The Macro and Meso Basis of the Micro Social Order
7.3 The Macro Level of Social Reality
7.3.2 Properties of the Macro Realm of Reality
7.3.2.2 The Ordering of Cultural Elements
In Fig. 7.3 , I have outlined elements of culture that I believe are most important in understand- ing macro to micro dynamics. I have arranged these hierarchically, with the arrows denoting the infl uence of one level of culture on another. True, this fi gure looks something like Talcott Parsons’
long forgotten, or rejected, “cybernetic hierarchy of control,” but its only similarity to Parsons’ for- mulation is the recognition that like social struc- tures, cultural systems are embedded in each other.
The culture of any society reveals texts (oral and/or written), technologies (or information
about how to manipulate the environment), and values (highly abstract moral codes on rights and wrongs). All of these basic elements have large effects on how the macro world becomes orga- nized; and often, this societal-level organization is infl uenced by connections to other societies, where texts, technologies, and the ideologies of other societies penetrate the culture of a particu- lar society. Thus, complex or simple texts, high or low levels of technology, and highly charged or lower-key moral codes exert pressures on members of a society and the corporate units organizing their activities. This infl uence results in the development of more specifi c codings—ide- ologies, meta-ideologies, beliefs, and normative
Fig. 7.3 Elements of micro-level culture as they constrain meso- and micro-level culture
expectations—that are at least partially consistent with higher-level moral codes and compatible with existing technologies. This constraint is greatest when there is a high degree of consensus on value premises (about right/wrong, good/bad, appropriate/inappropriate), when these codes reveal high degrees of internal consistency in their mandates, when they embody both offi cial and more general cultural texts, and when they allow for the implementation of technological knowledge.
The Importance of Ideologies and Meta- ideologies The most important cultural codes below these higher-order and abstract codings in a society’s culture are ideologies and meta - ideologies . Ideologies translate value premises into more specifi c moral codings for what is right/wrong, good/bad, and appropriate/inappro- priate within a particular institutional domain, such as kinship, economy, polity, law, religion, or education. They, in essence, translate the highly abstract value premises into more specifi c sets of moral instructions about conduct and action within any given domain. In turn, ideologies con- strain the beliefs that emerge in corporate-unit cultures and the normative expectations for incumbents at different locations in the division of labor of corporate units; and consequently, these normative beliefs and expectations con- strain the situational expectation states of indi- viduals in micro-level encounters.
Meta-ideologies are blended composite of the ideologies from dominant institutional domains, and like ideologies more generally, they translate abstract value premises and texts into more spe- cifi c moral premises within and between institu- tional domains. Like ideologies, meta-ideologies provide the more immediate and specifi c moral imperatives for meso-level sociocultural formations.
As societies become more complex, the cor- porate units within diverse institutional domains interact in often complex ways; and as these interactions occur, the respective ideologies of several domains are mixed together to form a composite ideology. As noted above, I term these
inter-institutional cultural formations meta - ideologies ; and the meta-ideology of the domi- nant institutional domains in a society—say, economy, polity, education, science—reconciles elements in each of the respective ideologies of these institutional domains, but these meta- ideologies do something even more important:
they legitimate the unequal distribution of valued resources by corporate units within institutional domains—in the example here, the unequal dis- tribution of money by the economy, power by the polity, learning by education, and verifi ed knowl- edge by science (see discussion and Table 7.1 for a listing of symbolic media as valued resources).
Thus, those who possess higher levels of these valued resources are seen as “deserving,” while those not receiving large shares of these resources are seen as “undeserving.” As a consequence, beliefs valorize the moral worth of those with resources, and conversely, stigmatize those who do not possess resource shares. Stratifi cation sys- tems are thus built up from the unequal distribu- tion of valued resources that are distributed unequally by the divisions of labor in corporate units within institutional domains; and this inequality is legitimated by the ideologies within each domain and, even more importantly, by the meta-ideology that combines and reconciles the individual ideologies of differentiated domains.
And, like the ideologies of variously autonomous institutional domains, this meta-ideology con- strains the formation of beliefs in the culture of corporate units and the status beliefs about those placed in social categories and receiving different shares of valued resources.
The Importance of Generalized Symbolic Media of Exchange Ideologies and meta-ideologies are built up from generalized symbolic media of exchange . As entrepreneurs seek to form corpo- rate units capable of responding to selection pres- sures, they begin to employ terms of discourse to explain and justify what they are doing; and as some of these actors become the dominant or core players in an evolving institutional domain, this use of a particular generalized symbolic medium is increasingly used by others (Turner 2010a , c ; Abrutyn 2013a , b ; 2015 ; Abrutyn and
Turner 2011 ). What eventually emerges is an ide- ology specifying the moral correctness of a par- ticular line of conduct by individuals and corporate-unit organizing individuals’ activities within an institutional domain. For example, as money is increasingly used to expand economic trade, it is not only the medium by which such trade occurs in emerging markets, its ability to symbolize value also makes it a moral symbol
that is incorporated into, for example, the ideol- ogy of capitalism emphasizing that profi ts and accumulation of capital are right, proper, and moral, thereby moralizing and justifying capital- ist behaviors and actions. Similarly, as power is increasingly used to consolidate control of other institutional domains in an emerging polity, it is not only the resource used to do so, but its mobi- lization is justifi ed by the symbolic nature of power—that a moral good that is needed to estab- lish control and order in a society.
Generalized symbolic media of exchange thus have several unique properties (Turner 2010b , c , 2014b ). They are (a) the terms of discourse within an evolving institutional domains; (b) they are the resource that is used to justify the organiza- tion of corporate units to deal with selection pres- sures; (c) they can often be the actual valued resource that is unequally distributed within and institutional system and thereby one of the resources that leads to the formation of a stratifi - cation system in a society; and (d) they are the moral codes that are used to form ideologies and meta-ideologies that constrain all meso and micro level social processes.
In addition to these properties, generalized symbolic media are often reifi ed as “totemized”
objects of worship toward which ritualized appeals are often made. For example, people do indeed “worship” money and power ; and such as also the case for other generalized symbolic media such as love - loyalty in family and kinship, imperative coordination and justice in law, learn- ing in education, sacredness - piety in religion, verifi ed knowledge in science, competition in sport, and aesthetics in arts. As symbols of moral- ity and as valued resources, generalized symbolic media can become totems of worship, thereby reifying them and giving them even more moral power to constrain the emergence of beliefs, nor- mative expectations, and expectations states in meso- and micro-level sociocultural formations.
To some degree these properties of general- ized symbolic media were recognized by Gorg Simmel ([1907] 1990 ) in his early analysis of money, and by more recent theorists such as Talcott Parsons ( 1963a ; b ) and Nicklas Luhmann
Table 7.1 Generalized symbolic media of institutional domains
Kinship Love/loyalty , or the use of intense positive affective states to forge and mark commitments to others and groups of others
Economy Money, or the denotation of exchange value for objects, actions, and services by the metrics inhering in money
Polity Power , or the capacity to control the actions of other actors
Law Imperative coordination/justice , or the capacity to adjudicate social relations and render judgments about justice, fairness, and appropriateness of actions
Religion Sacredness/Piety, or the commitment to beliefs about forces and entities inhabiting a non-observable supernatural realm and the propensity to explain events and conditions by references to these sacred forces and beings
Education Learning, or the commitment to acquiring and passing on knowledge Science Knowledge , or the invocation of
standards for gaining verifi ed knowledge about all dimensions of the social, biotic, and physico-chemical universes Medicine Health, or the concern about and
commitment to sustaining the normal functioning of the human body Sport Competitiveness, or the defi nition of
games that produce winners and losers by virtue of the respective efforts of players Arts Aesthetics, or the commitment to make
and evaluate objects and performances by standards of beauty and pleasure that they give observers
Note: These and other generalized symbolic media are employed in discourse among actors, in articulating themes, and in developing ideologies about what should and ought to transpire in an institutional domain. They tend to circulate within a domain, but all of the symbolic media can circulate in other domains, although some media are more likely to do so than others
( 1982 ). Even more recent theorists (Turner 2010a , 2013b ; Abrutyn and Turner 2011 ) have extended the analysis of generalized symbolic media because they are the basis of those cultural coding systems—ideologies and meta- ideologies—that constrain the formation of cul- tural codes and expectations at the meso and micro levels of social organization. And, from an evolutionary perspective, generalized symbolic media evolved in response to selection pressures as actors seek to cope with adaptive problems arising from selection pressures, and to justify and legitimate their solutions to these problems.
Thus, in a sense, generalized symbolic media arise at a more micro and meso level in history, but once institutionalized they become external constraints on the culture of these meso- and micro-level social structures.
7.3.2.3 Structural Properties