Bernard S Phillips - Bureaucratic Culture and Escalating World Problems

BUREAUCRATIC CULTURE AND ESCALATING WORLD PROBLEMS

A Series from Paradigm Publishers

Edited by Bernard Phillips and J. David Knottnerus

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Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st-century Sociology
By Keith Kerr (2008)

Struggles before Brown : Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today
By Jean Van Delinder (2008)

The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy
By Kenneth A. Gould, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg (2008)

Bureaucratic Culture and Escalating World Problems: Advancing the Sociological Imagination
Edited by J. David Knottnerus and Bernard Phillips (2009)

Ritual as a Missing Link within Sociology: Structural Ritualization Theory and Research
By J. David Knottnerus (2009)

ADVANCING THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

edited by J. David Knottnerus and Bernard Phillips

First published 2009 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bureaucratic culture and escalating world problems: advancing the sociological imagination / edited by J. David Knottnerus and Bernard Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59451-653-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Bureaucracy. 2. Organizational sociology. I. Knottnerus, J. David. II. Phillips, Bernard S.
HM806.B89 2009
302.3'5--dc22

2008044769

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-653-5 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-654-2 (pbk)

Bureaucratic Culture and Escalating World Problems makes its appearance on the 50th anniversary of the publication of C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination (1959), voted by the members of the International Sociological Association as the second most influential book for sociologists that was published throughout the entire 20th century (with first honors going to Weber's Economy and Society ). Where are we today with respect to the problems in society that Mills wrote about in 1959? And where has the discipline of sociology come after all of these years? Mills is being honored this year by the publication of a special issue of Teaching Sociology celebrating this anniversary by examining the book's significance, one of a great many honors that his work has achieved over the years. Yet have we sociologists succeeded in carrying forward his insights into the alienation that pervades contemporary society with our sense of feeling "trapped" by threatening forces that we neither understand nor can control? Have we carried forward his insights into our bureaucratic society with its threats to the Enlightenment dream of freedom and reason? Have Mills's insights in his The Causes of World War III been carried forward? And have we carried his insights into our approach to the current wide range of threatening yet unsolved problems?

In his penultimate chapter, "On Reason and Freedom," Mills took a hard look at his colleagues in the social sciences, ending with these words:

I do not know the answer to the question of political irresponsibility in our time or to the cultural and political question of The Cheerful Robot [alienated man]. But is it not clear that no answers will be found unless these problems are at least confronted? Is it not obvious, that the ones to confront them above all others, are the social scientists of the rich societies? That many of them do not now do so is surely the greatest human default being committed by privileged men in our times. (1959: 176)

It was bureaucratic social scientists along with their "bureaucratic social science" whom Mills was castigating for their "political irresponsibility" in the face of the mammoth problems of the day, including a Cold War that might morph into a hot war and take civilization along with it. Have we contemporary social scientists succeeded in learning the lesson that Mills was trying to teach, the lesson of taking on our shoulders the incredible responsibility of confronting our own mammoth problems, which appear to us to be even more threatening than the Cold War? Or have we, insteadwhile continuing to heap praise on Millsproceeded even further in what Mills called "the greatest human default being committed by privileged men in our times"? In Mills's time there were relatively few specialized areas of sociology with limited communication among them; in our own day we have no less than forty-sixand countingsections of the American Sociological Association but still with limited communication among them. Not only does bureaucratic social science continue to live in our own day, but it has continued to prosper. We give Mills lip service, but we simultaneously continue to trash his idealsthey are also the ideals of contemporary societyof reason and freedom.

The junior editor of this volume was a student of Mills at Columbia University, and both of us editors were deeply influenced by him. Following his optimism about sociology's possibilities, we are proud of not having given in to pessimism at this time in history despite the feelings of gloom and doom that pervade the social sciences. We look back at Mills not to worship him but rather to build on his understanding, his commitment, and his achievements. The bureaucratic social science that he fought against emerged to a substantial extent as a result of the impact of four volumes based on social research on the armed forces during World War II: The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath, Experiments in Mass Communication, and Measurement and Prediction. Those bookscoupled with ideas of philosophers who saw physical-science procedures as the epitome of the scientific methodhave continued to influence social scientists to focus on mathematics and quantitative techniques to the exclusion of the broad approach that Mills championed. Yet the poverty of these narrow sociological and philosophical approaches is becoming ever more apparent. Further, escalating problems are becoming ever more obvious in contemporary societies.