Social and economic transformation during the Industrial Revolution

¶ … shift from agrarian to industrial society a simple substitution of one form of economic behavior for another, hanging up the hat of the farmer to put on the hat of the factory worker. But there was in fact a substantial shift in nearly everything about daily life for those generations caught up in the transition from rural to urban worlds. The most obvious change was in the relationship between people and the land itself. No longer were people defined by their place of birth, by where they had always lived. They were defined - by others as well as themselves - by a series of portable skills.

The magnitude of this change is difficult for those of us who have grown up in a world in which mobility is the norm. But it must have been for those living at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution a shattering (as well as liberating) discovery: For the first time in millennia, since humans has given up the freedom of pastoralism for the greater security and wealth of agriculture people began to sever ancient connections, as Marx describes.

This shift was advantageous for some, disadvantageous for many, for the choice to stay and farm or go to the city was often that of landlords rather than poor workers. The overall effect of industrialization was an increase in wealth and in leisure for a growing percentage of people. In other words, the rise of a middle class was based on the increased wealth that industrialization produced. This was perhaps of some comfort to the poorest members of society in that they might believe that they too some day might become middle class.

As the majority of workers ceased to be defined by a particular position on the earth's surface and more and more on portable skills, at the same time they had to reevaluate what skills were important and valuable in this new world. Industrialization is, at its heart, the substitution of machines to perform the labor that once humans and other animals performed, and this shift in a dependence on the power of steam and coal rather than muscles required a fundamental reevaluation of the purpose of human labor.

Another fundamental change that occurred as societies industrialized was the separation of the family and the workplace. Farmers do not need to worry about who is caring for their children, for all members of the family live at their workplace. Once workers had to go somewhere away from home to perform their work (a necessity for factory work because the needed machines were too large for homes and too expensive to make or purchase for each worker), the sphere of men and women became dramatically more separate than it had been.

Just at the point at which machines were doing much of the heavy work and men should therefore have lost the social superiority that they held because of their ability to perform feats of strength, married women were mostly banned from the workplace. They would stay at home with children, far away from the family ties and feudal obligations that in the country had provided a network of support for raising families. The day-to-day help that family members could provide was lost. Women - without their own gardens or friends or families nearby - had to depend entirely upon their husbands. They would, as a direct result of this, soon begin to agitate for greater legal rights.

Agrarian life - Industrialized Life

Work/family life merged - Work separate

Family

Connection to land key - Portable skills most important

Women and men - Women primarily at home work in same sphere Men in workplace

Tied to long-standing - Greater freedom,

Fewer safety nets community

Suicide in America and Europe

Emile Durkheim's model of suicide, as described in "Social Order and Control Via Close Social Ties: The Example of Suicide" is one of the foundations of modern sociological theory. In this paper, he demonstrated how even the most seemingly private, existential act of taking one's own life is in fact affected by the kind of society we live in.

Durkheim argued that society is not simply the sum of its parts and nothing more. Rather, he argued that the relationships between and among people in a society produce what he called "social facts," and that these "social facts" must be considered to be valid - to be "real" - when trying to understand the nature of society. These social facts create the integrated whole of a society that also must be seen to have a life of its own. We each interact not only with each other but with society as a whole; we each have a part to play in the greater drama (and structure) of society.

This view of society is referred to as a "functionalist" view of society because each element (including each individual person as well as every social fact) has a function, and they come together to produce a society that is reasonably able to maintain itself.

We should note at this point that Durkheim was not arguing that we are simply automatons: He certainly believed that every individual is unique and that we each possess a unique set of dreams and a unique set of skills for attempting to achieve those dreams.

Nevertheless - and this is the essential and undeniable point for Durkheim - that uniqueness that we each possess as individuals can never be considered apart from society. In fact, he might well argue that it does not exist except as a sort of reflection of society. For Durkheim, there is nothing at all that that is truly private, there exists nothing at all that is not influenced by the groups of which we are each a part.

This means that when a society fails to function as well as it might (for functionalists are certainly not so naive as to imagine that all societies function perfectly smoothly, like one of those physics problems in which friction can be dismissed with an airy wave of the hand), these failures have a significant impact on the individual.

But society cannot disintegrate without the individual simultaneously detaching himself from social life, without his own goals becoming preponderant over those of the community, in a word, without his personality tending to surmount the collective personality. The more weakened the groups to which he belongs, the less he depends upon them, the more consequently he depends only on himself and recognized no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.

Durkheim argues - and backs up this argument with his statistics on rates of suicide in various countries - that societies in which people are tightly integrated into the collective ethos are those that are most functional both for the continuation of the society and for the individuals. In those societies in which people are only loosely connected to each other (such as in the United States today with its high levels of divorce), suicide rates rise.

1. Divorce rises - People become disconnected from each other and society

2. Feelings of anomie rise - divorce rates rise

3. Divorce rates rise further - anomie is more common

4. Anomie is more common - suicide rates rise

5. Suicide rates rise - anomie rises, divorce rises

6. Divorce and anomie rise - suicide rises... In a continuing cycle

Institutionalized Discrimination

Although we at least should all know that discrimination is always bad, in fact there are different kinds of discrimination - and these have very different repercussions for society. The first of these we may call personal discrimination: This applies to how an individual feels and how he or she acts as an individual.

The second we may call institutional discrimination: This refers to structural aspects of society that affect individuals based not on individual merit (or lack thereof) but rather on race.

The former is dangerous, but the latter is more pernicious because it allows for far fewer effective ways of battling against it. Some hypothetical examples should make clear how these different forms of racism can manifest themselves in a society - and in the lives of individuals.

Let us take a landlord in Los Angeles in the 1920s. This person is a racist: He is white and he doesn't like blacks. He refuses to rent apartments to blacks. These people who are turned away from possible housing have no legal recourse: No laws yet exist to prohibit racial discrimination in housing, and indeed various parts of California have "racial covenants" that require landlords to practice racial discrimination. This is an example of institutional discrimination blended with personal discrimination: A person acts out of individual bias, and this bias is upheld formally by the institutions of the society at large.

Let us skip forward to the present day. Once again we have a Los Angeles landlord who is racist. He doesn't like blacks. He refuses to rent to blacks. Now what course is open to those people turned away from housing? Quite a bit - assuming that they can prove that they were in fact turned away because of their race rather than because of the fact (for example) that they have eight pet pot-bellied pigs. A landlord with a history of racist practices is in violation of fair housing standards developed during the Civil Rights era and can be fined and even jailed in some jurisdictions.

In this case, we have personal discrimination hard at work still, but it is in large measure combated by institutional anti-discrimination policies.

In some cases, institutional constraints not only provide remedies for wrongs done by discriminatory practices but prevent those wrongs from being done at all. It is inconceivable to us today that we should ever see a black person bleed to death in an emergency room because it is for whites only: The medical staff (even if they all have to be members of the KKK) know that they could be charged with murder if they were to refuse to treat someone on the grounds of race, and so they rush to treat the person, remembering that the only color that counts in an ER is how much red there is.

These are examples of how institutional structures can lessen or even negate the discriminatory beliefs of individuals. However, the opposite case is also true, as Hughes and Thomas demonstrate. An example from my own family will help to illustrate this.

My grandmother, as a girl, was blond and fair skinned. Her full sister is black-haired and dark-skinned. My grandmother takes after their Irish-American father; my great-aunt after their Cherokee mother. They grew up in a small town in the South, and by the conventions of that time and place my grandmother was white (because she looked white) and my great-aunt was "colored" because she didn't look white.

The result of this distinction (despite the fact that everyone knew that they were sisters - in a town of 600 everyone knows everyone else) was that my grandmother and her sister couldn't sit at the drugstore counter together or drink from the same water fountain at school. From their stories, nearly everyone in the town realized that this was a pretty stupid way to go about treating two sisters (it was the logic that seemed to bother them, not the moral problems of racism). But that was just the way things were: The law was the law and that was that.

Institutional discrimination sets up rules that allow bigots to practice their bigotry without being challenged and prevents those with more open minds from trying to change the status quo. It is much more difficult to change institutional discrimination than personal discrimination because to change the former requires changing both attitudes as well as the structure of institutions - and changing them at more or less the same time.

Changing personal inclinations toward discrimination requires only changing the opinion of individuals one at a time, which is much easier to do than trying to shift the inertia generated by an institution and all of its members. The fact that so much racism and sexism still exists in our society is in no small part the result of the difficulty of changing institutions and the structural ways in which people - even good people - practice discrimination against one another.