Re:Academic Drivel Report: Confessing my sins and exposing m...
by curveship on Friday February 26, 2016 @10:22PM
(#11185937)
Sure. This is actually a pretty standard summary of the shift away from structuralist social theories.
Social structures tend to be pretty stable: the same people and forces stay in power for a while. How should we think about that stability?
One way is to imagine that society is like a building: a solid structure that preserves those people and forces in power. It's stable because it's rigid, and time doesn't affect it much.
But there's a second option. Think of a standing wave in a river, like the kind that whitewater kayakers like to surf on: it's not rigid at all, but it's still "stable," welling up continually at the same spot.
So is our society structured like a building, or like a standing wave?
If we go with the standing wave idea, that brings up a lot of new questions. We start wondering about dynamics, flow and motion. We also start wondering about the river bottom: is there a big rock under there causing the wave, or does it just happen to emerge from the otherwise random arrangement of smaller rocks?
Social structures tend to be pretty stable: the same people and forces stay in power for a while. How should we think about that stability?
One way is to imagine that society is like a building: a solid structure that preserves those people and forces in power. It's stable because it's rigid, and time doesn't affect it much.
But there's a second option. Think of a standing wave in a river, like the kind that whitewater kayakers like to surf on: it's not rigid at all, but it's still "stable," welling up continually at the same spot.
So is our society structured like a building, or like a standing wave?
If we go with the standing wave idea, that brings up a lot of new questions. We start wondering about dynamics, flow and motion. We also start wondering about the river bottom: is there a big rock under there causing the wave, or does it just happen to emerge from the otherwise random arrangement of smaller rocks?