Michael Garfield Smith - Corporations and Society: The Social Anthropology of Collective Action

The republication of his essays in a single volume always requires some justification by the author, whether or not they are supplemented, as these are, by unpublished pieces. My primary justification for the present volume is that it brings together a number of scattered essays which separately illustrate, develop and apply a common conceptual framework for the study of social life. I hope that by publishing them together I may demonstrate the range, sensitivity and analytic power of that framework in ways that the separate essays never could. Moreover, as this conceptual framework is ideologically neutral, free of questionable assumptions about the nature of society and social relations, and has an obvious, immediate applicability to all concrete forms of social organization, I hope that it may prove of value for comparative and intensive studies of empirical situations and processes in human societies.

It seems to me that social anthropology and sociology currently need some new conceptual framework free of unverifiable postulates on which to base comparative or monographic studies of societies and their major components. For several generations social scientists have sought such a framework in the idea of society as a functional system having such institutionally or analytically differentiated sections as government, economy, religion or education as subsystems, each operationally and normatively integrated in itself and with the others. At the very least, then, our traditional ideas of societies as normatively and functionally integrated systems of action need to be supplemented and perhaps replaced by concepts that suspend such assumptions and allow us to study social units, their components and relations, directly as concrete empirical structures. The various shortcomings of our traditional theory and models indicate that we should neither conceive societies as systems, nor postulate their functional integration, structural consistency, normative consensus, equilibrium, closure or homogeneity, as general features. Such postulates constrain us to document the ways in which empirical collectivities illustrate the theory, often by casuistry or data manipulation. For an objective, analytic framework, free of such presuppositions, the notion of corporations that informs these essays may thus provide social science with a basis superior to the familiar system-model. At least this alternative seems worthy of exposition and trial.

Assembled here for joint publication are nine essays written over a period of eighteen years that illustrate the slow and hesitant development of the idea that, as the major perduring frameworks of social action, and the most inclusive regulative units of social organization, corporations constitute and demarcate societies by discontinuities in their composition and articulation. It will be obvious from a cursory reading of these essays that the analytic and processual implications of the various kinds of corporations, their bases, requisites, properties and entailments, are only stated and illustrated but not systematically developed here. It should be equally obvious that this conceptual framework, however appropriate for macro-sociological analysis and comparison, neither pretends to treat issues of genuine significance to social science for which the micro-sociological models of role, dyads, interaction and network are particularly apt, nor does it dispense with the need for analysis of those cognitive structures of assumption, classification and symbolism that so pervasively and variably inform the routine activities of individuals and social aggregates. Indeed, the macro-sociological framework of corporation theory assumes and requires these and other types of analysis as essential complements in any comprehensive study of human situations or societies. For these reasons, no claim is made, however obliquely, that these essays expound a total theory of social structures and processes, though I do hope that they may provide a general framework for such theories, and that they do illustrate scope and utility application to such topics as law, pluralism, race relations, stratification, political organization and change, all patent features of macro-structure in societies.

To indicate the range of materials to which we can usefully apply the ideas of corporation theory, I have included three unpublished essays: Race and Stratification in the Caribbean, A Structural Approach to the Study of Political Change, and The Comparative Study of Complex Societies. In different ways, these essays illustrate the capacity of corporation theory to order and integrate diverse bodies of synchronic and diachronic data within a single analytic framework. It may also be worth mention that the approach outlined in the essay on political change will be tested and developed or modified as appropriate, in a series of detailed monographs on the political histories of Daura, Katsina, Maradi, Kano and Sokoto, five Muslim states of the Central Sudan, which is now under way.

Thus one general justification for re-issuing the earlier essays with these three unpublished ones is that together they illustrate the development, analytic power and applicability of the conceptions of corporations that inform them all. Since corporations provide the major institutional frameworks and agencies of collective regulation, it is neither surprising that their theoretical significance was initially grasped by scholars trained or interested in the law, such as H.S. Maine, Otto von Gierke, J.P. Davis and Max Weber, nor that several essays in this volume should discuss social phenomena of a political kind. However, other papers on kinship, stratification, pluralism, race relations and social evolution demonstrate that law and political organization do not exhaust the relevance of corporations for the study of social organization. Moreover, as indicated above, studies of collective behaviour and micro-sociological analyses of roles, networks, interpersonal relations and interaction are readily assimilated within corporate frameworks, since these furnish the contexts that determine their form, content, distribution, implications and meaning. While attempts to crystallize such a synthesis must await the future, their roots and directions are clearly implicit in the papers presented below.