Industrialization and the Traditional Order

This chapter discusses the social effects represented by the forms of group life that industrialization brings into being. Industrialization is viewed generally as a process that attacks, undermines, and displaces the traditional social order. The effect of the rejection of early industrialization in whole or in part is to restrict the ability or the likelihood of industrialization to act on the structure of the existing society. A disjunctive relation may be said to exist when early industrialization grows up as a distinct and separate development alongside the traditional order of life, without incorporation in that order of life. An "assimilative response" takes place when the established social order absorbs industrialization without resistance and without disruption to its own organization and patterns of life. The disruption of traditional life under early industrialization is so well known that there is scarcely any need to call attention to it.