Shahjalal University Of Science & Technology

Assignment on
Sociology
course title: SOC 201Z
Date: 22-02-2015

Submitted by Submitted to
Dipashree Bhowmick Mr A H M Belayet Hussain
Dept. of PME,SUST Associate Professor
Reg no: 2012336043 Dept. of Sociology, SUST
session-2012-13
Question:
What are the major theoretical strands in industrial
sociology? Discuss Durkheim’s ‘human relations’ and
‘system thinking’ strands in industrial sociology.

Answer:
 The major theoretical strands in Industrial
Sociology:

Industrial Sociology is the study of the motivations and

behaviors of people at the workplace. Many descriptions in this
field tend to be nearly anthropological in presentation, as if an
outside observer from Mars visited and objectively observed
the workings in an office or assembly line. The strategy which
is chosen here for overcoming the problems of diversity of
focus and approach in the sociology of work and industry is to
concentrate first on establishing the main characteristics and
interests of the six theoretical strands.
 There are six major theoretical strands in industrial
sociology is given below:

Theoretical Strands Applications and Development

Managerial psychologist >Scientific management(Taylorism)

>Psychological humanism

Durkheim Systems >Human relations

>Systems thinking in organizational analysis

Interactionist >Occupations & professions in society

>Organizations as negotiated orders
> Ethnomethodology

Weberian-social action >Social action perspective on organizations

>Bureaucratic principles of work organization
>Orientations to work

Marxian >Individual experiences and capitalist labour

processes
>Structural contradictions in society and economy

Pastmodern >Discourse and human subjectivity

>Postmodern organisations
Durkheim’s “Human relations” strands in industrial
sociology:
Emile Durkheim is rightfully considered to be one of the founders of
modern sociology. He identified four distinct environmental conditions
that he believed to be responsible for various patterns of high suicide
rates: egoism, altruism, anomie, and fatalism. At this point, we shall
focus only on the best known of these four causes of suicide, anomie.
Durkheim’s analysis of anomie and his concern about social solidarity
and integration was a strong influence on the work of Elton Mayo(1880-
1949) who has come to see as the leading spokesman of the human
relations ‘school’ of industrial sociology. Whereas Durkheim’s
sympathy was not with the ruling or managerial interests of capitalist
society, Mayo’s were. In place of Durkheim’s seeking of social
integration through moral communities based on occupations, Mayo put
the industrial workgroup and the employing enterprise, with the
industrial managers having responsibility for seeing the group
affiliations and social sentiments were fostered in a creative way. To
Durkheim, men were creatures whose desires were unlimited. Unlike
other animals, they are not satiated when their biological needs are
fulfilled. "The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions
received only stimulate instead of filling needs." It follows from this
natural insatiability of the human animal that his desires can only be
held in check by external controls, that is, by societal control. When
social regulations break down, the controlling influence of society on
individual propensities is no longer effective and individuals are left to
their own devices. Such a state of affairs Durkheim calls anomie, a term
that refers to a condition of relative normlessness in a whole society or
in some of its component groups. Anomie does not refer to a state of
mind, but to a property of the social structure. It characterizes a
condition in which individual desires are no longer regulated by
common norms and where, as a consequence, individuals are left
without moral guidance in the pursuit of their goals..
The context of the contribution of human relation group was the
problems of controlling the increasingly large scale enterprises of the
post war period and the problem of legitimating this control in a time of
growing trade union challenge. The faith of the scientific management
experts in a solution which involved the achieving of optimum working
conditions, the ‘right’ method and an appropriate incentive scheme
proved to be blind. Practical experience and psychological research alike
were indicating the need to pay attention to other variables in work
behavior. Here we see the importance of Hawthorne experiments.
The Hawthorne investigations had been started in Chicago by engineers
of the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne plant. They have
investigated the effects of workshop illumination on output and had
found that as their investigations proceeded output improved in the
groups investigated, regardless of what was done to the lighting. The
investigation inferred that the close interest shown in the workers by
investigators, the effective pattern of communication which developed
and the emerging high school cohesion within the group brought
together the needs of the group for rewarding interaction and co-
operation with the output needs of the management. This type of
explanation was also encouraged by the other stages of the
investigations.
A more important influence on all of these interpreters was Pareto
(1848-1923). The effects of Pareto on this first specialized school of
industrial sociology were two fold:
1. The suggestion that workers behavior can be attributed to their
sentiments rather than to their reason. The problems did not arise
 from economic and rationally perceived conflicts of interest and
were therefore not open to solution through scientific management.
2. An emphasis on the notion of system, this conveniently according
with the holistic tendencies of Durkheim. Here we have the
organic analogy with its stress on integration and necessary
independence of the parts and the whole.

Durkheim argued that economic affluence, by stimulating human

desires, carries with it dangers of anomic conditions because it "deceives
us into believing that we depend on ourselves only," while "poverty
protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself." Since the
realization of human desires depends upon the resources at hand, the
poor are restrained, and hence less prone to suffer from anomie by virtue
of the fact that they possess but limited resources. "The less one has the
less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely." By
accounting for the different susceptibility to anomie in terms of the
social process--that is, the relations between individuals rather than the
biological propensities of individuals-- Durkheim in effect proposed a
specifically sociological theory of deviant behavior even though he
failed to point to the general implications of this crucial insight. In the
words of Robert K. Merton, who was the first to ferret out in this respect
the overall implications of Durkheim's thought and to develop them
methodically, "Social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain
persons in the society to engage in nonconforming rather than
conforming conduct."

Durkheim’s “Systems thinking” in industrial

sociology:
Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things, regarded
as systems, influence one another within a whole .Durkheim’s message
to sociologists was that they should look beyond the individuals who
compose society to the level of the underlying patterns of social activity.
The instructions, which are part of this pattern,are to be studied not only
to locate their ‘genesis’ but to understand their ‘functioning’-that is,the
contribution of the parts of the society to the continuation and survival
of the whole.
System thinking defined as the social entities such as socities or
organizations can be viewed as if they were self regulating bodies
exchanging energy and matter with their environment in order to
survive.
The idea of looking at society itself or at industrial organizations as
social systems is rooted in the old organic analogy which views society
as a living organism constantly seeking stability within its
environment,and has come down into contemporary sociology through
the work of Durkheim,Pareto and various anthropologists working in the
Durkheimian tradition.Perhaps the most influential single sociologists of
the twentieth century,Talcott Parsons, is much taken up with Elto Mayo.
His influence has been enormous,establishing an intellectual ambience
in which a conisiderable proportion of existing contributions to
industrial and organizational sociology have been fashioned.
The greatest impact of systems thinking in the sociology of work and
industry has undoubtedly been on the study of work and organizations.
Between the mid 1950’s and about 1970 the view of the formal
organization as an open system functioning within its environment
virtually became an orthodoxy shared by various different schools of
organizations theory. These includes the socio technical systems
approach and the very influential contingency approaches. The systems
approach amounts to the replacement of the classical managerial
metaphor which sees the organization as a rationally conceived machine
constructed to meet efficiency the goals of its designers with the
metaphor of the organization as a living organism constantly adapting in
order to survive in a potentially threatening environment. Systems views
are still widely followed in the study of organizations even if their use is
sometimes more implicit than explicit.

 They have two significant strengths:

1. First, they properly recognize that organizations are much more

than official structures set up by their initiators. They are, rather
patterns of relationships which constantly have to adapt to enable
the organization to continue.
2. Secondly, they stress the importance of close interrelationship
between the different parts, or subsystems,of the organization. The
tendency for changes in one part of a system to have implications
for other part of it is strongly emphasized.
The influence of systems thinking in industrial relations has been long
lasting, at least among those talking a more sociological view of
industrial conflict.
The greatest weakness of all of the components of this Durkheim
systems strand of thinking, as seen by later sociologists, has been the
tendency to overemphasis integration and consensus both within
societies and within work organizations at the expense of attending to
underlying conflicts and fundamental differences of interest.Besides,
they are often seen as too readily viewing the organization, or the society
of which it is part, from the point of view of managerial or other
dominant interest groups.
Systems thinking is valuable in its stress on structures and patterns in
social life. It is therefore a useful corrective to over individualistic
approaches to explanation. However it does face the danger of over-
reacting to individualistic perspectives. Systems models are not only
seen as one-sided in their overemphasis on integration and consensus.
Often implicit in analysis of social relationships as ‘systems’ is the
priority given to considering ways of maintaining that systems. T
consider an approach which gives prime emphasis to meanings and to
interaction rather than to systems and structures existing outside the
individual, we now turn to a quite different strand of the sociology of
work and industry.