The Social Functions of Voluntary Associations in a Nineteenth-Century American Town

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don H. Doyle

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski

This chapter examines music in the British workplace. It considers whether it is appropriate to see the history of music in the workplace as involving a journey from the organic singing voice (both literal and metaphorical) of workers to broadcast music appropriated by the powerful to become a technique of social control. The chapter charts four key stages in the social history of music in British workplaces. First, it highlights the existence of widespread cultures of singing at work prior to industrialization, and outlines the important meanings these cultures had for workers. Next, it outlines the silencing of the singing voice within the workplace further to industrialization—either from direct employer bans on singing, or from the roar of the industrial noise. The third key stage involves the carefully controlled employer- and state-led reintroduction of music in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century—through the centralized relaying of specific forms of music via broadcast systems in workplaces. The chapter ends with an examination of contemporary musicking in relation to (often worker-led) radio music played in workplaces.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-152
Author(s):  
Malarsih Malarsih ◽  
Usrek Tani Utina ◽  
Moh Hasan Bisri

This study aims at analyzing the non-aesthetic aspect of Mangkunagaran-style dance from the perspective of its social context. The method employed in the study is interpretative-descriptive qualitative. The approach used social culture to analyze the perspectives. The research was conducted in Pura Mangkunagaran, with the focus of research lies on the non-aesthetic aspect of Mangkunagaran-style dance taken from the perspective of its social context. Techniques for collecting data was an observation, interview, and documentation study. The data validity mainly used data triangulation. Results show that from the perspective of social context, the Mangkunagaran-style dance is divided into four major social functions, i.e., the social order for integration, the function of expression, the function of entertainment, and the function of Psychiatric, Aesthetic, and Economic. These for main social functions are taken part in the existence of Mangkunagaran-style dance in Pura Mangkunagaran and wider communities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4-1) ◽  
pp. 168-179
Author(s):  
Elena Erokhina ◽  

The article is devoted to the analysis of imagination as a philosophical and sociological concept that played a significant role in the development of social theory in the middle of the 20th century. Exploring the premises of the contradictory relationship between science and society, it is easy to find a connection between the development of science and social change. Currently, it is generally accepted that scientific, including social theories, through the transfer of ideas, transform the social order and, on the contrary, social practices transform knowledge about the world. The article proves that imagination plays a key role in this process. An excursion into the theory of ideas reveals the connection between imagination and irrational and experiential knowledge. The author of the article refers to the works of P. Berger and T. Luckmann, C. Castoriadis and C. Taylor, who showed a direct connection between theoretical ideas and the world of "social imaginary", collective imaginary and social changes. For the first time in the history of mankind, thanks to imagination, society does not see the social order as something immutable. Methodological cases are presented that illustrate the specific role of the concept of imagination as a source of the formation of new research strategies that allow for a new look at the problem of nationalism (social constructivism) and the study of public expectations from the implementation of technological innovations (STS). For decades, Benedict Anderson's work “Imagined Communities” predetermined the interest of researchers of nationalism in social imagination and the collective ideas based on it about the national identity of modern societies, their history and geography. The research of Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim has formed a new track for the study of science as a collective product of public expectations of an imaginary social order, embodied in technological projects. The conclusion is made about the contradictory nature of social expectations based on collective imagination: on the one hand, they strengthen the authority of science in society, on the other hand, they provoke the growth of negative expectations from the introduction of scientific discoveries. The article substantiates the opinion that imagination is an effective tool for assessing the risks of introducing innovations.


Author(s):  
Joanna Innes

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe.


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