Management Philosophies Compared And ContrastedEssay Preview: Management Philosophies Compared And ContrastedReport this essayTo Durkheim, men were creatures whose desires were unlimited. Unlike other animals, they are not satiated when their biological needs are fulfilled. “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs.”10 It follows from this natural insatiability of the human animal that his desires can only be held in check by external controls, that is, by societal control. Society imposes limits on human desires and constitutes “a regulative force [which] must play the same role for moral needs which the organism plays for physical needs.”11 In well-regulated societies, social controls set limits on individual propensities so that “each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limits on individual propensities so that “each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limits set to his ambitions and aspires to nothing beyond. . . . Thus, an end or a goal [is] set to the passions.”12
When social regulations break down, the controlling influence of society on individual propensities is no longer effective and individuals are left to their own devices. Such a state of affairs Durkheim calls anomie, a tern that refers to a condition of relative normlessness in a whole society or in some of its component groups. Anomie does not refer to a state of mind, but to a property of the social structure. It characterizes a condition in which individual desires are no longer regulated by common norms and where, as a consequence, individuals are left without moral guidance in the pursuit of their goals.
Although complete anomie, or total normlessness, is empirically impossible, societies may be characterized by greater or lesser degrees of normative regulations. Moreover, within any particular society, groups may differ in the degree of anomie that besets them. Social change may create anomie either in the whole society or in some parts of it. Business crises, for example, may have a far greater impact on those on the higher reaches of the social pyramid than on the underlying population. When depression leads to a sudden downward mobility, the men affected experience a de-regulation in their lives–a loss of moral certainty and customary expectations that are no longer sustained by the group to which these men once belonged. Similarly, the rapid onset of prosperity may lead some people to a quick upward mobility and hence deprive them of the social support needed in their new styles of life. Any rapid movement in the social structure that upsets previous networks in which life styles are embedded carries with it a chance of anomie.
Durkheim argued that economic affluence, by stimulating human desires, carries with it dangers of anomic conditions because it “deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only,” while “poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself.”13 Since the realization of human desires depends upon the resources at hand, the poor are restrained, and hence less prone to suffer from anomie by virtue of the fact that they possess but limited resources. “The less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely.”14
By accounting for the different susceptibility to anomie in terms of the social process–that is, the relations between individuals rather than the biological propensities of individuals– Durkheim in effect proposed a specifically sociological theory of deviant behavior even though he failed to point to the general implications of this crucial insight. In the words of Robert K. Merton, who was the first to ferret out in this respect the overall implications of Durkheims thought and to develop them methodically, “Social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconforming rather than conforming conduct.”15
Durkheims program of study, the overriding problems in all his work, concerns the sources of social order and disorder, the forces that make for regulation or de-regulation in the body social. His work on suicide, of which the discussion and analysis of anomie forms a part, must be read in this light. Once he discovered that certain types of suicide could be accounted for by anomie, he could then use anomic suicide as an index for the otherwise unmeasurable degree of social integration. This was not circular reasoning, as could be argued, but a further application of his method of analysis. He reasoned as follows: There are no societies in which suicide does not occur, and many societies show roughly the same rates of suicide over long periods of time. This indicates that suicides may be considered a “normal,” that is, a regular, occurrence. However, sudden spurts in the suicide rates of certain groups or total societies are “abnormal” and point to some perturbations not previously present. Hence. “abnormally” high rates in specific groups or social categories, or in total societies, can be taken as an index of disintegrating forces at work in a social structure.
Durkheim distinguished between types of suicide according to the relation of the actor to his society. When men become “detached from society,”16 when they are thrown upon their own devices and loosen the bonds that previously had tied them to their fellow, they are prone to egoistic, or individualistic, suicide. When the normative regulations surrounding individual conduct are relaxed and hence fail to curb and guide human propensities, men are susceptible to succumbing to anomic suicide. To put the matter differently, when the restraints of structural integration, as exemplified in the operation of organic solidarity, fail to operate, men become prone to egoistic suicide; when the collective conscience weakens, men fall victim to anomic suicide.
In addition to egoistic and anomic types of suicide, Durkheim refers to altruistic and fatalistic suicide. The latter is touched upon only briefly in his work, but the former is of great importance for an understanding of Durkheims general approach. Altruistic suicide refers to cases in which suicide can be accounted for by overly strong regulation of individuals, as opposed to lack of regulation. Durkheim argues in effect that the relation of suicide rates to social regulation is curvilinear–high rates being associated with both excessive individuation and excessive regulation. In the case of excessive regulation, the demands of society are so great that suicide varies directly rather than inversely with the degree of integration. For example, in the instance of the Hindu normative requirement that widows commit ritual suicide upon the funeral pyre of their husbands, or in the case of harikiri, the individual is so strongly attuned to the demands of his society
, and this tendency to self-preservation is present in a high number of studies in the field. In addition, these studies used utilitarian methods to investigate whether different societies (particularly the “modern” ones) regulate suicide. These studies were mostly descriptive of individual suicide and did not use psychological or emotional analysis to investigate suicide, although they clearly indicated the existence of this relationship and its associated characteristics with different societies. Some analyses of suicides based on the moralistic literature also were used to investigate the relationship between moralism and suicide.
Conclusion What is particularly important about the nature of suicide is it does not only include specific psychopathological and moralistic issues in all the types of sadistic and non-sociopathic suicide, but also many, many other types of suicide in different regions of the world. In that regard, the overall nature of suicide (and of suicide itself) has long been discussed in an extensive and well-informed field of research by the professional scientists of the world. For example, it is said with respect to the way suicide is expressed in a variety of different cultures, as well as among individuals, that the suicide rate in many cultures is extremely high. The general general idea here is that this is a result of a combination of factors, such as social interaction,[1] the nature of cultures being too complex for any single individual to completely understand and deal with, economic systems, etc. Therefore, although a specific method may be used and discussed, it cannot always provide all the answers that a universal method can offer, for example, in terms of the structure of individual suicide and its relation to society,[2] or whether it may be the cause of the variation that makes the risk of suicide in one particular region of the world so high that there has been no attempt at a universal control method. In that sense, Durkheim’s work is significant because he shows a strong moral and psychological dimension to suicide, and the general tendency of societies to focus on the specific issues in which they experience suicide, rather than the general problems that arise from the general social dynamics of suicide.[3] This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of what is known about suicide, though it will be very difficult to do so and because it is not a well-characterization of the whole phenomenon.
An important distinction between suicide and murder thus becomes quite clear when analyzing all social and cultural factors that affect suicide.[4] The major cause of suicide is not its mental illness. In many cultures, the main cause is physical weakness, but suicide also has its major social component insofar as it is caused by trauma and other trauma. The same can be said of all non-sociopathic and anthropophilia. Analyses of suicide, however, are carried out by scientists, and that is usually to understand suicide as having specific and specific social functions. As the example shown above, suicide rates can be described by the same criteria, but the primary cause can be the failure of the individual to manage their own life in order to survive and work for others. In theory, many other psychological or human factors will influence the suicide rate and thus the rate of mortality. For example, these factors such as self-sufficiency, empathy, tolerance, self-determination, self-identity, etc., usually play a crucial role in the suicide rate. But these are not the same reasons that affect every individual and they also can have an important negative impact upon a person’s self-esteem. In the end, the main factor is the environment for suicide. In some societies the overall cause of suicide has much more to do with social status and individual self-responsibility than with the social and economic factors that affect suicide. Thus, the level of psychological stressors that affect most people in most societies can sometimes be very subtle. For instance, certain conditions and environments will have strong effects on the rate of suicide in any part of