Gaining Perspective: A Framework for Analysis
John C. Allen, Don Andrew Dillman · 2018
Various perspectives on community life have been found useful by different authors but provided only limited help in resolving the contradictions and in determining the kinds of issues to focus on in seeking to understand the behavior of Bremerites. The community-control era was the predominant social form when small agricultural settlements were isolated from one another by the lack of rapid transportation and communication technology. The information age directly attacks the essence of the mass society—cheap production of goods and services through mass production. In the mass society relationships were focused on organizations and were national in scope. Mass production was predicated upon meeting the average needs of consumers in the US market, i.e., producing products that would achieve maximum overall acceptance. In the mass society the most important worker skills changed to assembly line dexterity and the discipline to work long hours on repetitive, often uninteresting tasks.