The Conflict Between the Scientific‐Technological Process and Malignant Ceremonialism*

Louis Junker

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1983, vol. 42, issue 3, 341-352

Abstract: Abstract. A technological revolution may be seen as the process when more flexible or warranted technological relations break through destructive forces so decisively that the institutional‐technological structure is transformed into what Clarence Ayres called a set of “efficient organizational structures.” Growing flexibility of such relations can lead to broader public access to the means of life This creates conflict because ceremonial forces are expressed through repressive. obstructive and exploitative institutions in technology and science so that there is a greater benefit to those rested powers than to society, and because the vested interests ability to withhold or charge heavily for access to economic opportunity would be reduced. Two processes are at loggerheads: encapsulation vs. liberation. A ‘general trust’ in ‘technology’(used as an euphemism for the anti‐consumer business power system) abandons the main thrust of the ceremonial instrumental dichotomy: the scientific‐technological process is the social context in which the forces of warranted or warrantable knowledge are expressed through community institutions enlarging accessibility and participation on a peer‐to‐peer basis. Thus the reconstructed dichotomy is both a coinflict theory and a conflict resolution theory.

Date: 1983
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