Stephen K. Sanderson - Modern Societies

Modern Societies

A Comparative Perspective

Stephen K. Sanderson

First published 2015 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sanderson, Stephen K.

Modern societies : a comparative perspective / Stephen K. Sanderson.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61205-667-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Organizational sociology. 2. Sociology. I. Title.

HM786.S26 2014

302.35dc23

2013051045

ISBN 13 : 978-1-61205-667-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13 : 978-1-61205-668-5 (pbk)

There are approximately two hundred societies in the world today. Modern Societies: A Comparative Perspective explores the nature of many of these societies by comparing and contrasting their basic institutions and patterns of social organization. The books distinctiveness lies in its comparative and global perspective. It allows students to situate the United States in global contextto see how their society is both similar to and different from other societies. Modern Societies mixes description with theory, and rather than discussing theory at the beginning, it compares and contrasts competing theories in individual chapters. This is designed to give instructors maximum flexibility in using the book.

Modern Societies is suitable for courses in introductory sociology, social institutions, and comparative sociology. Major topics include

How the rich democracies became both rich and democratic

Governments and welfare states

The growth of democracy in the twentieth century

The collapse of Communism and the transition to postsocialist societies

The circumstances of less-developed countries, with attention to those that are developing rapidly as well as those that continue to lag far behind the rich countries

Racial and ethnic divisions and conflicts worldwide

The gender revolution of the past fifty years and contemporary patterns of gender inequality throughout the world

Major shifts in family patterns and the transition to below-replacement fertility

The global spread and expansion of mass education and educational credentialism

Worldwide patterns of religious belief and practice

The controversy over the secularization thesis

Economic, political, and cultural globalization

The nature of social and economic progress over the past two centuries

Nine predictions concerning the short-term and long-term future of the world

The book provides detailed and fully up-to-date statistical data in forty-five tables. Students and instructors will find data from countries throughout the world on such topics as

Economic development

Government expansion

Democracy

Racial segregation

Gender empowerment

Fertility levels

Single-parent households

Educational enrollments

Religiosity

Religious pluralism and religious freedom

Happiness

As a pedagogical aid, discussion questions for each chapter are posted on the books companion webpage at www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=393431.

I am grateful to Rosemary Hopcroft and Rae Lesser Blumberg for their critical comments on drafts of several chapters. They were especially helpful in suggesting important revisions to the chapter on gender.

As everyone knows, humans did not always live in the kinds of societies most people live in today. For the vast majority of human history and prehistory, humans survived entirely by hunting and gathering. Hunter-gatherer societies were small (usually comprising no more than a few dozen members), had a very simple division of labor (men did most of the hunting and women most of the gathering), and limited technology (e.g., spears, bows and arrows, traps). People moved around a lot, sometimes every few days or weeks, sometimes only three or four times a year. This depended to a large extent on how abundant resources were in a given place and on such things as seasonal changes.

Then about 10,000 years ago, the earliest forms of agriculture began to emerge throughout much of the world. People began to settle down and live in villages, which were permanent or semipermanent. These earliest agricultural societies are best called horticultural societies, which are societies that depend on the gardening of relatively small plots of land, using simple tools such as digging sticks or hoes. In horticultural societies women do most of the cultivating, although men usually prepare the land so that crops can be planted. The simplest horticultural societies usually possess a lot of land, so they tend to cultivate a garden for only a few years and then abandon it, moving their garden somewhere else. But as populations grew over thousands of years, land became increasingly scarce and people could not be so casual about cultivation. They had to cultivate any given plot of land for a longer time and move their gardens less often.

Sometime after 5,000 years ago, the plow was invented, allowing people to farm the land more intensively and to cultivate larger plots. More food could be grown to feed more people, which was essential because there were many more people living on the planet. We call societies that use the plow agrarian societies and the people who do the plowing peasants. In these societies most peasants live at a subsistence level, although there are often peasants who may be fairly well off, that is, rich peasants. Peasants face a major problem with not only getting enough food to eat for themselves but satisfying the demands made on them by landlords. Where there are agrarian societies, there are always peasants, and there are always landlords. If peasants are lucky, they may own their own land, but if they are not so fortunate, the land is owned by a landlord, and they are considered mere renters or tenants. In any case, landlords exert a lot of control over what peasants can do. Even if landlords dont own the land, they control it, and they can use this control to exact concessions. Peasants usually must produce enough to turn over part of their product to the landlord, and they often have to provide labor services by working on the landlords own land part of the time. Landlords get rich, and peasants stay poorat least, this is what happens most of the time.

In some areas of the world there is not enough rainfall to sustain agriculture of any type, and peoples living in these dry regions have taken to depending only (or at least primarily) on stock raising, that is, animal herding or pastoralism. Animals raised for food, such as sheep, goats, or cattle, cannot be eaten very often because they are capital investments. People therefore live principally on animal products, especially milk and its processed forms, such as cheese. They may also bleed their animals periodically and drink the blood. When animals die a natural death, they will be eaten, and occasionally a healthy animal will be sacrificed.