Social Integration and System Integration Re-visited

Abstract

The well-known distinction between Social Integration and System Integration introduced by David Lockwood (Social integration and system integration. In: Zollschan GK, Hirsch HW (eds) Explorations in social change. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1964) is the springboard for sketching a brief, analytical history of progressive reductions in social bonds and bonding during late modernity. When taken together with the systemic crises of the new millennium these are basic to explaining the current global mess now confronting us. Empirically, it is shown how social integration is lost more easily than it can be regained. Theoretically, however, a complete explanation requires the incorporation of the ‘missing middle’ (the ‘meso-level’) to differentiate and articulate the properties, causal powers and dynamics embedded in the stratified ontology of late modern society. Part I traces the generative mechanisms responsible for Morphogenesis to start outstripping Morphostasis (namely, positive, elaborative, feedback prevailing over negative, homeostatic feedback at the macroscopic level.) Part II briefly examines the slippage in Social Integration that accompanies the former: at the macro-level by Government without normative conviction, reliant instead upon Bureaucratic Regulation; at the meso-level by the loss of ‘collegial’ bonding in social institutions; and the micro-level by the consequences of digital diffusion throughout the lifeworld. The conjunction between low systemic and low social integration was always held to be explosive, but current manifestations of Populism and Nationalism are not new versions of social integration but extremely hostile to it.