A detailed, in-depth summary of chapter 8 of the book Politics by Andrew Heywood. The summary includes all terms and definitions and is sufficient scope for an exam. This book is often used for first-year political science courses.
CHAPTER 8 – POLITICIS, SOCIETY, AND IDENTITY
- Politics is a social activity
- Declining significance of social class
Politics and society
- What do we mean by society? Collection of people who occupy the same territorial
area
o Regular pattern of social interaction, sense of connectedness, mutual
awareness
- Status → person’s position within a hierarchical order
- Society can shape politics in few ways
o The distribution of wealth and other resources in society conditions the
nature of state power
o Social divisions and conflicts help to bring about political change in the form
of legitimation crises
o Society influences public opinion and the political culture
o The social structure shapes political behaviour, who votes, how they vote,
who join parties
- Trying to define the content of human nature
o Marxists → irreconcilable conflict
o Liberals → harmony exists amongst competing interests and groups
- Modern society appears to be characterized by hollowing out of social
connectedness → from thick connectedness (close social bonds) to thin (more fluid
and individual)
From industrialisation to post industrialism
- Dramatic increase in geographical mobility
- German sociologist Tonnies → Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
o Gemeinschaft → community, social ties typically found in traditional societies
and characterized by natural affection and mutual respect
o Gesellschaft → association, the loose, artificial and contractual bonds
typically found in urban and industrial societies
- Marxist → class is the most fundamental, social division
- Class consciousness → a Marxist term denoting a subjective awareness of a class’s
objective situation and interests, the opposite of false consciousness
Decline of class politics
- Marxist model – discredited by the failure of Marx’s predictions to materialize
- Societies are increasingly complex
- Post-industrial society → society based on service industries, rather than on
manufacturing industries, and accompanied by a significant in the white-collar
workforce
, - Atomism → the tendency for society to be made up of a collection of self-interested
and largely self-suffici9ent individuals, operating as separate atoms
- Social class → group of people who share a similar social and economic position
- Two-thirds and one-third moment
o Two-thirds are relatively prosperous – social levelling and high education
o Underclass – suffers less from poverty but more from social exclusion, a
poorly defined and politically controversial term that refers, to people who
suffer from multiple deprivation
- Fordism, post-Fordism → large-scale mass-production methods pioneered by Henry
Ford in Detroit UDS
New technology and the information society
- Increased importance placed on knowledge and information and intellectual capital
- Birth of the information age
- Internet → a global network of networks that connects computers around the world,
virtual space in which users can access and disseminate online information
- Connectivity → a computer buzzword that refers to the links between one device
and others, affecting the speed, ease and extent of information exchanges
- Knowledge economy → an economy in which knowledge is the key source of
competitiveness and productivity, especially through the application of information
and communications technology
- John Kenneth Galbraith
o Canadian economists and social theorist
o One of the most prominent social commentators
- Network → a means of coordination social life through loose and informal
relationships between people or organizations, usually for the purpose of knowledge
dissemination or exchange
- Information society → society in which the creation, distribution and manipulation of
information are core economic and cultural activities, underpinned by the wider use
of computerized processes and the internet
o Internet does not discriminate between good and bad ones
- Cult of information → people are no longer able to distinguish between information
and knowledge
No such thing as society?
- Thinning of social connectedness – the rise of individualism
o Before people were seen as members of social groups
- Rise of individualism is widely seen as a consequence of the establishment of
industrial capitalism – broader range of choices and social possibilities
- Economic individualism → the belief that individuals are entitled to autonomy in
matters of economic decision-making, linked to property rights
- Individualism has been strengthened by the growth in consumer society and the shift
in favour of neoliberal economics
o Emphasis on production tends to foster social solidarity
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