Social Integration Research Paper

1. Actor Integration: Cohesion And Breaking Apart, Integration And Disintegration, Harmony And Conflict

What are the constituent parts of social units? On one level, we can say that these are actors as members of social units like groups, organizations, communities, and societies. On a second level, families form constituent parts of clan societies, estates of estate societies, classes of class societies, functional units of functionally differentiated societies, organizations of organizational societies; groups and divisions are second-level constituent parts of organizations. What is then the extent and intensity of interlinkages between the constituent parts of a social unit? With regard to members of social units as individual actors or corporate actors (groups, organizations, communities, national societies within world society) it is the number of actors involved in recurrent interaction (extent) and the frequency of interactions (intensity). Such interactions can be more or less harmonious or conflictual. Actors can be extensively and intensively linked by conflict. For example, a couple could live in war from marriage to death. Such a case would be covered by our thus far outlined definition of social integration. Forces of attraction which keep them together must be stronger than forces of repulsion (Simmel 1992, pp. 312–15, Coser 1956, pp. 81–85).

Here we enter the field of explaining social integration. One explanation is that they are linked together because both of them have either no alternative at all or alternatives that are too costly so that transaction costs would be too high. For reasons of clarity, we can use the term ‘cohesion’ in order to denote a type of relationship between the members of a social unit which entails extensive and intensive interlinkage, as there are more forces of mutual attraction than of mutual repulsion. The opposite of social integration is not conflict but social disintegration; both are the extreme poles of a continuum with many gradations in between and a middle zone where it is difficult to determine precisely where integration ends and disintegration begins. We can say that a couple is more integrated the more they share a common life together and the more their action is mutually supportive, and it is more disintegrated the less this is the case. Just as integration has its opposite in disintegration and not in conflict, so conflict has an opposite of its own, namely harmony. Conflict means that with two or more actors, one actor’s gain implies the other actor’s loss. They may have different goals which cannot be attained at the same time, or they may have the same goal which, however, cannot be reached by every actor at the same time. Harmony, instead, implies that every actor’s goal can be realized at the same time or that one and the same goal can be reached by every actor at the same time.

2. Action Integration: Negative And Positive Integration

A more ambitious notion of social integration is at stake, when we do not only look at the integration of actors as members of social units, but also at the integration of their actions. This is a second step in defining social integration. The integration of actions can be realized in two ways: negatively and positively. The negative way avoids the actions interfering with each other. The ideal-typical case of this integration of actions is embodied by two farmers who live on their own on their demarcated territory with guarded fences so that there is no chance of intrusion in either’s domain of freedom. This kind of coordinated freedom can be called negative freedom. It is a freedom which results from preventing others from intruding in one’s domain of free action. The corresponding type of integration can be called ‘negative integration.’ Durkheim used the term ‘negative solidarity’ for that (Durkheim 1964). It refers to the mutual acknowledgment of property rights. In the case of negative integration, the actors do not need more than the acknowledgment of their freedom to act by other actors; they do not require their cooperation and support.

The counterparts to negative freedom and negative integration are positive freedom and positive integration, which explicitly rely on mutual cooperation and support (Durkheim 1964). The most elementary form of positive freedom can be found in market exchange. As Adam Smith (1937) demonstrated, the utility maximization of one actor does not occur at the cost of other actors here, but even furthers the other actors’ own utility maximization. In the founding years of sociology, it was Herbert Spencer (1972) who promoted this idea. The actors are not engaged in a zero-sum game, but in a game with a growing sum of which potentially every actor can make a profit. Their actions are in a complementary relationship to each other. Both exercising negative freedom on one’s own space without interference from others and positive integration through market exchange are only possible if the actors share a minimum of rules of the game; otherwise they would end up in struggles for advantages by unlimited means including force and fraud, the Hobbesian war of all against all (Hobbes 1966). The question is, then, how it is possible that free actors come to share a minimal set of rules of the game. In a first step, cooperation in market exchange might rely on the human individual’s sympathy for other people as Adam Smith, as well as David Hume, assumed (Smith 1966, Hume 1980). However, this sympathy mostly does not reach beyond particular communities and does not always guarantee the commitment to the rules of the games. Therefore, there is a need for further arrangements. Here the notion of ‘positive freedom’ becomes relevant. We move from the Scottish moral philosophers’ individualistic theory of market integration to Rousseau’s collectivistic theory of integration by the general will based on the republican spirit of citizens (Rousseau 1973). A further tradition of thought, which takes on significance here, is German idealism. It was founded by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in response to Kant’s critical philosophy and carried on in transformed ways by Marx and his followers right through to critical theory and Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Kant 1956, Hegel 1965, Marx 1962, Habermas 1984, 1989).

3. Social Integration And Social Order

At this stage of our treatment of social integration we realize that social integration comes close to social order as soon as we ask for the integration of free action and of rights to act. Integration and disintegration then correspond to the pair of order and disorder or anomie in Durkheim’s terms (Durkheim 1964). From this viewpoint, the actions of individuals are integrated, in as much as everybody can rely on normative regulations that determine the space of their actions so that negative interferences are avoided. Social order of this kind is a normative order, as Talcott Parsons has emphasized in particular (Parsons 1968). It is based on processes of regulation through collectively binding decision making. Its opposite, disorder or anomie, means that individual actors cannot count on such regulations when they encounter other actors and thus have to rely on the power available to them in order to defend their claims for space for action. As everybody has to do so, there is always the danger of the Hobbesian war of all against all.

If actors and groups are free to articulate interests within a wide framework of constitutional rules, and if the actors see themselves dependent on the tolerance and/or cooperation of the other actors, they will engage in bargaining processes in which each actor looks for the maximization of his or her interests. Such rules will have better chances of survival which allow for the growing satisfaction of a growing number of interests. Here the actors conceive of themselves as utility maximizers who learn to cooperate in a way which is beneficial for all. This is how the evolution of cooperation is explained from the point of view of utility maximization. This order is an ongoing process of steady change which serves for one interest some time and another interest at another time, or better, an always changing mixture of them. The evolutionary explanation of social order in economic terms has been particularly demonstrated by Robert Axelrod (1984). Generally speaking, this tradition of thought in sociology goes back to Herbert Spencer (1972) and is represented in contemporary sociology, for example, in the works of George C. Homans (1974), Michael Hechter (1987), and James Coleman (1990). The basic paradigm is rational choice theory. There have been many attempts to transcend the limits of economic thought, beginning with the classics, particularly Adam Smith in his work on moral sentiments (Smith 1966). One of the more prominent recent attempts is Jon Elster’s acknowledgment of the noneconomic, in his view nonrational, emotional sources of normregulated behavior (Elster 1989).

However, there are also other settings which exert a different shaping influence on the emergence and continuation of social order. There may also be unbridgeable conflicts between the goals of major actors. In this case, social order is an outcome of a power struggle with winners who shape social order by their ideology and impose that order on the defeated through the application of monopolized physical force. This is what Dahrendorf (1958) has emphasized in his conflict theory of social order. A more complex model of conflict theory for the explanation of social order, which includes negotiation and ritual, has been constructed by Randall Collins (1975).

A completely different setting is given, when there are well-established institutions of discursive reasoning and professional legislation in the hands of legal and other types of experts. Both interest negotiation and power struggle have a more limited space for influencing the emergence and continuation of social order. This process takes place much more as the steady building up of an all-embracing, consistent, coherent, and detailed set of laws. The major question, which decides on the success of a certain proposal of legislation, is not so much as to what interests are served and what power can be mobilized, but as to what good reasons can be given and as to how it fits in the existing system of law. This type of social order is a steadily growing legal order which covers almost everything that changes in an ongoing process of adjustments to new problems and challenges. In this perspective, we conceive of social order as a normbuilding process. There are different approaches to addressing this problem. The tradition of German idealism sees norm-building as a process of meaning construction. The modern version of this approach is Habermas’ (1984, 1989) discourse ethics which explains norm-building as a procedure of rational argumentation. Another perspective of relevance here is phenomenology as developed by Schutz (1964), Berger and Luckmann (1966) and others. Here, normbuilding is conceived of as a process of institutionalization through habitualization, sedimentation, and traditionalization as well as legitimation from rudimentary explanations to generalized symbolic. From the point of view of Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology and related conversational analysis, normative order is an ongoing process of ordering through the concerted action of individuals in their respective situation. For symbolic interactionism as promoted by Herbert Blumer (1969)—based on the work of George Herbert Mead (1934)—and by Anselm Strauss (1978), for example, order is negotiated in processes of mutually fitting different perspectives on the situation. In the pragmatist perspective developed in the works of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, and revitalized by Hans Joas, order is produced and reproduced by the creative acts of individuals who cooperate in the solution of problems (Joas 1992).

A further factor which exerts an influence on the emergence and continuation of a social order is the building of relationships of solidarity in the sense of mutual support and help. The breakdown of the traditional order and its hierarchical system of privileges for estates was partly caused by lacking the inclusion of the rising bourgeoisie according to its contribution to the working of the society, particularly in terms of tax payments. There was a new class that was inadequately included in the participation in associational, political, and cultural life. The bourgeois revolutions established a new form of inclusion which was much broader. Inclusion was no longer based on inherited status, but simply on achievement (particularly in terms of market income, but increasingly also in terms of education and professional status). This new form of inclusion served as the door for every further movement aiming at participation in economic, political, associational, and cultural life and their organizations. The first one to succeed was the labor movement with the inclusion of the working class; it was followed by different kinds of movements, from the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the movements for any kind of minority rights, right through to the movements for multiculturalism, prochoice and prolife. The sociological approach that sees the emergence and continuation of social order particularly as a process of solidarity, civic order and citizenship production, reproduction, and transformation, was founded by Emile Durkheim. This approach is carried on, in particular, in the functionalism of Talcott Parsons and in its contemporary revitalization by neofunctionalism. A further major contribution is T. H. Marshall’s work on citizenship (Durkheim [1893] 1964, Parsons 1971, Munch 1998, pp. 140–65, Alexander 1998, Marshall 1964).

4. Social Integration Beyond The Nation State

A new level of inclusion has now been achieved in the process of transcending the system of nation-states by supranational units like the European Union or even the United Nations. A major driving force behind this transformation of social integration is the international division of labor. In Emile Durkheim’s terms, the shrinking of distances through population growth, and, in the highly developed regions, much more through the increasingly faster methods of transport and communication are the major forces which promote the growing division of labor (Durkheim [1893] 1964). In this situation, competition for scarce resources intensifies and leaves specialization as the only effective means of escaping the struggle of all against all, besides suicide or emigration, which are, however, less attractive for people who love their lives and their country. Emigration is also only effective for people in poorer regions yet ever less feasible because of the crowding of the economic centers. The change from nation-state inclusion to European and worldwide inclusion is a further step from mechanical to organic solidarity in Durkheim’s view. The high level of equality of results in the European welfare states can be interpreted as the most advanced level of founding the organic solidarity of labor division on much reconstituted mechanical solidarity within the boundaries of the nation-state. It reserves the equality of results for natives and excludes people in the poorer regions from its accumulated wealth. In Max Weber’s terms, ingroup morality and outgroup morality are strictly differentiated (Weber 1923, pp. 303–4). Within the boundaries of the European Union, this differentiation is fading and being replaced by one comprehensive morality which is now less substantial and concrete and more formal and abstract justice as fairness within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state (Munch 1993, 1998).

5. The Negative Effects Of Social Integration

Social integration is not an overall positive state of affairs. In as much as it is limited to a particular unit below world society, it is always accompanied by at least some demarcation from other social units and corresponding disintegration. In this sense, nationstate disintegration is a precondition for supranational integration. Further on, social integration resides at least to some degree on processes of internal homogenization which may include not only the peaceful merging of different regions, ethnicities, and cultures, but also the imposition of a central culture on peripheral cultures, of the domination of a central ethnicity on peripheral ethnicities, of a central region on peripheral regions. Instruments for this process of ‘internal colonization’ are the penetration of the center’s language, legal system, bureaucracy, school system, and communication system into the peripheral regions (Hechter 1975). In this way, social integration levels down differences and thus the richness of cultures and social life as well as the potential for innovation and change. Thus we can say that a balance of integration and at least some disintegration is a necessary prerequisite for preserving the potential for diversity and innovation. This was particularly emphasized by Emile Durkheim 1982). Georg Simmel 1992) pointed out the interrelation of integration and disintegration, harmony and conflict. Lewis Coser (1956) and Donald Levine (1980) revitalized this contribution by Simmel emphatically.

6. Social Integration And Systems Integration

Social integration becomes increasingly complex and increasingly requires a balance with elements of disintegration the more we proceed in the evolution of human societies. Clan societies in the early stages of sociocultural evolution are integrated by blood and rules of intermarriage. Traditional estate societies are integrated by every estate serving a specific function for the living of the whole and the attribution of privileges according to the inherited status. Cohesion and the integration of actions is promoted by the hierarchical order of inherited ranks (Weber 1976 pp. 133–5, 148–55). Modern societies are integrated in a much more complex way. Their cohesion is based on comprehensive inclusion according to achievement and the constitution of citizenship with civil, political, social, and cultural rights as an abstract community beyond any primordial ties of ethnicity, color, gender, or any other kind of group.

Beyond social integration, modern societies are systemically integrated in as far as they have established functionally specified systems like economy, polity, law, science, education, the media, arts and literature, or religion. Money and democratically legitimated political power are examples of media of communication which serve as means of systemic integration in as much as they allow for the coordination of extremely differentiated economic interests or political goals, irrespective of time, place, and persons involved (Lockwood 1964, Luhmann 1988).

In the process of globalization the functionally specialized systems increasingly reach beyond the nation-state with its relatively strong social integration and produce a world society which is much more integrated systemically than socially through solidarity production and a binding social order (Luhmann 1997). It is disputed whether we approach worldwide systemic integration without social integration or whether there is a necessity and also a chance of a subsequently growing social integration on the supranational and even global levels. If we understand social integration in terms of the relatively strong positive integration of the nation-state, there are little chances for social integration on the supranational and global levels. If we realize, however, that this process involves a transformation of social integration in terms of farther-reaching and internally more differentiated solidarity of networks instead of homogeneous social units, which is accompanied by a corresponding abstraction and formalization of justice, we can imagine that supranational and global systemic integration can still be complemented by social integration.

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