182                           STAGES   OF   THE   LIFE   CYCLE
accord with this pattern. There are many elements of strain, but on the whole they may be considered normal for this type of society. Furthermore, the patterns of reaction on the part of American youth also seem well within normal limits. Given the American value system we have outlined, it seems fair to conclude that youth cannot help giving a relative sanction to the general outline of society as it has come to be institutionalized. On the other hand, it is impossible for youth to be satisfied with the status quo, which must be treated only as a point of departure for the far higher attainments that are not only desirable but also obligatory.
Clearly, American youth is in a ferment. On the whole, this ferment seems to accord relatively well with the sociologist's expectations. It expresses many dissatisfactions with the current state of society, some of which are fully justified, others are of a more dubious validity. Yet the general orientation appears to be, not a basic alienation, but an eagerness to learn, to accept higher orders of responsibility, and to "fit," not in the sense of passive conformity, but in the sense of their readiness to work within the system, rather than in basic opposition to it. The future of American society and the future place of that society in the larger world appear to present in the main a challenge to American youth. To cope with that challenge, an intensive psychological preparation is now taking place.
8
The Link Between Character and Society
WITH Winston White
I.  RIESMAN'S APPROACH AS "WE SEE IT
AS INDICATED by the subtitle—^ Study of the Changing ~ American Character—Professor Riesman has addressed himself hi The Lonely Crowd to major trends in American society, with particular reference to the relation between character and social structure. "We find ourselves in general agreement that these major changes have had far-reaching implications for the socialization process and that they have significance for personality.
Our primary objective is to present an alternative interpretation of certain of these recent changes and their consequences. In an effort to clarify our areas of agreement as well as our points of departure, the first section of this essay will set forth our understanding of his main position without critical comment We will reserve our own opinions for the second section, where we will present our alternative approach. A third section will then look into some of the empirical issues we have raised.
The central structural focus in Professor Biesman's work, it seems to us, is the "link between character and society . . . the way in which society ensures some degree of conformity from the individuals who
Reprinted from Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, eds., Culture and Social Character, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961, pp. 89-135.
t84                        stages of the life cycle
make it up"1 and, reciprocally, the way in which individuals seek meaningful guidance from society. After pointing out the necessary abstractions one must make in talking about the "individual" and "society," Riesman sees this link as forged by three mechanisms, each one of which is characterized by a source of direction—tradition, inner, and other. Since these mechanisms link the individual and society, the typology of direction is at the same time applicable to either.2
Eiesman explicitly points out that all three types are universal, with no society or person ever wholly dependent on one; but any particular individual or society can be characterized by the one mechanism on which principal reliance is placed.3 "With respect to society, he sees an historical process of development from tradition- to inner-to other-direction that permits a fundamental analysis of why these mechanisms have succeeded one another as primary sources of direction>We want to sort out what we think are the basic reference points in his conception of that process, in order to show how they lead quite logically to his empirical conclusions, particularly to the salient features of other-directed society.
Historical Process
In the tradition-directed society, there is a high degree of ascription; status and its consequent relations of power are largely determined by birth, with a fusion of political, economic, and religious functions within the kinship nexus. Because of this ascription, both goals and their implementation through specific acts are prescribed to a much greater degree than in the subsequent stages of societal development. Riesman speaks here of the focus on "securing external behavioral conformity."*
With inner-direction these ascriptive ties begin to break down, for reasons we need not go into here except to say that they are broadly included in what Max Weber meant by the process of ra-
i. The Lonely Crowd, Doubleday, p. 20. References to The Lonely Crowd will be made to both the hard-cover (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950), and the paperback (New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1953) editions, in that order, unless the reference is to be found only in one (as in the above instance).
2.  Faces in the Crowd, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1952, p. 4.
3.  Ibid., p. 7.
4.  The Lonely Crowd, p. 15; 30.
The Link Between Character and Society                   185
tionalization. Increased personal mobility, expanding geographical frontiers, the development of market systems freed from particularistic relations, and rapid technological innovation, among other factors, necessitated greater freedom in the implementation of goals, an emancipation of goal-fulfillment from the specifications of a tradition that no longer proved adequate. But, although the goals changed, they remained inescapably destined—by the exigencies of an expanding society and economy—to acquire capital, master techniques, and the like. And such goals were implanted by parents and other adult authorities in the young, who—knowing their destination—had to arrive at it as best they could.
With the development of a highly industrialized society and its mature economy, the problems of production become relatively solved, the exigencies of financing and of technological advance routinized. What had previously been areas of daring innovation in an inner-directed society becomes institutionalized, "built into" society. The attainment of these goals by the society greatly diminishes them as a source of direction for the individual.
'. . . on the whole, contemporary society, especially America, no longer requires and rewards the old enterprise and the old zeal. This does not mean that the economic system itself is slowing down: total production may continue to rise; but it can be achieved by institutionalizing technological and organizational advance. . . . The invention and adoption of new improvements can be routinized, built into the system, so to speak, rather than into the men who run the system.5 In general, I think it can be said that many of the motives which were in earlier decades built into the character structure of individuals are now built into the institutional structure of corporate life.0
In this last stage, society becomes characterized by other-direction, wherein the individual looks to his peers—and those formidable peer-surrogates, the mass media—for his source of guidance. Here the goals are no longer set but ever shifting, and only the mechanism of direction itself remains. /
The goals toward which the other-directed person strives shift with that guidance; it is only the process of striving itself and the process of paying close attention to the signals from others that remain unaltered throughout life.7
5.  Individualism Reconsidered, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1954, p. 104.
6.  Ibid., p. 231.
7.  The Lonely Crowd, p. 22; 37.
186                           STAGES   OF   THE   LIFE   CYCLE
Order and Agency
In analyzing Riesman's scheme, we want to introduce two central reference points—order and agency. From the point of view of the individual, his behavior can be looked at as a choice—as Rostow has put it—among perceived alternatives. But in making a choice, the in-vidual necessarily applies some criteria of selection: why choose X when the choice of X necessarily means the rejection of Y and Z? Unless one wants to adopt the utilitarian position of assuming that such choices are made on the basis of individual criteria alone, a major source of criteria lies in the normative order of society, the shared expectations of what is considered desirable (ought to be desired). Indeed, Riesman's concept of direction takes cognizance of this aspect (although the other-directed case raises certain problems So be discussed later).
In addition, these societal criteria are transmitted by agents of socialization—by the extended,kinship nexus, by parents, or by peers. Riesman's typology of mechanisms collapses . these two reference points of order and agency into the single concept of source of direction. In sorting them out, we see a decrease in the specification of order and a shifting of primary agency as follows:
Source of Direction                            Order                            Agency
Tradition                             Goals and                            Kinship
their means
Inner                                   Goals only                           Parents
Other                                  Indeterminacy                      Peers
This is not to say that with this decrease in specification there is less conformity, but rather to say that societal processes and ensuing shifts of direction have made the content of that conformity more fluid, to the point that in other-direction its shifting structure becomes indeterminate. "We next want to look at the salient features of other-direction, using the underlying reference points we have suggested.
1. Indeterminacy of Order
In tradition-direction and inner-direction, societal criteria had a determinate structure in either traditional prescriptions or set goals. They had an order that was analytically independent of the agents who transmitted them. But in other-directed society, this order is
The Link Between Character and Society                 187
said to be greatly reduced. The content of conformity becomes so fluid and the changes so rapid8 that the other-directed person is hard-pressed to keep up with what it is he is supposed to conform to. His only guidance comes from signals from others like him, from the primary agents of socialization.
But this indeterminacy of structure in normative content also has the consequence of homogenizing the structure of the agents in the peer group, in that their role-relationships tend to be less functionally differentiated in terms of leadership and the like. Since conformity with a shifting content of expectations is problematical, the only reassurance that one is getting the proper guidance is approval "irrespective of content";9 thus no one member of the group can go too far in giving direction to others for fear of losing their approval. The group, then, is characterized by marginal leadership, by competing for approval.
The other-directed situation becomes a caricature of Cooley's looking-glass self, where peers reflect each other in infinite regression like mirrors on barbershop walls. The other-directed person is an agent himself for the agent he looks to. Riesman characterizes this suggested lack of structure by noting that "the other-directed person grows up in a much more amorphous social system, where alternative destinations cannot be clearly chosen at an early age."10 In the realm of consumption, he speaks of an "objectless craving" in which the craving itself "for the satisfactions others seem to have"11 transcends the craving for specific objects.
"Where in previous stages agents of direction (as in socialization) had been agents for a determinate structure of tradition or goals, they are now only agents for other agents. Order as an independent source of direction has disappeared, and other-direction relies on agency alone. Given this definition of the situation, Riesman quite rightly focuses on this aspect in the titles of Chapters 2 and 3: "... Changes in the Agents of Character Formation."12
The reliance on agency alone has an interesting parallel to the utilitarian conception of society, in which order was assumed to be random but a "natural identity of interests" was maintained by a metaphor of agency—"the invisible hand"  (to which Riesman al-
8.  Ibid., p. 26; 42.
9.  Ibid., p. 49; 66.
10.  Individualism Reconsidered, p. 105.
11.  The Lonely Crowd, p. 80; 100. f Italics in original.)
12.  Ibid., pp. 36, 84; 54,86.
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ludes).13 The conceptualization of other-direction implies, it seems to us, a recrudescence of utilitarianism, applied to the peer group. This is particularly evident in the realm of consumption.
2, Consumption, the Last Frontier
Riesman's analysis of the societal processes underlying the shift "from inner- to other-direction focuses on production, specifically economic production. When the solution of the problems of production becomes built into the system, the goals of production cease to be problematical for the individual and he turns to consumption. Where the inner-directed person pioneered on the frontier of production, the other-directed is "moving to the frontiers of consumption"11 —not just consumption of goods, but of words, images, and personal relationships themselves, particularly those aspects that deal with "the minutiae of taste or speech or emotion which are momentarily 'best.'"15 Approval is bestowed on those who embrace the momentarily right consumption preferences, the "fandoms and lingoes" of the peer group.10
Since these preferences are momentary and not seen as structured —as was production by the goals of attaining it—they are dominated by swings of fashion.17 "To escape the danger of a conviction for being different from the 'others' requires that one can be different— in look and talk and manner—from oneself as one was yesterday."18
Thus the only source of guidance that remains in other-direction is the approval by one's peers of shifting consumption preferences. Or, to put it in our terms, the only determinate reference point is the sanctioning by other agents of performances of an indeterminate nature. In the utilitarian conception, these sanctions become the "glad hand"10 that replaces the invisible hand; the consumption preferences of the group replace individual wants as "givens."
This aspect of increasing indeterminacy in consumption is crucial in its bearing on future process; that is to say, how can the previous shifts of direction, seen in the context of societal process, be ex-
13.  Ibid., p. 130; 151.
14.  Individualism Reconsidered, p. 211.
15.  Ibid., p. 105.
16.  The Lonely Crowd, Doubleday, p. 94,
17.  Ibid.,p.95.
18.  Ibid.
19.  The Lonely Crowd, pp. 130 ff; 151 8.
The Link Between Character and Society                 i8g
trapolated to possible future situations? With the institutionalization of production goals, no further direction of the individual from society seems possible other than the sanctioning of peer-agents. The "end-of-the-line" seems to have been reached. "Today, in the advanced industrial countries, there is only one frontier left—that of consumption."20 Where the individual formerly innovated on the frontier of production, he now adjusts to others on the last frontier —that of consumption.
Innovation has been routinized into the system and taken out of the hands of the men who run it. Institutionalization is thus interpreted as made at the expense of individuality, and the individual .has suffered a "loss of function."
... it is difficult, as an empirical matter, to decide who is autonomous when we are looking at the seemingly easy and permissive life of a social class [upper socioeconomic levels] in which there are no "problems" left, except for persons striving for autonomy.21
Given this interpretation, the individual must rely on himself for future direction by means of his autonomy; ". . . the other-directed person cannot proceed toward autonomy by any other route than that of self-awareness."23
By this, we do not interpret Riesman as saying flatly that innovation is no longer possible at the societal level, for he explores such possibilities in the realms of city planning, educational experimentation, and the like. Nor does he fail to point out persistently the rich variety of models for personal exploration and innovation already existent in the society. But he does seem to be saying that these are not sources of direction for the individual without his assertion of autonomy, without his transcending the limitations of other-direction.
3. Personal Relationships
The heavy reliance on peers as agents of direction, on agency itself as the sole remaining source of direction, emphasizes the importance of personal relationships in other-direction. The "hardness of the material" of inner-direction (hard because of structured goals?) is replaced by the "softness of men."23 This conceptual em-
20.  Individualism Reconsidered, p. 103.
21.   The Lonely Crowd, pp. 301-302; 294.
22.   Faces in the Crowd, p, 736.
23.   Ibid., p. 131; 152.
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STAGES   OF   THE   LIFE   CYCLE
phasis is strongly supported empirically by the increase, in general, of the division of labor launched in the inner-directed era, with the associated phenomena of urbanization, rise of bureaucratic structure, increase in the proportion of labor-intensive industries, and the like.
The necessity of coping with this proliferation of "others"—both at work and at play—and of seeking their approval is such that personal relationships in and of themselves become the main highway to self-definition, to identity; and in so doing, they tend to make other avenues seem like detours without guideposts. "The world of interpersonal relations almost obscures from view the world of physical nature "1 and the supernatural as the setting for the human drama."24 The peer-agents, engaged in socializing each other in consumption preferences, in the last analysis, consume their own membership.25
Socialization in the Other-Directed Society
A few more words will touch on the implications that these changes of direction in American society have for socialization, particularly the socializing agents—the family and the school and the peer group.
Other-directed parents, no longer able to instill in their child the unequivocal goals that an inner-directed society presented, "can only equip the child to do his best, whatever that may turn out to be. What is best is not in their control but in the hands of the school and peer group that will help locate the child eventually in the hierarchy."20 Since, in a changing world, they can no longer "hold themselves up as exemplars—when both they and the child know better,"27 they install something like a psychological radar set in him that will enable him to be sensitive to the guidance of others.
Thereafter, the parents influence the children's character only insofar as (a) their own signals mingle with others over the radar, (b) they can locate children in a certain social environment in order to alter to a very limited degree what signals they will receive, (c) they take the risks of a very partial and precarious censorship of incoming messages. Thus the parental role diminishes in importance as compared with the same role
24.  Faces in the Crowd, p. 7.
25.  The Lonely Crowd, p. 82; 102.
26.  Ibid., p. 48; 65.
27.  Ibid., p. 52; 70.
The Link Between Character and Society                   191
among the inner-directed.2B The family is no longer a closely knit unit to which [the child] belongs but merely a part of a wider social environment to which he early becomes attentive.20
"With the diminution of their authority, parents seek to retain what control they can by "manipulation in the form of reasoning,"30 or they may seek to "force the pace ... in the child's social life" as, for example, "stage managers for the meetings of three- and four-year-olds."91 There is, too, less discontinuity between the parents' lives and those of the children. The children have less privacy as anxious parents supervise their affairs, at the same time confronting them with the uncertainty of their supervision. The mass media, as an all-inclusive peer surrogate, beam their messages at the entire family, so that parents and children alike can participate in the discourse of consumption preferences.
In school, too, the social distance between teacher and pupil dwindles, with the manipulation of emotions and the socialization of taste and interest replacing the inner-directed style of impersonal stress on accomplishment.32 Teachers, increasingly, are taught "to be more concerned with the child's social and psychological adjustment than with his academic progress—indeed, to scan the intellectual performance for signs of social maladjustment. "33 They convey "to the children that what matters is not their industry or learning as such but their adjustment in the group, their cooperation, their (carefully stylized and limited) initiative and leadership."34
The curriculum tends to be more "realistic"—as in the emphasis on social studies—with' consumption of current affairs diminishing the time spent on more abstract pursuits. And here the subject matter may be vitiated by the effect of community vigilantes on vulnerable teachers. "Thus the children are supposed to learn democracy by underplaying the skills of intellect and overplaying the skills of gregariousness and amiabüity."35
These agents of socialization—the parents and the school—have, then, virtually abdicated their authority to the peer group, for it and
28.  Ibid.,p. 55; 14,
29.  Ibid., p. 26; 41.
30.  Ibid., p. 52; 70.
31.  Ibid., p. 70; 91.
32.  Ibid., pp. 60-64; 79-85. 33- Ibid., p. 60; 80.
34.  Ibid., p. 62; 83.
35.  Ibid., p. 64; 84.
192                           STAGES   OF   THE   LIFE   CYCLE
it alone can determine what is momentarily best and pass judgment on the child's ability to adjust. As agents for each other, the peers are now jury, now defendants; and the peer group becomes the primary and overwhelmingly significant agent of character formation. As it becomes increasingly uniform in age and class composition (because of ecological selection in suburban patterns of living), it increasingly demands submission of the individual to its criteria of taste and style of behavior. Individual performance, indeed, any manifestation of idiosyncratic variation is discouraged in favor of holding the correct preferences in common. The other-directed peer must keep solvent with "counters in a preferential method of relating oneself to others,"30 with approval as a sort of favorable credit rating.
Three characteristics seem to be salient in such a group. First, since only marginal differentiation is tolerated or even dared, leaders —although powerful—do not lead too far ahead lest the fate of the prematurely streamlined Chrysler overtake them. Second, the group exerts a tyranny over the individual in such a way that other alternatives of direction are seen as an escape from it. Thus the peer-group role does not complement other roles as much as it conflicts with them. It is a case of "peer group or else."
. . . we can distinguish conceptually between the needs of society (as a system of social organization) and those of environing groups (as a system of psychological ties and expectations). As so defined, society, the larger territorial organization, often provides the mechanisms by which the individual can be protected against the group, both by formal legal procedures as bills of rights, and by the fact that large-scale organization may permit the social mobility by which individuals can escape from any particular group.37
But even in a large-scale organization, the individual may find himself in yet another group where he perforce must manipulate and conciliate others. Thus escape from any particular group is likely to be an appointment in Samarra (a happy metaphor that Eiesman has used in another connection). The third characteristic, then, seems to be that such group-direction follows one throughout the stages of life, for occupational roles in labor-intensive industry are subject to the same exigencies of coping with the others. Riesman notes that even in consumption patterns the same mechanisms operate on adults and children alike. "The child may consume comics or toys
36.  The Lonely Crowd, Doubleday, p. 99-
37.  Individualism Reconsidered, p. 26.
The Link Bet-ween Character and Society                   193
while the adult consumes editorials and cars; more and more both consume in the same way."38 The following passage sums up:
The other-directed child, however, faces not only the requirement that he make good but also the problem of defining what good means. He finds that both the definition and evaluation of himself depend on the company he keeps. Approval itself, irrespective of content, becomes almost the only unequivocal good in this situation: one makes good when one is approved of. Thus all power, not merely some power, is in the hands of the actual or imaginary approving group, and the child learns from his parents' reaction to him that nothing in his character, no possession he owns, no inheritance of name or talent, no work he has done is valued for itself but only for its effect on others. Making good becomes almost equivalent to making friends, or at any rate the right kind of friends.30
II. AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
in the preceding section we have outlined our understanding of Professor Riesman's main position with reference to the relation between social structure and character in contempotary American society. We have indicated that there is an important area of agreement between us {i.e., Riesman and the authors of this paper), but our specific task in the present paper is to present, and relate to that of Riesman, an alternative interpretation of some of the salient empirical and theoretical problems involved in his position, particularly those concerning the relevance of values to these problems. The present section is devoted to the exposition of our own alternative view, while the third and final one will attempt to bring the comparison of the two to a head in relation to some of the empirical issues involved.
We would like to put the problem in terms of the concept of values In its relation, in the first instance, to the structure and functioning of the society, but also as a factor in the personality of the individual. We will start with a delineation of what we conceive to be the paramount American value-system and will proceed to a discussion of the ways and levels in which it is institutionalized in the structure of the society, with special reference to the areas of Professor Riesman's main concern: work in occupational roles, the family and consumption, and the social context of the development
38.  The Lonely Crowd, p. 80; pp. 100-101.
39.  Ibid,, p. 49; 66.
194                           STAGES   OF  THE  LIFE   CYCLE
of the individual personality, especially the role of the peer group in the latency and adolescent periods.
There is no clearly settled usage of the concept of value in sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and hence of the ways in which it is to be used in the analysis of social and personality systems. "We cannot take space for an exegetical discussion of different usages here, so will confine ourselves to setting forth our own view as clearly as possible and juxtaposing this with that of BJesman.
First we follow Clyde ■ Kluckhohn in defining values as "conceptions of the desirable." Such conceptions are, in the first instance, part of a culture; they may, on the one hand, be more or less fully shared by the human individuals participating in the culture; the degree to which they are common to the members of a society or subsystem of it is clearly highly important. Secondly, on the other hand, they may, as conceptions, be more or less explicitly stated in verbal pronouncements. Often values have to be inferred from more diffuse or particularized attitudes and from behavior.
Next, we would assume that values are conceptions of the desirable at the highest level of generality that is applicable to the system of action in question. As we conceive them, they are not concerned with the internal differentiation of the object of evaluation or with the specificities of the situation either for the system as a whole or for subunits within it. Thus to "contain" the expansion of Communist influence in the world is not, in this terminology, a value of American society, but a policy goal of its government, as is, say, to raise the standard of living of the lowest income groups in the society. Similarly, for a personality, to "get to the office on time today" is not a value, but a goal. Otherwise the concept of value would tend to be identified with the specific normative content in the regulation of behavior in general.
Values, we assume, are located in the first instance in the culture. The first-order differentiation of values then concerns the primary classes of objects with which human action is inherently concerned. On the one hand this differentiation would apply to the valuation of the cultural patterns themselves and of the "nonempirical" references in relation to which they are grounded, on the other to the four great categories of empirical objects with which human beings are inevitably implicated, namely social systems, personalities, organisms, and the physical world.
Values we define as conceptions of the desirable type of object in
The Link Between Character and Society
T95
each of these categories. Social values, then, are conceptions of the desirable social system; personality values, of the desirable type of personality; and so on. They evaluate the type of society without reference either to its internal differentiation or to particularities of its situation; they are thus concerned only with the generic features of the relation of the system to the equally generic features of its situation.
A particularly important aspect of values for our present purposes concerns the self-valuation of a social object, i.e. a human individual or collectivity. In the case of a personality, this is his "ego-ideal" as a normative self-image. In the case of a social system it is the conception, held by members in common, of what is a good social system—in the most important case, a society good for them, whatever may be held to be good for others differently situated. In the personality case, we would speak of the values as internalized; in that of the social system, as institutionalized, which implies internalization as well, but not necessarily evenly over the population. The institutionalized values of a society thus constitute the conception of the good society as applied to their own society by its own members.
Using the concept of values for the social system in the above sense, we shall maintain two principal theses with respect to the American value system at the highest level of generality. The first is that there is, and for some time has been, a single relatively well integrated and fully institutionalized system of values in American society, and second, that at this most general level the value-system has not undergone a fundamental change in recent times.40 Our immediate concern is not with the empirical defense of these two theses, but with the delineation of what we conceive to be the main outline of this value system. Following this delineation we will discuss, only in broad outline because of limitations of space, the main trend of structural differentiation within the society in the recent
40. Most of the distinguished foreign observers of American society emphasize patterns that are consistent with this statement. Their statements are fully reviewed by S. M. Lipset, who also presents important independent evidence in "A Changing American Character?" in Culture and Social Character, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961, Chap. 7. Kluckhohn maintains the same thesis down to the decade of the 1930's; hence it is only for the most recent period that we are forced to differ with him. Our evidence for the thesis of continuity down to the present and the immediately foreseeable future will be presented below.
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periód and the types of strain and the concomitant patterns of deviant behavior associated with this very large-scale process. - "We have stated above that the primary roots of a system of social values lie in the cultural rather than the social system. In the American case this means, above all, in its religious heritage, centering on "ascetic" Protestantism—a proposition on which there seems now to be fairly wide agreement. Our task here is not, however, to attempt to analyze this heritage and its development, but rather, taking it for granted, to delineate the value-system at the social level and to test its fit with the facts of those areas of American social life that figure most prominently in Eiesman's work.
The most general formula we would propose for the value-system is that it represents, for the society as a system, an orientation of instrumental activism. "When we say "instrumental" we contrast it with "consurnrnatory." The society is conceived to be not an "end in itself" but rather an instrumentality to ends that in some sense are outside or beyond it. In terms of the cultural heritage, these ends have been defined in religious terms, the most important conception being that man, including his social organization, was to be conceived as the instrument of God's will. In secular terms it generally takes the form of what may be called a secular "individualism." The society exists in order to "facilitate" the achievement of the good life for individuals. A crucial question then concerns the content of this good life for the individual: is it in some sense "self-indulgence" or is it in turn his dedication to values and goals that are "above and beyond" his purely "personal" needs or interests?
It is at this point that the relevance of the other component of the system, what we call its "activism," becomes relevant. This essentially is to say that the society is conceived to have a moral mission and that, relative to this mission though not relative to the interests of the society as such {i.e., its "consurnrnatory" interests), the individual in turn is also conceived to be an instrumentality. In religious background terms again, this refers to' the Divine Will, which enjoins the building of a Kingdom of God on Earth. In secular terms, this becomes the building of a good society in which the primary obligation of the individual is achievement. Not every exhibition of "prowess," however, is valued; the achievement must be "worth while," and the criteria of worth-whileness must be found in some kind of "contribution" to the building (not merely the maintenance) of the good society.
The Link Between Character and Society                 197
The term "activism" as used above was meant, as a characterization of a set of values for a social system, to refer to an orientation to active mastery of its external situation in an empirical sense of situation. Though indirectly including the physical environment and other societies, in the most direct sense, in analytical terms, "situation" here means the motivations and behavior of the human individuals who are members of the society itself. We interpret active mastery to mean essentially the mobilization of resources, among which the commitments of individuals occupy the key place, in the interest of a mission for the society that is not defined as the "gratification" of individual wishes in the usual psychological sense.
But does this "mission" imply a goal for the society if not for the individual? This is in one sense a semantic issue. If the question refers to a source of leverage on the individual, who is expected in-strumentally to serve an interest beyond himself, the answer is clearly yes. On the other hand, we prefer to reserve the term "goal," as applied to the society as a system, for a specific state of affairs, toward the attainment of which the system as such is conceived to be striving and which, when attained, is conceived as a definitive realization of the "desirable" for the society. Communist societies, for example, may be conceived as oriented toward such a goal: the achievement of the state of "communism." The American value-system, however, does not imply the primacy of such a goal. Its values place the unit of the system, in particular the individual, in an instrumental position. His goal cannot be self-indulgence or the maximization of the gratification of his personal wishes, but must be achievement in the interest of the good society. The society itself does not, however, tend toward a specific goal, but rather to a prospect of progressive improvement of the level of realization of its values.
What may be called instrumental or institutionalized individualism is therefore a very important keynote of the American value system. What we have in mind must, however, be clearly distinguished from the "utilitarian" version of individualism which has played such an important part in the intellectual history of the English-speaking peoples. Instrumental individualism differs from the latter on two counts. First, the utilitarian version, by postulating the givenness of the individual's wants, does not take account of the element of activism that we have emphasized; there is simply no basis of an obligation to achievement rather than  an  orientation to hedonistic enjoyment.
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Secondly, there are no adequate criteria of the "worth-whileness of individual goals and action; these are left to the theoretically arbitrary discretion of the individual. Instrumental individualism, on the other hand, imposes the obligation of contribution to the goodness of the society. For the individual this means, first, the obligation of commitment to an instrumental role and, second, that the criteria of what is worth while are socially given. Whereas the implementation of his obligation is left very largely within his own discretion, the normative criteria that define it are not; they are institutionalized. It is in this direction that we will have to look for the component of order in the most recent phases of American social development, which we think Riesman overlooks.
There is one further implication of our position on values which needs to be brought out before we take up some of the complexities of their institutionalization in the society. There is no question in our minds that the obligation of individual achievement is paramount at that level. But the criteria of worth-whileness involve contribution to the functioning of a certain kind of society. Hence there is no presumption that a particular contribution that can be identified as "purely individual" has any precedence over one that is on some level collective. In value terms, there is no basis of choice as to whether contribution through collective organization or "independently" of such organization is better; it is a pragmatic question depending on the more specific nature of the contribution and the situational circumstances. Thus if economic production is valued and if it is more effective in large organizations,* we should have large organizations. It is, however, true that the absence of a specific definitive goal for the society as a system precludes the primacy of the over-all paramount collectivity in organizing all activity in the society. But this is a special case and does not imply that at many intermediate levels collective organization stands in opposition to the value-system; on the contrary it receives a powerful legitimation,
Structural Differentiation
V/e have noted above that the value-system for a society is couched on a level of generality such that it can define only the generic type of society in relation to a generic type of situation. As such it cannot, without further specification, serve as an adequate
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guide for the conduct of individuals or collectivities as units of the system. In dealing with the problem of normative specification we come to a central point of our argument; this is that the mode and level of specification required for normative integration of a society, for order in the regulation of the action of its units, is a function not only of its value-system, but of its more detailed structure, in particular of the kinds and levels of differentiation of that structure. Structural differentiation is, however, a function of several variables other than the value-system, and can change independently of any change in the value-system itself. One of our principal theses about American society is that, whereas the paramount value-system has (as we believe) remained stable, the structure of the society has been undergoing a major process of differentiation. We believe that a major part of the phenomena that form the center of the analyses of Riesman, Kluckhohn, and others are results of these structural changes and can be analyzed in terms, not of the breakdown or dis- • appearance of the component of normative order, or of a new one at the general-value level, but of new specifications of the general value-system, in relation to new structural and situational conditions. Another component, about which we will also have something to say, is the malintegration which is a necessary concomitant of extensive and rapid structural change.
Here, both for reasons of space and because the levels of specification called for are a function of particular modes and levels of differentiation, we propose only to outline the most general principles according to which the analysis of specification should be carried out, then to move over directly to some problems of empirical interpretation of the relevant aspects of American society.
The Inner-Directed Case
It may be useful to couch the beginning of this discussion in terms of Rjesman's own scheme of analysis as outlined above. It is our view that the specifications of expected conduct for units of the social structure in the tradition-directed case include, and indeed focus at, the lowest level of specification—namely that of the specific procedures that should be taken in the attainment of institutionalized unit goals. Every social system must institutionalize a normative order in this area, but we feel that the most important range of variability
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is that of the level of generality at which this order is institutionalized. In the traditionalistic society, to a far higher degree than in others, units, both collective and individual, must fulfill detailed prescriptions of what they should do. In the course of the evolution that Biesman outlines, these detailed prescriptions are suspended; it is left up to the unit to decide the "what" in the sense of how to proceed to a goal. But we think we differ from Riesman in interpreting what this means. If we interpret him correctly, he seems to suggest that the inner-directed unit is left without institutional guidance in the area of procedures, of mobilization and utilization of facilities. Our view is rather that he is still given guidance, but of a different kind on a different level, one that increases the stress of his own responsibility.
What come to be institutionalized are no longer the specific procedures to be taken, but certain more generalized criteria for the choice of specific procedures. The crucial case here is the criterion of economic rationality, which states in general that value of yield should be related to cost, so that a commitment involving excessive cost in relation to probable yield should be avoided. There are many complex questions concerning the relation of this pattern to social structure, particularly respecting markets and the monetary system. In our opinion, however, there is little doubt that, while the institutionalization of norms in this area has necessitated breakdown of more specific normative prescriptions, this breakdown is only one side of the coin. The other side is the new development of positive institutionalization of generalized normative criteria that make it possible to handle a situation in which both the resources and the destinations of production are far more mobile than in a tradition-directed situation.
Perhaps we are not far wrong in feeling that the prototype of Eiesman's inner-directed man is the nineteenth-century business entrepreneur. By contrast with earlier forms of the organization of economic production, the classic entrepreneur was precisely characterized by independence from the detailed prescriptions of earlier tradition. He enjoyed a wider margin of freedom and concomitant responsibility. But this did not occur without positive institutionaliza-ton of the more generalized criteria by which he was expected to operate.
Our understanding of the nature of this new institutionalization
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fits with Eiesman's formula for the case. It is that a set of goals had become institutionalized, and hence internalized in the personality of the individual. In the paradigmatic case of the entrepreneur, this is the dual goal of contribution to productivity of the economy and the measurement of success in this endeavor by the symbol of profit. "Whatever the qualifications that must be made about the adequacy of the profit criterion in a free-enterprise economy, and they are many and serious, in the broadest sense we contend that this is precisely the core of the set of mechanisms that made possible a relative integration of a competitive market economy, in part through the institutionalization of the dual goal of production and profit. It is true that this could be metaphorically described by Adam Smith's famous figure of the "invisible hand." But since Durkheim, though the mechanisms are invisible to the ordinary person, we need not represent them as the operation of a "supernatural" agency; they are empirically understandable in terms of our general knowledge of social systems. They quite definitely include patterns of normative order defining not only goals, but acceptable ways of going about attaining them.
There is, however, an important sociological qualification that must be entered to the formula that it was "the individual" who was the primary focus of this internalized productive-achievement goal. The primarily structural context of this type of achievement was the family firm, which is still predominant in the small business sector of the economy today. Above all it was the commitment of family property and fortunes to the enterprise, in a sense structurally different from commitment to an, occupational role today, which was the main focus of responsibility.
In our analytical terms the emergence of entrepreneurial free enterprise represented above all the differentiation of a major sector of the society, where economic primacy could have far wider scope than in earlier types of social organization. This has meant that the differentiated values of the economy as a subsystem of the society could predominate in this area and be more directly internalized in the personalities of those responsible for it. And one major aspect of this differentiation was in turn the emancipation of the entrepreneur from a whole range of the traditionalistic restrictions that bound his predecessors in leadership of productive functions, but another was the institutionalization of a more generalized normative order.
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The Other-Directed Case
Let us now apply the same analytical logic to the next phase in ■Biesmarľs series, the shift from inner- to other-direction. Here our thesis is that in the main structure of the American economy, and with special reference to the bearing of this on the system of occupational roles more generally, the primary incidence of patterns of order has moved up still another step in the scale of levels of generality. This means that certain earlier bases of institutionalized prescription have dropped out; therefore it is quite correct to say that on one level previous institutionalized guides to conduct for the individual have been lost. At the individual level we think it is broadly correct to say that a very general goal of "success" has tended to become the predominant one. We would, however, insist that it has the same basic duality of structure that characterized the goal of the entrepreneur; it is a goal of achievement on the one hand, of symbolic recognition of that achievement on the other. Recognition of success or approval is the equivalent, for the new phase, of profit for the older one.
To interpret this statement it is essential to see the occupational role of the individual in its structural setting. On the one hand, in the pace-setting aspects of the social structure, the burden of full responsibility for producing a marketable41 product is no longer typically taken by "the individual" but by an organization. The decisions are made by individuals, but in their capacities as officers of the organization. Business entrepreneurs, like many others, perform their functions predominantly in occupational roles. Their personal return is not "profit" in the older economic sense, but occupational remuneration, which is an individualized success-symbol as well as, of course, an essential facility for household maintenance.
This seems to be the context to which Riesman refers when he speaks of the productivity function having become institutionalized in the society. "What we disagree with is simply the possible implication that somehow the new system can operate on a lower level of average individual responsibility than was the case before; we believe the exact opposite to be true.
It is also important to note that the rapidly increasing develop-
41. We mean this in a broader sense than that of economic primacy alone. Higher education is "marketed" to students, even though not financed on "business" principles.
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ment of a system of occupational roles make possible the great extension of certain principles of social organization beyond the business sphere. This is to say that, in the business case, the "profit-orientation" no longer applies in the old sense to "the individual" but is transferred to the firm as a complex organization. Other organizations are not governed by a primacy of profit orientation in this sense, e.g. governmental agencies, educational organizations, hospitals, and clinics, to say nothing of churches and families. But for the individual it becomes increasingly indifferent what the "goal" of the employing organization may be, in the sense that the social structuring of his role can be treated as, to a substantial degree, independent of that goal.42 Thus engineers are employed by business concerns, but also by various governmental, educational, and research organizations. Salary in all. these cases is an important measure of past or expected achievement level, but this does not define expectations for the organization so much as for the role.
Essentially what has happened is that a level of social structure, the operating organization or collectivity, has developed between the basic social function, which defines what we interpret to be "goals" in Kiesman's sense, and the role-expectations applying to the individual. It follows that this order of goals can no longer be directly the individual's responsibility, and cannot be directly specified to him as part of his preparation for his role.
A corresponding process of differentiation has gone on in the other aspect of the individual's role-participation. "We stressed above that the classical entrepreneur was the head of a family business. Here neither the property interests nor the fortunes of the kinship unit were dissociated from the productive organization except at the lower, the "employee," level. In the phase of structural differentiation with which we are here concerned, the organization responsible for the primary functional contribution to the society becomes dissociated from the "consumption" interests of those involved in it. It is of course true that the institutionalization of occupational roles means that the family becomes overwhelmingly dependent on the occupational income of its employed members for its standard of living. But this is a very different matter from the kinship unit itself acting as a productive unit. The family does not stand or fall by the
42. By "goal" here we mean essentially what Barnard meant by "organization purpose" (cf. C. I, Barnard, The Functions of the Executive, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1938).
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fortunes of this particular productive unit, but "labor" at these levels has become a mobile resource transferable from one unit to another. Hence not only is the typical employed individual not the focal center of a direct productive unit, but he must function in the occupational world in a role that is far more independent of the kinship base in which he occupies an ascribed position than had previously been the case. This applies above all from generation to generation; the imperatives of the organization preclude guaranteeing generational succession in particular roles, even though the same occupational categories may be acceptable. But it also means that the household must be structurally "segregated" from the occupational organization, in a much more radical sense, than was previously the case.
What are the implications of this for the element of order we have emphasized? In the first place the expectations of order most directly relevant to primary social function, such as economic production, no longer confront "the individual" so directly; his personal goals are not directly of this order. They have been transferred to the employing collectivity so that, even where an individual takes high responsibility, for the operation of such a collectivity, it is on its behalf, not on his own behalf, that he takes it. This shift does not mean that operation ceases to be dependent on individuals, but that the mechanisms through which this dependence works out have changed. The sociological conclusion that the regulative functions of normative order are just as vital and just as definitely operative in the new society as in the old seems to us to be inescapable.
Conversely, a new order of structural differentiation between production and consumption has entered in. The household unit, even in the higher groups, is no longer in the same sense as before a productive unit, in the economic and certain other occupationally relevant senses. Consumption has, in this sense, been "set free" from a set of constraints previously operating upon it.
The individual is in a sense left "in the middle." On the one hand, his personal occupational goals have become structurally differentiated from the goals of the employing organization. He cannot in a one-to-one sense "identify" with them. On the other hand, these same occupational goals and interests have become differentiated from his household and kinship associations, so that they cannot in the old sense be identified with the goals of the family either.
Hence it is quite correct to say that two older elements of order
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that have defined expectations for a strategic class of individuals have been weakened in their direct impact on him But this is not to say that the functions previously performed by these elements of order have ceased to be performed, or are today performed, if at all, only in terms of a radically different system of generalized values. One set of functions of order is, as we have suggested, to be found in the restructuring of the family, which we will discuss presently. . But we feel also that there has been a new structure of order developing in the sphere of the occupational expectations of the individual, which has been filling the gap left by the changes Kiesman has emphasized. To see the main outline of this new order, it is necessary to say something of the general trends of change of the American occupational and educational systems.
The Occupational System
"We may say that three primary processes of change in the occupational system have been going on, which may be called, respectively, quantitative expansion, differentiation, and qualitative upgrading. By expansion we mean, relative to the population of working age, the increasing proportion performing structurally differentiated occupational roles in the above sense, not only "in the labor force" in the statistical sense, but in roles that are structurally segregated from nonoccupational contexts, particularly those of kinship. Perhaps the largest single contribution to this expansion has come from the immense relative decline in the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture; since the family farm is the basic unit of agricultural production, this case will illustrate our meaning.
The second fundamental process of change has been one of qualitative differentiation. If it was ever possible to say reasonably, as the Marxists have, that the only two important types of occupation besides agriculture were those of proprietor of a business enterprise and worker employed in one, that time has long passed for our type of society. Perhaps the most important single direction of differentiation has b een in the immense proliferation of technical occupational roles. Though still quantitatively only a small proportion of the total labor force, strategically the most important of these have been the professional roles, which have been the fastest-growing category of all. Among these, in turn, the roles involved in scientific investigation, in training in the pure and applied sciences,
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and in the practical uses of science are the most prominent. As part of what we just referred to as "expansion" it is notable to what extent the study and the management of human relations and personality have become the object of differentiated occupational
roles.
A close second to the technical roles in differentiation are those that may be called "executive" or in some sense "managerial," which have emerged in many different fields and of course at many different levels. Naturally, this type of differentiation is the consequence and concomitant of the immense proliferation of increasingly large-scale organization within the society. There are complex patterns of overlap between what we are calling technical and executive role-types, e.g.j the person trained as an engineer or a lawyer functioning as a business or governmental administrator. But there cannot be any doubt that both the differentiation of executive from technical roles and the internal differentiation of the latter category have proceeded a very long way in even the last half-century.
The third most important aspect of differentiation has probably been the "occupationalizing" of many functions that previously were handled within functionally diffuse social structures, such as kinship and the local community. The whole field of social and personal relations, on which we will comment presently, is one of them; another very important one is the field of communications, perhaps particularly where content is only peripherally "utilitarian."
By "upgrading" we mean the process by which the general levels of "-competence and responsibility required for adequate occupational role-performance have been rising. For the case of responsibility the most important indices lie at two levels: first the scale of organization, and second the replacement of traditionalistic norms in inter-organizational relations by generalized normative patterns that leave much determination to be reached by explicit decision-making processes. In the former context it is important to bear in mind that not only do large organizations require a very high level of responsibility on the part of their "top" executives, but that as they become more complex, the number of echelons requiring substantial levels of such responsibility increases. We feel confident that a careful analysis would reveal that in contemporary organizations not only larger absolute numbers, but larger proportions of those involved are carrying more complex decision-making responsibilities than was true fifty years ago. Then, in the interorganizational field, the very
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fact that the automatisms of the ideal type of pure economic competition cannot be relied upon means that very complex processes of adjustment and regulation must continually be going on.
In the technical fields the most tangible indices of the change are the levels and spread of qualifications of training for occupational functions. It is true both that higher levels than were ever before required have become commonplace, and that the range of incidence of such qualifications has immensely widened. The relevance of this to the educational system is obvious and will be briefly discussed presently.
The above shifts are most conspicuous at or near the top of the occupational pyramid. An equally significant process has been going on at and near the bottom. In broad terms, this is the elimination of an immense proportion of the previous lowest-level occupational functions and roles. One of the most notable phenomena in this field is the fact that, after the 1920's, the proportion of the labor force engaged as "workers" in manufacturing industry steadily declined in spite of the immense increases in manufacturing production. This shift and the corresponding ones in other areas have been the product of mechanization, and now "automation," and also of improved organization of the work process. Now, not only have most of the older unskilled "pick-and-shovel" type jobs been eliminated, but an increasing proportion of the "semiskilled" machine-tending and assembly-line types of jobs have followed them.
It is our general contention, then, that an occupational system that has generalized the occupational role-type farther than ever before, that has become immensely differentiated and greatly upgraded in average levels of competence and responsibility, cannot be making lower rather than higher demands on the individual persons who participate in it. First, the performance of functions within diffuse social structures is very generally accompanied by a larger proportion of ascriptive specification of processes than in occupational contexts. Second, differentiation of the system automatically, produces more complex problems of integration of the highly differentiated parts than before; and third, the highest levels of functional requirement, in contexts both of technical and of organizational responsibility, require independence, initiative, and responsibility on higher levels than before.
If this be true, then we think it follows that such a system must and does involve both institutionalization of determinate normative
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culture in the society and internalization in personalities, at higher and on the whole firmer levels than before.
On the societal level, the relevant normative patterns are to be looked for in three main places. The first of these is in the standards of competence which operate predominantly in the technical aspects of occupational role-functions. Increasingly these standards are rooted in the sciences and applied from this source to the various fields of operation. Not only have the older sciences been rapidly developing, but the range of science has been expanding so that a larger and larger proportion of the field of social action has been covered by such standards. The second area is that most directly involved in organizational responsibility, the normative structure relevant to the "good"—good in the sense both of effectiveness and of compatibility with the social interest—conduct of organizations. Because of the general process of differentiation, this organizational responsibility is . a special concern of a smaller proportion of the labor force, but in the society it has become a more rather than less prominent area of concern. Finally, the third primary point of incidence of this normative culture is that at. which these many functions have to be integrated in the interest of the society as a whole. "We feel that the law as a system is very crucial on this level, and it surely cannot be said that concern with law is atrophying in our society. Law, however, does not exhaust this category. Other examples that fit in the same general category are important areas of political functioning and of the operation of "fiduciary" functions.
If, then, we contend that a restructured, more generalized normative order has become an increasing instead of diminishing source of "direction" to individuals' action, how do we conceive its relation to that "direction"? With Riesman, we think it is fruitful to treat the problem in the context of the process of socialization. The best introduction to the structural setting of this process is, we feel, a brief sketch of some highlights of the educational system in the United States and of the altered structural position of the family, since, in our opinion, these are the two primary agencies of the socialization function.
Some Highlights of American Education
The same general classification of processes that we used in connection with the occupational system is also applicable to educa-
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tion. There have been processes of expansion, of differentiation, and of upgrading.
Since something approaching universal primary education, at least in the earlier grades, was achieved more than half a century ago in this country, the most conspicuous expansion has occurred at the higher educational levels—and here we mean expansion relative to the size of the age-cohorts, not the component resulting from increase of population as such. This expansion has gone on all along the line. Whereas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was still a minority, about 35 per cent, who had any secondary education at all, recently it can be said that over SO per cent have completed a high-school course. It seems that we are approaching a situation where only a residual minority, who are essentially "defectives" of some sort, will do without a high-school education.
In the meantime, the proportion going on from high school to some kind of college has also steadily increased, now having reached the neighborhood of 35 per cent. And though, of course, the percentages are much smaller, the same general trend is not only conspicuous, but most rapid, at the highest level of all, namely postgraduate training of some professional or semiprofessional character.
This process of expansion is quite clearly at the same time a very notable process of upgrading. Whereas up to about the end of World War I it could be said that there was still a considerable problem of illiteracy in this country, this has almost disappeared. As noted, the normal minimum is approaching completion of high school, and the college sector, already about one third of the cohort, is rising steadily,43 to say nothing of the postcollege level.
It is in the nature of formal education that in the earlier stages it should be relatively undifferentiated. The common foundation of the three R's has to be shared by all. But by essentially the same token, the process of expansion and upgrading is almost by definition at the same time a process of differentiation. As the scale is pushed upward
43, It has frequently- been alleged chat this immense quantitative expansion of the educational system has been accompanied by a serious decline of qualitative standards. This is a complex question. Recently, however, Lipset (op. cit.) has surveyed the available evidence, which is admittedly fragmentary, and finds no support for this view. Even if there were a moderate average decline of standards, the net result would be an impressive upgrading of the average educational level of the population. The burden of the proof would seem clearly to be on the side of those who claim, not only that there has been a decline, but that it has been so great as to cancel out the quantitative gains.
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there are not only on the average higher levels of educational attainment, but an increasingly wide variety of kinds. It is no accident that, at the same period when the university rather than the college came to constitute the upper layer of the educational system, the traditional rigid language-mathematics curriculum broke down. Perhaps President Eliot's elective system represented an extreme reaction, but the varieties of human learning were by that time too diverse to to be successfully contained in the older strait jacket of predominantly classical studies, particularly the rote-learning of dead languages. The counterpart of this is the immense development of postgraduate university studies, the bringing of medical and legal education into the university setting, and the enormous proliferation of the sciences and the many professions associated with them. The immense variety presented today by the offering of a "university college," like Harvard, Chicago, or the University of California at Berkeley, illustrates the point.
"Wnat then of the connection between education and future occupational role? Again there would seem to be no doubt about one major trend: that entrance to the higher occupational role-levels has been becoming increasingly dependent on educational qualifications. The myth about the superior virtues of the "school of hard knocks" attended by the man without "book-learning" still lingers and will doubtless be with us for a long time, but the facts of the realistic structure of opportunity do not bear the myth out.
Even in the business world, at least college attendance, distinctly preferably a bachelor's degree, is certainly an important if not yet essential prerequisite of a career. Indeed an increasingly important group of business executives now have postgraduate training, both in schools of business administration and in other professional fields, above all engineering and law. "What is true to this degree for business goes without saying for the proliferating technical specialties, where a career is clearly out of the question with only a high-school education.
This development on the positive side of the connection between education and occupational status is clearly complemented by the decreasing importance of ascriprive bases of higher occupational status, at least standing alone. It is of course true that children of the higher groups have important differential advantages in access to higher occupational and educational opportunity. But they must now go through the educational channel, whereas this was previously
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unnecessary, and they must measure up to the educational standards. And the universalization of the principles of educational achievement means that the same facilities also, with certain qualifications, become accessible to persons born without the advantages of ascriptive status. Otherwise how account for such phenomena as the extraordinary success story of the American Jew?
Not only is there, thus, a very close, indeed increasingly close, connection between educational attainment and future occupational career status, but there is solid evidence that academic attainment within the educational system is the principal selective mechanism that operates. Let us cite two kinds of evidence. First, a study of four thousand high-school boys in the Metropolitan Boston area, by Samuel Stouffer, Florence R. KLuckhohn, and Talcott Parsons, has shown unmistakably that the overwhelmingly predominant criterion of selection between those who do and do not go to college is the academic record of the pupil in school performance. It is interesting that the decision focuses primarily on entrance into the college preparatory course in senior high school (under New England conditions), and that it is made on the basis of achievement in primary school and the first year of junior high school. The influence of family socioeconomic status, which was carefully studied, does not operate independently of school record, but as a factor predisposing to good school records,44 and through this to occupational success.
The second type of evidence we have in mind concerns the process of selection operating between the college and the various graduate and professional schools. Here it seems to be abundantly clear that academic achievement counts very heavily indeed. The proportion of college graduates going on to postgraduate work has*
44. It is important also to point out that the results of this study do not bear out the common view, particularly put forward by Prof. Allison Davis of the University of Chicago, that school achievement is determined by middle-class values through the mechanism of systematic discrimination by teachers against lower-class children. The relation between ability (as measured by I.Q.) and school performance (as measured by grade records) remains essentially constant from the first grade through the high school. Hence unless the I.Q. tests themselves, as administered in the first grade, are the source of the bias, we have no evidence for its existence. It may be further noted that in this study approximately 50 per cent of the high-ability, lower-class boys in fact did go to college. It remains true that the loto-ability lower-class boy has a far smaller chance of going to college than does the low-ability higher-class boy. Thus it may be said that high status predisposes both to good school work and to occupational success, not to occupational success without good school work.
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as noted, been continually increasing. A general atmosphere of increasingly serious attention to studies in the colleges has been widely noted, particularly in the years since "World War II. In our opinion this is very directly related to the problem faced, in terms of their own ambitions, by an increasing proportion of students of securing admission to the graduate school of their choice.45
In general, therefore, corresponding to the occupational picture, we have an educational picture of rapid expansion, upgrading, and differentiation. In our view this picture is not consistent with the interpretation that internalized norms, values, and indeed goals have lessened in average importance for the typical individual going through the system. Above all, the educational picture is not consistent with the conception that normative patterns, inculcated by teachers and by the faculties of colleges and universities, are playing a smaller part than they did earlier in the orientation of the oncoming generation.
Trends in the American Family
Before approaching the problem of the role of the peer group in socialization, which is so central to Biesman's ideas, we must say something about the family. Our general view is that, in the time period under consideration, the American family has been undergoing an important process of restructuring, which is part of the more general process of differentiation we have been stressing. It has first become a much more differentiated unit than before, and hence its functions relative to those of other units have become more specialized. In the process, as always and necessarily happens, there has been a "loss of function" to other units, which include, at the childhood level, the school and peer group and to some extent the mass media, and at the adult level, above all economic organization and
45. Perhaps one example from personal experience is in order. When the senior author of this paper came to Harvard in 1927, any honors graduate of any reputable college could be admitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the social sciences without question. In the postwar years the Department of Social Relations has rejected approximately four out of five applicants who, on the older basis, would readily have gained admission. For graduates of Harvard College, not attaining the A.B. degree magna cum laude is almost fatal to chances of admission. See Talcott Parsons, Report to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on the First Ten Years of the Department of Social Relations, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, 1957.
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other occupationally organized types of units, such as hospitals, but also certain voluntary associations.
The most conspicuous change is the one already alluded to, where functions of economic production have been transferred to other units. Also, however, through private and social insurance and other agencies, even important parts of the older responsibility for financial security have been transferred. The broad result has been to concentrate family functions on what, in certain respects, may be called the highly personal relations of its members to each other.
Associated with this is the increasing structural "isolation" of the nuclear family. Seen in comparative terms, this is particularly conspicuous in the setting of kinship as such—relative, that is, to "extended" kinship relations. The new marriage establishes a unit, which in residence, economic support, and a wide variety of relationships, is independent of the families of orientation of both partners. This isolation is strongly reinforced by geographical mobility, since in a decreasing proportion of cases are the parents of either marriage partner resident in the same local community, especially at the neighborhood level. Isolation, however, in this sense, has the further aspect that there is far less continuity of neighborhood relations over long periods, to say nothing of that of generations, than in other societies or in our own past. It is the nuclear family that is the primary unit of our processes of social mobility in both the geographical and status senses.
These changes, which we interpret as primarily processes of structural differentiation, have not led to any general tendency to "dissolution" of the family; rather, we think, the contrary. Of this there are such evidences as, first, that the proportion of the population married and living with their spouses has increased rather than decreased; it now stands at the highest level in the history of census data. Second, the divorce rate, after reaching a peak after the war, has considerably receded. Third, home ownership of single-family dwellings is at an all-time high, with an immense relative as well as absolute increase since the war. Finally, fourth, the postdepression revival of the birth rate has persisted, so that it is no longer possible to interpret it as simply an economic recovery phenomenon. Indeed, the general "familistic" trend has gone so far that some of our ideological bellwethers are coming to view it with alarm, as evidence that interest in occupational concerns in declining. In this connection, whatever the masculine role, it is interesting, and in line with
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our general view, that this process of reinforcement of the nuclear family has coincided with a very large increase in the participation of married women in the labor force.40
- Our view, then, is that the family has become substantially further differentiated from other agencies in the social structure than previously. Its primary societal functions are now much more sharply defined than before: the socialization of children and the psychological or personality "tension-management" of its adult members. On this new structural basis, after a considerable period of crisis, it has now begun at least to be stabilized.
This restructuring of the relation of the family to the wider society has been accompanied by important internal changes, which involve the fundamental roles of the sexes and the generations in relation to each other and have an important bearing on the socialization function. The first of these is a shift in the balance of the sex roles, which is often, with only partial accuracy, described as a decline of masculine "authority." Our interpretation of the shift is that, broadly speaking, as the family has become a more specialized agency in terms of societal function, the "managerial" responsibility for the implementation of its functions has tended to become increasingly concentrated in the wife-mother role, whereas the husband-father has tended to assume more of a "fiduciary"—"chairman of the board"—type of role, concentrating his primary commitments more in the field of extrafamilial functions, particularly through his occupational role. This shift naturally appears to some as an "abdication" of masculine prerogative, but we think of it rather as an aspect of the "loss of function" which always accompanies processes of structural differentiation. Essentially, this is to say that the "average" woman is trained to be more of a specialist in "human relations" and the management of motivationally subtle psychological problems than is the average man (discounting of course the senses in which men on occupational bases can become higher-level experts in certain of these fields). The more that functions other than this type of management are dissociated from the family, the more a differentiated specifically feminine role comes into its own, and the more it is emancipated from an authority that was grounded
46. Cf. Manpower Commission, Report. The broad data on the family situation were summarized in Talcott Parsons and R. F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1955, Chap. 1. The trend since these data were brought together has been somewhat further in the same direcdon.
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in other functional imperatives, such as the maintenance of family property through business enterprise.
The related shift in the generation roles is, we feel, intimately connected with this. Essentially it is that the child is no longer to the same, extent placed in a situation to which he has to "adapt" in the sense of "conforming"; but his "problems" are more explicitly taken into account and made the object of more or less deliberate management. This is connected with the sex-role shift in that the average woman, both by virtue of her own socialization and by virtue of her actual role-responsibilities in the family, which include far more continual and intimate contact with the children, is better fitted than her husband to undertake the active management of these problems, so far as it is undertaken at all.
One aspect of the generation shift is, necessarily, greater permissiveness to children, more concern with them as persons. The crucial question is whether the essential feature of this aspect is the abdication of parental authority, and still more of responsibility, in the interest of letting children do anything they want, or is rather a new way of "leading" the child, rather than "forcing" him, to higher levels of growth through the internalization of social object-systems and patterns of normative culture. It is definitely our view that the latter is the main trend, though of course on the way there are many actual failures of responsibility.
If our interpretation is correct, then a very important apparent paradox must be faced. As a condition of building up motivation to the higher levels of autonomous and independent achievement, it is necessary to cultivate dependency in the relation of child to parent, at the appropriate stage. "We feel that the greater and more explicit emotional intensity of American family relations, particularly between mother and pre-oedipal child, is directly linked with the greater requirements that the child has to face later on in developing capacity for independent achievement without the guidance of specific parental role-models that could be presumed, in an earlier type of social situation, to be more nearly adequate.
Thus on the one hand, by cultivating intense attachments, the American family deprives the young child of the emotionally "cool" early independence conspicuous above all in the English family. But this dependency in turn is the psychological foundation on which is built a later autonomy that helps to equip him for facing situations that are specifically unstructured by comparison with our own earlier
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and other social systems. What seems to many foreigners to be the incredible leeway given to American latency-period and adolescent children is thus linked with the intensive concern of parents, particularly mothers, with the children's attachment to them, especially in the earlier periods. To us this is an instance of the increasing mobility of resources constituting one of the central conditions of the development of an industrial society.
Look, now, at the structural situation facing the child in these terms. In the pre-oedipal period within his own family he has been very intensively "enveloped" in a "close emotional corporation." The condition of such envelopment is the existence of a group, the members of which are bound to each other by essentially ascriptive ties, and who do not compete with one another. Then, first in the immediate neighborhood, the child is exposed to relations to others, with whom his parents have no ascriptive ties at alt—most definitely his playmates are not cousins, or even the children of close family friends, but are likely to be the children of relative strangers. Then, on entering school, he is exposed to a highly formalized process in which, regardless of sex and family relation, he must strive to achieve in a context where the judge is an impersonal teacher. It is crucial here that his achievement in the first few years of schooling will become the primary basis of his occupational future, which, in the American system, is the primary aspect of his total future as a person.47
Seen in this perspective, the recent changes in the American family may be said to be adjustments to the requirements of the type of society we have sketched above, as those requirements apply to the earlier stages of the socialization process for adult roles in that
47. Seen in this context, the nursery school is an interesting phenomenon. It may be regarded as a response primarily to two complementary pressures. One is the difficulty faced by the child in unregulated peer relations in the neighborhood. The other is the parents', above all the mother's, drive to get him started on independence, which we believe is only secondarily motivated by her understandable desire to "get him off her hands" for part of the time. Essentially what the nursery school does is to provide an opportunity for working out relationships to age-m&tes to whom the ascribed relation of siblings does not apply, but under adult supervision and without the process of formal evaluation of performance that is the critical feature of the regular school. It fits very directly into the analysis put forward by S. N. Eisenstadt (From Generation to Generation, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1956) concerning the mechanisms that must operate in mediating between the particularism of family involvements and the universalism of an achievement-oriented adult status system.
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society. There has indeed been quantitative expansion in the newer type of family function—witness the proportion married and with children. But most important for our purposes, there has been both differentiation and upgrading. Differentiation in the present context applies above all to the functions of the family relative to other agencies in the socialization process, notably after the early period: the school and the peer group. This we will take up presently. But the most important point to make here is that, in relation to its function in the socialization process, the American family has been subject to a quite definite upgrading process, not, as is so frequently suggested, a downgrading process.- The requirement of preparing the child for high levels of independence, competence, and responsibility means that as socializing agent the family .cannot do its job unless it emancipates its children from dependence on the parents, an emancipation that precludes parents from being too definite role-models for the child's own life course. What Eiesman interprets as the ab-dictation of the parents from their socializing responsibility can therefore be interpreted in exactly the opposite way. If parents attempted to impose their role-patterns in a detailed way on their children, they would be failing in their responsibilities in the light of the American value system.
The Continuity of the American Socialization Pattern
Particular attention should be called to the continuity of the main features of the socialization situation, from the pre-oedipal stages within the nuclear family to postgraduate professional training. The central keynote is training for achievement, conceived, as we have suggested above, in the first instance as contribution to the good society in the sense we have outlined. This contribution is to be made within an occupational system that has been coming to be progressively more widely expanded, more highly differentiated, and in general upgraded. Furthermore, as a result of this process, and of the attendant social mobility, the average time-interval between the laying of the motivational foundations of this achievement-orientation in the family and the actual commitment to occupational roles has been increasing, thereby decreasing the detailed and specific influence of parents in determining the commitment pattern.
We have maintained that the primary keynotes of the adult oc-
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cupational role, so far as these can be generalized relative to the immensely differentiated variety, are, besides the commitment to achievement as such, "independence," responsibility, and competence. Independence in the present sense refers above all to capacity to "alienate" the orientation of labor from undue attachment to functionally diffuse contexts of attachment, in the first instance delineating commitment to the job context independently of family, friendship, and the like. The meaning of competence would seem to be clear enough without further elaboration. By responsibility we mean, in the occupational context itself, psychological capacity to make decisions in accord with the relevant normative criteria as distinguished from undue vulnerability to the various internal and external pressures to evasion by the "easy" way.dB.
As we have noted, the development of the personality structure in which these motivational patterns are highly developed requires the temporary cultivation of high levels of emotional dependency. The most conspicuous j and best-documented case of this is the early dependency on the mother. This is associated with the motivational capacity necessary for the earlier phases of performance-learning, in the pre-oedipal period starting with the very basic motor and communication skills exemplified by walking and talking and their subsequent elaborations. The "dialectical" relation between dependency on the one hand, independence and achievement on the other, we believe does not cease with the oedipal period.
To be sure, the child becomes "emancipated" from his parents, through several stages, but most conspicuously in the early latency period and again in adolescence. "We suggest that the very com-pulsiveness of his attachments to his peer groups at those stages is an
48. We have chosen to stress the occupational role as the goal of che socialization process because of its strategic place in our social structure. Clearly not even for the most committed male is this exhaustive of his role-obligations, and it does not explicitly take account of the predominant factor in the feminine role. With respect to the latter it is undoubtedly significant that a larger and larger proportion of women in increasing proportions of the life cycle are indeed assuming occupational roles—as well as becoming more highly educated. But in addition to this, as an aspect of the differentiation of the family from other structures, there has been a change in the direction of "occupationalizating" familial roles, particularly for the adult woman. We feel that the concern for psychology, the "rationalizing" of child training and the like, fit into this pattern, _as do the more "material" aspects of home management. Similar considerations apply to other roles that have not become formally occupational, such as much "volunteer" community service.
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indirect expression of the severe psychological strains that the process entails. More broadly, we suggest that the school, with the performance-learning expectations associated with it, is the primary focus— in the structure of socialization agencies—of the pressure to learn independence and achievement; whereas the peer group tends to replace the parents, or more broadly the family of orientation, as the primary focus of the emotional support that is necessary if the effort exerted in competitive achievement is not to be too severely disorganizing to the developing personality.
On these grounds we would expect that, as a consequence of the general process of differentiation and upgrading in the occupational and education spheres, there would appear, in addition to the phenomena of those spheres we have reviewed, a more prominent and more differentiated set of peer-group expectations and interactions than was characteristic of an earlier type of social system. Broadly, from the psychological point of view, this peer-group structure tends to fulfill one set of needs that are prominently involved in the socialization process, and is in this respect the primáry successor of the more supportive and nurturant aspects of the family functions, which of course tend to be centered primarily in the maternal role. Furthermore, as noted, we think that these phenomena are most prominent at two different phases. The first is the early latency period, in which the crucial phenomenon is the one-sex peer group. This may be regarded as a mechanism of reinforcement of the ascription of sex-role, the primary structuring of which was a central aspect of the oedipal period itself; one might say it was a mechanism for carrying over this structure from the familial to the extrafamilial context, thereby generalizing sex-role commitment. The second is the adolescent peer group, where the primary pattern of independence from the family has already become established, and the "problem" is that of mobilization of motivational resources for the decisive phase in which both occupational role and marriage commitment are to be worked out, notably, by contrast both with our own past and with most other societies, independently of the family, of orientation.
It is our main contention that the phenomena of peer groups in our society should not be treated in isolation but should be seen in the context of their relation to the educational and occupational systems on the one hand, to the family on the other. In interpreting them it should be remembered that the child who is a peer-group
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member is at the same time in school as well as typically living at home and economically dependent on his family; and that he is, with increasing self-consciousness, looking forward to a place xn the adult world—for the boy, above all his own position, for the girl, partly her own but more decisively that of her prospective husband. Furthermore the family lies not only behind him in the form of his family of orientation but also ahead of him as his own prospective family of procreation. His "job" is not only to internalize the values and orientations of his family of orientation, but to adapt himself to the exigencies of the educational system and to treat these, by both conscious and unconscious mechanisms, in relation to his future in both occupational and familiar terms. Seen in this way, we do not think that the phenomena of peer-group behavior and orientation, which Riesman emphasizes so strongly, are—with certain empirical corrections, which we will discuss presently—in conflict with the interpretation of American social development we have sketched in this section; but that they find their place as an important part of that development, which can be "retrospectively predicted" on the basis of sociological analysis.
III. SOME EMPIRICAL ISSUES
LET us turn now to a few of the issues of the interpretation of empirical phenomena of American society highlighting the similarities and differences between Riesman's interpretations and our own. These are deliberately selected as issues where the empirical consequences of our respective conceptual analyses come to focus. They are hence, with respect to the society as a whole, selective rather than broadly representative. For this purpose we have chosen three interconnected issues. The first of these is the problem of the nature and place of the peer group in American society, particularly the adolescent peer group. The second is the place of consumption relative to production, not only in the structure of the economy as such, but in the articulation of the economy with the rest of the society. Finally, the third is the broader problem of the relation of the capacities, values, and attitudes of the individual personality—his "character"—to the pattern of functioning of our type of society, which is involved in Riesman's emphasis on the growing importance of "personal relations."
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The Place of the Adolescent Peer Group
. We have already given the main points of reference for our interpretation of this problem. Our main thesis is that the emergence of youth culture and peer groups is part of the general process of structural differentiation that has been going on in American society under the relatively stable general system of values we have sketched, and that within this framework the peer group has assumed a place that is complementary to that of the school on the one hand, the family on the other, in the differentiated subsystem of the society having to do with the socialization process. "Within this subsystem, in turn, we feel that broadly the peer group represents patterns of orientation that are secondary to the main patterns, which are those of the system of formal education. In this context, we feel that the main difficulty with Riesman's position is that he tends to "reify" the peer group, as if it were the overwhelmingly predominant factor in socialization and constituted a kind of microcosm of the emerging adult "other-directed" society.
Within this more general framework, we would like further to suggest that internally the typical peer gtoup is more definitely structured about a normative culture of its own than Riesman's formulations imply, and that its members mutually control one another in terms of these values and norms. Secondly, we suggest that this structure of the peer group is typically more closely integrated both with school norms and with parental expectations than he indicates. Finally, third, we would like to suggest a formulation of certain broad social mechanisms by which peer groups, more broadly the youth culture, operate to facilitate the process of socialization and the allocation of new members within the status system of the society.
Internal Structure. Riley, Riley, and Moore,40 in a study of 2500 high-school adolescents, gathered data about their subjects' attitudes toward a variety of youth situations—peer relations, school wotk, and outside interests. They found that their adolescent peer groups were relatively determinately structured with respect to institutionalized norms; the peers' attitudes revealed a clear differentiation between approved and disapproved patterns of behavior. While such "other-directed" traits as popularity and friendliness were prominent
49, See Matilda White Kiley, John W. Riley, Jr., and Mary E. Moore, "Adolescent Values and the Riesman Typology," in S. M. Lipset and L. Lowenthal, op, cit., Chap. 16.
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among approved traits, so also were other traits of a less ad hoc nature (to be discussed later).
Another study of the same subjects by Riley and Cohn50 gives strong evidence that the peer groups studied are also determinately structured with respect to differentiated roles, particularly with respect to social control. The subjects were asked whom among their peers they liked and whom they disliked, and then to describe those named in terms of conformist and/or deviant traits.
As might be expected, the attribution of conformist traits was more likely to go with liking, of deviant with disliking—even with respect to the same person when named by both Ulcers and dislikers. Further, there is important evidence of the existence of consensus on norms in the fact that the more widely a group member is liked, the more likely he is to be described as having conformist traits; the more widely disliked, the more deviant. Conformity with group norms did indeed elicit approval, as others—Jennings and Blau, for example— have shown.
But Riley and Cohn went on to show that the relation between approval and conformity was no simple matter, for their data also revealed that those who were widely liked by many of their peers were also relatively widely disliked by others. Likability and dis-likability were not merely poles on a single continuum, nor were peers perceived with unalloyed consensus. There was a definite status hierarchy (supported in addition by independent variables) in terms of the combination of being liked and disliked, being considered conformist and deviant.
All group members were differentially perceived by others, and these differentiated perceptions served the complementary functions of rewarding conformity and punishing deviance. Social control in the group operated through a determinate system of role-differentiations, oriented to the shared normative culture.
These findings should be sufficient to suggest that these peer groups are not unstructured in either the role-differentiation or the normative senses. They possess a relatively definite set of patterns of institutionalized norms, which are upheld by a complex set of sanctioning mechanisms. The individual member is not left without criteria to guide him as to what behavior is and is not approved in the
50. Matilda "White Riley and Richard Cohn, "Control Networks in Informal Groups," Socwmetry, 21   (March, 1958), 30-49.
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group. And though the group is fairly permissive in permitting a considerable range of tolerated behavior, there are definite rewards for conforming and punishments for deviant behavior. The essential point is that "approval" is not left completely "free-floating," but is bound down to fairly definite normative criteria.
Articulation with Norms outside the Peer Group, If the peer group is organized about a fairly definite normative culture, how does the content of this normative culture relate to that of the wider society? Because, as we contend, the peer performs differentiated functions in the socialization system, we would expect that it would not be a microcosm of the general value and normative system we have sketched, but its norms would be differentiated in the direction of stressing tie personality needs of its members with special reference to "dependency," which at this level we may say takes the form above all of the need for "social acceptance."
"We do indeed find this to be true according to the findings of the Rutgers study by Riley, Riley and Moore reported above. The most highly valued orientations of all are those referred to as "popularity" and "friendliness." Other important ones that are prominent, though perhaps less potentially useful for adult life, are interest in "fun with the gang," athletics, and popular music. These are all familiar aspects of "youth culture."
There is, however, another significant finding. This is that, whereas popularity and friendliness retain their prominence broadly across the board the desirability of being a good student and the valuation of achievement also come in a position of almost equal prominence for a substantial proportion of the sample. Broadly, the authors distinguish two main types of peer group, one which stresses these youth-culture values and plays down studentship and achievement, and a second which gives almost equal value to both complexes at once. "We may regard this second type of peer-group orientation as a direct point of articulation between the youth-culture values on the one hand and those of the adult society on the other.
It should be further emphasized, as noted above, that there is definite social control in the form of negative attitudes toward radically deviant behavior of the too hedonistic and "wild" kind, of radical isolation or retreatism, and of radical rebellion against school work.
Further evidence of the linkage between the youth culture and adult values is given in the data concerning the subjects' perception
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of their parents' expectations, and their own evaluations of the significance of these traits for their own futures after they finish school. It is perhaps not surprising that these adolescents perceive their parents as valuing school work and achievement, for the "other-directed" cases, more highly than they themselves do. It is, however, more surprising that parents share the combined popularity-friendliness and achievement pattern of expectations, though with substantially more emphasis on achievement than the predominantly youth-culture-oriented younger generation, Then, with regard to self-assessment of what counts for the future, even the extremer youth-culture groups' value achievement much more highly than the evaluation they attribute to their peers in the peer situation itself.
We have cited from the Rutgers study in this connection only sufficient data to give empirical substance to our view that the values of the peer group are, to be sure, differentiated from those predominant in the larger-society, particularly in the occupational system, but are sufficiently in contact with those values so that the degree of divergence is consistent with the conception of a differentiated functional subsystem in the system of agencies of socialization. The peer group, particularly the more other-directed subtype, is neither a radically dissociated "sport" phenomenon within the society nor a microcosm of a wider society in which achievement values are minimized; nor, we think, is it a prototype of the direction of the development of the society.
We attribute considerable significance to the coincidence of the values of one wing of the peer-group structure and of parents on the combination of the other-directed valuation of popularity and friendliness, and studentship and achievement. The significance of this pattern may, we think, be dual. On the one hand, as we noted in the last section, an increasing proportion of occupational roles in the society are performed within the context of organization, in which ability to "get along with people" has in fact become an increasingly important condition of successful achievement. (Similar considerations apply to the shift in family structure.) On the other hand, the prominence of the pattern may also be a function of a later stage in the process of institutionalization of achievement values for the individual. This is to say that, with progressively fuller institutionalization, the values have come to be more symmetrically implemented on both the performance and the sanction sides of the interaction process. They are, therefore, incorporated in the norms on which ap-
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proval is contingent, and not so exclusively localized in the internalized orientations of a limited class of performers. This we conceive to be an aspect of the processes of expansion and upgrading in the educational and occupational systems we have outlined. It seems to underlie what Riesman refers to as the institutionalizing of the productive functions.
Allocation of Persons among Peer Groups. Still another aspect of the situation is suggested by the Rutgers finding of the tendency to bifurcation of the peer-group system, as between the contingent in which the popularity-f riendli ness element is clearly dominant and that in which it is combined with the studentship-achievement element. The study does not have direct evidence on the matter, but it is the impression of the authors of the study51 that there is a broad relation between the first type and the prospect of not going to college; between the second and college-orientation.
In connection with the Stouffer-Kluckhohn-Parsons study referred to above, we were struck by the salient importance of the bifurcation of the age-cohort in terms of whether they were to go on from high school to college, or to go directly into the labor force. As noted, this "decision" (for the individual) has a clear relation to his probable future status in the occupational system and hence in the stratification system generally. From the point of view of the society as a system this is a focal point in the process of allocation of its resources.
There are clearly, seen in terms of social structute, in turn two correlated but independent focuses of the organization of those resources. One is the fact that families that can, by virtue of cultural level, income, and other factors, provide their children with "advantages" constitute a favorable point of departute for children seeking to attain not only high status but high achievement levels. The other is the fact that the distribution of "ability," whatever its more ultimate determinants, is in important degree independent of the family status of the individual. Therefore, along with the process of "training" as such, there must be a process of selection through which a balance is struck between these two essential components of the "performance capacity" input into the adult role-system of the society.
"We suggest, along lines sketched by the senior author in a previous publication,02 that the functions of the peer group are in this
51.  Oral communication.
52.  Robert K. Merton et al. (eds,), Sociology Today, New York, Basic Books, Inc., 1959.
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respect closely analogous to those of political parties on the national scene. Some groups of candidates for higher occupational status are anchored primarily in the expectations of family status, while others are anchored more in the ability of the individual. Thus the high-ability, low-family-status boy is under "cross-pressure" in the sense of the Berelson-Lazarsfeld studies of voting behavior.
From both the Rutgers study and our own we infer that there is not just one type of peer group, but that peer groups in most communities constitute a differentiated system. They range all the way from those composed of members who, on ascriptive bases, are definitely slated for high occupational status to those that overwhelmingly reinforce what are, in this respect, the "low" expectations of their members (the delinquent gang is at the extreme in this respect). But somewhere in the middle there is a set of peer groups in which the potentially conflicting elements of the cross pressure system meet, where those of higher family status but indifferent ability and those of lower family status but higher ability are together present. The peer group in this area is a mechanism for fixating the "independent vote." It helps to test out the qualifications, other than academic achievement as such, of the candidate for higher status; and hence its acceptance or rejection can, along with the evaluating processes of the school, contribute to the general allocative process.
Peer-group membership is a resultant of the preference of the individual within the available range on the one hand, acceptance by the other members on the other. Broadly, then, we suggest that the individual headed for higher occupational status will choose peer groups that tend on the whole to facilitate his progress in this direction. But his success in this respect is not only his own doing. He may find it easy or hard to gain acceptance. Though of course there are many complex problems in this area, we suggest that, statistically viewed, the rejections by peer groups of otherwise "qualified" persons are not likely to be too grossly dysfunctional; and, on the other side, the retention, by peer groups oriented to lower eventual status, of persons of. relatively high ability may, again statistically, be related to motivational weaknesses that eventually, in spite of current indications of ability, would impede success when tougher tests were applied.
The broad bifurcation of the peer-group structure revealed by the Rutgers study thus seems to us to be analogous to the two-party system in politics. The latter may be viewed as a mechanism for al-
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locating a fundamental societal resource, namely generalized support for political leadership, between groups oriented to more activistic Or "liberal" political policies and those with more conservative policies.53 The parties mediate between the focused responsibility of office on the one hand and the diversity of "interest groups" on the other.
Similarly, with all the importance of qualitative differentiation, the educational system has a definite hierarchical structure in terms of educational level attained, and the attainment of college entrance is the most significant single "cutting point" in this hierarchy. Those who reach the higher level are of diverse social origin, with a substantial contingent exposed to the cross-pressures of conflicting predisposing factors. The schools, by virtue of their commitments to universalistic standards of the evaluation of achievement and to the specificity of academic work, cannot serve as mediating integrating mechanisms except so far as types of schools themselves are differentiated. This seems to us to be an important aspect of the positive functional significance of the peer-group structure. It stands, as it were, "behind" the school, in that it can test out the strength of motivation and other factors in the capacity of individuals (in the diffuser contexts) for making the commitments that are essential for successful educational, and later occupational, performance.
In relation to lower-status families, we suspect that there is a dual function. On the one hand, acceptance in the "right" kind of achievement-oriented peer group can be a major factor in reinforcing the child's predispositions, in terms of his own ability and its encouragement in the school, to transcend the expectations of his class origin. In such cases the peer group takes over a supportive function, which the family, by virtue of its status, cannot effectively perform and which the school, because it is the immediate agency of evaluation, also cannot perform. On the other hand, in a society where upward mobility is so highly valued, it is inevitable that many lower-status families will have unrealistic expectations for their children. We suspect that in a statistically significant proportion of these cases the peer group performs the function of damping these unrealistic expectations by providing for the child a network of associations that do not encourage his ambitions to go beyond the levels his abilities
53. Cf. Talcott Parsons, " 'Voting* and the Equilibrium of the American Political System" in E. L. Burdick and A. J. Brodbeck (eds.), American Voting Behavior, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959.
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would justify. In all such connections, however, it must be strongly emphasized that there are many individual cases in which the connections we suggest fail to work out; our generalization is statistical. "We have now suggested three different contexts in which we think the available information about adolescent peer groups in American society fits with our view that it is a society with a strongly mstirutionalized normative culture oriented in terms of the values of instrumental activism. The crucial points are, first, that the peer group itself is not a system in which the individual is left without normative guidance to seek a merely arbitrary approval, but is a normatively structured social system; second, that the norms of this system are not unrelated to the general value structure of the society as we have outlined it, but can be interpreted as a differentiated subsystem of this normative structure in the context of socialization; finally, third, the peer-group system is itself differentiated in ways that seem to be functionally related to the exigencies of the selection process in a highly differentiated yet mobile society.
"With these considerations in mind, let us now turn back to the ■family. Its place in the picture will provide an advantageous point of departure for taking up the problem of consumption raised in the first section.
Like the peer group, the family also fills similar functions complementary to the educational system. Since children are socialized by other agencies earlier and offener, and since the father's occupational role is largely distinct from ascriptive ties to the family, instrumental norms of achievement become increasingly independent of the familial context. The family itself becomes more than ever an area of controlled expressive gratification (but also of motivational management) where children may be heard as well as seen, where fathers may participate in domestic activities that would formerly have been incongruent with their previously fused roles as head of family and of family firm (or farm).
It is central to our thesis of structural differentiation to see the implications of the consequent functional specialization. "When two functions, previously embedded in the same structure, are subsequently performed by two newly differentiated structures, they can both be fulfilled more intensively and with a greater degree of freedom, of mobility. The particularities of either one no longer act as ascriptive limitations on the other. Thus, on the one hand, parents
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not only push their fledglings from the nest earlier and oftener through independence training, but—conversely—they can allow them greater permissiveness on their return from flight.
Insofar as the management of the individual personality is concerned, the upgrading of achievement and the maintenance of discipline in certain areas thus becomes linked with the relaxation of that discipline in others. In this sense, both the family and the peer group may be seen as cases of the latter, focuses of "socialized regression" where an emotionally supportive floor is required under the demands of achievement in other contexts. If our position is correct that a general process of upgrading has made these demands greater in one direction, then it is possible to contend that greater permissiveness is a concomitant in another.
Kluckhohn, among others, comments on the current expansion in America of aesthetic and expressive activities "greatly beyond mere 'comfort.' "5i Eiesman calls attention to the concern with taste in the widespread sophistication about food and dress. "We suggest that this rise in aesthetic appreciation, in hedonism, if you will, is not merely an effort to establish new criteria of status through marginal differentiation53 but mainly a heightened expressiveness—complementary to, rather than conflicting with, a rise in instrumental demands for achievement. In addition to its being an instance of further differentiation, this phenomenon is also one of extension, in that it is manifested by a larger proportion of the population.
Consumption and the Noneconomic Resource
The distinction between what is instrumental and what is expressive (or consummatory, to use the more inclusive term) should not, however, be equated with the distinction between production and consumption, in the conventional sense of economics. In economic parlance, only those resources generated within structural units in the society having economic primacy (broadly speaking, the business sector) are customarily regarded as production. Their utilization outside the "economy," and particularly in the household, is seen as consumption.
From the economist's point of view, Such terminology is of course
54.   Clyde Kluckhohn, "The Evolution of Contemporary American Values," Daedalus, Spring, 1958, p. 96.
55.   The Lonely Crowd, p. 153; pp. 171-172.
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justifiable, but a functional approach, to the total social system requires that production and consumption be analyzed in terms of their specific relevance to each type of unit under consideration. Food, the consumable par excellence, is an essential resource for the human organism. What may be consumption from one point of view may not be from another. Take, for example, the so-called hard goods ■—such things as washing machines and dryers, dishwashers and power mowers. While in terms of economic production these are considered consumers' goods, they are, for the household, factors of production, and otherwise serve as instrumental facilities that in part replace labor-input. Members of the household have, so to speak, made a decision to plow back a portion of their income into plant equipment; their "consumption" of these goods is, analytically speaking, actually an input of resources to the household.
It may be fruitful to trace through some of the implications of such household capitalization in order to assess the consequences of what is ordinarily thought of as consumption. Members of the household, in sloughing off the drudgery of routine tasks on machines, are upgraded from such unskilled labor and "set free" for the further pursuit—on the one hand—of more constructive work (e.g., do-it-yourself improvements in the home, civic participation outside the home), or—on the other hand—of gratifying expressive needs (which, as we have maintained, is essential to personality-management and not just hedonism). Again, one must look on such a process of specialization as affecting complementary functions at the same time. Not to be overlooked is the concomitant emancipation of the labor force previously employed (by those who could afford it) in domestic service—a substantial reduction not solely due to the increased cost of such service.
To use economic terms in a noneconomic context, as the household become more capital-intensive, the labor-input into household tasks is emancipated for higher-level activities. Thus to equate resources held by noneconomic structural units with consumption may be misleading in analyzing a total society. At times Riesman seems to adopt this approach. In characterizing the shift from inner- to other-direction, among other factors, by a solution of the problem of production, he tends to generalize the strictly economic interpretation to the total society and so equate consumption with everything "non-economic."
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[Other-directed people] move around ... in search of frontiers of consumption as well as of production. That is, they look for nice neighborhoods in which their children will meet nice people. Although much of the moving about in America today, within and between cities, is in search of better jobs, it is also in search of better neighborhoods and the better schools that go with them.50
If better neighborhoods and schools are to be viewed primarily as preferred markets for exchanging the currency of approval alone, then they are indeed frontiers of consumption, although how long even the rapid fluctuations of- such markets, or the constant moving about required to escape diose declining, can keep the frontier open is another question.
As an alternative approach, we suggest that there are many noneconomic resources that are generated by processes quite outside the structurally defined economic. sphere, generated by a plowing-back of income diverted from consumption. Our illustration of household capitalization is one example, not to mention the home itself (including the marginal utilities beyond having "a roof over one's head"), schools, and many public facilities, but—most crucial of all —the personalities of members of the society.
We should try to make as clear as possible the analytical complexity of the problem involved here. We have taken the position that in the analytical economic sense a very important component of household consumption is properly to be regarded as investment in the greater effectiveness of the operation of the household. In this respect the household may be regarded as analogous to a firm. But a firm is an organized social unit with primacy of economic production as its definition of function, symbolized by profit as the measure of its effectiveness. The household, on the other hand, is definitely not a firm; its primary functions in the society are noneconomic, belonging in the area which, technically, we call "pattern-maintenance." In this particular case the primary output is motivational commitment to the type of achievement valued in the society, a commitment which in turn is one major component of "capacity for role-performance."
This capacity in turn constitutes one of the primary factors of production in the economist's sense, namely labor. It therefore enters into the economy, analytically considered, in the first instance (though not solely) through the medium of the labor force, part of
56. Ibid,, p. 66; pp. 87-88.
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which is employed in business enterprises, but an important and probably increasing part in organizations that have primacies in other directions than production. The essential point here is that the generation of these factors of production is not itself a process of production in the economist's sense, but nevertheless the process of generation involves an economic—in this sense, a "productive"— component.
Personality as Resource
In The Affluent Society, Galbraith draws attention to the importance of what we call noneconomic resources, particularly to those generated by means of governmental expenditures.57 His theory of social balance stresses their current deficiency and ascribes it to the aversion to public expenditures and the difficulties of justifying costs and benefits. But he stresses, above all, the importance of the human individual as a'resource to the society as a whole and of building up the capacities of that resource through investment in education. In doing so, he points out how the concept of consumption is linked with earlier conditions:
A century ago, when educational oudays were not intimately related to production, men sensibly confined the word investment to the increase in capital which brought a later increase in product. Education was a consumer outlay. The popular usage has never been revised.50
Human development, in other words, is what economists have long termed an external economy.50
He also points out how societal development, through what we have called upgrading, has increased the importance of human resources:
However, with the development of a great and complex industrial plant, and even more with the development of a great and sophisticated body of basic science and of experience in its application, all this has been changed . . . modern economic activity requires a great number of trained and qualified people. Investment in human beings, is prima facte, as important as investment in material capital.00
57- J- K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958.
58. Ibid,, p. 274. 59- Ibid., p. 275. 6o. Ibid., pp. 271-27'2,
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Thus the process of generating societal resources does not stop with the attainment of a mature economy as an end-of-the-line. Indeed, this stage, by progressively emancipating personality resources from lower-level resources, is antecedent to bringing a really crucial focus to bear on their full development. In the earlier stages of societal development, not only property but human services have tended to be ascriptively bound. For personal capacities to become a fully fluid resource for societal functions, these ascriptive bonds must dissolve and be replaced by other allocative mechanisms. We interpret the process under analysis here as the latest major stage in this development toward greater mobility of human resources.
"We think Durkheim was aware of this when he affirmed that as the complexity of society increases through the division of labor, individuals face demands for "greater specialization, harder work, and intensification of their faculties."01 He goes on to say that these demands need not imply social regimentation of the individual, for specialization of functions brings about flexibility and individual variety by giving the individual progressive independence from ascribed ties.
. . . independence is not a pristine fact in societies, since originally the individual is absorbed in the group. But we have seen that independence later appears and progresses regularly with the division of labor.02 It is none the less true that individualism has developed in absolute value by penetrating into regions which originally were closed to it.03
The development of individualism and the intensification of the faculties of individuals, then, are dependent on the development of society. Further, such development does not reach the point where the individual must (or can) proceed entirely on his own. The link between character and society does not break. Thus we agree with Riesman when he says that "the product now in demand is neither a staple nor a machine; it is a personality."^ But, we add, a product in the sense of a highly developed resource, not a product marketed for peer consumption alone.
In this connection, a study by Miriam Johnson05 of a sample of
61.  Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1947, pp. 336-337.
62.  Ibid., p. 287.
63.   Ibid., p. 198.
64.   The Lonely Crowd, p. 46; 64. (Italics in original.)
65.   Miriam Johnson, "Instrumental and Expressive Components in the Personalities of Women," Ph.D. dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1955.
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college women reveals some interesting evidence about the attitudes of prospective mothers toward children. On the basis of responses from her subjects, she classified them on a Guttman scale as being either instrumental or expressive. She found that the former were more likely to want an occupation outside of the home—to be teachers at more advanced levels, or social workers or technicians of various sorts. The latter, if they planned to work at all, tended to want to teach very young-children or to be private secretaries.
In addition, the instrumental girls wanted more children than did the expressive girls and expected to get gratification from training them for adulthood; they were already looking ahead to the time when their as yet unborn children would enter society as full-fledged members. The expressive girls expected to "enjoy" their children in and for themselves. The correlation between wanting larger families and thin lang in terms of their mature development is significant. "We consider socialization, including the agencies of family, school, and peer group, as the process by which personality as a resource is generated. In addition, we would include the necessary "plant equipment" to implement this process. The increased activity of parents, particularly mothers, in civic affairs as well as P.T.A. and church activities, is a manifestation of concern over maintaining and developing those facilities.
Personal Relations
We have, up to this point, stressed personality as a resource in performing increasingly upgraded and specialized functions. In the attainment of collective goals, such functions have of necessity to be integrated; the proliferation of roles must be organized in highly complex collectivities. As Riesman says, "People, therefore, become the central problem of industry."00
It is easy, perhaps a pardonable error, to write off the efforts to solve the problem of coordination as manipulation, groupism, or "togetherness," and to lump them all together under the rubric of the "social ethic," as Whyte has done. But it is another matter to come up with effective organization—a resource in itself. No doubt some of the efforts have backfired or been characterized by crudity, and the adverse criticism they have elicited may prove to be salutary. But inadequacy in solving a problem does not mean that the problem
66. The Lonely Crowd, p. 132; 152.
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does not exist or is not worth solving. The division of labor necessitates group coordination and demands that individuals acquire the necessary role-skills to make coordination possible.
Problems of social organization are, of course, not limited to occupational contexts, but apply to human relationships generally. The activism that has characterized American mastery of production applies equally to mastery of personal relationships (this does not mean "domination" of other people). In extending the development of resources to a more organized and differentiated set of mechanisms for developing and regulating personality, the constellation of role-relationships that constitute it becomes, in the last analysis, the crucial linií between character and society. It seems to us, for example, that it is this particular emphasis that lies behind the American psychoanalytic stress on the ego—a product of social interaction—as opposed to the more European interest in the id—a given. Kluckhohn observes a "rise in psychological values' related to mental health, the education and training of children, and the like."07 We interpret this rise as an increasing concern with the production of personality through socialization.
In presenting our alternative interpretation, we by no means intend to overlook empirical instances where, as Riesman observes, there are low occupational commitments, where standards of achievement have declined, where the socialization process has turned out passive approval-seekers. But we believe that the empirical issues we have raised indicate that the other side of the picture deserves serious attention. If our interpretation is correct, the developmental trends we have outlined—not the failures—define the main stream.
67. Kluckhohn, op. cit., p. 105..