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0:25
we've been in a way talking about social order how it is that we don't live in chaos we live in massively man chaotic life from the way we are able to walk down the street with each other past crowds of people here in Manhattan not run into one another not even glance too long with rare exceptions and have conversations even though that I hope you've got some sense of the fact that that's trickier than it then it might presume and then the fact that we are able to come together in a
1:05
room like this through this massive organization that we're participating in New York University and if you think of it it's just extraordinary what has happened which is that you all have a need or a desire or a requirement or whatever it is that got you into this room to fulfill your requirements or your interests and the University has worked out a system whereby all the people who need to be are here together in this room at this time no one else is trying to get into this room most of you
1:44
have have it in your in your mind and hopefully in your body that you're going to be here for an hour and hour and fifteen minutes you're here for the sit and I'm here for the stand and we're going to make this thing go and that's really extraordinary and it's of course not just happening in this room it's happening all over these buildings that NYU operates and then up at Columbia in the new school and all of that and then of course it concert halls and all sorts
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of edit Macy's analogous things are going on and that's really an incredible accomplishment when you think about how how is it that we would all be able to get together if I had to go on the street and start walking up and down Manhattan yelling so chuan so chuan meet at 11 o'clock in the morning come on in meet there it's just not going to be brought off what brings it off is this thing that I just called New York University and New York University is an example of
2:50
an organization that I've been talking about just a few moments ago about social order and social organization and the fact that even such a simple thing is walking down the street or being able to applaud somebody or hold back the glance is a part of organization that's all organization that's what's going on that social organization this though is a qualitatively different kind of organization this thing like NYU and we sociologists make the distinction by using the term formal organization
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and that's what NYU is an example of the United States government is another example of a formal organization and the United States Army and the Internal Revenue Service and General Motors and that didn't do a thing did it all of those are examples of formal organizations that are operating operating in the world and I thought we were on something that we're not we're not up to so I'm just curious can people in the back see when I write these things down on here the back row can you
4:08
see that word okay I'm going to just use it and betray the whole electronic apparatus of this room I feel like a rebel so we say formal organizations and not a very not a very tricky term the development of formal organizations is something thought to be the way of defining what modern society is now you've all had the language of modernism and modern society and different explanations and talk about what modern society is often it's linked to the development of
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industries and of a certain sort of the assembly line for example all of those are plausible interpretations of what modern society is but according to and here's our dead German back for another meeting with us according to Max Weber the creation of modern organization of formal organizations is what modern modernity is and in fact for Weber the development of formal organizations is the great miracle it's not the great transformation did not occur through new gizmos new technologies harnessing
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resources development of energy it happened through formal organization which indeed makes possible all of those other things without it it wouldn't matter what technologies existed in some sense they could never be developed they could never be fielded they could never be integrated with other aspects of life so the great invention of modernism is the invention of formal organization and Weber contrasts formal organization with the other ways in which society is
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massively organized so he contrasts the formal organization and the modern times we live in with what went on in prior moments and the first kind of thing that Weber is contrasting our current society with and our current way in the beginning there was tradition and it may be that we should think about Marshall solids native peoples and Hawaiians as being living in that way people get up in the morning they have a way of life they do what they do because it is the
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way everybody always did it and so it continues on that way so up primitive people's let's call them at how unfairly and pejoratively we might want to use that term native peoples operate through tradition the problem in a way doesn't arise of how things might evolve how we field new technologies how we generate new belief systems or intellectual systems it doesn't arise people just do the same old thing day after day the other way in which a society can be organized according to
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Weber is through charisma and this uh use of charisma from Weber is the way in which this word has become popularized again through sociology classes like this throughout our language and the way we talk charisma and his idea of charisma and it's not the same way of thinking about it as Max atkinson's idea in applause the way in which charisma operates is that a human being creates social order by dint of themselves so everybody is getting up in the morning guided by tradition and then
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along comes a really fabulous human being like Jesus Christ he's our icon literally of a charismatic figure and Jesus says go here they go there uh whatever Jesus says goes and the same for Moses and in modern times we might say that Gandhi or Martin Luther King also were charismatic leaders and the notion is and Weber thought this was true that an individual somehow has these qualities or is at least imbued with these qualities that cause people to do things his way and so Martin
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Luther King says we're going to have a march on Washington and the fact that he says it is what makes it work that way now I am using I'm saying those things whirring as I'm saying them because the empirical literature we have on and the histories would have been written about for example Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement make it very clear that Martin Luther King did not do this on his own and it makes us suspicious that Christ where we have much less historic
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evidence that Christ didn't do it on his own but the story is that charisma gets things done and poor President Obama we all bet on our many people bet that his capacities at moving crowds of stirring crowds his charisma would allow for example health care to get passed the Congress and we overdid it didn't we he his charisma is not up to that task it's less than that he doesn't have the rest of the choir organized well enough for for it to happen but the idea is that
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you can be tradition directed you can be charisma directed or and this is then the formal organization you can be and the term we use for this last stage from Weber is the bureaucratic society it is ah it is all about a bureaucracy and we use the word bureaucracy in our everyday language as a dirty word we use it pejoratively oh it's just a bureaucracy well for Weber what do you mean just the bureaucracy uh all the things that I've been talking about this miracle of us
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all being in this room at the appropriate time this miracle of what goes on in the laboratories of NYU the miracle of the Metropolitan Transit District that actually the F train usually runs on the F line all of those miracles are due to the fact that they are bureaucratic there are bureaucracies that organize what would otherwise be this crazy chaotic life now I should point out that besides the fact that there are these contrasts with bureaucracy as ways of thinking about what holds society
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together there are different perspectives coming from outside of Weber and we'll meet them later in the course the main one is Karl Marx who is a weber is writing in in reaction to to some degree and as you I'm sure probably all know that for Marx it has to do what's organizing and running everything in our modern times is capitalism and the capitalist class that is exploiting workers so I just wanted to bring up Marx to show that that this isn't obvious that this is the way it operates
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that there is this other version of what the big thing is in modern industrial society and and Weber is in contrast to Marx or something like Marx and he was aware of Marx and the need to come up with something that he thought was better these ideas have become fundamental in not only sociology but also political science and to some degree the field of economics and Weber is someone who has an honored history in all of those fields as well as anthropology that I should mention while
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Weber was a systematic type of person and you can see he systematically is laying out the history of social order really almost nothing less than that it's quite an extraordinary piece of and of intellectual ambition he's got he's a systematic type guy and he also then lays out what are the characteristics of bureaucracies themselves and maybe because you're reading Weber and he lists them quite clearly in your reading I won't repeat them I mean I won't write
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them on the board but I'll bring them to your attention once again so that I can give you some illustrations of a contrasting way of thinking about how things work so one of the qualities or characteristics of any bureaucracy according to Weber is that there are fixed offices fixed offices and by offices he doesn't necessarily mean the physical thing that we call an office but the status of the person in the organization and so I am a professor and there is a president to the
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University and there's a guard downstairs so you have to show your ID to each of those people is has occupies and office and those offices then for each one there are written rules about what you can and cannot do in your office and so NYU has a very elaborate set of written rules about what an employee is entitled to what the healthcare benefits are or are not what time they have to be at work what time they can leave their rights and privileges and what their work consists
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of it tends to be formally written down and the argument of Weber would be that helps all of these things get done these are circumscribed so I give lectures I don't do pizza I don't iron your clothes and I also am NOT your religious leader so I don't tell you what to do on Saturday or Sunday which God to believe in that would be outside my office and the same way with the guard downstairs the guard doesn't say to you the guard is says to you let me see your ID the
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guard does not say to you would you please not even please let me see your ID and but get me a latte that is not within the guards purview and you would know that something is very wrong if a guard did that and so it is in vapours thinking for this entire vast world of organizations of formal organizations and bureaucracies it is following written rules circumscribed Authority you can't do but certain things and that goes for I use the example of the guard it goes for the
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police it goes for the military even those who are thought to be quite powerful they're part of a bureaucracy and each one a general Alou tenant a sergeant each one can only do certain things and those things alone there are hierarchies so the president of NYU is above me that president makes more money that president has a larger wingspan of people who operate under him and so it goes through all bureaucracies and all organizations that is that they are hierarchical and another aspect of
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bureaucratic society is that there is a separation between work and home so again if I go back to the tradition society or think about the Hawaiians prior to contact with Captain Cook people lived at home they raised their food at home if they had a craft they did it at home there was no separation between work and home home is not a bureaucracy that's a kind of intimate space a backstage that for example Goffman might say but under modern society where the bureaucracy becomes
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critical to getting the work done of society the social social organization of society these things are separate from one's intimate life space so there is then a line between work and home there are some other aspects too which are again spelled out in your in your readings but I want to give you some of the sort of payoffs or bottom lines of this one I keep emphasizing which is that this is the way a flex world is accomplished and we've got to stop Weber would tell us using the
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word bureaucracy as a dirty word but along with this amazing stuff that bureaucracies get done they also have a kind of dark side and for Weber the dark side is what in a way it is like to live in them and Weber use the term iron cage not a happy term iron cage these rules these fixed notions of who does what and the fact that you better learn them creates an iron cage not altogether not altogether a pleasant circumstance further because you see it isn't just
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that NYU has these characteristics that I've been listing in that Weber lists in his piece but we now have it as part of our consciousness so when when you go to McDonald's I if you go to McDonald's or let's do Starbucks perhaps a more likely case for some of you uh when you walk in to Starbucks you know to get in that line don't you and it's a single line that starts somewhere near the door and then when's past the place where you order and pay for your stuff and then
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you go to another spot where you pick up your latte what obedient little soldiers we all are so we and at McDonald's we know it's different there'll be three or four lines and you order pay your money and you stand there and they give it to you so only under exceptional circumstances when things break down they tell you to you have to stand aside because the fries aren't yet out of their little trapdoor and you've got to wait for a moment the the point is is that we not only first of all were
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trained in the idea that there is an order to doing all of these things there isn't you can't walk up and say wait a minute I'm a professor at NYU I do it here by the way I get in early because of in fact that I have to set up unsuccessfully as it turns out but while you poor dogs are waiting in line in the rain I just go right to the front and just get my ass in because I'm a professor and you're not and that's how that works but when I go to McDonald's it's nothing and I've
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got a wait in the line so it's in me and it's in you that there are bureaucracies and we perform them it isn't just McDonald's that is creating the bureaucracy and enforcing it we are performing it and we know to do that and sometimes if we're in a foreign country or something and we don't know the setup or if a new kind of enterprise opens like my stepfather also because he had this little recalcitrant streak in him would never clean up after himself at McDonald's that's another aspect of the
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way we've been trained before McDonald's when you went to a restaurant you got served and then you got up and left the thing dirty that's the way it was it still is in many restaurants but McDonald's trained us in the idea that know when we're done we pick up our stuff and we bus our own stuff that is an amazing thing when you think of it why should each of us do this little charitable act for one of the largest corporations on the globe that is of course destroying bodies responsible for
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obesity raping the countryside's of where their agricultural products inserting poisons in the world killing animals name the list and I know McDonald's has also some nice things they do but they have been attacked very much for all these things why should we clean up for them but we all do don't we so we have the organization we have the bureaucracy in us it's it's like w eb de bois talking about a double consciousness this is now an aspect of our consciousness that there are
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bureaucracies there are rules let's find out what they are and then let's perform accordingly and so we do and for weber this is pretty uh pretty astonishing and we don't think again of the contrast when you go to the registrar's office which i know is something that you're all probably very fond of when you go to the registrar's office and your turn comes you don't ask them for pizza it's just not what they are and if you do ask for pizza will think you need counseling
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um and then that whole bureaucracy will kick off at trying to retain you in the in you as a student at NYU because if you can't know if you don't know enough to know that the Registrar doesn't do pizza then there is nothing you can be depended upon to know you're a wild beast on the campus so uh will we're all very aware of that okay so what we've got then is this a fairly rigid setup and we've explained social order we've explained all of history in a way and
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shown how it's evolved to this point where bureaucracies organize our societies and organize even our consciousness at least to an extent to a high degree and it's not fun but we get all these wonderful things like cars and TVs and Airlines and airplanes and all the rest of it because of this a wonderful organization aspect even if it does have these prices that we have to pay well are you sold on all of this ladies and germs because it's an old vaudeville lying by the way
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ladies and germs I'll take my wife please that's another one ah so so what what about it um does this vey Berrien idea of bureaucracy hold up that particular the aspect of how it is that society really works these rules that bureaucrats follow these rules that we follow and these this iron cage miss this restrictions of how we work the kind of passivity of the model that that this that this portrays well not so fast Max Weber there are some criticism of this theory and that's why you've come
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here is to hear the criticisms today well let's talk about another sociologist and this one is no longer alive but alive enough recent enough that I knew him man named Robert Merton who was a professor for his career at Columbia and Robert Merton said wait a minute you know these organizations they have all of these rules for example about what they're devoted to and what their missions are and how those missions are are accomplished through these the specifics of how they're
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organized and all the rest of it those are however what Merton called the Manifest rules that the manifests that is there up on the manifest they're obvious they're clearly stated and they are proclaimed put forward those are the manifest goals like the manifest goal of NYU if you have been ready in the last year set of years but all universities write up something about themselves to the something like serving humankind from developing the culture allowing people to fulfill their highest
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ambitions to advance learning and science expression and music and poetry you've seen that kind of stuff you've applied for schools recently so you had all those catalogs and usually on the inside front cover they or first page they put this kind of stuff down well that's one of the things that NYU is got going for itself but every organization according to Merton has what he called latent goals latent and you know when you have a latent bacteria in you or something it's
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there and it's waiting for it's underneath but it's there and every organization has latent goals as well so one of NYU's goals latent goals is to raise more money and they are constantly trying to raise more money to get hold of more real estate in New York - what are other latent goals of NYU anybody want to join this conversation can you think of other things that well NYU is paying the salaries of its faculty and its administrators and keeping all of these families alive and around and
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living at a certain standard of living and NYU is eager to beat out of the University of Rochester which I think it has and now it's just chomping at the heels of Yale and the University of Chicago and it wants to overtake it and overtake them and I can tell you as a faculty member this is oh this is not this is fairly obvious that things here are organized in order to accomplish those goals and when you get the catalog of NYU it doesn't say welcome to NYU we are
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going to beat out Yale we've already done in we've already surpassed and then you list the universities that used to be ahead of NYU and now they are just dust in our path and we're going to continue marching on and indeed we're going further because we're going to the world we're going to create global nyu and this brand is going to be worldwide we are going to be the McDonald's of universities so stand back here we come so let's look at some of these contrasts
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between manifest goals and latent goals that have been now come part of the sociological literature through studies of real places of that as they actually operate so for example here's one of one of my favorites from olden days the great charity of the March of Dimes have you heard of the March of Dimes that's still a known thing raise your hand if you've heard of it okay everybody has so this was the foundation for solving the problem of polio in the United States
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infantile paralysis and the March of Dimes organized something called the mothers march on polio and so all over the United States mothers went door-to-door and collected Dimes and there were this was a vast bureaucracy that's that's the point and a person studied this bureaucracy and found out that the March of Dimes is not just devoted to collecting money to solve the problem of polio there are other things going on there is a hierarchy of the in the March of Dimes
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some people need the March of Dimes because it is the way they make their living and they are the high-paid people at the top of the March of Dimes furthermore all the mothers who have organized the March of Dimes on their blocks they are the one they are getting satisfaction out of this they are linking up with other women they are gaining prestige in their neighborhoods because they are the block captain they are the neighborhood captain a whole lot is being done by the March of Dimes
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besides addressing the problem of polio and one evidence for that is what happened when they cured the March of that when they cured polio that was great for children who had not yet contracted polio but it was very bad for the March of Dimes and so rather than saying we've accomplished our thing we're done by everybody we close the Excel the offices on Fifth Avenue and everybody goes home and now makes cookies again instead they looked for another disease and they but the problem
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was was that all the great diseases were already taken by you know the Heart Association and this one in that zone so they had to settle on on congenital defects which is now what this organization is oriented toward but that's a much less sellable thing than crippled children which is what polio was and allowed them to build a much vaster set of operations than congenital disease which just doesn't have a good poster child they always had a poster child by the way that's where that
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phrase comes from the March of Dimes always had a poster child an innocent child who was crippled by the disease and that was then the vehicle through which they raised money so that starts telling us that the organization is up to something that is beyond the details of what it says in its official rules and that maybe it operates a little differently as well so here's an example that you that you're reading in your in your in your reading in your readings which is this piece
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called dead-on-arrival written by a sociologist named David sudden L and what sudden L studied was the emergency rooms of hospitals and many of us have been in emergency rooms and if you've been in an emergency room in a big city on a say a Saturday night you may have gotten wind of a tremendous amount of of activity bordering on chaos people are being brought in from the ambulances they have gunshot wounds that they other people are coming in and they're like nuts and there babbling
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around some people are hysterical because their child has been injured all kinds of stuff like that is going on what to do well one notion would be first-come first-served that they don't do that in hospitals and one of the things that bureaucracies do we know is besides their official doctrine like triage in an emergency room besides their official doctrines they've got to deal with crises that come their way when for that that threaten to stop the organization
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full stop so if a person is coming in and screaming they squeaky wheels do get oil and one reason they do is because if you don't take care of them then you can't take care of everybody else the organization is put in danger and so you if you see that operating whether you're a receptionist in a welfare agency which we have studies of or whether you are up or whether you're working in an emergency room at a hospital you've got to have your eye out for what will allow
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the organization to continue on and what will stop it and you make exceptions to the rules right on the spot in order to keep the organization operating in a fairly smooth path so here's another example from this is the one from Sud now I haven't talked about Sud now yet side now studied emergency rooms and in amidst the clients of the emergency rooms are recurrent people and in particular sub now is pay some attention to alcoholics so we've seen these people on the streets they're often lost
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consciousness they're laying there and they're they're tragic these are tragic people these people are coming and going to emergency rooms because of course they don't have any other appropriate medical care and they are scooped up by the police and brought in to the emergency room if you have an emergency room which is on the verge of chaos anyway and you have a limited staff you have to make the decision whether a person is alive or dead that is the key decision that an emergency room a set of
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doctors and medical professionals have to make and there are very different outcomes if someone is dead you are done they then you turn it over to a different agency the morgue or somebody like that and you're done and now you can go on to the bleeding child the man who's having a heart attack the person who's been as the gunshot wound and who you can have recover so you're done if they're dead and sub now says that then the influences what whether they are dead or not in other words the social
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context of the emergency room and how the bureaucracy works influences the diagnosis the fundamental diagnosis as to whether someone is dead or alive and sudden now is not painting a picture of people who just don't care of doctors who are wanting to clear the streets these alcoholic people who are unpleasant as we meet them in the subways and whatnot it's not that it's just that it's ambiguous anyway increasingly in medical practice whether a person is alive or dead there's great
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controversy about that within the medical world about what death is and when has death been accomplished and when did it occur sub mouse point is is that whether it's a duck or a bunny a dead or alive is subject to the social exits E's and situations and so people who really are like that are more likely to be dead and that then helps the organization to do its job by seeing ducks rather than seeing bunnies and at the margins and that's what we're talking about it will lead to the
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diagnosis of death for those kinds of people and it's kind of like also they're going to be if they're not dead they're going to be dead because they are destroying their livers and they're barely alive now and if they're not dead this time they'll be dead next time so all of this is in some way without being thought through embodied in what people do and so it's not only math law through it's certainly not written down and in fact everything the hospital writes down
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and the medical profession writes down they the oath and all of that is all about you know nobody's ever dead until the the unambiguous death occurs now we now know scientifically that it's getting harder and harder to ever say that someone is truly dead as opposed to truly alive so therefore the social factors intervene just like the ash experiment the length of the lines all of that they are getting to be dead through all of those circumstances because there are latent goals that
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going on in this hospital and in this emergency room and not just manifest goals so let's give you another couple of things to think about what we talked about the the drug laws and the dope laws and so Howard Becker we've mentioned before in the class Howard Becker learning to be a marijuana user he wrote an article called that Becker also points out and thinks that politicians need for marijuana to be against the law they run on that basis government agencies needed and in fact
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Becker argues as a historic matter that the movement of marijuana into being classified as a dangerous substance than illegal substance which happened after the heroin by the way a laws it happened in my mind it's 1937 I could be wrong on that date but it happened too because several federal agencies were losing their authority over a large spread of regulatory functions in the United States because of a reorganization of government and so to grow their agency
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it was convenient to add another illegal substance to the catalog of illegal substances and it was convenient because because hippies or didn't have hippies then but you know jazz singers and and african-americans were using marijuana just mostly in the population so of course that's convenient as well to label these people and everything they do as deviant and go after them but the point is is that it built the organization and that means that you have more offices your salaries rise
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because you're the spread of employees that you supervise grow you grow and prestige you may be headed for a post in the cabinet all these things start working in your direction by creating a new law that puts more people under under your jurisdiction within your grasp and now you have more things to do more people to hire more reasons to go on television more Wars to fight and all the rest of it so this starts giving us another clue as to how things work and that is that
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the people who make up organizations are kind of ad-libbing all the time they're innovating they're inventing and I've just given you negative examples like calling someone who could be thought of as alive calling them dead but it is also just the way in which the only way in which complex organizations can ever operate which is that if somebody is hysterical you've got to serve them first or the whole thing will come to a bloody standstill if you're supposed to
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inspect at the subway or the airport security a part of your security apparatus every suitcase that comes past you and you really are supposed to get into it and hold each thing up if if their circumstances are wrong you will hold up the line and everyone will miss their flights or a lot of people will miss their flights and that constrains what the people at security do we read about all the time because some people get through without really being thoroughly inspected well that's true
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but on the other side of it it's these workers jobs to get everybody through and if they didn't ad-lib if they didn't work it out as the as things went along there might be trouble of the other sort and so organizations are constant people in organizations are always working out how it is to make this whole thing function in ways that otherwise wouldn't there's a here's one evidence that that is massively going on one of the ways in which ah there can be um uh in which labor can
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rebel in organizations is they do something called work to rule and what work to rule means is that they literally enforce the rules they do their job just as the official rules say their job should be done and when they do that the whole thing breaks down if they are customs inspectors or if they are subway conductors or whatever it might be if you actually work to rule you stop the organization and so without going on strike that is a labor tactic that's used around the world especially
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in Great Britain work-to-rule was a common technique of being obstreperous and of the workers insinuating themselves into the work process and the union's finding a way to move things through well vast amounts of sociology and work has been done for example on how it operates in the criminal justice system the fact that things don't go to trial that the vast majority of cases are plea bargained that people are are charged with crimes that not only did they not commit but that they're not
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even thought to have committed because you can then get them on the lesser charge the police are not supposed to do that but it is massively done and if someone can get off by pleading guilty to a lesser charge they do that and that is the routine process by which we are spared court trials if everybody who was charged with a crime went to trial the entire criminal justice system would collapse because only I think it's about ten percent of charges actually go to
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trial the other ninety percent are settled by people pleading guilty and they are plead guilty to not the thing that they allegedly did but to something else and in that way they are induced to go without a trial and instead just stand before the judge and work and end and do what's plea-bargained ahead of time that keeps the criminal justice system going and without it if we actually follow the rules there would be no way that it could work at all so where does this leave us
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okay it leaves us with the idea that Weber couldn't have had it all that besides the manifest goals there are late in goals besides the formal rules of the organization there are what one sociologist called the informal rules of the organization of which for example plea bargaining is one that I've just given you and that the plea bargains are themselves patterned so that if someone is charged with grand larceny and they don't have a record then it will be reduced to misdemeanor and and that's
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way the way that works if it's if it's a nice boy a saint as opposed to a roughneck then you can see it's a nice boy and so the nice boy gets probation and without a prison term these are understood within the organization as what you would do and if you don't do that then you're betraying the informal rules and so you have to answer for it but there are informal rules the most radical the most radical departure from vapers ideas about what organizations are and what rules are have been put
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forward by a group of sociologists who we call who they call themselves I'm going to spell this out for you f no methodologists what in the world could that be ah and remember ethno ethnic we've been over that a couple of times the people it's the study of people's methods and that's what I've been talking to you about that's what I've been doing in other words one thing we can study is the organization's and manifest goals that they put forward another thing we
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can study is what people actually do in LA in light of those official rules how do they actually function these human beings what do they do to make our life possible Goffman and the idea of dimming the lights and civil and attention that that's kind of like saying wait a minute that's a that's a method we have ladies and gentlemen boys and girls for maintaining social order that's what we actually do there's no written down anywhere I swear to like when you become
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an American citizen I swear to not look anybody in the eye for longer than three tenths of a second ah nobody swears by that there's no rules like that but we massively perform that way so we study the methods of the people to get through the day and that makes our life possible so what goes on in these gorgeous organizations that I've been extolling the virtues of but also talking a little bit about the the negative side of is that what is going on is that people are
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not just following rules but themselves are actively participating in creating the organization and how do they do that they see in the situation what needs to be done they'll worry about the rules later I got to make sure that this assembly line keeps going I got to get people through to their airplanes I got to get the hospital to work I got to get the people out of this courthouse and get them processed that's what's going on and I see in the situation how to do the
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so it's even more radically active than following the informal rules there may be no formal rule that's really works and no informal rule that really works but I figure out what needs to be done and this way of looking at things really celebrates the genius of each of us and how amazing we are to be able to make this thing work that there are extraordinary capacities to make it work and so I gave the example of walking through the recreation room of a suburban house and seeing a stop sign on
51:57
your way to the bathroom there is no formal rule that's applicable the formal rule is stop when you see the stop sign that is idiotic and you won't do that and there's no informal rule nobody's ever seen an informal rule like well you don't have to stop at a stop sign if you're in somebody's recreation room it's maybe you have never seen a stop sign in a recreation room you know it doesn't apply you're able to look at the context and all the details of the context and how they come together to
52:30
decide this thing is no rule at all or this thing is a little bit of a rule but it applies in this way not in that way that is the magic of what we all can do is figure out from the context what in fact has to be done and this makes sense because there are always too many rules for one thing so Adolph Eichmann has got to make these trains run on time and he that's a set of rules that he must must be doing but at the same time is all his religions of the world including presumably his says
53:10
thou shalt not kill and that's a rule as well so I got these two rules what do I do so having a rule is no solution when you've got two rules that are absolutely opposite each other and tell you to do different things our lives and I've given you examples of that before in class are filled with these days if you do and damned if you don't collisions of multiple rules that apply at any given moment and our job is to figure out which one applies on which occasion so a rule comes into being on
53:47
the occasion of its use then we know what the rule is so for example thou shalt not kill there's a good one what about rats in New York don't we kill them every chance we get bedbugs in New York don't we kill them how about a cockroach at a picnic some of us will kill them some of us will walk down to the street and give it a better life there's all sorts of ways of deciding but it is ways of deciding we're in the military and we're in Iraq we're fighting Adolf Hitler where's the
54:24
line thou shalt not kill what about Nazis shouldn't we kill Nazis what is it the story here should we kill people in the laboratory because it's Yale University that's asking us to do it or a man in a white coat or what how do we handle that there are always too many rules so there is no escape from having to make sense of it in light of the larger context and figuring out what that rule actually must mean it given the situation and the circumstance one last
55:02
note of this whole rule thing and that is after the fact we explain our behavior by following rules that is this way of living in the world of figuring out what must be done by virtue of all the details that come into our awareness how we handle this is done tacitly and the people who preach this way of thinking use that word a lot this is Cassatt knowledge nobody ever told you that but that when you see a up sign in in a recreation room you just keep on going and if you wanted to go to
55:49
the bathroom you just go do it it's tacit it's not spoken it is just known and we all know all of these we don't know all of them sometimes we're in very awkward situations because we don't get it we don't understand the tacit understandings that in fact rule in that moment but when we have done what we have done we need to explain ourselves through as rational actors who were following rules that's what we do we invoke rules after the fact to explain why it is we did that as opposed
56:32
to doing something else so I common at his trial would invoke the fact that his job was to keep the railroad transportation system going that he was under the organizational rules of whatever that agency was of the Nazi regime that caused him to do that that's a dramatic example but the reason why I went to the university I went to was that for my graduate work is that I had a summer job I was doing Christmas catalogs for department stores and I actually wanted to finish the one I was
57:09
working on and so I decided not to go to the universities that were starting earlier and instead went to the one that started last so I admit to that ok and but when I got to that University and they asked me why have you come and when you had to fill out the thing about why do you want to go to that University I wrote all this bull about the great learning and the writer and I and why it was perfect for me not that I was working in a Christmas catalogue place
57:42
which is a not legitimate reason for doing anything like that so here's what we do ladies and gentlemen what we're all about is making sure that nobody thinks were in native is that we operate when we call it a duck we call it a bunny we are rational actors and we exaggerate we cut out all of this tacit capacity that allowed us to figure out what to do when and where and under what circumstances this amazingly complicated stuff and instead we come up with a rule
58:25
that will work in that circumstance so if it's why did you kill the bug well it's because um I was protecting the lunch of the child or that's a bad example uh why did you not pay attention that's a better example why did you not pay attention to that man on the gurney in the hallway on the stretcher it's because he is dead and our rule is is that once they're dead you press this other button and they come and you the corpse Department comes and takes it over and the medical staff is finished
59:06
that's why I did that rather than this whole rigmarole story that I've given you that that was given by David Sutta now to explain how it is that someone is or is not dead on arrival that that is what is going on so don't the fact that people massively explain their behavior by giving the rules that they were obeying don't let that fool you these ethnomethodology say they are using the rules to rationalize to pass themselves off as legitimate people in the society so it's like
59:55
saying oops when you say I did it because it's the law it's another version of oops that is not what created the behavior it's what explains the behavior after the fact and through this way of thinking rationality and the exhibition of rationality is our religion is our ideology is our practice and it is probably absolutely necessary that we do it because a world without rules would be something that would be threatening a difficult to imagine and disastrous so a
1:00:38
way the world is held together now this is a very radical interpretation it's not by the fact of the rules but by the belief in the rules that allows us to make apparent to one another the rationality and our common participation in a rational world again we're not natives now let you now I pass this on to you okay I've given you the Weber interpretation think about it or something like it you don't have to buy the whole Weber thing hook line and sinker but think about the idea that
1:01:15
wait a minute there are rules there are regulations and the world works through their effectiveness as opposed to this other idea which annoys it upside down and says no the world works through the capacity of human beings to interpret there's that word again to interpret the context therein and then later explain what they did if called upon to do so as conforming to rules we were conforming but to the needs of the settings in which we're in we weren't conforming to the rules don't
1:01:54
cut out the middleman the middleman is our own consciousness and capacity to make sense of what goes on in front of us so that's today's sermon ah when you leave this room perform some experiments go to the registrar's office and ask for pizza go to church and ask to be registered for a class do some stuff like that and you will find the real world bye-bye
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