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EMILE DURKHEIM: THE CITY, THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND THE MORAL BASIS OF COMMUNITY

His method provides a direct contrast to the approaches of both Karl Marx and Max Weber Durkheim assumes that reality is given in observation He asserts the ability of sociology to penetrate the essence of social phenomena His is a positivist sociology His endorsement of a purely experimental basis for knowledge, his equation of the logic of explanation between the natural and social sciences. Reality cannot be known through ideas about it. Social phenomena in themselves as distinct from the consciously formed representations of them in the mind We must study them objectively as external things. Science thus begins with a complete freedom of mind.

Social facts Types of social solidarity - sociology therefore relies on observable phenomena as indicators of the essence of social facts Social facts

the collective phenomena of social life

Moral authority of laws and determinacy of socialization and collective life

Products of group life, it is the nature of the group Durkheims sociology begins by identifying social facts Two types of social solidarity 1. organic 2. mechanic

the growth of the division of labour

transition from one to the other

the analysis of the city becomes important

two factors give rise to an increased division of labour in society: (a) material density(density of population increased in a given area ) (b) moral density ( increased density of interaction and social relationship within a population) The division of labour (1933)

an increase in moral density

The increase in moral density of a society is expressed through urbanization: Cities always result from the need of an individuals to put themselves in very intimate contact with others. Urbanization together with the associated development of new means of transportation and communication, is the cause of the division of labour. A concentrated human population can survive only through differentiation of functions

An increase in population, necessarily determines advances in the division of labour. Increased moral density increased division of labour (the collapse of the society or to the elimination of weaker competitors within it) Moral density is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The city as a force for change presents

The city undermines traditional controls that the collectivity cannot possibly impose a single code of moral conduct over the diverse spheres of action in which the urbanite becomes involved, The city extends its influence over the surrounding countryside and thus urbanizes the society as a whole.

Division of labour

social solidarity

a new organic solidarity of interdependence, but in a state of moral basis of social life. Role of the city as the primary force for change It provided the organizational expression for functional economic interests. Rome was essentially an agricultural and military society basis of association was familial rather than urban

As Marx and Weber deny the theoretical significance of the modern city.

no longer express Class relation

no longer express human association

He sees the city as an historically significant condition for the development of particular social forces the division of labour development by breaking down the bonds of traditional morality. He sees the modern city the expression of the current (abnormal) development of these forces pathological disorganization reflecting the anomic state of modern society

SOCIAL THEORY CAPITALISM AND THE URBAN QUESTION


Most areas of sociology today are characterized by a certain degree of theoretical and methodological pluralism and urban sociology is no exception, there are distinctive Marxist urban sociologies, Weberian urban sociologies, each differing according to the questions they pose. Contemporary Marxist urban theories the method of dialectical materialism, the theory of class struggle and capitalist state The central concern of all of these writers was with the social, economic and political implications of the development of capitalism in the west at the time when they were writing

the rapid growth of cities was among the most obvious and potentially
disruptive of all social changes at that time.

In England and Wales, e.g., the urban population, nearly trebled in the second half of the nineteenth century with the result that over 25 million people ( 77% of the total population ) lived in urban areas at the turn of the century.

The growth of urban problems the spread of slums and disease, the
breakdown of law and order, the increase in infant mortality rates and a plethora of other phenomena.

the disintegration of moral cohesion Durkheim


the growth of calculative rationality Weber the destructive forces unrealized by the development of capitalist production - Marx

Durkheim's works on the social effects of the division of labour came to be incorporated into ecological theories of city growth and differentiation in the 1920s. webers writings on political domination and social stratification formed the basis for a conceptualization of the city as a system of resource allocation in the 1960s.

In the 1970s Marxs analysis of social reproduction and class struggle was developed as the foundation for a new political economy of urbanism. the paths followed by their ( weber, Durkheim, and Marx) respective analyses are divergent, yet the end-point is the same.

MARX AND ENGELS: THE TOWN, THE COUNTRY AND THE CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
the discovery of the forces which shaped the development of the social world. - as for ex: Darwins work had led to the discovery of the forces shaping the evolution of the natural. the principle of the dialectic is essentially that any whole is comprised of a unity of contradictory parts, such that it is impossible to understand any one aspect of reality without first relating it to its context. capital and wage labour are tied together in an inescapable yet absently antagonistic relation of mutual interdependence

a method of analysis which is dialectical no single aspect of reality can be analyzed independently of the totality of social relations. the term materialism in this context is generally used in contra-distinction to idealism. material world exists prior to our conceptions or ideas about it. according to Marx, the first real class society was that of the ancient city ( notably Rome). roman society was based on a slave mode of production in which the wealth of the ruling class was founded on agricultural land ownership.

ownership of the means of production became increasing concentrated into great estates. ancient classical history is the history of cities but cities based on landownership and agriculture.
the growth of a merchant class in the established towns during the middle ages had the important effect of extending trading links between different areas, thereby facilitating a division of labour between different towns and stimulating the growth of new industries. the new system of capitalist manufacture facilitated by merchants capital in the medieval towns, thus tools root in the countryside and the great cities of the industrial revolution grew up around it.

the new social relations of capitalism thus became established as the anti-thesis to the old social relations of feudalism.
the contradictions the class antagonism between industrial bourgeoisie and feudal landowners came to be represented directly and vividly in the conflict between town and country. in the feudal period the division between town and country not only reflected the growing division of labour between manufacture and agriculture but was also the phenomenal depression of the antithesis between conflicting modes of production. struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie extends across urbanrural boundaries as workers in town and countryside are increasingly drawn into the capital relation.

the role of the city in capitalist societies - the city express most vividly the evils of capitalism - within the city that the progressive forces of socialism are most fully developed. not the city that is held responsible for the poverty and squalor of the urban proletariat, but the capitalist mode of production. the city is portrayed as the hot house of capitalist contradictions. the housing shortage from which the workers and part of the petty bourgeoisie suffer in our modern big cities is one of the innumerable smaller secondary evils, which result from the present day capitalist mode of production

pattern of urban deprivation in that city the city is not only a reflection of the logic of capitalism but the necessary condition for the transition to socialism. it is in the city that the revolutionary class created by capitalism, the proletariat achieves its fullest classic perfection capitalism are most fully developed in the great cities. common deprivation of the proletariat is most likely to result in the growth of class consciousness and revolutionary organization. the city represents a concentration of the evils of capitalism, it also constitutes the necessary conditions for the development of the workers movement that will overthrow it.

Marx and Engels communist manifesto to the effect that the bourgeoisie has rendered a service to the workers movement by creating large cities which have rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. the city may illustrate the manifestations of essential tendencies within capitalism.

MAX WEBER: THE CITY AND THE GROWTH OF RATIONALITY

webers approach to sociological explanation represents almost a total reversal of Marxs method. Marx emphasized totality, the need to relate everything to everything else, weber argues that only partial and one-sided accounts are ever possible. the basic concept in webers sociology is that of the human subject endowed with free will who, in interacting with others, attempts to realized certain values or objectives. Ideal types: these are mental constructs which serve to specify the theoretically most significant aspects of different classes of social phenomena.

he suggests that cities are defined by the existence of an established market system: economically defined, the city is a settlement the inhabitants of which live primarily off trade and commerce rather than agriculture. the city is a market place he then distinguishes between consumes, producer and commercial cities on the basis of this economic criterion. political dimension, he suggests that partial political autonomy is a key criterion: The city must be considered to be a partially autonomous association, a community with special political and administrative arrangements.

City 1. patrician city, run by an assembly of notables. 2. plebeian city, run by an elected assembly of citizen. the political autonomy of the cities in northern Europe was achieved on the basis of economic rather than military power. taking these two dimensions together, weber then constructs his ideal type city. To constitute a full Urban Community a settlement must display a relative predominance of trade commercial relations with the settlement as a whole displaying the following features. 1. a fortification a tower, wall, gun position it built to defend a place against attack .

2. a market 3. a court of its own and at least partially autonomous law 4. a related form of association 5. at least partial autonomy and autocephaly, thus also an administration by authorities, in the election of whom the burglars participated. the medieval cities in western Europe sustained a fundamental challenge to the feudal system which surrounded them paved the way for the subsequent development of a rational, legal, capitalistic social order. this challenge partly from the erosion of traditional values and the development of new forms of individuals. medieval cities as places of revolution as centres.

FERDINAND TONNIES
GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT

In the late 19th century, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1937) studied how life in the new industrial metropolis differed from life in rural villages. Tonnies (1887) used the German word Gemeinschaft- (meaning roughly community) to refer to a type of social organization by which people are closely tied by kinship and tradition. the Gemeinschaft of the rural village joins people in what amounts to a single primary group. on the contrary, Urbanization fosters Gesellschaft( a German word meaning roughly association), a type of social organization by which people come together only on the basis of individual selfinterests.

In the Gesellschaft way of life, individuals are motivated by their own needs rather than a drive to enhance the well-being of everyone. city dwellers display little sense of community or common identity and look to others mostly as a means of advancing their individual goals. Tonnies saw in Urbanization the erosion of close, enduring social relations in favor of the fleeting and impersonal ties typical of business.

THE URBAN AS A CULTURAL FORM


Tonnies classic study of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft originally published in 1890 and republished with a new introduction in 1931. his purpose to study the sentiments and motives which draw people to each other, keep them together and induce them to joint action. 1. natural will the sensations, feelings and instincts which derive from physiological and psychological process in born and inherited. 2. rational will the deliberate, goal-oriented and calculation product of the use of intellects.

social relationships were governed mainly by natural will Gemeinschaft. social relationships were governed mainly by rational will Gesellschaft. human societies had changed over time from form of association based on Gemeinschaft to those based on Gesellschaft. extension of trade and the development of capitalism. Gesellschaft as bourgeoisie society. the unit of sentiment (in Gemeinschaft), flows from the natural bonds of blood, neighborhood and religious belief is disrupted by the growth of industrial capitalism.

the possibility of a relation in the Gesellschaft assumes no more than a multitude of mere persons who are capable of delivering something and consequently of promising something. Gesellschaft = modern day capitalism as the urban centers grow, so the Gemeinschaft of the rural hinterland is eclipsed and undermined. family life and village communalism are replaced by urban individualism and state power, which itself carries the seeds of a future development of socialist union. Tonnies work as regards the later development of Urban Sociology.

ROBERT PARK : THE URBAN AS AN ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITY


The ecological perspective advanced between the wars by Robert Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. Human ecology was the first comprehensive urban social theory and in the US it has some claim to have been the first comprehensive sociological theory. It developed at a time when America sociology was gaining institutional recognition as a discipline but lacked an indigenous body of theory. human ecology could be seen as a sub-discipline within sociology

Human ecology was concerned with the specific theoretical problem of how human populations adapted to their environment Parks students Human ecology, as Park conceived it, was not a brand of sociology but rather a perspective a method and a body of knowledge essential for the scientific study of social life and hence, like social psychology, a general discipline basic to all the social sciences.

From Emile Durkheim that Park derived his methodological framework and from Charles Darwin that he derived his theory.

Durkheims influence can be found first Parks ontological assumptions regarding human nature and the relationship between the individual and society.
- Ontology a branch of Philosophy that deals with ontological(the nature of existence).

In 1916, Park wrote, the fact seems to be that men are brought into the world with all the passions, instincts and appetites uncontrolled and undisciplined.
Park takes as his starting point the tension between individual freedom and social control.

Like Durkheim, Park explains personal and social disorganization in terms of the erosion of moral constraints, for homo ecologic in an inherently egoistical and unsocial creatures who needs to be kept in check by society for his or her own good and for the good of others Durkheim noted that social disorganization necessary price to be paid for human progress. was the

Too much moral constraints was as bad as too little since it resulted in individual fatal and social stagnation. So, Park found in the break-down of traditional moral controls a cause for both concern and celebration.

He saw that the growth of the cities had undermined the social cohesion once maintained by the family, the church and the village and he pointed to the threat of the mob swept by every new wind of doctrine, subject to constant alarms. He saw the potential for individual freedom and self-expression that the city represented. Disorganization new level of human organization involving new modes of social control Human nature and moral constraints any form of human organization was necessarily an expression of both. the structure of the city = 1) its physical structure and 2) its moral order.

Human society involves a double aspect community and society as the biotic as its cultural level of social life proved highly problematic Ecology is concerned with communities rather than societies. The ecological approach to social relations, therefore, was characterized by an emphasis on the biotic as opposed to the cultural aspect of human interaction. Web of life through which all organisms were related to all others in ties of interdependence or symbiosis. Competition for the basic resources of life thus resulted in the adaptation of different species to each other and to their environment.

The evolution of a relatively balanced ecological system based upon competitive co-operation among differentiated and specialized organisms. His analysis in other words, is both functional and spatial: the main point is that the community so conceived is at once a territorial and a functional unit. His idea of the development of functional differentiation and interdependence in the human community draw heavily on Durkheims analysis of the origins of the Division of Labor. Park suggests that an increase in population size within a given area, together with an extension of transport and communication networks, results in greater specialization of functions.

ERNEST WATSON BURGESS (1886-1966)


24th president of the American Sociological Society University of Chicago Asst.Professor in Sociology Born in Tilburg, Ontario, Canada. Kingfisher College in Oklahoma and received B.A., in 1908. university of Chicago Ph.D., in 1913. He has been called the first young sociologist. His career spanned for five decades (1916-1957). In his 1951 book, American Sociology: The Story of sociology in the US through 1950.

Processes of competition, dominance, succession and invasion that provide the basis for the well-known model

of community expansion proposed by Burgess (1967)

City could be conceptualized ideally as consisting of five zones arranged in a pattern of concentric circles.

The expansion of the city occurred as a result of the invasion by each zone of the next outer zone.

The Central business district tended to expand into the surrounding inner-city, zone of transition which in

turn tended to expand into the zone of working-class


housing around it.

This physical process of succession therefore results in the segregation of different social groups in different parts of the city according to their suitability;

In the expansion of the City, a process of distribution


takes place which sifts and sorts and relocate

individuals and groups by residence and occupation.

Segregation offers the group and thereby the individual who compose the group, a place and a role in the total organization of city life.

This constant process of change and adjustments,


invasion and succession, disorganization and reorganization is especially marked in the inner-city zone

of transition.

Burgess recognized that mobility is therefore most pronounced in the inner-city areas that are in an almost constant state of flux, and he sees this as the explanation

for the social disorganization that tends to characterized


these area.

Mobility, in other words, is a source of change and of personal and social disorganization.

where mobility is greatest, so too is the lack of social cohesion and the demoralization of the human spirit.

These processes are natural and spontaneous response of

human population to changes in the environment in which


they live.

Human beings enjoyed scope for mobility which plants did not
possess. They had a capacity for consciously changing their environment. Mckenzie observes, the Human community different from the plant community in the two characteristics of mobility and

purpose,
that is, in the power to select a habitat and in ability to control or modify the conditions of the habitat. Human beings, in other words, shared a culture.

ROBERT McKENZIE
One of Parks colleagues at the University of Chicago. The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community. It is a method of analysis; plants & animals

Biology Society is made up of individuals spatially separated, territorially distributed and capable of independent locomotion. These spatial relationships of human beings are the products of competition and selection.

competition

selection

spatial relationships of human beings process of change These spatial relationships change the physical basis of social relations is altered producing social and political problems

process of Human = competition & = ecology accommodation Sociologist has failed to recognize the above and it determining the size and ecological organization of the human community. The human community differs fro the plant community in the two dominant characteristics of mobility and purpose. Man is a gregarious animal; he can not live alone; he is relatively week and need not only the company of other human associated both shelter and protection from the elements as well.

Natural ecology

McKenzie (1967): the size of any human community is limited by what it can produce and by the efficiency of its mode of distribution. a primary service community (based on agriculture) cannot grow beyond a population of around 5000. an industrial town can grow to many times that size provided its industries are serviced by an efficient system of market distribution.

Any particular type of community tended to increase


in size until it reached its climax point at which the size of population was almost perfectly adjusted to the capacity of the economic base to support it.

The community would then remain in this state of equilibrium until some new element (e.g., a new

mode

of

communication

or

technological

innovation) distributed the balance.

Competition = would again sift and sort the population functionally and spatially until a new climax stage was reached. Drawing again on Darwins work, the human ecologists referred to this process of structured community change as succession that orderly sequence of changes through which a biotic community passes in the course of its development from a primary and relatively unstable to a relatively permanent or climax stage

so, too in the human community the pattern of land use changes as areas are invaded by new competitors which are better adapted to the changed environmental conditions than the existing users.
such a process of invasion and succession is reflected in the human community in changes in land values with the result that competition for desirable sites forces out the economically weaker existing users (e.g., residents) who make way for economically stronger competitors (e.g., business).

following a successful invasion a new equilibrium is then


established and the successional sequence comes to an end.

The human community differs from the plant community in two dominant characteristics of mobility and purpose, that is, in the power to select a habitat and in the ability to

control or modify the conditions of the habitat.

Human beings, in other words, shared a culture. McKenzie argues that the biotic forces of competition always tend to produce a natural equilibrium at the point where the population is optimally adjusted to its environment. At this climax stage, the community is functionally and spatially differentiated such that different functional groups are located in different areas according to their relative suitability.

As this unstable biotic equilibrium develops, so too do


distinctive cultural forms corresponding to the different areas: The general effect of the continuous processes of invasions and accommodations is to give to the developed community well-defined areas, each having its

own peculiar selective and cultural characteristics.

McKenzies major works: 1. The neighborhood: A study of local life in Columbus, Ohio.(1921) 2. The ecological approach to the study of the human community, chapter-3 (1925) 3. The Metropolitan community, New York, McGraw Hill(1933). 4. The Ecology of institution (1936) 5. On human ecology selection writings (edit) by Amos Henry Hawley, University of Chicago press (1968).

GEORGE SIMMEL (1858-1918)


German sociologist and Philosopher, born in Jewish family in Berlin. He studied history and philosophy at University of Berlin His Ph.D., in1881. He published over 200 articles over a dozen books. He offered a micro-analysis of cities, studying how Urban life shapes individual experience According to Simmel, individuals perceive the city as a crush of people, objects and events. His writings on the sociology of space are a case study of Simmels contributions to social sciences concepts.

Simmels writing on space appears in two articles 1. 1903- The sociology of space 2. on the spatial projections of social forms
In 1908 three essays on (a) The social Boundary, (b) The sociology of the senses, (c) The Strangers The chapters spatial themes including: a) the socially relevant aspect of space b) the effect of spatial conditions upon social interaction and c) upon forms of social, physical and psychological distance he did not present an organized theory of space

Simmel's approach to spatial analysis


* The sociology of space a contribution of his uncompleted project to express the preconditions of human sociation by formed categories of time, mass and number which he called social geometry. The Metropolis and Mental Life: Simmels sociology is highly personal, willfully eclectic and internally incoherent.
concern with the questions of individuality and freedom, modernity and the division of labour, and intellectual rationality and the money economy.

All of these concerns are expressed in his essay on the metropolis and mental life.

sociology, therefore is the science of the forms of human association as abstracted from real-world interaction. interaction among its members

the personal and emotional commitments of members of small groups are replaced by formal means of control ( as agencies of the law).
custom is characteristics of small characteristic of large ones. An increase in the size of a social group groups, law is

the scope of individual freedom & but also for the degree of individual distinctiveness

As a group expands, so it threatens to immerse the individual with the mass: It pulls the individual down to a level with all and sundry

The intellect of the individual is eroded by the emotion of the masses, and social interaction is debased as social life becomes grounded in the lowest common denominations.
The larger the group, the more impersonal group interaction becomes and the less concerned members become with the unique personal qualities of others. people in the metropolis come to emphasize their own subjectivity both to others and to themselves.

In the large group, the individual stands alone isolated yet rejoicing in the privacy which the metropolis affords. The social effects of size thus leads to the conclusion that in a large group: 1. custom is replaced by formal social control mechanisms 2. the individuals commitments become extended across a number of different social circles. 3. the scope of individual freedom is increased 4. the character of social relations is highly impersonal 5. the individuals consciousness of self is ----

development of an advanced division of labor in society 1. the growth of the division of labor in modern societies forms of human associations. 2. the division of labor reinforces the self-consciousness engendered by an increase in size 3. the division of labor therefore encourages egoism and individualism these characteristics of modernity the development of a money economy Money is totally depersonalized for its exchange leaves no trace of the personality of its previous owner.

It reduces all qualitative values to a common quantitative base. It is a source of individual freedom and independence cash economy social expansion individual freedom of choice. the finest expression of the rationality of the modern world. Money is both the source and the expression of metropolitan rationality and intellectualism Metropolises are guided by their heads rather than their hearts by calculation and intellect not affection and emotion. Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of how much?.

Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference becomes the common denominator of all values. his unique emphasis on sociology of number. the metropolis is above all a large human agglomeration city in other than merely geographical or numerical terms.

LOUIS WIRTH (1897-1952)


Major figure in the Chicago school of Urban sociology. Wirth (1938) is best known for blending the ideas of Tonnies, Durkheim, Simmel and Park into a comprehensive theory of urban life. City as a setting with a large dense and socially diverse population these traits result in an impersonal, superficial and transitory way of life. living among millions of others, urbanites come into contact with many more people than rural residents.

when city people notice other at all, they usually know them not in terms of Who they are! but what they do ?- as, for instance the bus driver, florist or grocery store clerk. specialized urban relationships can be pleasant enough for all concerned. limited social involvement coupled with great social diversity makes city dwellers more tolerant than rural villagers.

Rural communities often jealously enforce their narrow traditions but the heterogeneous population of a city rarely shares any single code of moral conducts.

Tonnies and Wirth saw personal ties and traditional morality lost in the anonymous rush of the city. Wirth (1945) explained it, the basic physical and natural forces at work in human society establish the framework and the context within which people act and human ecology is therefore basic and complementary to the analysis of social organization and social psychology. Human ecology is not a substitute for but a supplement to, the other frames of reference and methods of social investigation. Wirths essay can be seen as an extension, modification and development of Simmel's paper on the Metropolis Wirths article on the city from the sociological standpoint

Simmels identifies size as a key explanatory variable and analysis of the division of labour is Replaced by

Wirths paper by an analysis of heterogeneity while the effects of a money economy are dropped from the analysis altogether.

He also drew upon some of the insights developed by the Chicago Human ecologists as regards the effects of density on human organization and the dominance achieved by the city over its hinterland.

Three significant perspective on the city

-Human ecology -Organizational -socio-psychological

City

To develop a theory of the city that could account for the ecological, organizational and socio-psychological characteristics of Urbanism Variations in patterns of human association may be explained as the effects of three factors size, density and heterogeneity.

The task for urban sociology is then to analyze the extent to which each of these three variable gives risk to definite forms of social relationships.

Wirths emphasizes that folkways of life may still be found in cities, for previously dominant patterns of human association are not completely obliterated by urban growth. Urban ways of life are likely to spread beyond the boundaries of the city, given the ecological dominance of the city over its hinterland. Wirths analysis of the social effects of size closely reflects that of Simmel. large size -----------> greater variation the spatial segregation of different groups acc.to ethnicity, race, status, occupation and so on

Simmel increase in size reduces the changes of any two individuals knowing each other personally, segmentalism in social relationships secondary rather than primary contacts His earlier study of a Jewish Ghetto in Chicago for ex., he concluded that it formed a cultural community with a communal way of life. The individual gains a certain degree of emancipation or freedom from the personal and emotional controls of intimate groups.

The effects of density on social relationships are a function of the growth of differentiation. Density thus reinforces the effect of numbers in diversifying men and their activities and in increasing the complexity of the social structure.

People relate to each other on the basis of their specific roles rather than their personal qualities. the analysis of social heterogeneity is concluded largely in terms of Simmels

ROBERT REDFIELD
born 4th December 1897, died on 16th October 1958. U.S. pioneer of Urban sociology and anthropology

From his studies of Mexican communities Redfield developed a theory (1956) of a folk-urban continuum to account for the difference between folk society and urban society.
A folk society was small in size, isolated, homogeneous, preliterate with a social and cultural life linked to kinship and sacred beliefs.

Urban society had opposite of all these features He believed that any community had a place on this continuum from folk to urban.

this scale implied that simpler or folk forms of society would evolve to complex social forms with time. Anthropologists new consider the way folk and urban societies are part of a larger social, political and economic environment, rather than considered as separate poles on a continuum. Robert Redfield was a student of Robert Park. Redfield (1941) studied four communities in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, ranging from the small, homogeneous and very isolated settlement at Tusik to the largest town in the region, Merida.

on the basis of this study, he argued that the less isolated and more heterogeneous the settlement, the more it became characterized by cultural disorganization, secularization and the growth of individualism.
Redfield (1947), proceeded to develop an ideal type of the folk society which complemented wirths analysis by identifying the characteristics of communities at the other end of the rural-urban continuum.

Folk societies have certain features in common which enable us to think of them as a type a type which contrasts with the society of the modern city.

Society

folk society > small, isolated, illiterate and homogeneous with a strong sense of group solidarity Modern city -> vast, complicated and rapidly changing world

The ideal type folk society small, isolated, non-literate, intimate, immobile, homogeneous and cohesive. a rudimentary division of labor based mainly on a rigid differentiation of sex roles; the means of production were stared; economic activity was contained within the community

culture strongly traditional and uncritical it was grounded in social bonds based upon kinship and religion. its internal coherence derived from custom rather than formal law.

patterns of interaction were based on ascribed status and social relationships were personal and diffuse. there is no place for the motive of commercial gain.
the work of wirth and Redfield exhibits two main themes. - the first is that patterns of human relationships can be conceptualized in terms of a pair of logically opposite ideal types.

Redfields work : variations in patterns of human relationships between different communities are to be explained in terms of differences in their size and density their degree of internal homogeneity and the extent of their isolation from other centres of population.
the value judgment that folk societies are good and urban societies bad. folk societies are integrated while urban societies are the great disorganizing force.

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