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Sociology Daily Answer Writing For Mains 2021

Starts 16 Nov

CONFESSIONAL TECHNOLOGIES

This translation of a term coined by Michel Foucault, as with so much of his work, mis- leads as much as it informs.

He does not mean ‘technologies’ at all; he means social practices (a combination of ideas and activi- ties) which encourage people to see them- selves as requiring or benefiting from the assistance of psychiatrists, therapists, social workers and the like in becoming ‘normal’. ‘

Confessional’ is clear in that it borrows the Catholic Church notion that the burden of sin can be removed by admitting it to a pro- fessional who has the power to prescribe rituals for its discharge.

But ‘technologies’ seems to have been chosen to remind us of Foucault’s claim that such methods of polic- ing the self are peculiarly modern.

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Why have Western Europe and the USA developed consumer cultures? British sociologist Colin Campbell, emeritus professor at the University of York, discusses this question in his important study, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987), intended as a sequel to Max Weber’s similarly named and hugely influential The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05).

Weber claims that the values of self-discipline and hard work, which lie at the heart of modern capitalist societies, have their basis in the Protestant work ethic of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Campbell, building on Weber’s work, advances the theory that the emotions and hedonistic desires that drive consumer culture are firmly rooted in the ideals of 19th-century Romanticism, which followed on the heels of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

The Enlightenment conceived of individuals as rational, hard-working, and self-disciplined. But the Romantics saw this as a denial of the very essence of humanity. They stressed intuition above reason, and believed that the individual should be free to pursue hedonistic pleasures and new and exciting feelings.

The Romantic ethic was inculcated into and carried forward by the burgeoning middle class, and by women in particular, Campbell argues. Within consumer culture this ethic is expressed as a self-perpetuating loop: individuals project their desire for pleasure and novelty onto consumer goods; they then purchase and make use of those goods; but the appeal of the product quickly diminishes as the novelty factor and initial excitement fade; the desire for excitement, fulfilment, and novelty is then projected onto, and re-stimulated by, new consumer items. And so the cycle of consumption, fleeting fulfilment, and ultimate disillusionment, repeats itself.

In his influential book on industrial society, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (1964), US sociologist Robert Blauner draws heavily on Marx’s concept of alienation to examine the possibility that alienation in the workplace can be significantly reduced by the effective use of technology.

Blauner claims alienation is central to understanding the negative impact of automation on workers during and after the Industrial Revolution. His text critically assesses Marx’s claim that all workers are necessarily alienated due to the increased automation of work.

Blauner suggests, on the contrary, that automation can actually facilitate, empower, and liberate workers. Using a wide range of data (including statistics, interviews with workers, and attitudinal surveys), Blauner examines four types of industry: craft printing, car assembly lines, textile machine-tending, and chemical-processing. Alienation levels are tested according to four criteria: job control, social isolation, sense of self-estrangement, and meaningfulness of work.

According to his study, alienation is typically very low among print workers. He suggests that the use of machinery is empowering for these employees because it provides them with greater control and autonomy. The same is true for workers in chemical-processing plants: again, these individuals are empowered, he proposes, because they possess expert knowledge of the relevant technology, which in turn is meaningful and fulfilling because it furnishes them with a significant degree of control over their work experience and environment.

By contrast, the automated technology used in car production and in textile factories leads to relatively high levels of alienation.

These findings seem to contradict Blauner’s claim that greater automation diminishes alienation. To explain this, however, he argues that it is not technology itself that alienates workers, but a lack of control over the way it is used, how work is organized, and the nature of the relationships between workers and management.

Blauner concludes that under the right organizational conditions, automation increases the worker’s control over his work process and diminishes a sense of alienation in equal measure.

Labor and Monopoly Capital is considered a classic contribution to the discipline of sociology, but it is the only academic book that Braverman ever wrote. The book’s influence on the application of critical Marxist thinking to the empirical study of industrial work has been profound. Like Marx, Braverman never held a university post and it is perhaps for this very reason that he was able, without fear of censorship, to write such a penetrating and biting critique of the injustices of industrial capitalism and their impact on the majority of the workforce. While Braverman was not the first or only thinker to identify and denounce the relationship between automation and de skilling, his work was crucial for revitalizing the analysis of work across a broad range of disciplines, including history, economics, and political science.

Since the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital, Braverman’s ideas have continued to generate debate among sociologists of work. Writing in 1979, US sociologist Michael Burawoy was strongly supportive of Braverman’s work, as was US sociologist Michael Cooley in his study of computer-aided design. While the conviction with which Braverman presented his arguments has led to criticism from some quarters (in the work of Robert Blauner, for example), his central ideas have survived and been carried forward in the work of Manuel Castells, the highly influential Spanish sociologist of globalization and the network society.

"Marxism is not hostile to science and technology… but to how they are used as weapons of domination."

Harry Braverman

Rich challenges preconceptions about what a le***an is – it is not someone who hates men or sleeps with women, but simply a woman who loves women.

This idea is known as “political le***anism”: Rich and others saw it as a form of resistance to patriarchy rather than simply a sexual preference.

Lesbianism can, then, be placed on a continuum, which includes those who are sexually attracted to women and those who may be heterosexual but are politically connected to other women.

Adrienne Rich

Suggest that, far from being natural, heterosexuality is imposed on women and must be seen as a system of power that encourages false binary thinking – heterosexual/homosexual, man/woman – in which “heterosexual” and “man” is privileged over “homosexual” and “woman”. Compulsory heterosexuality, she says, presents “scripts” to us that are templates for how we conduct relationships and “perform” our gender. We are, for example, encouraged to think of men as being sexually active and women as sexually passive, even though there are no studies to prove this. Women are therefore expected, according to Rich, to behave in restrictive ways, as passive and dependent on men; behaviour that does not conform to these expectations is considered deviant and dangerous. Sexually active women, for instance, are labelled as abnormal or called promiscuous.

The first step toward becoming rational is to understand our fundamental irrationality.