Unit 4 - You Can't Fight City Hall, Or Can You?

Lecture

When most people say you can't fight city hall, they mean that it is quite difficult for one person, or even a group of people, to affect an established bureaucracy or to get it to work the way they want it to. But, of course, sometimes one person, or a small group, does get their way. They may achieve their goals despite a bureaucracy or they may even alter the bureaucracy. Since a change in a bureaucracy is a form of social change, we can use this situation to understand something about the complexity of social change.

To understand the dimensions of this issue sociologists have framed the debate in terms of "structure" and "agency." By structure, sociologists are referring to the relationships between different roles that people play. By “agency” they mean human actions.

Structure

Let's talk about structure first because that's probably the most difficult concept to understand. As you may remember from SOC 204, social roles are positions that people occupy in society. Some of those roles are assigned to people, such as brother, teenager, senior citizen, daughter, woman, or uncle. These are roles based on the characteristics of people or their relationships with others. You may be assigned the role of teenager just because you are between the ages of 13 and 19. You don't have any control over that. You may be assigned the role of uncle because your brother and his wife have a baby. You don't have any control over that either. You become a teenager or an uncle just because of your age or relationship. Other types of roles are achieved. College student, husband, computer programmer, mayor, felon, nerd, movie star, or First Lady are achieved roles not so much because you have to work to get them but because they are the result of something you do. They get attached to you by others because of your behavior or activities. Once they are attached or achieved you can't always get out of them by changing your behavior. For example, a kid with behavior problems may “achieve” the role of juvenile delinquent. She may later mend her ways and become a model citizen but it might be a long time before people forget the label of jd and stop putting her in that role.

All roles, whether assigned or achieved, have rules for behavior. Sociologists call these rules norms. Teenagers, college students, mothers, CEOs, scientists, and rock stars, are all expected to behave in certain ways. College students, for example, are expected to read books, take exams, attend class or read on-line lectures, and party on weekends. Fathers are expected to provide for their children, teach sons to play baseball or go hunting, and give away the bride at her wedding. Every role you have has rules that dictate what you should do when you are playing that role. Now, it isn't always that we follow the rules. We all know bad mothers, inept college professors, student slackers. But the only reason we know that they are bad, inept, or slackers is because we compare them against a set of expectations for what people in that role should be doing. Mothers should, we all know, provide meals for her children. That is part of the role of mother in our society. Mothers who don't feed their kids are, therefore, bad mothers. That is, they are not filling the demands of the role. Students who skip class or on-line discussions may be perfectly wonderful people in all other ways but they are not good students. They are not living up to the rules of the role. It is the rules that define the roles. The rules are useful in that they give us a way to behave, should we choose to do so. We don't have to flounder around trying to figure out what to do in most cases. If you have ever been in a situation, perhaps after joining a club or visiting a foreign country, where you didn't know what the rules for behavior were, you know that having no guidelines for how you should behave can be very uncomfortable. Must as we may push the limits of our roles, we like to have them available so we know what to do.

People play many different roles over their lifetimes and even during a certain period of their lives. We move from being a child to a teenager to a wife to a mother to a senior citizens as our years pass. During young adulthood we may be a student, an employee, a husband, an uncle, a golfer, and a political activist all at the same time. Sometimes these multiple roles fit together well but sometimes they cause us problems. Our different roles may be in conflict, as when you have a sick child (caretaker) and must go to work or class. They can also cause us problems because it is hard for us to be in a particular role. A job that requires you to report at 8am when you are a night person, who likes to stay up until 3pm , causes role strain.

Roles are related to each other. Some of the rules for behavior involve another role. This creates what sociologists refer to as structure. Families, businesses, bureaucracies, and teams, are examples of the structures that relationships between roles create. No one can be a college instructor without students. Students can't play the role without an instructor. The two roles, instructor and student, are related to each other and neither exists without the other. Together they form a structure. One of the requirements for the role of student mean that there is an instructor available. Being an instructor without students would be meaningless. Athletic teams are another good example. Each person connected to the team has a role to play. Coaches do one thing, managers another. Players have rules for their behavior both on and off the playing field. If you are a pitcher, you are to go out onto the mound and throw the ball towards home plate. But that would be a pretty useless activity if there were not a batter standing there trying to hit the ball you throw. And, it certainly helps if there is a catcher to give you a target and to return the ball. A team is an example of a structure because all the roles are related.

Every human social organization has a structure. Even a two person friendship has a structure as the people play their achieved roles as friends. And the Federal government has a structure made up of the hundreds of roles from postal delivery person to President. All of the roles in a “government” make up a structure.

Social Change

As I hope you can see, the structures composed of roles, are independent of the individuals that fill those roles. We can have one president now and another next year but the basic structure of the government doesn't change. People have to fill the roles but the structure doesn't care much which particular people fill those roles. Students come and go, college presidents change, but the educational structure continues. The college experience is pretty much now what it was 100 years ago. Although that may be changing as we saw last week. And when structures change, we have social change. In fact, one definition of social change is when a structure changes in significant ways.

The family provides a good example. Up until about 50 years ago in American society, the relationship between roles that we call "the family" was pretty stable. The structure consisted of male husband, female wife and any children those two had or adopted. Extended families might include four grandparents, some aunts and uncles and cousins but the basic structure in our society was what we called the “nuclear family”, the nucleus of father, mother, and kids. However, something began to happen in the 1960s. As women began to move into the work force and get some resources of their own, the divorce rate began to climb. Before 1960 divorces were relatively rare but soon fifty out of every marriages ended with a split. People weren't rejecting the structure of the family, however, so they often got remarried and had more children. New roles were added to the basic structure. We had ex wives & husbands who were still parents to children they did not live with. It became common for people to have six or eight grandparents instead of four and many children had step-brothers & sisters. The norms for all these parts of the new structure were not clear and family gatherings at birthdays and Christmas became very difficult. Who should give the bride away now? A step-father who had participated in rearing a daughter since her fifth birthday or a biological father she hadn't seen since she was twelve and he moved to California ? This is what sociologists refer to a structural (or social) change.

And then things got even more complicated. During the 1980s people started living together without getting married. They formed long-term committed relationships, had children, but never went through the prescribed ceremonies either religious or civil. Kurt Russell & Goldie Hawn, both well known movie stars of the time, were prime examples. Gay men and lesbians also began to form families in a way that had not been common or visible before. As I write this, there are debates in many states, including Oregon , over the legality of marriages between two men or two women. . Most of the gay people who are marrying in the spring of 2004 are not trying to destroy marriage. In fact, they are planning to support the structure. That's why they are getting married Note that gay marriages are a cultural change but not a structural one. Nothing about allowing gay marriages changes the institution of the family although it does change the cultural form of marriage. That's takes us back to the debate over what is social change. Some people feel gay marriages shouldn't be allowed as they change the nature of marriage. Others think it all right because it doesn't really affect the institution.

Agency

One very important thing to note about the changes in the structure of the family is that nobody intended this social change to happen. Few of the people who got divorced in the 1960s or 1970s thought about changing society. They just wanted to get rid of their spouses. People who starting living together without getting married in the 1980s and 1990s just didn't want the constraints of a formal union. They weren't acting in concert with thousands of others to change the nature of the family. But all of those hundreds of thousands of people did change society because they changed the rules for behavior in the family. New roles were added, new relationships between the roles developed, norms were altered to better fit with people's behavior and what was considered right or wrong. This is the very definition of social change or, more accurately, institutional change as we discussed during week two. We have altered the values, norms, statuses/roles, and groups that make up the institution of the family. The basic need of society hasn't changed. The family is still needed to regulate sexual behavior and rear children to be members of the society, but the form of the family has changed. And not because anyone set out to change it. The structure changed without a conscious choice by individuals or society as a whole.

Processes like these cause some sociologists, called structuralists, to believe that social change is largely the result of unintended and uncontrollable alterations in the structures of society because of the actions of many people acting over a long period of time. They believe that we really don't have a lot of control over whether society changes or the direction of change. You can't fight city hall (a structure). This view is contrasted with the "agency" perspective. People who take the agency view believe that most social change is the result of conscious intentions by individuals or groups to make changes in institutions or structures. They believe that it is the efforts of people working together in organizations or sometimes even as individuals result in desired changes in society. They believe that it is possible to fight "city hall," a metaphor for the structures in society, and win. Structuralists are more likely to take the view that "you can't fight city hall."

You may be thinking, “who cares about all this except a bunch of sociologists?” But this really isn't just an academic debate. The argument over the origins of social change takes place every time people attempt to solve a social problem of any kind. Congress has a constant discussion over changing structures versus allowing individuals to act on their own behalf. Any political campaign is a structure/agency debate. Any social movement is full of people who believe in agency. What's the best way to make society the way we want it? Can we actually do that? Can we change structures? Does agency work? You'll have to make up your own mind as we cover some of these issues in the rest of the course.