Abstract: For Durkheim, the society integrates as dual, separately in a mechanical and in organic way. The first individuals in their interactions habituate new local rules which integrate society in its specific issues in a bottom-up direction. When new rules are institutionalisded and enforced for all, they feed back as mechanical restriction of behaviours from the top-down. Micro to macro structuration is seen as a circular process and does not err in descriptions of integration process that is also circular in nature. However, it fails to explain what integrates society constituted on unresolvable oppositions, and so how translate integration efforts into the integration outcome.
To fill this gap, integration is reorganised from dual to triadic concept first and so adjusted to fit a meso, instead of conventional micro or macro frame. The case is illustrated with evaluation study. Three measures of integration are derived. A strong balance is a measure of the mechanical integration between primary oppositions involved in the evaluated issue. Cohesion is a correlative measure of cooperative achievements. The third is a weak balance which measures mutuality of relations, assessing if they weave social ties in an emancipatory way. Circular interpretation is thus not rejected here. It is only reframed in a triadic concept having in its centre a meso category which is soft in its logic, intermediary in its function, but radical in transformative consequences.
Bojan Radej ( bojan.radej@siol.net), Mojca Golobič, Slovenian Evaluation Society, Working paper, vol. 6, no. 1 (June 2013), 23 pp.;
Background: http://www.sdeval.si/knjige/index.php/en/
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