What is a corporation? This global question has acted as a driving force for much of the work done by theorists in the anthropological and sociological fields over time. Although these various social theorists have adopted distinct methodologies and frameworks, which typically guide their research in different directions, they have generally discussed similar themes throughout their work. Over the past 150 years, classical Western social theorists such as Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, and many others have all speculated on three specific aspects of society. First, it was common to consider social actors, that is, to discuss the role individuals play and the freedoms they enjoy within a given community. Second, the social theorist's goal was often to discover and explain the structure and order of the society they were studying. Finally, as these social theorists were writing during the advent and emergence of the modern Western world, they often used traditional and primitive societies as a tool for analyzing the components of modernity. In addition to classical social theorists, contemporary social theorists, such as Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Donna Haraway, Michael Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Clifford Geertz, have also considered these three themes. Classical social theorists generally saw an increase in the individuality of social actors during the transition from traditional to modern society. Durkheim formulated his idea of the individual around a concept he called “collective consciousness” (Durkheim 2012, 225). In traditional societies, characterized by mechanical solidarity, “the individual… medium of paper… time, such as feudalism and slavery, however these comparisons act to reveal the similarities and repetitions that have occurred throughout history (Marx 1848). Rather than comparing premodern society and modern society, Haraway created a synthesis between the natural aspects of traditional society and the mechanical and technological aspects of modern society to create a cyborg (Haraway 1993). According to Haraway, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” that exists in the postmodern era (Haraway 1993, 597). When considering the postmodern era, on the surface it would seem useful to use modern society as a contrast, however recently postmodernity is “considered as part of the modern” and therefore the modern contrast may not be as effective in explaining the idiosyncrasies of postmodernity ( Featherstone 2008, 465).
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