Motives in Social Organization
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2013, Vol 4, Issue 2
Abstract
The special issue brings together a range of discussions examining motives and accounts drawing on the pioneering work of C Wright Mills (1940, 2000). In addressing the classic sociological question of ‘how is social order achieved?’, Mills posited that the display and deployment of motives and accounts of reasoning about one’s or another’s actions are a prominent feature of the social order. For Mills the action of ascribing motives to people behaviour or claiming motives for some action revealed peoples routine socially based common sense reasoning and mundane theorising practices. In this way motives were not to be treated as windows into some inner mental state, indeed as he points out “There is no way to plumb behind verbalization into an individual and directly check our motive-mongering”(Mills 1967: 447), but as a form of social action. For Mills treating this psychological concept as a sociological one meant focusing on the way that motives for action were talked into being, how they were constructed, for whom and for what purpose. From this the analysis of verbalised motives provided a basis for recovering and examining typical vocabularies of motives as a constituent and essential part of examining social order. As such motives, and their fellow traveller accounts, provided a way of accessing the way society is perceived to be organized and how it is perceived to operate. Viewed this way the production of motives and accounts tells us much more about how social knowledge is organized, how people use common social knowledge about a society and its members when accounting for action, through routine reasoning that reveals a taken for granted social order.
Authors and Affiliations
Richard Fitzgerald
Keywords
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