Modern Societies Modern Societies A Comparative Perspective Stephen K. Sanderson Paradigm Publishers Boulder • London All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any media or form, including electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or informational storage and retrieval systems, without the express written consent of the publisher. Copyright © 2015 by Paradigm Publishers Published in the United States by Paradigm Publishers, 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO 80303 USA. Paradigm Publishers is the trade name of Birkenkamp & Company, LLC, Dean Birkenkamp, President and Publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sanderson, Stephen K. Modern societies : a comparative perspective / Stephen K. Sanderson. pages cm. — Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61205-667-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Organizational sociology. 2. Sociology. I. Title. HM786.S26 2014 302.3’5—dc23 2013051045 Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the standards of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 Contents Preface vii 1. Rich Democracies, I: Economy, Work, and Class 1 Premodern Prelude 1 Being and Becoming a Rich Democracy 3 Occupation and Stratification 6 Modern Welfare States 13 From Industrial to Postindustrial Society? 14 2. Rich Democracies, II: The Polity 19 Early Modern States 19 The Increasing Size and Scope of the State 21 From Autocracy to Democracy 25 The Rarity and Difficulty of Democracy 33 3. Socialist and Postsocialist Societies 35 The Nature of State Socialism 35 Leninist Regimes 39 Reform and the Transition to Postsocialism 42 The Great Collapse 44 Postsocialism 47 Does Socialism Have a Future? 51 4. The Less-Developed World 53 The Nature of Underdevelopment 53 Why Underdevelopment? 57 Development in East Asia 61 Development in Latin America 66 Sub-Saharan Africa and the Failure of Development 70 v vvii CCoonntteennttss 5. Race and Ethnicity 75 Race in the United States 75 Race in Brazil 79 Race in South Africa 81 Ethnic Homogeneity and Heterogeneity 84 Ethnicity and Its Discontents 88 6. Gender Roles and Relations 95 The Patriarchal Past 95 The Great Gender Transformation 96 The Contemporary Situation 102 7. Marriage and Families 111 The Traditional Family in Asia and Europe 111 The Evolution of the Modern Family System 112 The Contemporary Family Revolution 115 From Large Families to Small 120 The Modern Family: Change or Decline? 125 8. Modern Mass Education 129 Education in Historical Perspective 129 The Emergence and Expansion of Mass Education 131 Explaining Educational Expansion 137 Credentialism and Its Consequences 140 9. Religion in the World 145 What Religion Is 145 The World’s Religions 146 Religious Groups in Modern Societies 151 Religion in the United States and Europe 153 Religion in Latin America 157 The Secularization Controversy 159 10. Globalization (with Arthur S. Alderson) 165 What Globalization Is 166 Globalization and Its Critics 170 Is Globalization Something New? 175 11. Assessing Past and Future 181 Have We Progressed? 181 Are We Happier? 187 Nine Predictions in Search of a Future 190 References 199 Index 215 Preface There are approximately two hundred societies in the world today. Modern Societies: A Comparative Perspective explores the nature of many of these societies by compar- ing and contrasting their basic institutions and patterns of social organization. The book’s distinctiveness lies in its comparative and global perspective. It allows students to situate the United States in global context—to see how their society is both similar to and different from other societies. Modern Societies mixes description with theory, and rather than discussing theory at the beginning, it compares and contrasts competing theories in individual chapters. This is designed to give instructors maximum flexibility in using the book. Modern Societies is suitable for courses in introductory sociology, social institutions, and comparative sociology. Major topics include • How the rich democracies became both rich and democratic • Governments and welfare states • The growth of democracy in the twentieth century • The collapse of Communism and the transition to postsocialist societies • The circumstances of less-developed countries, with attention to those that are developing rapidly as well as those that continue to lag far behind the rich countries • Racial and ethnic divisions and conflicts worldwide • The gender revolution of the past fifty years and contemporary patterns of gender inequality throughout the world • Major shifts in family patterns and the transition to below-replacement fertility • The global spread and expansion of mass education and educational credentialism • Worldwide patterns of religious belief and practice • The controversy over the secularization thesis • Economic, political, and cultural globalization • The nature of social and economic progress over the past two centuries • Nine predictions concerning the short-term and long-term future of the world vii vviiiiii PCroenfatecnets The book provides detailed and fully up-to-date statistical data in forty-five tables. Students and instructors will find data from countries throughout the world on such topics as • Economic development • Government expansion • Democracy • Racial segregation • Gender empowerment • Fertility levels • Single-parent households • Educational enrollments • Religiosity • Religious pluralism and religious freedom • Happiness As a pedagogical aid, discussion questions for each chapter are posted on the book’s companion webpage at www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail .aspx?productID=393431. I am grateful to Rosemary Hopcroft and Rae Lesser Blumberg for their critical comments on drafts of several chapters. They were especially helpful in suggesting important revisions to the chapter on gender. Chapter 1 Rich Democracies, I Economy, Work, and Class Premodern Prelude As everyone knows, humans did not always live in the kinds of societies most people live in today. For the vast majority of human history and prehistory, humans survived entirely by hunting and gathering. Hunter-gatherer societies were small (usually comprising no more than a few dozen members), had a very simple division of labor (men did most of the hunting and women most of the gathering), and limited technology (e.g., spears, bows and arrows, traps). People moved around a lot, sometimes every few days or weeks, sometimes only three or four times a year. This depended to a large extent on how abundant resources were in a given place and on such things as seasonal changes. Then about 10,000 years ago, the earliest forms of agriculture began to emerge throughout much of the world. People began to settle down and live in villages, which were permanent or semipermanent. These earliest agricultural societies are best called horticultural societies, which are societies that depend on the gardening of relatively small plots of land, using simple tools such as digging sticks or hoes. In horticultural societies women do most of the cultivating, although men usually prepare the land so that crops can be planted. The simplest horticultural societies usually possess a lot of land, so they tend to cultivate a garden for only a few years and then abandon it, moving their garden somewhere else. But as populations grew over thousands of years, land became increasingly scarce and people could not be so casual about cultivation. They had to cultivate any given plot of land for a longer time and move their gardens less often. Sometime after 5,000 years ago, the plow was invented, allowing people to farm the land more intensively and to cultivate larger plots. More food could be grown to feed more people, which was essential because there were many more people living on the planet. We call societies that use the plow agrarian societies 1