Mead and Burawoy against Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons: More than a History of Chicago and Harvard Sociology

Mark Gould, Haverford College

George Herbert Mead’s social behaviorism is taken as paradigmatic in my characterization of “Chicago Sociology.” I contrast it with a “Harvard Sociology” drawn in the image of Weber and Durkheim, mediated through Parsons. I establish that the my argument is something other than an intellectual history, that, instead, it demonstrates that “Harvard sociology” is a superior foundation for sociology’s development. I illustrate my argument by focusing on Michael Burawoy’s early work, Manufacturing Consent, which I take to be an anti-Weber, anti-Parsons tract. Burawoy fails to provide an adequate grounding for his crucial insight, his understanding of Marx’s distinction between labor-power, the capacity to work, and labor, work. In consequence, his analysis of why workers work hard, focusing on making-out, the game that the workers he studied play, a type of worker conduct, is inadequate. While Burawoy wrote about Analytical Marxism, the folding of Marxian theory into neoclassical, Arrow-Debreu, general equilibrium theory, he never explains its fundamental error, that the distinction between labor power and labor is meaningless in this perfect-information, neoclassical model. Once we realize that, if we are to analyze worker motivation meaningfully, we must construct an imperfect-information model from within what Parsons called “voluntarist theory,” we can demonstrate that such a model must include social norms, social values, and cultural norms. Recognizing this, I characterize the institutional structure of the labor process as a social system, arguing that a satisfactory analysis of why workers “consent” to their exploitation must center on whether they view the boss’s orders as valid: justified as the due process outcome of legitimate procedures, where the orders themselves are legitimate, and where the relationships are commonsensical, a part of a lifeworld where workers cannot imagine an alternative economic structure. This entails a reconstruction of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, where valid norms serve capitalist interests.

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 Presented in Session 83. Theoretical Approaches to Structural and Infrastructural Transformation