The written and the repressed in Gouldner's industrial sociology

Abstract

In many ways Alvin Gouldner's industrial sociology prefigures his later work. His studies of the General Gypsum Company combine what later become two separate branches of his discourses on social theory: the exploration of the liberative potential of structural functionalism and the appropriation of the critical moments of Marxism. In Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, he explores Merton's ideas of functional equivalence, to suggest alternative forms of factory administration, and of latent function, to unveil the domination behind bureaucratic rules. In WiMcat Strike, he turns Parsons's conditions of stable interaction into their opposite: the conditions for disequilibrium. In both books he draws on Marxian ideas of systemic contradiction and struggle as the motor of change, to explain the emergence of new patterns of industrial bureaucracy and to illuminate purposeful collective action. His subsequent books The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology and For Sociology, on one hand, and The Dialectic of Technology and Ideology and The Two Marxisms, on the other can be viewed as reflections on what was tacit and repressed in his analysis of the General Gypsum Company. Even The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class has roots in Gouldner's construction of the ideal type "representative bureaucracy" based on expertise and in his treatment of bureaucratic succession in terms of the ideologies of locals and cosmopolitans. Nor is this continuity between his early industrial studies and his later critiques of Academic Sociology and Marxism surprising. For Gouldner was not interested in locating the General Gypsum Company historically, or as a specific part of a specific totality. To the contrary, like other major organization theorists of the period (e.g., Lipset, Selznick, and Blau), he was more concerned with stripping away the particular to reveal the general. General Gypsum Company was a laboratory for testing and developinggeneral theories applicable to diverse contexts, rather than a specific sociology of industry. And yet Gouldner's analysis remains particularly relevant to recent Marxist studies of the labor process. His critique of the "metaphysical pathos" behind