Whyte and Berry Individual and Society
Whyte and Berry both believe that the individual in society is being slowly killed, figuratively and literally, by cultural trends far greater than he. Whyte attempts to reveal this in the context of the modern white collar worker while Berry attempts to reveal it through the dilemma of the modern consumer. Because of their historical contexts, they focus on different reasons for these cultural problems.
Specialization
Both Whyte and Berry indict the trend towards professional specialization as the most proximate source of the modern individual's discontent. Whyte believes that the transfer of work duties from the individual to the group leave the individual with little challenge and little to work towards. (Whyte: 399)
The Subjugation of the Individual to the Group - Social Ethic
Whyte believes that the root of our cultural problems, specialization, arise from the social ethic. Whyte defines the social ethic as "that growing body of thought which makes morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual." (Whyte 1956: 5) He recognizes three propositions of this social ethic: "a belief in the group as the source of creativity; a belief in "belongingness" as the ultimate need of the individual; and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness." (Whyte 1956: 5)
Whyte believes that the social ethic was created in response to the void left by the decline of the Protestant Ethic. (Whyte 1956: 4) The Protestant Work Ethic expounded the virtues of hard work, thrift, and competition as a means to salvation, providing men with an ultimate goal and a reason to live. With the increase of secular values and the decline of religious values, the Protestant Ethic was no longer compelling for the majority of American society. However, the individual's productive impulse did not die with the Protestant Ethic, it manifested itself again in what Whyte called the Social Ethic, the pursuit of collective prosperity. It was the individual's self-interest being achieved through the success of the collective.
Worse still, specialization may not even be very productive. Whyte intimates that thinkers who used to believe that morale necessarily increases productivity now "warn that the supervisor who concentrates on making the group happy may produce belongingness but not very much else." (Whyte: 399) Thus, specialization and the group ethic underlying it, are harmful to the interests of productivity as well as personal fulfillment.
The Gulf between Production and Consumption - Economics over Agriculture
Like Whyte, Berry also attributes the plight of the modern individual to specialization. (Berry 1977: 18) Berry explains that "…a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal…the American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and "agribusinessmen," the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators." (Berry: 19) Thus, the individual is exempt from being concerned about his larger impact on the world, for the purposes of Berry's analysis, the environment. Berry observes that "This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself." (Berry: 19)
For Berry, the true danger of specialization is not just boredom, but impotence. Specialization robs a man, successively, of responsibilities, skills, and eventually willpower. "He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride." (Berry 1997: 19)
The specialization away from the basic task of food production is Berry's ultimate focus. Berry suggests that the individual's ignorance of natural law and natural order causes the breakdown of the larger community. According to Berry, "The community disintegrates because it loses the necessary understandings, forms, and enactments of the relations among materials and processes, principles and actions, ideals and realities, past and present, present and future, men and women, body and spirit, city and country, civilization and wilderness, growth and decay, life and death -- just as the individual character loses the sense of a responsible involvement in these relations. (Berry 1977: 20)
For Berry, the separation of consumption and production changed the way the individual thought about his environment. "The collaborators purified their roles -- the household became simply a house or residence, purely consumptive in its function; the farm ceased to be a place to live and a way of life and became a unit of production...
Nursing Theory Analysis Theory-based nursing is the phenomenon that has been researched much during the past two decades. Nursing theory has become the foundation for nursing practice with its own knowledge base. The current paper is an analysis of King's theory of goal attainment. King acquired her goal attainment theory model from an interpersonal system and a behavioral science. The nurse and patient communicate to achieve a common goal of patient
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