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Education in Sociology at School


Every kind of culture can be characterized by its fundamental form of social organization. Folk culture is based upon kinship and mediaeval society depends upon feudalism as its method for organizing social relationship between its members. With the rise of cities and commerce a different kind of system became necessary. Bureaucracy is the term often applied to his form. This is not to say that bureaucracy did not exist before modern times but that the kind of social relationships required by bureaucracy have become more essential to the maintenance of society. The fairly obvious historical trend that the notion of increasing bureaucracy attempts to describe has also been characterized in highly different ways but always with the same them. The change is characterized by increasing importance of specialization and of rationality applied to the organization of social life by members of society.

It comes about through differentiation in the function of major institutions and the consequent growth of association aimed at furthering specific interest. Concomitantly, there has been a trend towards secularism and pragmatism. The value of ways of doing things tends to be measured in terms of their effectiveness in achieving some practical end. tailcoat parsons summarized the trend in the notion that, increasing, the dominant value them in advance society is mastery of the world around.

Bureaucracy:
In several ways, therefore, observers have noticed the growing importance of rational and legal restrictions on behavior, which they expected to have serious consequences for individual personalities. They obviously believe that social structure was “educative” in the sense that it can change personalities. Max Weber pointed to the rational legal characteristics of the modern organization as the major contributor to this trend. In doing so bequeathed us a description of an ideal type or perfect realignment of a rational social organization.

Etzioni’s classification of organization:
In the hope of strengthening this movement Etzioni (1964) has suggested that the term bureaucracy should be replaced by the non-emotive “organization”. His view is that Weber’s ideal-type, in its concentration upon the rational legal aspects of a large organization diverts our attention from the equally important non-rational exercise and legalimation of authority. Gouldner (195) developed this distinction into a theory that there are two types of bureaucracy-representative and punishment-dertered. The first contains authority based upon knowledge and expertise.
Etzioni (1961) grapples with the problems of variations form the bureaucratic ideal-type by suggesting a nine-fold typology summarizing different kinds of compliance. in addition to looking at how our organization on forces authority we must consider the kind of involvement, which it stimulates in the members. The compliance relationship is a two sided one.