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The Organizational Interpretation of American History: A New Synthesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Robert F. Berkhofer Jr
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The overall interpretation of American history has fallen upon hard times. Once upon a time, so the story of American historywriting goes, there existed a complete model of the United States' past that explained as it described the dynamics of American history over the centuries. Not only did the progressive or conflict school of historians assent to a paradigm of moral and methodological assumptions, but its practitioners also possessed a model of American society that was applicable to the whole of the United States' past as well as to its parts. The succeeding counterprogressive or consensus historians, by transmuting the realities of their predecessors into the realm of myth and paradox, questioned their easy correlation of class position and ideation, but they failed to develop an explicit model of the workings of American society that would describe let alone explain the dynamics of its history. New Left historians challenged the static nature as well as the moral judgments of consensus history by stressing, once again, the relationship of power and interests to cultural hegemony and the possibilities of social action from the masses, but the dynamics of conflict they reintroduced into American history too often failed to meet the new standards of rigorous explanation considered so important by the practitioners of the so-called new histories. The new economic, political, and social historians' insistence upon explicit methodology and the statistical analysis of correlation and variability destroys old models more than it advances new ones to explain parts of American history, let alone all of it. Thus, at this point in the history of American historiography, we have lost any overall approach to the framework of American history as we have gained sharper tools to achieve its testing and verification.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 4 , October 1979 , pp. 611 - 629
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Hays, Compare Samuel P., “A Systematic Social History,” in American History: Retrospect and Prospect, eds., Billias, George A. and Grob, Gerald N. (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 315–16Google Scholar, and “Introduction: The New Organizational Society,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America, ed., Israel, Jerry (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 1–15Google Scholar. See also Russo, David J., Families and Communities: A New View of American History (Nashville, Tenn.: The American Association for State and Local History, 1974).Google Scholar

2. The development of the approach may be followed in review articles: Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review, 44 (Autumn 1970), 279–90Google Scholar; Cuff, Robert D., “American Historians and the ‘Organizational Factor’,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 4 (Spring 1973), 19–31Google Scholar; Hall, Tom G., “Agricultural History and the ‘Organizational Synthesis’: A Review Essay,” Agricultural History, 48 (April 1974), 313–25.Google Scholar

3. Few of the implications of this branch of sociology for the study of American history are dealt with in this paper. Neglected are measures of organizational effectiveness, input-output analysis, and other quantitative investigations, although they do possess important ramifications for the study of history as proposed here. Particularly significant are the statistical techniques of analysis developed by the sociologists of formal organizations as they moved from studies of individual cases to comparisons of variability among relatively large numbers of organizations. Definitions of the field and the object of its study are presented in Hall, Richard H., Organizations: Structure and Process (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972)Google Scholar. The nature of new work that transformed the field in the decade previous to their publication can be found in three anthologies: Hall, Richard H., ed., The Formal Organization (New York: Basic Books, 1972)Google Scholar; Heyderbrand, Wolf V., ed., Comparative Organizations: The Results of Empirical Research (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973)Google Scholar; Azumi, Koya and Hage, Jerald, eds., Organizational Systems: A Text-Reader in the Sociology of Organizations (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1972)Google Scholar. It was the work of Jerald Hage of the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison that first inspired my thinking along the lines of this paper.

4. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1962).Google Scholar

5. For example, see Ulman, Lloyd, The Rise of the National Trade Union (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955).Google Scholar

6. Polsby, Nelson W., “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review, 62 (03 1968), 144–68Google Scholar. This important article contains more of significance to the whole approach advocated in this paper than just the organizational differentiation of the House of Representatives. Zemsky, Compare Robert, “American Legislative behavior,” in Emerging Theoretical Models in Social and Political History, ed., Bogue, Allan G. (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications, 1973), pp. 70–75.Google Scholar

7. Snielser, Neil J., Essays in Sociological Explanation (Englewood Cliffs N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968)Google Scholar. I have omitted the word “roles” from his definition. A comparison of what he himself left out of his original definition, as given in his Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 2Google Scholar, shows the original strict social evolutionary model that lay at the heart of his conception.

8. For example the classic Taylor, George R., The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951)Google Scholar. A study that specifically traces such changes is Porter, Glenn and Livesay, Harold C., Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971).Google Scholar

9. Formisano, Ronald P., “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic's Political Culture, 1789–1840,” American Political Science Review, 68 (06 1974), 473–87Google Scholar, and Shade, William G., “Two Stages of Party Development in Early American History: A Quantitative Description”Google Scholar (unpublished manuscript), survey the relevant literature and offer their conclusions on the differences between the first and second party systems. On dating the acceptance of a dual party system, consult Hofstadter, Richard, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969).Google Scholar

10. These two types of organization derive from the distinction Emile Durkheim made between segmental and organized types of social organization in The Division of Labor in Society, trans., Simpson, George (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 174–93.Google Scholar

11. For a suggestive study of duplicative organization, see Stephan, G. Edward, “Variation in County Size: A Theory of Segmental Growth,” American Sociological Review, 36 (06 1971), 451–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Young, James S., The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966).Google Scholar

13. Warner, William Lloyd et al. , The Emergent American Society: Large-Scale Organizations (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967)Google Scholar, attempt to survey the actual organizational complexity of twentieth-century America. The studies mentioned in the review articles cited in note 2, above, generally pertain to this period. See also Israel, , ed., Building the Organizational Society.Google Scholar

14. A young historian wrestles with these issues in Gillam, Richard, ed., Power in Postwar America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Historical Problem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)Google Scholar. See his bibliography. The concept of countervailing power was offered by John K. Galbraith to explain American Capitalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956).Google Scholar

That interpenetration of the economic and governmental sectors began early in the twentieth century is the view of Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Cuff, Robert D., The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations During World War I (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973).Google Scholar

15. Of course, this definition of elites is not entirely adequate even to the task at hand. The definition should be tied to levels of social integration and coordination in the society in order to encompass scope of influence, nature of decision-making, and overlap of personnel, among other things. See Benson, Lee, “Political Power and Political Elites,” in Benson, et al. , American Political Behavior: Historical Essays and Readings (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 280–310Google Scholar, for suggestions on these topics; and Keller, Suzanne, Beyond the Ruling Class: Strategic Elites in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1963)Google Scholar, on the relationship between elites and organizational complexity, although she places this connection in a structural-functional context.

16. See, for example, the analysis of conflict on various levels of a colonial society by Bailyn, Bernard, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed., Smith, James M. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 90–115.Google Scholar

17. Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969)Google Scholar, suggests but does not prove such connections for the Revolutionary era, as does Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), for the antebellum period.Google Scholar

18. Gutman, Herbert, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” American Historical Review, 78 (06 1973), 531–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. This model has important implications for the understanding of social stratification and class, although I have not developed the ramifications as such. Insofar as social class and stratification result from levels of hierarchy in organizations and from levels of coordination in the society, they are covered by the organizational perspective. However, to the extent that stratification comes from aggregate effects in the society, it too, like other aggregative effects, must be studied by other approaches. Surely, changing levels of social integration and coordination as well as the formation of new interorganizational organizations possess important ramifications for social class. In the end, however, social class analysis will rest upon assumptions about the nature of society as well as upon empirical findings.