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INTRODUCTION
Whenever you want
to accomplish task neatly, aesthetically and usefully, it
depends a great deal on the tools you are able to choose
and your knowing how to use them.
Michaelangelo was 23 years old when he completed his
Pieta. He chose for it best piece of marble, a piece
without a vein. He made his tools according to the
perception he had in his mind and brought it to his
hands, sometimes gently, sometimes with force. The human
being has the capacity to collect, compare and apply
answers to the burning questions which face us.
In this chapter we want to fashion a tool by which you
can gain an insight either in an institution, the
neighbourhood, or environment or the society at a wider
base. This tool is called a social analysis. The analysis
contains the components of the society we live in, deals
with, and is related to the gathering of information
about its vitality, its freshness, its expansion, its
expansion, its planning force for the future, its
production system, its protection system, its education
system, its social and religious make up, its
communication system, and its recreational system.
The above shows already how complex our society has
become, but still at the base of it all we find an age
old unit -- the family, the neighbourhood, the village,
the city, the state, the country. Within this context we
find the institutions, and the groups and all that
bustles with life and makes it vibrate. Our time is the
most historically minded of all ages, if we understand
history as the struggle of the human being, by the
esercise of his/her reason, to understand his/her
environment and to act on it. In this process, human
beings have become the builders of society. This
conscious person understands how societies develop and
thereby givesdue importance to the masses and to various
factors such as economics, politics, and ideology.
Socities undergo a social evolution, due to self
regulating systems of communication and control. To
analyse a society you have to become aware of the
regulating and controlling systems, you have to put your
hand on the pulse, and come know where the systems are
hidden which makes the society vibrate or die, act in a
corrupt, or oppressive way. In the following pages you
will find information to guide you in the way you can
perform soical analysis.SECTION I
APPROACHES TO
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
One approach can
be academic and the other, action oriented.
The academic approach tends to study a particular social
situation in a detached, fairly abstract manner,
dissecting its elements mainly for the purpose of
knowledge, yet at the same time being committed to social
change. Commitment to change becomes then the motivating
force for accurate, society study. In the action oriented
approach the role of the scholars and intellectuals is an
important one, because their output will form the basis
of collective action for change.
WHAT IS SOCIAL
ANALYSIS ?
Social analysis is
a process through which one abtains an ever more complete
picture of a social situation by exploring its historical
and structural relationships. Social analysis permits us
to understand the reality of which we are a part and
which we want to transform. It explores social reality in
a variety of dimensions. Sometimes it focuses and
isolated issues, such as unemployment, inflation, and
hunger. At other times, it focuses on the politicies that
address those issues. At another time it is used to help
you understand our economic, political, social and
cultural institutions. Also you can go with it beyond
issues, policies and structures and use it in terms of
time, to get a historical analysis. This studies changes
in social systems through time. If you use in terms of
space it will provide you a structural analysis. This
gives you a cross section of a system’s framework at
a given moment of time. Then you can distinguish the
objective dimensions of reality which includes the
various organisations, behaviour patterns and
institutions that take on external structural
expressions, and the subjective dimensions which includes
consciousness, ideologies and values. These elements have
to be analysed in order to understand the assumptions
operative in any given social situation.
DIFFICULTIES OF
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
The factors and
circumstances which complicate the process of social
analysis are :
The social system in which we live dicatates the values
which guide our lives and determines our understanding or
may block our grasp ot it. If one lives in a socialist
country or in a tribal society one develops attitudes,
outlooks on life, nature etc. which differ from those
found in a capitalist society. Our work or occupation,
deeply influences our way of thinking. An engineer
working in an atomic station, a college lecturer, a
labourer, a fisherman, a nurse, a doctor, a social
worker, a salesman, will all have different ways of
looking at events, persons, and things.
The class and the caste we belong to colours our
perception of the social reality around us. Our religion
deeply influences our understanding of the world, our
code of ethics. A Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew and
a Christan will have different outlooks on society and
nature, and man’s obligation towards God and
neighbour. Influenced by our religion, perhaps, we may
have the following scheme deeply ingrained in our mind :
Good individual ...... good families....... good
communities....... good villages....... good towns......
good nations. According to this scheme, if we want to
have a ‘good’ society we think that it is
enough to have good individuals. A good society,
according to this view, starts with good individuals.
Behind this conception there is a basic assumption;
society is good but does not work ‘because
individuals are bad, dishonest’. What matters is a
conversion of heart. Let each one be a good and honest
person, and society will be healthy. But then we forget
that through the socialising process a person, right from
his or her childhood is very much a social product. It is
not so much the individual who makes a society
"good" or "bad". The starting point
is as much society as the individual. There is a
dialectic relationship between society and the individual
:
Man .......
Shapes......... Society........ Shapes ......... Man
THREE BASIC
PRINCIPLES OF SOCAIL ANALYSIS
The first
principle is to approach social reality as a
totality, be it the vilalge, the region, the nation or
even bigger geographical entities. No one social element
can be explained by itself. It has always to be situated
within the whole. For instance, a phenomenon like
delinquency in a city should be placed in the total
social phenomenon of the city life : migration, type of
urbanisation, unemployment, and so forth.
These in turn are the result of certain power structures
of class organisation of society. It is not enough,
therefore, to know how many delinquents are in the city,
their age, and type of delinquency. This is only a
description of the phenomenon which gives very little
information about the causes of delinquency. Nor is it
encough to look at delinquency as a mere ethical problem.
We have to go the root cause of the phenonmenon. Only a
deeper analysis will reveal them.
The second principle is the need to discover what
is not directly visible in society. For example, in
tribal societies one does not see the clan, but every one
knows that it existis. It is a social structure which
influences social behaviour very strongly through rules,
organisations, system of authority, etc. Also invisible
are the links between various social phenomena. For
instance, the members of a religious society or of a
voluntry organisation may be working in a school thinking
that they are doing a very good job, useful to thier
neighbour and society. They train young people well, have
good relations with the parents, get good results in the
examinations. The school has a very good reputation and
attracts ‘very respectable people’, in fact the
entire ‘elite’ in the region. The social
function of such elite schools in society is most of the
time ignored. The truth of the matter is that a social
elite needs such institutions to maintain itself in
power, and education is one of the tools which helps them
to do so. Thus the school becomes an instrument which
reinforces the structures and the functioning of society
in favour of the elite even though the institution may
coopt some elements from the poorer starata.
The third principe is that social facts do not
speak by themselves: they have to be organised. It means
that one must have the tools to put them together in a
meaningful manner. Just as a mere accumulation of facts
may be more confusing than helpful to understand society,
one must have a framework within which these facts are
organised.
METHODS OF
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
A
Basic Framework
For the sake
of analysis one generally distinguishes four basic
strutures, also called sysems: Economic, Social,
Political, to which must be added the Meaning system in
which ideology is a very important component.
Economic
System
The first requisite for any social group is to exist,
that is, to live. For this, any human group needs a
material basis: to eat, to drink, to clothe themselves,
to have shelter, etc. Any society must produce those good
which answers those needs. I thas to be organised to this
effect. In other words it has to produce food and all
other necessities of life. This takes place within the
economic system. Three main elements have to be taken
into consideration:
- The means of
production like the land, the factories, the
capital.
- The organisation of
labour.
- The distribution of
the social product.
In order to study the
economic system, you can do it in an easy way, by asking
the following questions:
- Who owns the means of
production (land,factories, capital)?
- What is being
produced?
- What technology is
used?
- What kind of
relationship bind the producers? How are the
goods produced, distributed?
- Who consumes the
things produced?
- Where are the
consumers located?
- Where are the
producers?
To this you can add any
question need like :
- Where does the
economic activity take place(does economic
initiative come from outside or from within) ?
- Is the economy
dualistic (has it a dominant and a dependent
sector) ?
- How are they
inter-related ?
- What is the long-term
effect on the environment of the inter relations.
Social
system
When we study social systems we try to find out which
kind of social groupings exist. For example, in a
primitive society, based on clans, the divisions would be
only among clans (relationship between several clans).
In a feudal society, the main division would be between
landlord and peasants, the two main classes of fuedal
society. In that case, the division is based on ownership
of the meansof production (land) by the first class and
on bonded labour for the peasants. In between there
exists someother social groups like the artisans in
cities, bureaucrats in the state administrations, clergy,
etc.
In a capital society, the two major groups are no longer
as in feutdal society, the aristocracy (landlords) and
the peasants, but the capital owners and the workers
(industrial or agriculture). Other groups may continue
toexist according to the type of development of the
capitalist system. Some distinctions within the major
groups alsoexist as the result of new technological
developments in the cpitalist economy like white collar
jobs, technicians, etc.
While studying the social structure we may ask a few
questions :
How do gfroups relate in the process of production?
(e.g. How do workers in the factory relate to
industrialists)?
How do those who till the land relate to the landlords?
What kind of status hierarchy is emerging in Society and
what is its basis?
Political
System
Each human group needs some type of collective
organisation, in which the decision making power may be
widely distributed among the members, or highly
concentrated in the hands of a few. The baisc political
fieldin a capitalist society can be divided into the
following sections: political parties, organisations of
the State and within the State we may distringuish the
administration (bureaucracy), justice, the
repressive/controlling forces (police, army etc.) While
studying the political system,one may ask the following
questions :
Who has power?
What are the instruments for the exercise of popwer?
In favour of whom or of which group is power generally
exercised?
Meaning
System
Every human group always elaborates a representationof
its own reality. This is precisely the characteristic of
a human group; it is what distinguishes it from an animal
group. This is why human beings are able to communicate;
they build an image of reality (natural or social) and
they express it in words, gestures, sounds. When a system
of representation is built we call it a specific culture,
a pjhiolosophy, or even a religion when this is built in
reference to the belief in supernatural realities and
entities.
As part of the meaning system, ideology plays a very
important role. Ideology in this context consists in the
main explanation and justification given for the
economic, social and poliical organisation of a given
society. While studying the meaning system, we try to
find out the dreams, myths and symbols of that particular
society.
We try to answer some of the following questions :
What is the symbolic manner in which people explain their
world and their situation in the world in relaion to
supernatural reality?
What are the beliefs?
What are the ethics?
What is the religious organisation?
How is it structured? When are the functional positions?
More specifically in relation to ideology we ask the
following question :
What are the latent or unexpressed explanations and
justifications for the existance of the economic, social
and political order?
What are the dominant groups (elite or rural classes)
saying about the existing order ?
What do the dominant groups (workers, the poor etc.) say
about their future?
How is the ‘New Society’ envisaged?
With the above basic framework, see Appendices 1 and 2
for some methods of social analysis.
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