Social Organization: Types, Legitimacy, and Modern State
Social Organization: Legitimacy and Forms
Private property, despite its debated historical origins, remains a significant institution. The legitimacy of institutions, whether positive or negative in origin, is ethically important, but origin alone doesn’t guarantee legitimacy. For example, some festivals with positive historical origins now have questionable legitimacy.
Society and its Organization
Every society is a form of organization, defined by rules governing interactions among its members. Different
Read MoreLanguage Functions, Speech Acts, and Text Structures
Language Functions
Language serves multiple functions in communication:
- Expressive: Conveys thoughts, emotions, and relationships.
- Referential: Delivers verifiable information.
- Phatic: Checks if the communication channel is working.
- Poetic: Embellishes the message using literary devices.
- Metalinguistic: Refers to language itself (e.g., discussing grammar).
- Conative (Nickname): The message is related to a change in attitude.
Speech Acts
Speech acts analyze the purpose and effect of utterances:
- Locutionary
Understanding Cultural Dynamics: Infrastructure to Superstructure
Infrastructure, Structure, and Superstructure
Culture can be understood through three interconnected levels:
1. Infrastructure
This level comprises two key components:
- Technologies and productive/reproductive activities: These activities provide food and shelter, protect against disease, and address basic human needs and impulses.
- Environmental influence: This refers to how a corporation’s natural habitat limits or enables the production of goods and reproduction, including the methods used to manage
Mastering Administration: Functions, Importance, and Features
The Four Basic Functions of Administration
Administration involves four basic functions:
- Planning: Define in advance what you want to accomplish in the future. Identify alternatives to achieve this, and choose the best one. Define objectives, goals, policies, and standards for the future. What should be done? Where? When? What? (P)
- Organization: Define the structure of the company, including roles, hierarchy, the type of activities to be performed, and who should run them. Who will? With what authority?
Marxism, Anarchism, and the First International
Marxism
The two most important thinkers: Marx and Engels.
The first formulation:
- The basic idea was published in the Communist Manifesto.
- Context: “The social history of contemporary art is the history of class struggle.” The text denounced bourgeois society and suggested that it is necessary for the working class to achieve sovereignty to build a new society without classes, and the middle class will disappear.
- Call to action: “Workers of the world, unite!” Workers should organize and call for political
Dystopian Societies: Characteristics and Examples
Characteristics of a Dystopian Society
- Propaganda is used to control citizens.
- Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted.
- A figurehead or concept is worshipped by citizens.
- Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance.
- Citizens have a fear of the outside world.
- Citizens live in a dehumanized state.
- The natural world is banished and distrusted.
- Citizens conform to uniform expectations; individuality and dissent are bad.
- The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world.