11 - Durkheim's Vision

Summary

Abstract. I return to Durkheim's vision of a sociology that would allow a transformation or social engineering of communities and organizations toward desirable states of unity and self-regulation. I discuss the promise of a structural social psychology in aiding the development of an operations-research approach to macro-sociology, and the relationship of formal and ethnographic work in delivering on this promise.

The Transformation of Social Space

In order to diminish anomy in the highly differentiated societies of the West, Durkheim proposed a revitalization of the corporations or guilds that were a prevalent form of occupational organization during the Middle Ages. Durkheim believed that a resurgence of guild associations would fulfill the largely unmet needs of social integration that emerged with the progress of differentiation. This view appears in various places in Durkheim's work, but most especially in The Division of Labor in Society (1933) and Suicide (1951), and in his lectures on professional ethics, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1958).

In The Division of Labor Durkheim asserts that the structural conditions of social integration have not appeared in most complexly differentiated social structures – not in the scientific community, nor in the marketplace, nor in the nation. He argued that a system of so-called corporate organizations would fulfill the conditions of societal integration that the division of labor has brought into being:

If it is true that social functions spontaneously seek to adapt themselves to one another, provided they are regularly in relationship, nevertheless this mode of adaptation becomes a rule of conduct only if the group consecrates it with its authority. … […]