From Kinship and Community to Markets and Corporations

Contrast between country and city were a staple of nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century social commentary (Williams 1973). Nearly everyone preferred the country. The country was clean, while the chimneys of city factories belched black smoke; the country was morally pure, while cities were dens of iniquity; perhaps most important, country dwellers enjoyed true community and social order, while cities were chaotic, unregulated, and anonymous. Early social theorists believed that cities somehow embodied the core features of a new kind of society, and this new society contrasted sharply with the previous, more communally solidaristic social order. Today, however, Tönnies's (1887) Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft contrast, Wirth's (1938) and Redfield's (1941) folk-urban continuum, and other contrasts of tradition and modernity are as familiar as objects of abuse as they are as mandatory bits of vocabulary in introductory sociology textbooks. Those who attack this approach generally focus on the community or tradition side of the dichotomy (e.g., Gusfield 1967, 1975). They argue that the depictions by Tönnies and others of traditional community life are nostalgic and unrealistic; they also note that the portrayal of most of the Third World as traditional rather than modern is both patronizing and predisposed to neglect the extent to which contemporary Third World patterns are produced by modern capitalism and international relations.^[8]

Surprisingly, the sociological inadequacies of Tönnies's (and others') conception of Gesellschaft have not received comparable comment; the same goes for most of the other well-known binary oppositions.^[9] The

[7] Marxism's lack of an account of social integration is not simply the result of the fact that Marxist class theory suggest fundamental social contradictions whereas Parsons and other functionalists consider the stratification system to be primarily integrative. The problematic of social integration is not developed in Marx's work or most Marxism. Indeed, the concrete relational dimension to internal class solidarity is not much developed by Marx; when it has been studied by other Marxists, the theoretical or conceptual bases have been drawn from outside Marxism and often have been left in unclear relationship to Marx's more central categories theory of capitalism.

[8] This voluminous literature has been reviewed recently by Worsley (1985). The arguments of Wallerstein (1974, 1979) and Frank (1969, 1978) are perhaps the most prominent. Calhoun 1978, 1980, 1983) ties to salvage something of the notions of community and tradition from these critical dismissals and from the genuine nostalgia, paternalism, and error found in earlier formulations.

[9] The one real exception to this contention is the Marxist critique that most of these conceptions neglect the centrality of capitalism to "modernity" or Gesellschaft .

impact of the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in Tönnies's conceptualization was largely the loss of a felt sense of belonging together in favor of an exaggerated individualism and a focus on instrumental relations. Tönnies had little social-structural foundation for his notion of changed personal experience, which accordingly remained unsatisfactorily impressionistic.^[10] Simmel's analysis of "the metropolis and mental life" made a good deal more of the change in concrete social relationships that accompanied the emerging social psychology of urban life ([1903] 1971]). His attention, however, was focused on the larger issue of the development of individuality in the modern West. His characterization of cities, along with most of the other famous typologies of tradition and modernity, offered only a very general view, one that was lacking in historical specificity—or rather, one that failed to recognize the historical specificity implicit in its apparently general account (Abu-Lughod 1969). To be more precise about the experience—let alone the sociological significance—of modern urban life, we need to go beyond such broad statements about sociopsychological differences to a specific analysis of change in the structure and the kind of social relationships.

Almost all major premodern forms of social organization depended primarily on direct interpersonal relationships. Kinship, community life, and even the most stable, recurrent relationships of economic exchange all took place within the conscious awareness, and usually the face-to-face copresence, of human individuals. Such relationships might be more or less systematic and complex: for example, webs of kinship can link hundreds of thousands of members of traditional African societies. However, the actualization of each relationship, as opposed to its latent potential, was normally directly interpersonal. Although state apparatuses certainly predate the modern era (and occurred historically throughout the world), Giddens is surely right to argue that few if any were able to "govern" in the modern sense of the word; their capacity for regularized administration of a territory and its residents was very limited.^[11] This limitation was largely the result of the fact that power relations could not be extended

[10] It was partly to avoid this sort of impressionistic account that human ecology went to the opposite extreme in borrowing models from biology and developing a highly "objective" account that purported to treat cities as wholes without reference to their constituent interpersonal relationships. Here the key variables in human ecology became population, organization, ecology, and technology. See Duncan 1959 and Hawley 1950, 1981. Haines (1985) has offered a cogent critique of this biological emergentism and the human ecologists' corresponding neglect of alternative "relational" approaches to their subject matter.

[11] Giddens 1985, 63. Such "administrative power can only become established if the coding of information is actually applied in a direct way to the supervision of human activities, so as to detach them in some part from their involvement with tradition and with local community life" (Giddens 1985b, 47).

effectively over large distances.^[12] Although their cultural variation was enormous and their variation in specific patterns of social organization was considerable, premodern peoples were only rarely able to produce the physical infrastructure and administrative practices that are necessary to build large-scale social organization of much intensity.

The direct relationships that prevailed included both "primary" and "secondary" ones, to use Cooley's language ([1909] 1962).^[13] Useful though it may be for some purposes, Cooley's conceptual distinction does not differentiate the modern age adequately from its predecessors. Modernity is not constituted by the presence of secondary relationships or the absence of primary relationships; both sorts exist in a wide range of modern and nonmodern societies. Rather modernity is distinguished by the increasing frequency, scale, and importance of indirect social relationships. Large-scale markets, closely administered organizations, and information technologies have produced vastly more opportunities for such relationships than existed in any premodern society. This trend does not mean that direct relationships have been reduced in number or that they are less meaningful or attractive to individuals. Rather it means that direct relationships tend to be compartmentalized. They persist as part of the immediate life-world of individuals, both as the nexus of certain kinds of instrumental activities (e.g., the many personal relationships that smooth the way for or make possible business transactions [see Granovetter 1985]) and, especially, as the realm of private life (family, friends, and neighbors). However, direct interpersonal relationships organize less and less of public life, that is, fewer and fewer of the crucially determinant institutions controlling material resources and exercising social power. Indirect relationships do not eliminate direct ones, but they

[12] This point was recognized some time ago by Innis ([1950] 1972) in his arguments about the centrality of space-transcending communications media to the building of empires.

[13] Cooley's opposition was between relationships that linked people merely as the enactors of specific social roles and those that involved whole persons, linked to each other in ways that transcended the fragmentation of life into different spheres. See also the discussion in Nisbet and Perrin 1977. Cooley's version of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy implied a Rousseauian critique of the inauthenticity of secondary relationships. This and other criticisms that secondary relationships are less fulfilling, less meaningful, and weaker than primary relationships are central to the concepts of primary and secondary relationships as they have commonly been used. Cooley's conceptualization exists to describe an expansion in the number of relationships that is accompanied by a deterioration in their meaningful content and social strength. There may be something to this critique, but it would be better to make the issue one of the relative importance of each sort of relationship in organizing various kinds of activities, to recognize the secondary relationships are central to public life and democratic political participation, and to keep in mind the distinctive difference between both sorts of directly interpersonal relationships, on the one hand, and indirect relationships, on the other hand.

change both their meaning and their sociological significance.^[14] Although they are as sociopsychologically and culturally powerful as ever, direct relationships are no longer constitutive of society at its widest reaches.^[15]

The growing importance of indirect relationships was recognized by both Marx and Weber. For Marx these relationships characterized above

[14] For a general discussion of some of the distinctive features of face-to-face relationships in contrast to mediated ones see Meyrowitz 1985. For example, nonmediated relationships are more easily clustered, he suggests, so that individuals can communicate in different styles and contents to different groups:

The combination of many different audiences is a rare occurrence in face-to-face interaction, and even when it occurs (at a wedding, for example) people can usually expect the speedy resumption of private isolated interactions. Electronic media, however, have rearranged many social forums so that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways…. And the merger of different audiences and situations through radio and television has made it difficult for national politicians to say very specific things to particular constituencies or to behave differently in different social situations. (Meyrowitz 1985, 5)

This observation seems quite true, but Meyrowitz's account is biased toward broadcast media (rather than computers and other electronic media that use numbers, text, and other more abstract codes). Although broadcast may indeed maintain a kind of surveillance over public figures that shapes their behavior and eliminates certain "privacies," two qualifications seem in order. First, earlier modes of social control may have been at least as powerful in forcing individuals to adhere to constant standards of rectitude in their behavior. Television cameras may never have invaded Victorian gentlemen's clubs or brothels to embarrass their patrons, but standards of public propriety in dress, speech, and the like allowed less flexibility in many regards even though enforcement was only through direct observation. (Giddens's [1985b] Foucault-inspired account of the growing capacity for surveillance is similarly not complemented by attention to either more informal means of social control or changing opportunities for political participation.) Second, computerized communications allow a great deal of tailoring of messages to specific audiences, as any recipient of direct-mail political advertisements knows. Where candidates speaking on television must appeal to a certain common denominator of "the general public," those targeting various population categories for funding can shape each appeal in a distinctive, perhaps quite contradictory way. An elaborate variety of statistical and other consulting services help candidates know just which issues to stress with mailing lists of churchgoers, veterans, schoolteachers, people of high incomes, parents of school-age children, or any of a hundred other segments into which the population of potential donors may be categorized. Although it is a bit dated (particularly with regard to the computerization of direct mail), Sabato 1981 is probably the best general account of this phenomenon.

[15] This situation is one source of modern populist politics—the politics of local communities and traditional cultural values. It is a potent kind of politics, and it offers potentially radical and important visions of alternative modes of social organization. Many of its variants, however, are based on some combination of (1) systematic misrecognition of the opportunities for local autonomy available in a world structured largely by large-scale organizations of indirect social relationships, and (2) systematically biased analogies between the world of direct personal relationships and that of large-scale organizations of indirect relationships (e.g., "balancing the U.S budget is just like balancing your family checkbook").

all the system of commodity production and capital accumulation. For Weber the commodity form was also key, but, characteristically, market rather than production relations were central; the "indirect exchange of money" was prototypical:

Within the market community every act of exchange, especially monetary exchange, is not directed, in isolation, by the action of the individual partner to the particular transaction, but the more rationally it is considered, the more it is directed by the actions of all parties potentially interested in the exchange. The market community as such is the most impersonal form of practical life into which humans can enter with one another. This is not due to that potentiality of struggle among the interested parties which is inherent in the market relationship. Any human relationship, even the most intimate, and even though it be marked by the most unqualified personal devotion, is in some sense relative and may involve a struggle with the partner…. The reason for the impersonality of the market is its matter-of-factness, its orientation to the commodity and only to that. When the market is allowed to follow its own autonomous tendencies, its participants do not look toward the persons of each other but only toward the commodity; there are no obligations of brotherliness of reverence, and none of those spontaneous human relations that are sustained by personal unions. (Weber [1922] 1978, 636)

Weber's ideal-typical market does not correspond to any actuality, of course, any more than Marx's pure model of capitalism does. But each expresses a distinctly modern tendency.

Weber's analysis of bureaucracy suggests another such tendency: the creation of social apparatuses for rational administration. Weber tended to assume that bureaucracies would be sociogeographically concentrated; he associated them with cities and treated their development as a specification and enhancement of the role of cities as centers for the exercise of power. In fact Weber wrote at about the point in Western history when cities began to lose some of their distinctive centrality to systems of power and administration.^[16] In ancient empires, dispersed city-states, and late-feudal Europe alike, cities had been at the heart not only (obviously) of civilization but also of both power relations and trade. Cities were the nodes that could anchor structures of indirect relationships in an age of minimal information technology. They could provide for mediation among participants in far-flung markets, and they were

[16] Thus Weber was one of the many classical sociologists who together placed urban studies at the heart of sociology without recognizing the historical specificity of the centrality of cities, especially to the period of the transition to modern capitalism and nation-states. See Saunders 1985 for an argument that this error is at least partially repeated (with less excuse) by the geographers and sociologists who would make the spatial analysis of social relationships a field of its own.

the focal points for political and military control. As a result, they created networks of power and exchange stretching well beyond their boundaries. Moreover, they provided(and to a considerable extent still provide) for the direct relationships that make systems of indirect relationships work (the personal relationships that connect banking houses, for example, and the direct communications among central government officials).^[17] Cities also provided for public life, which is composed of direct—although not necessarily intimate—relationships among strangers (Sennett 1977; Calhoun 1986). But the development of modern transportation and communications technologies, on the one hand, and the growing administrative organization and power of the state, on the other, meant that both economic and political activity could begin to bypass the cities.^[18]

In short, state power could grow because the new forms of organization and the improved transportation and communications infrastructures (based partly on new technologies but, at first, more on heavy investments in the extension of old methods) enabled the spread of increasingly effective administration throughout the various territories of a country. This is the story Giddens (1985b) offers as the centerpiece of his critique of historical materialism, and it is a necessary complement to Marx's analysis of capitalism. It is a crucial complement, but it is not sufficient.

A full account needs to recognize, first, that the growth of the state, like the capitalist economy, developed infrastructures that could be used by ordinary people to develop connections with each other. Roads, trains, telegraphs, and telephone furthered the social integration of dispersed populations, promoted their common participation in capitalist production and exchange, and made possible their common subjection to state surveillance and administration. Class struggle itself, in the sense of the mobilization of workers organized on the same sociogeographic

[17] Ancient and early-modern cities relied much more on these direct relationships because they lacked the material and organizational infrastructures to do otherwise. Written communications were the only means of transcending the spatial and temporal limits of copresence—and literacy was not widespread, especially outside the cities. In countries of limited infrastructural technology and organization cities still appear to be largely aggregations of smaller populations linked almost exclusively by direct interpersonal relationships. Cities remain central (and often swell beyond their ready supporting capacity or their leaders' desires) because the lack of communications, transportation, and organizational infrastructures makes it all but impossible to create economic (and political) opportunities at a distance.

[18] "The growing obsolescence of the city, in its traditional form, in political, economic, and military terms, is one of the most fundamental transitions initiated—although certainly not completed—as part of the emergence of the absolutist state" (Giddens 1985b, 97).

scale as capital accumulation, had to wait for a communications infrastructure that was adequate to the formation of large-scale trade unions and political parties (Calhoun 1988).

Second, a full account also needs to recognize that modern states are in fact special (and critically important) instances of a more general phenomenon: corporations. As Giddens notes, the absolutist kings were distinct from other traditional rulers in the crucial sense that they not only sat at the pinnacle of state power but also incorporated the state symbolically within their own sovereign persons: "The religious symbolism of 'divine right' should actually be seen as a traditional accoutrement to something very new—the development of 'government' in the modern sense, the figure of the ruler being a personalized expression of a secularized administrative entity" (1985b, 93–94). This notion is part of what Kantorowicz (1956) meant in his brilliant portrayal of the late-medieval doctrine of the "king's two bodies," one personal and the other public. The king had begun to assume the status (still common to Roman Catholic bishops and other ecclesiastical nobles) of a "corporation sole" (see also Gierke 1934; Maitland [1900] 1958). Eventually, a doctrine of corporate personality developed that freed the corporation from any legal need for embodiment. On this and other bases corporations (starting at least as much with the state and various monastic bodies as with the urban corporations from which the lineage is usually traced) were eventually able to command routine public, jural, and even (rather unanalytical) sociological acknowledgment as unitary actors.

Oddly, the corporate form of social organization has received very little attention in sociological theory even though it is central to modern institutional arrangements.^[19] A brief discussion of this remarkable form of organization is therefore in order before considering more recent information technology and the question of whether we have left, or are about to leave, modernity behind us.

The corporation is a remarkable cultural artifact. One of the most extraordinary things about business corporations—as well as the other types of corporations from religious and charitable institutions to governments and quasi-governmental organizations of various sorts—is that we so routinely reify or anthropomorphize them.^[20] With minor variations and qualifications corporations throughout the Western world may own

[19] Coleman 1982 is one of a handful of modern exceptions to this stricture; see also Selznick 1969. One of the best sociological treatments comes not from a sociologist but from the legal theorist Dan-Cohen (1986).

[20] In Social and Cultural Dynamics, Sorokin (1957, chapter 18) found that the modern West exhibited a "reemergence of singularism," with continued rapid growth into the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Sorokins's analysis links singularism—the claim of ontological or nominalist social reality for collectivities—with a "triumphant individualism."

property, litigate, and make contracts in the same way as "natural persons." They may, indeed, enter into a variety of relationships—usually highly asymmetrical—with natural persons.^[21]

Such relationships are quintessentially indirect. Although real human beings are linked by them, this linkage is almost invisible. Indeed, social relationships seem to disappear in the operation of an apparently self-moving technical and social system.^[22] With even a minimal communications technology the relationships constituting an organization can be rendered indirect, that is, distanced both in time and in space (e.g., by the storage, retrieval, or transmission of the written word) and socially mediated (by transmission through the official functions of other corporate agents). Thus a corporation is in one sense merely an aggregate or structure of social relationships, most (but not all) of which are indirect. In another sense, however, it is a social creature at a different level, a whole unto itself.^[23] Our Western—especially American—culture grants the corporation the status of an autonomous actor, one that is capable of "responsibility," thus offering its members limited liability for their actions.^[24]

Both corporations and large-scale markets depend on the flow of information through indirect social relationships, and both are accordingly

[21] "Asymmetrical" is Colemen's (1982) apt term for relationships between corporations and "natural persons." The relationships that spring to mind are, usually, contractual ones such as employment, the sale of goods, or credit; the ownership of shares in a corporation is perhaps a special case of contractual relationship. But corporations also enter into other sorts of relationships with natural persons, as for example when they produce or distribute toxic substances that kill them.

[22] Studies have long explored the impact of mechanical analogies on our understanding of human nature. the idea of automation—self-movement—came early on to influence conceptions of social organizations. Hobbes ([1651] 1962, 81), for example, describes Leviathan as an artificial man, or automaton. The image of an artificial man suggests much of our ordinary understanding of the independence of such social automata from human action. Sociotechnical systems subject to automation not only industrial production and office work but also the control and coordination of social relations. In doing so, they create indirect relationships that are particularly conducive to reification.

[23] A corporation exhibits, for example, the characteristics Durkheim ([1895] 1966) thought defining of social facts: it endures, at least potentially, longer than any of its individual members of agents; if is external to any individual (although whether it is external to all is perhaps better treated as a question of theoretical presupposition rather than one of empirical fact; see Alexander 1982); and it is capable of coercion over individuals, both conscious and intentional, and unintended and/or unrecognized on either side.

[24] See the discussions in Dan-Cohen 1986, French 1984, Orhnial 1984, and Stone 1975. Attempts to apply criminal law sanctions to corporations raise particularly difficult questions about their "responsibility" and ontological status. It is not entirely clear, for example, what is meant by the notion of "punishing" a firm, as distinct from the individuals who act as its agents, own it, or otherwise create and compose it (see Coffee 1981).

subject to routine reification.^[25] Economists predict, and nearly everyone discusses, the economy as though it were as natural and objective a phenomenon as the weather. This tendency reflects a culture that is at once pervasively individualistic—and thus underrecognizes the social dimension in the creation of both markets and corporations—and at the same time supports a maximally "disembodied" ontology that allows people to accord some manner of unitary individual existence to bodiless social creatures. Markets differ from corporations, however, in that they lack administration. They are the aggregate of individual actions, and sometimes collective action, but they are not collective actors.

Because of this difference, corporations tend to be not only reified but also anthropomorphized. As note earlier, we no longer find it necessary to embody states in the persons of their rulers; er attribute individuality to the disembodied state itself (see also Manning 1962; Giddens 1995b, chapter 4). Similarly, corporations are readily understood to exist, and in some sense to act, independently of their chief executives. However attractive Chrysler Corporation may find it to promote Lee Iacocca as its symbolic image or however much Ronald Reagan may appeal to Americans as a symbol of their country, no once confuses the person with the corporation. As Justice Marshall wrote nearly a hundred and seventy years ago, a corporation is "an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law."^[26] The confusion comes in treating the corporation as a person.

[25] Although administrative flows of information are the most obvious aspect of this dependence in corporations (including states), we should not forget that the maintenance and operation of such organizations as collective actors depends on a whole variety of "informal," that is, not specifically administered, information flows. Indeed, one of the questions that some ask about the new information technology is whether it does not subject many of these informal lines of communication to increasing surveillance or formalized administration and thus in one way weaken the organizations it more generally facilitates.

Both money and commodities can be understood as the basis of information flows in markets. Parsons (1963), Luhmann (1979, chapter 3), and Giddens (1985b, chapter 5) all offer understandings of monetary transactions as communications. Simmel ([1907] 1978, 284–85, 297–302) stresses the role of money in making possible impersonal relations between people and thus promoting individualism; he does not, however, quite develop an account of money as a medium of communications. Marx's notion of commodity fetishism has been developed in this direction (Taussig 1978; Lukács [1922] 1971). Both Luká and Simmel draw connections between commodification and what Simmel calls "the calculating character of modern times" ([1907] 1978, 443).

[26] Dartmouth v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518 (1819). See also Simmel's stress on the significance of the personal unity of the owner, including the socially created corporate owner:

Every sum of money has a different qualitative significance if it belongs to a number of people rather than to one person. The unit of the personality is thus the correlate or the pre-condition for all qualitative differences of possessions and their importance; here the assets of legal persons are, in terms of their function, on the same level because of the uniformity of their administration. Similarly, we may speak of a nation's

wealth only if we conceive of the nation as a unified possessing subject. That is to say, we have to conceive the assets owned by the individual citizens as being unified by their interaction within the national economy, in the same way as the fortune of one individual comes together as a practical unity through such interactions—for example, distribution, the relation of individual expenditures to the total, balance between income and expenditure, etc. ([1907] 1978, 271).

For Weber ([1922] 1978, 48–52), social relationships constitute an organized or corporate group (Verband ) only insofar as a set of specific individuals (usually together with an administrative staff) regularly enforces its boundaries. Weber refuses, however, to recognize the corporate whole as distinct from the individuals in authority. See also the discussion in Sorokin (1957, chapters 18–19)