Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

      Questioning Governmental Authority

      Famous movie director Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden gave renewed life to the controversy surrounding U.S. Central Intelligence Agency contractor Edward Snowden and his leak of thousands of classified government documents. The clamor in the United States became especially loud—and it has not died away to this day—when Snowden told the world that the U.S. government, through its National Security Agency, had been attempting to prevent terrorist acts by spying on ordinary American citizens. This was being done through the systematic accumulation of bulk data (or metadata) on routine phone calls. Public reaction was swift and divided, with some arguing that Snowden was a hero for revealing this fact and that the government had gone to unwarranted lengths in breaching its citizens’ privacy. This view was upheld by a federal appeals court ruling that such data collection was illegal. Others continue to argue that any and all steps necessary to uncover terrorist plots, including spying on American citizens, are defensible. Snowden eventually fled to Russia, where he continues to receive asylum. Snowden’s revelations continue to have impacts. Some terrorist groups have altered the way in which they communicate because some of the documents Snowden released revealed information about U.S. surveillance techniques. The leaks also led to great changes in the way in which the government protects secret documents.

      The events surrounding Snowden’s leaks reveal the relationship between us as individuals and the organizations and institutions that frame our lives, such as our local and national governments. These organizations cannot exist, at least for very long, without willing members. When groups of individuals begin to question the authority and rationality of the bureaucracies that govern them, they may voice concern about, seek to change, or even rebel against those bureaucracies. Social order cannot be maintained if citizens refuse to adhere to society’s shared laws and norms. How do governments, as institutions, react? Some believe that governments and institutions often overreact. Snowden continues to be wanted by the U.S. government for violating the Espionage Act.

      We have seen how technology and globalization facilitate the global flow of information, fundamentally altering the way in which we communicate. But this nearly instantaneous dissemination of ideas has become a bonanza for everyone, including whistle-blowers, revolutionaries, rioters, potential terrorists, and even elected governments. For instance, revelations that swiftly followed Snowden’s initial leak suggested that the United States had also been secretly conducting extensive monitoring of the communications of its European Union allies (including the prime minister of Germany). Some governments (e.g., the United Kingdom) have considered shutting down digital communication during public disturbances. Other countries, such as China, Syria, and Iran, routinely censor their citizens’ use of the internet. Such barriers to the flow of information, as well as efforts such as Snowden’s to overcome them, are of profound interest to sociologists, public figures, and social activists alike.

      Picking up where the previous chapter left off with groups, this chapter moves on to the more macroscopic levels of interest to sociologists: organizations, societies, and global relationships. These social structures are discussed here as if they were clearly distinct from one another. However, the fact is that they tend to blend together in many clear-cut ways, as well as in other almost imperceptible ones.

      The individuals, interaction, and groups of focal concern in Chapter 4 all exist within, affect, and are affected by the various macroscopic phenomena of concern here. In fact, neither microscopic nor macroscopic social phenomena make much sense without the other level. Individuals, interaction, and groups do not exist in isolation from macro-level phenomena, and organizations, societies, and global social relationships cannot exist without individuals, interaction, and groups. What is new in recent years is the emergence, largely because of the explosive growth of digital communication, of an increasingly networked social world where both micro-level and macro-level phenomena are ever more closely intertwined. And this contributes to the dramatic expansion of globalization as a process and of the growth of global relationships at every point in the continuum that runs from the most microscopic to the most macroscopic social phenomena. You are, of course, deeply implicated in all of this. In fact, if you are a young person, you are the most likely to participate in, and be affected by, these recent developments, especially those involving digitized interrelationships. For example, through our (micro-level) smartphones, we are able to access, participate in, and even influence everything from the most micro (our close friends) to the most macro (global) levels of the social world.

      Organizations

      The social world is awash in organizations, collectives purposely constructed to achieve particular ends. Examples include your college or university, which has the objective of educating you as well as your fellow students; corporations, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Walmart, whose objective is to earn profits; the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which seeks to stabilize currency exchanges throughout the world; and Greenpeace, which works to protect and conserve the global environment.

      A particularly long and deep body of work in sociology deals with organizations (Adler et al. 2016; Godwyn and Gittell 2011), much of it traceable to the thinking of Max Weber on a particular kind of organization, the bureaucracy. As you may recall, a bureaucracy