Leadership and Social Change: The Reactions of a Special Group to Industrialization and Population Influx

Abstract

Immediately perceivable social reality becomes a chaos of opposing myths and symbolic systems, and the experiential basis of this chaos is relatively inaccessible. As a result the real world is a public relations world, that is, one of claims and counterclaims by different types of experts and different organizations. Only a few are able to confront this public relations world with their limited experience. The majority cannot find expression for their immediate experience in publicly accessible symbolic systems. They therefore must either retreat into a fantasy or personalized world and reject the public affairs world, or-as is more commonly the case-they passively accept or compulsively affirm particular authoritative pronouncements on the mysterious incomprehensible world about them. his bureaucratic membership. This can work in two ways. Individual recognition may be limited to recognition by peer experts. Concomitantly professional and learned societies can function to cut across specifically bureaucratically oriented jobs and permit substantive experts to play out their substantive expert roles apart from their occupationally derived role patterns. Even here, however, the substantive contribution of a particular expert results in the conferring of his peer-granted prestige to the organization which employs him. In university life, as Logan Wilson has searchingly noted, this becomes an important element in institutions' rating of staff.