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Durkheim: punishment and solidarity:
The sociology of punishment offers a framework for analyzing penal institutions that can give a fuller and
more realistic account than the punishment-as-crime control approach of penologicalstudies or the
punishment-as-moral-problem approach of the philosophy of punishment. Sociological perspective view
punishment as a complex institution, shaped by an ensemble ( a group of things or people acting or taken
together as a whole, especially a group of musician who regularly play together) of social and historical
forces and having a range of effects that reach well beyond the population of the offenders. The
durkhemian perspective interprets as a morality affirming, solidarity-producing mechanism grounded in
collective sentiments.(David Garland, Crime and Justice, Vol.14 (1991), 115-165)
Punishment and Social Solidarity: The Durkheimian Perspective
Durkheims engagement with punishment is two fold. First, he asks what it reveals about the nature of
society. Since, although society has a reality and an externality, it is not visible, it cannot be studied
directly. The character of the society can only be deduced by reading its expressions, by apprehending
what he calls a visible index and one of the important indices of societys culture is what it chooses to
punish and how. The second strand of his sociology of punishment is the functions punishment fulfills for
the maintenance of social order and for the reinforcement and transmission of culture. By following these
two strands, he develops a theory of the relation between the nature of punishment and the nature of the
society and the importance of punishments for social solidarity.
Durkheims theory of punishment appears first in probably his most famous work The Division of
Labour in society (1960). Then the theory is elaborated in his article Two Law of Penal Evaluation
(1984). In The Division of Labour in society Durkheim analyses the difference between modern
industrial society and the society which went before. In the book Durkheim used two term: Mechanical
Solidarity and Organic solidarity to show the difference of the society.
Mechanical solidarity and punishment:
In a pre-industrial society, most people carry out the same range of task. In a subsistence, pre-industrial
economy, all are engaged in providing food, clothing and shelter for themselves and their families; there
will be very few members of the society whose daily routines are different (priests, and rulers for
example) and the majority will also share the tasks involved in providing for these exceptional members.
Shared life experience will make for shared beliefs, shared understandings, and shared traditions. There
will be a solidarity based on similarity. Durkheim calls this Mechanical Solidarity. The societys rule
and customs will be functional to the survival of the society-for example, the rules for marriage and
kinship that arise in accordance with different societies neess to keep the group tightly together or to
recruit members of nearby societies. In such societies where peoples experiences of life are similar, there
will be, Durkheim tells us , a general belief in the rules and customs as essential; rules will in a very real
sense be the rules of the whole society. Since mechanical solidarity is based on likeness, it is assumed that
everyone in this type of society acts and thinks in the same way. It is under this logic, that Durkheim
states that its members strive to conserve their common collective consciousness. This term denotes the
totality of beliefs and sentiments which are held by all ordinary members of society. It is due to this
collective consciousness that Durkheim can also define what a crime and how this crime is punishable.
He claims that due to the fact that everyone thinks the same way and holds the same values that anything

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done against, or deviating from this collective moral thought, is considered a crime. These crimes are
punished by repressive law and are public, organized, and passionate and emotional. It is in exposing
these deviant members to shame that the state reinforces the common moral consciousness of its people.
Organic Solidarity and Punishment:
In contrast, once specialization of tasks develops, peoples experiences of the society they live in and its
relation to the outside world will differ, and instead of a solidarity based on sameness, there must be a
solidarity based on interdependence with fellow members whose lives, and therefore attitudes and beliefs,
shared commitment to rules and traditions, cannot be assumed, but mechanisms must be found whereby
the relationships necessary for the maintenance of the society and the satisfaction of the needs of its
members can be sustained. Durkheim call this kind of solidarity organic solidarity.
Organic solidarity on the other hand is defined by its instrumental involvement with the division of labor.
Since this type of solidarity is based on difference, the different members of this type of society
complement each other and move forward as a whole. The laws that rule over this society restitutory in
that they are designed to restore the status quo of the division of labor. If there is a problem with the
way things are running, the specialized bodies such as the courts and lawyers work to return the calm over
the situation and get people to work together again. Finally, since these rules do not involve common
consciousness, they approach conflict differently depending on the severity of the case and do not involve
punishment.


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WEBER: BUREACRACY AND RATIONALITY

Explanation of some important terms:
Bureaucracy:The word bureaucracy is derived from two words; bureau and Kratos. While the word
bureau refers to the office the Greek suffix kratia or kratos means power or rule. Thus we use the
word bureaucracy to refer to the power of the office [2]. Bureaucracy is rule conducted from a desk
or office, i.e. by the preparation and dispatch of written documents and electronic ones.
I ntroduction:
Max Weber (18641920) was another of the great founding fathers of sociology. Although he did not
engage directly with punishment, many of his ideas about the character of authority in modern society and
about the forms of social institutions including law found in modern societies are relevant to an
understanding of some of the contemporary developments in, and debates about, penality.
Bureaucracy and rationality:
Weber defines bureaucracy as the means of carrying community action over into rationally ordered
social action an instrument for socializing relations of power, bureaucracy has been and is a power
instrument of the first order. Some scholars [5-9] argue that public administration is a field of control;
control of public administrators, control of people, control of inputs, and control of outputs. All these
kinds of controls seek to achieve one main goal which is to meet the peoples needs and expectations in
an efficient way. According to Weber, bureaucracy is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of
attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally that most rational known means of
carrying out imperative control over human beings [3]. Weber argues that human civilization evolved
from primitive and mystical to the rational and complex stages and relationships. Weber believes that
societies move from the primitive stage to theoretical and technical ones. According to Weber, the
evolution of societies is facilitated by three types of authority that he identifies as traditional, charismatic
and legal-rational authority [10].
Traditional authority,where rules are obeyed because those making them have been accorded the right to
do so through tradition (for example, hereditary monarchs); charismatic authority, where a ruler or group
of rulers is regarded by the populace as having some special qualities which give them the right to rule;
and legal authority, where rules are made by a person or persons who are given the right to rule through
following some special procedure, such as being elected to office.
Legal authority is promoted by Weber as being the most appropriate form of rule for modern industrial
societies, because other forms of authority are more likely to be resistant to change, or are more likely to
rule in the interests of the rulers rather than of the society as a whole.
Under legal authority, those granted the right to rule must themselves obey the laws. It follows that if
procedural rules are the source of legal authority, then these procedural rules will have some special status
in the society, akin to the aura of monarchy or religion in traditional societies. The status of the
Constitution in the USA is a good example of rules having almost sacred status. Like Durkheim, then,

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Weber seems to be suggesting that in modern societies law itself becomes the ultimate source of
authority: Webers conception of legal domination has been drawn on extensively in the elaboration of
the doctrine of the rule of law by modern legal theorists (Cotterrell 1984).
Weber extends his analysis to uncover the characteristics of legal authority, the forms of behaviour that
best suit the maintenance and enhancementof legal authority. Systems of laws, he says, may be rational or
irrational, formal or substantive. In a rational system, decisions are made by following rules and
procedures for classes of cases rather than seeing each case as unique and establishing ad hoc rules of
judgment for every new case. Systems are substantive if they appeal to rules or beliefs outside the system
of law itself (for example, religion); they are formal to the extent that the definitions and beliefs involved
in making judgments are defined by law itself (Cotterrell 1984). A formally rational system of criminal
law, then, would have a set of definitions of crimes and a set of rules of adjudication, and a formally
rational penal code would complement this with a prescribed set of penalties. Weber sees formal
rationality as the best principle for the formulation and operation of law (and other subsystems of
authority and government) in modern capitalist societies. The characteristics of formally rational systems,
of proceeding according to rules, of authority being vested in roles rather than persons qua persons he
calls bureaucratic rationality, and he sees this as an essential feature of an efficient, legitimately
governed, modern state.
If we look at punishment in modern industrial societies, we can see many of the characteristics of
Webers bureaucratic rationality. Judgments must be made according to rules; authority is vested in
position-holders rather than in people themselves (judges can only impose punishments while they are
sitting in court; they lose their right to punish when they retire). To the extent that criminal justice
systems do not conform to the ideal of bureaucratic rationality, there is public criticism. Much of the
impetus for sentencing reform in the USA, in England and Wales, and elsewhere in the 1980s was
because of inconsistencies in sentencing, and perceptions that judges were sentencing according to their
own prejudices rather than according to the facts of the case and the rules of due process (Frankel 1973;
Hudson 1987). These criticisms of criminal justice systems in the 1980s can be seen as pointing to
inadequacies in relation to bureaucratic rationality: critics of criminal justice in this period used decidedly
Weberian language when they posited a crisis of legitimacy (Cavadino and Dignan 1992: 74).
Weber uses the notion of the ideal type to help him with the problem of transitional phases and
intermediate societies. An ideal type is a set of correlated characteristics such as a capitalist economy,
an elected government, a secular society which will be approached rather than fully realized in any
actual society. Modern society and traditional society are thus divided by a continuum, not a dichotomy.
Contemporary England and Wales, for example, has a capitalist economy, an elected government, a
secular majority, but retains a traditional monarchy, vestiges of religious authority and vestiges of
substantive law. Other societies, such as the USA, may be further along the continuum towards modernity
on some characteristics (for example, not having a monarchy), and Weber certainly viewed the English
system of justice, especially in its reliance on precedent rather than the codes of continental Europe, and
its reliance on a lay magistracy, as not having gone so far along the continuum towards formal legal
rationality. He is consequently much challenged by Englands success as a capitalist, imperial nation in
the nineteenth century, and concludes that England achieved capitalist supremacy among the nations not
because but rather in spite of its judicial system (Weber 1978: 814).

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Many of the developments in punishment systems in the 1980s took societies such as England and Wales
further along the continuum towards Webers ideal type of a modern, bureaucratic society. Changes in the
granting of parole, the dissemination of sentencing guidelines, and the move to make sentencing more
predictably correlated with the seriousness of the offence (Ashworth 1989) all pointed in this direction of
making criminal justice more rational in the bureaucratic sense: more firmly tied to the following of rules
and precedents, less open to individual assessment of circumstances of cases.
These reforms continue the rationalization of punishment that is a prominent theme in sociological-
historical studies of social control appearing from the 1970s onwards (Spitzer 1983). On this reading,
developments such as regular paid police forces, a professional judiciary, rules of evidence and due
process, penal codes with graduated punishments, the move from torture, mutilation and death to
imprisonment and fines, are not so much progress in humanitarianism as progress in bureaucratized
rationalism, necessary to meet the social control needs and legitimacy conditions of modern societies.
Some historians and sociologists of punishment have, on the other hand, rather like the functionalist
anthropologists, challenged the idea that simple societies have irrational means of social control and
modern societies have rational means. They have argued that control systems may well be rational for the
societies in which they exist (Philips 1983); different types of society pose different problems of social
order and generation of solidarity (as Durkheim saw) and may call forth different models of rationality (as
Weber demonstrates).
As well as his analysis of authority and rationality, Webers great contribution to sociology was his
argument that the logic of social science is interpretative, not predictive. Unlike Durkheim, he did not
view society as something extra and external to individuals, but saw that society consists of the actions of
its members. Human beings carry on their lives through interpreting each others actions, and from this
build up patterns of identity, behaviour and meaning which become generalized within their own lives
and within a society. These stable patterns become the customs, social roles, laws and institutions that we
call culture, and for Weber and the sociologists who have followed his Verstehen(understanding)
methodology, cultures must be studied by observation of the actions of individuals. Sociological
understanding will take the form of interpretation of these patterned actions, and sociological theory can
only be in the form of correlations and generalizations: because human behaviour is always contingent on
interpersonal interactions, outcomes can only ever be probable; there cannot be predictive laws as in the
physical sciences. In relation to penal justice, Weberian methodology has given rise to a vast literature on
observational studies of behaviour in courtrooms and prisons, of interactions between police and suspects,
and between social workers and probation officers and their clients (Rubington and Weinberg 1968).