In such communities, millions of people participate in the corporate institutions of trade, finance, industry and communications.
New key institutions have emerged in modern life.
The first is the market, with its potential of regulating value through the play of supply and demand in a “free” or “price-regulated” market system.
The market system was instrumental in the rise of industrialism – the harnessing of exterior sources of power to machines and people working together in synchronized effort.
In economics, then capitalisms, working through the market, compete with state regulation, harking back to an earlier mode familiar to anthropologists from feasting complexes: distribution.
The second key institution is the legal rational corporate bureaucracy derived from the old dynastic bureaucracy of a monarchy’s household.
The impersonal corporation, with careers open to talent, has spread world wide and has been coupled with industrial organization.
In sociology, old forms are conserved while new ones overlay them. In many countries the impersonal corporation vies, still, with the dynastic principle of inherited ownership of the corporation is a single linage.
Schooling is now the corporate form of age grading in mass society. It provides for socializing large numbers of youth and giving them the skills to interact impersonally with other by role and skill in a corporate setting.
In politics everywhere, mass participation is a norm. In societies, where power is monopolized by the state itself, this participation is a ritual exercise in which elections reflect ritual consent of the state’s choice of rulers.
In other societies the participation is more nearly a reality. But in any mass society true participation is always hard to achieve.
Moreover, in most of the world old and new empires are giving way to the nation state, a political form that tries to wed ethnic culture and identity (nationalism) with formality self governing constitutional form.
In addition, ethnic groups, labor, youth and in some advanced modern centuries – women and gays are everywhere forming protest movements to achieve more participation in the state and economy.
Modern Metropolitan Civilization
