Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER III SOCIAL FUNCTIONINGS A. Social Efficiency Every adult member of society, under the pressures of felt needs, instincts, and the influences exerted by his fellows, strives toward self- realization and the conservation and improvement of the conditions affecting him. Due to similar pressures he strives to affect others—to help or to hinder, to repel, or to coopt, to love or to hate them. Social evolution enlarges group areas of collective action (latitudinal social expansion) and the accumulated social inheritance (longitudinal or chronological social expansion). Hence individual strivings for efficiency merge increasingly into collective strivings on the part of social groups. Aspirations, policies, and programs of groups for social efficiency thus appear. At first these are largely by-products of unreflecting experience, sometimes made luminous and striking by the interpretative powers of genius, and incorporated into customs, traditions, codes. But increasingly they are characterized by collective consciousness, wider purposiveness, scientific evaluation. Blind progress gives place to purposive progress (see Ward's telic progress) in "spots." ("The twentieth century has appeared in only a few places as yet.") Social efficiency1 is now pursued along lines—sometimes by letting individuals or voluntary groups pursue their own ends, vrith society in some collective ways holding them to the "rules of the game," as in the case of economic production, family rearing, religious observance, invention, and the reorganization of customs; and sometimes by "public" collective action, as in defence, government, education, and sanitation. To the promotion of social efficiency almost all kinds of knowledge can be made to minister. In so far as sociology, the most inclusive of the social science...