as a standard of comparison for evaluating themselves. Its power is that it need not be a group the person belongs to.

Merton's classic finding, from research on American soldiers, is the one to cite because it is counter-intuitive and it makes the concept indispensable. Soldiers in units with high promotion rates were less satisfied with promotion than soldiers in units with low rates. On any simple account this is absurd. It becomes intelligible once you see that satisfaction is not a function of the objective position but of the comparison: where many are promoted, a man not promoted compares himself with those who were and feels aggrieved; where few are, he compares himself with the many who were not and feels ordinary. Merton called this relative deprivation.

The functions of a reference group

• Normative, when it sets the standards a person tries to live up to.
• Comparative, when it provides the yardstick against which a person measures their own position.
• Anticipatory socialisation, when a person adopts the values and manners of a group they hope to join, before they join it. A first-year law student who begins to dress, speak and read like an advocate is doing this, and Merton's point is that it makes entry easier if they succeed and leaves them stranded between two groups if they fail.

Relative deprivation, and why it explains discontent

The concept explains a pattern that puzzles governments: discontent frequently rises when conditions improve. If a group's circumstances get better but the group it compares itself with improves faster, deprivation increases although the absolute position has risen.

This is one of the most useful ideas in the whole module for a law student, because it explains why a benefit conferred on one group can produce grievance in another that has lost nothing, and why the perceived fairness of a scheme depends on the comparison it invites rather than on its own terms.

The three compared

The distinction students miss. An in-group is about belonging; a reference group is about evaluating. They coincide often but not always, and the interesting cases are those in which they diverge: a person from a poor household who takes a professional class as their reference group, or a member of a community who has adopted the standards of another and is judged disloyal by their own.

A worked example

Sameer joins a set of chambers after graduating from a college that was not the usual recruiting ground for it.

His in-group at the start is his college batch. He says we about them, and he explains a batchmate's failure as bad luck.

The chambers are an out-group he wishes to enter. He notices that its members are described in his batch's conversation as a type rather than as individuals, and he begins to notice the same being done to him.

The chambers are also his reference group, before he belongs. He changes what he wears, learns which reports are cited, stops using the phrases his batch uses. This is anticipatory socialisation, and it will help him if he is taken in.

Relative deprivation arrives at the end of the year. His stipend has risen, and he is unhappier than he was, because he now compares himself with juniors in the same chambers rather than with his batchmates. His absolute position improved and his satisfaction fell, which is Merton's finding exactly.

Criticism

1. The in-group and out-group division is treated as universal, and while the tendency is very widespread, its intensity varies enormously by society and situation, so it explains less by itself than it appears to.
2. The reference group concept is elastic. A person has many, they change with the question asked, and identifying which one is operating is often done after the fact, which weakens its predictive power.
3. Relative deprivation risks circularity. If discontent is explained by whatever comparison would produce it, the explanation is not testable unless the comparison group is identified independently.
4. The concepts describe rather than explain. They tell us that hostility follows group division; they do not say when division will produce hostility and when it will not.

Quick revision

1. Sumner: in-group, we-feeling, loyalty, cooperation; out-group, they-feeling, hostility, stereotyping. Attached idea: ethnocentrism.
2. In-group and out-group are relative and situational; a person has many.
3. The asymmetry of explanation, excusing our own and typifying theirs, is the engine of prejudice.
4. Merton: a reference group supplies the standards a person judges themselves by, whether or not they belong to it.
5. Its three functions: normative, comparative, and anticipatory socialisation.
6. Relative deprivation: satisfaction depends on the comparison, not the objective position. Soldiers in high-promotion units were less satisfied with promotion.
7. In-group is about belonging; reference group is about evaluating.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish an in-group from an out-group and give the characteristics of each. An in-group is one the individual belongs to and identifies with, marked by we-feeling, loyalty, mutual help, conformity to shared norms and a tendency to see members as individuals. An out-group is one they do not belong to, marked by they-feeling, indifference or hostility, competition, and a tendency to see members as interchangeable instances of a type, which is stereotyping.

2. What is ethnocentrism? Sumner's term for the tendency to regard one's own group as the centre of things and to evaluate all other groups by reference to its standards, so that other ways of living appear not merely different but inferior. It strengthens in-group solidarity and is a standing source of hostility to out-groups.

3. Define a reference group and give its three functions. A group whose standards, values and perspectives an individual uses as a frame of reference for evaluating their own situation and conduct, whether or not they are a member. Its functions are normative, setting standards to live up to; comparative, supplying a yardstick for self-evaluation; and anticipatory socialisation, whereby a person adopts the ways of a group they hope to join before joining it.

4. Explain relative deprivation with Merton's example. Deprivation felt by comparison rather than in absolute terms. Merton found that soldiers in units with high promotion rates were less satisfied with promotion than those in units where promotion was rare, because the unpromoted man in a fast-promoting unit compares himself with those who advanced and feels aggrieved, while in a slow unit he compares himself with the many who did not and feels ordinary.

5. Why does the distinction between in-group and reference group matter? Because belonging and evaluating are different things. A person may belong to one group while judging themselves by the standards of another, which explains both the ambition of those who adopt a group they hope to enter and the friction they meet from the group they came from, who read the adopted standards as disloyalty.

Types of crowd. A casual crowd, gathered by accident, such as onlookers at a fire. A conventional crowd, gathered for a purpose and behaving by established norms, such as an audience. An expressive crowd, gathered for emotional release, such as a festival procession. An acting or aggressive crowd, directed at a target, which is a mob.

How a crowd becomes a mob. Through a focus of attention, a shared definition of the situation, an emotion that builds by contagion, and a suggestion that supplies a target. The Thomas theorem in [Symbolic Interactionism] explains the middle step: what the crowd believes is happening becomes what it acts on, and it need not be true.

The competing explanations. The older view, associated with Gustave Le Bon, held that a crowd has a collective mind that submerges individual judgment. The modern view is more sober: crowd members do not lose their reason, but anonymity lowers the cost of acting, emergent norms replace ordinary ones for the duration, and people who came for different reasons converge on a common line of action. The modern view fits the evidence better, and saying so lifts an answer.

Why a lawyer needs this. Offences relating to unlawful assembly and rioting, the dispersal of assemblies, the doctrine of common object, and vicarious liability for the acts of an assembly all rest on propositions about how crowds behave. So does the question of individual responsibility: the law's difficulty in attributing an act to a person in a mob is the legal reflection of the sociological fact of anonymity.

The comparison

A worked example

A rumour spreads in a suburb that a cooperative bank is about to fail.

At nine in the morning the depositors outside the branch are a queue: an aggregate, no structure, no leadership, no common aim beyond each person's own.

By eleven they have become a crowd. They are talking, a shared definition of the situation has formed, emotion is rising, and someone has begun to speak for the rest.

By one, after an announcement is misheard, a section becomes an acting crowd, which is a mob: a target, a suggestion, and the anonymity of numbers.

Three weeks later the same depositors have formed a depositors' association, with a president, a subscription, a set of rules and an advocate. It is now an organized group, and for the first time it can do the things law recognises: hold property, appear in proceedings, bind its members and be answerable for what it does.

That progression is the whole chapter, and it shows why the distinction is not academic. Organisation is what converts a number of people into an entity the legal system can deal with, and the entire law of associations, societies, unions and companies exists to manage that conversion.

What this does NOT mean

Unorganized does not mean disorderly. A queue is unorganized in this sense and is highly orderly. A conventional crowd at a concert follows norms closely. The absence of formal structure is not the absence of regularity.

Organized does not mean effective. A body may have offices, rules and a constitution and still be incapable of acting.

It is not the same as the primary and secondary distinction. A family is a primary group and unorganized in this sense; an army unit is a secondary group and highly organized. But a small chamber may be primary and organized, and a large crowd is secondary in scale and unorganized. The two classifications cut across each other, and confusing them is a common error.

Quick revision

1. Organized: definite structure, rules, offices, division of functions, continuity beyond members, and the capacity to act as a unit.
2. Unorganized: interaction without structure, emergent leadership, indeterminate membership, duration limited to the occasion.
3. Organisation is a matter of degree.
4. Crowd characteristics: proximity, anonymity, suggestibility, heightened emotion, sense of invincibility, contagion.
5. Types of crowd: casual, conventional, expressive, acting or aggressive (the mob).
6. Le Bon's collective mind is the old explanation; the modern account uses anonymity, emergent norms and convergence.
7. Organisation is what lets a group be registered, represented, bound and made liable.
8. It is a different classification from primary and secondary, and the two cut across each other.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish organized from unorganized groups. An organized group has a definite structure of offices and statuses, settled rules and procedures, a division of functions and recognised authority; it acts as a unit and continues although its members change. An unorganized group has interaction and perhaps a common feeling but no stable structure, no defined offices and no settled rules; leadership is emergent, membership shifts, and it ends with the occasion.

2. Give the characteristics of a crowd and its four types. Physical proximity of many people, anonymity which dilutes individual responsibility, suggestibility, heightened emotion, a sense of invincibility from numbers, and the contagious spread of feeling. The types are casual, gathered by accident; conventional, gathered for a purpose and following established norms; expressive, gathered for emotional release; and acting or aggressive, directed at a target, which is a mob.

3. How does a crowd become a mob? Through a common focus of attention, a shared definition of the situation which need not be accurate, emotion that builds by contagion between people who are physically close, and a suggestion that supplies a target for action. Anonymity lowers the perceived cost of acting, and emergent norms displace the ordinary ones for the duration.

4. Why does the distinction matter legally? Because organisation is what allows a body of people to be treated as an entity: registered, represented, capable of holding property, of binding its members and of being made answerable. An unorganized group cannot be dealt with in that way, which is why the law reaches the crowd through the individual and through doctrines such as unlawful assembly and common object.

5. Is the distinction the same as primary and secondary? No, and the two classifications cut across each other. A family is primary and unorganized; an army unit is secondary and highly organized; a small set of chambers may be primary and organized; a large crowd is secondary in scale and wholly unorganized. Primary and secondary classify the quality of the relationship, organized and unorganized the presence of formal structure.

Ideal and practical norms

A distinction MU has set directly, and it is worth its own heading.

An ideal norm is the standard a society professes: what its members say ought to be done and would defend if challenged. A practical, real or operative norm is the standard actually observed in daily conduct.

The gap between them is normal and is not hypocrisy. Every society professes standards it does not fully keep, and the gap is data rather than scandal: it tells a researcher which norms are held as aspirations and which as working rules. Truthfulness in all dealings is an ideal norm in most societies; the practical norm permits the courtesies and evasions of ordinary life. Punctuality, non-discrimination in employment, and the prohibition of dowry are further instances where the professed and the observed standards differ measurably.

Why a lawyer should notice it. A statute enacts an ideal norm. Whether it is obeyed depends on the practical norm already in the field, and the size of the gap between the two predicts the cost of enforcement, which is the argument of [Law and Social Change]. It is also the source of a standing research problem: a survey asking what people think ought to be done measures the ideal norm, and only observation or record measures the practical one, which is why [Observation] insists that behaviour and reports of behaviour are different data.

Characteristics of norms

1. They are social, held by a group rather than an individual.
2. They are prescriptive: they state what ought to be, not what is.
3. They are relative to time, place and group. Nothing is a norm everywhere.
4. They are learned, through socialisation.
5. They carry sanctions, positive as well as negative: praise and standing as much as punishment.
6. They are mostly internalised, and this is the important one. Most people obey most norms without any external enforcement, because they have made the norm their own and would feel shame in breaking it. A society in which norms were obeyed only from fear of sanction could not be policed.
7. They vary in force, from the trivial to the absolute.
8. They change, and Module III is about how.

The functions of norms

They make behaviour predictable, which is the precondition of all cooperation. They provide order without constant supervision. They integrate the group by giving it a common standard. They control conduct, and they define the group, since to accept its norms is part of belonging to it.

Values

What they are

A value is a general and enduring conception of what is desirable. It is not attached to a particular situation, which is what distinguishes it from a norm. Honesty, equality, respect for elders, hospitality, patriotism, individual liberty, purity, family loyalty.

Characteristics

1. General and abstract, applying across situations.
2. Enduring, and slower to change than norms.
3. Shared, though never by everyone in a large society.
4. Hierarchically arranged: societies and persons rank their values, and the ranking matters more than the list, because the interesting cases are conflicts.
5. Emotionally charged, and defended when challenged.
6. The ground of norms: they supply the reason a norm is thought right.

How values and norms relate

The relation is one of justification. A value is why; a norm is what. The value of respect for life justifies norms against killing, against dangerous driving and against negligence in a hospital, and legal rules in each field. One value generates many norms; one norm may serve several values.

Value conflict is what makes hard cases. Liberty against security, individual autonomy against community integrity, equality against the recognition of difference. A society does not resolve these once; it settles them repeatedly and differently in different fields, and a great deal of constitutional adjudication is exactly that settlement.

Norms and values compared

Law among the norms

This is the section a law student should be able to reproduce in an examination.

Three propositions follow, and each is examinable.

Most law begins as a more. Prohibitions on killing and theft were moral norms long before they were enacted. Legislation ratifies and specifies what a society already believes.

Not all law corresponds to a more, and that is where enforcement becomes expensive. Traffic rules, registration requirements and tax provisions are largely norms without moral weight, obeyed from prudence rather than conviction, so obedience varies with the chance of being caught in a way that obedience to the prohibition on killing does not.

Law can move ahead of mores deliberately. A statute may forbid what much of the society still approves, as with untouchability, dowry or child marriage. This is the whole question of [Law and Social Change], and the sociological answer is that such a law can work but is slow, expensive and dependent on other forces changing the mores alongside it.

A worked example

A Mumbai road at eight in the morning.

Letting an elderly person cross first is a folkway. Nobody is punished for failing; it produces a look.

Not driving away after knocking someone down is a more. The condemnation is severe and immediate, and it does not depend on whether anyone reports the matter.

Stopping at a red light is a law. It is written, specific, and enforced by an agency with power to fine.

The chapter's point is in the comparison. Compliance with the third depends heavily on whether a camera or a constable is present, while compliance with the second does not, because the second is internalised and the third mostly is not. A rule supported only by sanction is expensive to enforce; a rule supported by a more enforces itself. That is the practical reason a legislator should care about sociology.

What this does NOT mean

Norms are not always followed, and the gap between the norm and actual behaviour is one of the standard subjects of research.

Values are not always practised. A society may hold equality as a value and practise discrimination. The gap is real data, not hypocrisy to be dismissed.

Norms are not always good. Norms sustaining untouchability or the seclusion of women are norms in exactly the same sense as norms of hospitality. The concept is descriptive.

Law is not the highest norm sociologically. It is the most formal, not the most powerful. In most people's lives, on most days, the mores of their group govern far more conduct than the statute book does.

Quick revision

1. Norm: a rule about how one ought to behave in a situation, carrying sanctions. Value: a general, enduring conception of what is desirable.
2. Sumner's classification: folkways, mores, taboo, and law; fashions and rituals are usually added.
3. Folkways: mild disapproval. Mores: strong moral condemnation. Taboo: absolute prohibition. Law: enacted, written, state-enforced.
4. Norms are social, prescriptive, relative, learned, sanctioned, internalised, variable in force, and changing.
5. A value is why, a norm is what. One value generates many norms.
6. Value conflict is what produces hard cases and much constitutional adjudication.
7. Most law begins as a more; law lacking moral support is expensive to enforce; law can be pushed ahead of mores, slowly and at a cost.

Test yourself

1. Define norms and values and state the relation between them. A norm is an accepted standard of behaviour prescribing what members of a group ought to do in a given situation and carrying sanctions for breach. A value is a general and enduring conception of what is good, right and desirable. The relation is one of justification: the value supplies the reason the norm is thought right, so a value is why and a norm is what, and one value generates many norms.

2. Distinguish folkways from mores, with examples. Folkways are ordinary customs whose breach produces mild disapproval and the judgment that a person is odd or ill-mannered, such as forms of greeting or dress at a wedding. Mores are norms regarded as essential to the group's welfare and carrying strong moral significance, such as prohibitions on incest or on killing, whose breach produces severe condemnation and which are felt by those who hold them as self-evident rather than as custom.

3. Where does law fit among the norms? Law is a norm distinguished by being deliberately enacted, written and specific, and enforced by the organised power of the state through specialised agencies. It differs from folkways and mores in its source, its form, its definiteness and its capacity to change immediately by legislation, and it is the most formal but not the most powerful regulator of everyday conduct.

4. Why is a law that does not correspond to a more expensive to enforce? Because obedience to such a rule is not internalised. People obey it from prudence rather than conviction, so compliance varies with the perceived chance of detection and requires continuous supervision. A rule that rests on a more is enforced by the person's own conscience and by the reaction of everyone around them, and therefore costs the state almost nothing.

5. Give an example of value conflict and its legal consequence. Liberty against security, or individual autonomy against the integrity of a community. Because a society ranks values differently in different fields and at different times, such conflicts are not settled once; they are resolved repeatedly and inconsistently, which is why a great deal of constitutional litigation consists of choosing between two values each of which the society genuinely holds.

Examples

A trade union, a company, a political party, a cooperative housing society, a bar association, a students' union, a religious trust.

Institution

The concept students find hardest

An institution is not a group of people. This is the single point on which marks turn, and the confusion is encouraged by ordinary usage, in which a hospital or a university is called an institution.

Sociologically, an institution is an established procedure: a set of norms, roles and practices organised around a permanent need of society. Marriage is an institution; a particular married couple is not. Property is an institution; a particular title deed is not. Law is an institution; the Bombay High Court is an organisation within it.

Characteristics

1. It is a system of norms and procedures, not a body of persons.
2. It meets a permanent social need: reproduction and child-rearing, subsistence, order, the sacred, the transmission of knowledge.
3. It is universal in its function, though its form varies enormously between societies. Every society has marriage of some kind; the forms are in [Forms of Marriage].
4. It is relatively permanent, changing slowly.
5. It is normative and obligatory. It prescribes, and departure is sanctioned.
6. It carries symbols and codes: a ring, a robe, a ceremony, a rulebook.
7. It is interconnected with the other institutions of the society, so change in one moves the others.

The five basic institutions

The list conventionally given is family, religion, economy, education and the state, including law, each answering one permanent need. Some writers add recreation.

The three compared

The compact way to remember it. A community is where people live; an association is what people form; an institution is how things are done. Or, in the standard formula: an association is a group organised for a purpose, an institution is the procedure that group follows. A trade union is an association; collective bargaining is an institution. A church congregation is an association; religion is an institution. A family is a group; marriage is an institution.

A worked example

Take a village in Ratnagiri district.

The village itself is a community. People live there, know one another, share a way of life, and have the three sentiments. Nobody chose to be born into it.

The cooperative society, the temple trust and the youth mandal are associations. Each was founded, each has a register of members, a set of rules and office-bearers, and each exists for one interest.

Marriage, property, caste, religion and law are institutions. No one is a member of marriage. It is the established way in which this society organises the union of two people and the raising of children, and it operates on everybody without anybody joining.

Now change one thing and watch the three respond. Say a road is built and half the young adults take work in Mumbai. The community weakens: contact falls, sentiment thins. The associations may formally survive with a membership that is absent. The institutions change slowest of all, but they do change: the joint household becomes harder to maintain, and the institution of the family shifts, which is [Changing Patterns of the Family].

What these are NOT

A community is not a society. A society is the whole web of relationships and may contain many communities.

An association is not a community. It is founded, not grown; partial, not whole; voluntary, not ascribed.

An institution is not a building or an organisation. A hospital is an organisation; medicine is the institution. Ordinary speech says otherwise, and an examiner is testing precisely whether you can set ordinary speech aside.

An institution is not the same as a norm. A norm is a single rule; an institution is a whole complex of norms, roles and procedures organised around a need.

Quick revision

1. Community: locality plus community sentiment (we-feeling, role-feeling, dependency-feeling). Covers the whole of common life, grows naturally, membership by birth or residence.
2. Association: deliberately founded, specific interest, organised, determinate and usually voluntary membership, capable of legal recognition.
3. Institution: NOT a group. An established system of norms and procedures meeting a permanent need. Universal in function, various in form.
4. Five basic institutions: family, religion, economy, education, and the state including law.
5. The formula: an association is a group organised for a purpose; an institution is the procedure it follows. Union and collective bargaining; congregation and religion; family and marriage.
6. A nation is an imagined community: sentiment and territory without face-to-face contact.

Test yourself

1. Define community and give its two essentials. A group of people living together in a definite locality and sharing a common way of life. Its essentials are locality, a definite territory the group occupies, and community sentiment, the feeling of belonging together, which MacIver analysed into we-feeling, role-feeling and dependency-feeling. Locality without sentiment is a settlement, not a community.

2. Distinguish an association from a community. An association is deliberately founded to pursue one specific interest, has a determinate and usually voluntary membership, a formal structure and rules, and lasts as long as the interest does. A community grows naturally, covers the whole of common life, is entered by birth or residence rather than by choice, and rests on community sentiment rather than on a shared purpose.

3. What is an institution, and why is a hospital not one? An institution is not a body of people but an established system of norms, roles and procedures by which a society regularly meets one of its permanent needs. A hospital is an organisation, a particular association of persons with premises and staff; the institution is medicine, or health care, the established way the society organises the treatment of illness, which operates through many hospitals and outlives all of them.

4. Give the relation between an association and an institution, with two examples. An association is a group organised for a purpose; an institution is the established procedure that group follows. A trade union is an association and collective bargaining is the institution; a congregation is an association and religion is the institution; a particular family is a group and marriage is the institution.

5. Is a nation a community? It satisfies both of MacIver's tests in one sense, since it occupies a territory and its members feel they belong together, but no member can know more than a tiny fraction of the others, so the face-to-face contact of a village is absent. Benedict Anderson's description of the nation as an imagined community captures this: the communion is real but is held in the mind of each member rather than produced by daily contact.

Status set is all the statuses one person holds at a given time: a woman may simultaneously be an advocate, a mother, a daughter, a tenant and a member of a housing society.

Status symbols are the outward marks by which a status is displayed and recognised: a robe, a uniform, a car, a title.

Role

The concepts that carry marks

Role set. Merton's term for the several role relationships attached to a single status. The status of judge carries relationships with advocates, litigants, court staff, the appellate court and the press. Note carefully: a status set is many statuses held by one person; a role set is many relationships attached to one status. Examiners test the difference.

Role expectation is what others believe the occupant should do; role performance is what the occupant actually does. The gap between them is where most social friction lives.

Role conflict arises when a person holds two or more statuses whose roles make incompatible demands. An advocate who is also the opposite party's cousin. A police officer whose duty is to arrest a neighbour.

Role strain arises within a single status, when the demands of one role are themselves incompatible. A judge must be patient with a litigant in person and must also dispose of a heavy board. Nothing outside the status is competing; the strain is internal to it.

That distinction, conflict between statuses and strain within one, is the most commonly examined thing in this chapter and the most commonly muddled.

Role distance, a term of Goffman's, is the visible detachment a person shows from a role they are performing, signalling that they are more than the role. A senior advocate who jokes about the ritual of the court while observing it perfectly is displaying role distance.

Role exit is the process of leaving a status central to one's identity, and it is rarely clean: a retired judge, a former spouse, a person leaving a religious order.

A worked example

Advocate Nikita Rane appears for a tenant in an eviction matter.

Her status set that afternoon: advocate, daughter, member of the bar association, tenant of her own flat, mother of a child whose school ends at three.

Her role set as advocate alone: obligations to her client, duties to the court, professional obligations to her opponent, responsibilities to her junior, obligations to the association.

Role strain, inside the single status of advocate: her duty to advance her client's case fully, and her duty not to mislead the court, are both duties of that one status and they pull against each other when her client instructs her to advance a version she doubts.

Role conflict, between two statuses: the matter is listed at two thirty, her child's school closes at three, and the roles of advocate and mother make incompatible demands at the same hour. Nothing is wrong with either role; they simply cannot both be performed.

How such conflicts are resolved, which is what an examiner wants after the definitions:

• Ranking the roles. Societies rank obligations, and a court appearance ordinarily outranks a school pickup, which is why the resolution feels obvious even though nothing formal decides it.
• Segregating them in time and space. The professional and domestic roles are kept in separate places and hours, and conflict appears exactly where the segregation fails.
• Delegating. Someone else collects the child.
• Formal rules. Professional rules resolve the strain inside the advocate's status by providing that the duty to the court prevails, which is precisely a society settling a role strain by legislation.

That last point is worth carrying into Module IV. A great deal of law is a society's settled answer to a recurring role conflict: rules on conflict of interest, on recusal, on the duties of a director, on the responsibilities of a trustee. Each names two roles that pull apart and says which wins.

Status and role compared

What this does NOT mean

A role is not a personality. Two very different people can perform the same role adequately, and the same person performs many roles in a day.

Statuses are not always ranked. Some are graded, but many are simply different positions.

Role playing is not insincerity. A person adapting their behaviour to the situation is behaving normally, and the failure to do so, behaving identically in a courtroom, at a funeral and at a party, is what strikes others as strange.

Ascribed does not mean unchangeable. Some ascribed statuses can be altered; the point is that they are not acquired by effort.

Quick revision

1. Linton: a person occupies a status and plays a role. Status is static, role is dynamic.
2. Ascribed: given at birth or without effort. Achieved: acquired by effort or choice. Achievement usually begins from an ascribed starting point.
3. Master status overrides the rest in how a person is treated.
4. Status set: many statuses, one person. Role set (Merton): many relationships, one status.
5. Role conflict: between two statuses. Role strain: within one status.
6. Role distance (Goffman); role exit.
7. Conflicts are resolved by ranking, segregation in time and space, delegation, and formal rules.
8. Much law is a settled answer to a recurring role conflict: conflict of interest, recusal, fiduciary duty.

Test yourself

1. Define status and role and state the relation between them. A status is a socially defined position in a group or society, carrying rights, duties and privileges. A role is the pattern of behaviour expected of whoever occupies that position. In Linton's formulation a person occupies a status and plays a role: status is the static positional aspect and role its dynamic behavioural aspect.

2. Distinguish ascribed from achieved status, and say why the distinction is not clean. Ascribed status is assigned without regard to ability or effort, usually at birth, such as sex, age, caste or family. Achieved status is acquired through effort, choice or competition, such as advocate or graduate. The distinction is not clean because achievement almost always starts from an ascribed position: schooling, language, money and contacts, which decide who can achieve, are themselves largely inherited.

3. Distinguish role conflict from role strain, with examples. Role conflict arises between two or more statuses whose roles make incompatible demands, as when an advocate's hearing and her child's school closing fall at the same hour. Role strain arises within a single status, when that one role's own demands pull apart, as when an advocate's duty to advance her client's case fully conflicts with her duty not to mislead the court.

4. Distinguish a status set from a role set. A status set is all the statuses one person occupies at a given time: advocate, mother, daughter, tenant. A role set, Merton's term, is the several role relationships attached to a single status: the status of judge carries relationships with advocates, litigants, staff, the appellate court and the press. One is about a person, the other about a position.

5. How does law relate to role conflict? A great deal of law is a society's settled answer to a recurring conflict of roles. Rules on conflict of interest, judicial recusal, the duties of directors and the obligations of trustees each identify two roles that pull in different directions and lay down which is to prevail, so that the conflict is resolved in advance and identically for everyone rather than case by case.

The peer group

The first agency the person chooses, and the first among equals rather than superiors. Its influence peaks in adolescence and it is the only agency capable of transmitting norms that oppose the others. It teaches negotiation, cooperation and competition between equals, and it is where much deviance is learned, which is the basis of differential association theory in [Explaining Deviance: The Sociological Theories].

The school

The agency of formal, deliberate socialisation. It transmits knowledge and skills, and along with them the hidden curriculum: punctuality, obedience to a timetable, competition, respect for impersonal authority, and the habit of being evaluated by strangers according to written rules. The hidden curriculum is arguably the more important half, since it is the training for participation in secondary groups and bureaucratic organisations.

Religion

Transmits values, a moral vocabulary, a sense of the sacred, and ritual. Its socialising power is greatest where practice is regular and the community is closely knit.

The workplace and the occupation

Adult socialisation happens mostly here. A person learns not just a job but an occupational culture: how members of this trade speak, what they think important, whom they defer to, what they may say to an outsider. Professional socialisation is an intense instance, and it is a subject of [Sociology of the Legal Profession].

The mass media

Now among the most powerful agencies, reaching a person continuously and largely without supervision. Its distinctive features are reach, repetition, and the presentation of models of behaviour, appearance and success. Its effects are contested, and the debate is in [Mass Media and Its Impact].

The state and the law

Often omitted and worth including. The state socialises through compulsory schooling, the curriculum, national symbols and ceremonies, and through law itself, which teaches by declaring what is unacceptable. That teaching function is one of the strongest arguments for legislating ahead of public opinion, taken up in [Law and Social Change].

The types of socialization

• Primary socialization, in early childhood, in the family. The most consequential.
• Secondary socialization, in later childhood and beyond, in school, peer group and workplace.
• Anticipatory socialization, learning the ways of a group one hopes to join before joining it, as in [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups].
• Resocialization, the deliberate replacement of a person's previous norms and values with new ones. It occurs in prisons, the army, religious orders and rehabilitation programmes, and the more thorough versions occur in what Goffman called total institutions, where a person's whole life is conducted in one place under one authority, cut off from the wider society. Prisons and mental hospitals are the standing examples, and the concept has been influential in criminology.
• Developmental socialization, the ordinary building of new skills onto existing ones through adult life.

Theories: the two that carry marks

Cooley: the looking-glass self. We come to know ourselves through the imagined judgments of others, in three moments: imagining our appearance to another, imagining their judgment, and feeling pride or mortification. Worked in [Symbolic Interactionism].

Mead: the stages and the generalized other. The child moves from imitation, through the play stage of taking one role at a time, to the game stage of holding all the roles in mind at once, and so arrives at the generalized other, the internalised attitude of the community. The self divides into the I, the spontaneous responder, and the me, the organised attitudes of others taken into oneself.

Freud is usually added: the personality divided into the id, the pool of biological drives; the superego, the internalised moral demands of society; and the ego, which mediates between them and reality. Freud's contribution to sociology is the idea that socialisation is not painless: it requires the renunciation of desires, and the conflict is permanent.

A worked example

Take a person from first year to the fifth year of practice.

Anticipatory socialisation begins before enrolment: the student changes how they speak, what they read, how they dress, on the model of a group they have not joined.

Formal socialisation teaches doctrine, but the more durable teaching is the hidden curriculum of legal education: that an argument must be authority-backed, that both sides of a proposition can be argued, that emotion is not an argument.

Occupational socialisation in chambers teaches what no syllabus contains: how to address a registrar, when a matter is really going to be heard, what may be said to an opponent outside court, how much confidence to show a client. It is learned by watching, and it is transmitted by a primary group inside a secondary institution, which is exactly the structure identified in [Primary and Secondary Groups].

Role distance appears around the third year: the person can perform the role fully and simultaneously signal that they see it as a performance.

The professional self is complete when the person's judgment of their own conduct is made by reference to the profession's standards rather than to those of their family or their college batch. The reference group has changed, and that change is what socialisation into an occupation actually is.

Limits, failure and criticism

Socialisation is never total. Every society produces people who do not internalise its norms, which is why it also needs the formal controls of Module II.

It is not deterministic. People resist, select and reinterpret. A model in which the person is simply moulded is the standard objection to the functionalist account of socialisation.

Its content can be examined critically. Socialisation transmits the inequalities of a society as readily as its virtues: gender roles, caste attitudes and class expectations are learned in exactly the way that honesty is.

Conflicting agencies. Family, peer group, school and media frequently teach incompatible things, and a person is not a passive recipient of a single message. This conflict is itself a source of social change.

Over-socialised conception of man. The influential objection that sociology sometimes describes people as though they were nothing but the sum of what they absorbed, leaving no room for the choosing individual.

Quick revision

1. Socialization is the lifelong process by which a person learns and internalises the norms, values, language and roles of their society and develops a self.
2. It is lifelong, two-way, largely unconscious, social, universal in occurrence but varied in content, and never complete.
3. Agencies: family (primary and most powerful), peer group (the first chosen, and where deviance is learned), school (the hidden curriculum), religion, workplace, mass media, the state and law.
4. Types: primary, secondary, anticipatory, resocialization (Goffman's total institutions), developmental.
5. Cooley: looking-glass self. Mead: play stage, game stage, generalized other, the I and the me. Freud: id, superego, ego, and socialisation as renunciation.
6. It explains why behaviour is regular although almost none of it is enforced.
7. Criticism: never total, not deterministic, transmits inequality, agencies conflict, and the over-socialised conception of man.

Test yourself

1. Define socialization and give four of its characteristics. The process by which a person, through interaction with others, learns and internalises the norms, values, beliefs, language, skills and roles of their society and thereby becomes a functioning member of it. It is lifelong rather than confined to childhood; it is a two-way process in which the person interprets and resists rather than merely absorbing; it is largely unconscious on both sides; and it is universal in occurrence though its content differs completely between societies.

2. Why is the family the primary agency? Because it acts first, on a person with no prior norms and no defences; because it acts continuously through the years in which capacities are formed; because the child has no alternative source and no choice of membership; and because it acts with an emotional force no later agency matches. It transmits language, elementary morality, sex roles, religion, and the family's own class and caste position.

3. Distinguish primary, secondary and anticipatory socialization. Primary socialization occurs in early childhood, chiefly in the family, and is the most consequential. Secondary socialization occurs later, in school, peer group and workplace, and builds on it. Anticipatory socialization is the learning of the ways of a group one hopes to join before joining it, which eases entry if one is admitted and leaves one stranded if one is not.

4. What is resocialization, and what is a total institution? Resocialization is the deliberate replacement of a person's existing norms and values with new ones, as in prisons, the army, religious orders and rehabilitation programmes. A total institution, in Goffman's phrase, is a place where a person's whole life is conducted under a single authority, cut off from the wider society, so that the previous self can be stripped away and rebuilt; prisons and mental hospitals are the standing examples.

5. How does socialization explain social order better than the threat of punishment does? Because most conduct is never observed and most rules are never enforced, yet behaviour remains highly regular. Socialization explains this by showing that the norms have been internalised: a person conforms not from calculation about sanctions but because they have become the kind of person for whom the alternative is unthinkable or shameful. Formal punishment deals only with the residue this process fails to reach.

The characteristics of culture

1. Learned, not inherited. This is the first and most important. A child of any ancestry raised in any society acquires that society's culture.
2. Social. It exists in a group, never in one person.
3. Shared, though not equally by everyone.
4. Transmitted across generations, which is what makes it cumulative.
5. Cumulative. Each generation adds without having to rediscover, which is why change accelerates.
6. Adaptive, changing in response to environment and circumstance.
7. Integrated. The parts hang together, so a change in one produces strain elsewhere.
8. Gratifying. It supplies the means of satisfying human needs.
9. Variable. It differs from society to society and within a society over time.
10. Idealistic and real at once. What a culture says it does and what its members actually do are different, and both are data.

Culture and society

They are not the same, and the difference is examinable. Society is the group of people and the web of their relationships; culture is their way of life. Society is the organisation; culture is the content. Neither exists without the other: there is no society without a culture and no culture without a society to carry it.

The concepts a question is likely to want

Cultural relativism. The principle that a practice must be understood within its own cultural context and evaluated by that culture's standards rather than by the observer's. It is a method first: it prevents the immediate condemnation that stops enquiry. Its limit, and this must be stated, is that in its strong form it disables all criticism, including of practices that cause serious harm, and it sits badly with any universal account of human rights.

Ethnocentrism. The opposite error: judging another culture by the standards of one's own and finding it inferior. Discussed in [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups]. Ethnocentrism is the natural condition; relativism is a discipline imposed against it.

Xenocentrism is the less common reverse, a preference for what is foreign over what is one's own.

Subculture. A group within a society whose culture differs in some respects while sharing the larger culture: a professional subculture, a regional one, a youth subculture. The legal profession has a pronounced one.

Counterculture. A subculture whose values actively oppose those of the dominant culture.

Cultural diffusion. The spread of cultural traits from one society to another, now vastly accelerated, and the mechanism behind much of what [Liberalization and Globalization] discusses.

Cultural universals. Features found in every known culture, though in different forms: language, family of some kind, marriage rules, religion, incest prohibition, division of labour by age and sex, property rules, and some means of settling disputes.

A worked example

Consider a wedding in a Maharashtrian household.

Its material culture: the mandap, the garlands, the clothes, the printed invitation, the videographer's equipment.

Its non-material culture: the rituals in their order and their meaning; the norms about who may attend and who must be invited; the values expressed about family, purity and continuity; the language of the ceremony; the symbolism of each object.

Its cultural universals: every known society regulates marriage, prohibits certain unions as incestuous, and marks the union publicly.

Its cultural variation: which relatives may marry, who arranges it, what is transferred between families, and what makes it valid, differ completely between communities in the same city.

Its cultural lag: the ceremony's rules developed for a society in which the couple lived with the husband's parents on land the family held. Where the couple now live in a rented flat in another city and both earn, the ritual persists while the arrangements it assumed have gone.

Its law. Whether this marriage is valid, who may claim maintenance and how property devolves is decided by a body of law built on top of these cultural facts, which is why personal law is the clearest legal instance of culture, and why [Legal Pluralism] is a Module IV topic.

What culture is NOT

Not high culture. In ordinary speech a cultured person means a refined one. Sociologically, culture includes everything a society does: its cooking, its abuse, its queueing, its bribery.

Not biology. Culture is learned, and this is the entire point. Attributing a group's practices to its nature is a mistake with a long and ugly history.

Not uniform. Every large culture contains subcultures and contradictions.

Not static. It changes continuously, which is Module III.

Not society. Society is the people and their relationships; culture is their way of life.

Quick revision

1. Tylor: culture is that complex whole including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities acquired as a member of society.
2. Material culture, physical objects; non-material culture, ideas, norms, values, language, law.
3. Ogburn's cultural lag: material culture changes faster, non-material culture trails, and the gap is a period of maladjustment. Law is usually in the lag.
4. Elements: language, beliefs, values, norms, symbols, sanctions, technology.
5. Characteristics: learned, social, shared, transmitted, cumulative, adaptive, integrated, gratifying, variable.
6. Culture is the way of life; society is the people and their relationships.
7. Cultural relativism against ethnocentrism; relativism's limit is that in its strong form it disables criticism.
8. Subculture, counterculture, diffusion, cultural universals.

Test yourself

1. Define culture and give five of its characteristics. In Tylor's definition, that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a person as a member of society. It is learned rather than biologically inherited; social, existing only in a group; shared among members; transmitted across generations and therefore cumulative; and adaptive and continually changing.

2. Distinguish material from non-material culture, and explain cultural lag. Material culture is the physical objects a society makes and uses; non-material culture is its language, beliefs, values, norms and law. Ogburn observed that the material part usually changes faster and that the non-material part trails behind, leaving a period of maladjustment which he called cultural lag. Motor vehicles preceded traffic law and digital communication preceded rules on data and online harm.

3. Distinguish culture from society. Society is the group of people and the web of relationships among them; culture is their way of life, the learned and shared ideas, norms, values and objects they carry. Society is the organisation and culture is the content, and neither exists without the other.

4. What is cultural relativism, and what is its limit? The principle that a practice should be understood within its own cultural context and judged by that culture's standards rather than the observer's. Its value is methodological: it prevents the immediate condemnation that stops enquiry. Its limit is that in a strong form it removes any ground for criticising any practice, including one causing serious harm, and it is therefore difficult to reconcile with any universal account of human rights.

5. Why does cultural lag matter to a lawyer? Because it names the ordinary condition of legal practice. New technologies and new material arrangements arrive before the norms and rules that will govern them, so the law is characteristically behind, and this is a structural feature of how culture changes rather than a failure of drafting. It also cautions against assuming every innovation requires new legislation before the existing categories have been tested against it.

Moksha. Liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. It is the ultimate aim, and its pursuit ordinarily belongs to the later stages of life.

The relation between them. Dharma and moksha are the regulating and the ultimate aims; artha and kama are the worldly aims, legitimate within the first. The scheme is therefore neither ascetic nor materialist but an ordered accommodation of both, which is the sociologically interesting feature and the one an answer should state.

The four ashramas

Brahmacharya, the student stage: study, discipline, celibacy, and the acquisition of the skills and knowledge of one's station. In the language of this book it is a stage of socialisation.

Grihastha, the householder stage: marriage, children, occupation, the earning of wealth, and the support of the other three stages and of the society. The householder is the productive centre of the scheme, and the classical texts say so expressly.

Vanaprastha, retirement: withdrawal from active occupation, the handing over of responsibility, and preparation for the last stage.

Sannyasa, renunciation: complete withdrawal from worldly attachment in pursuit of moksha.

The sociological function of the scheme, which is what a question is asking for. It allocates the aims to the stages: kama and artha belong chiefly to the householder, dharma to all, moksha to the last. It thereby sequences a life so that competing aims do not conflict at the same moment; it provides for the transfer of authority between generations, which is a problem every society must solve; and it legitimates both worldly activity and its abandonment, so that a society can contain the merchant and the renouncer without contradiction. Louis Dumont's account of the renouncer as the individual outside a holistic society is the standard sociological treatment of that last point.

Karma, rebirth and the Indian ethos

Karma is the doctrine that action has consequences which attach to the actor across lives, and rebirth the cycle those consequences operate in. Their sociological significance is the connection with varna, treated in [Caste]: where present position is understood as the consequence of past action, an unequal order acquires a justification that is neither arbitrary nor imposed, which is the legitimation function that [Religion: Definition, Characteristics and Functions] identifies and which the conflict perspective reads as ideology.

The Indian ethos, as the phrase is used in these papers, refers to the value complex formed by these ideas together: dharma as duty specific to station, the recognised place of wealth and pleasure within it, the ordering of the life course, the doctrine of karma, the value placed on renunciation, the emphasis on the group and on obligation rather than on individual right, and the ideal of tolerance among paths.

The criticisms

These must be given, and an answer consisting only of exposition is incomplete.

1. It is a textual ideal, not a description. The scheme appears in the classical texts and was never the way most people lived. Most Indians in most periods have been cultivators and labourers whose lives had no vanaprastha and no sannyasa, and treating a normative text as an account of a society is the error Weber's Indian study was criticised for in [Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism].
2. It is the scheme of a section. It was elaborated by and for the twice-born, and applied unequally: the stages and the aims as stated were not available to all varnas, nor equally to women.
3. It legitimates inequality, since svadharma makes duty depend on the station one is born into, and karma explains that station as deserved. This is the conflict reading, and it is the reason Ambedkar's critique of the scheme was so uncompromising.
4. It has been read too readily as an explanation of economic conduct, which is the substance of the criticism of Weber's India study: Indian mercantile communities pursued artha as systematically as any Calvinist.
5. It is not what governs modern Indian life, which is organised by employment, education, law and the market, though elements of it survive in the value placed on obligation and on family duty.

The balanced conclusion for an answer: the purusharthas and ashramas are a value scheme of great historical importance and considerable explanatory use, provided they are treated as norms rather than as description, and provided the question of whose norms is asked.

A worked example

Take one man's life against the scheme, and then against the record.

Against the scheme. Ramesh studies, marries, works, provides for his parents and children, hands the business to his son at sixty, and turns to religious observance. Brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha, and something short of sannyasa: the classical sequence, and it fits.

Against the record, which is the sociological move. Ramesh's father worked until he died, because there was no surplus that would have allowed a vanaprastha. His wife's life had no ashrama scheme applied to it at all, her duties being defined by her relation to him. And Ramesh's own son has taken a job in another city and will not receive the business, so the transfer of authority the scheme provides for has no occasion to happen.

The example makes the chapter's point. The scheme describes a life that requires property, a male line, and a household that stays together, and where those conditions have gone, as [Changing Patterns of the Family] shows they largely have, the scheme survives as a value and not as a practice. That gap between the ideal norm and the practical norm is precisely what [Norms and Values] says to look for, and it is the right thing to say about the purusharthas in an examination.

Quick revision

1. Purusharthas, the four aims: dharma (duty, the regulating aim), artha (wealth), kama (desire and pleasure), moksha (liberation, the ultimate aim).
2. Artha and kama are recognised, not condemned; they are legitimate when pursued within dharma. The scheme is neither ascetic nor materialist.
3. Svadharma: duty specific to one's own station and stage.
4. Ashramas, the four stages: brahmacharya (student), grihastha (householder, the productive centre), vanaprastha (retirement), sannyasa (renunciation).
5. Its social functions: it allocates aims to stages so they do not conflict; it provides for the transfer of authority between generations; and it legitimates both worldly activity and renunciation.
6. Karma and rebirth connect the scheme to varna and supply the legitimation of an unequal order.
7. Indian ethos: duty by station, regulated wealth and pleasure, the ordered life course, karma, the value of renunciation, group and obligation over individual right, tolerance among paths.
8. Criticisms: a textual ideal rather than a description; the scheme of a section, unequally available by varna and to women; it legitimates inequality through svadharma and karma; it has been over-used to explain economic conduct; and it does not govern modern Indian life.

Test yourself

1. Name the four purusharthas and state the relation between them. Dharma, righteousness or duty; artha, wealth and material means; kama, desire and pleasure; and moksha, liberation. Dharma is the regulating aim and moksha the ultimate one, while artha and kama are the worldly aims which are legitimate when pursued within dharma. The scheme therefore neither condemns wealth and pleasure nor makes them supreme, which is its sociologically interesting feature: it is an ordered accommodation of worldly and other-worldly ends rather than a choice between them.

2. Name the four ashramas and state the sociological function of the scheme. Brahmacharya, the student stage of study and discipline; grihastha, the householder stage of marriage, occupation and provision, which the texts treat as the productive centre supporting the other three; vanaprastha, retirement and the handing over of responsibility; and sannyasa, renunciation in pursuit of liberation. Its functions are to allocate the competing aims to different stages so that they do not conflict at one moment, to provide an orderly transfer of authority between generations, and to legitimate both worldly activity and its abandonment within one society.

3. What is meant by the Indian ethos? The value complex formed by these ideas taken together: dharma as duty specific to a person's station, the recognised but regulated place of wealth and pleasure, the ordering of the life course through the ashramas, the doctrine of karma and rebirth, the high value placed on renunciation, the emphasis on the group and on obligation rather than on individual right, and the ideal of tolerance among different paths. It is studied by sociology as a system of norms and values, without any position being taken on its religious truth.

4. How do karma and varna connect, and why does it matter sociologically? Karma holds that action has consequences attaching to the actor across lives, and rebirth is the cycle in which they operate. Where a person's present position in the varna order is understood as the consequence of past action, an unequal arrangement acquires a justification that appears neither arbitrary nor imposed. Sociologically this is the legitimation function of religion, which makes an order of ranks appear rightful, and which the conflict perspective reads as ideology sustaining the advantage of those already placed highest.

5. Give three criticisms of the scheme. That it is a textual ideal rather than a description of how people lived, since most Indians in most periods were cultivators and labourers whose lives contained no vanaprastha or sannyasa. That it was elaborated by and for a section, being unequally available across the varnas and to women. And that it legitimates inequality, since svadharma makes duty depend on the station one is born into and karma explains that station as deserved, which is why Ambedkar's critique of it was uncompromising.

Levi-Strauss and others used it to mean an underlying model, not directly observed, which the visible relations express. On this view structure is something the analyst constructs to explain the observed pattern, rather than the pattern itself.

An answer that notes the two usages and says which it is following is a strong answer.

Social system

The idea

The concept belongs above all to Talcott Parsons. A social system exists wherever two or more people interact in a situation, orient themselves to one another, and are guided by shared norms and values. It has parts; those parts perform functions; and the parts are interdependent, so that a change in one produces adjustment in the others.

Its elements

1. Actors, individuals or collectivities, occupying statuses.
2. Interaction between them, oriented to one another.
3. A situation, the environment in which they act.
4. Shared norms and values, which make interaction predictable.
5. Goals, pursued by the actors and the system.
6. Interdependence of the parts.
7. A boundary distinguishing the system from its environment.
8. A tendency to equilibrium, the system returning to balance after disturbance.

The functional prerequisites

Parsons held that every social system must solve four problems to survive, the AGIL scheme met in [The Functionalist Perspective]: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency or pattern maintenance. Law belongs chiefly to integration.

Levels

The concept scales. A family is a social system; a court is a social system; a whole society is a social system; and each is a subsystem of the next.

Structure and system compared

The relation, which is the point of teaching them together: a social system has a social structure. The structure is the arrangement of positions; the system is what happens when those positions are occupied and their occupants interact. Neither concept can be explained without the other, which is why they are one topic.

A worked example

Look at a district court first as a structure. Its parts are statuses: judge, additional judge, advocate, clerk of court, stenographer, process server, litigant, witness, accused. Each carries a role. The statuses stand in defined relations: who may address whom, who files with whom, who serves whom. There is a hierarchy, and there is a set of institutions, adjudication, the profession, the record, that the arrangement expresses. All of this can be described on paper, and it persists although every person in the building retires eventually.

Now look at it as a system. The parts interact. A delay in the process server's work changes the judge's board. A change in the appellate court's view changes what advocates argue. Shared norms make it predictable: everyone knows what will happen when a matter is called. There are goals, disposal, correctness, the appearance of fairness, that pull against one another. There is a boundary: the court is distinguishable from the society around it, though litigants cross it daily. And there is a tendency to equilibrium: disturb it with a strike or a vacancy and it adjusts, absorbs and returns to something like its previous state.

The two views answer different questions, and that is exactly why both concepts exist. Asked what a court is, describe the structure. Asked why a reform failed, describe the system: because the parts are interdependent, a change introduced at one point is absorbed by adjustments elsewhere, and the intended effect disappears. Anyone who has watched a procedural reform swallowed by the practice around it has seen a social system maintaining its equilibrium.

Criticism

1. The system concept assumes more integration than societies have. Real societies are loosely joined, full of contradictions, and not obviously tending to any equilibrium.
2. Equilibrium smuggles in conservatism. If the normal state is balance, change appears as disturbance and the model has no natural account of conflict. This is the objection in [The Conflict Perspective].
3. Structure can be reified. It is easy to slip into speaking of structure as a thing that acts, when it exists only in the repeated behaviour of people.
4. The individual disappears. Both concepts describe people as occupants of positions, which is the objection pressed by [Symbolic Interactionism].
5. They are hard to operationalise. Neither can be observed or measured directly, which makes empirical testing difficult.

Quick revision

1. Social structure: the enduring arrangement of statuses, roles, groups, institutions and norms, and the relations between them. Anatomy.
2. Social system: those parts interacting as a working, interdependent whole guided by shared norms. Physiology.
3. A social system has a social structure; each is defined against the other.
4. Structure is abstract, stable, external to the individual, normative, and changes slowly.
5. Radcliffe-Brown: structure as the actual network of relations. Levi-Strauss: structure as an underlying model.
6. Parsons is the theorist of the social system; its elements include actors, interaction, situation, shared norms, goals, interdependence, boundary and equilibrium; its prerequisites are AGIL.
7. Criticism: overstates integration, equilibrium is conservative, structure gets reified, the individual disappears, and neither is easily measured.

Test yourself

1. Define social structure and social system and state the relation between them. Social structure is the more or less enduring pattern in which the parts of a society, its statuses, roles, groups, institutions and norms, are arranged and related. A social system is a plurality of actors interacting in a situation under shared norms, whose parts function interdependently as a whole. The relation is that a social system has a social structure: structure is the arrangement, system is that arrangement in operation.

2. Why is social structure called abstract? Because it cannot be observed directly. What is observable is people behaving; the structure is inferred from the regularity of that behaviour and from the expectations people hold. It exists only in repeated performance and shared expectation, which is also why it would cease to exist, rather than merely stand empty, if enough people stopped performing their roles.

3. Give the elements of a social system. Actors occupying statuses; interaction between them oriented to one another; a situation or environment; shared norms and values that make interaction predictable; goals pursued by actors and by the system; interdependence of the parts; a boundary separating the system from its environment; and a tendency to return to equilibrium after disturbance.

4. How does the systems view explain the failure of a reform? By interdependence. Because the parts of a system act on one another and the whole tends towards equilibrium, a change introduced at one point provokes adjustments elsewhere that absorb it, so that the intended effect is dissipated and the system returns to something close to its former state. A procedural reform swallowed by the surrounding practice is the standard example.

5. Give two criticisms of the social system concept. That it assumes far more integration than real societies possess, which are loosely joined and full of contradictions; and that its central idea of equilibrium is conservative, since it makes stability the normal state and treats conflict and change as disturbances rather than as ordinary features of social life.

The functions of marriage

This is the part an examiner asks for directly, and the answer should be organised, not a list.

Regulation of sexual behaviour

Every society channels sexual activity rather than leaving it unregulated, and marriage is the principal channel. This function explains why sexual conduct is so heavily normed everywhere and why breach of the norms carries such disproportionate reaction.

Reproduction and the legitimacy of children

Marriage identifies who a child's socially recognised parents are. Its importance is often missed by students: the biological facts of parenthood do not by themselves settle who is responsible for a child, who must maintain it, or from whom it inherits. Marriage is the institution that assigns those, which is why legitimacy has been so central a legal category and why so much family law concerns it.

Socialisation of children

Marriage produces the family, and the family is the primary agency of socialisation, as [Socialization] sets out.

Economic cooperation

Historically, and still in much of the world, the married pair is a unit of production and consumption with a division of labour between its members. In an agrarian economy the household is the enterprise. This is why marriage is so closely tied to property in every legal system.

Transmission of property and status

Marriage decides who inherits and who succeeds, and it transmits caste, class, religion and family name. This function explains why marriage is so tightly regulated by communities: an unapproved marriage is a threat to the orderly transmission of property and rank, which is the real content of most family opposition.

Emotional and psychological satisfaction

Companionship, affection, security and support. This function has grown enormously in importance and is now, in the urban middle class, the one most people would name first. That shift is itself a major finding, taken up in [Recent Trends in Marriage].

Social status and identity

In most societies an unmarried adult occupies an anomalous position, and marriage confers full adult standing.

Alliance between families

An often overlooked function and an important one in India. Marriage is not only the union of two people but a link between two kin groups, which is why the arrangement is so frequently made by families and why the transactions accompanying it, gifts, dowry, bride price, matter so much. Levi-Strauss built an entire theory on this, treating marriage as an exchange between groups.

A worked example

A couple in a village marry in the presence of the community, with a ritual everyone recognises. Nothing about their relationship is changed by the audience. What changes is everyone else's knowledge of it, and that is the point.

Because the union is publicly known, the wife can claim maintenance from a husband who leaves; the child can claim to be his; the two families can be held to what they promised; and neighbours can be witnesses to all of it if it is ever disputed. The ceremony is a device for creating evidence and for binding third parties, and that is a function no private arrangement can perform.

This is also why the state's insistence on registration is a genuine change rather than a formality. It transfers the evidentiary function from the community to a record, which matters most exactly where community knowledge has broken down, in a city where the neighbours are strangers. A student who sees that can explain the drive for compulsory registration in one sentence: the older machinery has stopped working because the community that operated it has dispersed.

What marriage is NOT

Not a natural fact. It is a social institution. What counts as a marriage, who may enter one and what follows from it are decided by societies and differ completely between them.

Not the same as the family. Marriage is the institution; the family is the group. A family can exist without a current marriage, and a marriage without children is still a marriage.

Not identical with its legal definition. A great many unions are treated as marriages by their communities without satisfying any statute, and the sociological subject is the practice, not the text.

Not only about sex or only about children. The functions listed above are simultaneous, and an answer that gives one is thin.

Not universal in form, only in existence. Every society has it; almost nothing about how it is done is common to all of them.

Quick revision

1. Marriage is the socially recognised union establishing rights and duties between spouses and towards children; universal in existence, various in form.
2. Westermarck: recognised by custom or law, involving rights and duties for the parties and for the children. Malinowski: a contract for the production and maintenance of children.
3. Characteristics: universality, social approval, rights and duties, relative permanence, regulation of who may marry whom, ritual and publicity, it creates a family.
4. Functions: regulating sexual behaviour; reproduction and legitimacy; socialisation; economic cooperation; transmission of property and status; emotional satisfaction; adult status; and alliance between families.
5. The ceremony's function is publicity: it creates evidence and binds third parties. Registration transfers that function to a record when the community disperses.
6. Marriage is the institution; the family is the group.

Test yourself

1. Define marriage sociologically and say how that differs from a legal definition. Marriage is a socially recognised and approved union establishing rights and obligations between the spouses and towards their children, and providing the accepted framework for sexual relations, procreation and the transmission of property and status. A legal definition asks whether a particular union is valid under a text; the sociological account asks what the institution does for the society, works from actual practice including unions no statute recognises, and is comparative across societies rather than tied to one country's law.

2. State six functions of marriage. Regulation of sexual behaviour; reproduction and the assignment of legitimate parenthood; socialisation of children through the family it creates; economic cooperation and the division of labour in the household; transmission of property, caste, class and family name; and the provision of companionship and emotional security. To these should be added the conferring of full adult status and the creation of an alliance between two kin groups.

3. Why is marriage said to be universal? Because every known society has an institution that publicly recognises a lasting union and assigns rights and duties flowing from it. What is universal is its existence and its core functions; almost nothing about its form is universal, since who may marry whom, how many spouses are permitted, who arranges it and how it may be ended differ completely between societies.

4. What is the function of the marriage ceremony? Publicity. The ritual does not alter the relationship between the parties; it alters everyone else's knowledge of it. Because the union is publicly known, maintenance can be claimed, a child's parentage asserted, promises between families enforced and witnesses found. The ceremony is therefore a device for creating evidence and for binding third parties.

5. Why has compulsory registration of marriage become important? Because the evidentiary function once performed by the community has weakened. In a village where everyone attended and remembered, community knowledge proved the marriage. In a city where neighbours are strangers and families are dispersed, that machinery fails, and registration transfers the function to an official record, which matters most for those, typically women and children, who must prove a marriage in order to claim anything from it.

Polyandry

One woman with two or more husbands at the same time. It is rare, and recorded in relatively few societies.

Kinds. Fraternal or adelphic polyandry, where the husbands are brothers, the arrangement associated with the Toda of the Nilgiris and with some Himalayan communities; and non-fraternal, where they are not, in which the woman may live separately and the husbands visit.

Causes commonly given. A scarcity of women, whether from female infanticide or from migration; poverty and the wish to avoid dividing a small holding among brothers, which is the explanation most often given for the Himalayan cases; and heavy bride price, which several brothers can meet jointly but none alone.

The problem it creates, and the reason it needs a custom to solve it, is the determination of fatherhood. Societies practising fraternal polyandry commonly assign paternity by a ritual rather than by biology, which is a striking illustration of the point in [Marriage: Meaning and Functions] that legitimacy is a social assignment and not a biological fact.

Group marriage

Several men married to several women simultaneously. Whether it has ever existed as a stable institution is disputed; it is reported for very few societies and some anthropologists doubt the reports. Mention it, and say that its existence as a regular form is doubtful.

Part two: forms by rules of choice

Endogamy

The rule that a person must marry within a specified group. Indian society is the classic instance: caste endogamy is the rule that a person marries within their own caste or sub-caste, and it is the mechanism by which caste reproduces itself, as [Caste] explains.

Endogamy may be by caste, sub-caste, tribe, village in some communities, religion, race or class. Its social function is to preserve the group's purity, property, and identity, and its social cost is the enforcement, which at its most extreme includes violence against those who breach it.

Exogamy

The rule that a person must marry outside a specified group. Its universal core is the incest prohibition, forbidding marriage within close degrees of kinship, which is found in every known society though the degrees differ.

Indian forms include gotra exogamy, forbidding marriage within the same clan; pravara exogamy; sapinda exogamy, forbidding marriage within specified degrees of relationship; and village exogamy in parts of north India.

Why the incest prohibition is universal. Three explanations are usually given, and an answer that gives all three is complete. The biological explanation points to the effects of inbreeding, though societies without genetics arrived at the rule anyway. The psychological explanation, from Westermarck, holds that people raised together develop a sexual indifference towards one another. The sociological explanation, associated with Tylor and developed by Levi-Strauss, is the strongest: prohibiting marriage inside the group compels alliance outside it, so exogamy is what knits separate groups into a wider society. Tylor's formulation, that a group must marry out or be killed out, is worth remembering.

Note the apparent contradiction and resolve it, because examiners like this: Indian marriage rules are simultaneously endogamous and exogamous. One must marry within the caste and outside the gotra. There is no contradiction, because the two rules operate on different groups: endogamy fixes the outer boundary, exogamy the inner one, and a spouse must be found in the space between.

Hypergamy and hypogamy

Hypergamy, in India called anuloma, is the practice by which a woman marries a man of higher status or caste. It was recognised in parts of the country and produced predictable consequences: an acute shortage of grooms of the highest rank, competition for them, and the inflation of dowry, which is one of the standard sociological explanations of the dowry system's persistence.

Hypogamy, called pratiloma, is a woman marrying a man of lower status, and was widely disapproved.

The pair is worth learning because it is short, frequently asked, and directly connected to a live social problem.

The classifications compared

A worked example

A family in a north Indian village looks for a husband for their daughter.

Endogamy sets the outer boundary: the search stays within the caste, and in practice within the sub-caste.

Exogamy sets the inner boundary: the boy must not be of the same gotra, must not fall within the prohibited degrees, and in some communities must not be from the same village or from the villages of the mother's or grandmother's natal families.

Hypergamy sets the direction: a boy of slightly higher standing within the caste is preferred, and because many families prefer the same thing, the supply of such boys is short and the transfer demanded on marriage rises.

The result is a very small eligible set, sometimes a few dozen people across several districts, which explains a great deal that puzzles outsiders: the elaborate networks and intermediaries used to find a match, the distances travelled, and the severity of the reaction when a young person chooses outside the set. Almost every feature of the arrangement follows from the intersection of the rules, and that is what a good answer shows rather than merely listing the forms.

What this does NOT mean

Permitted is not the same as practised. Where polygyny is lawful it is usually a small minority of marriages.

These are forms, not stages. They are not steps in an evolutionary sequence, and the nineteenth century attempt to arrange them as one is not accepted.

Endogamy and exogamy are not opposites in practice. As shown above, the same society applies both to different groups.

Legality is a separate question. This chapter classifies social forms; which are lawful in India is a matter of personal and general law and varies between communities.

Quick revision

1. Two independent bases: number of spouses, and rules of choice.
2. Monogamy: one at a time; serial and strict. The most widespread.
3. Polygyny: one man, several wives; sororal and non-sororal. Commonest form of polygamy; practised by a minority even where lawful.
4. Polyandry: one woman, several husbands; fraternal (adelphic), as among the Toda, and non-fraternal. Causes: shortage of women, poverty and undivided holdings, heavy bride price. It requires a custom for assigning fatherhood.
5. Group marriage: existence as a stable form is doubtful.
6. Endogamy: marry within (caste, tribe, religion). Exogamy: marry outside (gotra, sapinda, prohibited degrees). Indian rules are both at once, on different groups.
7. Incest prohibition is universal; the strongest explanation is sociological: exogamy compels alliance and builds a wider society.
8. Hypergamy = anuloma, woman marries up; hypogamy = pratiloma, woman marries down. Hypergamy is a standard explanation for dowry inflation.

Test yourself

1. Classify the forms of marriage on both bases. By number of spouses: monogamy, one man to one woman at a time, in serial and strict varieties; polygamy, comprising polygyny, one man with several wives, in sororal and non-sororal forms, and polyandry, one woman with several husbands, in fraternal and non-fraternal forms; and group marriage, whose existence as a stable institution is doubtful. By rules of choice: endogamy, marriage within a specified group; exogamy, marriage outside one; and the directional forms hypergamy and hypogamy.

2. What is fraternal polyandry and what explains it? Polyandry in which the husbands are brothers, recorded among the Toda of the Nilgiris and in parts of the Himalaya. The explanations usually given are a scarcity of women, sometimes from female infanticide; poverty combined with the wish to avoid dividing a small holding among several brothers, since one wife for all of them keeps the property and the household intact; and a bride price too heavy for one brother but affordable jointly.

3. Distinguish endogamy from exogamy and show how Indian marriage rules use both. Endogamy requires marriage within a specified group, exogamy outside one. Indian rules apply both to different groups: a person must marry within their caste or sub-caste, which is endogamy, and outside their gotra and the prohibited degrees of relationship, which is exogamy. Endogamy fixes the outer boundary of the eligible set and exogamy the inner one.

4. Why is the incest prohibition universal? Give the three explanations. The biological explanation points to the harmful effects of close inbreeding, though societies arrived at the rule without knowing genetics. The psychological explanation, from Westermarck, is that people raised in close proximity from childhood develop sexual indifference to one another. The sociological explanation, from Tylor and developed by Levi-Strauss, is the strongest: by forbidding marriage inside the group the rule compels alliance outside it, so that separate groups are bound into a wider society. Tylor put it that a group must marry out or be killed out.

5. What are hypergamy and hypogamy, and how does hypergamy connect to dowry? Hypergamy, anuloma, is a woman marrying a man of higher status or caste; hypogamy, pratiloma, is her marrying one of lower status, and was widely disapproved. Hypergamy connects to dowry because if many families seek grooms of higher standing, the supply of such grooms is short relative to demand, and competition among the brides' families for a limited set of desirable matches raises the transfer demanded, which is one of the standard sociological explanations of dowry inflation.

Matrimonial advertising and now matrimonial websites and applications have industrialised the middle of that spectrum. Sociologically the interesting point is that they have not dissolved caste: the categories by which such sites are searched are frequently caste categories, so a modern technology is being used to conduct an old rule more efficiently, which is a good example of cultural persistence within apparent change.

3. Inter-caste and inter-religious marriage

Increasing, and still a small proportion of all marriages. The direction is not in doubt; the level is low. Where a figure is quoted from a survey it should be quoted with the survey's name and year, and a student who cannot recall one should write that such marriages remain a small minority, which is accurate and safe.

What matters more than the number is the reaction. Marriages outside the caste attract family opposition, social boycott and, at the extreme, violence, which is the subject of the Supreme Court's directions on so-called honour crimes and of the role of khap panchayats discussed in [Legal Pluralism]. The special procedure for civil marriage across communities is provided by the Special Marriage Act 1954, whose notice requirement has itself been criticised for exposing couples to exactly that opposition.

4. Dowry: prohibited, persistent, and changed in form

The Dowry Prohibition Act 1961 prohibits the giving and taking of dowry. The practice has not ended. Three sociological observations are standard and defensible.

It has spread, into communities and regions where it was not traditional, sometimes displacing bride price.

It has been monetised and inflated, moving from customary gifts to substantial transfers of cash, vehicles and consumer goods.

It is connected to hypergamy, as [Forms of Marriage] explains: where brides' families compete for grooms of higher standing, the transfer rises.

The legal response has widened over time to reach cruelty connected with dowry demands and dowry deaths, and India's National Crime Records Bureau publishes the annual figures for offences reported under those heads. A student citing numbers should name the NCRB and the year.

5. Rising divorce, from a low base

Divorce rates in India remain among the lowest recorded anywhere, and are rising, particularly in cities and among the educated and employed.

The sociological reading, which is what earns marks, is that a rising divorce rate does not by itself show that marriages have become worse. It shows that leaving one has become possible: legally, because grounds and procedures exist; economically, because a woman with her own income can leave; and socially, because the stigma, while heavy, has lessened. Where those three conditions are absent, unhappy marriages persist and the divorce rate stays low, so a low rate is not evidence of contentment.

6. Live-in relationships

Cohabitation without marriage has appeared in Indian cities. Its legal treatment has developed through decisions of the Supreme Court and through the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, which extends protection to a relationship in the nature of marriage. The sociological point is the mismatch: an arrangement defined by the absence of social recognition is being given legal consequences, which is unusual and interesting, and it shows law responding to a change in practice rather than leading it.

7. Working wives and the second shift

As married women take paid employment, the household division of labour becomes a subject of negotiation rather than of custom. Time-use evidence in India, including the Government's own Time Use Survey, consistently shows women performing very much more unpaid domestic and care work than men, including where both spouses are employed. The gap between the change in employment and the far slower change in domestic expectations is a clean instance of cultural lag from [Culture].

8. From alliance to companionship

The deepest change and the one that ties the others together. Where marriage was an alliance between families with companionship as a possible by-product, it is increasingly expected to be a companionship between two individuals, with the families' role reduced to approval.

This single shift explains most of the rest. If marriage is an alliance, its success is measured by whether the families are satisfied and it should not be dissolved for private unhappiness. If it is a companionship, private unhappiness is the very thing that makes it a failure, and divorce follows. Rising divorce is therefore not evidence that marriage is valued less; it is evidence that it is expected to deliver more.

9. Other trends to name briefly

Falling family size; increased remarriage of widows in some communities; later childbearing; a small but visible number of people not marrying at all; migration producing spouses living apart for years; and the recognition question for same-sex couples, which in India has been the subject of litigation and remains a live public debate.

A worked example

A woman married in a Konkan village in the 1980s at 17. Her family chose the husband; she met him once. She moved to his parents' house and worked in a household of nine. Her security lay in her husband's family, and leaving would have meant returning to a natal family with no land for her. Her marriage's success was judged by the two families.

Her granddaughter, in Pune, marries at 29. She met her husband through a website her mother found; they decided themselves. Both are employed; they live alone. Her security lies in her own salary. Her marriage is judged by whether the two of them are content, and if it is not, she has a legal ground, an income and a flat of her own to go to.

Nothing in this comparison shows the institution weakening. Both women are married. What changed is the age, the choice, the residence, the economics and the standard by which success is measured, and every one of those changes follows from the pressures listed at the head of this chapter.

What this does NOT mean

Marriage is not disappearing in India. The overwhelming majority of Indians marry, and rates of never-marrying remain low by world standards.

The trends are not uniform. They are concentrated in urban, educated and employed sections and are weak elsewhere, and generalising from Mumbai to the country is the commonest error in an answer.

Change is not the same as improvement. Later marriage and greater choice sit alongside dowry, honour crimes and a heavy unequal burden of domestic work.

Law has not caused most of it. Legislation has removed disabilities and provided remedies, but the drivers are education, employment, urbanisation and migration. This is exactly the argument of [Law and Social Change].

Quick revision

1. Rising age at marriage. Minimum ages 18 and 21 under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006; a Bill to raise the woman's age to 21 was introduced in December 2021.
2. From arrangement to a spectrum, ending in the couple's choice with family approval. Matrimonial websites have industrialised the middle, and still search on caste.
3. Inter-caste and inter-religious marriage rising from a low base; the Special Marriage Act 1954 provides the civil route.
4. Dowry prohibited by the Dowry Prohibition Act 1961; it has spread, been monetised, and is connected to hypergamy.
5. Divorce rising from a very low base. A low rate is not evidence of happy marriages; it is evidence that leaving is not possible.
6. Live-in relationships, partially recognised through the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 and case law.
7. Working wives with a persisting unequal domestic burden: cultural lag.
8. From alliance to companionship, the change that explains the others: marriage is expected to deliver more, so it fails more often.

Test yourself

1. State five recent trends in Indian marriage. Rising age at marriage, driven by education, employment and law; a shift from arrangement by elders towards a spectrum ending in the couple's own choice; a rise in inter-caste and inter-religious marriage from a low base; the persistence and monetisation of dowry despite its prohibition in 1961; and a rising divorce rate from a very low base, together with the appearance of live-in relationships and their partial legal recognition.

2. Does a rising divorce rate show that marriage is failing? Not by itself. A rise shows that leaving a marriage has become possible: legally, because grounds and procedures exist; economically, because a woman with an income can support herself; and socially, because stigma has lessened. Where those conditions are absent, unhappy marriages simply continue and the recorded rate stays low, so a low rate is not evidence of contentment. The rise also reflects a higher expectation of marriage, not a lower valuation of it.

3. Why has dowry persisted despite prohibition since 1961? Because the legislation addresses the transaction while leaving in place the social arrangements that generate it: caste endogamy, which restricts the eligible set; hypergamy, which makes families compete for grooms of higher standing and so bids up the transfer; the exclusion of daughters from a share in the family enterprise in practice; and the difficulty of proving an offence which both families have an interest in concealing. It has also spread to communities where it was not traditional.

4. What is the deepest change in the institution, and what follows from it? The shift from marriage as an alliance between families to marriage as a companionship between individuals. It follows that success is now measured by the satisfaction of the two people rather than of the two families; that private unhappiness becomes a reason to end the marriage rather than something to be borne; and therefore that divorce rises not because marriage is valued less but because it is expected to deliver much more.

5. Are these trends uniform across India? No, and saying so is essential to a good answer. They are concentrated among urban, educated and employed populations and are weak or absent elsewhere; caste endogamy remains the general rule; and dowry has spread even as choice in marriage has widened. Generalising from metropolitan practice to the whole country misdescribes both.

Essential functions

These are the ones no other institution has taken over.

Reproduction. The family is the socially approved arrangement for producing the next generation.

Physical maintenance and care. Feeding, sheltering and protecting the young, the sick and the old.

Socialisation. The primary agency, as [Socialization] sets out: language, norms, values, sex roles, religion, and the elementary morality.

Regulation of sexual behaviour. Together with marriage, which is the institution that licenses it.

Status ascription. The family confers a person's initial position: caste, class, religion, family name, nationality. Almost everything a person has by ascription rather than achievement comes from it, which is why the family is central to the analysis of inequality.

Emotional and psychological support. Affection, security and companionship, the function whose relative importance has grown most.

Non-essential functions, and how they have moved

These the family once performed and now shares with, or has surrendered to, specialised institutions. This transfer is one of the best answers available on Indian social change, and it is the pattern to learn.

Two conclusions follow, and both are examinable. First, the family has not lost its functions so much as specialised: it has surrendered the ones that can be done at scale and retained reproduction, socialisation and emotional support, which cannot. Second, where the family gave up a function, an institution and a body of law appeared to take it: labour law where production left the household, education law where teaching did, and maintenance and social security law where the care of the aged did. That is the single most useful proposition in this chapter for a law student.

A worked example

A weaver's family in a small town. The loom is at home. Children learn the trade by watching, and are working by twelve. The old are not retired, they do lighter tasks. Income is a household income, not an individual wage. There is no need for schooling, no need for a pension, and no wage to be regulated.

The same family after the loom is replaced by a mill in the next district. The adults leave the house to work. Children are no longer trained at home, so they must be schooled. Income is now individual and paid to the person who earned it, which alters authority inside the household. The old have no productive role, so their maintenance becomes a claim rather than a by-product. And the working relationship, once between father and son, is now between employer and employee.

Every institution and every branch of law that follows was called into existence by that move: compulsory education, factory and wage legislation, employees' provident fund and pension, maintenance of parents. The chapter's whole argument is in that one example, and an examiner asking about the changing functions of the family is asking for exactly this.

The criticisms of the functionalist account

A complete answer states them, because the standard treatment is uncritically warm about the institution.

The conflict criticism. The family reproduces inequality: it transmits property, caste and class, so it is one of the main mechanisms by which advantage is inherited. Marx's collaborator Engels argued that the monogamous family arose with private property in order to secure legitimate heirs, which is taken up in [Theories of the Origin of the Family].

The feminist criticism. The family is the principal site of the unequal division of labour: unpaid domestic and care work falls overwhelmingly on women, whose position within it is subordinate. The functionalist description of complementary roles conceals this. Time-use evidence, including India's own Time Use Survey, supports the criticism.

The dark side of the family. The institution described as the source of security and affection is, on the evidence, also the commonest setting for violence against women and children. Legislation addressed specifically to violence inside the household, including the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, exists because the family's private character shielded that violence from the ordinary law. An answer that omits this describes something that does not exist.

Diversity. The functionalist account describes one family type, the married couple with children, as though it were the family. Single-parent households, households of grandparents and grandchildren left by migration, households of unrelated adults, and families separated by long-distance work are all common and are not deviations from a norm.

Quick revision

1. Burgess and Locke: united by marriage, blood or adoption; one household; interacting in their social roles; creating a common culture.
2. Murdock's four elements: common residence, economic cooperation, reproduction, and a socially approved sexual relationship.
3. Characteristics: universality, emotional basis, formative influence, limited size, nuclear position, heavy responsibility, close social regulation, permanent as an institution and temporary in each instance.
4. Ogburn and Nimkoff: essential and non-essential functions.
5. Essential: reproduction, physical maintenance, socialisation, regulation of sex, status ascription, emotional support.
6. Non-essential, now transferred: production to firms, education to schools, health to hospitals, care of the aged to pensions and the state, religion to congregations, recreation to commercial media, protection to police and courts.
7. Where the family gave up a function, an institution and a body of law appeared to take it.
8. Criticism: it reproduces inequality; it rests on the unequal division of domestic labour; it is a common site of violence; and the standard account ignores the diversity of actual households.

Test yourself

1. Define the family and give Murdock's four elements. A group of persons united by ties of marriage, blood or adoption, constituting a single household and interacting in their respective social roles, in Burgess and Locke's formulation. Murdock's four elements are common residence, economic cooperation, reproduction, and the inclusion of adults of both sexes at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, together with one or more children.

2. Distinguish essential from non-essential functions and give three of each. Essential functions are those no other institution has taken over: reproduction, socialisation of children, and status ascription, to which are added physical maintenance, regulation of sexual behaviour and emotional support. Non-essential functions are those the family once performed and has largely surrendered to specialised institutions: economic production, now in firms; education, now in schools; and care of the sick and the aged, now in hospitals, insurance and pensions.

3. Has the family lost its functions? It has specialised rather than declined. It has surrendered the functions that can be performed at scale by specialised institutions, production, education, health care, protection, and retained those that cannot: reproduction, primary socialisation, status ascription and emotional support. Those retained functions are the ones most consequential for the individual, so the family's importance to a person has not fallen even as the number of its functions has.

4. Why does a lawyer care about the transfer of family functions? Because a body of law appeared wherever a function left the household. When production moved out, labour, wage and factory legislation followed; when training moved to schools, education law followed; when the care of the aged ceased to be a by-product of the joint household, maintenance and social security law followed. The pattern predicts where legal regulation appears: at the point where an informal family arrangement stops working.

5. Give three criticisms of the functionalist account of the family. That it reproduces inequality, transmitting property, caste and class and so making advantage heritable; that it rests on an unequal division of labour in which unpaid domestic and care work falls overwhelmingly on women, which the language of complementary roles conceals; and that it ignores the institution's dark side, since the family is on the evidence the commonest setting for violence against women and children, which is why legislation directed specifically at violence within the household became necessary.

John Ferguson McLennan

McLennan proposed a sequence beginning with promiscuity, in which he located the practice of female infanticide, producing a scarcity of women, hence polyandry, hence uncertainty of paternity, hence descent through the mother. He also coined the terms endogamy and exogamy used in [Forms of Marriage], and explained exogamy by the practice of marriage by capture, taking wives from other groups.

Friedrich Engels

Engels took Morgan's sequence and gave it a materialist explanation, which is the part that matters for Module IV.

His argument runs: in the earliest form there was no private property and descent was traced through the mother. The domestication of animals and the growth of herds created a surplus and with it property, which was controlled by men. A man with property wanted his own children to inherit it, and that required certainty of paternity, which required the sexual fidelity of one woman to one man. So monogamy was instituted to secure legitimate heirs, and with it came the subordination of women, which Engels called the world historical defeat of the female sex.

Whatever the merits of the history, the argument's structure is important and defensible on its own: the form of the family follows the form of property, and the monogamous family and the law of inheritance appeared together. A law student should be able to state that proposition even while doubting the anthropology, and it returns in [Marx: Historical and Dialectical Materialism].

The anti-evolutionary answer

Edward Westermarck

Westermarck denied the whole sequence, and modern opinion has broadly gone with him.

His argument: the human infant is dependent for an exceptionally long period, and its survival requires the prolonged care of both parents; therefore a durable pairing bond is adaptive and must be primeval, not a late achievement. He found no reliable evidence of any society living in promiscuity, and argued that the reports relied on were misunderstandings of institutions, ritual licence, sexual freedom before marriage, or forms of polygamy, that are not promiscuity at all.

He added the psychological proposition met in [Forms of Marriage], that persons raised in close proximity from early childhood develop a sexual indifference towards one another, which explains the incest prohibition without needing a stage of unregulated mating for it to have been imposed upon.

Other objections to the evolutionary theories

1. No evidence of a promiscuous stage. None has ever been observed, and the reported cases dissolved on examination.
2. Kinship terminology is unreliable evidence of past marriage forms.
3. Matriarchy in the strong sense is unproved. Societies tracing descent through the mother, matriliny, certainly exist, as do societies where a couple live with the wife's kin, matrilocality. Neither is rule by women, and the evolutionists conflated all three.
4. Unilinear sequences are unsupported. As in [The Evolutionary Perspective], the assumption that all societies pass through the same stages in order is not borne out.
5. The scheme is ethnocentric, since it places nineteenth century European monogamy at the summit and treats every other arrangement as an earlier stage of it.

The theories compared

The modern position, and how to state it

The safest and best answer says four things.

1. The evolutionary theories are historically important and are not accepted as history. They were the first serious attempt to treat the family as a subject of scientific study.
2. No stage of promiscuity has ever been established, and Westermarck's objection has largely prevailed.
3. Matriliny and matrilocality are real; universal matriarchy is not proved.
4. The family's origin is not recoverable, because it predates any record. What can be studied is variation among observed societies and change within recorded history, which is what the rest of this module does.

Engels's contribution survives the anthropology because of its structural claim, that the form of the family varies with the form of property, and that claim can be tested against societies we can actually observe.

A worked example

Morgan noticed that in some societies a child uses the same term for the father and the father's brother. He reasoned that a word records a relationship, that this word records the same relationship to two men, and that therefore both men must once have stood in the same relation to the child, which implies a form of group marriage.

The reasoning is not absurd, and it is worth setting out because it shows how an entire evolutionary sequence was deduced from language.

Why it fails. A kinship term can be extended for reasons entirely unconnected with marriage: because the two men owe the child the same duties; because the society classifies kin by generation and side rather than by biological distance; or because the usage is respectful. And a term can survive a change in practice by centuries. The inference from a present word to a past practice needs an assumption that is not available, and once it is withdrawn the sequence has nothing under it.

Quick revision

1. Evolutionary camp: Morgan, Bachofen, McLennan, Engels. Sequence from promiscuity or group marriage to monogamy.
2. Morgan's five forms: consanguine, punaluan, syndyasmian (pairing), patriarchal, monogamian. Evidence: kinship terminology.
3. Bachofen: hetaerism, then mother-right, then father-right. Matriarchy before patriarchy.
4. McLennan: promiscuity, female infanticide, polyandry, mother-descent; coined endogamy and exogamy; explained exogamy by marriage by capture.
5. Engels: monogamy was instituted to secure legitimate heirs once property appeared; the world historical defeat of the female sex.
6. Westermarck: the pairing family is primeval, because the human infant's long dependence requires both parents; no promiscuous stage ever existed.
7. Modern position: the sequence is not accepted; no promiscuity established; matriliny is real but universal matriarchy is not proved; the origin is not recoverable. Engels's structural claim survives.

Test yourself

1. State Morgan's sequence of family forms and the evidence he used. Consanguine, founded on the intermarriage of brothers and sisters; punaluan, the intermarriage of several sisters with each other's husbands and several brothers with each other's wives; syndyasmian or pairing, a man with a woman without exclusive cohabitation; patriarchal, one man with several wives organised around lineage and property; and monogamian, one man with one woman. His principal evidence was kinship terminology, from which he inferred earlier forms of marriage.

2. State Engels's account of the origin of monogamy. That in the earliest societies there was no private property and descent was traced through the mother; that the domestication of animals produced a surplus and with it property controlled by men; that a man with property wished his own children to inherit it, which required certainty of paternity and therefore the fidelity of one woman to one man; and that monogamy was accordingly instituted to secure legitimate heirs, bringing with it the subordination of women.

3. State Westermarck's objection to the evolutionary theories. That the pairing family is primeval rather than a late achievement, because the human infant is dependent for an exceptionally long period and its survival requires the prolonged care of both parents, so a durable bond between them is adaptive and must always have existed. He found no reliable evidence of any society living in promiscuity, and argued that the reports relied on were misreadings of ritual licence, pre-marital freedom or polygamy.

4. Why is kinship terminology weak evidence of past marriage forms? Because a kinship term may be extended to several persons for reasons unconnected with marriage: because they owe the child identical duties, because the society classifies relatives by generation and side rather than by biological distance, or as a form of respect. Terms also survive long after the practices around them change, so the inference from a present word to a past practice requires an assumption that cannot be independently supported.

5. What is the modern position on the origin of the family? That the classical evolutionary sequences are important in the history of the discipline but are not accepted as history; that no stage of general promiscuity has ever been established; that matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence are real while universal matriarchy is unproved; and that the family's origin is not recoverable, since it predates all record, so what can be studied is variation between observed societies and change within recorded history.

By marriage

Monogamous, one husband and one wife. Polygynous, one husband with several wives. Polyandrous, one wife with several husbands. These follow the forms in [Forms of Marriage].

By residence

Where the couple lives after marriage. The terms are easily confused and the examiner knows it.

• Patrilocal or virilocal: the couple lives with or near the husband's parents. The general Indian pattern.
• Matrilocal or uxorilocal: with or near the wife's parents.
• Neolocal: in a new residence of their own, neither with his family nor with hers. The characteristic urban pattern.
• Avunculocal: with the husband's mother's brother, found in some matrilineal societies.
• Bilocal or ambilocal: with either set of parents, by choice or in turn.
• Matrifocal: a household in which the mother is the centre and the effective head, whether or not a husband is present.

Why residence matters more than it looks

Residence decides who exercises daily authority over a young couple, who is available to care for children, and who is present to intervene in a quarrel. A change from patrilocal to neolocal residence transfers power inside the marriage and removes the elders who used to settle disputes, and it is one of the sharpest ways urbanisation changes the family. The consequence for law is direct: disputes once resolved within a household now arrive in courts, which is why the growth of neolocal residence and the growth of matrimonial litigation are connected.

By descent

Through which line kinship, membership and inheritance are traced.

• Patrilineal: descent traced through the father. The general Indian pattern.
• Matrilineal: descent traced through the mother. In India, the Nairs of Kerala and the Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya are the standard examples.
• Bilateral or bilineal: traced through both.

Do not confuse descent with residence and neither with authority. They vary independently, and the standing example is worth having: among the Khasi, descent and inheritance run through the mother, residence is matrilocal, and yet formal authority in the household is typically exercised by the mother's brother rather than by the mother. Matrilineal is not matriarchal, and that sentence answers a question examiners are fond of.

By authority

• Patriarchal: authority in the eldest male.
• Matriarchal: authority in the eldest female. Genuine matriarchy in this strict sense is disputed, as [Theories of the Origin of the Family] explains.
• Egalitarian or democratic: authority shared between the spouses. Increasingly the urban pattern, and driven above all by women's earning.

By the nature of the bond

Family of orientation: the family a person is born into, containing their parents and siblings. Family of procreation: the family a person creates by marriage, containing their spouse and children. Every married person belongs to both, and much of the tension in a marriage comes from competing claims of the two.

Conjugal family: organised around the married couple, whose bond is primary. Consanguineous family: organised around blood relatives, in which the tie between siblings or between parent and child is primary and the spouse is an addition. The traditional Indian joint family is consanguineous in this sense, which explains an outcome outsiders find puzzling: in a conflict between a man's mother and his wife, a consanguineous family expects the blood tie to prevail.

The classification summarised by basis

A worked example

Vikram and Sneha live in a two-room flat in Thane with their daughter. Vikram's parents live in Nashik. The Thane flat was bought with money from the sale of ancestral land held in Vikram's father's name, and the family's decisions about that land are still taken by his father. Sneha is employed and the couple's income is theirs alone.

A complete answer names the basis for each label. By structure, this household is nuclear, though the family remains extended in function. By marriage, monogamous. By residence, neolocal, which is why the daily authority of the elders has gone. By descent, patrilineal. By authority, egalitarian within the household and patriarchal as regards the ancestral property, which is the interesting split. By bond, this is Vikram's and Sneha's family of procreation and their daughter's family of orientation, and it is conjugal in daily life and consanguineous in respect of the land.

The example makes the chapter's real point. A single family is rarely one type. It is one type on each of six bases at once, and the bases can point in different directions, which is exactly where the strain in a modern Indian family sits.

Quick revision

1. Six bases: structure, marriage, residence, descent, authority, nature of the bond. Always name the basis.
2. Nuclear: husband, wife, unmarried children, independent household. Joint: the five tests, common residence, kitchen, property, worship and head.
3. Extended, and the modern Indian pattern of residentially nuclear, functionally joint.
4. Residence: patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal, avunculocal, bilocal, matrifocal. Neolocal residence removes the elders who used to settle disputes.
5. Descent: patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral. Nairs, Khasi and Garo are the Indian matrilineal examples.
6. Matrilineal is not matriarchal: among the Khasi, descent runs through the mother and authority through the mother's brother.
7. Authority: patriarchal, matriarchal (disputed), egalitarian.
8. Family of orientation (born into) and of procreation (created); conjugal (couple primary) and consanguineous (blood tie primary).

Test yourself

1. On what six bases is the family classified? Name the types under each. Structure or size: nuclear, joint, extended. Marriage: monogamous, polygynous, polyandrous. Residence: patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal, avunculocal, bilocal, matrifocal. Descent: patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral. Authority: patriarchal, matriarchal, egalitarian. Nature of the bond: families of orientation and of procreation, and conjugal and consanguineous families.

2. Give the tests of a joint family and say why they are no longer easy to apply. Common residence, a common kitchen, common property, common worship, and a common head whose authority is recognised. They are difficult to apply now because they come apart: a family may hold property jointly and worship together while its members live in three cities and cook separately, so a household may be joint on some tests and nuclear on others, which is why the distinction between jointness by residence and jointness by property became necessary.

3. Distinguish matrilineal from matriarchal, with an Indian example. Matrilineal describes descent, membership and inheritance traced through the mother; matriarchal describes authority vested in women. They are independent. Among the Khasi of Meghalaya descent and inheritance run through the mother and residence is matrilocal, yet formal authority in the household is typically exercised by the mother's brother, so the society is matrilineal without being matriarchal.

4. Why does a change from patrilocal to neolocal residence matter? Because residence decides who exercises daily authority over a couple, who is available to care for children, and who is present to intervene in disputes. Neolocal residence transfers power within the marriage to the spouses themselves and removes the elders who formerly settled quarrels internally, which is one reason matrimonial disputes that were once absorbed within the household now reach the courts.

5. Distinguish conjugal from consanguineous families and give a consequence. A conjugal family is organised around the married couple, whose bond is primary and to whom other relatives are secondary. A consanguineous family is organised around blood relatives, the tie between siblings or between parent and child being primary and the spouse an addition. The traditional Indian joint family is consanguineous, which is why in a conflict between a man's mother and his wife such a family expects the blood tie to prevail, an outcome that appears inexplicable if the family is assumed to be conjugal.

This is the single most useful qualification in the chapter and the one that separates a good answer from a copied one.

2. In authority: from patriarchal towards egalitarian

Authority within the household has shifted, driven above all by women's earning and by neolocal residence. It has not equalised, and evidence on the division of domestic work, including India's own Time Use Survey, consistently shows women performing very much more unpaid domestic and care work than men, including where both are employed. Authority over money has moved faster than the division of labour, which is a cultural lag in the sense of [Culture].

3. In marriage: from arrangement towards choice

Set out in [Recent Trends in Marriage] and not repeated here.

4. In functions: transferred to specialised institutions

Set out in [The Family: Meaning and Functions]. The family has specialised rather than declined.

5. In the position of women

The most consequential change. Later marriage, more education, paid employment, fewer children, legal rights in inheritance since the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, and remedies against violence within the home since 2005. Against those must be set the persistence of dowry, the unequal burden of domestic work, and the fact that women's labour force participation in India has not risen in step with their education, which is a well-documented puzzle.

6. In the position of the aged

The change with the sharpest legal consequence. In the joint household the old had a productive role, authority, and automatic maintenance. With neolocal residence and migration, all three weaken.

The state's response is direct: the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007 provides a summary mechanism for parents to claim maintenance from children. A statute conferring on parents a right to be maintained by their children is a precise measurement of how far the informal arrangement has failed, because in a functioning joint family such a right would have no occasion to be exercised. This is the clearest single illustration in the whole module of law appearing exactly where an informal institution withdraws.

7. In the relations between kin

Contact with a wider kin circle has thinned, and obligations to distant relatives that were once automatic are now discretionary. Communication technology partly offsets this, sustaining relationships across distance that would formerly have lapsed.

8. New household forms

Single-person households, especially of migrants and of the elderly; single-parent households; skipped-generation households, where grandparents raise grandchildren whose parents have migrated for work; couples living apart for employment; and, in cities, unrelated adults sharing accommodation.

The disorganisation reading, and the answer to it

A standard line in older textbooks holds that these changes amount to the disorganisation of the family: rising divorce, neglect of the aged, delinquency among children of working parents, and the loss of values.

The answer, which a good student gives, has three parts.

Change is not disorganisation. An institution that alters its form in response to altered conditions is adapting, and the joint family itself was an adaptation to an agrarian economy that no longer exists.

The comparison is with an idealised past. The joint family is being compared with a version of itself that omits the subordination of women, the suppression of individual choice, and the quarrels over partition that fill the older law reports.

Some of what is called disorganisation is a gain in visibility. Violence within the family is not new; its appearing in statistics is new, and it appears because it is now reportable. Rising recorded figures can indicate rising reporting rather than rising incidence, and confusing the two is one of the classic errors in reading social statistics, dealt with in [Social Research: Nature and Purpose].

A worked example

The Deshmukhs held eight acres near Satara. In 1970 the household was joint: three brothers, their wives, their children and their mother, one kitchen, one head, land held together and never partitioned because dividing it would have made each share unviable.

By 1995 two brothers' sons had taken jobs in Pune and Mumbai. The household was formally still joint, and in fact two separate households now existed, sending money home. The land remained undivided; the reason for jointness had become property, not residence.

By 2020 the third generation lives in flats in three cities. Each household is nuclear. The land is let out and the income divided. Decisions about it are still taken collectively by telephone, and the grandmother lives four months a year with each of her sons, which is an arrangement, not a rule.

Ask the examiner's question: is this family joint or nuclear? It is residentially nuclear, functionally joint, jointly propertied and patrilineal, with authority that has become consultative. The answer is that the question is wrongly framed, and saying so, with this progression to support it, is the best thing a student can write on this topic.

Quick revision

1. Causes: industrialisation, urbanisation, migration, education, employment of women, legislation, media.
2. Structure: households smaller and less often joint; but the joint family was never universal, and jointness survives in property and function after the household divides.
3. The key formula: residentially nuclear, functionally joint.
4. Authority: towards egalitarian, driven by women's earning; the division of domestic labour lags well behind.
5. The aged: the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007 measures how far the informal arrangement has failed.
6. Women: later marriage, education, employment, coparcenary rights after the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act; against which stand dowry and the unequal domestic burden.
7. New forms: single-person, single-parent, skipped-generation, and couples living apart for work.
8. Change is not disorganisation; the comparison is with an idealised past, and rising figures may mean rising reporting.

Test yourself

1. State the main changes in the Indian family and their causes. Smaller households and less frequent joint residence; a shift from patriarchal towards more egalitarian authority; a movement from arrangement towards choice in marriage; the transfer of production, education, health care and protection to specialised institutions; the employment of married women; a rise in neolocal residence; and a weakening of the position of the aged. The causes are industrialisation, urbanisation, migration, the education and employment of women, legislation, and the mass media.

2. Is the joint family disappearing? Give the qualified answer. The joint household has become less common, particularly in cities, but the simple claim is misleading in two ways. The joint family was never universal, its incidence varying with region, caste, occupation and especially with property. And jointness frequently survives the household's division: families are commonly residentially nuclear and functionally joint, holding property together, pooling resources in a crisis and deciding collectively while living apart. What has fragmented is the household rather than the family.

3. What does the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007 tell a sociologist? That the informal arrangement by which the joint household automatically maintained its elderly has failed sufficiently often to require a legal substitute. In a functioning joint family a parent's right to claim maintenance from a child would have no occasion to be exercised. The statute is therefore a measurement of institutional change, and an instance of the general pattern that law appears at the point where an informal arrangement withdraws.

4. Answer the claim that the modern family is disorganised. Change is not disorganisation: an institution altering its form in response to altered economic and residential conditions is adapting, and the joint family was itself an adaptation to an agrarian economy that has gone. The comparison is also with an idealised past that omits the subordination of women and the litigation over partition. And some apparent deterioration is increased visibility: violence within the family is not new, but its appearance in official statistics is, and rising recorded figures may reflect rising reporting rather than rising incidence.

5. What is meant by residentially nuclear and functionally joint? A family whose members live in separate households, often in different cities, but which continues to operate as a single unit for the purposes that matter: property is held or managed together, major decisions are taken collectively, money is pooled in a crisis, and care of the elderly and of children is shared. The description fits a great deal of contemporary urban Indian experience that the simple nuclear and joint dichotomy misses.

Secondary kin. The primary kin of one's primary kin, who are not oneself: father's father, mother's brother, sister's husband, wife's mother. The usual count is thirty-three.

Tertiary kin. The primary kin of one's secondary kin: father's brother's son, wife's brother's wife. The usual count given is one hundred and fifty-one.

Treat those totals as the conventional figures given in the textbooks rather than as measurements; what is examinable is the principle, that degrees are generated by successive steps from primary kin, and the ability to classify a given relative correctly.

Why degrees matter. Prohibited degrees for marriage are drawn by them; the order of succession follows them; obligations of mourning, of gift-giving and of support are graded by them; and the intensity of the usages below varies with them.

Kinship usages

These are the prescribed patterns of behaviour attached to particular kin relationships. They are the part of the topic most often asked and least often known, and each should be given with a named example.

Avoidance. A rule requiring certain kin to keep apart, or to restrict contact and speech. The most widespread instance in north India is between a woman and her husband's elder brother and, in many communities, her husband's father, involving veiling, not addressing them directly, and not being alone with them. Its function is usually explained as preventing sexual tension inside a household that lives at close quarters, and as marking respect.

Joking relationship. The opposite: a relationship in which two kin are permitted, and sometimes expected, to tease, insult or make free with each other without offence. Commonly between a person and their spouse's younger siblings, or between a woman and her husband's younger brother. Radcliffe-Brown analysed avoidance and joking as a pair, both being devices for managing relationships that combine attachment with potential conflict: extreme respect at one end, licensed familiarity at the other.

Teknonymy. Referring to a person not by their own name but through another, usually a child. A wife who does not utter her husband's name and refers to him as the father of her son is practising teknonymy. It is widespread in India and connects to the norm against a wife speaking her husband's name.

Avunculate. The special prominence of the mother's brother, who has particular rights and duties towards his sister's children, including in some societies authority over them and obligations at their marriage. It is characteristic of matrilineal societies, and among the Khasi and Nairs it is central.

Amitate. The corresponding special role of the father's sister, given particular honour and ritual duties, found in parts of India.

Couvade. The custom by which the husband observes the restrictions of childbirth, taking to bed, following dietary restrictions and abstaining from work as though he were the one confined. Reported among the Toda and the Khasi. It is usually explained as an assertion of the social fact of fatherhood, which is exactly the point in [Marriage: Meaning and Functions] that parenthood is socially assigned and not merely biological.

Kinship and descent

Descent is the rule by which a person is assigned to a kin group and by which membership, name, property and ritual obligation pass.

• Patrilineal descent: through the father. The general Indian rule.
• Matrilineal descent: through the mother. The Nairs of Kerala, the Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya.
• Bilateral or cognatic descent: through both parents, which is the general rule in modern urban and legal usage.
• Double or duolineal descent: some rights pass through the father and others through the mother.

Descent groups. A lineage is a group of kin who can actually trace their descent from a known common ancestor. A clan, in India the gotra, is a wider group believing itself descended from a common ancestor without being able to trace the steps. A phratry is a group of clans, and a moiety is one of two halves into which a society divides itself.

The rule that follows from clan membership is exogamy: one may not marry within the gotra, as [Forms of Marriage] explains. This is why descent is not an antiquarian topic even for a lawyer: it determines the prohibited field for marriage in a large part of the country.

A worked example

A wedding card from a north Indian family names the groom, his father, his grandfather, his gotra, and separately the maternal grandfather's family as hosts of one ceremony.

Each element is doing kinship work. Naming the father and grandfather establishes the patrilineage, which is the descent group into which the bride will be received. Naming the gotra publishes the exogamous unit, so that anyone can see the marriage does not breach the rule. Giving the maternal grandfather's family a ceremony of their own recognises the mother's brother, which is the avunculate in a patrilineal setting, where his role survives as ceremonial honour rather than as authority.

After the marriage the bride enters a set of usages: avoidance of her husband's elder brother and father, a joking relationship with his younger brother, and teknonymy once a child is born.

Every one of those is a social rule with no legal force, and yet a lawyer who does not know them will misread the evidence in a family dispute: who could have been present at a conversation, who would have spoken to whom, and why a particular relative was the one who intervened.

Changes in kinship

Kinship has weakened in scope and altered in content, from the same causes as in [Changing Patterns of the Family]: urbanisation and migration reduce contact; occupational recruitment through kin declines in a formal labour market; obligations to distant kin become discretionary; usages such as avoidance and teknonymy are observed less among the urban educated; and descent has become more bilateral in practice, with the mother's family playing a larger part than a strictly patrilineal rule contemplates.

Two counter-observations belong in a complete answer. Kinship remains decisive in marriage, where caste endogamy and gotra exogamy still operate widely, and it remains important in business and politics, where family firms and political dynasties are conspicuous features of Indian life. Kinship has retreated from the labour market and not from the marriage market.

Quick revision

1. Kinship is socially recognised relationship by consanguinity (blood) and affinity (marriage); fictive kinship is the extension of both to others.
2. Degrees: primary (8), secondary (33), tertiary (151), on the conventional counts. The principle is successive steps from primary kin.
3. Usages: avoidance, joking relationship, teknonymy, avunculate (mother's brother), amitate (father's sister), couvade (husband observes childbirth restrictions; Toda, Khasi).
4. Radcliffe-Brown treated avoidance and joking as a pair, both managing relationships that mix attachment with potential conflict.
5. Descent: patrilineal, matrilineal (Nairs, Khasi, Garo), bilateral, double.
6. Descent groups: lineage (traceable), clan or gotra (believed), phratry, moiety. Gotra membership generates exogamy.
7. Kinship has retreated from the labour market but not from the marriage market, and remains strong in family business and political dynasties.

Test yourself

1. Define kinship and distinguish its two main types. The system of socially recognised relationships between persons based on descent and on marriage. Consanguineous kinship is relationship by blood, that is descent from a common ancestor, and cannot be dissolved. Affinal kinship is relationship created by marriage, both with the spouse and with the spouse's relations, and depends on a marriage which may end. To these is added fictive or ritual kinship, where kin obligations are extended to persons related by neither.

2. Explain the degrees of kinship. Kin are graded by steps from the individual. Primary kin are the eight immediate relations: father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, husband, wife. Secondary kin are the primary kin of one's primary kin, conventionally thirty-three, such as father's father or wife's mother. Tertiary kin are the primary kin of one's secondary kin, conventionally one hundred and fifty-one. The degrees matter because prohibited degrees for marriage, the order of succession and the intensity of obligations are all graded by them.

3. Describe four kinship usages. Avoidance requires certain kin to restrict contact and speech, as between a woman and her husband's elder brother or father, and is explained as reducing tension in a household living at close quarters. A joking relationship licenses teasing without offence, typically with a spouse's younger siblings. Teknonymy refers to a person through another, as a wife calling her husband the father of her son. Couvade requires the husband to observe the restrictions of childbirth, reported among the Toda and the Khasi, and asserts the social fact of fatherhood.

4. What is the avunculate and where is it found? The special prominence of the mother's brother, who holds particular rights and duties towards his sister's children, sometimes including authority over them and obligations at their marriage. It is characteristic of matrilineal societies and is central among the Khasi and the Nairs; in patrilineal north India it survives in attenuated form as ceremonial honour given to the maternal uncle at a wedding.

5. Distinguish a lineage from a clan, and say why the difference matters legally. A lineage is a group of kin who can actually trace their descent step by step from a known common ancestor. A clan, the gotra in India, is a wider group whose members believe themselves descended from a common ancestor without being able to trace the connection. The difference matters because the exogamous unit for marriage in much of India is the clan rather than the lineage, so the prohibited field is far wider than traceable relationship and rests on belief in common descent rather than on proof of it.

The sociologically distinctive fact about India is the strength of state-level parties with no national presence, which follows from the regional plurality described in [The Pluralistic Nature of Indian Society].

Voting behaviour

Why it is a sociological subject

A vote is cast alone and in secret. If choice were purely individual, votes would scatter and there would be no pattern to study. In fact they cluster by social characteristic, in every country studied, and the clustering is stable enough to be predicted within limits. That regularity is a social fact in Durkheim's sense, and it is why voting is in a sociology syllabus at all.

The determinants studied in India

The correct treatment names the factors and stops there, without asserting how any group votes.

Caste. The most studied factor in Indian electoral sociology. It works in several distinct ways which should be distinguished: as a basis on which candidates are selected for a constituency; as a network through which campaigning is conducted; as a source of identification with a candidate; and, where a caste group is numerically significant and organised, as a bloc whose leaders can negotiate. Rajni Kothari's formulation is the standard reference point: the interesting process is not only the caste basis of politics but the politicisation of caste, in which caste identities are reshaped by their use in electoral competition.

Religion. Both as identification and as an issue.

Region and language. Which is why state parties exist.

Class and economic position. Occupation, landholding, income and access to public benefits.

Rural or urban residence, which affects both turnout and the issues that matter.

Age, with a very large young electorate in India.

Gender. The most striking recent finding, and one that can be stated confidently because the Election Commission publishes turnout by sex: the historic gap between male and female turnout in Indian general elections has narrowed very substantially, and in recent elections female turnout has been close to and at times above male turnout. That is a well-documented change and a safe thing to write.

Education and information.

Party identification and leadership, including the personal appeal of a leader, which can cut across every social factor above.

Local candidate factors: the candidate's own standing, accessibility and record.

Incumbency, and the well-attested Indian pattern of anti-incumbency, which is a tendency rather than a law.

The theoretical models

Three models are conventionally given and each explains part of the picture.

The sociological model. Vote follows social location: the groups a person belongs to shape their choice through shared interests and social pressure. Its strength is the observed clustering; its weakness is that it cannot explain change, since social characteristics move slowly and votes move fast.

The psychological or party-identification model. Voters develop a durable attachment to a party, acquired through socialisation in the family, which then filters how they see issues and candidates. Its strength is explaining stability; its weakness is that party identification is weaker in India than in the countries where the model was built.

The rational choice or economic model. Voters assess parties by expected benefit and vote for the one that offers most. Its strength is explaining swings and the salience of welfare delivery; its weakness is that the cost of acquiring information is high and the chance of one vote being decisive is negligible, which makes the calculation questionable.

The correct answer says that no single model explains Indian voting, and that the factors interact: caste supplies the network, the leader supplies the appeal, and the assessment of delivery supplies the swing.

A worked example

A rural constituency in Maharashtra with roughly two lakh voters.

A sociologist studying it would ask: what is the caste composition, and are any groups numerically dominant; what is the pattern of landholding, since that decides economic dependence; which cooperative institutions exist and who controls them, since in Maharashtra sugar cooperatives and credit societies have been political structures as much as economic ones; how many voters are recent migrants; what is the turnout by sex; and who the local party workers are and what services they provide between elections.

Notice what the list does not contain: any assumption about how a caste will vote. The sociologist's questions are about structure and mechanism, not about predicting outcomes, and this is the difference between electoral sociology and psephology.

The criticisms

1. It is difficult to measure. The ballot is secret, so the data comes from surveys with all their problems of sampling, recall and the tendency of respondents to report what they think is acceptable, which is discussed in [The Interview].
2. Ecological fallacy. Inferring how individuals voted from the results of an area where they live is a classic error: a constituency with many voters of a certain group and a large vote for a certain party does not establish that those voters cast that vote.
3. Determinism. Treating a social characteristic as deciding a vote denies the voter's judgment, and the evidence of large swings between elections with an unchanged social composition contradicts it.
4. Categories are unstable. Caste and community categories used in analysis are themselves shaped by politics, which is Kothari's point, so the explanatory variable is partly an effect of the thing it explains.
5. The list of factors is not an explanation. Naming caste, class and region does not say how they combine, and much writing stops at the list.

Quick revision

1. A party seeks to capture power; a pressure group seeks to influence it. That is the defining difference.
2. Functions of parties: interest aggregation, recruitment of leadership, political socialisation, opinion formation, providing government and opposition, and linking citizen to state through local brokerage.
3. Types: by ideology; national and state parties, a distinction recognised by the Election Commission; cadre and mass; broad-appeal and group-appeal.
4. Voting is studied sociologically because votes cluster by social characteristic, which is a social fact.
5. Determinants: caste, religion, region and language, class, rural or urban, age, gender, education, party identification and leadership, candidate factors, incumbency.
6. Kothari: not only the caste basis of politics but the politicisation of caste.
7. Gender: the male and female turnout gap in Indian general elections has narrowed very substantially, and female turnout has recently been close to or above male turnout.
8. Three models: sociological, party identification, rational choice. None alone explains Indian voting.
9. Criticisms: secrecy makes measurement hard, the ecological fallacy, determinism, unstable categories, and a list of factors is not an explanation.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish a political party from a pressure group. A political party seeks to capture governmental power itself, principally by contesting elections, and takes responsibility for governing across the whole range of public questions. A pressure group does not seek office; it seeks to influence whoever holds it, usually in relation to a narrow set of interests, and it can therefore work with any government.

2. State four functions of a political party. Interest aggregation, bundling the innumerable demands of a society into a few packages that can be voted on; recruitment of political leadership, since parties select who will hold office; political socialisation and the formation of public opinion; and linking the citizen to the state, which in India frequently takes the concrete form of local workers assisting people with documents, entitlements and access to officials.

3. Why is voting behaviour a sociological subject? Because although a vote is cast individually and in secret, votes cluster systematically by social characteristic: caste, religion, region, class, age, gender, education and residence. That regularity persists although the individuals change, so it cannot be explained by facts about any particular voter. It is a social fact in Durkheim's sense and therefore a proper object of sociological study.

4. What did Kothari mean by the politicisation of caste? That the relationship between caste and politics runs both ways. Caste supplies politics with networks, identities and candidates, but electoral competition also reshapes caste: it encourages the formation of wider caste federations, produces associations and leaders where none existed, and gives old identities new political content. The categories used to explain voting are therefore partly a product of the electoral process they are used to explain.

5. What is the ecological fallacy in the study of voting? The error of inferring the behaviour of individuals from data about the area they live in. That a constituency contains many voters of a particular community and returned a large vote for a particular party does not establish that those voters cast that vote; the correlation is at the level of the area, and the individuals within it may have voted in any pattern consistent with the total.

Participation in law making through the consultation processes on draft legislation and delegated legislation, and through evidence to parliamentary committees.

Mobilising public opinion: publicity, media campaigns, publications, research, and now social media.

Direct action: demonstrations, strikes, bandhs, non-cooperation, sit-ins, and at the extreme, obstruction. The legality of these varies and is itself contested.

Electoral support: endorsing, funding or campaigning for candidates favourable to the interest, without contesting in the group's own name.

Supplying expertise. The least visible and often the most effective technique: an official drafting a technical regulation needs information that the industry possesses, and the flow of that information shapes the outcome.

Parties and pressure groups compared

The overlap should be acknowledged, because examiners like the qualification. Some organisations do both: a trade union federation affiliated to a party, or a group that begins as a movement and becomes a party. The boundary is not always sharp, and the test is whether the body seeks office in its own name.

The functions they perform, and the objections

The case for them

They articulate interests in the period between elections, when a vote gives no guidance on any particular question.

They supply information and expertise that legislators and officials do not have.

They represent intensity as well as number. An election counts heads; a pressure group can convey that a small number of people care intensely about something a majority is indifferent to, which majority voting cannot express.

They provide a channel for participation to people who will never hold office.

They act as a check between elections, and in a system with a strong executive majority they may be a more effective check than a legislature.

They are the practical form of the freedom to form associations, without which those freedoms would be individual only.

The case against them

Unequal access. Groups with money and organisation are heard far more than the numerous and unorganised. Industry associations have permanent staff and researchers; agricultural labourers, domestic workers and slum residents do not. This is the standing objection, and it is a version of the point in [The Conflict Perspective] that formal equality coexists with unequal capacity to use it.

They are unrepresentative and unaccountable. A group speaks in the name of an interest but is answerable only to its own members, who may be a small proportion of those it claims to represent.

Sectional interest against the general interest. A group's success may impose a diffuse cost on everyone to secure a concentrated benefit for a few.

Methods. Where lobbying is unregulated, the line between persuasion, inducement and corruption is not drawn by anything but the criminal law, and in India there is no comprehensive statute regulating lobbying or requiring disclosure of it, which is a genuine gap worth naming.

Obstruction. Direct action can impose costs on people who are not parties to the dispute.

A worked example

A ministry publishes draft rules requiring a new safety certification for a category of small manufacturers.

The industry association meets officials, submits a memorandum with cost estimates, and offers a technical alternative. It has staff, data and access, and its representation is detailed.

A workers' federation submits a memorandum supporting the requirement and asks that inspection be strengthened, and organises a demonstration to attract notice.

A consumer organisation publishes research and briefs journalists, and threatens litigation if the rules are diluted.

Unorganised small workshop owners, who will bear the cost and are numerous, submit nothing, because they have no association, no information about the consultation and no capacity to respond within the period allowed.

The outcome will reflect the organisation of the interests rather than their weight in the population, and that sentence is the whole sociological point about pressure groups. It also identifies the standing argument for statutory consultation procedures and for publishing the responses received: they are attempts to correct for the unequal capacity to be heard.

Quick revision

1. A pressure group seeks to influence government; a party seeks to capture it.
2. Characteristics: organised, common interest, influence not office, selective concerns, works with any government, continuous, usually outside government.
3. Types: institutional, associational, non-associational (identity based, prominent in India), anomic (spontaneous). Cross-cutting: interest groups and promotional groups.
4. Techniques: lobbying, representations, litigation including public interest litigation, participation in law making, mobilising opinion, direct action, electoral support, and supplying expertise.
5. The relaxation of standing is what made litigation a pressure technique in India.
6. For: articulate interests between elections, supply expertise, represent intensity as well as number, provide participation, act as a check, and give practical form to the freedom of association.
7. Against: unequal access, unrepresentative and unaccountable, sectional against general interest, unregulated methods, and obstruction. India has no comprehensive statute regulating lobbying.

Test yourself

1. Define a pressure group and distinguish it from a political party. An organised association of persons with a common interest which seeks to influence the decisions of government, legislature and administration in favour of that interest, without contesting elections in its own name or seeking office. A party differs in aiming to capture governmental power itself, in contesting elections, in addressing the whole field of public policy, and in being answerable to the whole electorate rather than only to its own members.

2. Give four types of pressure group with examples. Institutional groups, formed within the machinery of government or established institutions, such as associations of civil servants. Associational groups, deliberately formed to advance a defined interest, such as trade unions, industry associations and bar associations. Non-associational groups, resting on identity rather than organisation, such as caste and community groupings. Anomic groups, spontaneous and short-lived agitations without permanent organisation.

3. Describe the techniques pressure groups use, and say which is distinctive in India. Lobbying legislators and officials, submitting representations to ministries and committees, litigation, participation in consultation on draft legislation, mobilising public opinion through media and publication, direct action such as demonstrations and strikes, supporting candidates without contesting, and supplying technical expertise. Litigation is distinctively important in India, where the relaxation of standing requirements in public interest litigation allows an organisation with no personal injury to raise a public question in court.

4. Give the principal criticism of pressure group politics. Unequal access. Groups with money, permanent staff and technical capacity are heard far more effectively than the numerous but unorganised, so outcomes reflect the organisation of interests rather than their weight in the population. To this are added that such groups are answerable only to their own members while claiming to speak for wider interests, and that in India there is no comprehensive statute regulating or requiring disclosure of lobbying.

5. What can a pressure group express that an election cannot? Intensity. An election counts heads and treats every vote alike, so it registers how many people hold a view but not how strongly. A pressure group can convey that a small number care intensely about a question on which a majority is indifferent, and can keep that view before decision-makers continuously between elections rather than only at the moment of voting.

India as a welfare state

This is the section that should be longest, because it is where the topic meets the reader's own subject.

The commitment is constitutional. The Preamble declares the resolve to secure justice, social, economic and political, and equality of status and opportunity. The Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV set out the welfare programme directly: the state is to strive to promote the welfare of the people by securing a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, informs all the institutions of national life; to direct its policy towards securing adequate means of livelihood, the distribution of ownership of material resources to subserve the common good, and equal pay for equal work; to make provision for just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief, and for public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement; to secure a living wage; to raise the level of nutrition and public health; and to provide free and compulsory education for children.

The Directive Principles are not enforceable by any court, and that is itself a sociologically interesting fact: the welfare commitment was written as a direction to the state rather than as a right of the citizen, which located it in politics rather than in litigation.

The judicial development. Over time several welfare guarantees were brought within the enforceable fundamental rights by interpretation, and the right to education was later made an express fundamental right by constitutional amendment, with the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 giving it statutory shape.

The statutory programme. India's welfare state is built substantially through legislation, and the examples worth naming are those that create rights: the National Food Security Act 2013; the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, which creates a legal entitlement to a specified number of days of unskilled manual work; the Right to Information Act 2005, which is a welfare measure in the sense that it makes entitlements claimable; the Code on Social Security 2020, which consolidates earlier social security legislation; and the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007, discussed in [Changing Patterns of the Family].

The distinctive Indian pattern, and the point that lifts an answer: India adopted the objectives of a developed welfare state at a level of income at which the countries that pioneered them had not yet attempted them. The consequence is a wide gap between the entitlement and the delivery, and a welfare system that operates heavily through targeted schemes and rationing rather than through universal provision.

The criticisms

Give these fairly, since an answer that only praises the concept is incomplete.

1. Cost and fiscal strain, particularly where the tax base is narrow.
2. Dependence. The argument that guaranteed provision weakens the incentive to work and to save. It is asserted more often than it is demonstrated, and saying so is fair.
3. Bureaucracy. Welfare requires administration, and administration brings delay, discretion, rent-seeking and the humiliation of applicants. Foucault's account of disciplinary power in [Post Modernism] is directly relevant: welfare is delivered through registration, inspection and classification.
4. Targeting errors. Both exclusion, of those entitled who do not receive, and inclusion, of those not entitled who do. In a country of India's size both are large in absolute numbers, and exclusion is the more serious because it falls on the poorest.
5. Paternalism. The state decides what people need.
6. The gap between promise and delivery, which is corrosive of trust in the state itself, and is the strongest criticism in the Indian context.

A worked example

A rural household is entitled to subsidised foodgrain under the National Food Security Act 2013.

As a legal entitlement it is straightforward: eligibility, quantity, price and a mechanism for grievance.

As a social process it involves several steps at each of which the entitlement can fail: the household must be identified as eligible in a list prepared by an administrative process; it must possess documents, which requires literacy or a broker; it must reach a fair price shop that is open and stocked; and it must be able to complain effectively if the quantity is short.

Who fails at each step is socially patterned, not random: the least literate, the most remote, the most recently migrated, the least connected to local political networks. A welfare state's real coverage is therefore not measured by its statute book but by who is standing at the end of the queue, and that measurement is a sociological exercise, using exactly the survey methods in Module III.

What a welfare state is NOT

It is not socialism. A welfare state accepts private ownership and the market and corrects their results. A socialist state seeks to change ownership itself. The distinction is regularly muddled in answers.

It is not charity. The provision is a matter of right, and that is the whole point of the concept.

It is not the same as a large state. A state may be large and not welfare-oriented, and a state may deliver welfare through transfers with a small administration.

It is not merely a policy. In India it is a constitutional commitment, which is what distinguishes the Indian case from a country where welfare depends on which government is in office.

Quick revision

1. A welfare state accepts responsibility for the social and economic well-being of citizens, providing minimum standards as of right, in contrast to the police or laissez-faire state.
2. It arose because industry destroyed the family, caste and village arrangements that met these needs, and because the franchise made the poor politically significant. Germany's social insurance of the 1880s; the Beveridge Report 1942 and its five giants: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, idleness.
3. Characteristics: positive functions, guaranteed minimum standards, social security, services, redistribution, economic regulation, full employment as an objective, democratic means.
4. In India the commitment is constitutional: the Preamble and the Directive Principles in Part IV, which are not enforceable by any court.
5. The statutory programme includes the National Food Security Act 2013, the rural employment guarantee of 2005, the Right to Information Act 2005, the Code on Social Security 2020, and the right to education, made a fundamental right by amendment and implemented by the Act of 2009.
6. India adopted developed-country welfare objectives at a low level of income, which is why the gap between entitlement and delivery is the central Indian problem.
7. Criticisms: cost, dependence, bureaucracy, exclusion and inclusion errors, paternalism, and the gap between promise and delivery.

Test yourself

1. Define the welfare state and contrast it with the police state. A welfare state assumes primary responsibility for the social and economic well-being of its citizens, guaranteeing minimum standards of income, health, education, housing and social security as a matter of right, and intervening in the economy to reduce inequality and insecurity. A police or laissez-faire state confines itself to maintaining order, providing defence and enforcing contracts, leaving well-being to the family, the market and charity.

2. Why did the welfare state emerge? Because industrialisation destroyed the arrangements that had met these needs: it moved people away from kin, made income depend on a wage that ceased with the work, produced unemployment as a structural condition and concentrated poverty visibly in cities. Poverty came to be understood as a consequence of the economy rather than of character, the extension of the franchise made the poor politically important, and the existence of a revolutionary alternative made reform attractive.

3. How is India's welfare commitment expressed constitutionally, and with what limitation? Through the Preamble's resolve to secure social, economic and political justice and equality of status and opportunity, and above all through the Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV, which direct the state to secure adequate means of livelihood, just conditions of work, a living wage, public assistance in unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement, improved nutrition and public health, and free and compulsory education. The limitation is that the Directive Principles are not enforceable by any court, so the commitment was placed in politics rather than in litigation.

4. What is distinctive about the Indian welfare state? That India adopted the objectives of a developed welfare state at a level of national income far below that at which the pioneering countries attempted them. The consequence is a wide gap between entitlement and delivery, a reliance on targeted schemes and rationing rather than universal provision, and a system in which the practical question is less what the law promises than who succeeds in obtaining it.

5. Give three criticisms of the welfare state. That it is costly and strains public finances, particularly where the tax base is narrow; that its delivery requires an administration which brings delay, discretion, rent-seeking and the humiliation of applicants; and that targeting produces both exclusion of the entitled and inclusion of the ineligible, of which exclusion is the more serious because it falls on precisely the people the provision exists for. To these is added the corrosive effect on trust of a persistent gap between promise and delivery.

The social importance of work and occupation

What work is, sociologically

Work is the exertion of effort to produce goods or services. Sociologically, three points follow immediately and are frequently missed.

Not all work is paid. Domestic and care work is work, and its exclusion from measures of production is a well-recognised gap, which is why time-use surveys exist.

Not all paid activity is regarded as work by those who do it, and the boundary between work and leisure is socially drawn.

Work is a social activity even when performed alone, since it is organised, evaluated and rewarded by others.

Why work matters beyond the wage

The list is what an examiner is asking for when the topic says "social importance".

1. Income, and therefore access to almost everything else.
2. Identity. The first question asked of a stranger in most societies is what they do. Occupation supplies a large part of how a person is described and how they describe themselves.
3. Status. Occupations are ranked, and the ranking is remarkably stable across societies and over time. It is a principal component of class, as [Class] shows.
4. Structuring of time. Work organises the day, the week and the year, and its absence disorganises them, which is one of the best-documented effects of unemployment.
5. Social contacts. For most adults the workplace is the main source of relationships outside the family.
6. Purpose and self-worth.
7. Socialisation. Occupational socialisation shapes outlook, vocabulary and values, as [Socialization] describes.
8. Social order. Work absorbs energy and time, and a society with a large number of unoccupied young adults is understood everywhere to be unstable.

The strongest evidence for all of this is unemployment, and it is what the topic is really about. Studies of unemployment consistently find effects far beyond loss of income: loss of time structure, of contact, of status and of purpose. A person given the same money without the work is not restored to the same condition, which is the clearest demonstration that work is not merely a means of earning.

Occupation as a social position

An occupation is not just a set of tasks. It carries a status, an occupational culture of shared language and values, a network, and often a regulatory body that controls entry, which is where the law student should notice the connection to [Sociology of the Legal Profession].

In India occupation has a further dimension: the traditional caste system assigned occupations by birth, so that occupation and ritual status were joined. The link has weakened greatly, and it has not disappeared, particularly at the bottom, where stigmatised occupations remain heavily associated with particular communities. Legislation prohibiting manual scavenging and providing for the rehabilitation of those engaged in it exists precisely because an occupation had become hereditary and degrading, which is a matter of caste as much as of employment.

Mechanization and the decline of traditional skills

What mechanization does

Mechanization is the replacement of human and animal effort by machines. Its social effects are the subject here, and there are six.

1. Deskilling. A craft that required years of training is broken into simple operations a machine performs or an unskilled worker feeds. Harry Braverman's argument that capitalist production systematically degrades skill is the reference.
2. The decline of traditional occupations. Handloom weaving, hand pottery, oil pressing, hand-made footwear, village blacksmithing and countless others have contracted sharply in India. The skill dies with the generation holding it, because there is no reason for a child to learn it.
3. Displacement and migration. The displaced move, usually to cities and to insecure work.
4. Change in the workplace and in authority. Work moves from home to factory, from kin to employer, from custom to contract, which is the movement described in [The Family: Meaning and Functions].
5. New skills and new occupations. Mechanization destroys occupations and creates others, usually requiring different and often formal qualifications, which is why the losers and the gainers are rarely the same people.
6. Alienation. Dealt with in [Work and Alienation].

The Indian case, stated carefully

India's handicrafts and handloom sector declined severely under colonial industrialisation, and the artisan communities affected were pushed towards agriculture and casual labour. The state's response since independence has included protective measures for the handloom sector, cooperatives, and the promotion of craft, and there is now also a market that values hand production precisely because it is scarce.

Two propositions can be stated with confidence, and the numbers should be left to a named source. First, the direction is one of long-term decline in traditional artisanal employment relative to the workforce. Second, what is lost is not only income but a body of knowledge, since a craft is transmitted by apprenticeship and cannot be recovered from a description once the chain of transmission breaks. The second is the sociologically interesting loss and the one an examiner rewards.

A worked example

A potter's household in a Gujarat village. The grandfather's household produced pots for a defined set of client families, receiving grain at harvest under a customary arrangement, and the skill passed from father to son by apprenticeship from childhood. Work and home were the same place, and occupation, caste and community were the same thing.

The father's generation met plastic and metal vessels made in factories. Demand fell, the customary arrangement broke down, and income became cash and irregular.

The son works in a ceramics factory in a town, operating a machine. He earns more, and reliably. He does not know how to make a pot by hand, and his father's skill will not outlive his father.

Read the change against the six effects listed above and every one appears: deskilling, decline of a traditional occupation, migration, the shift from custom to contract, a new occupation requiring different skills, and the separation of home from work. And note what has been gained, because an answer that laments only is a poor answer: the son has a higher and more reliable income, is not bound to hereditary clients, and is not tied by his birth to one occupation.

Quick revision

1. An economic system decides what is produced, how, who owns the means of production, and how the product is distributed.
2. Polanyi's three modes of integration: reciprocity, redistribution, exchange. Most societies use all three.
3. The economy is embedded in social relations (Granovetter): caste, kinship, community and norms shape employment, credit and consumption.
4. Work matters for income, identity, status, the structuring of time, social contacts, purpose, socialisation and social order. Unemployment proves it: money without work does not restore the person.
5. Occupation carries status, an occupational culture, a network, and often a body regulating entry.
6. In India occupation was historically assigned by caste, and the link survives most strongly in stigmatised work.
7. Mechanization: deskilling (Braverman), decline of traditional occupations, displacement and migration, custom to contract, new occupations for different people, and alienation.
8. When a craft's chain of apprenticeship breaks, the knowledge is lost and cannot be recovered from description.

Test yourself

1. What is an economic system and what must every one of them decide? The organised set of institutions, norms and relationships through which a society produces, distributes, exchanges and consumes goods and services. Every economic system must decide what is produced and for whom, how it is produced and with what division of labour, who owns the means of production, and on what principle the product is distributed, whether by need, status, contribution, ownership or force.

2. What is meant by saying that the economy is embedded in society? That economic activity is not a separate sphere governed only by calculation of advantage, but is shaped throughout by social relations. Whom an employer hires is affected by caste, kinship and language; whom a trader extends credit to depends on community and reputation; what people buy is governed by norms of what befits their standing; and in India entry to occupations was historically regulated by birth.

3. State the social importance of work beyond earning. Work confers identity, since occupation is how people are described and describe themselves; it confers status, occupations being ranked in a strikingly stable order; it structures time across the day, the week and the year; it supplies most adults with their main source of social contact outside the family; it provides purpose and self-worth; it socialises, transmitting an occupational culture; and it absorbs the energies of the population, which is why unemployment is treated everywhere as a threat to social order.

4. What are the social effects of mechanization? Deskilling, as crafts requiring long training are broken into simple operations; the decline of traditional occupations and the loss of the skills attached to them; displacement of workers and migration to cities and insecure work; the movement of work from home to factory and from customary relations with kin to contractual relations with an employer; the creation of new occupations requiring different and often formal qualifications, so that those displaced are rarely those who gain; and alienation from the work itself.

5. Why is the loss of a traditional craft more than the loss of an income? Because a craft is a body of knowledge transmitted by apprenticeship, learned by watching and doing over years rather than from a description. When demand falls and no one in the next generation learns it, the chain of transmission breaks and the knowledge cannot be reconstructed from written accounts. What disappears is therefore a technique, an occupational culture and a community identity, not merely a source of earnings.

Types of property

By nature. Corporeal or tangible property, land, buildings, goods; and incorporeal or intangible property, debts, shares, patents, copyright and trademarks. The growth of the second is one of the largest economic changes of the last century.

By use. Consumption property, personal effects and dwellings; and productive property, the means of production, land, factories, machinery. The distinction is central to socialist analysis, since it is productive property, not personal effects, that socialism proposes to socialise.

By holder. Private property, held by an individual or a legal person; common property, held by a defined community with regulated access, such as village grazing land, forests and tanks; public or state property; and open access resources belonging to nobody.

The distinction between common and open access is worth making because it is regularly confused. Elinor Ostrom's work showed that commons managed by their user communities under rules that the community makes and enforces can be sustained over long periods, and that the assumption that shared resources are inevitably destroyed conflates a managed commons with an unmanaged free-for-all.

Property and social structure

It determines stratification

Who owns productive property is, in Marx's analysis, the fundamental social division, as [Marx: Theory of Social Class and Social Conflict] sets out. Even on a non-Marxist account, ownership of land in an agrarian society decides income, security, credit, marriage prospects, political influence and standing.

It shapes the family

Property is the reason the joint family held together where it did, and partition is what divided it. Rules of inheritance decide who counts as family for the purpose that matters most, and Engels's argument in [Theories of the Origin of the Family] is that the monogamous family itself arose to secure legitimate heirs.

It structures caste and gender

Access to land was historically restricted by caste, and the exclusion of women from effective inheritance was general. Both have changed by legislation, and the change is a good test of the argument in [Law and Social Change]: the Hindu Succession Act 1956 and its amendment in 2005, which made daughters coparceners by birth in a joint family, altered rights on paper immediately, while the practice of daughters relinquishing claims in favour of brothers has changed far more slowly.

It is the basis of political power

The connection between landholding and political influence in rural India is direct, and it is why land reform was understood at independence as a political programme and not only an economic one.

Property in Indian social history

Four changes are worth naming, because they show property being remade by law.

Colonial settlements. The revenue settlements introduced under colonial rule reorganised rights in land and created intermediaries with rights that had not previously existed in that form.

Abolition of intermediaries and land ceilings. After independence, legislation abolished intermediary tenures and imposed ceilings on holdings, with results that varied greatly between states.

The constitutional change. The right to property was originally a fundamental right; it was removed from that Part by the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act 1978 and now stands as a constitutional right, and no person may be deprived of property save by authority of law. The change is a striking instance of a society deliberately lowering the constitutional protection of property in order to make redistribution possible.

Recognition of forest rights. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 recognised individual and community rights that had been exercised for generations without legal recognition, which is a clear case of law catching up with an existing social fact.

A worked example

A field in a village is recorded in the name of a man who died in 2010.

His sons occupy it and treat it as theirs. His daughter has a legal share under the law as amended in 2005 and has not asserted it, because doing so would breach the norm that a daughter takes nothing after her marriage. A tenant has cultivated it for twenty years and has rights under tenancy legislation. The village grazes cattle on it after harvest, an arrangement nobody wrote down and everybody observes. The state taxes it and can acquire it on terms.

Ask who owns the field and the question dissolves. Five parties hold different sticks in the bundle, two of them by social rule rather than by law, and the legal position and the social position do not coincide.

The daughter's position is the sociologically interesting one. She has a right the law gives her and a norm that prevents her using it, and which prevails depends on things a statute cannot reach: whether she is dependent on her brothers, whether she must return to the village, and what asserting the claim would cost her socially. This is [Law and Social Change] in one field, and it is the best illustration in Module I of the gap between a legal right and a social reality.

What property is NOT

Not a thing. It is a relationship about a thing.

Not natural. It is created and defined by society, and what may be owned differs completely between societies and over time.

Not absolute. Every legal system limits it: by taxation, by compulsory acquisition, by planning, by tenancy protection and by the rights of others.

Not identical with possession. A tenant possesses without owning; an owner may own without possessing.

Not confined to tangible things. Intangible property is now a large part of what is owned in an advanced economy.

Quick revision

1. Property is a relation between people about a thing, not between a person and a thing; it requires exclusion and therefore requires society.
2. It is a bundle of rights: possession, use, fruits, exclusion, disposal, destruction. The sticks can be held by different people over one object.
3. Types: corporeal and incorporeal; consumption and productive; private, common, state and open access.
4. Common is not open access: Ostrom showed that community-managed commons with rules can be sustained.
5. Property determines stratification, shapes the family and inheritance, structures caste and gender, and underlies political power.
6. Indian changes: colonial revenue settlements; abolition of intermediaries and ceilings; the Forty-fourth Amendment 1978 removing property from the fundamental rights; the Hindu Succession Act 1956 as amended in 2005; and the Forest Rights Act 2006.
7. A legal right in property may be defeated by a social norm: the daughter who does not claim her share.

Test yourself

1. Why is property described as a relation between persons rather than between a person and a thing? Because ownership consists in the exclusion of others, and exclusion is meaningless without other people and a rule they observe. A person alone can possess an object but cannot own it. Property therefore exists only because a society recognises and enforces the claim, which is why what may be owned, by whom and on what terms differs completely between societies and changes over time.

2. Explain property as a bundle of rights and give a consequence. Ownership comprises separable rights: possession, use, enjoyment of the fruits, exclusion of others, disposal and destruction. Because they are separable, different people may hold different rights over one object: a tenant has possession and use, the landlord the income and power of disposal, the state powers of taxation and acquisition, a neighbour an easement. It follows that asking who owns a thing is often the wrong question, and that legislation can redistribute rights without transferring the object.

3. Distinguish common property from open access. Common property is held by a defined community whose members have regulated access under rules the community makes and enforces, such as village grazing land, tanks and forests. Open access resources belong to nobody and are open to all comers without rules. Ostrom's work showed that managed commons can be sustained over long periods, so the claim that shared resources are inevitably destroyed applies to open access rather than to a genuine commons.

4. How does property structure social inequality in India? Ownership of productive property, above all land, determines income, security, access to credit, marriage prospects, political influence and social standing. Access to land was historically restricted by caste, and women were in practice excluded from inheritance. Both restrictions have been altered by law, notably the Hindu Succession Act 1956 as amended in 2005, but the practice of daughters relinquishing their shares shows that the social distribution changes far more slowly than the legal one.

5. What does the Forty-fourth Amendment tell a sociologist? That the society deliberately reduced the constitutional protection of property in order to make redistribution legally possible. The right to property, originally a fundamental right, was removed from that Part in 1978 and now stands as a constitutional right subject to authority of law. It is a clear instance of the rules constituting property being altered to change the distribution of social power, and it shows that property is a political arrangement rather than a natural fact.

Marx's account: the division of labour develops with the forms of property, and its detailed form under capitalism serves the extraction of surplus by making the worker a fragment of a process they do not control.

The social consequences

MU names this expressly as a topic, so the answer must be organised rather than impressionistic. Give the gains and the costs.

The gains

1. Productivity, and therefore the material surplus on which everything else rests.
2. Interdependence, which is the most important sociological consequence: specialists cannot survive alone, so specialisation binds people together. This is the whole of Durkheim's argument.
3. Skill and expertise, since concentrated practice produces competence that a generalist cannot reach.
4. Social differentiation, the emergence of distinct occupational groups with their own cultures, which enriches a society.
5. The growth of institutions. Specialisation produced the specialist institutions of Module I: separate economic, educational, medical, religious and legal institutions exist because the work was divided.
6. The professions and the possibility of formal law. A society without a division of labour has no full-time lawyers, judges or officials, so it can have custom but not a developed legal system. The legal profession itself is a product of the division of labour, which is worth saying in an answer on this topic.

The costs

1. Alienation, treated in [Work and Alienation].
2. Deskilling, treated in [The Economic System, Work and Occupation].
3. Inequality. Occupations are unequally rewarded and unequally esteemed, so the division of labour generates stratification.
4. Dependence and vulnerability. A specialist whose speciality disappears has nothing to fall back on, which is why technological change is felt as a threat.
5. Narrowness. Adam Smith himself observed that a man whose whole life is spent on a few simple operations becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human creature to become, and it is worth noting that the classic advocate of the division of labour saw the cost clearly.
6. The pathological forms, which is Durkheim's contribution.

Durkheim's abnormal forms

Durkheim held that the division of labour normally produces solidarity, and identified the conditions in which it does not. These are examinable and often omitted.

The anomic division of labour, where the specialised parts are not adequately regulated and their relations are not settled, so that conflict rather than cooperation results. Industrial conflict was his example.

The forced division of labour, where positions are allotted not by ability and inclination but by inherited advantage or constraint, so that people are held in tasks they did not choose. The forced division of labour is the concept that speaks most directly to caste, and to any society where birth decides occupation, and a student who links the two writes a strong answer.

The poorly coordinated division, where the work is specialised but the parts are not properly integrated, so effort is wasted.

Durkheim's remedy for the first two is not less specialisation but regulation: occupational associations, and rules governing the relations between the specialised parts. That is a direct argument for labour law, professional regulation and the machinery of industrial relations, and it is the point at which this chapter meets a law student's own subject.

Durkheim's conclusion, in one paragraph

The division of labour changes the basis on which a society holds together. Where people are alike and do the same work, they are bound by their likeness and by a strong common morality, which Durkheim called mechanical solidarity, and law is chiefly repressive, punishing offences against the shared conscience. Where labour is divided, people are unlike and are bound by their need for one another, which is organic solidarity, and law becomes chiefly restitutive, restoring relations rather than punishing. The whole argument, with its evidence and its critics, is in [Durkheim: Division of Labour and Social Solidarity].

A worked example

In a village where every household farmed and made most of what it used, a dispute about a boundary was settled by elders who knew both parties, knew the land, and had no speciality in settling disputes. The settlement restored the relationship, because the parties had to go on living together.

In a city where labour is fully divided, the same dispute is handled by an advocate, who is a specialist; before a judge, who is another; on a record prepared by a clerk; under rules drafted by a legislature; enforced by a bailiff. Nobody in the process knows the parties, and the parties need not deal with each other again.

Both features follow from the division of labour, and both are gains and losses at once. The specialised system is more expert, more consistent and more impartial. It is also slower, more expensive, and unable to restore a relationship, because nobody involved has any interest in the relationship continuing. A student who can state that trade-off has understood why dispute resolution outside the courts keeps being invented, and it connects Module I directly to the alternative dispute resolution a law course covers elsewhere.

Quick revision

1. The division of labour is the differentiation of a society's work into distinct tasks performed by different people. Forms: by sex, by age, simple or social, complex or detailed, territorial, and in India by caste.
2. Adam Smith: specialisation raises output; the pin factory; limited by the extent of the market. He also saw its cost to the worker.
3. Durkheim: it grows with material and moral density, and is the peaceful resolution of competition.
4. Gains: productivity, interdependence, skill, differentiation, specialist institutions, and the possibility of a legal profession and a developed legal system.
5. Costs: alienation, deskilling, inequality, vulnerability, narrowness.
6. Durkheim's abnormal forms: the anomic (unregulated), the forced (positions allotted by birth or constraint, which is caste), and the poorly coordinated. His remedy is regulation, not less specialisation.
7. In India the division of labour is also a division of labourers, because caste fixes the person to the task.

Test yourself

1. Define the division of labour and give its main forms. The differentiation of a society's total work into distinct tasks and occupations allotted to different persons, so that each performs a part and all depend on the others. Its forms are by sex and by age, found in every society; the simple or social division into distinct occupations; the complex or detailed division of a single occupation into separate operations, which industry brought; the territorial division between regions and countries; and, in India, division by caste.

2. How did Durkheim explain the growth of the division of labour? By the increase of material and moral density, that is the number of people in contact and the intensity of their interaction. As population grows and contact intensifies, competition for the same resources rises, and specialisation is the peaceful resolution of that competition, since people occupy different niches instead of contending for one. On this account the division of labour is a response to competition and not merely a device for raising output.

3. State the social consequences of the division of labour. Gains: higher productivity and the surplus that rests on it; interdependence, which binds specialists to one another and becomes the basis of solidarity; expertise; the emergence of distinct occupational groups and specialist institutions, including the legal profession and a developed legal system. Costs: alienation of the worker from the work; deskilling; inequality, since occupations are unequally rewarded and esteemed; vulnerability when a speciality disappears; and narrowness of the specialised worker.

4. What are Durkheim's abnormal forms of the division of labour? The anomic form, where relations between the specialised parts are inadequately regulated so that conflict rather than cooperation results, industrial conflict being his example; the forced form, where positions are allotted by inherited advantage or constraint rather than by ability and inclination, which describes a caste order precisely; and the poorly coordinated form, where the parts are specialised but not properly integrated. His remedy is regulation through occupational associations and rules, not a return to less specialisation.

5. Why does a developed legal system presuppose a division of labour? Because full-time judges, advocates, legislators, officials and enforcement agencies can exist only where a society produces enough surplus to support people who do not produce their own subsistence, and where work has been differentiated far enough for dispute settlement to become a separate occupation. A society without a division of labour can have custom and elders who settle quarrels alongside their ordinary work, but not a specialised legal profession or a standing machinery of adjudication.

The sociological development: Blauner

Marx treated alienation as a condition of a whole economic system. Later sociologists, above all Robert Blauner, treated it as a variable that differs between workplaces and can be measured. Blauner analysed alienation into four dimensions of his own, and this is the treatment that makes the concept usable in research.

• Powerlessness: the worker's inability to control the conditions and pace of the work.
• Meaninglessness: inability to see how one's own fragment relates to the whole product or purpose.
• Isolation: absence of a sense of belonging to the work community.
• Self-estrangement: the experience of work as a means only, with no involvement of the self.

Blauner's inverted U. He argued that alienation varies with technology rather than being constant. It is low in craft production, where the worker controls the process and sees the whole; it rises in machine-minding industry; it is highest on the assembly line, where pace, sequence and task are wholly determined by the technology; and it falls again in continuous process production, such as chemicals and refining, where the worker monitors a system, exercises judgment and works in a team. Plotted against technological development the curve rises and then falls, which is why it is called an inverted U.

The finding matters because it separates alienation from capitalism as such: if it varies with technology within the same economic system, it is not produced by ownership alone.

Criticism

1. It is difficult to measure. Alienation is a condition of a relationship, and survey questions measure reported feelings, which is not the same thing.
2. Alienation without misery. Workers in objectively alienating jobs frequently report satisfaction, and the standard reply, that they have adjusted their expectations, risks making the theory unfalsifiable.
3. It is not confined to manual work. Clerical, call centre and platform work display powerlessness and meaninglessness as sharply as any factory, and monitoring by software has extended precisely the control Blauner associated with the assembly line.
4. It is not confined to capitalism. Alienation was reported in state-owned industry in socialist economies, which suggests that scale, hierarchy and the division of labour contribute independently of ownership.
5. Whose standard? The concept assumes a view of what work ought to be, which is a philosophical position rather than an empirical finding.

A worked example

A wooden chair.

In a carpenter's workshop, one person selects the timber, decides the design, makes the whole chair and sells it. They control the process, see the result, and the chair is recognisably theirs. Alienation on all four of Blauner's dimensions is low.

On an assembly line in a furniture factory, one worker fits the same joint every ninety seconds for eight hours. They did not choose the design, cannot vary the pace, never see a completed chair, and the output belongs to the company. Powerlessness, meaninglessness and self-estrangement are all high.

In an automated plant, a worker monitors machines that cut and assemble, intervening when a fault appears, working with three colleagues who between them understand the whole line. Control returns, the whole process is visible, and there is a work group. Alienation falls, which is Blauner's curve.

Now note what the law does about each. For the second case, labour legislation regulates hours, breaks, safety and the pace of work, and provides machinery through which the workers may bargain collectively. The law cannot restore the worker's relation to the product; it can restrain the conditions that make it worst, and that limit is worth stating in an answer, because it is exactly the distinction between what law can and cannot do that Module IV explores.

What alienation is NOT

Not the same as dissatisfaction. A well-paid worker may be satisfied and alienated. Alienation is a description of a relation to work, not a report of a mood.

Not the same as isolation or loneliness. Isolation is one of its dimensions in Blauner's scheme, not the whole of it.

Not confined to factories, as the criticism above records.

Not the same as anomie. Durkheim's anomie is normlessness, a deficiency of regulation in a society. Marx's alienation is estrangement from work under a specific form of ownership. Examiners set the two against each other, and confusing them is the commonest error in this part of the syllabus.

Quick revision

1. Marx's four dimensions: from the product, from the process, from species-being, from other people. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, written 1844, published in the twentieth century.
2. Work should be human nature realised in an object; alienation is the breaking of that relation.
3. Blauner's four dimensions: powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, self-estrangement.
4. Blauner's inverted U: alienation is low in craft work, rises through machine minding, peaks on the assembly line, and falls in continuous process production.
5. Because it varies with technology inside one economic system, it is not produced by ownership alone.
6. Criticism: hard to measure; workers report satisfaction in alienating jobs; it is not confined to manual work or to capitalism; and it assumes a standard of what work ought to be.
7. Alienation is not anomie: alienation is estrangement from work; anomie is normlessness in a society.

Test yourself

1. State Marx's four dimensions of alienation. Alienation from the product, which belongs to another the moment it is made and confronts the worker as an alien thing; from the process of labour, since the worker does not decide what is made, how, or at what pace; from species-being, the conscious and creative production that Marx held to be distinctively human, which is reduced to a mere means of subsistence; and from other human beings, since workers are set in competition with each other and in opposition to the owner.

2. What did Blauner add to the concept? He turned it from a condition of an entire economic system into a variable that differs between workplaces and can be measured, analysing it into powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-estrangement. He then showed that it varies with the technology of production rather than being uniform, which made the concept usable in empirical research.

3. Explain Blauner's inverted U. Alienation is low in craft production, where the worker controls the process and sees the finished article; it rises with machine-minding industry; it reaches its highest point on the assembly line, where pace, sequence and task are dictated by the technology; and it falls again in continuous process industries such as chemicals, where the worker monitors a system, exercises judgment and works in a team. Plotted against technological advance the curve rises and then descends.

4. Distinguish alienation from anomie. Alienation is Marx's concept: the estrangement of the worker from the product, the process, their own nature and other people, arising from a system in which the means of production belong to another. Anomie is Durkheim's: a state of normlessness or deregulation in which established rules have lost their authority and no new ones bind. One concerns a relation to work under a form of ownership; the other concerns the regulation of desires and conduct in a society.

5. Give two criticisms of the concept of alienation. That it is hard to measure, since surveys record reported feelings while alienation is a description of a relationship, and workers in objectively alienating jobs often report satisfaction, which the theory can only explain in ways that risk making it unfalsifiable. And that it is not confined to capitalism, having been reported in state-owned industry in socialist economies, which suggests that scale, hierarchy and the detailed division of labour produce it independently of who owns the enterprise.

Its social consequences, as observed

Reduction of inequality of income, and wide provision of education, health care and employment security, which the historical record supports.

Bureaucracy. Planning requires an administrative apparatus of great size and power, and this is the standing sociological criticism: the concentration of economic and political power in the same hands. Weber anticipated it, arguing that socialism would increase rather than reduce bureaucratic domination.

Loss of the information the market provides. Prices carry information about scarcity and preference, and planners without them face a problem of calculation that proved severe in practice.

Weak incentives, where reward is detached from effort.

Restriction of choice, both of goods and of occupation.

Alienation not abolished. As [Work and Alienation] notes, workers in state-owned industry reported the same estrangement, which is evidence that the detailed division of labour and hierarchy contribute independently of ownership.

Kinds of socialism

Marxian or revolutionary socialism, holding that the transformation requires the overthrow of the existing order. Democratic socialism, seeking the same ends by constitutional means. Fabian or evolutionary socialism, seeking gradual change through legislation. Utopian socialism, the earlier tradition of Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier, which Marx and Engels criticised for proposing ideal communities without an analysis of how the change would come about.

The comparison

The mixed economy, and India

No large economy is purely either. Every capitalist economy has extensive public provision, regulation and redistribution; every socialist economy has had markets, legal or otherwise. The realistic categories are degrees of a mixture.

India's own position should be described in three phases and stated neutrally.

The Constitution does not prescribe an economic system, and the Directive Principles in Part IV direct the state to secure that the ownership and control of material resources are so distributed as best to subserve the common good and that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth to the common detriment. The word socialist was inserted into the Preamble by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act 1976.

The planned phase. From 1950 India followed a mixed economy with a large public sector, five-year plans, industrial licensing, restrictions on foreign investment and extensive regulation of private enterprise.

The 1991 turn. Facing a balance of payments crisis, India substantially liberalised: industrial licensing was largely dismantled, foreign investment was opened, tariffs were reduced and the public sector's reserved role was narrowed. The social consequences, growth, the expansion of an urban middle class, new occupations, widened inequality and continued rural distress, are the subject of [Liberalization and Globalization].

How to write this in an exam: describe the arrangements and their observed consequences, attribute evaluative claims to those who make them, and avoid asserting that either system is superior. That is both accurate and safe.

A worked example

Under capitalism, a company decides. It will produce a medicine if it expects the revenue to exceed the cost, which means a disease affecting people who can pay attracts research and one affecting people who cannot may not, however severe. The market's strength, responsiveness to demand, and its weakness, indifference to need without purchasing power, are the same mechanism.

Under socialism, a planning authority decides, in principle by need. Its strength is that a disease of the poor can be prioritised; its weakness is that the authority must know what is needed and in what quantity without the information prices carry, and its decisions are subject to political rather than commercial distortion.

In India both mechanisms operate, and the law is the instrument that mixes them: patent provisions defining what is patentable, compulsory licensing powers, price control of essential medicines, and public procurement for government programmes. A law student should notice that each of these is a device for correcting one system's characteristic failure with the other's logic, which is what a mixed economy consists of in practice.

Quick revision

1. Capitalism: private ownership, profit, wage labour, market allocation, competition, accumulation.
2. Socialism: social ownership of productive property, production for use, central planning, distribution by work or need, declared abolition of classes.
3. Capitalism's consequences: growth, class formation, urbanisation, inequality, insecurity, alienation, and the corrosion of ascriptive status.
4. Weber: modern capitalism required a disciplined acquisitive ethic and, institutionally, free labour, rational accounting, a calculable legal system and rational administration.
5. Socialism's consequences: reduced inequality and wide services, against bureaucracy, the calculation problem, weak incentives and restricted choice. Weber predicted greater bureaucratic domination.
6. Kinds: Marxian, democratic, Fabian, utopian.
7. No economy is purely either. India: a mixed economy from 1950 with planning and licensing; "socialist" inserted in the Preamble by the Forty-second Amendment 1976; substantial liberalisation from 1991.

Test yourself

1. Compare capitalism and socialism on five points. Ownership of the means of production, private against social or state; the object of production, profit against use and need; the mechanism of allocation, market and price against central planning; distribution, by ownership and market wages against by work done or need; and the role of the state, limited in the classical model of capitalism against central and extensive under socialism.

2. What did Weber say modern capitalism required? A distinctive attitude, the systematic, disciplined and calculating pursuit of gain as a duty rather than for enjoyment, which he traced to ascetic Protestantism; and a set of institutional conditions, namely formally free labour, rational accounting, a calculable and predictable legal system, and a rational administration. The inclusion of a calculable legal order is the point of most direct interest to a law student.

3. State three criticisms of socialism as observed in practice. That planning requires an administrative apparatus of great size, concentrating economic and political power in the same hands, which Weber predicted would increase bureaucratic domination rather than reduce it; that abolishing markets removes the information prices carry about scarcity and preference, leaving planners with a severe problem of calculation; and that detaching reward from effort weakens incentives, while choice of goods and of occupation is restricted.

4. Is India a capitalist or a socialist economy? Neither in a pure form. The Constitution does not prescribe an economic system, though the Directive Principles direct that ownership of material resources be distributed to subserve the common good and that wealth not be concentrated to the common detriment, and the word socialist was inserted into the Preamble in 1976. India followed a mixed economy with extensive planning and licensing from 1950, and liberalised substantially from 1991. It is a mixed economy whose mixture has changed.

5. Why does the assembly-line worker's alienation matter to the comparison? Because alienation was reported in state-owned industry in socialist economies as well as in private industry under capitalism, which indicates that it is produced substantially by the detailed division of labour, by scale and by hierarchy rather than by private ownership alone. It follows that changing who owns an enterprise does not by itself restore the worker's relation to the work, and that the comparison between the two systems cannot be settled on this ground.

Why it is not wage labour

This is the analytical heart of the topic and the paragraph that separates a good answer.

In the language of [Society: Meaning, Characteristics and Types] the jajmani relation belongs to Gemeinschaft and wage labour to Gesellschaft, and in the language of [The Evolutionary Perspective] the change from one to the other is precisely Maine's movement from status to contract. In Polanyi's terms, mentioned in [The Economic System, Work and Occupation], jajmani is reciprocity rather than market exchange.

The two readings of it

An answer must give both, because the literature is genuinely divided.

The harmony reading. Associated with W. H. Wiser, whose village study introduced the term to sociology, this reading emphasises the mutuality: each caste served the others, the relationship carried security, and no family was left without support. On this account the village was an interdependent whole, and the system provided a form of social security that the market does not.

The exploitation reading. Associated with T. O. Beidelman, and supported by much later work, this reading emphasises the inequality: the relationship was not between equals but between those who held the land and those who did not; the terms were set by the dominant caste; the returns to the kamins were meagre and could be withheld; and the arrangement bound low-status families to hereditary and often stigmatised occupations with no exit. On this account the reciprocity was real but the exchange was unequal, and the language of mutual service concealed a relation of dependence.

M. N. Srinivas's concept of the dominant caste is the bridge between the two readings: the caste that held land, numbers and local standing was in a position to set the terms of every jajmani relationship in the village, which explains why the same institution could be described as harmonious by those at the top and as coercive by those at the bottom.

Its decline

The system has largely disappeared, and the causes are the ordinary causes of Indian social change.

The money economy. Cash payment for specific work replaced customary shares.

Mass-produced goods. Factory cloth, plastic and metal vessels, and machine-made shoes destroyed the demand for the artisan castes' products, as [The Economic System, Work and Occupation] describes.

New occupations and mobility. Roads, railways and urban employment gave kamin families an alternative for the first time, and an alternative is what a hereditary tie cannot survive.

Land reform and the fragmentation of holdings weakened the jajmans' capacity to maintain dependants.

Legislation and political change. The abolition of untouchability, reservation, adult franchise and the political mobilisation of lower castes all attacked the ritual hierarchy the system rested on.

Education, which made hereditary occupation seem a limitation rather than a destiny.

What has replaced it is cash payment for specific services, performed for whoever will pay, by people who may or may not belong to the traditional caste, which is to say wage labour and the market.

A worked example

The barber's family in a village served twelve landowning households. They attended each family's weddings and funerals, performed ritual duties as well as cutting hair, carried messages between families arranging marriages, and received grain at each harvest, cloth at a festival, and food at every ceremony. They served nobody else and were served by nobody else in that capacity.

The barber's grandson runs a shop on the highway. He cuts anybody's hair for a fixed price, paid at once. He does not attend anyone's wedding and carries no messages. He earns more and his income no longer depends on the harvest. Nobody supports him if he falls ill.

Both the gain and the loss are in that comparison. He has acquired choice, mobility, cash and independence from the ritual hierarchy. He has lost a guaranteed claim on twelve households in a bad year. The market gave him freedom and took away his security, and the state's social security legislation is an attempt to supply what the market removed, which is the same pattern as in [The Welfare State].

Quick revision

1. Jajman is the patron, generally a landowning family; kamin or praja the serving family. From yajman, the patron of a sacrifice.
2. Characteristics: hereditary, personal to named families, durable, diffuse rather than specific, paid by a customary share of the harvest in kind, tied to caste, hierarchical, reciprocal, and inheritable as a right.
3. Not wage labour: birth against contract, no choice of party, lifelong, diffuse obligation, customary share against agreed price.
4. It is Gemeinschaft, status rather than contract, and reciprocity rather than market exchange.
5. Wiser's harmony reading against Beidelman's exploitation reading; Srinivas's dominant caste explains how both can be true of the same institution.
6. Decline: the money economy, mass-produced goods, new occupations and mobility, land reform, legislation and political mobilisation, education.
7. What replaced it: cash payment for specific work, from whoever will pay, with freedom gained and security lost.

Test yourself

1. Describe the jajmani system. The traditional Indian village arrangement under which families of service and artisan castes, the kamins, rendered hereditary services to particular landowning families, the jajmans, within their hereditary occupation and at all ceremonies, and received in return a customary share of the harvest together with food, clothing, a house site, fodder and assistance in difficulty. The relationship was hereditary on both sides, personal to named families, lifelong, and diffuse rather than confined to specified tasks.

2. Why is the jajmani relation not wage labour? Because it rested on birth and custom rather than on contract; neither party chose the other; it was lifelong and inherited rather than terminable; the obligation was to serve generally rather than to perform an agreed task; and payment was a customary share of the harvest in kind at harvest time rather than a price agreed in advance for the work done. It was a personal and total relation within a hierarchy, not an impersonal and limited bargain between formal equals.

3. Give the two competing interpretations of the system. The harmony interpretation, associated with Wiser, emphasises mutual interdependence and the security the arrangement gave every family, presenting the village as a whole in which each caste served the others. The exploitation interpretation, associated with Beidelman, emphasises that the terms were set by those who held the land, that the returns to the kamins were meagre and could be withheld, and that the system bound low-status families to hereditary and often stigmatised occupations from which there was no exit.

4. Why did the jajmani system decline? Because the money economy replaced payment in kind with cash for specific work; because mass-produced goods destroyed the market for artisan products; because roads, railways and urban employment gave serving families an alternative, which a hereditary tie cannot survive; because land reform reduced the jajmans' capacity to maintain dependants; and because the abolition of untouchability, adult franchise, reservation and education undermined the ritual hierarchy on which it rested.

5. What was gained and what was lost by its disappearance? Gained: freedom to choose an occupation and a customer, mobility, cash income independent of the harvest, and release from a ritual hierarchy that fixed a family's standing by birth. Lost: a guaranteed claim on named households in bad years, assistance at weddings and in illness, and a recognised place in the village order. Statutory social security is in part an attempt to supply what the market removed when it dissolved the older arrangement.

2. Family structure and kinship obligations

The joint family provided security and pooled resources, which supports investment. It could also spread the returns of individual effort so widely that the incentive to make it was reduced, and it restricted mobility, since a person could not readily move away.

The two-sided effect is what should be written, and the standing evidence for the positive side is the Indian business family: family firms whose kin networks supplied capital, trusted managers, credit without formal security and information, all at low cost. Kinship functioning as a substitute for a formal financial and legal infrastructure is a genuine developmental advantage, and it is why family business remains so prominent in Indian industry.

3. Caste and the system of stratification

Caste bore on development in several distinct ways, and separating them makes an answer precise.

Occupational rigidity. Hereditary occupation restricted the movement of labour to where it was most productive.

Restriction of talent. Where entry to trades and to education was closed by birth, ability was wasted, and this is the largest and least measurable cost.

Restriction of markets. Rules about commensality and contact restricted trade, service and residence.

Against which, some caste networks operated exactly as kinship does above: trading communities used caste ties for credit and enforcement, so caste both obstructed and facilitated depending on where one stood.

The general proposition is that a society which allocates positions by birth rather than by ability forgoes the productivity of everyone misallocated, which is Durkheim's forced division of labour from [The Division of Labour] restated in economic terms.

4. Education, health and skills

Uncontroversially a determinant. Literacy, technical skill and health determine what a workforce can do, and the distribution matters as much as the average: a society with high average education and a large excluded population develops differently from one with the same average distributed evenly. The comparison between Indian states on literacy and health outcomes is the standard illustration, and figures should be taken from a named source such as the Census or the National Family Health Survey.

5. The position of women

Female education and employment affect development directly, through the size and quality of the workforce, and indirectly, through fertility, child health and the schooling of the next generation. India's low and, for a period, declining female labour force participation despite rising female education is a well-documented puzzle, and it is a legitimate and safe thing to name, provided the explanation is offered as contested rather than settled.

6. The state, law and administration

Weber's list of the preconditions of rational capitalism included a calculable legal system and a rational administration, as [Capitalism and Socialism as Forms of Economy] notes.

The mechanism is worth spelling out for a law student. Investment requires that expectations about the future be reliable. Enforceable contracts, secure and ascertainable title to land, predictable regulation, courts that decide within a foreseeable time, and administration that is not arbitrary all reduce the risk of committing resources now for a return later. Where they are absent, capital is committed only within networks of personal trust, which limits the scale of enterprise to the reach of those networks. Delay in the courts and uncertainty of title are therefore not merely legal problems; they are developmental ones, and this is the single most useful proposition in the chapter for this audience.

7. Demography

The size, growth rate and age structure of a population. A large working-age share relative to dependants can support growth if the workforce is employed and skilled, and can produce unemployment and instability if it is not.

8. Social capital and trust

The density of associations and the general level of trust between strangers. Where trust is high, transactions between strangers are cheap; where it is low, everything must be secured, verified or confined to kin. Trust reduces transaction costs, and its absence is a real economic burden.

The direction of causation, which must be addressed

An answer that lists social factors as causes of development is incomplete unless it notices the obvious objection: the causation may run the other way, and probably runs both ways.

Development changes values, breaks down hereditary occupation, raises education, alters the family and improves administration. So a society described as having values unfavourable to development may have those values because it is poor, rather than being poor because of them. Attributing poverty to culture, when culture may be a product of poverty, is a well-known error with a bad history: it was used to explain colonised populations' condition by their character.

The defensible position is that social structure and economic development interact, that social factors condition how economic opportunities are taken and by whom, and that no single-factor explanation in either direction survives contact with the evidence.

A worked example

A credit scheme for small enterprises is extended on identical terms to two districts.

In District A, literacy is high, women's participation in work is substantial, caste restrictions on occupation are weak, land titles are clear and the local administration is regarded as reliable. Applications come from a wide range of people, security can be offered because title is provable, and defaults are pursued predictably.

In District B, literacy is lower, occupation still follows caste closely, land records are disputed, and the administration is not trusted. Applications come from those already established; those without provable title cannot borrow at all; and the scheme reaches the people who least need it.

The economic input was identical and the outcomes differ, and every difference is social. That is the chapter's whole argument, and it also shows why the legal infrastructure, land records and enforceable title, is a developmental question and not a technical one.

Quick revision

1. Values: Weber's Protestant ethic; his India study and its criticism; McClelland's achievement motivation. Values are one determinant, not the explanation.
2. Family: the joint family both pooled resources and diluted incentives; Indian business families show kinship substituting for a formal financial infrastructure.
3. Caste: occupational rigidity, waste of talent, restricted markets; but caste networks also supplied credit and enforcement. Durkheim's forced division of labour restated economically.
4. Education, health and skills, and their distribution, not only their average.
5. Position of women: direct through the workforce, indirect through fertility and children's schooling. India's low female labour force participation despite rising education is a documented puzzle.
6. State, law and administration: Weber's calculable legal system. Enforceable contracts, secure title and predictable courts reduce the risk of long-horizon investment.
7. Demography, and social capital and trust, which lower transaction costs.
8. Causation runs both ways. Attributing poverty to culture, when culture may result from poverty, is a known and discreditable error.

Test yourself

1. Name six social determinants of economic development. The value system and attitudes to work and acquisition; the structure of the family and the obligations kinship imposes; the system of stratification and the mobility it permits; the level and distribution of education, health and skills; the position of women and their participation in the workforce; and the character of the state, law and administration. To these should be added demographic structure and the level of generalised trust or social capital.

2. State Weber's argument about religion and economic development, and the criticism of his India study. Weber argued that ascetic Protestantism produced a disposition towards systematic, disciplined and reinvested acquisition which was among the conditions of modern rational capitalism, and that features of Indian religion and the caste order, notably hereditary occupation and ritual regulation of conduct, worked against such a disposition. The criticism is that he relied on textual sources rather than on observed practice, and that he underrated Indian mercantile communities whose conduct was systematically acquisitive on any measure.

3. How does caste bear on economic development? Chiefly by restricting the allocation of labour and talent: hereditary occupation prevents people moving to where they would be most productive, closure of trades and education by birth wastes ability, and rules about contact and commensality restrict trade and residence. Against this must be set the use of caste networks by trading communities to supply credit, information and enforcement, so that the same institution obstructed development in one respect and facilitated it in another.

4. Why is a calculable legal system a condition of development? Because investment means committing resources now for a return later, and that requires expectations about the future to be reliable. Enforceable contracts, secure and ascertainable title, predictable regulation and courts that decide within a foreseeable time reduce that risk. Where they are absent, resources are committed only within networks of personal trust, which limits enterprise to the reach of those networks, so delay in the courts and uncertainty of title are developmental problems and not merely legal ones.

5. What is the problem with explaining underdevelopment by culture? That the causation may run in the opposite direction. Development itself changes values, weakens hereditary occupation, raises education and improves administration, so values unfavourable to enterprise may be a consequence of poverty rather than its cause. Treating culture as the explanation has historically been used to attribute the condition of colonised populations to their character, and the defensible position is that social structure and economic development interact, with no single-factor explanation surviving the evidence in either direction.

MacIver and Page: religion implies a relationship not merely between man and man but between man and some higher power.

The characteristics of religion

1. Belief in the supernatural or the sacred, however conceived.
2. A distinction between the sacred and the profane.
3. Ritual and practice, which are not incidental: religion is done as much as believed, and Durkheim thought the doing was the more important half.
4. A moral community, a body of adherents who are joined by their common relation to the sacred.
5. Symbols and sacred objects.
6. A body of doctrine or myth, explaining origins, obligations and destiny.
7. A moral code, prescribing conduct.
8. Sacred places and times.
9. Specialists, in most developed religions: priests, monks, teachers.
10. A relation to the emotions. Religion addresses fear, grief, hope and awe, and its practices are heavily emotional.

The social functions of religion

Give these as functions, then give the dysfunctions, then the conflict and Weberian readings. That structure produces a complete answer.

Functions, in the functionalist reading

Social solidarity and integration. Durkheim's central claim. Collective worship assembles people, generates shared emotion, and renews the common sentiments on which the group's unity rests. What is worshipped, he argued, is at bottom the society itself.

Support and consolation. Religion supplies meaning in the face of suffering, injustice and death, which is why its rites cluster at exactly the crises Malinowski named.

Social control. Religion prescribes conduct and backs the prescription with sanctions beyond the reach of any human authority. It is one of the most powerful means of informal control, as [Formal and Informal Social Control] sets out, and its power lies in reaching conduct nobody observes.

Socialisation. It transmits values to the young, as [Socialization] notes.

Legitimation. Religion sanctions the social order, giving existing arrangements of authority and rank the appearance of rightness. This function is claimed by functionalists as integration and by conflict theorists as ideology; it is the same observation valued differently.

Identity and belonging, particularly for minorities and migrants, for whom religious institutions are frequently the main organised community.

Welfare. Religious institutions have historically provided education, medical care, food and shelter, and continue to do so extensively in India.

Psychological support, reducing anxiety and supplying confidence.

Dysfunctions

An answer that gives only functions is incomplete, and Merton's point in [The Functionalist Perspective] is that dysfunction is a question for investigation.

Division and conflict. The same solidarity that binds a community sets it against others, which is the in-group and out-group mechanism of [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups] operating on the strongest available identity.

Resistance to change. Sanctifying an arrangement makes altering it sacrilege, and religious sanction has been invoked against social reforms in every society including this one.

Legitimation of inequality. Where a hierarchy is given religious sanction, as caste was, religion sustains it.

Obstruction of enquiry, where doctrine is treated as settling questions of fact.

The conflict reading

Marx's account is the sharpest: religion is part of the superstructure resting on the economic base, it consoles the oppressed for a condition it does not change, and by promising redress elsewhere it reduces the pressure for redress here. His description of it as the opium of the people is usually quoted without its surrounding sentence, which also calls it the sigh of the oppressed creature and the heart of a heartless world, and a student who gives the fuller passage shows that Marx regarded it as an expression of real distress and not merely as a trick.

The Weberian reading

Weber's contribution is the opposite in direction and is essential for balance: religious ideas can cause social and economic change rather than merely reflect the economy. The Protestant ethic thesis in [Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism] is the demonstration.

Religion and law

The connection matters for this course and is worth its own short section.

Law and religion were once the same thing. In most societies the earliest law is religious law, and the separation of the two is a late development.

Religion remains a source of law in India, through personal laws governing marriage, divorce, adoption, guardianship, maintenance and succession for the different communities. This is legal pluralism in the strict sense and is taken up in [Legal Pluralism].

Religion is a subject of law: freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion; freedom to manage religious affairs; the protection of minority educational institutions; provisions on religious instruction; and the offences relating to promoting enmity between groups and to outraging religious feelings.

Religion is also a limit on law, in that a rule offending deeply held religious sentiment meets resistance disproportionate to any sanction, which is the practical form of the argument in [Law and Social Change].

A worked example

A community festival in a Mumbai neighbourhood, run by a mandal, lasting ten days.

The functionalist reading: it assembles the community, renews shared sentiment, transmits belief to children, and provides a structure through which disputes are avoided and status recognised. It also distributes food and organises charity.

The conflict reading: it displays and reinforces the standing of the families who fund it; the committee is a route to local political influence; and participation is not equally open to everyone in the locality.

The Weberian reading: it is not merely a reflection of interests, since it also carries ideas that shape how participants understand obligation, hospitality and duty.

The legal reading: it involves permissions, noise regulations, use of public space, and the possibility of communal tension, so the state is present throughout, regulating something it did not create and cannot forbid.

All four are true at once, and being able to hold them together is what studying religion sociologically means.

Quick revision

1. Durkheim's definition: a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, uniting adherents into one moral community. Three parts: beliefs, practices, community.
2. Sacred and profane: nothing is sacred by nature; the sacred is what is set apart and forbidden.
3. Malinowski: magic is instrumental and used where technique fails; religion is an end in itself and addresses life crises.
4. Characteristics: the sacred, ritual, a moral community, symbols, doctrine, a moral code, sacred places and times, specialists, and an appeal to the emotions.
5. Functions: solidarity, consolation, social control, socialisation, legitimation, identity, welfare, psychological support.
6. Dysfunctions: division and conflict, resistance to change, legitimation of inequality, obstruction of enquiry.
7. Marx: superstructure, consolation without change, the opium of the people, though also the sigh of the oppressed creature. Weber: religious ideas can cause economic change.
8. Sociology does not ask whether religious claims are true.

Test yourself

1. Give Durkheim's definition of religion and explain its parts. A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is things set apart and forbidden, which unite into one single moral community all who adhere to them. Its three parts are deliberate: beliefs, which are the ideas held; practices or rites, which are what adherents do and which Durkheim thought the more important half; and a community, since religion is collective and not a private conviction. The definition avoids reference to gods so that it covers religions which have none.

2. Distinguish religion from magic. Following Malinowski, magic is instrumental: a technique employed to produce a definite result, resorted to where knowledge and skill are insufficient to guarantee the outcome. Religion is not a means to a further end; its rites are performed as ends in themselves, it addresses the great crises of life, birth, initiation, marriage and death, and it involves a moral community, whereas magic may be practised individually by a specialist for a client.

3. State six social functions of religion. It produces solidarity by assembling adherents and renewing shared sentiment; it consoles and supplies meaning in the face of suffering and death; it controls conduct, reaching behaviour that no observer sees; it socialises the young into the society's values; it legitimates the existing social order, making established arrangements appear right; and it supplies identity and belonging, especially to minorities and migrants, along with welfare provision such as education and medical care.

4. Give the conflict and the Weberian readings of religion, and say how they differ. On the conflict reading, associated with Marx, religion belongs to the superstructure resting on the economic base; it consoles the oppressed for a condition it does not alter and, by promising redress elsewhere, reduces pressure for redress here. On the Weberian reading, religious ideas can themselves cause economic and social change, as the Protestant ethic thesis argues. They differ in the direction of causation: for Marx religion reflects material conditions, for Weber it can help to produce them.

5. Why does sociology not ask whether religious beliefs are true? Because the question cannot be settled by any observation, and the discipline's claim to be empirical requires it to confine itself to what can be studied by evidence. What sociology can study is what people believe, what they do, how the beliefs and practices are organised, how they change, and what consequences they have for solidarity, control, stratification and law. Taking a position on truth would exceed its methods and would also make the study of other people's practices impossible.

The community of adherents

The moral community in Durkheim's definition, and the forms it takes are the subject of [Church, Denomination, Sect and Cult].

Part two: theories of origin

Animism: E. B. Tylor

Tylor argued that religion began in the belief in spiritual beings. Primitive people, reflecting on dreams, visions, trances and above all death, concluded that a person consists of a body and a separable soul. That belief was extended to animals, plants and objects, and the spirits so postulated became the gods, so animism is the minimum definition of religion and the root of all later forms.

Criticism. It makes religion a mistaken piece of reasoning by an individual philosopher, which is intellectualist and improbable; it explains belief but not ritual or emotion; and it does not account for religion's social character.

Naturism: Max Muller

Muller argued that religion began in awe at the great forces of nature, the sun, the sky, storms, rivers, which were personified, named, and eventually became gods. He attributed much of this to a "disease of language", by which metaphors describing natural events were later misread as the names of persons.

Criticism. It is largely a theory about language derived from a narrow body of texts, and it does not explain the sacred quality attaching to trivial objects.

Animatism and mana: R. R. Marett

Marett argued that before belief in distinct spirits there was a vaguer belief in an impersonal supernatural power pervading things, called mana in Melanesia. Religion begins in awe at that force rather than in a theory about souls, and it is felt before it is thought.

Totemism: Durkheim

Durkheim studied the totemism of Australian Aboriginal societies as, in his view, the simplest religion available for study, and concluded that the totem, the emblem of the clan, is sacred because it stands for the clan itself. Since it is the clan that constrains the individual, sustains them and outlives them, the force people experience as divine is society, and in worshipping the totem the clan worships itself.

Criticism. The Australian material may not be as primitive as he assumed; totemism is not universal; and the argument that the object of worship is society is a redescription that adherents would not recognise.

Magic, religion and science: J. G. Frazer

Frazer proposed an evolutionary sequence: humanity first tried to control nature by magic, treating it as governed by laws the magician could manipulate; finding magic ineffective, it turned to religion, propitiating personal beings assumed to control events; and finally to science. Criticism: magic, religion and science coexist in every society including modern ones, so the sequence does not hold.

Psychological theories: Freud

Freud derived religion from the psychological situation of the child before the father, projecting that relation onto a cosmic figure, and treated religion as a collective illusion serving to reduce anxiety. Criticism: it rests on a speculative reconstruction of prehistory and generalises from one family form.

Fear and dependence

An older and simpler line, associated with the Roman poet Lucretius's remark that fear first made the gods, and with later writers who derived religion from human helplessness before nature. Criticism: fear explains why people might want a god, not why they have the specific beliefs, rituals and communities that religions actually have.

The modern position

Say four things.

1. The origin of religion is not recoverable. It predates writing and every record, so all these theories are inferences from present-day societies wrongly treated as living fossils of the past.
2. The evolutionary assumption underlying most of them is not accepted, for the reasons in [The Evolutionary Perspective].
3. The question has changed. Sociology now asks how religion works rather than how it began, which is a question evidence can answer.
4. Durkheim's contribution survives not as a history of origins but as an analysis of function: whatever religion's origin, collective ritual demonstrably produces solidarity, and that can be observed today.

A worked example

A stone under a tree at a crossroads acquires a coat of vermilion, then a shelter, then a weekly gathering, then a festival.

Tylor would look for a belief that a spirit inhabits it. Marett would look for a sense of power felt in the place before any spirit was named. Muller would look for a natural feature personified. Durkheim would ask who assembles there, and would say that the stone is sacred because it has become the emblem of that group, so that the sanctity is a property of the collective attitude and not of the stone.

Durkheim's account is the only one of the four that can be tested by looking, which is why it survived. One can observe who gathers, what happens to their conduct afterwards, and whether the group treats offences against the stone as offences against itself. The others require access to the thoughts of people long dead.

Quick revision

1. Structural aspects: beliefs, rituals, sacred objects and symbols, sacred places and times, a moral code, organisation and specialists, and a community of adherents.
2. Durkheim: positive rites prescribe, negative rites forbid; ritual is the mechanism, not decoration.
3. Weber: the priest holds authority by office and routine, the prophet by personal charisma.
4. Tylor: animism, belief in spiritual beings, from reflection on dreams and death.
5. Max Muller: naturism, awe at natural forces plus a disease of language.
6. Marett: animatism, an impersonal power, mana, felt before it is thought.
7. Durkheim: totemism; the totem stands for the clan, so society is the object of worship.
8. Frazer: magic to religion to science. Freud: projection of the father. Lucretius: fear made the gods.
9. The origin is not recoverable; the modern question is how religion works, not how it began.

Test yourself

1. Name the structural aspects of religion. Beliefs; rituals and practices, including positive rites which prescribe and negative rites which forbid; sacred objects and symbols; sacred places and times, which structure the calendar and with it social and economic life; a moral code prescribing conduct; an organisation with religious specialists; and a community of adherents, the moral community of Durkheim's definition.

2. State Tylor's theory and the objection to it. Tylor held that religion began in animism, the belief in spiritual beings, which arose when people reflecting on dreams, visions and death concluded that a person consists of a body and a separable soul, a belief then extended to animals, plants and objects whose spirits became gods. The objection is that this makes religion a mistaken inference drawn by an individual reasoner, which explains belief but not ritual, emotion or the collective character that is religion's most obvious feature.

3. Explain Durkheim's totemic theory. Studying the totemism of Australian Aboriginal societies as the simplest available religion, Durkheim argued that the totem is sacred because it is the emblem of the clan. Since it is the clan that constrains its members, sustains them and outlives them, the superior force which people experience in religious life is society itself, so that in worshipping the totem the clan is worshipping itself in a form it can see.

4. What was Frazer's sequence, and why is it rejected? That humanity first attempted to control nature by magic, treating events as governed by laws a magician could manipulate; then, finding magic ineffective, turned to religion, propitiating personal beings believed to control events; and finally to science. It is rejected because magic, religion and science are found together in every society including modern industrial ones, so they are not successive stages but coexisting modes of dealing with uncertainty.

5. What is the modern position on the origin of religion? That it is not recoverable. Religion predates writing and every record, so the classical theories are inferences drawn from contemporary societies wrongly treated as survivals of an earlier stage, and the evolutionary assumption behind them is not accepted. The question sociology now asks is how religion works, what it does for solidarity, control, identity and legitimation, which is a question the evidence can answer, and Durkheim's contribution survives as an analysis of function rather than as a history of origins.

Cult

1. Loosely organised, often without formal membership.
2. Individualistic. Its focus is typically the individual's experience, wellbeing or enlightenment rather than a moral community.
3. Centred on novel beliefs or a charismatic figure, frequently drawing on several traditions.
4. Low demands and easy entry and exit; adherents may retain another religious affiliation.
5. Not schismatic. Unlike a sect, it is not a breakaway; it originates outside the established traditions or imports from elsewhere.
6. Tolerant of other beliefs, generally.
7. Usually short-lived, though some grow into established movements.

A note on the word. In ordinary speech and in journalism "cult" has become a term of abuse implying manipulation. In sociology it is a neutral classification, and an answer should use it neutrally. Because of the confusion many writers now prefer "new religious movement".

The comparison

The sect to denomination cycle

The most useful dynamic idea in the topic, associated with H. Richard Niebuhr, and worth giving because it turns a static list into a process.

A sect forms by schism, in protest and with high commitment. Its members are converts and are typically drawn from those least satisfied with the existing order. If it survives its founder, the second generation is born into it rather than converted. Demands relax so that children can remain. Property accumulates and must be administered, which requires officials. Trained leadership replaces charisma. Hostility to the world softens as members prosper. The sect has become a denomination, and in doing so it creates the conditions for a new sect to break away from it in protest at the compromise, and the cycle repeats.

Does the typology fit India?

This is the section that lifts an answer, and the honest response is: partly, and with adjustment.

What does not fit. The typology was built on Christian history, where a single organised church claiming exclusive truth is the reference point. Hinduism has no single organising body, no universal clergy with jurisdiction, no membership roll and no central doctrinal authority, so the category of church applies awkwardly at best. The sect, defined as a breakaway from a church, presupposes something to break from.

What fits well. The sect-like and denomination-like forms are recognisable in the Indian sampradaya and panth: traditions founded by a teacher, organised around a lineage of successors, with distinctive practice, initiation and a defined following, some of which have grown into large established bodies with property, trained specialists and accommodation with the wider society, exactly as the cycle predicts. Movements founded around a living guru display the classic marks of the cult and, where they survive the founder, the transition Weber called the routinisation of charisma, treated in [Weber: Power and Authority].

Religions with organised structures. Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism in India each have organised institutions, and the categories apply more directly to them, though again imperfectly.

The Indian legal angle is worth a line: Indian law has repeatedly had to decide who constitutes a religious denomination, since the constitutional right of a religious denomination to manage its own affairs turns on it, so a sociological classification acquires a legal consequence. The characteristics courts have looked for, a common faith, a common organisation and a distinctive name, correspond broadly to the sociological marks above.

A worked example

A teacher in the 1930s attracts followers with a distinctive practice, criticises the temple establishment as corrupt, and demands of his followers a daily discipline and a plain style of dress. This is a sect: small, exclusive, converted membership, high demands, charismatic leadership, rejecting the surrounding religious order.

By the 1970s he has died. The movement has centres, land and donations. His successors are chosen by a committee. The children of the original followers are members by birth and are not required to observe the discipline as strictly. This is the routinisation of charisma and the sect becoming a denomination.

By the 2010s the movement runs schools and a hospital, is respected, and no longer criticises anyone. A group of younger members breaks away, saying the founder's teaching has been abandoned for property and respectability, and forms a small, strict, intensely committed body.

The cycle has completed and begun again, and that is the strongest way to answer a question on this topic: not four boxes, but a process with four positions in it.

Quick revision

1. MU prints "Sect Cult" without a comma; they are two separate forms.
2. Church: very large, bureaucratic, professional clergy, membership by birth, low demands, accepts and is accepted by society, claims exclusive and universal truth.
3. Denomination: church-like organisation without the exclusive claim; tolerant, respectable, moderate demands; usually a matured sect.
4. Sect: small, exclusive, entry by conversion, high demands, rejects society, charismatic leadership, usually formed by schism, often short-lived.
5. Cult: loose, individualistic, novel or imported belief, charismatic founder, low demands, not schismatic, tolerant, usually short-lived. The word is neutral in sociology; many now say new religious movement.
6. The sect to denomination cycle (Niebuhr): schism, high commitment, second generation born in, demands relax, property and officials, accommodation, and a fresh schism.
7. The typology is Christian in origin and fits Indian religion imperfectly; sampradaya and panth correspond to the sect and denomination positions, and guru-centred movements to the cult, with routinisation of charisma on the founder's death.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish a church from a sect. A church is very large, formally and bureaucratically organised with a trained professional clergy, entered chiefly by birth, makes low demands on members, accepts the social order and is accepted by it, and claims universal and often exclusive truth. A sect is small and exclusive, entered by deliberate conversion, makes high demands including distinctive conduct and sometimes withdrawal from ordinary life, is led charismatically rather than bureaucratically, rejects the wider society as corrupt, and is usually formed by breaking away from a larger body.

2. Distinguish a sect from a cult. Both are small and led charismatically, but a sect is schismatic, formed by breaking away from an established body whose compromise it rejects, claims exclusive truth, demands intense commitment and distinctive conduct, and is hostile to the surrounding society. A cult is not a breakaway; it arises from novel or imported beliefs, is loosely organised and individualistic, focuses on personal experience or wellbeing, makes low demands, permits easy entry and exit, and is generally tolerant of other beliefs.

3. What is a denomination, and how does one usually come into existence? A body with a church's formal organisation and trained clergy but without its claim to exclusive truth or its connection with the state, accepting that other bodies are legitimate and making moderate demands on members. It usually comes into existence as a sect that has aged: the founding generation dies, the second generation is born into rather than converted to it, demands relax so that children may remain, property accumulates and requires administration, trained officials replace charismatic leaders, and hostility to the world softens.

4. Explain the sect to denomination cycle. A sect forms by schism in protest against a compromised body, with converted and highly committed members. If it survives its founder, its children are members by birth, its demands slacken, property and organisation require officials, charisma is routinised into office, and accommodation with society follows, so that the sect becomes a denomination. Its own compromise then provokes a fresh group of dissatisfied members to break away and form a new sect, and the process repeats.

5. How well does this typology fit Indian religion? Imperfectly, because it was built on Christian history, where a single organised church claiming exclusive truth is the reference point. Hinduism has no central doctrinal authority, no universal clergy and no membership roll, so the category of church applies awkwardly and the sect, defined as a breakaway from a church, presupposes something to break from. The sect and denomination positions do correspond recognisably to the sampradaya and panth, traditions founded by a teacher with a lineage of successors and a defined following, and guru-centred movements display the marks of the cult, including the routinisation of charisma when the founder dies.

Harm to the person: human sacrifice, which is rare and which is the extreme case the law names; the beating and confinement of persons said to be possessed; branding, and the forced consumption of substances as cures.

Harm through the withholding of treatment: the substitution of ritual for medical care in serious illness, which kills chiefly children and women, and the treatment of psychiatric illness as possession, which is a substantial and under-reported field.

Harm to women: the accusation of witchcraft, which in parts of India has led to killing, expulsion and dispossession, and which frequently attaches to widows and to women holding land; and sexual exploitation under the claim of spiritual authority.

Economic exploitation: extraction of money against promises of cure, progeny, employment or the removal of misfortune.

Harm through the caste order: practices that a subordinated community is compelled to perform.

Why it persists

Naming the conditions is more useful than deploring the practice.

Failure of the alternatives. The correlation is with the absence of accessible health care, credit, policing and legal remedy, not with religiosity as such. Where the state's institutions do not reach a person, something else does, which is the same proposition as in [Legal Pluralism].

Poverty and insecurity, which raise the value of any promise of relief.

Illness for which medicine has no cure, and terminal or chronic conditions in particular.

The status of women, which makes accusation and exploitation possible against those least able to resist.

Education, and specifically the absence of the scientific temper the Constitution names as a fundamental duty of every citizen.

Charismatic authority's own structure, described above: no institution, no rules, no discipline, and disciples selected for loyalty.

Media, which has amplified the reach of individual figures enormously.

Community pressure, which makes complaint costly: the complainant is frequently the neighbour of everyone who believes.

The response

Law, in outline. The general criminal law reaches the harms directly: culpable homicide, hurt, wrongful confinement, sexual offences, cheating and extortion, and the offences protecting children. To it are added special statutes, and the Indian instances usually named are the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act 2013, and the corresponding Karnataka legislation of 2017, both of which proceed by enumerating specified harmful practices rather than by legislating about belief; the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act 1954, which prohibits advertisements claiming magic cures for specified conditions; and the provisions on unlawful assembly and on the promotion of enmity where the practice becomes communal.

The drafting technique is worth noticing and is exactly right sociologically. The statutes do not prohibit belief, faith, worship or the ordinary practices of any religion, which they expressly save; they prohibit enumerated acts that cause identifiable harm. That is how a legislature acts against a practice in a plural society without legislating about religion, and it is [Law and Social Change] applied.

The limits of law, which are those set out in that chapter: it acts after the harm; it depends on a complaint from a community that believes; witnesses are the complainant's neighbours; and the practitioner frequently commands more local standing than the complainant.

Society, which the question also asks about. Rationalist and anti-superstition organisations, whose method is public demonstration of how a claimed miracle is produced, and whose Indian record includes the murder of prominent campaigners; health services within reach, which removes the occasion; education and the scientific temper; media that does not promote such figures; and women's organisations, which have been central against witchcraft accusation because they can support the accused where the village will not.

A worked example

A child in a village develops a fever that does not settle.

The sequence that produces the harm. The nearest health facility is fourteen kilometres away, has no doctor on Fridays, and the household has no money for a private clinic. A local practitioner offers a ritual for a fee the household can raise. The child is treated for four days. By the time the household reaches a hospital, the illness is beyond it.

Read against the chapter. The entitlement to health care existed and was unreachable, which is the analysis in [Population, Food and Hunger] and [The Welfare State]. The practitioner supplied consolation, an explanation and an immediate response, which are the functions of religion listed earlier. The belief was real in its consequences whether or not it was true. And the criminal law, which would reach this after the death, could have done nothing before it.

The interventions that would have worked, in the order of their effectiveness: a functioning health facility within reach, which removes the occasion; an ambulance or transport; awareness that fever in a child is an emergency; and, last, prosecution. That order is the chapter's argument, and it is the honest sociological answer to a question that invites a moralising one: the practice recedes where the alternative arrives, and the law is the smallest part of the remedy.

Quick revision

1. The subject is exploitation and identifiable harm conducted under religious cover, not religion. Sociology takes no position on religious truth.
2. The godman is a case of charismatic authority from Weber: personal, outside institutions, recognising no rules, with disciples chosen for loyalty. Every feature that makes it powerful makes it unaccountable.
3. Followers are not merely ignorant: consolation, meaning, belonging and an immediate response are real functions, and people arrive after other institutions have failed them.
4. Thomas's theorem: a belief need not be true to produce real payments, obedience and injury.
5. The harms: to the person; through the withholding of medical treatment; to women, through witchcraft accusation and sexual exploitation; economic; and through caste-imposed practices.
6. Why it persists: the absence of accessible health care, credit, policing and remedy; poverty; incurable illness; the status of women; the absence of the scientific temper; the structure of charismatic authority; media; and community pressure on complainants.
7. Law: the general criminal law, plus statutes such as the Maharashtra Act of 2013 and the Karnataka Act of 2017, which enumerate harmful practices and expressly save belief and worship, and the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act 1954.
8. The practice recedes where the alternative arrives. Health services, education and organisation do more than prosecution, which acts only after the harm.

Test yourself

1. Why is the godman best analysed through Weber's concept of charismatic authority? Because every feature of that type fits: authority rests on devotion to an exceptional individual rather than on an office or a rule; it attaches to the person, so it is not transferable and not reviewable; it recognises no rules and no jurisdiction; and it is administered by disciples chosen for personal loyalty rather than by officials with qualifications and duties. The analysis explains the pattern without asserting anything about any particular person: the very features that make such authority powerful are those that leave it unaccountable to any institution.

2. Why do people follow such figures? Answer without condescension. Because the functions religion performs are real, and because the people concerned have usually been failed elsewhere. Such figures offer consolation, an explanation of suffering, belonging and an immediate response, to people who come with illness medicine has not cured, with debt, with childlessness or with a family crisis. A person for whom the hospital is unreachable, the police station unhelpful and the court unaffordable is not behaving irrationally in going where help is promised, and an explanation that treats followers as merely ignorant accounts for nothing.

3. How have Indian statutes on this subject been drafted, and why is the technique significant? By enumerating specified acts that cause identifiable harm, such as those listed in the Maharashtra Act of 2013 and the Karnataka Act of 2017, while expressly saving belief, faith, worship and the ordinary practices of religion. The technique is significant because it allows a legislature in a plural society to act against demonstrable harm without legislating about religion, which would provoke exactly the resistance described in [Law and Social Change] and would also be constitutionally objectionable.

4. What are the limits of law here? That it acts only after the harm has occurred; that it depends on a complaint from within a community many of whose members believe in the practice; that the witnesses are the complainant's own neighbours, who bear the social cost of testifying; and that the practitioner frequently commands greater local standing than the person complaining. These are the general limits identified in [Law and Social Change], and they are unusually severe here because the offence, the complainant and the witnesses all belong to the same small social field.

5. What reduces these practices most effectively? The arrival of the alternative. A functioning health facility within reach removes the occasion for a ritual cure; accessible credit removes the occasion for a promise about debt; education and the scientific temper reduce the plausibility of the claim; organisations that demonstrate publicly how a claimed miracle is produced reduce the authority; and women's organisations can support a person accused of witchcraft where the village will not. Prosecution matters and comes last in order of effectiveness, because it operates only after the harm has been done.

Why it matters to a lawyer, and this is the reason it earns its place. A great deal of what happens in a courtroom, in a police station and in a client interview is non-verbal: demeanour, hesitation, deference, who sits where and who is kept standing. Assessments of a witness's credibility rest heavily on it, and the sociological caution is that such assessments are culturally loaded: the demeanour read as evasive in one community is ordinary respect in another. Goffman's dramaturgy in [Symbolic Interactionism] is the analysis of exactly this, and [The Interview] applies it to research.

The characteristics of media

These are the characteristics of mass media specifically, since it is mass media that MU's topic is about and that the institution now consists of.

1. Reach. They address large audiences beyond any face-to-face limit.
2. A dispersed and heterogeneous audience, unknown individually to the communicator.
3. Simultaneity. Very large numbers receive the same content at the same time, which is what allows a whole society to attend to one thing at once.
4. Rapidity.
5. Impersonality. The communicator does not know the audience and cannot adjust to the individual.
6. In the classical model, communication is one way, from few to many, with limited feedback. Digital media have altered this fundamentally, which is the largest change in the field and is dealt with below.
7. Organised and institutional production, requiring capital, technical skill and a division of labour, so ownership matters.
8. Public rather than private communication, and therefore subject to regulation.
9. A commercial character, in most cases, with revenue from advertising and subscription, which shapes content.

The functions of media

The standard scheme is that of Harold Lasswell, with a fourth added by Charles Wright, and it is the tidiest way to organise this answer.

Surveillance of the environment. Collecting and distributing information about events: news. The society is informed of what it cannot see for itself, including warnings of danger.

Correlation of the parts of society in responding to the environment. Interpretation, comment and prescription: not only reporting an event but explaining its significance and suggesting a response. This is the editorial function, and it is where media influence is greatest.

Transmission of the social heritage. Socialisation: passing values, norms and culture from one generation to the next, a function shared with the family, school and religion, discussed in [Socialization].

Entertainment, added by Wright, which is quantitatively the largest use of media and is not sociologically trivial: entertainment carries values continuously and unobtrusively.

To these are usually added:

Agenda setting, the most important single concept in this chapter. The media may not determine what people think, but they substantially determine what people think about, by selecting what is reported and how prominently. This is the function with the clearest political consequence.

Mobilisation, promoting collective purposes.

Public sphere. Media provide the arena in which public opinion is formed and in which the state may be held to account, which is the function invoked by the description of the press as the fourth estate.

Advertising and the servicing of the economy.

Legitimation and status conferral. Attention itself confers standing: a person, cause or grievance that appears in the media becomes important by appearing.

The dysfunctions

Narcotising dysfunction, named by Lazarsfeld and Merton: large quantities of information may produce an informed but passive public that mistakes knowing about a problem for doing something about it.

Distortion and sensationalism, since attention is the commodity being sold.

Stereotyping of groups, with consequences discussed in [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups].

Concentration of ownership, which narrows the range of what is said.

Invasion of privacy.

Media trial, the trying of a case in public before or alongside its trial in court, which is treated in [Mass Media and Its Impact].

Media in India

Give the shape of the institution, not statistics that cannot be attributed.

Scale and plurality. India has an unusually large newspaper industry publishing in many languages, an extensive television sector with a large number of channels including news channels in the major languages, radio, a very large film industry, and rapid growth in digital and mobile access. The linguistic plurality described in [The Pluralistic Nature of Indian Society] is reproduced exactly in its media.

The regulatory landscape, which is what a law student should be able to sketch.

• Constitutional basis. Freedom of speech and expression, from which the freedom of the press is derived, subject to the reasonable restrictions the Constitution itself specifies.
• Print is governed principally by the Press and Registration of Books Act 1867, with self-regulation through the Press Council of India constituted under the Press Council Act 1978.
• Broadcasting: the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995 and the programme code under it; the Prasar Bharati (Broadcasting Corporation of India) Act 1990 for public broadcasting.
• Film is subject to certification under the Cinematograph Act 1952 by the Central Board of Film Certification, which makes cinema the most heavily pre-regulated medium in India.
• Digital: the Information Technology Act 2000, and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, which extended a regulatory framework to digital news publishers and streaming services.
• Advertising is subject to self-regulation through the Advertising Standards Council of India, and to statutory provisions in particular fields.

The sociologically interesting feature of that list is that regulation is medium-specific: the same content is treated differently according to the channel it arrives through, which is a legacy of technologies that once had distinct characteristics and is increasingly hard to sustain when all of them arrive on one device.

The change digital media has made

The classical model of mass communication, few to many, one way, with professional gatekeepers, described the twentieth century. Four changes have altered it.

1. Anyone can publish. The gatekeeping function that editors performed, deciding what reached the public, has been substantially removed.
2. Communication is many to many, and the audience produces content.
3. Distribution is by algorithm, and what a person sees is selected for them by systems responding to their previous behaviour, which produces the phenomena described as filter bubbles and echo chambers.
4. The economics changed. Attention is sold directly and measured continuously, which rewards content that provokes reaction.

The consequence for the functions above is that surveillance and correlation are no longer performed by identifiable institutions with professional norms and legal accountability, which is precisely the problem to which the misinformation debate, and the regulation of intermediaries, are responses.

A worked example

A wall collapses in a Mumbai chawl and three people are injured.

Surveillance: it is reported, so people who were not there know of it.

Selection and agenda setting: whether it appears at all, and whether on an inside page or as a lead item, decides whether it becomes a public issue or a local misfortune. Nothing about the event itself decides this.

Correlation: the coverage frames it. Presented as an accident, it calls for compassion. Presented as the result of unenforced building regulation, it calls for accountability, and the second framing produces demands, questions and possibly an inquiry.

Status conferral: a residents' association that had campaigned unnoticed for two years is now sought for comment, and its standing changes because it appeared.

Mobilisation and the public sphere: coverage brings other residents forward, and the matter reaches a body with power to act.

The event was the same in every version. What differed was selection and framing, and that is what it means to say that media are an institution and not a window.

Quick revision

1. Media are channels of communication; mass media reach a large, dispersed, heterogeneous audience simultaneously. They are an institution, not a technology.
2. Characteristics: reach, dispersed and unknown audience, simultaneity, rapidity, impersonality, one-way in the classical model, organised production requiring capital, public character and therefore regulated, and commercial.
3. Lasswell's three functions: surveillance, correlation, transmission of the social heritage; Wright added entertainment.
4. Add: agenda setting (what people think about), mobilisation, the public sphere, advertising, and status conferral.
5. Dysfunctions: the narcotising dysfunction (Lazarsfeld and Merton), sensationalism, stereotyping, concentrated ownership, invasion of privacy, media trial.
6. Indian regulation is medium-specific: Press and Registration of Books Act 1867 and Press Council Act 1978; Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995; Prasar Bharati Act 1990; Cinematograph Act 1952 with the Central Board of Film Certification; Information Technology Act 2000 with the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules 2021.
7. Digital change: anyone can publish, many to many, algorithmic distribution, attention economics; gatekeeping and professional accountability weaken.

Test yourself

1. Why are media described as a social institution rather than a technology? Because the institution consists of more than the means of transmission: organisations that produce and distribute content, occupational roles with their own training, culture and ethics, professional and legal norms governing conduct, recognised functions performed for the society, and settled relations with the state, the economy and the political system. A printing press is a technology; the press, with its editors, codes, ownership and legal regulation, is an institution.

2. State the functions of mass media. Following Lasswell: surveillance of the environment, that is collecting and distributing news; correlation, that is interpreting events and prescribing responses; and transmission of the social heritage, which is socialisation. Wright added entertainment. To these are added agenda setting, mobilisation for collective purposes, the provision of a public sphere in which opinion is formed and power held to account, advertising, and status conferral, by which attention itself makes a person or cause important.

3. What is agenda setting, and why does it matter? The proposition that media may not determine what people think but do substantially determine what they think about, by selecting which events are reported and with what prominence. It matters because the selection is not dictated by the events: a matter that is not reported does not become a public issue at all, whatever its gravity, and one that is reported prominently acquires an importance that its intrinsic features did not give it.

4. What is the narcotising dysfunction? Lazarsfeld and Merton's observation that large quantities of information can produce a public that is well informed and inactive. Time spent reading and viewing substitutes for participation, and knowing about a problem in detail comes to feel like having done something about it, so that increased exposure to news may reduce rather than increase civic action.

5. Sketch the regulation of media in India and say what is odd about it. Freedom of speech and expression provides the constitutional basis, subject to the restrictions the Constitution specifies. Print is governed by the Press and Registration of Books Act 1867 with self-regulation through the Press Council constituted in 1978; cable television by the Act of 1995 and its programme code; public broadcasting by the Prasar Bharati Act 1990; film by pre-certification under the Cinematograph Act 1952; and digital media by the Information Technology Act 2000 with the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules 2021. What is odd is that regulation is medium-specific, so identical content is treated differently according to the channel it arrives through, which is increasingly hard to sustain when every channel reaches the same device.

Its strength is that it takes the audience seriously as active. Its weakness is that it can slide into the claim that audiences are fully in control, which ignores that the range of what is available is decided by others.

5. Cultivation theory

Gerbner's argument that heavy exposure over long periods cultivates a view of reality resembling the world portrayed rather than the world as it is. His best-known claim is the mean world syndrome: heavy consumers of violent content come to overestimate the prevalence of crime and danger and to be more fearful, whether or not they behave more violently.

Why it is the most useful model here. It shifts attention from behaviour, where the evidence is weak, to perception of reality, where it is stronger, and perception of risk has direct social consequences: fear of crime affects where people go, whom they distrust and what policies they support, independently of the actual crime rate.

6. Agenda setting and framing

Agenda setting, from [Media: Meaning, Characteristics and Functions]: media determine what is thought about. Framing is the further step: the way an issue is presented shapes how it is understood. The same event framed as an accident, a crime, or a regulatory failure produces different reactions, and the framing is a choice made by the communicator.

This is where media power actually lies, on the current evidence, and an answer that says so is up to date.

The impact, area by area

On socialisation. Media are now a major agency, particularly for the young, transmitting norms, models of conduct, aspirations and vocabulary, alongside the family and school and sometimes against them.

On politics. Setting the agenda; providing the arena for campaigning; supplying the material on which opinion is formed; and increasingly, through algorithmic distribution, sorting people into audiences that receive different accounts of the same events.

On consumption and aspiration. Advertising and portrayal establish standards of what a normal life contains, and there is a well-attested effect on aspiration among groups whose own circumstances are far from what is portrayed. This connects to relative deprivation in [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups]: media supply reference groups that a person would never encounter in life, so the comparison that produces discontent is now with people on a screen.

On culture. Diffusion of language, dress, music and practice, and the concern about homogenisation discussed in [Liberalization and Globalization].

On social change. Media publicise reform, spread awareness of rights, and expose abuses. Government communication on health, sanitation and legal entitlements uses them deliberately.

On stereotyping and representation. How castes, communities, women, regions and occupations appear in media shapes how they are perceived, and under-representation is as consequential as misrepresentation.

On privacy. Continuous recording, publication and searchability alter what privacy means in practice.

On misinformation. The most-discussed current impact, and the one where the institutional change matters most: content circulates without editorial gatekeeping, at speed, within closed groups, and it is very hard to correct once spread.

Social media dependence, which MU has set repeatedly

What is claimed. That heavy and compulsive use of social networking and messaging applications produces a pattern resembling dependence: preoccupation, loss of control over the time spent, distress when access is removed, and continued use despite harm to work, sleep and relationships.

What can be said with confidence. That use is very heavy and has risen sharply; that the applications are deliberately designed to hold attention, through variable rewards, notifications, infinite scrolling and metrics of approval, which is the attention economics described above; and that heavy use is associated with reduced sleep and with displaced face-to-face interaction.

What is contested, and an answer should say so: whether this is properly called an addiction, since the diagnostic status is disputed; and the direction of causation, since people who are already isolated or distressed may use more rather than being made so by using.

The sociological reading, which is what the question is asking for. The effects reported are the ones this book has already described. Relationships shift from primary to secondary form, from [Primary and Secondary Groups]: many contacts, low intimacy, and interaction mediated by a screen. Reference groups multiply, from [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups], so that a person compares themselves not with their neighbours but with a curated display, which produces relative deprivation on a scale no previous society generated. Socialisation shifts, from [Socialization], as the media agency displaces family and school for adolescents. And cultivation operates, as set out above, on perceptions of how others live.

Remedial measures, which the situational questions ask for: digital literacy in schools; parental and institutional limits on hours and on access at night; platform design obligations and age gating; regulation of advertising directed at children; grievance machinery under the intermediary rules noted in [Media: Meaning, Characteristics and Functions]; and, most effective and least legal, the deliberate provision of alternatives, since displaced time returns to whatever is available.

Media trial, written for a law student

What it is. The extensive reporting and public adjudication of a criminal case, before or during trial, in a manner that pronounces guilt or innocence.

Why it is a problem. Four reasons, and they should be given as four.

1. The presumption of innocence is undermined when a person is publicly convicted before evidence is tested.
2. Witnesses may be influenced, having read accounts before deposing.
3. The fairness of the trial itself may be compromised where the atmosphere in which it is conducted is charged.
4. Reputation is destroyed irrecoverably, and acquittal restores it only formally. The person acquitted after a public trial in the media carries, in the language of [Status and Role], a master status they cannot shed.

The competing interest is genuine, and an answer must say so. Open justice is itself a constitutional value; reporting deters abuse of process; and public scrutiny has in real cases produced investigation where none was proceeding. The problem is not reporting but adjudication by media, and the distinction is what a good answer turns on.

The Indian legal position in outline: freedom of speech and expression subject to the constitutional restrictions, which expressly include contempt of court; the Contempt of Courts Act 1971, whose section 3 provides a defence for innocent publication and distribution, while the Act preserves the power to punish publications that prejudice or interfere with the course of justice; the reporting restrictions in particular statutes, such as the prohibition on disclosing the identity of a juvenile in conflict with law and of victims in certain offences; and the self-regulatory norms of journalistic conduct issued by the Press Council of India.

What the evidence supports, stated carefully