英文摘要 |
The decline of community, with the erosion of traditional values and of social integration, has been one of the most notable changes wrought by the shaping forces of modern society. Community today has lost its original capacity to satisfy the various needs of its members. It also has ceased to play an effective role as an intermediate group between the individual or the family and the state or the total society. To make matter worse, the new emerging voluntary association, which is expected to take the place and play the role of community in modern society, has not yet fully grown up to meet the requirements of society today. Hence a vaccume has been produced in modern society as a result of these processes. It is especially true in modern urban society where the people, because of lack of the effective intermediate organizations, has been in the rapid process of atomization, exploited from a stable group as the object of individual identification and sense of belonging. Consequently there are very common phenomena of anomie or anomic behavior among the people in modern society. The problem is particularly serious in the Chinese society where the majority of members are characteristically egocentric or family-centrede. The Chinese are generally said to be short of the ability in organizational behavior beyond the scope of kinship or traditionally land-related relationships. This paper explored in detail the theories of social group structure, especially those of intermediate group of the 19th and 20th Centry sociologists or political sociologists such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Harold Laski and William Kornhauser. The emphasis is also made on the types, functions and transformation of intermediate groups in modern industrial society. In an age of 'the Great Society' (G. Wallace) and of the machine-like bureaucratic formal organization, modern society is very likely vulnerable to become the victim of totalitarian society on one hand or of the irrational mass cociety on the other. The key to hold the society in line with the ideal of pluralistic.and democratic society lies in the development and the fully functioning of the strong and effective intermediate groups. This is the main theme of this paper. The author also has warned the too optimistic tendency of some of the theories of intermediate group, because as predicted by Max Weber, when the voluntary, instrumental association has become enormous size, it is likely to become a new cage of iron to restrain the independence and liberty of individuals. However the author find that to overcome this dilemma, there is no other way than the unceasing formation of new voluntary associations in order to deal with the endless problems of organization. This seems the inescapable fate of modern people, hence the 'social techniques' suggested by Karl Mannheim in handling the human enterprises has its particular implications today. |