Edward J. Lawler

The world is rapidly changing. Can the present social order survive the changes? The authors posit that social cohesion at the macro level requires strong person-to-group commitments at the micro level—from the bottom up. But in a market-oriented social world such as ours has become, the ties of people to social units tend to be loose, unsettled, and problematic. To be significant, personal ties to groups must have an emotional component. Affective bonds of people to groups are essential to the stability of the social order because people are affective beings who think and decide and act with their emotions. What makes this book different from others of its type is its emphasis on affect, the emotional component of social commitments. “The centrality of the emotional dimension to human lives.”

On the micro level, as the world becomes more depersonalized, person-to-person relationships tend to become shallower, looser, less often extending beyond the merely transactional. The result is emotional isolation. “People today are leading more individualized and privatized lives.” Can new social networks such as the Internet replace the person-to-person relationships of the past? The authors believe they have potential to do so. “The loss-of-community themes of today are anchored … in illusion and myth.”

This book extends from the micro to the macro, to social units of any size, from the smallest groups to the largest nation-states. It is about person-to-group commitments, how they can be created and sustained by giving persons shared tasks and responsibilities that engender in them feelings of solidarity with the group; and it is about person-to-person ties at the micro level. It offers a theory of social commitments that addresses the micro foundations of person-to-group ties, and it suggests practical applications of that theory.

A scholarly work of interest to academics, this is a challenging read because it deals with abstract topics: social inequalities, globalism, nationalism, etc. It is recommended to readers interested in those topics. It assumes some familiarity with sociology and psychology. Indexed and lavishly sourced.… (meer)