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Sociology 85
the school system. Parents were urged to exercise stricter control over their chil-
dren, and the former freedoms, expressed legally by the ease with which abortion
and divorce could be obtained, had to make way for strict state controls. The
inference is that these changes take place in a system with strict political control,
where a change in law or status is crucial. It also presupposes a relatively low
level of organizational complexity so that other institutions whose authority
patterns might contradict the general trend are either absent or ineffectual.
b. The second mode of explanation might be called the strategy type. The im-
agery is taken from the behaviour of a single individual who finds himself in a
specific situation and must decide how next to proceed.
Etzioni studies unification as a process which leads from units with separate
boundaries to some larger community. During this process, many strategic
decisions must be taken. Some emerge, with empirical hindsight, as steps in the
right direction, while others lead to failure. One such strategic decision in times
of a crisis, is whether to accelerate or decelerate unification efforts. Conse-
quences are defined as direct outcomes of the decision: acceleration is likely to
retard the prospect of final unification, and may even destroy previously taken
measures, while deceleration is much more favourable to unification in the long
run. While this decision is only one of many, Etzioni’s problem is not so much
to account for why a particular decision was taken, but to interrelate the various
consequences that resulted from previous bifurcations and to assess their rela-
tive weight in the overall final outcome.
While the decision-making organ could easily be identified in the previous
example, this is not true when the crucial determinant lies with a ruling elite or
some other stratum of society. Here, it is said that certain crucial attitudes have
developed which found expression in concrete actions. Moore compares the
reaction of the English and French landed aristocracy to the newly opened
possibilities of commercial farming. While the process of transition from an
agricultural society to a modern, industrialized one could proceed in various
ways, in cases where the landed aristocracy took up commercial farming, the
consequences were more favourable to the emergence of democracy than in
cases where they did not. Mere, the strategy sketch is linked with a linear scheme.
Moore attributes the English nobleman’s willingness to engage in these new
activities to his greater independence from the crown; the French counterpart
did not possess this autonomy.
c. The strategy sketch is more varied than the linear pattern because it considers
different strategies even if only one is actually carried out. A greater scope can
be introduced if the consequences of a choice can feed back on the first decision
and lead to a different choice. In the same way, the linear pattern may be en-
riched. A variate growing out of a preceding one may in turn affect its trend.
In these cases we shall talk of dialectic explanation sketches. They focus simul-
taneously on several lines of development. Processes unfoId and interact. Resist-
ances emerge and are either overcome, or deflect the original trend or force re-
traction. Because of its feedback element, the dialectic mode is likely to intro-