Religious Organization: A Trend Report and Bibliography [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9783112313602, 9783112302460

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CURRENT SOCIOLOGY/LA SOCIOLOGIE CONTEMPORAINE Volume XXI (1973), No. 2: Religious Organization

CURRENT SOCIOLOGY/LA SOCIOLOGIE CONTEMPORAINE

EDITOR

Margaret S. Archer Department of Sociology, University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7 AL, England EDITORIAL BOARD

J. Ben-David Department of Sociology Hebrew University, Jerusalem

A. Reiss Department of Sociology Yale University

A. Cavali Instituto di Sociologìa Università Padova

K. Svalastoga Sociologisk Institut Kfibenhavns Universitet

S. Lukes Balliol College Oxford

F. Tenbruk Seminar für Soziologie Universität Tübingen

ADVISORY BOARD

A. Akinowo Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research University of Ibadan

E. Gellner London School of Economics and Political Science University of London

S. Bagu F.L.A.C.S.O. Santiago, Chile

P. Gonzales-Casanova Instituto de Investigaciones social Ciudad Universitario Mexico

A. Bujra Department of Sociology University of Dar es Salaam

Le Thành Khôi U.E.R. de Science de VEducation Université René Descartes, Paris

A. Bouhdiba Department of Sociology University of Tunis

R. Mukherjee Indian Statistical Calcutta

F. Fukutake Department of Sociology University of Tokyo

P. Pieris U.N. Asian Institute for Economic Development and Planning, Bangkok

Institute

CURRENT SOCIOLOGY/LA SOCIOLOGIE CONTEMPORAINE Volume XXI (1973), No. 2

Religious Organization A Trend Report and Bibliography Prepared for the International Sociological Association under the auspices of the International Committee for Social Sciences Documentation by

JAMES A. BECKFORD

MOUTON . THE HAGUE . PARIS

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Contents

Religious Organization Introduction 1. Towards a History of the Concept 1.1. Bounding the Topic 1.2. Development of the Concept 1.3. Post-Classical Development 2. General Considerations 2.1. Why Study Organization? 2.2. The Distinctiveness of Religious Organizations 3. An Open-Systems Approach 3.1. A Model of Church Organization 4. Environment 5. Resources 6. Processes 7. Structures 7.1. Specialization 7.2. Formalization 7.3. Centralization 7.4. Distribution of Authority 8. Church and Sect or Religious Organization 8.1. Cultural 8.2. Social 8.3. Organizational 8.4. A Moratorium 8.5. Conclusion

7 7 9 10 12 17 18 18 22 29 31 34 50 62 75 76 81 85 87 92 93 94 95 96 102

L'Organization religieuse (Résumé)

105

6

Contents

Bibliography 1. Bibliographies 2. Sociology of Religion 3. Religious Organization — Substantive 4. Religious Organization — Formal 5. Organization Theory

109 109 110 117 158 164

Author Index

167

Religious Organization

INTRODUCTION A new departure in the design of Trend Reports necessitates a few preliminary remarks about the scope and intended function of what follows. There is no pretence to exhaustiveness in this report on work in the sociology of religious organization; rather, the intention is to present a general view of major or promising contributions made since roughly 1960. Instead of being a purely descriptive report, it attempts to convey a two-sided argument. On the one hand, it is argued that the disparateness of the contributions can be profitably reduced to an extended open-systems model of religious organization. On the other, the argument tries to establish the superiority of some very recent approaches to the sociological understanding of religious organization over the time-honoured practice of thinking in terms of 'church', 'sect', 'denomination', etc. In this way, a trend can undoubtedly be discerned, but the trend is frankly considered less important than the separate arguments of which it is composed. It must therefore be emphasized that the present writer is deliberately conveying a personal evaluation of these arguments and is consciously selective in his choice of material for comment. This rationale for the report entails two serious consequences: Very few individual contributions will be intensively examined, and some will be forcibly interpreted in novel ways. Apologies are therefore due in advance to those authors who will be offended by such procedures, but no alternative is feasible if the report is to achieve its objectives. Even a cursory perusal of the literature on religious organization can establish a few general considerations which merit brief mention at this juncture. National proclivities, for example, are strikingly apparent: Americans favour studies of role-behaviour; the Dutch focus on vocations to the priesthood; the French are drawn to organizational rationales; and the British are

8

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Organization

concerned with extremist groups. Secondly, studies of organization are dominated by a concern for their practical usefulness to religious administrators. Thirdly, the link between research and theories of organization is frequently absent or underdeveloped. Fourthly, there seems to be a reluctance to pursue organizational analysis beyond the framework of canon law or formal constitutions. Finally, the notion of religious organization is rarely extended outside the Judaeo-Christian cultural area. In varying degrees these considerations obstruct the free development of substantive knowledge and formal theory of religious organization, and the report will endeavour to propose some tentative ways of circumventing the obstructions. But there will not be time to perform satisfactorily the tasks of conceptual clarification that are also urgently required in the present state of knowledge. In addition to outlining trends in recent work, proposing new directions for research and suggesting ways of overcoming outstanding obstacles in the study of religious organization, the report will also serve to document indirectly the rapid changes that are presently occurring in the field of study. In this respect there are at least two different trends to describe, for the sociological phenomena themselves are changing faster than the sociologists' methods of studying them. But time and space permit consideration of only the organizational aspects of these changes. A continuing series of Trend Reports from different angles would be required to cover the whole ground satisfactorily. Existing bibliographies on the sociology of religion already constitute a rough framework of complementary studies for the present work and help to compensate for its deliberate selectivity. In particular, the on-going, serial bibliographies of Social compass and Les archives de sociologie des religions (very recently re-named Les archives de sciences sociales des religions) are a most valuable source of up-to-date information. The annual bibliography, published as a separate volume of the Journal of African and Asian Studies, is of great help in supplementing Western sociologists' generally meagre knowledge of some non-Christian religions. The usefulness of non-serial bibliographies is necessarily limited, but the following all contain reliable compilations of material relating to religious organization. Le Bras [5], Berkowitz and Johnson [I], Burr [2], Schreuder [7], Deelen [3], Scherer [275], Wilson [281] and Dobbelaere [4], The following people and institutions have all helped in the production of this Trend Report. The author would like to acknowledge his grateful thanks to: A. Bryman, A.W. Eister, R. Gombrich, C.C. Harris, P.M. Harrison, C.R. Hinings, G. Langrod, R.P. Scherer, J. Snook, K.P. Takayama, B.S. Turner, library staff at the universities of Durham and Reading and the Research Fund Committee of Durham University.

Towards a History of the Concept

9

1. TOWARDS A HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT On the evidence of some recently published works in the field of the sociology of religion, one might be led to believe that the concept of religious organization held no interest for the sociologist. The wide-ranging survey of Western religion, (Mol [28]), for example, considers its topic from almost evety possible angle save one: Forms of social organization. A similar picture emerges from the influential publications of the Survey Program in Religion and Society of the Survey Research Center at Berkeley, (Glock and Stark [21]; Stark and Glock [41]). Enormous effort and ingenuity have been expended on the task of refining a methodology appropriate for the study of religious beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and values. The surveys have also examined the patterns of behavioural consequences which are associated with patterns of religious cognition and emotion. But nowhere in the published reports has the topic of religious organization received serious examination. Finally, a recent introduction to some aspects of the sociology of religion virtually neglected the topic altogether on the grounds that it offered 'little purchase on the central question: what is the role of religion in our society?', (Budd [8:VII]. Although the author deserves congratulations for her frankness, there are very strong objections to her dismissive thesis about the implied irrelevance of religious organization. In fact, the whole of the present report of research bearing on this topic may be conceived as an extended apology for renewed interest in a concept which (in suitably qualified ways) could profitably be restored to centrality in the work of the sociologist of religion. That is to say, the argument will attempt to establish, on the one hand, the substantive importance of knowledge about patterns of religious organization and, on the other, the heuristic usefulness of using the concept to help uncover other sociological facets of religious phenomena. The broad outline of the report will be as follows: A brief historical survey of salient contributions to the study of religious organization will serve as a preface to an analytical clarification of the issues involved in using the concept. This will be followed by a critical review in an open-systems framework of research findings which illustrate its intrinsic usefulness and heuristic value for the sociological study of religious phenomena. Suggestions for the concept's refinement and for its more profitable articulation with other modes and areas of sociological enquiry will develop out of the critical discussion. Evaluation of the relative usefulness of a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of social organization will also be made at this juncture. Inevitably the bulk of illustrations will be drawn from examination of the Christian religion, but considerations of the concept's validity in other religious systems will not be totally lacking. But it must be stressed that there are no good a priori grounds for accepting that the very concept has no

Religious

10

Organization

applicability outside the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim areas. While it may be true that 'the patterns of affective neutrality, role specificity, performance expectations, self-orientation, and even universalism, which characterize the dominant organizational mode of Western society . . .' (B.R. Wilson [281: 428]) do not have identical counterparts in non-Western religions, it cannot be denied that these latter do assume some organized social expression. Anyone who doubts the usefulness of trying to understand non-Western forms of religion in terms of organizational structures should read, for example, Martini's [164] article on the organization of Buddhist monastic orders in Cambodia. Indeed, the fact that Western forms of organization do not characterize non-Western religions should act as a spur to the sociologist to broaden his concept of religious organization accordingly. Likewise, organization theory, if it cannot accommodate non-Western forms of religious organization, should ideally be expanded or revised to include the fresh material. Of course, the comparative applicability of devices such as the traditional church-sect typology may prove to be very limited in usefulness outside the Western context, but it does not follow that other kinds of organizational typology are necessarily unthinkable (see Eister [16]). It may, in fact, be salutary for sociologists within the Judaeo-Christian culture to re-think the rationales for their conventional concepts of religious organization in different religious contexts. One of the objectives of this report will, therefore, be to recommend and ideally to justify the sociological study of non-Western religious organization qua organization.

1.1

Bounding the Topic

On the assumption that unduly scrupulous concern with definitions at the very outset of analysis may only restrict the potential scope of enquiry, it is undesirable to proceed at this point beyond a minimal attempt to specify the boundaries of the topic. For present purposes, then, 'religious organization' will be taken to refer to the complex of recurrent social relationships, activities and rules within which religious ideas, attitudes and feelings are given stable social expression. At the most rudimentary level the concept refers simply to the interdependency linking together the members of groups whose reasons for association are related to religion. At the most complex level it can refer to the highly institutionalized and historically perduring ways in which religious interests have been represented in societies. The minimal definition of the concept clearly and deliberately admits of immense variation. It therefore ranges much more widely than does, for example, Gibson Winter's [245:12] authoritative (but intentionally ethnocentric) conceptualization: 'Organization is the application of rational processes of co-ordination

Towards a History of the Concept

11

and communication to achieve clearly defined goals or objectives.' While his definition is probably well-suited to the organization of contemporary religious groups in the U.S.A., it has little or no usefulness in many other contexts. Winter's definition raises the question: Is religious organization synonymous with ecclesiastical administration? 'Administration' embraces a far wider range of activities than designing forms or form-filling. It is no less important to stress the specific differences between 'administration' and 'organization'. The former is concerned with the design and performance of activities which have been established as the proper domain of a collectivity. In this broad sense, ecclesiastical administration may include not only the obvious day-to-day provision of material and personnel resources of religious groups but also the long-term planning and organization of activities with the objective of maximizing efficiency and effectiveness. This might be more usefully termed 'management' and is analytically distinguishable from 'religious organization' which, from the sociological point of view, concerns the structured interrelationships between sub-groups of people within a collectivity. It therefore has less to do with either the routine or exceptional processing of people, material and events than with the abstracted patterns of recurrent interrelationships among group members. The study of religious organization concentrates on the blueprint for transactions within and between groups, not on the transactions themselves or on the devices for facilitating and regulating them. Roughly the same kind of strictures against narrowness of definition apply to the term 'religion' as well. The value of a definition is reflected in its potential for facilitating the transmission of unambiguous ideas. The present context, therefore, demands nothing more than a minimal indication of the kinds of phenomena that might usefully be called 'religious'. The definition proposed by Clifford Geertz [19:4] satisfies this condition quite well: Religion is '. . . a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic'. In other contexts this definition may prove to be excessively lax, but for present purposes it is useful in indicating the kinds of symbol-system which find social expression in religious organizations as defined above. If it is objected that the definition includes too readily a number of symbolsystems which lack any reference to the numinous or to the transcendent or supernatural, the reply would be that, providing the allegedly non-religious symbol-systems conform with the definition in all other respects, then the similarities are too great to be suppressed in any dogmatic distinction between religion and non-religion. It would be helpful to bear in mind when

Religious Organization

12

considering the question of definition M.E. Marty's [25] catalogue of the bewildering diversity of religious phenomena that came to light in the course of the 1960s in the U.S.A. and some other parts of the world (see also [22]). There was a clear lesson in Marty's article that the traditionally restrictive definitions of religion could not have coped with the rapidly changing guises in which religion (loosely defined) was appearing.

1.2

Development of the Concept

The necessity to begin with some fairly general orientation-statements about the concept has been occasioned by the remarkable fact that 'religious organization' has not enjoyed a particularly long or distinguished existence among the conceptual instruments of sociologists. Or, more precisely, those sociologists who are frequently considered as founding-fathers of the subject rarely, if ever, used the concept explicitly. It was unquestionably implicit in some contributions of Comte, Saint-Simon and Durkheim, but it had not yet crystallised into an articulated construction. Robertson-Smith and Fustel de Coulanges were constrained by the subjects of their research — ancient Semitic and Roman religions, respectively — to pay little attention to the organizational structures within which religious interests could function as the principal raison d'etre and guiding principle of social groups. Their chief preoccupations were with the potential of religion to act as the social cement of a variety of natural groupings and social categories that had no purposive independence from civil society. Only in the work of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch was the suggestion made that the internal organization of groups founded with the prime and deliberate purpose of cultivating religious interests constituted a worthy object of sociological study. They pioneered the investigation of the conditions within which, and the factors affecting the ways in which, specifically religious organizations came to constitute a type of social group with some highly distinctive traits. In the context of Weber's broad interests in the historical development of rationality in the West, the process whereby specifically and narrowly religious associations separated themselves from previously undifferentiated, sacralized societies, marks a very significant watershed. While the wider significance of the 'autonomization' of religious associations is not central to present concerns, it is of interest insofar as it prepared the way for Weber to examine more closely the patterns of internal organization that seemed to distinguish religious organizations from others. By contrast with Simmel [37], Weber was careful to avoid pure speculation on the origins of religion in general: More central to his interests were the historical processes whereby religious organizations had undergone

Towards a History of the Concept

13

internal differentiation. Hence, his constant fascination with the emergence of various religious specialists and with the concomitant sociological problems in their groups of followers. Perhaps by comparison with the time that he also devoted to the study of relations between religious outlooks and aspects of secular culture, his attention to problems of religious organization may appear to shrink in significance. This assessment of his distribution of intellectual effort is probably justified, but it overlooks the immense, though indirect, contribution that he made to the study of religious organization through the schematic examination of the general principles underlying the structures and dynamics of all formal organizations. From his work on the concepts of 'authority', 'power', 'charisma' and 'bureaucracy' a rich vein of testable insights into the organization of purely religious bodies has come to light. Sociologists benefitting from his keen analytical perspective and from the impressive breadth of his erudition have now begun to achieve fruitful results from the application of his ideas to the study of contemporary religious organizations ranging from the American Baptist Convention to Scientology. But it was his pupil, Ernst Troeltsch, who first systematized some of the insights into religious organization that Weber had loosely formulated or suggested. He took up and amplified the general idea that Christian religious interests found social expression in three (and more, according to P. Gustafson [266]) typical constellations of doctrinal, moral and social characteristics. One of the aims of his monumental The social teachings of the Christian churches [42] was to spell out the internal logic of the interrelations among the clustered characteristics in the three types of Christian grouping — church, sect and mystical movement — and to highlight the organizational forms that were congruent with these types of religio-ethical outlook. It will be helpful for understanding some of the misconstructions that have subsequently been built upon Troeltsch's conceptualization of the allegedly basic types of religious organization if one essential point can be clearly established: Troeltsch had been stimulated to undertake his research into the social teachings of Christianity by the personal conviction that religious groups could, and should, formulate doctrines of social reform in full awareness of the social influences acting upon them. Foremost among these influences were the 'metaphysical convictions based on principle' [42:24] which were central to each religious group's tradition and which consequently determined 'modern ecclesiastical social doctrines' [42:25]. It follows, according to Troeltsch, that these social doctrines should be studied 'in the light of the history of the Christian ethic . . . Since no history of this kind is in existence, I am forced to open up the subject myself. . . My object will be to pave the way for the understanding of the social doctrines of the Gospel, of the Early Church, of the Middle Ages, of the post-Reformation

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confessions, right down to the formation of the new situation in the modern world, in which the old theories no longer suffice, and where, therefore, new theories must be constructed...' [42:25]. Two things need to be said immediately about Troeltsch's own conception of his objectives. Firstly, and this point will be discussed again later, the typification of Christian groups which he eventually proposed was designed with the narrow purpose of throwing into relief basic varieties of religioethical teachings. The more purely sociological characteristics that were built into the three types were predicated upon the irreducible base of ethical doctrines. It is important to establish this order of priorities not so much for understanding Troeltsch's own work but rather for appreciating the erroneous way in which some sociologists have attributed quite different intentions to him. Roger Mehl [26:19] was unquestionably correct, therefore, in saying that what Troeltsch had undertaken was really '. . . a sociology of dogma, revealing the role of the religious community in the formation and expression of doctrinal truth'. It should be added, of course, that Troeltsch also paid attention to the reciprocal relations between doctrine and type of religious organization. But the highly specific focus of his basic interest makes it questionable whether the types that he chose can necessarily have much usefulness in other investigations. If he had been concerned simply to devise a typology of religious groups in independence of any particular patterns of doctrine, then the result might have been very different. Secondly, there are many indications in The social teachings of the Christian churches of Troeltsch's personal sympathies with particular values and ideals, and they unquestionably influenced his choice of defining characteristics for the three types of Christian religious group. In other words, the types are not constructed on ideally objective criteria but reflect, instead, the intrusion of strong value-commitments. Dittes [261] has documented this argument more fully and has pointed up some fascinating parallels in the moral animus behind the construction of both the church-sect and the extrinsic-intrinsic typologies of religious phenomena. More recently, Eister [17] has clarified the differences between the moral considerations that inspired Troeltsch on the one hand and Niebuhr on the other to study types of religious group. Nevertheless, there are some marked similarities between the works of Troeltsch and Niebuhr, the American theologian-philosopher, whose influential The social sources of denominationalism of 1929 [30] and The Kingdom of God in America of 1937 [31] expressed his personal dislike of class-related styles of religious thought and practice. While his normative assessment of the dynamics of religious change in the contemporary U.S.A. has little direct bearing on 'religious organization', he must be mentioned for his part in making widely known the concept of 'denomination'. He thereby

Towards a History of the Concept

15

anticipated by only two years the publication in an English translation of Troeltsch's Social teachings, in which 'sect' and 'church' are distinguished from movements based on 'mysticism'. His debt to Troeltsch is enormous, and this has had serious consequences for the subsequent development of sociological thinking about religious organization. For Niebuhr was the first in a long line of writers to proceed beyond the objectives of Troeltsch's narrow research interests whilst retaining the original conceptual apparatus (with only minor modifications). No longer were 'church', 'sect' and 'mysticism' intended to represent primarily three social expressions of religioethical teachings, but Niebuhr had indissolubly fused each 'type' with a set of allegedly concomitant and, by implication, unchanging sociological characteristics. The narrow focus of his predecessor's interests and the explicitly one-sided nature of his type-formation were overlooked and submerged under the conviction that Troeltsch's types represented the best general, allpurpose characterization of religious bodies. Moreover, Niebuhr was less rigorous than Troeltsch in using 'church' and 'sect' in a constant manner (see Eister [17]). Niebuhr [30:6] wa's passionately hostile to what he scathingly called '. . . the accommodation of Christianity to the caste-system of human society'. The strength of his emotional response to the situation that he was studying must cast doubt upon the reliability and usefulness of his analysis for the study of other, allegedly similar, situations. Thus, his influence over the subsequent course of development of the concepts 'church', 'sect' and 'denomination' will be shown to have been unhelpful for the study of religious organization qua organization. In brief, Niebuhr's overriding and limiting concern with the socio-economic underpinning of the concepts has worked against the development of alternative perspectives on religious organization. He also helped to perpetuate the confusion in sociological thinking between ideals and facts, for, under the guise of analysing contemporary religious realities, he was actually arguing in defence of the ideal of Christian unity and against the 'evil' of denominationalism. In the same year that the English translation of Troeltsch's Social teachings was published, Joachim Wach was publishing in German the precursor to his English Sociology of religion [44] which eventually appeared in 1944. This schematic condensation of his outstanding erudition marked a significant advance in the slow process whereby 'religious organization' was emerging as a distinctive sociological concept. Although in some respects Wach's treatment of the subject bears a superficial similarity to that of Weber, Troeltsch and Niebuhr there are some unmistakable differences. First and foremost, Wach's analysis ranged widely outside Christianity and was not evidently stimulated by personal feelings about the relative merits of different types of Christian grouping. Secondly, the concepts that he

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employed fitted (albeit loosely) into a definite theoretical perspective: The increasing size of sociological units, the increasing differences in 'property, occupation and rank' [44:109], and the outstanding initiatives of certain leaders were adduced as factors in the explanation of change in religious groups. Thirdly, his apparent freedom from anxiety about the alleged disjunction between ideal and reality in contemporary Christian groupings allowed him to make a dispassionate and objective survey of modes of religious organization as they had emerged in a wide variety of religions (for his typology of Christian groups see [279]). Finally, Wach advanced definite ideas to account for the potential of new religious groupings to adopt either an outward-looking, missionary stance or an inward-looking, elitist one. He attributed the latter stance to '. . . groups united by an experience which is thought to be open only to an ethnically, religiously, or otherwise defined minority or majority of people: a religious elite' [44:111], Wach understood this to be the constitutional grounds of such diverse types of religious organization as secret- and mystery-societies and some sects. The 'universalist' stance was explained in terms of a constitutional refusal to adopt a different standard of ethics for members and non-members (although he had to admit that 'feelings of superiority toward the latter and double standards of morality will develop easily' [44:112]). It should be added that Wach's general theoretical orientation leaned heavily on the framework prepared by Durkheim and Weber. T h e former had already outlined a theory of social development through growing differentiation of institutional spheres. Durkheim accounted for the emergence of religious groups in terms of growing commercial relations between neighbouring tribes (in the Australian aboriginal context, at least), 'mutual loans and treaties', 'inter-tribal assemblies' and 'international marriages'. Wach's delineation of emerging religious groupings clearly shares the same general perspective. Wach also shared a common perspective on religious development with Max Weber in respect to their insistence that the innovatory role of prophets (in the loosest sense of the term), mystagogues and priests was of the utmost importance for the formation of new types of religious organization. The parallels between their work also extend to a common interest in the modes of realization and institutionalization whereby the radical breakthrough of an innovator is converted into a stable basis for everyday religious practice. Finally, a point common to them both was their insistence on supporting generalizing statements with a wealth, if not plethora, of wide-ranging and comparative examples. Indeed, Desroches [14] has identified the basis of Wach's typological method as the imaginative interplay between abstract ideal-types and concrete examples which, however numerous, could never exhaust the logical possibilities.

Towards a History of the Concept 1.3

17

Post-Classical Developments

As in many other fields of sociological inquiry, the initial phase of describing and classifying or typifying the available material yielded to a phase in which very few advances were achieved. Only H.P. Douglass's The church as a social institution [15] had attempted to collect and convey fresh information on certain aspects of Christian organization, but there was no advance in either the design of typologies or the elaboration of theoretical approaches to the study of religious organization. There was certainly scope for elaboration within the framework of concepts employed by H.S. Becker in his adaptation of Leopold von Wiese's Beziehungslehre, but the process of elaboration was to take another ten years to reach fruition. A new phase was heralded by the publication in 1942 of Liston Pope's analysis of the relations between socio-economic interest-groups and religious organizations in an industrial area of North Carolina (Millhands and preachers [33]). Pope's acceptance of Niebuhr's suggestion that denominational differences reflected lines of socio-economic division in American society entailed a long-lasting restriction of the meaning of 'church' and 'sect' to their members' material and honorific status. Although this was only one aspect of their total meaning for Weber and Troeltsch, it came to dominate the series of increasingly elaborate conceptualizations of religious groups that American sociologists devised after World War II. Thus, numerous writers contributed in various ways to the process of either refining church and sect or breaking them down into finer types, but the socio-economic criteria were central to each specification of the relevant dimensions (Yinger [46], Pfautz [186], Johnson [269] and Moberg [27]). These developments were ambiguous: On the one hand, they broadened the scope of religious organization by introducing such new concepts as 'cult', 'established sect' and 'ecclesia', but, on the other, they tended to focus more narrowly on the purely socio-economic determinants of religious organization and ideology. Not surprisingly, the vogue for sect studies in the U.S.A. coincided with the heyday of functionalist theorizing about the compensatory functions of religion. The trend is still observable but was soon being eclipsed by developments that first became widely apparent in the late 1950s, namely, the growing sophistication of studies of role-relationships in religious groups. Again, the U.S.A. was the scene of most such work, but reverberations of it were certainly felt elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon world. European sociologists of religion at that time were mainly preoccupied with two problems deriving from practical difficulties felt by the Catholic church. On the one hand, the sharp decline in vocations to the priesthood and to monastic orders was the occasion of extensive research into the family backgrounds, parish life and educational experiences of actual or would-be

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seminarians. On the other hand, sociologists began to examine the appropriateness of traditional parish structures for missionary or pastoral tasks, but only rarely did they conceive of their research in organizational terms. The main thrust of research in the sociology of religion at that time was tangential to questions of organization. In fact, it was only in the early 1960s that religious organizations came under intensive structural analysis. But the widely differing contexts in which this research was conducted conspired to obstruct the development of any general or formal theory. There were sect studies in Britain, 'organization and methods' analyses of American denominations, discussions of manpower questions in Europe, a dawning awareness of the special problems of inner-city parishes on both sides of the Atlantic and a near-universal interest in the organizational ramifications of Vatican II. Perhaps the factor that finally helped to crystallize a specific concern for organization in itself was the proliferation of so-called new religious movements in the mid-1960s. This factor was also instrumental in arousing Western sociologists' interest in non-Christian religions at home and abroad. The new movements showed up the ethnocentric and doctrinal narrowness of the concepts with which religious organization had customarily been analysed; they demanded a radically new approach. In part, the creation of professional journals and associations for the sociological study of religion in the U.S.A. reflects this trend (see Schroeder [35]). The much earlier establishment in Paris of the Groupe de Sociologie des Religions was evidence of a more flexible theoretical perspective and of a broader understanding of religious phenomena than were current in the English-speaking world. It is clear, however, that sociologists' response to the new demands has not been outstandingly generous or fruitful. There are signs of greater theoretical sophistication, a more ready willingness to link theory with research and a nascent dissatisfaction with old concepts, but religious organization is still a Cinderella subject.

2. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

2.1

Why Study Organization?

The relatively slow and piecemeal growth of sociological interest in religious organization can be explained in terms of a number of obstacles that seem to be inherent either in the subject-matter or in the cultural context within

General Considerations

19

which Western sociologists have usually worked. The effect of these obstacles has also been to place regrettable constraints upon the ways in which religious organization has actually been examined. At the head of the list of such constraints must come a generalised resistance to the very idea of studying the organizational aspects of religion. This is deeply embedded in Christian culture, and it reflects a tension which has pervaded Christian thought from its earliest days, namely, an alleged incompatibility between the spirit and the letter of religion. In theory, at least, the outward and visible forms of sociation that give expression to Christian teachings ana values are of little intrinsic importance compared with the all-important question of whether the social organization breathes or stifles the 'true spirit' of the religion. Not surprisingly, then, the traditional superiority accorded to the intrinsic over the extrinsic, the inner over the outer or the spirit over the letter has tended to discourage people in the Christian culture-areas from giving serious attention to the study of the forms of social organization assumed by groupings of Christians. Or, if interest was displayed in forms of organization, it was heavily tempered by qualifying clauses that re-asserted the 'essential' or 'true' superiority of the spirit over the form in which it was (never adequately) contained. E.S. Gaustad's pithy aphorism sums up the situation: 'Organized religion is what one apologises for, not what one writes essays on' [18:835]. The 'incompatibility of spirit and form' argument has recurred in many guises but has produced a uniform effect in severely limiting a priori the benefits expected to accrue from analysis of religious organization in itself. A common charge against such analysis is that by definition it misses the 'essence' of the religion and is therefore focused on the least interesting or rewarding aspects of the total religious phenomenon. But this kind of argument, based as it is upon normative assumptions about the ideal order of priorities in study, completely fails to appreciate the non-normative orientation of most sociology and the multi-faceted nature of religious, and all social, phenomena. Even those sociologists who do concern themselves with questions of religious truth are not thereby prevented from trying to examine forms of religious organization in objective terms. Nor does it logically follow from the view that the essence of religion escapes any attempt to understand its forms of social expression that the student of religious organization necessarily represents a threat to the integrity or survival-capacity of any religious group. For the fact that sociological analysis is narrowly focused on a factual or theoretical order of things precludes it from having direct normative relevance for religious groups. Sociological approaches to religious organization are not therefore directly or automatically threatening to religion as such. But those responsible for the welfare of religious groups have only rarely been persuaded that unfetter-

20

Religious

Organization

ed sociological analysis of their social organization would not of itself be subversive of the group's identity and purpose. On the other hand, one of the paradoxical features of the current situation in Western religious groups is that the normative assertion of the priority of 'spiritual' over 'institutional' considerations is often backed by arguments about social structure. Thus, the most ardent opponents of institutional religion are also amongst the leading students of its history and implications. This explains why some of the most percipient analyses of religious structures and dynamics have emanated from people who are totally committed to the destructuring of religious organizations. The argument about authenticity can in fact occur in the most unexpected places, as for example in Gibson Winter's suggestion that 'Evangelism would seem to lose its authentic flavour when it becomes formalized through an organizational structure' [245:37], Resistance to the suggestion that studies of religious organization could have a theoretical interest and a scientific value of their own has not infrequently been the cause of practical difficulties in the pursuit of such work. Both professional and lay people in religious groups have either deliberately obstructed research into the organizational aspects of their religion or refrained from co-operating in on-going research. Their reasons have usually been closely related to the arguments examined above, although account must also be taken of the widespread antagonism that is felt towards research into social organizations having no connection with religion. The result is that, compared with state-run organizations, for example, they have rarely undergone searching and forceful examination. A closely connected explanation for the paucity of studies of religious organizations is that, in the absence of strong 'reasons of state' and of politico-economic implications, the necessary material support for extensive organizational research in religious bodies has very rarely been available. Hence, sociologists have devoted more time and energy to studying educational, social welfare, political, productive and correctional institutions than religious organizations. Further practical difficulties follow from the paucity of effort expended on the analysis of religious organizations. It is a well-known, but nonetheless instructive, fact that the concepts and theories which have been developed and refined for studying non-religious social organizations are, for the stated 'policy' reasons, most appropriate for throwing light on organizations whose goals and methods have little bearing on the nature of religious groups. The very notion of 'goals', for example, is clearly relevant to productive, and some other, types of organization. But it may have only tangential relevance to religious organizations. Until resources are diverted to the study of religious and allied kinds of organization, the process of adapting existing concepts or

General Considerations

21

forging new ones will be necessarily slow. However, this particular difficulty does also present some advantages. So long as devices that have proved their worth in the study of non-religious organizations are also used in the preliminary choice of concepts appropriate for studying religious organizations, there will be a fruitful transfer of theoretical ideas from the more- to the lessdeveloped fields of research. Indeed, a recurrent argument in what follows will be for the desirability of, at least initially, applying general or formal concepts and theories of social organizations to the special study of religious organizations. Later sections of the report will show how concepts of general applicability may be fruitfully employed in their original or refined version in helping to explain the peculiarities of religious organizations. A final practical difficulty that warrants mention is that the sociological study of religious organizations, if it is performed at all, tends either to be sponsored by religious groups for their own purposes or to be conducted under the auspices of their own staff. Since it is rare for a sociologist to obtain independent financial backing for research into religion or to obtain permission from religious authorities to carry out research in religious organizations entirely according to his own design, it is doubly necessary for him to comply with the material constraints and to work within the terms of an imposed set of objectives and/or methods. Even in combination, however, the ideological resistance to, and the practical difficulties in, research into the social organization of religious groups do not amount to a block of insuperable obstacles. The past decase has witnessed the publication of several outstanding accounts of organizational research in the field of religion, and the likelihood is that a growing volume of such material will continue to be produced. Moreover, the example of research into roughly analogous forms of social organization is encouraging and helpful in suggesting profitable avenues of enquiry. Greater sophistication in the present-day understanding of social movement organizations, for example, points to parallel areas for research in specifically religious movements. ( c f . [293]; [122]; [289]). Studies of such ostensibly diverse phenomena as trade unions, political parties, pressure-groups, moral campaigns and care-institutions can all lead to the specification of theoretical questions to be asked of religious organizations. Concepts deriving from the analysis of correctional institutions, manufactories and secular bureaucracies can also inform the design of research into religious organizations. The more open and flexible the approaches to religious organization are, the more likely it is that insightful and imaginative analyses will be achieved in the long-term. The foregoing argument should not be taken to imply that religious organizations cannot be characterized in distinctive ways and analytically distinguished from non-religious organizations. The desirability of having broad and flexible definitions, the usefulness of drawing constant analogies

22

Religious

Organization

with forms of non-religious social organization and the need to be attentive to radical transformations in the social expression of religious phenomena do not preclude the possibility of establishing a number of basic characteristics which are found in most religious organizations. Indeed, the attempt to specify such distinguishing characteristics will be helpful at this stage because they will serve as landmarks for the rest of the report. But although the distinctiveness of religious organization has a certain intrinsic interest for the specialist in such affairs, it cannot be fully useful in the present work unless it is allied to the elucidation of theoretical issues having wider import. Thus, the whole purpose of enumerating points of distinctiveness is, on the one hand, to identify both continuity with, and disjunction from, non-religious organizations and, on the other, to highlight the contribution of theoretical sociology to an understanding of the patterns of differences and similarities. The first step will be to outline the arguments for treating religious organizations as a 'type'. It must be emphasized, however, that the distinctiveness of religious organizations is only a matter of degree. This means that (a) there is no single characteristic which is unique to them alone, (b) no actual religious organization displays all the distinctive characteristics in itself and (c) religious organizations vary in the strength with which any particular characteristic is displayed. Since they are merely one variety of the wider class of value-oriented movements, it is to be expected that other classmembers will resemble them in numerous respects. The fact that other, non-religious organizations may share one or more of the characteristics does not detract from the usefulness of this approach. But it is unlikely that any non-religious organization would display a large number of them.

2.2

The Distinctiveness of Religious Organizations

The following section is loosely woven around three headings — mainly for the purpose of simplifying the task of exposition. The discussion of each set of characteristics is deliberately sketchy; the major points will be taken up and expanded in the course of the report's more substantive sections. But the primary objective will be to stimulate discussion about the relative appropriateness of the various conceptual schemes and theoretical models that have been used to account for either organizations in general or religious organizations in particular. 1. The dominant mode of analysis of social organizations is the attempt to explain structure and dynamics in terms of their relation to the goals that the organization pursues. Although the goal-model has rarely been explicitly

General Considerations

23

applied to religious organizations, it is often invoked implicitly in approaches to them which are ostensibly based on other criteria. But all attempts to analyse religious organizations in terms of their goals confront certain problems which point up instructive insights into their distinctive features. One of the problems of using the goal-model in this context is that the very notion of goal, authoritatively defined as 'a desired state of affairs which the organization attempts to achieve' [288:6] is applicable to only a small part of the programme which religious groups pursue. For in addition to all the problems which normally beset an attempt to specify the goals of secular organizations (i.e., breadth of scope, vagueness, differences between personnel in different parts of the organizational structure, changes over time, etc.) there is a more intractable problem which stems from the very nature of many religious ideologies. That is to say, religious groups do not usually aim to devise or to work out gradually an optimum set of organizational principles by which to achieve particular goals. Rather, it is assumed that the group is already in possession, or within reach, of knowledge that has ultimate significance either for its own members or for a wider constituency. The ultimacy which characterizes most religious ideologies therefore infuses the design of corresponding organizational arrangements with similarly grandiose validations. The appropriateness of the chosen form of organization is not decided merely in terms of its instrumental relation to the achievement of goals; the organizational format partly embodies the goal in itself. The very existence on earth of a group proclaiming specific truths amounts to a partial achievement of that group's major goals. Organizational instrumentalities are just as likely as are doctrines to be infused with ultimacy in religious groups proclaiming allegedly ultimate truths [128]. These considerations have important implications for the capacity of religious groups to innovate and to adapt to changes in their environment. The point is briefly illustrated by Caporale's [81 ] contention that the Roman Catholic Church has had to devise a relevant manner of presenting its traditional 'deposit of faith' to successive generations of members. 'But each reformulation of beliefs implicitly questions the basic belief about the hierarchical nature of the church' [81:67]. There is therefore a systematic relation between beliefs, goals and organizational structures which precludes the possibility of usefully isolating any one of them. Scherer [275] saw in 'the infusion of historically conditioned forms with ultimate value' a barrier to religious organizations' adaptation to environmental change. This could be classified in Merton's terminology as 'ritualism', i.e., 'the affirmation of "institutionalized means" together with the rejection of "cultural goals"' [275: 98]. But it would be unprofitable to assume that religious organizations are

24

Religious

Organization

incapable of pursuing goals. In this respect Robertson's [34] distinction between 'movements' which pursue or defend 'specific objectives' and 'organizations' which 'are primarily concerned with ensuring that certain values and beliefs are upheld' [34:114] is unhelpful. Some religious organizations clearly do pursue specific objectives as well as upholding beliefs, etc. (see Scalf et al. [273]). Thus one of the virtues of Ash's [283] approach to social movements is precisely the importance that she accords to the role of 'movement organizations' in continually mobilizing support for goal-pursuits. A more useful distinction than between movement and organization would therefore be between active and passive religious organization. Hillery's suggestion [136] that it is useful to distinguish between types of monastic institutions in terms of whether they pursue specific goals or not suffers from the same sort of drawbacks as Robertson's movement/organization distinction. Starting from Parsons' distinction between 'formal organizations' which are primarily oriented towards attaining specific goals and 'communal organizations' which do not have such an orientation, Hillery asks whether all convents can be classified under one of these headings. Relying heavily (and uncritically) on Parsons again, he accepts that goals can be operationally defined in terms of (a) the identifiable nature of goal products 'such as automobiles, M.D. Degrees, etc.' [136:148], (b) the possibility that the output could be 'amenable to a contract, e.g., it can be bought and sold' [136:148]. The result of all this labour is the purely analytic inference that since religious worship cannot, by Parsons' definition, be termed an identifiable, saleable product for use in another system, and since worship is the main raison d'etre of the 'monastic' type of convent, this type does not qualify as a formal organization. The 'apostolic' type of convent, on the other hand, which is primarily designed to achieve specific tasks (such as teaching) is said to be classifiable as a formal organization. In addition to the fact that the whole argument is a rather vacuous discussion of definitions and provides little prospect of advancing substantive knowledge of monasteries, it reaches a conclusion which is highly questionable: 'It may be that religious ends are inherently non-specific and that any organization which is defined in terms of such ends must be to that degree non-formal' [136:151]. The problems that frequently attend the specification of an organization's goals are further compounded by the discrepancies that may occur between different perspectives on the goals. Whereas it is difficult to identify collective goals unambiguously in any organization because people in different organizational positions may entertain different ideas about the desired state of future affairs that the whole group could help achieve, the task is doubly difficult with regard to religious organizations. The main reason is that religious ideologies 'speak to' both collectivities and individuals. The fact that allegedly ultimate truths are involved in religion implies that the

General Considerations

25

individual may find it absolutely necessary to extract from the group's ideology some personal interpretations of truth that clash with the group's 'official' views. Not infrequently, individuals interpret a religious group's shared beliefs and values in idiosyncratic fashion and therefore establish goals for themselves that are discordant from the group's point of view. The deleterious results of the clash are aggravated by the fact that individual and group often continue to assert public commitment to the same set of beliefs and values, thereby exacerbating the friction. For since their originally agreed-upon outlook was said to contain absolute truth, it is unlikely that a complete repudiation and replacement of it by the dissenters would be psychologically or socially tolerable. Instead, the central truths remain essentially unchanged, and the friction is for that reason all the more intense. This may lead to a process of'marginal differentiation' in beliefs and values among the dissenters from a religious tradition (see [239]; [257]). If goals are taken as the principal item for a sociological analysis of the organizational characteristics of religious collectivities, there is a risk that the influence of environmental factors on the process of choosing, evaluating and executing them will be overlooked or inadequately accommodated. The danger of an overly mechanical and problem-free view of the way in which the members of religious groups, in unanimity or in cliques, establish objectives is that it dispenses by definition with the potential sources of much intra-group strain and conflict. To do full justice to the complex process whereby what Perrow calls 'operative goals' are selected and pursued would require in itself such a detailed and lengthy examination of a religious group's history that the analysis of other organizational characteristics would suffer as a result. The value of the alternative approach to goal-analysis, i.e., focussing narrowly on 'charter' or 'official' goals, is limited by formidable problems even in non-religious contexts (see [291]). For the reasons stated above, the application of this approach to specifically religious organizations runs into much thornier problems. As Etzioni has cogently argued [287], goal-analysis invariably produces the twin findings that organizations are failing to achieve their goals with even a modicum of effectiveness and that their goals have been transformed over time. He attributes these regular findings to an equally regular logical error in the analysis: It confuses distinctly different orders or levels of phenomena. An organization's goals are cultural entities that enjoy an existence on the level of ideas, but the human organizations that attempt to achieve these goals can only do so on the level of social reality. Given that it is easier to devise goals in the abstract than to achieve them concretely, there must of necessity be a discrepancy between the ideals and the reality. In any case, if organizations devoted all their resources to the achievement of stated goals, they would quickly cease to function at all because they would thereby have

26

Religious Organization

neglected to satisfy a range of other pre-requisites for the continued functioning of any social group. It should not, therefore, be surprising that, judged in terms of goal-achievement, social organizations normally appear to be grossly ineffective. But, such a realistic perspective on organizational effectiveness is generally intolerable to the people who commission research into their own religious organizations because the presumptive goals of the organization are closely related to their personal values. What is more, their principal values usually relate to notions of absolute truth and ultimate significance. These considerations make it unlikely that the personnel responsible for religious organizations would agree to abandon the goal-model for the sake of an approach to organizational analysis that did not appear to accord primacy of importance to their professed goals. The same form of argument can be used to explain why it usually seems to be the case that organizational goals undergo severe modification in the course of time. The impression of calculative adaptation is largely, according to Etzioni, an artefact of the logic of goal-analysis. The false impression follows from the fact that this method often takes a description of an organization's goals from the blueprint on which it was designed. But blueprints are cultural ideals to which social reality can never approximate closely. The discrepancy between ideal and actual goals is, therefore, not necessarily the result of a deliberate change of objective but may be merely a logical implication of the attempt to compare cultural and social orders of phenomena. A final comment by Etzioni has immensely far-reaching implications for the analysis of religious organizations in goal-terms. He demonstrates that the attempt to identify an organization's goals frequently induces researchers to project their own values or ideals on to the group that they are studying. In other words, structural positions within an organization constrain officeholders to take partial views of its goals, and the same sort of constraint is exercised no less forcibly over the organization's observers. This problem is all the more acute when the researchers' social background resembles closely the background of the majority of an organization's members. In the sociological study of religious organizations there is thus a veiy real danger that middle-class, liberal academic observers are attempting to identify the goals of organizations whose responsible personnel are for the most part at least equally middle-class and highly educated. The situation is further complicated by the fact that religious organizations have tended to commission research from academic specialists within the ranks of their own members or sympathizers. The result of common backgrounds, educational experiences and professional status among an organization's professional leaders and the professional researchers into its goals is that the goal-pursuits of the leadership or professional section are accorded priority of importance for the total

General Considerations

27

organization by the researchers. The outcome of such a situation is the production of organizational analyses which are (albeit unintentionally) onesided in their bias towards the organizational interests of the professional or leadership strata. This account of the inappropriateness and the difficulties of analysing religious organizations in goal-terms has helped to indicate some distinctive features of this type of organization. Clearly, religious organizations are not unique in the vagueness, sectional variation, allegedly ultimate significance and cultural idealism of their goals, but the combination of these features with other structural characteristics goes a long way towards accounting for their distinctiveness.

2. A second cluster of distinctive features is associated with the potential or aspiring universalism of religious organizations' stance towards the world. This means that the vast majority of religious ideologies are considered by their subscribers to have absolute value and ultimate significance not only for themselves but also for people outside the organization which propagate such ideologies. Not all religious organizations are actually structured in ways which allow them even to attempt to achieve a universal distribution of their outlook, but the ideal of such a state of affairs may still be a persistent constraint on their activities. The most visible expression of this ideal in reality is the nominal, and occasionally actual, openness of religious organizations to the ready admission of new members. In some cases, this organizational feature dominates all others and dictates the pattern and emphasis of the whole group's activities. If maximal recruitment is not a religious organization's dominant ideal and objective, it may nevertheless be used on occasions as an ideological legitimization for changing the actual distribution of its resources and efforts. In short, the latent or manifest universalism of many religious ideologies creates a strain towards membership increase; the achievement of such increase may be incompatible with some of the other ends that could be legitimized in religious organizations. The resulting problems and the range of possible solutions are characteristic of religious organization. Another sociological implication of ideological aspirations towards universalism is that it is very difficult for programmed activities to take place without being frequently disrupted by suggestions of alternative, and sometimes conflicting, programmes which could be equally easily legitimized by the group's ideology. Religious organizations are therefore vulnerable to weakness deriving from the fragmentation and diffusion of members' efforts to pursue legitimate objectives. The theoretically unlimited capacity for proliferation of specific objectives within an organization holding to a universa-

28

Religious

Organization

lizing ideology raises problems about the distribution of resources which do not arise in most secular organizations. An allied point about universalizing ideologies is that they may induce organizations to take up issues that do not directly concern them. Thus, the need felt by many contemporary Christian leaders in the West to make explicit their organizations' views on every conceivable topic and to be 'in dialogue' with as many other collectivities as possible may create intraorganizational tensions between different groups of specialists and may undermine the consciousness of members that they belong to a unitary organization. Rare indeed are those religious organizations that do not seek to apply their ideas outside their own constituency. In fact, it could be argued that the uniquely distinctive products or outcomes of religious organizations are so limited in scope (states of mind, rituals, sacraments) that diversification of activities is a functional pre-requisite of group-survival. Looked at in another way, the potential of religious organizations for exercising a powerful monopoly over distinctive capacities or tasks is exceedingly strong, but, unless it is allied to involvement in non-distinctive task-areas, it allows the organization no opportunity to defend its material interests or to ensure either its survival or its effectiveness. The pressure towards involvement in non-distinctive areas could be termed a 'diversifying imperative' or a 'strain towards variety' [79:128]. The deliberate, pointed and ideologically legitimate (if not actually 'required') universalizibility of religious outlooks has a further sociological implication which materially affects the structure and functioning of religious organizations. Few religious ideologies admit of legitimate and irreversible exclusions-by-definition of whole classes of human beings from religious knowledge or from participation in organized religious activities. Of course, there are important differentiations within organizations between levels of permissible knowledge or participation, and there are ethnic barriers against full knowledge of, or participation in, some religious traditions. But within the bounds of each legitimate constituency, religious groups have a tendency to assert their responsibility or concern for many more people than actually choose to acknowledge membership of the groups. The 'universalizing imperative' usually implies a nominal dominion over such entire classes as ethnic groups without regard for age or sex. Religious organizations are therefore constrained to provide a wider range of services and provisions than are most secular organizations. An additional complication is that the purely nominal members may still feel entitled to make demands on the organization, despite their effective renunciation of its mantle (see, for example [134]; [217]). 3. A further contributory factor to the distinctiveness of religious organiza-

General Considerations

29

tions is the unusually high levels of commitment that some members occasionally display to their professed values, beliefs and activities. This is partly a result of the ideological argument that religious interests are, or should be, superior to all others and partly a result of the sociological structure that is shared by many religious groups. But this should definitely not be taken to mean that all members of religious groups display uniformly and perduring high levels of exclusive commitments; the vast majority do not. The fact that only a small proportion do so nevertheless has organizational implications that help to set religious organizations apart from non-religious equivalents. Amongst others, Fichter [105] and Dobbelaere [97] have tried to estimate the proportion of the strongly and poorly committed segments of the membership in religious organizations: The fact that the size of the highly committed group never exceeds 10% of the total has serious implications for the social structure of religious organizations and, in particular, for their modes of internal government. Moreover, the complexity of commitment will require extensive examination in a later section of the report. The peculiar nature of sanctions against deviance in religious organizations will also be examined at length. A final complication stemming from the unusually high level of commitment expected of, and manifested by, a small proportion of members of religious organizations is that differences in the expected level may sometimes be formally signified. Not only is the distinction between professional and 'amateur' religionist reflected partly in differing degrees of expected commitment, but it also serves to distinguish between various sub-groups of members. Indeed, virtuosity in the performance of certain religious tasks is largely equated with high levels of commitment to the group. If practical and ideological obstacles to intensive research into religious organization have deterred would-be students of the subject, its three-fold distinctiveness may, on the contrary, have increased its attraction. For in addition to its own intrinsic problematic, it also provides a challenging way of tapping several questions in the broader field of the sociology of valueoriented movements. There is much to be said, then, for pressing ahead with research in spite of the difficulties.

3. AN OPEN-SYSTEMS APPROACH In view of the problems involved in analysing religious organizations primarily in terms of goals, however instructive these problems may be in underlining the distinctiveness of this type of organization, a more appropriate framework for comprehensive study must be devised. In recent years sociologists have demonstrated the usefulness of conceiving of human orga-

30

Religious

Organization

nizations as open systems, i.e., as recurrent patterns of events involving the regular transformation of selected in-puts into typical outputs. Other opensystem characteristics will be explored later, but for the moment it is sufficient to mention only a small number of basic system-properties that function as general constraints on all the genotypical phenomena. For a concise over-view of organization theory, see Bowey [285]. This report will not take up any of the complexities that are inherent in systems theory but will merely use it as a framework. Among the basic properties must be the openness of any social system to influences originating in its environment. The regular and structured interaction of organization members is the only evidence that a system is in operation, and it is clearly insufficient as a guarantee of system stability. A second general property of social systems is that their survival depends on the continuing motivation of members to function in them (maintenance in-puts) as well as on their continuing application to the tasks which the organization is, or parts of it are, pursuing. For analytic purposes, at least, a distinction can therefore be discerned between maintenance and productive inputs. Thirdly, the boundaries of open-systems are often sufficiently illdefined to permit, if not encourage, the admission of new members; they, in turn, introduce into the organization a variety of values, beliefs and interests which may be at odds with its productive or maintenance programmes. Only by the erection of discriminating boundaries to the system and of stringent controls over the admissibility of in-puts can a system maintain a relatively stable existence. Fourthly, a system's outputs must be somehow converted into resources which may then serve to renew its in-puts. A factory sells its products for money which is then converted into a major productive resource for its continuing operation. The participation of members in the activities of a voluntary association is usually considered rewarding in itself and therefore motivates them to participate again. In these ways the system ideally produces the means of its own survival, but they are not necessarily the conditions for a stable existence. Nor is the continuing provision of members the sole indicator of the system's effectiveness; negative feedback on the state of the system may derive from a variety of sources including internal factors such as the level of collective morale, rates of participation, intensity of membercommitment and external factors such as the degree of collective influence on the environment, inclusiveness of membership in relation to potential population and level of popularity in public opinion. Within the general framework of a systems approach to social organizations several authors have already achieved finer specification of systemstates and problems that are more specific to religious organizations. For example, O. Schreuder's [7:227] hopes that ' . . . la sociologie organisationelle américaine qui s'est fort développée pourrait fournir ici an apport impor-

An Open-Systems

Approach

31

tant' were partially fulfilled by Caporale's analysis of the strain generated within the Roman Catholic church between three crucial parts of its social system: The ethico-dogmatic system; the power-structure; and the social characteristics of its members [81]. A later analysis of Vatican II by Houtart focussed even more narrowly on the 'institutional tensions' which were said to have developed within Roman Catholicism from a conflict between values and forms of organization. Yet, he counterbalanced the organizational emphasis with considerations of changes that had also taken place in the social environment since the Council of Trent. His prognosis for the church was of continuing strain between ill-fitting components of the institutional system. Similar system-problems, but with different outcomes, were said by K.A. Thompson [215] to have characterized the development of formal bureaucracy within the Anglican church during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a subsequent work [278] he analysed Anglican developments in even more explicitly systemic terms, this time highlighting the disjunction that has occurred between the church's organizational reforms and its major symbol-systems. Gibbs and Ewer [114] used a specifically open-systems approach to church organization in studying the conditions of Methodist congregations' response to social issues. But perhaps the most noteworthy application of this perspective to the study of religious organizations is R.P. Scherer's specification of system-tasks as outlined by Parsons and Bales [275]. Under the headings (i) external relations (ii) internal differentiation, goal attainment and problem-solving, (iii) internal cohesion and (iv) replenishment and maintenance of personnel, he was able to present a coherent picture of American churches as social systems. In these, and many other, ways some of the insights of formal organization theoiy and of an open-systems approach have given rise to substantive studies of religious organization, but a concerted attempt to outline a formal theory in this field has yet to be made. Nevertheless, the first deliberate steps towards specifying some of the concepts around which such a theory might be constructed have recently been taken by Hinings and Foster [267].

3.1

A Model of Church Organization

The experience of Hinings in helping to refine some of the major variables used in the analysis of work-organizations had already facilitated the design of a causal model of organizational development in churches. The result of the most recent work is therefore a sophisticated delineation of the variables affecting religious organizations, but the usefulness of the model for present purposes is unfortunately compromised by a basic confusion between 'belief-

32

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Organization

system' and 'goals'. This demands urgent discussion, but first of all it must be made clear that Hinings and Foster's clarification of the contextual, structural, activity- and performance-variables influencing religious organizations represents a productive step forward in the sociological understanding of religion. Their contribution will undoubtedly serve as a convenient and reliable framework within which most research findings in this area can be accommodated. It will be in fact only slightly modified to serve as the backbone of the present account of developments in this field. What is more, the prospects for the future study of religious organizations as social systems are all the brighter for Hinings and Foster's preparatory work. The heuristic value of T h e organization structure of churches' is beyond doubt here, but can it be said that the proposed model of church organization is acceptable in all respects? Most of its components are unexceptionable: The influence of an organization's size, technology and relations with other organizations. Even the relatively novel concepts of 'organization climate' seems worthy of inclusion in the model when it is explained as the 'prevalent values, norms, attitudes, behaviours and feelings of a social system' ([267:99] quoting [290]), as reflected in the perceptions of church members. But it is highly questionable whether the model should be usefully conceived as a 'goal model, giving causal priority to the purposes, belief systems and aims of the organization, and suggesting that from this flow the kind and size of membership that a church will have and also the extent to which it will be linked to other organizations' [267:102], This is especially questionable in view of what the writers had earlier termed 'the comparative lack of precise and measurable goals' of churches. Worse still they seem to conflate goals with theology and 'organizational charter'. These separate entities are undoubtedly important in influencing a religious organization's structure and functioning, but they can hardly be said to be the only candidates for causal efficacy. This aspect of Hinings and Foster's model is in serious need of revision, and much of the material reported below will serve as a correction to their misplaced emphasis on the causal primacy of theological beliefs. In particular, the unintended and paradoxical consequences of theological programmes will be extensively reviewed, for this is an area which would fall outside the scope of the theology-as-goal model. The desirability of examining unintended consequences is clearly exemplified in, amongst others, Bormann's [70] analysis of the social organization of tjje Lutheran Church in Wurtemburg; and Wilson's [240] study of dictatorial leadership among the Exclusive Brethren. A conceptual distinction is therefore proposed for the purpose of this report between (a) theological programmes, (b) group goals and (c) outcomes. There may also be a case for isolating canon law as an additional, separate category, since this also enjoys partial autonomy in

An Open-Systems

Approach

33

influencing Roman Catholic organization structures. But the dangers of focussing exclusively on canon law as a guide to actual processes and structures are unwittingly but vividly illustrated in Bachelet's [54] analysis of the Vatican's administrative machinery. In spite of these reservations about the hypothesized causal primacy of beliefs and values in determining the organizational structure of religious collectivities, it is clear that the conceptual framework employed by Hinings and Foster can serve a very useful purpose in sensitizing sociologists to the major dimensions of organizational analysis. It will suit present needs merely to omit reference to directions of causation among the variables. This procedure unquestionably emasculates the goal-model but also lays the foundation for a more flexible open-systems approach which is not dependent for its results on a judgment about the relation between ideal objectives and operative goals. This is all the more necessary in view of the present report's objective to summarize the major findings on the sociology of religious organizations during the past fifteen years or so: The objective would be unattainable if the conceptual framework of the report were too narrowly circumscribed by a particular theoretical argument. In seeming anticipation of objections to the direction of causation which gives their model coherence, Hinings and Foster added two qualifications: The direction may be reversed in some relationships, and a completely different order of causal priority could conceivably be suggested for the whole model. Their reasons for preferring the published version of the model have been promised for a later report. But the fact that even the possibility of a rearrangement of the model was in the authors' minds indicates that their conceptual framework could be adapted for purposes other than testing the hypothesized priority of 'ideas' over 'structure'. In fact, variability in the interrelationships among the model's components will be illustrated many times in the following report. An outstanding question will be whether the order of causal priority varies with broad types of religious organization. Unfortunately, Hinings and Foster examined data from only the Church of England and the Methodist Church; there are therefore good reasons for entertaining doubts about the applicability of their version of the causal model to religious organizations lacking either an Anglican or a Methodist polity. Drawing on an extensive body of published material on the theory of formal organizations, Hinings and Foster constructed a model of the organization structure of churches which embraced both contextual and structural variables. The former include such diverse things as the organization's size, charter, technology, location and relations with other bodies. The latter all have a bearing on the way in which tasks in the organization and task relationships are defined. They include specialization, standardization, for-

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malization, centralization, configuration of authority structures and degree of flexibility in the whole structure (for other possibilities, see [282]). Research has already suggested a pattern of relations between these two sets of variables which could serve as the basis for testable hypotheses. Variables concerning ways in which activities within an organization are carried out and evaluations of organizational effectiveness were omitted from the framework of the report because they seemed more appropriate to work organizations than to religious organizations. Conversely, members' attitudes towards, and beliefs about, their churches seemed especially relevant because churches provide services for members and are therefore heavily dependent on them for organizational survival. The next four sections are designed to summarize critically the advances made since roughly 1960 in sociological knowledge about four important aspects of religious organizations as systems: Environment, resources, processes and structures. The concluding section will review the development of concepts used in the sociological study of religious organization and make some suggestions for profitable paths of future research.

4. ENVIRONMENT Although some religious organizations can be characterized by the tension that may be deliberately maintained between themselves and their social environment, the achievement of complete isolation from external influences is an impossibility. Indeed, there is immense variety in the types of influence that may be felt by religious organizations — or, to be more precise, by sections of religious organizations. For the effects of the environing social conditions are differentially felt by different groups of people within a religious organization. Of course, this proposition is true of all social groups, but it has special relevance for religious groups since the basis for their successful functioning and continuing cohesion may be a fairly slender thread of ideological sympathy. At the other end of the scale, loyalty to religious groups may be extremely strongly rooted in a sense of familial, ethnic or national identity. The effects of the social environment on religious organizations are further complicated by the variable competence of leaders to mediate those effects for members. In large organizations the number of mediators may be large, and they may mediate the influence in incompatible ways. If unitary authority cannot be exercised, the resulting ambivalence of members towards the external environment may find expression in social divisions or internal squabbles. Again, this is characteristic of groups whose major basis for cohesion is ideology.

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This is an appropriate juncture for stressing an important reservation about all open-systems approaches to social organizations and especially those which centre around an ideology. The influence of contextual or environmental factors can never be ascertained with complete accuracy, nor is it useful to conceive of the environment-organization relationship in deterministic terms. Rather, the role of leaders or decision-makers is crucial in mediating the relationship in accordance with the situational evaluation of what J.D. Thompson [292] called the organization's 'dominant coalition', i.e., those who are in a position to impose their will on the organization at a given time. Thus, the effects of environment on organization depend partly on the 'strategic choice' made by the dominant coalition among the whole range of constraints and opportunities available to them (see [286]). In religions and other ideological organizations, strategic decisions may be based on a wider range of considerations than is normal for work-organizations, and this makes it all the more necessary for sociologists to examine the purely political aspects of decision-making in such organizations. In this respect the environment of religious organizations must be considered as only a set of constraints and opportunities within which the scope for strategic choice is very wide. In some cases the source of a religious group's vulnerability to parts of its environment is the result of its own initiative. It may have entered into official relations with another body or it may have deliberately antagonised other religious groups. In both cases, the effects of its actions may turn out to be totally unanticipated and unwelcome, but they are no less forceful for all that. This was strikingly illustrated in Wood's [247] exposition of the unanticipated consequences for some American denominations of participation in a coalition of churches in the National Council of Churches in Christ. Briefly, their participation entailed at least nominal support for policies to which they, as independent bodies, were not strongly committed. One of the unanticipated and unwanted results of this organizational coalition was the secession of many dissident congregations from their parent denominations in protest against their 'entailed' policies. The anticipated fruits of the coalition — increased control over uncertainties about resources in the environment — may not be entirely offset by their unanticipated corrolaries. In no case is a social group's environment ever completely stable, nor can its effects be uniformly imposed or perceived. Research findings on the receptivity of religious organizations to their environment document this proposition very clearly and underline the absolute necessity to conceive of them for this reason as open-systems. In this respect, J.D. Thompson's [292] perspective on organizations is most helpful; they are understood to require means of coping with uncertainties in their environment and their chosen technology. To this end, assuming the application of criteria of rationality,

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organizations adopt a number of strategies for survival. Although Thompson applied this perspective exclusively to work-organizations, some part of it will be shown to function efficiently in explaining the strategies of religious organizations. Limiting-cases of environmental influence include the extremes of both hostility and accommodation. Hawthorn's [132] study of the Doukhobors confirmed Simmel's argument that secret societies have better chances of persisting in hostile, rather than friendly or indifferent, environments. However, strong member-commitment and secretive forms of organization have been shown to outlast their usefulness in changed external circumstances and to become an obstruction to a group's continuing viability. Hammond's [125] study of Norwegian sects that migrated to the U.S.A. in the early nineteenth century illustrates this point conveniently: Ideologically unified sects quickly disintegrated during the process of establishing communities in the new country because their insistence on maintaining religious consensus at all costs made them particularly reliant on the external world for the satisfaction of basic needs. Material problems were handled more easily in sects which recognized the primary need to meet all internal needs themselves. Once the settling-in period was over, the disruptive effects of partial reliance on an external environment were lessened. This helps to account for the fact that Mennonite and Hutterian communities, which were originally very self-sufficient, are nowadays capable of maintaining their distinctiveness in spite of occasional contacts with the outside world (see [137:62]). Other findings on religious communities that aspire towards total isolation from their social environment have confirmed the commonsense assumption that persecution or perceived hostility from the outside world reinforce their internal cohesion ([181]; [234]). But further study is necessary to discover the importance of ways in which community leaders mediate and interpret the persecution for their members. Yet, by way of contrast, the loss of a religious group's distinctiveness from its social and cultural environment may have no less deleterious effects on its ability to survive as a distinctive entity. Lee [154], for example, argues that the combined effects of a general democratic ethos in the U.S.A. and a universal recognition of the importance of organizational effectiveness have been to diminish the differences between the Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Episcopalian forms of church polity. The growing resemblance between the culture of religious and secular spheres was said to have induced uniformity of organization. In a very different context, the constricting effects on religious organization of'co-optation' by secular forces have recently been exposed as equally harmful in the long-term [176], It was alleged that the Roman Catholic Church's resistance to the idea of including social science in the Sister Formation Programme in the 1950s was a reflection of its exclu-

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37

sive concern for the security-seeking middle-classes. Sister Neal attributed the sharp decline in nuns' interest in this educational programme in the 1960s to the harmful effects of secular 'co-optation'. The climate of ideas in the local community can materially affect the internal organization of religious groups — as was strikingly demonstrated in the case of some American irreligious bodies [94]. There was stimulus among heretical Roman Catholic migrants from Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to attack the clerical establishment in Wisconsin, but the combination of declining clerical power and rising secularism in the twentieth century eroded the ideological raison d'etre of many rationalist groups. Organizational response to the new situation was mixed: The predominantly lower-middle class group in the large city of Milwaukee affiliated with the American Rationalist Federation and preserved a fairly radical anti-clerical stance. But the group in Sauk City was unable to preserve its distinctiveness because in a smaller town it was more difficult to avoid the watering-down effects of kinship and communal links with members of the pro-church middle-class. It therefore affiliated with the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship and adopted a programme of philanthropy. Differing communal environments and social constituencies were very largely responsible for the diverging patterns of organizational evolution in these two branches of an originally unitary ideological movement. Closely similar findings emerged from Gollin's [120] comparative study of the social factors which brought about the differential development of the doctrinally identical Moravian communities in Saxony and Pennsylvania. Sklare's [203] classic interpretation of the social roots of the Conservative movement among American Jews also accentuates the influence that changes in the socio-economic status and residential situation of middle-class, acculturated Jews exerted over their religious feelings, ideas and behaviour. The move to 'third settlement areas' outside the ghettos in American cities entailed (a) necessary communication with non-Jews and with people of widely differing social status and (b) recognition of their own minority status. The ritual, educational and associational responses to these changes favoured the formation of congregational-type synagogues with multi-functional rabbis. The predominantly Christian culture of the third settlement areas undoubtedly conditioned the Conservative movement's adaptation to its environment. An equally wide range of responses to environmental conditions is represented in the relations between religious organizations and the agencies of sovereign states. A brief summary of the major ground; , for legal friction in this relationship in the U.S.A. is available in Morgan [29]; Donald E. Smith's works ([38]; [39]) provide a useful perspecxive on relations between religious groups and sovereign states in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Total isolation from secular codes of law is an impossibility in the long-

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term, but some religious bodies have devised various ways of meeting their legal obligations without appearing to concede legitimacy to the state in all respects. A common mechanism has been the establishment of special agencies within religious organizations to deal directly with the state's agencies and thereby to act as a buffer between members and their environment. Thus, the interests of conscientious objectors have been represented by either denominational or inter-denominational agencies, (see, for example [36]); formalized procedures have been created in groups which proclaimed their dislike of such things — Holiness groups in Britain set up bureaux for coping with matters of conscription and pension schemes for employees [227], and leading Christadelphians were obliged to compromise their studied avoidance of formality in order to protect their co-religionists' interests in two world wars [236]. A less common, but nonetheless effective, outcome has been the formation of agencies to conduct a constant war of legal attrition, as, for example, in the case of Jehovah's witnesses' unceasing litigation in defence of their refusal to salute flags [160] or to sanction blood transfusions [103] and in the case of Scientologists' recurrent skirmishes with state agencies and mass media in many parts of the world [111]. In nearly all cases the intrusion of state agencies has prompted at least some formalization of religious groups' internal structures and has therefore reinforced the pressure on religious groups to adopt (often against their will) administrative processes that resemble in some respects the dominant modes of contemporary secular organization. Evidence on which to base empirical generalizations about the factors affecting the response of religious groups to state directives or pressures is sadly deficient, but some tentative ideas might be advanced. In the first place, religious organizations like the Greek Orthodox Church [193], which are dependent on the state for material resources, are clearly constrained to conform with official directives. A similar picture emerges from Morroe Berger's [63] valuable study of the process whereby successive Egyptian governments have steadily eroded the former semi-autonomy of Islamic institutions and have substituted a form of direct state involvement in mosque administration. Maclnnis's informative article [157] on the state's changing attitude towards religion in mainland China since 1949 also emphasizes that prior to the suppressive phase of the Cultural Revolution there had been several attempts by state agencies to infiltrate, take over and re-direct religious organizations of all persuasions. To the extent that many personnel of Christian, Moslem and Buddhist organizations conformed with state directives in the matter of tailoring their doctrines to suit patriotic objectives, it would seem that the policy of co-optation was successful. Thompson [215] argued that the state's formal control over the Church of England has hindered genuine administrative reform but in compensation has preserved for

Environment

39

it a privileged position or voice in councils of state. This represents a variant on the church-type solution to the dilemma of power [46] and is partly determined by the church's dependence on the state, not so much for material benefits nowadays as for symbolic support and a privileged claim to inclusiveness. Similar benefits accrue to the Buddhist organizations of Thailand: In return for direct sponsorship and support, many Buddhist monks have granted legitimation to state activities ([57]; [145]). Relations between the Buddhist Sangha and the state in other Asian countries vary according to the varying patterns of resolution to a number of institutional tensions [58], The tensions include: State control vs. Sangha autonomy; monastic landlordism vs. ideal of monastic renunciation; idea of Buddhism as independent religion vs. idea of Buddhism as defender of national heritage; political indifference of monks vs. active involvement of monks in political processes. Bechert's view is that the pattern of these crucial tension-resolutions largely determines the effect that modern Buddhism can produce in each country. State interference in Sangha affairs is therefore critical to Buddhism's potential to become or remain, in turn, an important force in national affairs. But the internal constitution of each Sangha tradition is no less important as a determinant of its response to outside pressure [213], The subtle interplay between state directives or incentives towards modernization and the practical response of various religious organizations is also well illustrated in the post-World War II proliferation of tight-knit religious groups in South Korea [184], Their dependence on the state for legal protection and privilege is a strong determinant of their programmes and organizational viability. According to Vallier [221] the situation of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America is not one of material dependence on the state but has largely been a form of complete subsumption under broadly secular powers. The organization of the church has been so weak at local level and so deprived of viable hierarchical structures that its elites could not instill religio-moral values in the nominally Roman Catholic population. This increased the church's vulnerability to state interference on two levels, (a) The ecclesiastical elite was completely subject to secular control, and (b) the grass-roots members had very little consciousness of allegiance to specifically religious groups or values. Within this general framework, variations reflected differing degrees of, on the one hand, church autonomy, and, on the other, closeness of formal links between church and state ([220]; [221]). The capacity for untrammelled freedom for the church to make its own decisions was thereby minimized, and its strategies were limited to making 'coalition arrangements with political groups, direct appeals to mass emotion, and direct hierarchical interventions into the public arena' [221:39].

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In situations where the state does not interfere directly in the affairs of religious organizations and does not exercise material sanctions over their activities, it is still possible for (establishment) influence to be exerted in other ways. Church of England bishops, for example, have been drawn for the last one hundred years almost exclusively from a narrow social stratum which also provides many leaders for British political, economic and judicial institutions [167], This also helps to explain why the Church of England is unable or unwilling to resist the incursions into its own domain of state agencies such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. Fascinating research into the history of religious programmes on the state and commercial television channels in Britain [49] revealed that the B.B.C.'s directors had always regarded the preservation of mainstream religious culture as one of its primary objectives, and to that end a Central Religious Advisory Committee had been founded. Appointees to this Committee are usually elite representatives of varying opinions within mainstream churches (although by no means 'official representatives'), but the effect of lengthy experience in this form of advisory work has been to loosen the attachment of the advisors to particular churches and to strengthen their sense of identity with the B.B.C. Religious broadcasting has therefore become an end in itself and bears little instrumental relation to the achievement of particular churches' objectives. By way of a significant contrast, Roman Catholic bishops in France and the U.S.A., where ecclesiastical support for official policies has often been lacking, are drawn from a wider spectrum of social strata than are their Anglican peers. Poulat [190] described the social origins of about half of all French bishops since 1900 as 'lower-middle-class' and only seven out of one hundred and nineteen as 'noble'. Donovan's [98] finding that only a small percentage of American Catholic bishops' fathers had had a college education is consistent with Fichter's [110] judgement that American bishops showed greater loyalty to Rome than to the idea of a distinctly American church. They apparently lack the kind of prestigious kinship and educational ties that might otherwise link them with other segments of the national elite. When this fact is coupled with the predominantly vertical orientation of most communications and the suppression of horizontal loyalties within the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S.A., it helps to account for its relative independence from state interference, (for a contrast with the prestigious social origins of American Protestant clergymen, see [205]). While the state exerts clear, but variable, influence on religious organizations, there are other components of the social environment that can exercise less Visible' constraints on the freedom of religious bodies to conduct their affairs in the chosen way. First and foremost among these constraints are the material, political and ideological interests of the local communities or areas within which formal religious activities are carried out. Again, the dif-

Environment

41

ferential receptivity of religious bodies to local pressures depends partly on the type of church polity. Thus, Christian groups embodying the notion of congregational autonomy and voluntaristic membership principles tend to be sensitive to local affairs, to have strong lay leadership and to be able to exercise considerable control over professional ministers [258], The general symptoms and long-term effects of this kind of organizational precariousness in the face of community power-interests have received ample discussion in sociological literature (loci classici include Pope [33] and Underwood [43]), but recent refinements in observation have revealed the importance of less-obvious factors. The salience of kinship as a factor reinforcing local interests in congregational polities has been shown to place constraints on initiatives towards change in Northern English Methodism [217], The pattern of social relations in an area has also been said to persist within the imposed structure of a Roman Catholic parish [179], Kinship and local interest systems may also exert influence over religious organizations at a higher level of abstraction. Thus, the traditional Indian social structure ('organic, closed pluralism' according to Taylor [214]) may produce serious transformations in the shape and position of Christian missionary societies in a situation outside state regulation. For reasons associated with indigenous social and cultural patterns, Indian Christians show signs of adapting the voluntary association model of Western Protestant churches to suit local conditions. 'A new sort of closed pluralism' [214:206] may be the dominant outcome of the interplay between the community environment and the missionary societies. Lalive d'Epinay [152] has presented a clear account of the reasons why Chilean Pentecostal ism has assumed an organizational structure which is both more authoritarian and more personal than that of the American Methodist Church from which it seceded in the early twentieth century. The transition from the Methodists' 'paternalistic "oligarchy"' to the Pentecostals' 'paternalistic "dictatorship"' [152:68] is explained largely in terms of the influence exerted by existing cultural models in Chilean society. The necessarily and traditionally authoritarian relationship between Protestant missionaries and their indigenous audience, the paternalistic nature of selected biblical images of leadership and the pervasive image of the Chilean hacendado as community-chief were all said to affect the Pentecostal pastors' public image and chances of success as a leader of people. Moreover, Pentecostalism's characteristic form of organization is no less an integral part of the movement's social appropriateness than is its system of beliefs and values. Lalive d'Epinay's research bears out the general thesis of this report, namely, that understanding of the organization of religious bodies is an indispensable part of the wider attempt to understand religious phenomena in a sociological framework. This point has also been underlined in a recent

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attempt [232] to delineate the close parallels between the 'constituting norms' of American religious organization and the norms and values of the wider American society, e.g., democracy, voluntarism and individualism. Recent research has also illuminated the weakness of religious organizations as sources of innovation in the field of controversial values which are intimately linked with local interests (see [80]; [123]; [246]; [199]). For example, the ability of American Methodist leaders to secure local implementation of denominational policies and programmes on racial integration was found to vary by region with the extent to which the issue was considered controversial [249]. Those local interest-groups which thought that they would have suffered from racial integration were able to resist pressure from within the Methodist church because they could materially affect each congregation's financial situation and the standing of the incumbent in the local community. Resultant divisions within the Methodist church between advocates of, and resisters to, racial integration overlap with both regional divisions and a split between the pro-integration elite and a large mass of anti-integration members at grass-roots level. In this respect local interests are in head-on collision with the church's national policy of pursuing ecumenical links with churches which are already racially integrated or at least not embarrassed by questions of integration in their own congregations. (For divisions in Australian Methodism see [95]). Closer examination of the environmental conditions affecting the structure and functioning of religious organizations has highlighted the salience of competition among them as an independent variable. Within the sphere of cultic religion, for example, competition for members is strong because the 'market' responds basically to the forces of supply and demand; there are few reasons for individuals to generate strong commitment to particular cults. Rapid turn-over in membership, the transience of most cults and the circulation of seekers among the available groups obviously obstruct the consolidation of stable organization [79]. But the absence of stable organization, in turn, precipitates further membership fluidity and completes a vicious circle. The same sort of problems beset the attempt to organize rationalist movements in areas where competition from similarly oriented Unitarians was strong [93], In a more radical interpretion of the effects of market-competition on forms of religious organization in general, Berger and Luckmann [65] attributed the formation of extensive, formal organizations in Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist groups to the need for them to regulate competition which might otherwise threaten their very existence. The growth of religious bureaucracies therefore entails not only organizational but also policy implications because: 'Les bureaucraties finissent par être dominées par des principes plus économiques que politiques, même quand elles traitent avec l'Etat. Leur politique, leur organisation et leur per-

Environment

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sonnel, en arrivent à ressembler à ceux des groupements économiques, à la différence des plus anciennes bureaucraties religieuses qui ressemblent bien davantage à leurs analogues gouvernementaux . . . Le type humain de Imminence grise est remplacé par celui de l'organisateur vigoureux' [65:120]. The conclusions are that protective cartels are formed among religious groups, and religious products come to display merely marginal differentiation. Research into the effects of ecumenical co-operation among some Reformed and Lutheran churches in France, however, has brought to light a slightly different response to competition in a pluralistic situation. Mehl [165] has indirectly pointed out that ecumenism may promote a deliberate search for activities which are distinctively religious or at least outside the scope of available secular agencies. Liturgical revival, emphasis on mission, Christian stewardship and the 'église consistoriale' are some of the internal concomitants of protective cartelisation. The loss of internal differentiation may therefore be compensated for by gains in increased differentiation from the products of non-religious agencies. Evidence for this view is found in Mehl's belief that ecumenism has prompted churches to look for ways of attending to social needs that are not being adequately met by secular agencies. The resources of high-level, integrated ecumenical bureaucracies are therefore being channelled into such outstanding problem-areas as leisure and poverty. Under pressure of competition between religious and non-religious agencies, some of the former are being constrained to seek fresh fields for distinctive work. Does this mean that 'the God of the scientific gaps is paralleled by a church of the social service gaps'? [167:12]. A recently published, provocative interpretation of the organizational aspects of ecumenicalism plays down its relation to competitive pluralism and emphasizes its historical continuity as a movement of protest within mainstream churches — including Roman Catholicism [201 ]. Séguy's book suggests that the bureaucratized ecumenism of the large institutional churches is actually parasitic upon the more authentic brands of the interconfessional dialogue that is taking place today among laity in small 'groupes de base'. Conflicts are therefore occurring inside large religious bodies between the official retainers of formal authority (who support ecumenical bureaucracies in the main) and the unofficial advocates of real dialogue who are systematically excluded from positions of power and authority in their own churches. This new version of the classic church-sect tension only makes sense, however, against the background of high-level debates and agreements among 'super-power' churches. Séguy's ingenious argument is therefore further indirect confirmation of the desirability of adjusting the meaning of terms like 'church' or 'sect' to suit the changing socio-cultural context.

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Competition and/or ecumenical relations can produce a wide variety of consequences for religious organizations. They may stimulate close attention to unfulfilled needs in the wider society, may foster conservative bureaucracies, may adversely affect the incidence of vocation to the priesthood or to monastic orders (see H.P.M. Goddijn [118]) and may render out-dated the provision of denominational social services (Remy [191 ]). In addition, there is evidence to indicate that a competitive environment may induce religious organizations to adopt a more radical or aggressive attitude towards the external world. But each instance suggests that this response is peculiar to small minority groups in environments which threaten either their existence or their effective functioning. One of the clearest illustrations of this possibility is drawn from the process whereby the Y.M.C.A., under pressure from an increasingly apathetic public, abandoned the primary objective of Christian evangelism in favour of character-development at the end of the nineteenth century ([252]; [253]). A series of adjustments in its internal organization, programmes and membership composition increased the Y.M.C.A.'s capacity to attract and retain members, to resist the formation of an executive elite among its branch secretaries and to remain economically viable at a time when other voluntary associations were experiencing grave difficulties. These changes have helped it to maintain its competitiveness in the face of mounting competition from a variety of sources. There may even be an analogy to this situation among Roman Catholics; the European rates of formal religious practice in cities are higher in regions of religious pluralism than in predominantly Roman Catholic areas [138]. This could mean that stiff competition provokes conscientious practice on the part of the faithful. An alternative interpretation is that the obligation on minority groups to confront a permanently uncertain, and sometimes hostile, environment elicits an organizational response which seeks to isolate them from potential threats to survival as a collectivity. Westhues's [280] application of J.D. Thompson's perspective on organizations to the case of the American Catholic church's heavy involvement in education and welfare confirmed this interpretation's usefulness. His argument was that competition from Protestant denominations and from a secular ethic obliged the Catholic church in the early twentieth century to invest in protective subsocieties that would create a Catholic 'atmosphere' and check the influence of competing forces. Thus, grade schools and hospitals for Catholics were just two of the devices used to overcome the indeterminacy and uncertainties of a strange environment in which Catholics constituted a distinctive minority. This interpretation is supported by the findings of W. Goddijn's [119] research in Holland, but they also pointed out that Catholic segregation in a minority situation can aggravate the hostility felt towards them by the majority.

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The polarization between extremes of reformism and conservatism in religious organizations may be accelerated in social environments encouraging open competition for supporterà or members. Thus, the more inclusive are an organization's aspirations for membership, the more likely it is to adopt more radical policies. The Salvation Army's adoption of militaristic structures after 1878, for example, marked a definite outcome to the period of 'experimenting with various methods and techniques in . . . competitive efforts to convert the urban working-class' [196:54]. It also reflected a radicalization of policy and practice which helped to overcome the obstacle of marginal differentiation among nineteenth centuiy evangelistic organizations. Finally, 'religious competition' has apparently augmented the pressures forcing the Roman Catholic Church to abandon its 'hierarchical, priestly, passive emphasis, and by contrast, to develop close-knit, active laymen's groups that can establish the religion on a communal basis in the working and lower classes of Latin America' [219]. In addition to the environmental influences originating in state agencies, hostile groups or situations of competitive pluralism, religious organizations are also subject to the influence of heterogeneous factors falling under the general heading of social change. The all-embracing nature of the term 'social change' renders it useless in itself for explanatory purposes because it at once explains too much and too little. It is possible, however, to break it down into more specific factors for analytical use. A small number of factors have emerged as recurrent foci of recent research, but their special relevance to an understanding of the organizational aspects of religious phenomena has not been intensively studied. There is widespread confirmation in research findings of the view that the high degree of urbanization in contemporary Western societies has exacerbated some already long-standing problems of religious organizations relying on the territorial parish as their basic structural unit ([121]; [138]; [149]; [228]; [148]; [150]; [208]). The consensus among both Catholic and Protestant sociologists seems to be that the fixed territorial parish is ill-suited to contemporary urban conditions and should be either abolished or supplemented with more flexible arrangements (see [155]). Rates of participation in Roman Catholic church services decline with rapid rates of population growth in European cities, high rates of geographical and social mobility and extensive cultural contacts across local boundaries [138]. But urban statistics also strongly reflect wider regional characteristics [71]. Even within the city areas the differences can be sharp, as, for instance, between suburban and 'neighbourhood' or inner-city parishes ([52]; [149]). The latter have constituencies consisting mainly of migrants, ghetto-residents or day-time workers. The notion of the territorial parish as a contributory factor towards community-integration has therefore

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been effectively destroyed, and suggestions for ways of adapting church structures to the changing urban situation have been legion ([106]; [264]; [139]). In general, the proposals embody schemes for transcending the limits of territorial units, establishing specialist agencies for the inner-city missions and centralizing the planning of each city's pastorate under local administrators. A conscious adoption by churches of what some commentators consider to be 'sectarian' stances is part of their general strategy for coping with pluralistic, urban, competitive situations. The rapid growth of suburban areas has also created problems for Christian groups and in particular for their organizational structures. Attempts to overcome the disadvantages that faced religious groups in gaining a foothold in the suburbs have recently been criticized for being too successful in some respects. Thus, Gibson Winter [244] reasoned that the numerical strength and religious inclusiveness of suburban 'organization churches' belied their social exclusiveness and collective introversion. His vision of freedom for Christian churches from the constraints of'suburban captivity' was based on an ideal infusion of such 'sectarian' features as 'the quality of faith and interpersonal community' [244:124], Other students of the changing position of churches in suburban areas have pointed to the possibility that the spatial separation of residence and work-place may disqualify the suburban clergy from developing the competence to handle most of the major issues affecting their parishioners' lives [191]. They would allegedly be left with exclusive concern for residual problems of the family and personal religiosity. A similar picture emerges from studies of the place of American rabbis in urban and suburban environments: Their formerly exclusive concern for interpreting the Law has been slowly eroded. Now they are expected to show competence in a wide range of activities, many of which are more closely connected with the home lives of Jewish families than with the task of interpreting the Law in the widest possible context (see [72]; [245]; [203]). But more radical responses to the suburban environment have recently been proposed and implemented which would undoubtedly entail a thorough-going disruption of traditional forms of church organization. Yet, few of the writers in this field seem to have taken cognizance of this possibility. Josephine Klein [148], for example, devoted a long article to an analysis of experimental ways of bridging the social gap between the individual member and the parish congregation in Anglicanism, but she failed to give serious consideration to their wider consequences for church organization. The implication was that the creation of flexible intermediary groups within parishes would fulfill 'functions' for the individual, the community and the society but would not apparently create problems for, say, authority relations at parish level or communications at diocesan level. It must therefore

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be emphasized that experiments with lay apostolates, house-meetings, 'prophetic' ministry and community service schemes have implications for the re-distribution of power and authority in even the least hierarchically organized groups. One unintended outcome may be the substitution for clerical control at local level of centralized, bureaucratic direction by pastoral specialists. The effects of an increasingly urban environment have also been felt in the organization of some monastic orders. Among Dutch Franciscans, for example, the response to large-scale social change has taken the form of an increase in the proportion of ordained brothers, demands for equal rights for lay brothers and a relaxation of the formerly strict rules about living in monastic houses [53]. Yet, in accordance with the widespread decline in respect for the value of parish structures, the proportion of Franciscans performing the duties of parish priest has been more than halved in the past one hundred years. Organizational adjustments to the new situation have lagged behind the pace of change in practice, but there are a few signs of democratization and rationalization of administrative procedures. Moreover, awareness of wider social changes has begun to express itself in well-documented demands and programmes for the internal reform of other religious orders [176] and for the adjustment of their external tasks to new social conditions [175], A strong case could be made for arguing that sociologists studying mainstream Christian churches have tended to operationalize 'social change' largely in terms of the physical or social-relational environment, whereas sociological understanding of 'deviant' religious groups has usually been framed in terms of cultural factors. This pattern of predilections for certain types of explanation may be a reflection of the historical links between churches and physical/social communities or between sects/cults and movements of subcultural dissent. It is in urgent need of adjustment. As far as Christian churches and denominations are concerned, cultural changes in the wider society have been said to conduce towards the adoption of rational, instrumental criteria for evaluating their procedures and organizations ([32]; [212]). What is more, the response of Protestant churches in the U.S.A. to outside pressures towards organizational rationalization has been to adopt almost uniform structures ([130]; [154]). But denominational uniformity in the U.S.A. may be less the result of accommodation to the values of the secular world than of accommodation to its dominant modes of organization [276]. Post-Vatican II changes in the Roman Catholic organizational design and liturgy may also bring about a greater measure of uniformity in administration and practice than was possible under the traditional system of virtually autonomous, autocratic bishops [140]. On the other hand, the allegedly increasing value of the individual and of

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the notion of spontaneity in modern Western societies might imply a deepening tension between formal religious organizations and their individual members [150]. Whereas the very structure of the denominational forms of organization is well-matched to a democratic ethos and to cultural ideals of mild egalitarianism ([161]; [162]), the Roman Catholic Church has been dilatory in matching its organization to changed cultural circumstances. Conflicts of authority have followed from the failure to bring organizational principles into line with recent re-definitions of the nature of the church and of its mission which echo some currents of the contemporary ascendancy of individualism and 'participationism' ([141]; [81]). Moreover, the cultural pluralism of the U.S.A. and the slow decline of ghetto-consciousness among American Catholics have often been cited as factors which nowadays render the tight-knit parish both unnecessary and unhelpful from the church's point of view [106]. It has also been discovered in Britain that one of the unintended consequences of Roman Catholic grammar-school and high-school education for working-class children has been the eventual alienation of many intelligent Catholics from the church [74]. Their achievement of a measure of intellectual sophistication and material prosperity unfitted them for a simple acceptance of the traditional structure of social relationships in urban parishes [150]. Conversely, the parish priest was unable to accept that young, educated working-class Catholics would no longer offer him unthinking deference and obedience. The resulting conflict tended to alienate them still further from parish life. Careful research into the range of reactions to plans for manpower reallocation in a rural diocese of the Church in Wales revealed further ways in which a disjunction between the socio-cultural conditions of action for parishioners and church administrators could lead to serious disputes over proposals for change [128]. Again, a misalignment of rational principles for organizational change and church members' other-than-strictly-rational reasons for legitimating traditional organizational forms provoked conflicts of authority. The explanation of friction between parties within the diocese hinged on Harris' view that instrumentalities in religious organizations are no less value-infused than are their ultimate goals. Normative compliance does not therefore necessarily guarantee acceptance in all sections of a religious body of changes in ways of attaining even agreed-upon-goals. In fact, the social heterogeneity in the diocese that Harris studied meant that a variety of 'theologies' legitimated the local parish arrangements. Resistance to the imposition of planning proposals for parish amalgamations from the diocesan 'centre' therefore took the form of arguments about the theological justification (or lack of it) for centralized administration. Harris's conclusion is that such a situation, which is not uncommon in organizations dependent upon normative compliance, calls for a modification of Etzioni's original

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rationale for the three types of compliance structure. In particular, the sources of normative power need to be specified more clearly because it now seems that large organizations may contain a multiplicity of not necessarily mutually compatible justifications for normative compliance. Evidence from the U.S.A. suggests that the cultural strain towards rationalization in all forms of social organizations has prompted some antirationalistic reactions. Religious movements celebrating the virtues of spontaneity, creativity, affectivity, unreason and informality have all been interpreted as collective protests or refuges against the all-pervading instrumental rationality of the modern world ([194]; [177]). The organizational forms appropriate to such outlooks might be expected to embody minimal formality or rationality. Indeed, the history of spiritualist and other cultic organizations in Britain and the U.S.A. has been marked by constant tension and/or conflict between centralizing, rationalizing tendencies and pressure towards preserving the freedom and spontaneity of local groups of adepts [178], Organizational forms in the cultural milieu are varied and reflect 'the nature of the cultural tradition of which they represent deviant forms': Thus, if it is heterodox science, then like para-psychology there will tend to be "colleges" and "institutes" . . . offering quasi-educational courses, lectures, demonstrations and facilities for research. If it is heterodox religion then one finds "orders", "lodges", "fellowships" and "brotherhoods"' [79: 126], In other words, contemporary Western culture contains a range of possibilities for deviant cultural expressions, and the organizational forms adopted by each cultic group are heavily conditioned by its particular cultural orientation. The fact that there seems to be a 'fit' between cultural orientation and form of organization in contemporary cults should not go unquestioned, however, for evidence is accumulating to indicate that many of today's 'cults of unreason' are nothing if not reasonably organized — at least for shortterm operations ([60]; [194]; [180]; [192]). Even if it appears that the structure of some religious movements is loose, there is usually a clearly articulated set of authority relationships which guarantee leadership but may still allow for ease of transition into and out of the movement at grass-roots level [100], It is also clear that many so-called 'deviant' religious groups have been able to develop successfully in modern Western societies through the espousal of the very ethos of rationality which has allegedly occasioned other movements of reactive protest. Few sects have matched the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, in their deliberate and forceful rationalization of organization structures, propagandizing and member-induction processes ([59]; [61]). Nichiren Shoshu in the U.S.A. also compensates for relatively

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loose membership criteria with assertive, purposeful leadership and rationally efficient modes of communication [276]. The systematic organization of Christian Science and its pragmatic teachings accord well with the dominantly instrumental ethos of a technological civilization, 'for in the broad arena Christian Science has no quarrel with the prevailing culture' [238:214]. And Scientology's doctrines are so deeply rooted in 'current, if marginal, thought' that it 'suffers from doctrinal precariousness' [226:413]. Not surprisingly, therefore, the organizations of all these 'deviant' groups have become increasingly impersonal, standardized and centralized, for they have no reasons for rejecting the canons of instrumental rationality which pervade the culture of modern Western societies. To sum up the argument so far, religious groups are situated within a socio-cultural environment which places identifiable contraints on their modes of organization. The multiplicity of sources for environmental influence is matched by the variability of religious organizations' responses to it. Nevertheless, certain tentative generalizations about the relationship between religious organizations and their environment can be distilled from the findings of recent sociological research. 1. The influence of environmental factors is felt most strongly by those religious organizations which have either a poorly articulated or an indistinct collective outlook. 2. The precise effects of environmental influence are mediated for religious organizations by their leaders, and the outcome depends to a large extent on the nature of the leaders' position in the organizational structure. 3. Religious groups which make strenuous attempts to maximize their recruitment or to produce major changes in the outside world are highly susceptible to environmental influence. 4. Changes in environmental conditions may occasion changes in the internal structure and the external products of religious organizations.

5. RESOURCES

To conceive of religious organizations as social systems operating in a complex changing environment helps to account for some of the constraints on their organizational structures. But systems are not passive entities; they are active in using parts of the environment as resources for their continuing operation. The relation between organizational structure and resources is never static in a viable system because the availability of materials is subject to fluctuation. Resources for religious organizations may be classified for present pur-

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poses under the headings of ideas, people and materials. They are not all of equal importance nor is the pattern of salience necessarily shared by other types of organization. But each class of resources exercises discernible constraints over religious organizations and is, of course, in turn a reflection of each organization's independent determination of what is to count for it as a resource. The relationship is consequently two-way and for that reason all the more complex. The fact that it is difficult to identify unambiguously the productive process or processes of religious organizations as systems means that (a) their resources are sometimes only analytically distinguishable from their environments, and (b) control over resources is a particularly grave problem for them. What evidence is there to suggest that ideas serve as raw materials in the productive processes of religious groups? There are at least two possible ways of answering the question. On the one hand, religious organizations can be seen as regular structures within which people are 'processed'. Part of the 'person-processing' operation consists in deliberately altering people's consciousness in allegedly determinate ways through such processes as catechetics, instruction, discussion, contemplation, teaching, studying, preaching or exhorting. One component of religious organizations' resources consists therefore of the ideas that the people who are being 'processed' bring to the group. Among Jehovah's witnesses' techniques of proselytism, for example, is the powerful and persuasive gambit of explicitly drawing out the prospective proselyte's existing beliefs and ideas in the ultimate intention of re-arranging them (with a few additions) around the Watch Tower Society's key doctrines [61]. It represents not so much a genuine use of outsiders' ideas as resources but, rather, a purely instrumental device for facilitating the exposition of the group's own teachings in a rationally efficient manner by linking them with those of outsiders. On the other hand, some religious organizations undoubtedly 'consume' ideas. In some cases the ideas are generated largely within the organization but have a struggle to achieve acceptance within it. Thus, schism among the Brethren and Christadelphians has often taken the form of divisions on points of doctrine which have apparently arisen out of the members' incessant doctrinal questioning ([238]; [239]). In time, the group becomes highly introverted, and ideas-as-resources from outside its stock of conventional ideas cease to provide the grounds for further dispute. Other cases illustrate the consumption of external ideas-as-resources. The cultic milieu is said to be a matrix of changing ideas which are being continually worked and reworked into novel constellations by cult-adepts. The capacity for leadership in such organizations must depend heavily on the ability to absorb or manipulate fresh ideas with confidence. The threat to organizational viability of

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constant exposure to new ideas also calls forth a number of mechanisms which are intended to promote stability and ideational 'closure' (see [79]; [226]). A third variant on the way in which religious organizations consume ideas-as-resources concerns the role of certain specialists within the ranks of religious professionals. There is growing evidence to show that the structural location of such functionaries as campus ministers ([127]; [126], specialist Roman Catholic priests [124], mental hospital chaplains [168], non-parochial Protestant clergy [123] and religious educators and theologians [207] increases their openness to novel ideas and enhances their capacity to introduce innovations. There is clearly an additional element of pre-selection in the responsiveness of specialist religious professionals to outside ideas, but their structural location is probably a necessary condition of its effectiveness. In a special study of the Y.M.C.A.'s changing fortunes and organizational responses M. Zald (see also [253]) stressed the constraints that 'enrollment economies' can impose on an organization's programmes and internal structures. If an organization depends for its economic viability on the continuing support and participation of members, then it is under pressure to adapt itself to meet their changing needs and preferences. In this respect the location of economic resources is crucial for a voluntary religious group's potential for development. But not all religious groups are entirely dependent on a discrete membership. Income from investments, property rents and trusts helps to insulate the high-level leaders of some groups against the pressure to adapt to members' changing preferences. In such cases, the exercise of formal authority can be backed by a degree of economic independence which may inspire officials to resist the will of the majority of members [246]. An alternative strategy for avoiding the problems of an enrollment economy in a voluntary religious association is to accept the risk of high rates of membership-turnover but to insist that all members must be active in selling the group's literature or other products. In this way, a steady source of income is available to the group's leaders, but the members are prevented from developing sufficiently solidary relations among themselves to disrupt the economic base (see [61]). Religious groups which aspire towards the exclusiveness of members in terms of specially selected qualities are constrained to devise organizational structures and procedures for examining the suitability of new recruits and existing members alike. In this case the main problem is not so much to smooth over potential internal differences as to stimulate a sharp awareness of collective superiority over the external world. Boundary-maintenance assumes paramount importance in such groups, but heterogeneity in members' social background does not necessarily present a threat to internal cohesion. The differences between inclusive and exclusive religious groups are

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basically a matter of degree, and the way in which organizational features cluster around this distinction can be convincingly illustrated by reference to the different policies of two branches of one particular minority church. The 'inclusive-aspiring' Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints has a ratio of about one missionary to every 200 full members. But the schismatic and exclusive Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints employs only one missionary for every 1,750 members [218]. After the 1844 schism the Reorganites established a highly centralized church which allowed very little authority to local officials and which consigned the control of missionaries to one central agency. These arrangements, according to Vallier, had been dictated by the minority status of Reorganites in all areas where they operated after the schism and by their physical dispersal in many widely scattered communities. Survival in such circumstances demanded a tight-knit organization with centralized control over finances and a policy of basically passive evangelism. Reorganite missionaries are therefore 'spotted' by the church's elite, investigated in depth, appointed during adulthood but summoned to duty only when necessary. They are entirely financed by the church, which devotes 25% of its budget to mission work. Missionaries of the mainstream Mormon church, on the other hand, must volunteer for unpaid missionary service during late teenage, accept assignments in any part of the world and work at high pressure under close surveillance. These arrangements are said to have been rationally adapted to the majority status of Mormons in certain areas of the U.S.A. in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Other comparative studies of doctrinally similar religious groups have confirmed the view that factors in the socio-cultural environment may bring about differences in internal organization. Thus, for example, the divergent organizational developments of the Moravian communities in Saxony and Pennsylvania were attributed largely to differences in the environment (Gollin [120]). Thus, differences in the external environment of two groups sharing very similar sets of beliefs brought about widely differing manpower problems and policies for utilizing labour resources. The organizational consequences of unremitting evangelism can also be observed in the Watch Tower movement (see [59]; [61]). The strict subordination of everything to the primary tasks of spreading their message as widely as possible and of recruiting the maximum numbers of fellowworkers constrains most Jehovah's Witnesses to legitimate the Watch Tower Society's bureaucratic organization and to obey its orders. Stringency of membership criteria ensures that it is mainly the most active proselytisers who remain in fellowship and who are by definition well-disposed towards the Society's programmes and leaders. The number of individual resignations is high, but so long as the number of new recruits continues to exceed the number of drop-outs, there will be little pressure to alter either the proselytising

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programme or the form of Watch Tower organization. In these circumstances many problems of an enrollement economy are avoided. A similar configuration of high pressure recruitment policies, high membership turn-over rates and widespread legitimation of bureaucratic, hierarchical forms of organization has been observed in some of the new religious movements in Japan and South Korea. There are indeed marked parallels between Soka Gakkai or Rissho Koseikai and the Watch Tower movement in terms of organization (see [231]; [229]), while Korea's Tong-il church has succeeded in exporting its distinctive forms of aggressive proselytism to the Western world in only marginally altered form (see [166]; [61 ]). Mormons are also very successful in recruiting fresh members [76], but the reasons why the Mormon church avoids the main problems of an enrollment economy are different — although equally related to the form of church organization. Its missionaries are carefully supervised, subject to severe normative and utilitarian sanctions and constantly reminded of their dependence on relatives for financial and moral support. The mechanisms of socialization, incorporation and identity-stimulation are so highly developed that (especially in the U.S.A.) deliberate withdrawal from fellowship is relatively uncommon and certainly difficult [135]. So long, therefore, as missionary work remains a condition of upward social mobility in the American Mormon community, the church is assured of a ready supply of evangelists. So long as the supply of fresh recruits continues to exceed the extent of membership loss, the hierarchical organization will probably resist pressure to undermine its autocracy. To this extent, the Mormon church can also avoid many problems of an enrollment economy. If the examples of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons support the argument that the structure of religious organizations helps to determine the statistical chances of member recruitment, the question of what sort of people are thereby recruited remains unanswered. But very little research has been conducted into the social characteristics of recruits to larger, more stable and highly organized religious bodies. Kraemer [151] has suggested, however, that the rigidly static structure of the Roman Catholic parish system in metropolitan areas means that the most loyal parishioners tend to be drawn nowadays from the ranks of 'marginal people' who are outside the main spheres of city-life. Further research is now needed to examine the relation between type of religious organization and type of recruit. Bibby and BrinkerhofFs [66] study of recruitment in Canadian conservative churches is a step in the right direction. One of the problems facing churches which aspire nowadays towards inclusiveness is that the increasing social heterogeneity of members in modern Western societies imposes new strains on the organization. In the European Catholic Church, for example, parishioners no longer share similar frames

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of reference and therefore impose a wider variety of not necessarily reconcilable demands on the priest [200]. The priest's response is usually to accentuate one or more of his sub-roles in the attempt to serve the maximal number of parishioners, but he thereby incites yet further criticism of his role-performance. The multi-purpose nature of the inclusive religious body in the modern world inevitably generates organizational tensions and conflicts which militate against the achievement of its professed aims. R.H. Lauer's [153] analysis of social relations in Protestant congregations offers a similar viewpoint. Taking this argument further, it can be seen that changes in the availability and/or quality of professional manpower resources may also entail corresponding changes in the organization of religious groups. In the face of difficulties in recruiting young graduates into the ministry, the Church of England, for example, has altered its whole system of theological college training and is slowly adjusting to a novel situation in which the average age of its ministers is growing steadily higher (see [84]). The organizational repercussions of this deficiency of human resources include attempts to redistribute the available personnel in a more efficient manner, schemes to improve the administrative efficiency of the church and experiments in more intensive lay participation in the liturgy. But the problems of quantity cannot be completely isolated from questions of quality. Wilson [45], Towler [216] and D.H.J. Morgan [167], inter alios, have all suggested that the changing social status of the Anglican clergy (including bishops) has adversely affected its potential to influence the course of both secular affairs and the church's own internal government. Perhaps as a result of the Catholic priesthood's traditional exemption from the wider community's status system in many Western countries, the source of manpower problems in that church may be located elsewhere. A small selection of research findings will suffice to point up significant differences from and parallels with the Anglican situation. In the first place it is clear that differences in the cultural contexts of research into the two churches have dictated different approaches to the sociological understanding of their respective manpower problems. The greater importance of the notion of 'vocation' to the Catholic priesthood accounts for the dominant interest of Catholic sociologists in the quality of the familial and educational backgrounds of prospective priests and religious (see [107]; [110]; [89]; [90]; [189]; [55]; [91]; [142]). Secondly, studies of recruitment to the Catholic priesthood have often overlooked the importance of the church's own organizational arrangements in affecting its manpower supplies. But recent research has begun to unravel the complex web of relationships linking perception of the priesthood as a career with the decision to become ordained or to remain a priest. In par-

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ticular, Hall and Schneider's Organizational climates and careers [124] explored in depth the influence of organization structure on priests' perception of their own 'psychological success' in achieving career goals. Their findings confirmed that 'career outcomes' are very largely conditioned by an organization structure which systematically undermines such minimal conditions for psychological success as the feeling that a curate's work is challenging, the opportunity to work independently, the sense of doing something important and the actual attainment of some visible goals. Further documentation on the structural conditioning of clerical attitudes towards the Catholic church's organization is available in the report of O'Donovan and Deegan's [183] questionnaire survey of pastors in Western and mid-Western U.S.A. Their findings are entirely consistent with Hall and Schneider's argument about the importance of organizational climate as a determinant of the chances for psychological success in a priestly career. Research by Fichter [109] into the opinions of a large sample of curates in the U.S.A. had also discovered that their working conditions, including structural relations with superiors and fellow-priests, were amongst the most powerful determinants of their views about the priesthood as a profession. Among the most important of recent contributions to the sociological understanding of recruitment to the ministry in Protestantism is Carroll's [83] careful examination of the effects of professional training in different types of theological seminary on ministers' subsequent theological orientation. The main hypothesis was that an organization's social climate and operative goals exercise structural constraints over the trainee minister's developing notion of his 'selfhood'. The findings confirmed the general hypothesis and gave support to the typology of seminaries that Carroll had previously constructed from an intuitive consideration of the ways in which seminary goals tended to cluster. But even more impressive was his discovery that the influence of seminary-type on theological orientation persisted when control was made for the individual respondent's personal philosophy, his parental socio-economic status, the type of denomination to which he belonged, his first preference in seminaries, the outlook of his closest friends in the seminary and the type of ministry in which the respondent was currently practising. The patterns of emphasis on basic operative goals in Protestant seminaries were shown to condition, more strongly than any previous or subsequent experience, the theological orientation of Protestant ministers. Even this hasty summary of what amount to complex findings from a sophisticated piece of research is hardly required to underline their implications for religious organizations. But in a more theoretical perspective Carroll's conclusions might be thought to differ from those of Hall and Schneider's study of the determining influence of organizational climate after training on priests' career outcomes. The point at issue would be whether

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professional training or professional practice exercised the stronger constraint over the careers of religious personnel. But this apparent discrepancy rests on no firm foundation, for the two pieces of research examined quite different things. Hall and Schneider concentrated on the conditions of psychological success in the priestly career, whereas Carroll was interested in discovering the structural sources of ministers' enduring theological orientation (i.e., regardless of psychological success). There are some preliminary (and unwitting) suggestions of the usefulness of combining the approaches of Carroll and Hall and Schneider in Kelly's [147] study of the determinants of role-satisfaction among Catholic priests. In brief, the findings of his research showed that levels of satisfaction tended to be high among (a) priests whose current role-expectations and attitudes towards Catholic beliefs were not widely different from those of their preordination period, and (b) priests whose pre-ordination role-expectations and attitudes towards Catholic beliefs had not accorded with traditional standards. This indicates that seminarians who retained their unconventional attitudes and expectations through their professional practice were most likely to feel satisfaction with their current roles. Kelly's research did not pursue the topic any further, but two questions naturally arise: What conditioned the pre-ordination attitudes and expectations? and What conditioned the difference (if any) between pre-ordination and current attitudes and expectations? The structurally oriented research designs of both Carroll and Hall and Schneider are considered highly relevant to these questions, for it is part of this report's general thesis that the independent effects of organizational structures on the sociological and psychological outcomes of behaviour in religious groups deserve special attention. Evidence from a study of Protestant ministers who left the Church of Christ also supports the view that organizational structure is a major determinant of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the ministerial career [146], The major findings parallel very closely those of Hall and Schneider: '[The church is]. . . an occupational system in which the needs of its professional leadership are being frustrated by sluggish mobility channels, inadequate salary and living conditions, a low level of response to the minister's leadership efforts, and a "support system" which often seems to isolate rather than to support the pastor in his work' [146:90]. But perhaps the most enlightening finding of the research was that expastors still retained self-identity as ministers: They had not wanted to leave the ministry — organizational strains had forced them out. Differences in church polity are clearly important in conditioning the precise way in which organizational strain is generated and perceived, but the broad similarities in the pattern of strains between widely different types of church indicate that religious organizations share certain problems of re-

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sources in common. Fluctuations in the supply of members and professional workers alike create organizational difficulties, but in turn, organizational structure also affects the statistical chances of member and worker recruitment. In addition to problems of manpower supplies, religious organizations face difficulties in securing adequate and stable material resources. The nature of the difficulties and the methods of combatting them vary with differences in the types of religious organization. Just as enrollment economies create problems of authority and government in religious organizations, so groups which do not enjoy a source of material benefits which is largely independent of their members' voluntary generosity are constrained in the scope of their activities. At the simplest level it means that members may withhold financial contributions in an attempt to obstruct the implementation of unpopular policies. This is precisely what happened, for example, when national leaders of the Methodist Church in America began in the late 1950s to disband the Central Jurisdiction for Negro Churches and to integrate all churches, regardless of ethnic composition, into a uniform system of geographical divisions [249]. Resistance to such a policy among those members of the Methodist Church in the South opposed to racial integration took the form of reduced financial contributions to the special fund for Race Relations Sunday and decreased use of official church literature which advocated integration. Other, non-financial, tactics were also adopted by the anti-integration lobby among Methodists in the South. But their purely economic tactics had the greatest effects because the Methodist church found itself in a market situation where its continuing operation was being threatened by a form of financial boycott (see also [123]). It must be emphasized that the ability of individual ministers to prevail over the entrenched opposition of their congregations is partly dependent on their security of tenure in the face of lay opposition. In churches where the lay members of congregations can hire and fire ministers, the capacity for ministerial ascendancy over lay opinion is drastically reduced. Thus, despite the findings that ministers are on balance more liberal in civil rights matters than laity, many whole congregations in the South have seceded from the United Methodist Church, the Southern Presbyterian Church and the Episcopalian Church in protest against their integration policies. It is not unlikely that ministers' wishes have been over-riden in some cases of secession. Perhaps the most extreme illustration of this effect is found in Chilean Pentecostalism where the criterion determining an intending pastor's promotion from spare-time to part-time and finally to full-time evangelistic status is his ability to attract and retain a sufficiently large congregation. If he is unsuccessful in building up his own congregation in a mission area, he

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is deemed unfit for ordination and further promotion [152], Another economic factor affecting the distribution of power in religious organizations is the source of their regular income. The on-going process of administrative centralization in Protestant churches is currently undermining the freedom of action which the congregation of many denominations have traditionally enjoyed in controlling ministerial behaviour. On the one hand, external pressure to achieve a rationalization of denominational administration is working against the notion of congregational autonomy. And on the other, the development of central financial resources is giving denominational executives a measure of independence from congregational control which has been historically lacking in many Protestant polities. Research by Takayama [211], for example, into the centralization of administrative structures in 29 American denominations revealed that the recent growth of investment programmes at national level has increased the real power of church executives to over-ride resistance to their policies at congregational and regional levels. Significantly for present purposes, the churches relying most heavily on income from sources other than the contributions of local congregations tend to be large and to have congregationaltype polities. The smaller the denomination, the more likely it is to derive most of its income from purely local sources. These findings are consistent with Harrison's [129] understanding of the origins of the Northern Baptist Convention: 'The new organization was primarily designed to augment the promotional and budgetary affairs of the societies' [129:42] and 'probably more than any other single factor, the financial condition of the national societies induced the denominational leaders to consider seriously the creation of a centralized organization [129:49]. In this way, the easily quantifiable (and therefore more persuasive) arguments for rationalizing the economies of missionary agencies were indirectly responsible for radical innovations in the legislative and executive activities of the whole denomination. According to Gibson Winter [245] similar processes occurred in Methodism and among the Disciples of Christ in the U.S.A., but only in the latter's unitary, hierarchical form of organization did centralization of budgeting and administration actually produce a decrease in overall administrative costs. Efforts to rationalize the Methodist church encountered strong resistance from the traditional centres of regional power and authority, and the outcome was the establishment of two parallel hierarchies of boards and conferences. Winter's study of religious organization also pointed up the immense importance of fund-raising and distribution as factors originally promoting cohesion among Jews in the U.S.A. In spite of the lack of any central organization of Jewish affairs, interests or religious practice, the community is still able to retain a sense of identity partly through a complex web of spe-

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cialist agencies for fund-raising and information dissemination. But attempts to centralize the activities of all the separate agencies under these two headings have invariably failed. Consequently, the synagogue and the community centre have more recently emerged in new guises as potential agencies for promoting a greater sense of religious identity among later generations of acculturated American Jews. Shifts in the allocation of voluntary gifts now benefit communal and educational programmes, thereby precipitating role-problems for rabbis who are nowadays endowed with unaccustomed power and administrative responsibility outside the field of religious instruction. In religious organizations which have centralized decision-making offices and a clearly articulated distribution of authority culminating in a powerful elite, there is usually close control over material resources (see, for example [51 ]). A corollary of this situation is that marked shifts in the source of voluntary contributions do not commonly occur and, even if they do, are of relatively slight import in comparison with central sources of income which are not subject to such shifts. For the very existence of a powerful centre virtually ensures that local churches have little or no opportunity to withhold contributions to central funds and, conversely, that decision-making on major economic issues is confined to the organization's upper echelons. In this respect the Roman Catholic Church and the Watch Tower movement have much in common. Both are partly dependent on the willingness of members to make voluntary contributions to the organization's funds, but both also enjoy considerable incomes from sources beyond the control of rank-and-file members. They are alike in having sharply delineated hierarchies of officials and alike in excluding all except a small number of elite officials from decision-making bodies. It may not be a simple coincidence that they both maintain effective silence about their respective economic situations. It should be added, however, that these two organizations differ sharply in their methods of avoiding the pitfalls of an enrollment economy: The Roman Catholic Church has enormous reserves of wealth in the form of property, land and liquid assets, but the Watch Tower movement derives most of its income from the sale of literature to the general public. In these different ways, then, they are both protected against uncertainties in the supply of voluntary contributions from their members, and their chosen policies have important but different consequences for their organizational structures. A variation on the theme of organizational buffering against the effects of fluctuating supplies of resources is the process whereby the religious 'producer' intensifies the relationship with the 'consumers' of his or her products. In time, the relationship assumes a practitioner-client character and embraces a wide range of the client's life-spheres. This development is a

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characteristic strategy of Scientology and some other para-scientific cults in which the leaders' sole means of controlling followers lies in the possibility of creating ever more urgent needs among them for the services which only the cult can provide. Religious organizations such as the Church of England or the Methodist Church stand in an anomalous relation to the extremes of hierarchical and congregational control over material resources. They both incorporate an hierarchical structure of ecclesiastical offices which have some responsibility for material affairs as well as a complex network of committees and boards containing strong lay representation with special regard for material resources. But the disadvantage is that reform of policy or practice in temporal affairs is a very cumbersome operation which often produces deep rifts between different factions inside the churches. The work of Thompson [215] and Vié [223] on the Church of England makes it clear that extensive lay involvement in church government severely complicates the decision-making process and the church's response to social change. Democratization and decentralization characterize the Church of England's organization and largely condition its inability to deal promptly and effectively with problems in the creation and allocation of material resources. Research conducted in parallel with that of Sister Vié points up the sharp contrast with the way in which the Catholic Church in France has been tackling the same problem of clerical salaries [222], Initiatives for reform came from the church's top leaders and were deliberated almost exclusively among the clergy in each of the dioceses which are formally autonomous in their 'politique financière'. The emergent reforms, in various ways embodying a greater sense of equality and communal responsibility among the clergy in each locality, are therefore the creation of bishops, diocesan chancellors and elective priests' committees. With the exception of a handful of finance experts at diocesan level the laity have not participated in the discussion of reform at all. At the risk of alienating those sections of both laity and clergy who disliked the new modes of payment, the church's leaders in some dioceses have achieved a thorough-going rationalization of financial matters in a relatively short time. In sum, the severity of the problem of choosing, extracting and retaining resources for religious organizations are clearly related to their internal structures. This is no less true of their different ways of processing the resources that they do receive.

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6. PROCESSES

Religious organizations are structured, albeit opaquely, in ways that facilitate characteristic operations involving the transformation of resources into products. The major difference between the productive processes of religious and work-organizations lies in the fact that the former are most efficient at transforming ideas and people's outlooks, whereas the latter are competent to produce saleable goods. This underlying difference has clear implications for their respective organizational structures, and the object of the present section is to review the research findings that have come to light on this subject in recent years. One of the effects of social change and of limitations in personnel resources in mainstream Christian and Jewish organizations in the West has been the relative devaluation of teaching as a distinctively religious process. This is reflected in the large number of findings that laity display considerable ignorance of the basic tenets of their professed faith (see, inter alios, [123]; [41]). More than one student of the Roman Catholic church has recently suggested that one of the major sources of conflict in clerical-lay relations is between formal, traditional teachings and vague, popular beliefs (see, for example, [150]). But this conflict is more likely to be a symptom of a deeper, structural disjunction that an independent factor in its own right. Perhaps more significant in the long-term are the findings that laity do not expect their clergy or rabbis to concentrate on teaching-functions but in fact prefer them to accentuate the more expressive, caring aspects of their total roles. The disjunction between clerical and lay expectations in the matter of teaching is more clearly illustrated in Judaism where formal instruction in the Law has always been the rabbi's primary competence. Rabbi training and professional socialization prepare men primarily for teaching-roles [72], but the structural and cultural constraints on their role-performance nowadays emphasize non-teaching skills. Marshal Sklare's belief that 'the contrast between the learned and the ignorant has been obscured on the contemporary scene' ([204; 272]) bears testimony to the changes that have occurred in the tasks to which American rabbis of Reform and Conservative Judaism are now encouraged to apply themselves. Although Christian ministers have never accorded teaching the pride of place that it has traditionally held among the tasks of rabbis, there has nevertheless been a relative decline in its salience both for forms of worship and for the minister's own conceptions of his role. Indeed, B.R. Wilson's [45] view is that American denominations were not even founded primarily on doctrinal differences but were the outgrowth of extra-doctrinal social differences. If this is true, it would hardly be surprising that doctrinal instruc-

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tion was not currently among the foremost processes of religious groups in the U.S.A. The fact that ministers are still trained primarily for teaching roles merely generates confusion about what is really expected of them. The situation is made more complex by the inconsistency between ministerial and lay evaluations of the relative importance of a minister's various roles (see [117]; [108]). The current popularity of conservative churches in which formal teaching in doctrine and ethics is still accorded some importance by both clergy and laity is an indirect sign that the depreciation of teaching processes in mainstream churches is provoking a critical reaction in some quarters. The numbers of denominational 'switchers' to conservative groups are quite high [41: 184-203], and there is some evidence that they are partly motivated by a search for positive, unambiguous instruction in all aspects of religion [66]. It follows that the formal teaching process is nowadays conducted almost exclusively in groups characterized by authoritarian relationships between teachers and taught. Moreover, this type of relationship extends beyond the group of initiates and acts as a framework for proselytism among outsiders. In contrast, religious groups in which the emphasis is on experience rather than doctrinal knowledge are most likely to dispense with visible relations of authority. The 'latihan' of Subud [177], the spiritualist seance [178], and gatherings of Meher Baba followers [194] all exemplify the limiting-cases of religious activities displaying minimal formal organization. Significantly, they are also the visible social expressions of ideologies which pointedly play down the usefulness of rational thought, logical modes of learning and formal methods of teaching. One might speculate that the lack of written doctrines and the absence of qualified teachers in these groups facilitate the emergence of charismatic individuals in undisputed leadership positions. It should not be overlooked, however, that the social forces which have undermined the teaching process in mainstream churches have also been felt in some highly conservative bodies. Absalom's [48] insightful analysis of role conflict among Anglo-Catholic priests within the Church of England stresses the contrast between the former centrality of doctrinal teaching and its contemporary eclipse by other activities. The value of this particular study is that it located the depreciation of formal teaching in the context of broader structural changes in the distribution of authority between clergy and laity. The eclipse of teaching activities in contemporary religious organizations represents a paradox in the sense that it has occurred at the same time as the so-called 'knowledge explosion' in Western societies. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the recent proliferation of specialist ministries which might be presumed to have at least the opportunity to impart knowledge on specialised topics. But it is precisely in chaplaincies and special ministries of all kinds that the non-teaching ministerial roles have achieved

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their greatest elaboration. For military chaplaincies, see Burchard [77] and Zahn [251 ]; for the chaplain's role in mental hospitals, see Morrow and Matthews [168]; for campus chaplains, see Hammond [126]. Teaching is widely considered inappropriate in all these various special ministries. Finally, it might be argued that teaching, albeit in a radically new guise, is central to the new forms of ministry that are currently being developed at such centres as the Urban Training Center in Chicago. Ministers are trained in methods of 'preparing people for endeavour in society' [155], and this involves a certain amount of teaching on topics relevant to the issues that the trainees attempt to put before parishioners in a critical fashion. But what is significant for the present argument is that this teaching does not include any of the elements of traditional religious instruction; it is confined largely to the presentation of background information for group discussions of such issues as urban poverty, race relations or the war in Vietnam. The specifically doctrinal component in these new conceptions and methods of teaching is minimal. Even if the new forms of ministry are considered to embody religious teaching, it represents such a radical departure from conventional teaching as to entail momentous organizational difficulties and adjustments. It calls in question the distinctive, traditional competence of professional ministers by involving them in work which overlaps considerably with that of some purely secular specialists, and it virtually destroys the conventional clergy/laity distinction upon which many Christian organizations are founded. In short, if this kind of 'teaching' became widely adopted by the clergy, their churches would require complete reorganization. This is a field in which further sociological research might soon be urgently needed. Very little progress has been made in the past fifteen years in improving sociological understanding of recruitment processes in religious organizations. In this context 'recruitment' may refer primarily to the selection, training and initial appointment of either full-time or part-time leaders of religious groups. Alternatively, it may, of course, refer in other contexts to the induction of proselytes into religious groups as voluntary associations, and the close connection between the two meanings underlines a characteristic difficulty of studying religious organizations. There is no clear boundary line between the people who serve as the raw material for 'processing' and those who conduct the 'processing operation' (i.e., line-personnel). A further complication is that some of the line-personnel also function as staffpersonnel. Apart from the obvious implications that this situation has for authority relationships in religious organizations, it also generates peculiar problems for the recruitment of personnel. One of the recent advances in sociological knowledge about recruitment of personnel has been related to the apparent incompatibility between the syllabus of Christian theological seminaries and the skills required of clergy

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in their first appointments. In part, the incompatibility arises from the fact that seminaries have tended to concentrate on improving the spiritual and/or intellectual qualities of would-be ministers of religion rather than on preparing them directly for pastoral duties (Caroll [83] characterized these dominant seminary goals as 'spiritual formation' and 'mastery of the Christian tradition'). The evaluation of this order of priorities in syllabus design is outside the scope of this report, but it undoubtedly produces significant effects on the career-prospects of new clerical appointees. Carlton [82] has also shown how the intellectual orientation of Baptist colleges in Britain leads their graduates to expect that constant evangelism through well-prepared sermons is the most efficient means of achieving longterm goals. But the denomination's policy of 'throwing its ministers in at the deep end' of parish responsibility during their probationary year only accentuates the shock of realizing that the laity expects something different from them. The narrow orientation of Baptist colleges is therefore held largely responsible for the apathy or rebelliousness which some ministers display in response to the shock of confrontation with the realities of parish work. According to Hall and Schneider [124] the recruitment process in the Roman Catholic church is no less likely to generate dissatisfaction among curates in their first parish appointments. But the reasons for their dissatisfaction lie not so much with the narrowly idealistic orientation of seminary syllabuses as with the structure of authority relationships in the parish and diocese. For whereas the probationary Baptist minister is given sole and immediate charge of a parish, the Catholic curate usually finds himself constrained to live in a small community with other priests who, by reason of seniority, may enjoy more challenging and independent work. Furthermore, their personal career is enveloped in the confines of a vast authoritarian bureaucracy. In view of the structures of relationships among Catholic clergy in parishes and dioceses, it is debatable whether recent changes in the syllabi of seminaries will actually precipitate more or less friction in the immediate future. Huot-Pleuroux's extensive account of seminary reorganization in France since the mid-1960s [189] unwittingly raises the distinct possibility that changes in this part of the system have preceded more urgently needed features of the church's 'organizational climate'. Moreover, it is possible that the developing notion of in-service training for young priests could reinforce their resistance to the traditional structure of relationships and build up a base for concerted action in favour of major structural transformations. Sociological research could very profitably be focussed on the effects produced by modern seminary training on social relationships among parish clergy. As a consequence of the greater institutional differentiation between

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family or community and mainstream Protestant churches, the process of recruitment has characteristically taken a different route from the Roman Catholic pattern. There is, on the one hand, correspondingly less evidence of the influence on career decision-making of significant others in the family or community and, on the other, a generally lower degree of dependence on others in the new minister's first appointment. Consequently, the decision to seek ordination may typically occur later in life than among Catholics, and the structure of relationships between local clergy of varying seniority tends to be correspondingly less authoritarian. In turn, of course, their situation precipitates problems of identity, morale and apathy which may eventually occasion withdrawal from the active ministry (see [146]) or a retreat into either ritualism or evangelicalism [82], A structural upheaval in the Church of England's present-day clergyrecruitment processes, itself reflecting such career disturbances as early retirement, withdrawals from theological training courses and declining numbers of ordinands, is likely to produce two major effects on the church's organization. Firstly, the traditional relationships of authority between senior and junior grades of clergy may be disrupted as a consequence of fresh modes and sources of personnel recruitment. Certainly, there will be changes in the material status of the lower clergy if the church is to retain their loyalty. Secondly, in the face of clerical recruitment problems the laity are beginning to play a more intrusive role in many of the church's ritual, evangelical and social activities. But some research has already established that the new forms of synodical government have not allayed the disquiet of the laity that authority is concentrated in all the structural positions above them [75]. Personnel recruitment processes are intimately, but opaquely, linked with clergy/laity relations and with general problems of authority in religious organizations. Just as sociological research into personnel recruitment and its organizational implications has advanced only slowly during the period covered by this report, so the study of member-recruitment in mainstream churches has shown no major advance. There havk, of course, been important contributions to the body of knowledge about the rates and reasons of denominational affiliation in the U.S.A. [41]. But explanations for the statistical findings has usually been framed in terms of individual psychological motivation or extra-religious social relations. Little attempt has been made to understand recruitment rates and processes as outworkings of particular forms of organization. Exceptions to this statement are confined to the policy-oriented work of, inter alios, Kraemer [151] and Golomb [264]. They both take it for granted that the organization of the Roman Catholic parishes and dioceses is ill-fitted to the missionary task in urban areas, but the precise reasons for this disjunction are only summarily explored.

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As regards mainstream Protestant churches, the process of recruiting members seems to be placed low in the list of priorities for structural improvements and changes. The same forces that undermined the teacher-role among Protestant ministers have also de-emphasized the importance of recruiting new members. The lack of interest in organization for member-recruitment is all the more surprising in the light of the steadily growing body of sociological knowledge about the effectiveness of a variety of recruiting processes among 'deviant' or new religious groups. It has been known for some time that the Mormon Church, for example, had gained a certain amount of stability and vitality from both the systematic organization of its missionary enterprise and the undeniably good results that it thereby achieved [181 ]. Recruiting processes and organization (ostensibly among outsiders) therefore have tangible consequences for promoting cohesion among existing church members. Although proselytism does not serve quite the same integrative functions among young Jehovah's Witnesses, it undoubtedly contributes towards a strong sense of community and shared interests/problems among adult members of the Watch Tower movements. Moreover, the local organization of door-to-door canvassing in small groups complements and reinforces the cohesiveness of the worshipping group [61]. It may be significant that Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons have always placed great emphasis on the statistical record of their missionary endeavour, for this probably stimulates individuals to even more strenuous exertions on behalf of the wider group. It should also be noted that recruitment drives are often instrumental in galvanizing the members and marginal participants of new and emergent religious movements. Thus, a long series of abortive attempts to establish representative federations of Spiritualists in Britain in the 1870s only came to a more constructive conclusion during the 1880s when missionary work in the provinces was organized on a pragmatic basis [178], Finally, studies of the meteoric rise to numerical and cultural importance of Pentecostal churches in Chile have underlined the fact that the mobilization of all recruits in the incessant recruitment of further followers gives these churches considerable vitality, cohesiveness and stability (see, for example, [152]). These reflections on the organizational implications of a systematic orientation towards member-recruitment in some new and fast-growing religious movements suggest the usefulness of revising a widely held view about the organizational transformations that supposedly occur in their development. Instead of supporting the argument that groups which actively seek to convert people are disproportionately susceptible to denominationalizing tendencies, the evidence cited above indicates that a distinction should be made between 'conversionist' groups and 'recruitment organizations'. The latter

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type is systematically and primarily organised for the maximal use of personnel and material resources in continually increasing the number of recruits and turning them into further recruiters. In this way, the organizations may become large, bureaucratic and complex, but the unceasing production of new recruits and recruiters combats any concomitant tendency towards inactivity and stagnation. The recognition that recruitment organizations constitute a type of group which cross-cuts some of the conventional typologies of religious organizations has obvious implications for the distinction between sects and churches and between different sub-types of sect. This will be taken up again in a later section. Recent research into recruitment processes among minority religious groups in the West has brought to light the importance of not only their 'sales techniques' but also, to prolong the analogy, their 'after-sales service'. Wilson [238] drew attention to the fact that the functions of sect affiliation may change considerably during different phases of a sectarian's lifetime, and research has confirmed the usefulness of conceiving of 'Conversion' as a career which extends beyond the moment of initial admission to membership in a religious group. The organizational implications of this situation are that successful recruitment depends partly on the availability of mechanisms and agencies for supervising and signalling the recruit's statuspassage. Evidence may be cited from groups as different as Guatemalan [195] and Chilean Pentecostalism [152], African independent religious movements [56], Jehovah's Witnesses [61], West Indian Pentecostal sects in Britain [78] and Scientology [224] that an organization's capacity to transform its recruits into committed members is dependent on the institutionalised provision of responsibility-posts and other ways of signalling statuspassage. By contrast, a brief note on the recruitment problems of religious cults is appropriate here. Recent work by C.B. Campbell [79] and Wallis [226] has highlighted the difficulties of maintaining the commitment of adepts in groups which basically purvey deviant versions of secular knowledge. Since the adept-group relationship approximates to that of client-practitioner, there are few structural opportunities to intensify it and to lay the foundations for a stable membership or organization. Attention must finally be drawn to the extensive examinations of recruitment processes in the so-called new religions of Japan. The list of contributions is now so long that it is impossible to single our any representative piece of work: Reference will simply be made to Morioka and Newell's helpful bibliography [6] and to the on-going journal Contemporary religions in Japan. But a common characteristic of these varied contributions is an insistence on seeing recruitment as a key area for the successful functioning of the new movements and, more particularly, on interpreting recruitment

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policies and practices within the context of each organization's overall structure. By reason of sociologists' interest in the so-called problem of order one of the processes in religious organizations which has always occupied much of their attention is that of control. The way in which policies are framed, decisions taken, rewards and punishments distributed, values embodied and policies implemented is usually subject to the supervision of various groups and official positions within a religious organization. For present purposes, then, the 'controlling process' refers to the actual operations that are involved in placing limits on the activities and thoughts of people in religious organizations. The question of structural authority-distribution will be reserved for a later section. The control process is clearly of the highest importance because it largely determines how religious organizations respond to their environment, how resources are employed and how the 'processing' of members is conducted. But it is also among the most difficult organizational components to study because it may not be entirely visible to a sociological observer and may not correspond with what the organizational design would lead to expect. The kind of 'political economy' approach that Zald [252] used in his study of the Y.M.C.A. or that Gusfield used in studying the Women's Christian Temperance Movement [122] is well-suited to an examination of control processes. This section of the report will be divided into two sections: (i) ideology, and (ii) behaviour. (i) In the first place some findings have furthered the sociological understanding of difficulties facing religious organizations in the control of diffuse ideology. Cultic groups with weak organization are perhaps most vulnerable to the danger that competing values, outlooks and goals might lead to their dissolution or complete re-orientation [94], The organizational reasons for this precariousness include the absence of clear distinctions between practitioners and clients, the obstructions to the formation of a stable and loyal membership and the tendency for clients to attach themselves to charismatic leaders (see [263]) or to local practitioners rather than to the cult organization as a whole (see [226]). Some apparently weak religious organizations have been found, nevertheless, to contain mechanisms and agencies that serve to control their development in subtle ways. Among the separate local groups of the Exclusive Brethren, for example, the lack of a formal apparatus of control is outweighed by the ideological insistence that each assembly should be doctrinally pure. The effect of this deliberate control over individual assemblies is to impose an involuntary form of control over them all through the rule that forbids contact between pure and impure assemblies [240]. The situation

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among the Amish has been shown to be very similar [137]: Lines of division between the different 'clans' reflect differing degress of 'purity'. One of the paradoxical findings of research in the area of small groups apparently lacking formal organization is that it is precisely in these groups that the opportunities for autocratic leadership are most readily available. Control over ideology in the Society of Friends in the nineteenth century, for example, was found to lie mainly in the hands of a few prominent Quakers whose material circumstances allowed then to dominate a formally egalitarian, unstructured group [144]. Only businessmen or leisured people had the necessary time and money to participate actively in Quaker government and administration, and only the articulate could affect the decision-making process. Thus, the political economy of Quakerism tended to be oligarchical and conservative. One example of its subtly effective mode of operation was the periodic decision to revive interest in the group's collective history and distinctiveness [143]. This invariably succeeded in reviving the old symbolic and social mechanisms against ideological contamination and in temporarily stemming the tide of doctrinal development. (See [227] for a comparison with the Holiness movement in Britain.) The problem of ideological precariousness is less pressing in religious organizations in which either the control process is firmly in the grasp of identifiable elements or the group pursues limited and specific goals. Control may be exercised through formal doctrinal instruction for members and obligatory theological training for all 'personnel'. The very existence of such institutions encourages conservatism and lends immense power over ideology to the administrators and/or executives who control them. This was clearly reflected in Neal's [176] discovery that the response of individual American nuns towards the self-questioning that followed the Sister Formation Programme was very heavily determined by the ideological 'line' taken by each order (see also [173]). Indeed, as Westhues [280] demonstrated in his study of the Catholic church's heavy involvement in education and welfare, a characteristic organizational strategy for ensuring the survival of distinctively Catholic religiosity in the United States was to build up a protective shield of institutions for isolating Catholics from their allegedly insidious environment. Similarly, episcopal autonomy in the Catholic church (at least until recently) largely ensured that bishops could effectively control the ideological influences to which seminarists and young priests were subjected in their own dioceses. One of the structural conditions for the closeness of episcopal control over seminary training is, as Fichter pointed out in 1961 [107], the fact that the Catholic church recruits, trains and commissions all its own personnel. Only military establishments and some exclusive religious sects pursue an equally exclusive training programme, and the parallels between

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these religious groups and the military in their methods of cultivating discipline and respect for authority are quite striking. Most other churches, however, depend upon universities, colleges and training institutes which are partially outside the surveillance of their dominant hierarchies. The differences in structural location of training institutes may account for the apparently smaller potential of most Protestant bishops or high-level leaders to control the training of clergy under their formal charge. It also helps to explain why the ideological orientation of Protestant theological colleges has always been a matter of bitter dispute between church factions. They represent a crucial power resource in struggles to control any particular denomination. Studies of widely differing types of religious organization have brought to light a further device in the hands of high-level ideologists for controlling the beliefs of members on an especially delicate topic, namely, major changes in teachings or ideology. Although it has sometimes been suggested that reform is not possible in religious organizations 'since it must cast doubt on present and past arrangements which were ordained by God' [239:11 J,1 there is evidence that both sects and other types of religious organization are capable of adopting alterations in their basic organization and/or ideology through using such notions as 'developing truth', 'opening-up' truth or 'increasing light'. This device is plainly observable in the articulated legitimation for successive changes in, for example, Brethren teachings on various subjects [240], in the Watch Tower Society's doctrinal and ethical teachings [231], in the Catholic church's recent attempts to up-date its outlook and organization [81 ] and in the 'revelation' required by the Mormon leaders from God before a major change in the church can be approved [182]. A slightly different interpretation of the same device is M. Hill's [133] concept of 'revolution by tradition' as it was displayed by reform movements within the Church of England in the nineteenth century. Hill's argument is that the motivation and momentum for reform of an ecclesiastical organization based on tradition can be derived from within that tradition by the deliberate revival of certain key symbols or 'mythological charter'. Hill adopts this approach in accounting for the evolution of two traditional but innovatory movements originating inside the Church of England: Methodism and Tractarianism. By focussing on the differences in the mythological charters that Wesley and the Tractarians employed as legitimations for church reform, Hill is able to explain the different organizational outcomes of the two 'revolutions'. (For similar processes in the Watch Tower movement see [254]; [233]).

1. Wilson's original quotation referred exclusively to religious sects.

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Future research in this area might profitably be concerned with the structural location in organizations of the capacity and opportunity to produce change by largely traditional symbolic means. An outstandingly erudite exemplar for this programme is P.L. Berger's [64] review of ongoing academic disputes about 'the social location of Israelite prophecy'. Hill and Berger seem to be agreed that the resources necessary for securing legitimation for revolution or innovation in religious matters may be located within traditional cultic institutions and do not have to represent an incursion of uninstitutionalised, free-floating personal power. The material success of some syncretistic or acculturative movements also testifies to the innovative potential of traditional symbols if they are skilfully manipulated. The Jamaa movement of the Katanga and Kasai regions of the Congo, for example, has thrived on a judicious mixture of Catholic orthodoxy and Bantu themes (see [88]). Jamaa's origins within the Catholic church and its use of traditional Catholic symbolism have undoubtedly helped to boost the growth of its following. In this respect it differs from a movement like Blekete in Ghana which is at the same time syncretistic and completely outside any particular traditional religious institution (see [104]). The latter movement cannot secure a comparable level of public legitimization because it lacks an institutional framework within which its innovations could (paradoxically) be justified by reference to tradition. A final example of the radically innovative potential of traditional religious structures is the recent policy of the Catholic church in Paraguay to oppose the country's military dictatorship and to inaugurate programmes of 'liberation' (see [230]). Research in this area might follow up a few scattered indications in the literature that control over the media of communication in religious organizations (or indeed any type of organization) gives considerable potential for influencing their ideological development and the beliefs of members. The evolution of both Christadelphianism and the Brethren movement, for example, has been shown to be strongly influenced by the views of the editors of their principal magazines ([238]; [239]), and the history of the struggles for control over magazines in the Watch Tower movement is the key to its early organizational development [197]. Finally, dissemination of information and propaganda has always been a distinctive feature of the Catholic Action Movement in all parts of the world (see [188]). Indeed, there would seem to be a connection between the proliferation of agencies for mass evangelism in the West and the rising rates of literacy in lower social strata. Conversely, the effects of mass literacy have produced significant, but largely uncharted, consequences for the control processes in all types of religious organization. Religious groups pursuing specific goals were earlier termed 'recruitment organizations'. The very specificity and quantifiability of goals and results allows the organization's leaders to determine the limits of belief and the cri-

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teria of excellence. Processes of ideological control thereby become inextricably linked with routine administration of proselytism and sales-campaigns (see [59]). Under cover of business efficiency and pragmatism, the leaders may actually constrain the scope of members' freedom of ideological manoeuvre. A slight variation of this theme is found in organizations selling peace-of-mind or psychological security; ideology is controlled less by unremitting emphasis on campaign statistics and more by attempts to persuade members or adepts that the evidence of alleged improvements in their own physical or mental states is testimony to the correctness of the underlying system of ideas (see [225]). (ii) The processes of control over the behaviour of participants in religious organizations raise fewer problems for the sociologist than do the ideological control processes, and there are wide variations in the salience of this area of control for religious organizations as integral systems. Again, the distinction between activist and passive types of organization is suggested by the findings. In the former case, the effective or efficient mobilization of resources in pursuit of determinate goals calls for relatively strict control over members' behaviour. The control process in recruitment organizations may therefore be an integral part of normal group activity and may take such diverse forms as regular monitoring of proselytising output (among Jehovah's Witnesses), periodic scrutiny of individuals' mode of living (in the Unified Family), or intensive examination of personal values and attitudes (in Scientology). The distinction between activist and passivist organizations meshes fairly well with the distinction that Scalf et al. [273] have elaborated between 'formal' and 'communal' types of religious group. A discussion of this scheme will be postponed to a later section of the report. The processes of controlling participants in religious organizations having a diffuse ideology and lacking a general orientation towards specific objectives are less visible and less successful. The evidence points up the inability of mainstream Christian churches to influence strongly the behaviour of more than a small percentage of their total membership. ([105]; [97]; [52]) Moreover, Stark and Glock [41] argued that 'the demise of traditional theology and a concomitant drop in other aspects of commitment' [41:215-216] in American Protestant churches are currently associated with the rise of a new 'ethical perspective' which paradoxically tends to remove members from active participation in church activities. These findings vindicate the attempts to break down religious commitment into its component dimensions, but they also underline the need to go further in the direction of relating patterns in the dimensions of commitment to patterns of organization. A comparative study of the interrelations between ideology, organization and commitment in the British Israelite movement and Moral Re-Armament [243] has already shown how insightful such an approach can be and how useful it

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is in helping to transcend the constraints imposed by the inappropriate terms 'church' and 'sect'. An article by R.M. Kanter [271 ] does indeed satisfy some of the needs for a structural perspective on religious commitment. It justifies analytical distinctions between three problem-areas — continuance, cohesion and control — which concern, respectively, roles, relationships and norms. Most importantly for present purposes, however, the article draws upon these distinctions between three problem-areas — continuance, cohesion and control tional types on patterns of commitment. The need to break down the notion of commitment into its analytic components was also stressed in Dhooge's [96] study of the different types of member commitment to the Catholic church. Primary commitment could be to values, beliefs or norms but not necessarily to all three at once. It is particularly interesting in the present context that Dhooge found it useful to distinguish between active and passive models of involvement in the church's organization, for this supports one of the report's principal arguments, namely, that it is necessary to understand religious organizations partly in terms of the kinds of member involvement that they elicit. What is more, the active/passive axis cross-cuts such well worn, if not worn out, categories of religious organization as churchness and sectness. It would also be possible, although too time-consuming in the present context, to reformulate Moulin's ([169]; [170]; [171 ]; [172]) insights into the structure of government in Roman Catholic monastic orders specifically in terms of characteristic types of control process. A theme which has attracted the attention of sociologists in recent years is the problem in religious organizations of the relation between their internal modes of controlling members and the types of social control that are prevalent in the outside world. The findings of Baan's [53] research on changes in the Dutch Franciscan province, Kokosalakis's [150] study of authority relations in Liverpool parishes, Houtart's [141 ] summary of authority conflicts in the Catholic church as a whole, Steeman's [207] account of radical changes in contemporary Catholicism and Remy's [191 ] reflections on broad social changes affecting Catholic institutions are all in agreement on one point: The Roman Catholic church's notion of authority is nowadays in head-on collision with the currently widespread view among sections of the laity that authority is a matter of adjustments in personal relationships designed to facilitate maximal freedom. Whether the basis for control of the entire institution could be reformulated in this way is very doubtful, but the question could serve as a fruitful starting-point for further research into the church's changing organization.

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7. STRUCTURES In contrast with the exiguity of theoretical work of the contextual and processive aspects of religious organization, the structural dimension of the topic has been so extensively researched in recent years that there are some signs of a promising break-through into higher levels of theoretical understanding. Nevertheless, the general impression is that the profusion of discrete case studies and analytical exercises has not yet yielded the basis for the development of systematic generalizations about the structure of religious organizations. Perhaps this should be qualified: The legacy of half a century's tinkering with the concepts of church and sect has undoubtedly provided a few high-level insights into organizational structure, but at the same time the volume of exceptions and modifications to the general schema has continued to swell. This section of the report describes the development of sociological knowledge of organizational structures in religious bodies, but it will deliberately ignore the relevance of this knowledge to the church-sect schema. A review of the fortunes of this particular conceptual device will be postponed until a later section, where it may be more meaningfully connected with the possibilities of alternative approaches. In maintaining the open-systems framework, it is convenient to arrange the material for report and discussion under the headings of variables that appear commonly in the literature on theory of organizations. In particular, the work of the so-called 'Aston School' has clarified the nature of structurable variables and has contributed valuably to the development of understanding of social organizations. The 'Aston' perspective also informed the design of Hining's and Foster's model of church organizations [267] and is therefore doubly useful for present purposes. Hence, the selection of variables is confined to specialization, formalization, centralization, authority configuration and standardization. This list exhausts the principal dimensions of organizational structure with the possible exception of flexibility, stratification and complexity. 'Flexibility' has been omitted from the report because it has almost completely escaped the attention of sociologists of religion and has been of interest only to a few designers of improved religious organizations. Other writers have argued plausibly for the usefulness of investigating separately the other two dimensions of organizational structure, but they are omitted from the present list because most of the material that would fall under them can be satisfactorily included under one or more of the Aston headings.

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Organization

Specialization

If it is true, as J.D. Thompson [292] asserts, that social organizations are designed to cope with uncertainties in their environment and in the technologies employed in producing output, then specialization of activities among an organization's personnel can be understood as one means of combatting a number of such uncertainties. This perspective has rarely been applied to religious organizations, but many research findings can be shown to support Thompson's argument — and the scope for further research is wide. Much of the sociological interest in the professional character of the clergy role in Christianity and Judaism seems to be actuated by a desire to demonstrate that clerics possess specialized skills and knowlegde which facilitate their performance of distinctive tasks. From Fichter's Religion as an occupation [107] to Glasse's Profession: Minister [116] there is remarkable continuity in the general argument and some incidental confirmation of Thompson's thesis on the relation between specialization and the reduction of uncertainties in the organization's environment and productive technology. These two books, separated in time and dealing with different types of church, nevertheless discussed some of the structural problems of professionalization in religious organizations in very similar terms. Both were agreed, for example, on the anomalous character of the clergy role's Janusheaded stance towards specialization and 'general practice'. Both believed that a satisfactory solution to this problem could be found. But a wide gulf separated their respective suggestions, and the difference interestingly marks a failure that has been manifest in a variety of recent studies of the clergy to pursue in a more rigorously sociological perspective the insights of such early investigators of ministerial roles as Blizzard and Burchard. There has been some advance, however, in the discussion of professionalization. Contrary to the rather idealized picture that Fichter and Glasse painted of professional clerics, Towler [216] and Harrison [131] have both denied that the ministerial role can be usefully classified as professional. Towler's argument is that since changes in the wider society have deprived at least the Anglican clergy of many of their formerly distinctive competences, it is now impossible for them to perform even their traditional roles unambiguously. This situation has further deprived them of the opportunity to achieve distinctive goals and has therefore limited their social status to what is ascribed to them. Harrison's approach is different but the conclusion is similar: Protestant ministers in the U.S.A. nowadays constitute only a quasi-profession (see [68] for the status of female clergy). The reasoning is that a combination of external and internal changes in their roles has undermined the clergy's claim to professional status on all five characteristics by which Harrison

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defines 'profession'. The defining characteristics are: A sense of vocation to community service; possession of the necessary esoteric knowledge for performing the service; possession of authority grounded in that knowledge; membership of an independent guild or association; and fulfillment of an important function in society. However perceptive and cogent these arguments are, they still fail to meet the present need for an investigation of the effects of professionalization or otherwise on the organizational structure of churches. There are passing remarks in Harrison's article about the effects of changing clerical status on clergy/laity relations, but broader questions of how this might affect the very possibilities for organized religion are not asked. For example, recent changes in Christian church organization might provide a suitable testingground for the hypothesis of Blau et al. [284] that the professionalization of personnel in small bureaucracies represents an alternative to managerial centralization under conditions of an increasing division of labour. It would be interesting to examine the relative fortunes of these two mutually incompatible modes of organizational development in today's churches, for, whatever the outcome, it is clear that the traditional organizational structures will not survive much longer. Only in the small number of studies directed specifically at the structural location of specialists among the clergy are there any clues to the organizational consequences of increased rates of professional specialization (see, for example, [209]). A theme which incidentally runs through many separate case-studies of specialist clergy is that their structural location favours the development of innovative, if not radical, outlooks. Hadden's [123] account of the radicalization of ministers attending Chicago's Urban Training Center emphasizes that it was the 'structural freedom' of ministers from inner-city or nonmetropolitan congregations which were racially integrated that probably explained why they were apparently more radical in their support of civil rights than ministers from congregations with a differently constituted membership. If the minister's performance does not match the congregation's expectations, then, as Campbell and Pettigrew [80] showed in their study of churches in Little Rock, he may come under strong pressure to change his views or resign (see also [69]). Hadden's findings on the association between structural location and radicalism (in civil rights) could be summarised in the form of a transitive relation: The most radical activists are outside the ministry — non-parochial clergy are more liberal than parish ministers — parish ministers are more liberal than the laity. Certainly, the first term in this relation is supported by the findings that both the Catholic priests and the laity who participate in the so-called 'underground church' tend to be located on the margins of the church, i.e., not wholly integrated into, or committed to, its institutions (see [207]).

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An alternative view is that a condition of viability in religious organizations is the segregation of radicals in order to preserve a balance between idealism and compromise (see [127]). Many studies of religious orders and sects have confirmed a similar point (see, for example, [133]). The position of campus ministers (both college chaplains and university pastors) may also be understood in these terms as a form of safety-valve which allows a denomination to tolerate its radicals by segregation. From the campus ministers' point of view, however, their specialized structural location may unexpectedly restrict the scope for innovation. Hammond's finding that the annual turn-over among American campus ministers amounted to 14% and that the length of their tenure tended to be shorter than among parish clergy are two preliminary indications that their position does not necessarily conduce towards high job-satisfaction. The investigation discovered in fact that role-ambiguity was high, and job-commitment low. Hammond's explanation was phrased in terms of a double-bind situation between the incompatible demands of universities and sponsoring denominations. He concluded that the interstitial position of campus ministers makes it unlikely that their recruitment, training and modes of professional adaptation could ever be satisfactorily institutionalised because there is no agreement in universities or denominations about what is expected of them. Ambiguity about roles does not, however, appear to present insurmountable obstacles to job-satisfaction for either the specialist curates whom Hall and Schneider [124] studied or for military chaplains. The findings of Burchard's [77] classic analysis of strategies for minimizing the effects of roleconflict were largely confirmed in Zahn's [251] study of chaplains in the Royal Air Force. The later research incorporated a few conceptual refinements (e.g., substituting the more appropriate 'role-tension'for 'role-conflict') and a more broadly based set of methods. It also had the signal advantage of pointing to the influence of a structural feature of the chaplain's role performance. He hinted at the obvious, but usually neglected, point that the specialized nature of the chaplain's training, work and structural location do not necessarily set him at odds with either the military or the denominational establishment because the narrowly circumscribed ambit of military affairs and their institutional segregation from other institutional spheres help to set clear limits on the scope and content of the chaplain's activities. Moreover, although the chaplain officially stands outside the normal system of military rank, the context of sharply defined authority relations in which he works nevertheless affords him a measure of authority which becomes problematic only when put to the test. This contrasts with recent findings about the parish clergy's almost constantly anomalous position vis-à-vis the laity. The conservatism of military chaplains indicates that the status of a clerical specialist does not by itself determine a radical or innovatory outlook.

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Rather, it points to the necessity to examine the nature of the context within which the specialist minister has to work. Two curious consequences of the general contextual location of specialist ministries are (a) that such specifically religious products as ritual and doctrine are eclipsed by interest in the less unambiguously religious topics of morals, morale and social welfare, and (b) that the competitive element in interchurch relations yields to an oldfashioned form of good-mannered ecumenism. The result is an apparent watering-down of both religious and denominational distinctiveness which derives not only from the largely secular nature of specialist tasks and skills but also from the sociological context in which the tasks are accomplished. The specialist must therefore conform in part with the rules of independent institutions whose main concerns are unlikely to be prima facie religious. The adaptive strategy of the specialists (not unlike that of salaried professionals within bureaucratic organizations) is to 'tone down' their distinctiveness and to co-operate with all other parties. The evidence from public welfare agencies, penal, military and educational institutions is in line with Morrow and Matthew's [168] discovery that the broad role definition of specialist chaplains to mental hospitals played down the opportunity for evangelism in favour of an unconventional religious ideology which stressed the value of a humanistic, non-custodial view of treatment. This accounts for the ascendancy of mild ecumenism over doctrinal distinctiveness and their lack of evangelical fervour. Specialization of clerical functions is not, however, confined to extraparochial ministries, for it has become common in recent years for Christian ministers to cultivate special competence in one or more areas of their general responsibilities. Again, it must be repeated that the sociological implications of this change have not been thoroughly investigated, although the repercussions on organizational structures are of immense importance. A lot of useful effort has been invested in, on the one hand, conceptualising the dilemma facing ministers in choosing the kind of role to play in parish work (see Blizzard's summary of earlier work [67]) and, on the other, accounting for the pressures to accentuate particular patterns of sub-roles (see [200]). But this method of studying roles is subject to such a wide variety of problems and qualifications that W.S.F. Pickering [187], for example, was led to advance that the notion of 'role' tout court should be abandoned but that it was worthwhile retaining three principal components of this approach: Role-demands, role-strain and role-conflict. There is no indication that Pickering's strictures against conventional role analysis have been taken to heart by sociologists of religion. The effects of ministerial specialization at parish level have often come under scrutiny as, for example, in Cumming and Harrington's [85] sophisticated study of the variables affecting the performance of counselling roles.

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Conversely, the effects of parishioners' expectations on the minister's choice of roles to accentuate have been shown to exercise powerful and even painful constraints over ministers' self-conceptions [153]. But the organizational context of both the pressures and the outcomes has still to be clarified in detail. Wilson's [237] study of role-conflict among Pentecostal ministers is one of the few valuable exceptions. He located the source of role-conflict in the strain generated between the competing demands of their congregations (which seek freedom) and the church's national hierarchy (which seeks to impose its authority). The clash between the structurally loose base of the movement and its tight-knit leadership stratum produces role-conflict and identity problems for the ministers whose own structural position lacks ideological legitimacy. Similarly, Currie's [86] analysis of the problematic status of itinerant ministers in early nineteenth century English Methodism focussed on their awkwardly interstitial position between a theoretically free laity and the 'theocratic centralism' of Conference. Interestingly, Martin's [163] study of the local preacher's position in contemporary Methodism unwittingly suggested that the problem had not changed in the intervening 150 years. Finally, it must be recognised that specialization refers not only to the performance of clerical roles but also to the division of labour that obtains within a whole religious organization. The growth of organizational strata [50] and the proliferation of boards in Methodism [245] and the development of the Jesuit congregation [112] have all been analysed in terms of a process of internal differentiation. In turn, this process can be understood within the open-systems approach as an organizational strategy for controlling uncertainties in the 'technology' of religious processes. It helps to ensure that developments in methods and teachings are effectively incorporated into the organizational design and that they contribute towards reducing uncertainties in the supply of resources and markets. The disproportionately rapid growth in managerial, as compared with line-personnel, in religious organizations (see [212]; [245]) is not therefore simply a function of increasing size of the membership but is connected with the disproportionately rapid increase in problems of communication and control. The organizational consequences of an increasing division of labour are mediated by the basic structure of organizations. Whereas, for example, the officials of specialist boards in the Lutheran Church in America are able to bypass the hierarchy of synods in order to deal directly with congregations because they have acquired power through control over centralized resources, officials of the specialist agencies in the Missouri Lutheran Synod are prevented from doing so by the control that bodies of pastors have always maintained over them (see [245]). Similarly, in the Roman Catholic church, most specialist agencies have failed to achieve complete independence from

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the hierarchy because the two potentially distinct structures are actually linked at the nodal point of the diocesan chancery. The complex, and sometimes stormy, history of relations between the hierarchy and religious orders (see [24]) or 'ethnic parishes' (see [156]) is a reflection of the crucial impor tance that control over specialised (or horizontal) agencies has always constituted for the 'vertically' articulated Catholic church. This is even more true of its close control over supposedly 'lay' organizations such as Catholic Action (see [188]). 7.2

Formalization

Formalization in the sense of the availability of written (or at least widely understood) descriptions of tasks, responsibilities, procedures and authorityrelations occurs in all viable social organizations and is a measure of their ability to survive changes in personnel. It is so closely linked with standardization (the applicability of common criteria to organizational tasks) that for present purposes the two will be considered together. For a variety of reasons connected with the general considerations applying to the relation between religion and organization, these two structural dimensions probably excite a more intensely anti-organizational reaction on the part of committed religionists than do other dimensions. Complete standardization or formalization is therefore unlikely to occur in religious organizations, but evidence has been collected to show that strains towards a measure of both dimensions are felt in precisely this type of organization. The early history of most religious movements that subsequently succeeded in achieving organizational viability has often been marked by disputes about formalization and standardization (see [50]). An interesting facet of Methodist expansion in the U.S.A. was that the number of Assistants failed to grow in a constant proportion to the number of Methodist converts. The 'dominant coalition' or elite therefore grew relatively smaller as the membership base grew larger. Currie's [86] trenchant account of the many offshoots and secessions in nineteenth century British Methodism located the source of much discontent with the dominant Wesleyan connection in its growing formalization of offices, duties, procedures, responsibilities and patterns of authority distribution. But the strain towards formalization is not always in accord with the deliberate intention of the leaders of religious organizations. In fact, as a consequence of the openness of some religious groups to their environment, formalization occurs 'accidentally'. Thus, a middle-class, post-World War II Quaker group in an American university resisted such pressures conscientiously, but nevertheless within ten years it had spawned a formal constitu-

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tion (in response to demands from the university authorities) and formal patterns of worship, business meetings and educational activities [198]. But Wilson ([238]; [236]) and others have shown that formalization may be imposed by political exigencies and does not necessarily represent a qualitative change in a sect's response to the world. A slightly different view is that formalization may occur largely in response to the demands of ecumenical bargaining or discussion between churches of differentially formalized structures [245]. This situation may prompt interest in 'constitutional' matters that had not previously attracted much attention but which may become crucial in close relations with another group. Perhaps less attention than it deserves has been given to the process whereby some religious movements have deliberately sought to increase their degree of structural formalization. Spiritualism, Scientology, some new movements in South Korea or Japan and various Hindu reform movements [257] have all used formalization as a strategy for improving their status in outsiders' eyes as well as for making their internal organization more efficient. Formalization has also been shown to be in the material and honorific interests of some positions in religious organizations in the West. Harrison, for example, seemed to be suggesting that although the theory of Protestant ministries was that the professional minister should only serve as a means of facilitating the laity's own ministry, it had actually acquired its own structural interests which were inimical to real lay involvement in church affairs. One way of preserving these interests was to defend the high level of formalization that currently characterized the organization of Protestant churches. This argument might also apply to groups in which formalization of tasks, etc., has become conventional but the distinction between a professional and non-professional ministry had not been recognized. Both Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses may serve as full-time missionaries or administrators with obviously formal role-specifications, responsibilities and rewards. But they do not consititute a professional ministry because they lack formal ordination and, with the exception of the Mormon elite, distinctive ritual capacities. There is no doubt, however, that the formalization of their position has entailed structural interests that may conflict with those outside the leadership stratum (see [61]; [73]; [135]). It will be recalled from the earlier discussion of the basic problems in conceiving of the structures and processes of religious groups in organizational terms that it was curiously difficult to know what it is that characterised their 'production' process and the distinction between 'processing' personnel and 'processed' material (or people). This problem recurs when the question of standardization is raised. Within limits it is possible to understand such tasks as administering the sacraments, conducting funeral services, hearing confessions, reciting formal prayers as standardized forms of behaviour in

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the sense that common criteria are widely available for judging their conformity with established patterns and/or rules. Indeed, this would seem necessary if, as Caporale [81 ] suggested, the main task of religious organizations like the Roman Catholic church were to transform the individual's religious experiences into a continuously available form. From this point of view, standardization extends to catechisms, seminary syllabi and ordination procedures. But an added complication in the case of religious organizations is that a measure of inherent value or sacredness often attaches itself to the standardized procedure, thereby transcending the realms of instrumental rationality. Standardization tends to have more serious consequences for the possibility of change in religious than in secular organizations, but this difference is only a matter of degree. In groups approximating to the 'recruitment organization' type (see section 6 above), the norms of instrumental rationality govern certain parts of the 'production' process, i.e., the methods of proselytism and the sales techniques. According to J.D. Thompson this is to be expected in organizations whose technology involves strong links between consumer and producer/practitioner but relatively weak links between the separate consumers. The principal organizational requirements of this technology are (a) that the processes should operate in standardized ways and as extensively as possible and (b) that all segments of the organization should be geared towards supporting the primary processes. It follows from the nature of this technology that changes in the criteria of standardization do not present serious problems because their relation with instrumental rationality and specific objectives is relatively clear. These theoretical expectations are borne out most faithfully in studies of the Watch Tower movement [61 ] and Scientology [226]. In pursuit of their relatively narrow aims of either selling a product to the public or persuading an individual to register for a course of 'treatment', these organizations have adopted rules for relatively impersonal relationships between members of the producing or processing staff, a hierarchy of formal organizational offices, standardized procedures for recurrent situations, extensive reliance on written modes of communication and public ways of advertizing production statistics. Moreover, and critically in Max Weber's opinion, central control over the distribution and expenditure of financial resources reinforces other strains towards bureaucratization. It is justifiable to think of them as bureaucratic organizations. Research into mainstream Christian denominations has begun to uncover the consequences of bureaucratic tendencies for other parts of their organizational structures. The positive relation that Takayama [212 : 29] hypothesized between organizational size and complexity, for example, was confirmed in the results of his study of 29 American denominations. His con-

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elusion was that 'bureaucratization is a function of operational forces (or functional requirements) rather than ideological and professed aspects of church government'. In this respect Harrison's [129] exemplary analysis of the Northern Baptist Convention has proved valuable in sensitizing sociologists to the need to consider the addition of 'rational-pragmatic' to Weber's celebrated three-fold typology of claims to legitimacy for exercising authority. What is more, Harrison showed that if bureaucratic principles for the organization of a voluntary associational church were not accompanied by rational-legal sources of legitimacy for bureaucratic authority, a number of interesting mutations of the bureaucratic model would occur. Examples include the following: The hierarchy of offices is likely to be disguised as purely functional differentiation; the acquisition of knowledge and experience counts for more than specific qualifications; the formal authority necessary to ensure that set goals are achieved is rarely given to officials; recourse to formal rules for enforcing normative compliance is rare; and the idea of making a career out of office in a bureaucratic organization is incompatible with the notion of a 'calling' to service. K. Thompson [215] raised further doubts about the usefulness of thinking of churches as complete bureaucracies by asking poignant questions about the kind of symbolic legitimation that could be claimed for bureaucratic innovations in the structure of an organization relying heavily on traditional symbols and arguments to justify itself. The response to this problem in the Church of England was for each special agency in the bureaucratizing organization to claim legitimacy in terms which reflected its particular origins and functions. A further obstacle to the full development of religious bureaucracies is that the premium placed on knowledge, experience and proven integrity favours leadership by older people whose generally conservative opinions might obstruct the strict application of rational rules in policy implementation. D.L. Brewer [73] attributed the resistance of Mormon leaders to change in their church's attitudes towards Negroes, for example, to their advanced age and their preoccupation with preserving the appearance of disinterested dignity. Genet's [113] investigation of administrative procedures in the Catholic church in France brought to light other respects in which a religious organization giving the appearance of being a bureaucracy in fact departed from the classic model; diocesan administration was characterized as 'légère' in the sense that it rested on individual clerics rather than on a formal structure; the variety of disparate tasks that it undertook made it necessary for parish clergy to assist the regular diocesan officers and for each officer to be responsible for several tasks. In short, for reasons connected with the distinctiveness of some processes

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and structures of religious organizations, it seems unlikely that bureaucratization could develop in them to the same extent that it has developed in work organizations.

7.3

Centralization

If centralization is defined as the concentration of the power to make critical decisions in the highest echelons of a religious group's organization, it follows that it is a necessary condition for bureaucratization. But it may also exist independently of other bureaucratic features and may even serve to combat bureaucratization in some circumstances. In fact, the ideological animus against organization in religious bodies and the peculiar nature of the professional priesthood present obstacles to the full development of completely centralized polities. In its most general sense, centralization implies that decisions materially affecting the whole of a religious body are taken at one central point in the organization. This was the way in which Makler [158] used the term in his comparative study of American denominations' methods of controlling the status-passage of ministers through the official 'career sequence'. In highly centralized organizations the key decisions affecting scrutiny of seminarists' qualifications, performance during training and initial appointment and criteria for terminating an appointment are all reserved for the highest levels of denominational government where relatively few people actually participate in the decision-making. By contrast, strongly decentralized denominations are characterized by the concentration of all such decision-making power at local church level in the hands of the whole congregation. An alternative strategy is to define centralization operationally in terms of either the proportion of centrally to locally raised funds or the high percentage of a group's permanent staff employed at central headquarters (see [211]). What is particularly interesting about the latter indicator is that its effects are mediated by intervening variables which account for some unexpected findings in Takayama's research on American denominations. Thus, very large denominations have disproportionately small central headquarters because their sheer size necessitates regional organizational units with their own staffs (see also [235]). Similarly, a high degree of ministerial professionalization in a denomination is negatively correlated with large central headquarters because professionals resist control by administrators (another echo of the hypothesis of Blau et al. [284] about power in small bureaucracies). But most intriguing is Takayama's discovery that denominations with avowedly congregational polities tend nowadays to have large central admi-

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nistrative staffs because the requirements of efficiency have brought about the amalgamation of all their formerly separate central boards. By contrast, the denominations which have always tolerated some measure of central government (e.g., Presbyterians and Episcopalians) have largely avoided the necessity for a high degree of centralization because their regional structures are strongly entrenched and/or efficient. Another reason, according to Winter [245], for the unexpected and unwanted tendency for centralization to occur in denominations with a congregational polity is that it is paradoxically adopted as a method of checking the proliferation of autonomous agencies at congregation or regional level. A 'leap-frogging' sequence of moves towards, alternately, greater agency-proliferation and higher levels of co-ordination therefore culminates in the establishment of central organs of control. It has been shown that one of the structural conditions for the effective operation of the 'mediating technology' employed by 'recruitment organizations' and religious agencies with specific operative goals is the ascendancy of organizational centre over periphery. Thus, while the Salvation Army movement has always been carefully controlled by a small elite at its centre (see [196]), the struggle between centralizing and centrifugal forces in the Watch Tower movement was the most salient feature of its history between 1916 and the mid-1930s (see [61]; [197]). In both cases control over the centre was an essential pre-requisite for the effective implementation of 'activist' policies and for the mobilization of members in evangelism. A similar pattern is to be observed in the development of Catholic Action in Italy (see [188]). This originally lay movement has fallen under progressively more direct clerical surveillance and has at the same time become more closely linked to the central organs of Vatican control. Yet, it is important to emphasize that an organization like the Y.M.C.A. has until recently avoided the apparently inevitable strain towards centralization for a number of reasons: (i) It has not compromised its inter-denominational stance; (ii) it has remained in the hands of laymen; (iii) financial resources still come mainly from local branches; (iv) local branches have remained autonomous by virtue of their dependence on the support of local dignitaries; and (v) consciousness of professional interests in common among the permanent Branch secretaries has remained low because they lack professional training and a professional organization (see [253]). Zald and Ash's [293] exposure of the fallacy of believing that centralization is invariably associated with conservatism in organizations has underscored the potentially innovative role of centralized leadership. In criticism of the 'metaphysical pathos' that, according to Gouldner, infects most analyses of goal-displacement or transformation and oligarchization, it was argued that small oligarchies may be competent to promote change in

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organizational programmes. This view is certainly confirmed in studies of non-democratic, mass evangelistic movements in which flexible adaptation to constantly changing internal and external conditions is a pre-requisite for organizational survival. Movements such as M.R.A., Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology and New Thought all combine centralized decision-making with oligarchical leadership in a way that facilitates efficient adaptation of programmes to changing circumstances. Moulin's [172] delineation of the three major types of monastic government support this point: It is the highly 'active' and mobilizable Jesuits who have the most centralized mode of government and the least communal form of association. Contemplative orders (in parallel with Spiritualism and gnostic movements) tend to have decentralized, communal polities. A final condition favouring centralization is involvement in ecumenical dialogues, mergers or rationalizations of resources. As reported above, one of the unintended consequences of these processes is a strengthening of an organization's core. If it normally lacks such a structure, it will be obliged to respond in an unusually cohesive manner to initiatives originating outside its boundaries. Even a hostile response to outside approaches requires some co-ordination of mind and effort; a positive response may entail massive re-structuring of internal arrangements. Houtart's [140] opinion is that the Catholic church, for example, will experience even more pressures towards bureaucratic centralization as a result of post-Conciliar attempts to rationalize some aspects of its organizational structure.

7.4

Distribution of authority

If religious organizations are considered as open systems, there are two principal ways of looking at the distribution of authority within them: (a) From the point of view of the maintenance of system-boundaries against pressures from the outside and (b) from the point of view of the attainment of the system's own objectives in the wider society. The relation between authority and boundary-maintenance is clearly central to the concerns of religious systems which are differentiated from other institutional areas. Moreover, these two aspects of religious organizations as systems are undoubtedly interrelated in complex ways which reflect the influence of events in the wider society. B.R. Wilson [281] has recently proferred some very general propositions about authority in religious groups which seek to introduce distinctions between two types of religious organization on the criterion of whether the religion was founded by a prophet or is based on ethnicity. The distinction

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was said to have implications for the nature of commitment expected of members/followers and for the differential propensity of religious organizations to be reabsorbed into the surrounding society and culture. The proposed distinction is certainly congruent with the analytic division of religious groups that would emerge from an application of the criterion of stringent or lax boundary-maintenance. It follows that in situations where the environing culture is broadly supportive of a religious group's (or tradition's) values, teachings and outlooks, boundary-maintenance tasks and highly elaborate authority structures will fail to crystallize. But in situations of strain or conflict between the religious and the non-religious or other-religious dimensions of culture, it is likely that the authority structure of religious groups will be correspondingly elaborate. One of the clearest instances of this inverse relationship was reported in H.-D. Evers's [102] comparison of the respective degrees of elaborateness in the organizational structure of the Buddhist Sangha in Ceylon and Thailand. Whereas Sinhalese monasteries tended to admit monks from particular lineages only (thereby reinforcing the ancient divisions of the wider society), Thai monasteries made no such stipulation but recruited from all sections of a society that was, in any case, only loosely structured. Since Sinhalese monasteries had such narrow recruiting fields, boundary-maintenance tasks were not prominent aspects of their organizations; authority relations in the Sangha were largely a reflection of the patterned relations governing behaviour in the recruitment strata. In contrast, the Thai monasteries tended to have clearly articulated authority structures with sharply defined decisionmaking groups; codified ecclesiastical legislation was the framework for organizational arrangements. Singer's article on the Rhadha-Krishna bhajans of Madras City [202] stresses in a different context an essentially similar point, namely, that devotional groups of Hindus in loosely textured city life have acquired a heightened awareness of religious distinctiveness, which cross-cuts traditional Indian lines of social division and finds expression in an unusual concern for organization, 'intellectualization and sectarianism'. The possibility of hierarchization in an Indian context is also illustrated in Mandelbaum's [159] delineation of what he believes to be a developmental cycle in the formation of sectarian jatis. The formation of Lingayat jatis, for example, as an explicitly reforming movement allegedly follows the common pattern: Their organization links each Lingayat to a guru in his village and to a greater figure in a religious supercenter. Each family is hereditarily associated with a particular lineage of priests, Jangamas, from whom it takes its gurus. Each Jangama lineage, in turn, is associated with one of the five main Lingayat maths, monastic establishments, which are located in the five great centres of Shiva pilgrimage in India . . . Each centre has a jagadguru

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swami, a 'world master' who tours about visiting the Lingayats associated with his math' [159: 538]. Lingayats' opposition to some aspects of their social and cultural environment has elicited a 'sinewy' organization and a rudimentary hierarchy, both of which facilitate boundary-maintenance on a level that is unheard of in 'orthodox' branches of Hinduism. The emerging argument is that concern with details of organization, distinctiveness and authority becomes important only when a religious group's culture or activities are markedly at odds with its social environment. A more speculative implication of this argument is that the elaborate organizational pattern that characterizes many Christian groups may not be simply an expression of inherent features of Christianity but may also be a systemic response to the cultural and institutional heterogeneity (or conflict) of the societies in which it has been rooted. The view finds some confirmation in Murvar's [174] thesis that hierocracy, strictly defined, is found only in the Western branches of Christianity and has always been culturally and socially inappropriate in the areas of Eastern Orthodoxy. In the latter case the church has usually enjoyed interdependence with the monolithic state apparatus and has therefore failed to develop a highly differentiated authority structure. By contrast, the Western church's links with feudal power-holders and with powerful bourgeois interests have served to precipitate both the differentiation of the religious from other social institutions and the internal differentiation of religious organizations. Indeed, this view would seem to be justified in the light of a recent study of the conditions within which the formerly State-dominated Paraguyan hierarchy has begun to oppose the country's military dictatorship (Westhues [230]). The switch from identification to differentiation (in Murvar's terminology) has entailed corresponding changes in the church's organizational structure. Recent research in other world religious traditions may be taken to support this argument about the association between the salience of boundary-maintenance questions in religious organization and the groups' relations with their social environment. Briefly, there is a growing body of evidence to show that a number of new religious movements in the Far East and Africa can be characterized by a far higher degree of elaborateness of organization and by closer attention to the exercise of authority over members than has traditionally been the case. In large measure, of course, these changes point up the rapid dissolution of formerly cohesive communities and communication networks that were coterminous with the participants in traditional religious cults. More elaborate forms of religious organization in the new movements therefore reflect a rational adjustment to the need for deliberate means of co-ordinating, controlling and directing people who have been freed from the old networks of control. This situation would in itself

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elicit more elaborate forms of organization. Islam is an interesting anomaly. The cultural heterogeneity of Moslem societies has always been reflected in a profusion of esoteric or local cults within the general framework of Islam. Some of these cults have attained impressive proportions and elaborate organization. According to the present thesis, minority cults that did not depend exclusively for support on the members of any 'natural' community would have experienced pressure to develop relatively formal organizations with special mechanisms for enforcing authority and for protecting the group against external influences. Morroe Berger [63] has argued that the Sufi orders, for example, ' . . . have been surprisingly stable in internal organization . . . the orders have been dominated by charismatic leaders; yet some have been able to construct enduring hierarchies and loyalties,' [63 : 67], Indeed, Berger's account of the high degree of co-ordination, frequency of communication and intensity of planned activity among Sufis in local groups makes it clear that sharply defined authority is the key to Sufi organization. Moreover, the effectiveness of internal organization in local Sufi groups is a bulwark against state interference and cultural erosion of its distinctiveness as a Weltanschauung. But Gilsenan has argued [115] that the strength of local Sufi commitment is so strong that it undermines the power of the centralized agencies that supposedly govern Sufi affairs in Egypt. However, the available evidence on 'Black Muslims' in the U.S.A. also supports the view that there is nothing inherent in Islam (and its derivatives) that militates against a hierarchization of essentially religious specialists, but that its socio-political context has usually discouraged such a development. In the context of the U.S.A., therefore, a version of Islam has given rise to a very authoritarian movement whose leaders combine priestly with military traits and whose authority is grounded in a hierarchy of religious offices, (see [101 ]). In contrast, the orthodox Sunni institutions are to all intents and purposes sufficiently integrated into the state apparatus in most countries to avoid the need for such defensive provisions. The protection and privilege that they have enjoyed make it unnecessary (and counter-productive) to pay special attention to questions of boundary-maintenance. Moreover, the non-sacramental, individualistic nature of worship in Islam did not favour the development of a separate priestly class: Only the administrators of law could exercise authority through special competence and could therefore constitute a sacred hierarchy. But the intimate links between the legal and the political institutions prevented even these specialists from becoming a fully autonomous hierarchy. However, the political, social and cultural transformations of some Moslem countries in recent decades have disturbed the communal basis of the traditionally undifferentiated religio-political system. Institutional differentiation is now occurring in response to deep structural changes

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and to deliberate governmental policies for curtailing the qualified autonomy that religious personnel had previously enjoyed. (For the situation in Egypt, see [63]). Paradoxically, this situation may have become more paradoxically created even more scope for career-bureaucrats to exercise religious hierarchies. While the foregoing discussion has tried to scotch the argument that formal or hierarchical organizations are unique to Christianity and that nothing can be gained by applying insights from organizational theory to non-Christian religious groups, it should be emphasized that, for cultural and social-environmental reasons, the complexity of organizations in Christianity is probably unparalleled. It is easier therefore for the sociologist to study the organization of Christian groups — but not necessarily more 'valid' or profitable. In the period covered by this report there have been few attempts to depart from the characterization of authority distribution in Christian organization in terms of the three-fold typology of congregational, presbyterian and episcopal. Moberg's [27] explication of the typology remains the baseline for the purpose of reference and commentary, and the typology is frequently used as a stable framework for research into other aspects of religion. Confirmation of its usefulness has tended to be taken for granted (see [87]), but there are indeed strong grounds for arguing that the terms 'congregational', 'presbyterian' and 'episcopal' are reflections of the ideology of 'dominant coalitions' in religious groups — not objective descriptions of their political structure. Two examples may serve to illustrate the weakness of the conventional typology. Firstly, only the briefest mention of Harrison's [129] work on the Baptists is required as a corrective to the view that the ideological legitimation for a church's authority distribution is necessarily in accordance with the actual practice of church government. Secondly, a longer account of Sutter's admirably intensive study [210] of organizational changes in the Catholic church in France is a convenient way of underlining the fact that (at the other end of the political spectrum) a supposedly episcopal polity could also find that its traditional (and ideologically correct) distribution of authority was in danger of being subverted or by-passed by agencies outside the official hierarchy. In other words, the convocation in 1951 of the first full episcopal assembly since 1907, the creation of apostolic regions in 1961, the formation of a pastoral secretariat of the episcopate in 1962 and the subsequent imposition of episcopal commissions on almost all aspects of French Catholic life can all be seen as steps towards the re-assertion of traditional types of authority over areas that had seemed to be falling increasingly under the control of lay agencies. But the elaboration of episcopal bureaucracy has paradoxically created even more scope for career-bureaucrats to exercise power and authority independently of the overworked bishops. Thus,

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'technicians' have been able to subvert the formal distribution of authority in an episcopal organization with almost as much ease (but for different reasons) as did the lay executives of the congregational-type Baptist polity that Harrison studied. A further drawback of the conventional typology of church polities is that it obscures the relevance of not only the systemic interrelations of the internal components of social organizations but also the 'open-systemic' relations between internal components and external conditions. To make this point, it is necessary merely to recall the findings of work by, inter alios Gibbs and Ewer [114], Wood [248], Wood and Zald [249], Demerath and Thiessen [94] and Lalive d'Epinay [152]. Types of polity are best used as a formal expression of 'doctrines of the church' which are subject to the influence of innumerable non-doctrinal factors. But even then, as Wood [248] argued, it is imperative to study the varieties of structure that characterize the agencies and sub-groupings within the three main types of polity: For there may be sharp contrasts between the organizational principles of these entities and those of the more inclusive church polity. What is more, Lee's [154] argument is that among American denominations the three types of church polity are in process of converging into one more or less undifferentiated, pragmatic kind of structure. The inescapable conclusion is that it is essential to devise concepts that are specific to the study of religious organization and to beware of those that pretend to serve a multiplicity of different functions.

8. CHURCH AND SECT OR RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION?

At numerous junctures throughout this report, questions about the descriptive, classificatory or explanatory adequacy of the most common concepts used in the sociology of religious organizations have been postponed to a later section. Now is the appropriate time to bring together the loose threads of the argument and to present a general view of the trends that have emerged in this area of study. Since, in the present writer's opinion, one of the problems in the sociology of religious organization is that the terms 'church', 'sect', 'denomination' and (to a lesser extent) 'cult' and 'ecclesia' are too well known and too unthinkingly applied in a wide diversity of situations, it will be neither necessary nor helpful to spend a long time in documenting their history. Rather, the intention will be to present a rough classification of the dominant 'traditions' within which the terms have tended to occur with relatively specific meanings. This will be followed by a series of arguments in favour of a mora-

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torium on their use (unless more carefully applied) and a brief set of suggestions for alternative approaches to the sociological study of religious organization. A logical structure of contrasting dualities runs through most of the conventional usages of 'church' and 'sect', etc. Even when 'cult' and the other more specific terms are introduced, they are usually fitted into a continuum extending between two poles. In short, the dimensionality is commonly limited to two possibilities, although mere aggregation of dimensions has occasionally been used to give the appearance of a less rigid approach. But each of the dimensions tends to be expressed in dualistic terms. For the purpose of the present analysis, then, the major dimensions of alleged 'sectness' or 'churchness' will be treated separately but will be roughly grouped under the heading of the level at which their analytic power is directed: Cultural, social or organizational.

8.1

Cultural

The earliest examples of conceptualization in terms of church and sect revolved around a basic opposition between purity and compromise in doctrines and ethics. Sects were said to be attempts to embody the unadulterated, pristine message of the Christian gospel (or some other core tradition); churches were said to represent compromise between original purity and the demands or influences of the everyday world. This approach can also be expressed in an opposition between the sacredness of the sect and the secularity of the church. What these approaches have in common is a narrow focus on the relation between religion and social values or ethics. Closely allied to the opposition between purity and compromise in values is an opposition between the relative immediacy of the sacred in sects and its intermediacy in churches. This distinction can be based on either the type of worship or the members' perceptions of their personal relations with the sacred. In both cases (and they are, of course, linked) the perceived location of the sacred is believed to affect many other aspects of religious group life. The direction of causation is presumably from the location of the sacred to the other arrangements of the group, but other interpretations are also feasible. P.L. Berger [256] has contributed most to the clarification of this perspective, but it is also central to the work of B. Johnson [268], P. Gustafson [265] and R. Knox [23]. The next pair of 'cultural' oppositions might be considered to be incompatible with the 'location of the sacred' approach because they distinguish between church and sect in terms of relative dogmatism and doctrinal flexibility. The adherence of sects to fixed principles of fundamental truth is

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contrasted with the church's amenability to the notion of evolving knowledge. Thus, it could be argued that the immediacy of the sacred was incompatible with the principles of fundamentalism, and the concreteness of sacramentalism with a progressive view of truth. But in practice the incompatibility never occurs in any particular analysis becaus sociologists do not usually adopt these two perspectives simultaneously. This approach is exemplified in the work of Martin [162] and Robertson [34]. The final pair of cultural oppositions is sometimes indistinguishable from the purity/compromise dimension but it is analytically separable. It rests on a contrast between the allegedly ascetic life-style of sectarians and the more materialistic life-style of church members. While these two life-styles are not, strictly speaking, mutually exclusive, they are often said to express widely differing religious outlooks and commitments. They are also related to some of the social dimensions of churchness and sectness but have been included here because they can reflect sharp contrasts in value-orientations. Again, Max Weber's authoritative influence has helped to perputuate this way of approaching differences between religious groups, and it is prominent in the work of Demerath [92], Yinger [46] and Glock [20],

8.2

Social

Of the cultural oppositions that also have a counterpart in oppositions between types of social characteristic or behaviour the most dominant and enduring is that between protest and accommodation. Sects are said to be movements of protest against prevailing social conditions, while churches are characterized by their accommodation to the prevailing conditions. The protest and accommodation may be in relation to cultural, material or social conditions, but the precise reference is often neglected. This approach is associated with the work of Johnson ([269]; [270]), Yinger [47] and Wilson [238], Analytically separable from, but often combined with, the protest/accommodation dimension is the opposition between the allegedly compensatory functions of sects and the legitimating functions of churches. Sects are said to provide channels for the compensation of relative deprivations (or at least the postponement of immediate gratification of desires), whereas cnurches are believed to legitimate, if not celebrate, the relative privileges of their members. Church and sect are therefore opposed as representatives of such opposing social groups as social classes, ethnic strata or colonial/indigenous populations. Writers in this tradition include Demerath [92] and Glock [20]. A conceptual opposition between church and sect has frequently been based on their allegedly different membership principles. Sects are expected

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to admit only those people who display an appropriate sign of merit, whereas membership in churches is believed to be open to a much wider range of people. The opposition between exclusive and inclusive membership principles is often coupled with the same type of opposition between different principles of doctrinal selection. But the terminological similarity actually conceals a completely different approach to the typology. It is conceivable, for example, that a religious group could have an exclusive membership principle but an inclusive set of doctrines, and vice versa.

8.3

Organizational

One of the crudest, but most persistent, characteristics that is supposed to distinguish sharply between churches and sects as organizations is the difference in numbers of members. Sects are said to be small, churches large. This formulation overlooks the question of whether size is measured in local groupings or in national aggregates, but sociologists who have employed this particular type of opposition have also tended to ignore this basic question. The literature on church-sect distinctions contains many instances of the failure to specify the organizational level at which the two types of group are contrasted. This is particularly evident in cases where an opposition is suggested between the unstable, informal and simple organization of sects and the stable, formal and complex organization of churches (see [259]). It is not inconceivable that the local groups of a religious organization could be unstable, etc., while the national hierarchy could be highly stable, etc. It goes without saying, of course, that measures of stability, formality and complexity need not always vary together, but for the sake of conciseness they are being treated here as one dimension. There is also a questionable tendency to assume that egalitarianism will be associated with instability, etc., and inegalitarianism with stability, etc. Finally, it is not uncommon for sects to be characterized as warm, primary social groups, whereas churches are said to be impersonal, secondary associations. Again, the organizational level at which this kind of opposition is said to operate is rarely made explicit, but such an elementary precaution is obviously necessary. Dumont [99] finds evidence of both elements of the opposition within the Catholic parish. This brief outline of some of the major dimensions that have been employed in constructing both ideal-types and empirical-types of church and sect should give some idea of the possibilities for confusion that are now inherent in using them for analytic purposes. Further problems derive from the variability in certain purely formal features of their construction. (1) The two types may be contrasted in terms of either collective or indi-

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vidual factors, but clarity ideally demands some specification of, and consistency in, the choice of level. Unfortunately, the analysis often switches unthinkingly from the collective level to that of the individual member, thereby obscuring some potential sources of insight into individual/group differences. For instance, the collective ideology of a sect may be aggressively protesting, but its individual members may nevertheless retain a quietistic Weltanschauung. (2) Definitions of church and sect may be composed of several dimensions of opposed attributes, but explanation of collective processes and structures may be covertly framed in terms of only one particular set of oppositions. In other words, the generous breadth of definition may obscure an underlying intention to treat only one characteristic as dominant and to account for the group's distinctiveness in terms of this one alone. Alternatively, the emphasis may shift from one attribute to another as the analysis proceeds, thereby achieving analytic results purely by covert manipulation of definitions. Similarly, different sociologists use the same terms with widely differing emphases on different aspects of them. Only confusion can result. (3) It is unfortunately rare for sociologists to specify whether the defining or ideal-typical characteristics of church and sect are expected to hold good at any time or to change with time. No less regrettable is the common failure to specify clearly the purpose for which the type has been constructed. But as the long list of potential components suggest, there is a very real danger that common usage of the same basic concepts actually belies wide differences in both the purposes and the forms of conceptualization. Sometimes the purpose may by to explain why people join religious groups, sometimes why they remain in fellowship, sometimes why the collectivities evolve in distinctive ways, etc., etc. To assume that a once-and-for-all conceptualization (let alone definition) of church and sect will fulfill all these different demands is to commit a serious logical error. Such an assumption also precludes the possibility of adopting a more subtle and differentiated approach to the whole gamut of sociological questions about religious organizations.

8.4

A moratorium

This compilation of largely technical problems and difficulties involved in constructing conceptualizations and definitions of the contrasted types of religious organization — church and sect — may not suffice to prove the point that they are not the most helpful or profitable ways of approaching the subject. But there are further arguments of a less technical' nature which lend greater strength to the general case for introducing a moratorium in the use of these terms. The purpose of such a moratorium would be to oblige

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sociologists to consider seriously the conceptual alternatives and to allow them time to re-think the rationale for their conventional approaches to religious organization. Individually, the following arguments may not be convincing, but their cumulative force cannot be denied. The first reason for requesting a moratorium is that the volume of criticisms and modifications of the original typification of church and sect by Weber, Troeltsch and (to a lesser extent) Niebuhr has now grown so large that the present-day retention of their terminology smacks of the perverse. The accumulation of methodological, theological and historical arguments against the usefulness or validity of these pioneering works must surely indicate the need for major revisions or alternative approaches. Yet, sociologists of religion continue to offer a ritual acknowledgement of their debt to the ancestors — and then proceed to shoot holes in their conceptual frameworks. One suspects that this tactic is nothing more than a bid to claim professional legitimation for work which really borrows very little from, or adds very little to, the contribution of eminent 'names'. The swelling volume of exceptions to, and so-called necessary refinements of, church and sect only serves to weaken the analytic value of the terms themselves (however modified they may be). Retaining the traditional conceptual set entails the need to design either complex subtypes or tortuous rhetorical constructions for indicating that the group being studied is neither church nor sect nor denomination, etc. (see, for example [206]). Both strategies suffer from the grave disadvantage that they focus attention on matters of conceptualization and definition instead of facilitating the communication of substantive information about religious organizations. There are unquestionably occasions when it is profitable to discuss the merits of competing typologies or other methodological devices, but a situation has now developed in the sociology of religion where it is almost impossible to convey meaningful information about religous organizations without stirring up a hornets' nest of methodological problems. One solution to some aspects of this problem would be to abstain from using the arch-problematic church, sect, etc., and to substitute 'purpose-built' concepts which would be free from such inflammatory potential. In this way the prospects for advance in substantive knowledge about religious organization would be improved. A closely related point is that the continuing use of church and sect is an obstacle to the possibility of focussing sociological analyses sharply on questions about religious organization. The obstacle takes two forms. Firstly, it introduces theological and ethical complications into supposedly objective and ideally scientific studies of organizational structures and processes. This also means that more directly relevant considerations (such as theories of organization) tend to be excluded from the analysis in favour of considerations deriving from universes of theological and ethical discourse.

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Secondly, it encourages a disposition to assume that churches and sects raise different sorts of theoretical questions and require different sorts of explanatory theory. Indeed, in the present climate of research it requires a strong effort of will to challenge these assumptions and to ask theoretical questions about religious organizations regardless of their allegedly sect-like or churchlike characteristics. Until very recently very few sociologists have seemed disposed to accept the challenge. Finally, and most importantly, it is necessary for the sociological concepts of religious organization to show at least some recognition of the enormous changes that have recently occurred in social expressions of Western religion. Again it seems perverse that sociologists should continue to employ basic concepts in the analysis of modern religious phenomena that were designed to explain a very different set of phenomena in a completely different context. The advent of religious pluralism in the West, the growth of indifference to religion, the declining legal significance of religious divisions and the proliferation of new religious movements have created a situation in which most of the binary oppositions or graduated continua that formerly constituted the grounds for the basic 'types' of organization no longer have much relevance. That is to say, one can explain very little about the dynamics of contemporary religious organizations by focussing exclusively on the dimensions that made up concepts like church and sect. The new situation demands new conceptualizations — not just modifications of the old ones. Not the least important subsidiary reason for this view is that the non-religious context in which religious organizations are presently situated has also changed drastically, and has therefore imposed new conditions on their structure and functioning. Fairness demands, however, that mention be made of the various attempts to refine the basic church-sect typology. As regards the church-type, efforts at refinement have been few and unprofitable. The fruitlessness for sociological purposes of dividing churches into congregational, presbyterian and episcopal sub-types has already been exposed. Similarly, the distinction between established and universal churches offers little except propaganda value for ideologists; the sociological relevance is minimal. There is, however, some usefulness in the distinction between communal and associational churches — providing that it is applied to all religious bodies. In other words, these dominant modes of commitment and participation should ideally be explored in both churches and sects. A potentially useful sub-type of church, designed by Mehl [26] and employed by Millett [272], is the 'minority church'. This refers to those groups of religionists who consitute such a small minority in some countries that they might be expected to adopt a sectarian posture. But they resist this tendency by maintaining strong moral ties with a larger world-communion

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of members which serves as a positive reference-group for them. Thus, groups of Calvinists and Lutherans in France, for example, have never adopted sect-like behaviour in spite of extensive persecution from the Catholic majority. Millett found that the concept was particularly useful in the analysis of Canadian census data on religious affiliation because it introduced some differentiation among the 93% of Canadians who in 1961 reported affiliation with a Christian church-type religious body. A further refinement was to divide the minority churches into two classes: Foreign-orientated and native-oriented. This procedure was undoubtedly helpful in breaking down the mass of church-type groups in that country into more analytically useful units, but its relevance for the strictly organizational aspects of religious groups has yet to be demonstrated. Apart from Martin's [161] explication of the concept of denomination as a type sui generis, no further refinements on it have been published recently. Refinements of the sect-type have been much more numerous and somewhat more profitable. Pride of place must be accorded to Bryan Wilson's several discussions of the typifying process and of schemes for sub-typifying sects (for example, [241]; [242]). One might wish to quibble with the vagueness of his criteria for the typification, e.g., 'response to the world', but there can be no denying the fact that this procedure has served as a vehicle for conveying a rich profusion of new insights into sect dynamics and structure. It is only a matter for speculation whether an alternative choice of criterion might throw into sharper relief the more narrowly organizational aspects of sects or whether an exclusively organizational criterion might extend the scope of analysis to include all religious groups. The outstanding question remains 'Would the same criterion produce the same set of subtypes of church and, if so, is the church-sect distinction worth preserving?' Yinger's three-fold typology [47] of acceptance, aggressive and avoidance sects was based on the criterion of 'response to an undesired situation'. It is obviously rooted fast in the tradition of deprivation/compensation theories of individual psychology and collective behaviour. This limits the applicability of 'sect' to such a degree that the account of each sub-type follows analytically from the definition. Moreover, the purpose of the typology was so obviously to describe the possible modes of response to frustration or deprivation that it has almost nothing to say about forms of internal organization. For the same reason it would be unthinkable for Yinger to extend the analysis to other-than-deprived religious groups. In this respect, then, its usefulness is severely restricted. Several authors have argued for the usefulness of constructing empirical types of sect by breaking the concept down into its constituent dimensions and basing the new typology on the major patterns of clustered characteristics that would somehow emerge (see [262]; [274]). The problem with this

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approach is that it does not provide any guidance on the question of what dimensions to select (presumably they would vary with the purpose of the typology) and on the more difficult question of how to achieve comparability between the different measures appropriate to each dimension. These are precisely the problems that would also undermine O. Dent's [260] even more ambitious scheme for a factor-analytical approach to type-construction. There are admittedly enormous benefits to be gained from increased precision in measuring the variations between religious groups in selected dimensions of their overall structure, but objective and reliable indicators of the dimensions are notoriously difficult to discover. More problematic still is the apparent belief that factor-analysis will 'throw up' interrelations between dimensions that the researcher had not envisaged. But it is very naive to think that the process of factor-analysis can generate insights that had not been programmed in the first place: It can only confirm and measure intercorrelations between dimensions that the researcher had previously devised for himself. There is therefore no way of circumventing the prior necessity to specify clearly the factors for analysis and to relate them to a wider theoretical framework. The latter consideration seems entirely lacking from these projects for empirical type-constructions. It is only likely, in the present writer's opinion, to become a major determinant of type-construction if the a priori division between churches and sects is at least suspended, if not abolished. The provisional conclusion of this hasty review of typologies of religious organization is that, in their refined versions, they have served a very useful purpose in suggesting some important patterns of collective characteristics. But is must be emphasized that these gains have been at the expense of more refined information on the specifically organizational aspects of religious groups. What are the alternatives? At the moment they are not numerous, but at least three recent initiatives have taken some of the above considerations seriously and have heralded future advances in this area. (1) Benson and Dorsett [255] have tried to devise a conceptual framework that would permit the generation of testable hypotheses and meaningful generalizations about the dynamics of religous organizations. The framework, consisting of four prominent dimensions of organizational variation (bureaucratization, professionalization of the clerical role, secularization and integration), gives rise to hypothesized interrelations among them. The rationale behind the hypotheses is that structural arrangements in religious organizations are conditioned by (i) an inner logic of compatibility, (ii) the force of external pressures, and (iii) the degree of exposure to external pressures. The sources of bureaucratization and professionalization are located within religious groups themselves, whereas secularization and

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integration are located in pressures emanating from the community. The degrees of exposure to these influences are related to, respectively, the power-dependence relation between denomination and congregation and the involvement of congregation members in a wide network of community relationships. The scheme fulfils many of the stated conditions for substantive advance in the sociological study of religious organizations qua organizations. The twelve resulting hypotheses are certainly testable in empirical research, and there is no evidence of a priori assumptions about differences between churches and sects, etc. One might only object to the choice of the basic dimensions — particularly to the rather idiosyncratic meanings attached to secularization and integration — but final judgment must await the results of the scheme's implementation. (2) The second innovation takes the form of a set of conceptual guidelines for research on religious organizations — it does not constitute a full-fledged theoretical model. R.P. Scherer's [275] T h e church as a formal voluntary association' begins with the helpful observation that the concepts of church, sect and denomination have some limited usefulness in accounting for a few aspects of the broad historical process whereby formal religious organizations became differentiated from other social institutions. But these concepts have little relevance in the contemporary U.S.A. (because of the near-universal ascendancy of the denominational form of organization) and could be profitably replaced with 'more general concepts in the field of formal organizations' [275 : 86]. The main reason for abandoning the old concepts is that they 'do not carry us very far in the detailed study of contemporary denominations since the criteria are vague and overlapping' [275 : 88]. The method that Scherer employs with great effect is to examine religious organization in the same terms that Parsons and Bales used in their delineation of the major categories of system-tasks. Thus, under the headings of External Relations, Internal Differentiation, Internal Cohesion and Replenishment and Maintenance of Personnel, he is able to assemble meaningfully a mass of details about organization structure and processes. The emergent pattern underlines the distinctiveness of the denomination as a type of organization and allows specification of the contextual conditions that influence its operation. From information about the internal structure and external context of the dominant types of religious organization in the U.S.A., Scherer goes on the predict its likely paths of future development. His scheme therefore fulfils most of the requirements that were established above for a theoretical approach to modern religious organizations. (3) The third innovation is a systematic attempt to devise a theoretical model for explaining the structure of religious organizations. Scalf, Miller and Thomas's [273] 'Goal specificity, organizational structure and partici-

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pant commitment in churches' presents a deliberate alternative to churchsect modes of analysis through the use of a distinction between 'formal' and 'communal' types of organization. The former pursue specific corporate goals, whereas the latter's goals tend to be ill-defined or diffuse. In this context organizational structure refers to the institutionalised means of attaining corporate goals. It therefore follows that there is a direct relationship between the specificity of the goals and the formality of the organizational structure (or bureaucratization). The specificity-diffuseness dimension is complemented by a dimension of members' organizational commitment. The latter may be indicated by (i) loyalty towards either the local congregation or the denomination and (ii) loyalty towards traditional or nontraditional beliefs. The model provides five basic propositions about the interrelations between these dimensions of structure and commitment. The degrees of goal-specificity and bureaucratization are assumed (without discussion) to be determinant of the degrees of commitment. In a sophisticated application of the model to a random sample of 500 Baptists in the Ohio Valley region, it was found that churches pursuing specific goals tended to have a bureaucratic structure and members whose loyalty was to the local congregation and to traditional beliefs. Churches with diffuse goals tended to have lower levels of bureaucratization and members with a degree of ecumenicity and non-traditional beliefs. This pattern of, respectively, 'formal' and 'communal' characteristics overlaps only partially with the church-sect distinction and in a possibly unexpected fashion (at least to those sociologists who think of sects as informal, unstable organizations). But rather than agree that 'formalization of organizational structure is a very real characteristic of the sect and not the church' [273 :182], it might be more profitable for sociologists in the long-term simply to admit that organizational analysis cuts across the traditional church-sect distinction and renders it otiose. Religious organizations can be systematically analysed without using church-sect concepts (e.g., [245]); it is possible to construct types embodying organizational and ideological dimensions without recourse to church-sect typologizing (see [211]; [212] and [158]). Reason therefore seems to demand, on the one hand, a moratorium on the use of church-sect concepts and, on the other, an accelerated programme of research into the alternative approaches to religious organization.

8.5

Conclusion

It is regrettably the case that the full potential of organizational analysis in the field of religion has yet to be realized. The handful of promising studies

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which have some bearing on organization theory are greatly outnumbered by a welter of 'abstracted empiricism'. But this is not to deny that the years 1960-1974 have produced any worthwhile works; it is merely to underline the relatively slow rate of change in the 'conceptual habits' of sociologists of religion. In fact the gains in sociological understanding of organizational dynamics have been considerable. Beginning with Harrison's [129] magnificent analysis of the informal power and authority structures in the North American Baptist Federation, the empirical study of Christian organization has proceeded to throw much explanatory light on the inner dynamics of so-called sects and cults. Analysis of ministerial roles and clergy-lay relations in so-called denominations and churches has also made some progress. The structural analysis of territorial organization, bureaucratizing tendencies and organizational climates is nowadays a 'growth area' in research, but it is still unnecessarily cloistered from the influence of comparable studies in non-religious organizations. There have, however, been attemps to understand the organization of both irreligious and non-Christian groups as well as of agencies attached to religious movements. But in comparison with the volume of publications on basically other-than-organizational aspects of Christianity, the amount of attention devoted to the study of organization is still rather small. In addition to the reasons given for this situation in section 3 there are factors in the present socio-cultural context that help to explain it. The processes of secularization and interiorization in Christianity may well have undermined the importance of organization in religion, but what is more certain is that the belief of sociologists that secularization and interiorization were taking place has diverted their attention from matters of organization. This has led to a curious contradiction between the increasing potential of sociology to explain organizational phenomena and the increasing unwillingness of sociologists to realize the potential. The contradiction is matched in its oddity by a growing disparity between the contemporary formalization of many religious structures and the orientation of sociological theory towards anti-structural modes of thought. Contrary to expectations, the proliferation in recent years of religious research institutes, professional journals for sociologists of religion and sophisticated information-collection schemes have not yet yielded significant advances in accounts of religious organizations qua organizations. They have undoubtedly facilitated the amassing of statistics which may have some value for religious administrators, but in the absence of theoretical relevance these data can hardly contribute towards the improvement of sociological knowledge. Theoretical relevance is in the long term crucial for sociological research, since it is a pre-requisite for comparative and replicative studies.

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Not surprisingly, comparison and replication are conspicuously absent from studies of religious organization; the aggregation of disparate facts is a poor substitute for cumulative research findings. It is only in the works cited at the end of the previous section that the prospects for cumulative, theoryrelevant research were clearly opened up, and it is hardly a matter of coincidence that those works displayed an outstandingly high degree of articulation with theoretical considerations from general sociology. Nor is it at all coincidental that their theoretical frameworks were completely devoid of theological assumptions, for the latter have often obstructed the full development of unambiguously sociological concepts in this field. Closer articulation with sociological thinking about non-religious phenomena is probably the most urgently needed task in the future orientation of studies on religious organization. This is, in turn, connected with the above arguments for a deliberate moratorium on the use of those conventional concepts of religious organization which prevent the topic from making theoretical progress. Such a programme would, it is hoped, lead to a better understanding of processes and phenomena that cross-cut the present modes of thought. If the programme brings about a higher rate of 'turnover' or proven failure in successions of new concepts than has been common in the sociology of religion, then its usefulness will still have been vindicated. This will at least be preferable to the present situation which is characterized by conceptual stagnation in the face of violent changes in religious phenomena.

L'Organisation religieuse (Résumé)

Usant pleinement de la nouvelle liberté accordée aux auteurs des "Trend Reports", l'auteur du présent document se donne pour but de compléter la description des études sociologiques publiées depuis 1960 sur l'organisation religieuse par deux arguments longuement développés. D'une part il y démontre qu'une méthode de travail à système-ouvert (open-systems) est bien adaptée à la tâche de couvrir la plupart des progrès faits récemment par les sociologues dans l'étude de l'organisation religieuse. D'autre part la démonstration pose la supériorité de quelques très récentes méthodes d'approche à l'étude de l'organisation religieuse par rapport à cette pratique consacrée d'analyse en termes de "secte", "église", "dénomination" etc. Indirectement, bien sûr, une description des études sur l'organisation religieuse doit aussi rendre compte des changements rapides qui ont actuellement lieu dans les phénomènes religieux eux-mêmes. Le rapport débute par un bref résumé historique des courants de pensée divers et des contributions les plus importantes à l'étude sociologique de l'organisation religieuse. Vient ensuite une discussion des différents aspects qui font que les organisations religieuses sont distinctes et de l'utilité potentielle d'une méthode d'approche à système-ouvert (open-systems) pour expliquer cette distinction. Les quatre chapitres suivants sont une critique des résultats des recherches publiées depuis 1960 sur le contexte d'environnement des organisations religieuses, leurs ressources, procédés internes et caractères structuraux. Le chapitre servant de conclusion a pour but (a) de démontrer la pauvreté théorique des modes conventionnels d'étude de l'organisation religieuse, et (b) de prouver l'utilité pratique et théorique de quelques autres stratégies possibles. Il est à regretter que la plus grande partie des illustrations soit tirée de la tradition chrétienne, mais il n'y a aucune raison pour que les organisations d'autres traditions ne puissent être étudiées également en termes de système.

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En dépit de la prolifération des études publiées sur la sociologie des religions depuis 1960, les sociologues ont porté relativement peu d'attention à l'étude des organisations religieuses en tant qu'organisations. Afin de remédier à ce déséquilibre le rapport met l'accent sur la nécessité de les considérer en termes de systèmes ouverts ayant des rapports complexes avec leur environnement socio-culturel, faisant face à un besoin constant de choisir et d'extraire des ressources adéquates, établissant des modes régulières d'utiliser ces ressources, et opérant à des degrés très variables de structure organisationelle stable. Puisque le modèle théorique d'organisation religieuse de Hinings et Foster constitue la formulation la plus explicite de cette façon de voir, il est très largement analysé et finalement adapté comme cadre de base pour le rapport ci-dessous. Les sources de l'influence de l'environnement sur les organisations religieuses sont innombrables. Une des complications supplémentaires est le potentiel des leaders de s'interposer entre leur organisation et l'environnement. En conséquence, les réactions des organisations sont très variées — elles vont d'un retrait total à la complète identification — et sont affectées par des considérations externes telles que le courant d'idées dans les communautés locales, l'importance des liens de la parenté à renforcer les contraintes exercées par la communauté, l'existence de concurrence entre les groupes religieux, et la vitesse et l'étendue des changements socio-culturels. La liste des facteurs internes comprend la disponibilité d'agents pour protéger les organisations religieuses contre l'influence de l'environnement, la nature des trauvaux que les organisations religieuses se sont elles-mêmes assignée dans le monde, la position structurale et la force des leaders de l'organisation et le caractère distinct de l'idéologie collective. Les conceptions de l'organisation religieuse qui ne tiennent pas compte de la pression très réelle de l'environnement ne servent que d'obstruction à une recherche sociologique valable. Une fois posée la difficulté d'identifier des procédés caractéristiques des organisations religieuses, il n'est pas facile d'établir des propositions générales sur la façon dont elles tirent et utilisent les ressources, (i) Les idées sont de toute évidence une ressource importante, mais les exigences de stabilité de l'organisation imposent certaines limites à leur champ d'acceptabilité, (ii) Les gens, pris comme ressources, sont également d'importance vitale aux organisations religieuses, mais les problèmes de "l'économie d'enrôlement" exercent une sérieuse contrainte sur les modalités de l'organisation. Ceci est vrai à la fois pour le recrutement des membres et des leaders, quoique les implications puissent varier d'un groupe à l'autre, (iii) Enfin, il y a une relation mutuelle entre les types d'organisation et les types de difficulté pour l'approvisionnement en ressources matérielles. Ainsi, les exigences financières exercent généralement une pression bien plus forte dans l'écono-

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mie d'enrôlement que dans les organisations ayant des objectifs très spécifiques ou une hiérarchie hautement élaborée. En partant du fait que les organisations religieuses, à l'encontre des organisations de travail, sont plus compétentes pour transformer idées et façons de voir que pour produire des biens consommables, leurs principaux processus peuvent se résumer sous trois rubriques: instruire, recruter et contrôler, (i) La dévaluation relative des processus d'enseignement au cours des dernières années est associée aux changements encore plus grands survenus dans la répartition de l'autorité dans les organisations religieuses et au déclin du caractère distinctif des idéologies religieuses, (ii) Ici encore, le processus de recrutement (aussi bien des membres que des professionels) a été fortement affecté par des changements dans la société et a, en retour, donné naissance à des difficultés complexes pour l'organisation interne des groupes religieux. Dans des groupes qui n'ont pas su adapter la structure de leur organisation aux nouvelles circonstances, les processus de recrutement ont été sérieusement perturbés dans leur fonctionnement. Par opposition à cela, des groupes qui emploient des moyens sophistiqués et délibérément choisis pour attirer du personnel nouveau, ceux-là récoltent actuellement quelques bons résultats substantiels, (iii) Les processus de contrôle (d'idéologie et de conduite) sont conditionnés par la spécificité des buts de l'organisation, par le degré d'indépendance de responsabilité devant leurs membres dont jouissent les leaders, par la nature et la force de l'engagement des membres dans le groupe et par les modes dominants de relations d'autorité dans la société. Dans les études d'organisation c'est seulement par l'analyse que l'on peut séparer processus et structures. Cette dernière peut être divisée en un petit nombre d'aspects qui sont particulièrement pertinents aux organisations religieuses, (i) La spécialisation des tâches parmi les gens exerçant des fonctions cléricales est nettement un très important facteur pour déterminer comment sont accomplies les fonctions de l'organisation, mais c'est également intéressant en tant que source de problèmes pour l'exercice de l'autorité. Ceci est particulièrement vrai des ministères en dehors des paroisses dans le monde chrétien occidental, (ii) La formalité des structures d'organisation (voulue ou non) et la standardisation des processus typiques ont des conséquences qui varient avec la taille des groupes religieux et avec la spécificité de leurs objectifs. Mais il semble improbable que l'on puisse jamais réaliser la bureaucratisation totale dans une organisation religieuse, (iii) La centralisation des structures d'organisation a paradoxalement tendu à se produire récemment dans des groupes religieux dont l'idéologie militait, dit-on, contre elle. La prédominance sur l'idéologie de considérations sur l'environnement et sur l'administration rend compte de ce paradoxe, (iv) Si l'on prend la répartition de l'autorité de se protéger contre les autres

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groupes, on peut voir que cette répartition varie en importance et élaboration avec les conditions extérieures et les objectifs intérieurs. Les changements actuels au sein de ces deux facteurs ont rendu nulle l'utilité du schéma conventionnel des organisations de type épiscopal, presbytérien et congrégationaliste. Les conceptions conventionnelles de l'organisation religieuse sont incapables de rendre compte des changements récemment survenus dans les phénomèmes religieux occidentaux et n'ont généralement pas la même pénétration que les analyses menées dans une perspective à système ouvert. En outre, les problèmes techniques et logiques résultant de la façon dont les termes tels que "secte" et "église" ont souvent été utilisés réduisent leur valeur d'outil analytique. La longue liste de modifications et de soi-disant raffinements des vieux concepts a largement aggravé la confusion fondamentale et n'a certainment pas réussi à éclaircir la dynamique spécifiquement organisationnelle des groupes religieux. Une solution possible à quelques uns de ces problèmes est de cesser d'employer de tels termes et de les remplacer par une ou plusieures des nouvelles approches à l'étude des organisations religieuses. En particulier, les contributions de Benson et Dorsett (255), de Scherer (275) et de Scalf, Miller et Thomas (273) offrent toutes de considérables promesses d'explication. Aucune d'entre elles ne se fondent sur les données douteuses des conventions d'analyse en termes tels que sectes et églises et toutes donnent naissance à des hypothèses vérifiables par l'expérience.

Bibliography

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Berkowitz, M.I.; Johnson, J.E., Social scientific studies of religion: A bibliography. Pittsburg, University of Pittsburg Press, 1967, XVII-258 p. Impressive collection of items mainly from American and European sources beginning in 1945. The collection contains more than 6,000 items under 130 classificatory headings. The main categorization excludes 'religious organization' as a specific topic but includes definitions, descriptions, history and development, relations with other social institutions and behaviour, religion and social issues, religion and social change, impact of religious belief on behaviour, textbooks and readers, and bibliographies, encyclopedias and dictionaries. Burr, N. (in collaboration with Smith, J.W.; Jamison, A.L.). A critical bibliography of religion in America: Religion in American life, vol. 4, parts 3,4,5. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1961, XVpp. 545-1219. Annotated references under the broad headings of Religion and Society, Religion in the Arts and Literature, Intellectual History, Theology, Philosophy and Science. But a significant lack of reference to works on the organizational aspects of American religion. Deelen, G. 'Selected bibliography about the social status and role of the Catholic priest' Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse. Clergy in Church and society. Actes de la IX e Conférence, Montreal, 1967: 401-411. A useful collection of works covering most of the principal interests of Catholic sociologists in this field until 1966. The emphasis is firmly on role analysis and pastoral problems. Dobbelaere, K. 'Trend report on the state of the sociology of religion 1965-1966', Social Compass 1 5 , ( 5 , 1968): 329-365.

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Bibliography A comprehensive and well-documented report on the major areas of research and publication. Le Bras, G. 'Sociology of religions: A trend report and bibliography', Current Sociology 5, (1, 1956): 5-78. The first attempt at a systematic collection of source materials in the sociology of religion. Morioka, K; Newell, W.H. 'An integrated bibliography', Journal of Asian and African Studies 3,(1-2, 1968): 118-137. A useful bibliography of sociological works on Japanese religion of the last 100 years. Schreuder, 0 . „Sociologie religieuse et recherche socio-ecclésiastique au cours de la période 1962-1964". Social Compass 13, (3, 1966): 205-235. A content-analysis of articles on the sociology of religion convinced the author of the need and desirability of closer attention to problems of church organization. There is a useful bibliography of works from several countries.

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Budd, S. Sociologists and religion. London, Collier-Macmillan, 1973, VIII196 p. Much more than an introductory textbook. It breaks through some of the conventional restraints on the manner of presenting material in the sociology of religion by focussing attentively on problems in the sociology of knowledge and by incorporating the author's specialised knowledge in the field of irreligion. The book's weakness is its inattentiveness to problems of religious organization, but this was undoubtedly a deliberate tactic. Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse. Vocation de la sociologie religieuse et sociologie des vocations. (Actes de la V e Conférence, Louvain, 1956) Tournai, Editions Casterman, 1958, 241 p. Part I contains some general comments on the progress of religious sociology. Part II contains a number of statistical and sociographic articles on the sociology of vocations to the priesthood in Europe and the U.S.A. Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religeuse. Clergy in church and society. Actes de la IX e Conférence, Montreal, 1967. A very diverse collection of papers on both micro- and macro-level aspects of the Christian clergy. Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse. The contemporary metamorphosis of religion? Actes de la XII e Conférence, The Hague, 1973.

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A collection of papers on a very wide range of topics in the sociological study of various religions. Cutler, D.R., ed. The world year book of religion: The religious situation, vol. 1, London, Evans Brothers, 1969, XLVII-992 p. The quality of contributions to this collection of basically descriptive articles on religious institutions in different parts of the world varies widely. But the general product is useful as a source of information on relatively little known subjects. Cutler, D.R., ed. The world year book of religion: The religious situation, vol. 2, London, Evans Brothers, 1970, 1091 p. The second volume in this series contains more analytic articles and aspires to a less universal coverage of the topic. The result is more satisfactory. Desroches, H. „Sociologie et théologie dans la typologie religieuse de Joachim Wach", Archives de Sociologie des Religions 1, (1956): 41-63. A perceptive analysis of the two ways in which Wach used typologies. In the first he drew attention to the dynamic relation between abstract, ideal types and concrete examples; and in the second he used concrete examples to reflect typical constellations of factors in socio-historical situations. Douglass H.P.; Brunner, E. The protestant church as a social institution. New York, Harper, 1935, XV-368 p. The pioneering work in religious sociography and sociology conducted under the auspices of the short-lived Institute of Social and Religious Research of New York. The collection of separate articles ranges over a wide variety of topics from the patterns of religious practice to the factors conditioning churches' responses to external conditions. The book contains no signs of a 'metaphysical pathos' about the inevitability of complex organization in religious groups. Eister, A.W. 'Empirical research on religion and society. A brief survey of some fruitful lines of inquiry', Review of religious Research 6, (3, 1965): 125-130. A straightforward enumeration of empirical findings on sociological aspects of religion under five headings: The relation between types of behaviour and types of religious traits; role studies; organizations; parish studies and population profiles; religion and culture. Eister, A.W. 'H. Richard Niebuhr and the paradox of religious organization: A radical critique', in Glock, C.Y.; Hammond, P.E., eds., Beyond the classics? Harpers & Row, 1973. A scholarly examination of the confusion in Niebuhr's use of the terms 'church, sect and denomination'. Troeltsch's approach to the study of religious organization is shown to be more objective. But both of these classic approaches are rejected as a reliable foundation for a social

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Bibliography scientific study of religion in favour of Weber's procedure which depended mainly on a dichotomous typology of the principle on which membership of the religious group was granted. There is an unusually critical review of some of the shortcomings of conventional American sociological research on religious groups. Gaustad, E.S. 'America's institutions of faith', in Cutler, D.E., ed., The world yearbook of religion: The religious situation, vol. 1. London, Evans Brothers, 1969: 835-870. A well-documented account of the geographical and demographic features of Amercian religious pluralism. This is complemented by some sociological comments on ecumenism and the political influence of religious interestgroups. Geertz, C. 'Religion as a cultural system', in Banton, M., ed., Anthropological approaches to the study of religion. London, Tavistock, 1968: 1-46. An excellent, long essay on the merits of a cross-cultural definition of religion which stresses its symbolic efficacity as a motivational force. Glock, C.Y. 'The role of deprivation in the origin and evolution of religious groups', in Lee, E.; Marty, M.E., eds., Religion and social conflict. New York, Oxford University Press, 1964: 24-36. In criticism of crude social class theories of the evolution of religious groups the author broke down the concept of deprivation into five types (economic, social, organismic, psychic and ethical) and outlined the relation between particular types of deprivation and particular types of religious groups. This is one of the most seminal essays within the general 'deprivation-compensation' school of thought. Glock, C.Y.; Stark, R. Religion and society in tension. Chicago, 111., Rand McNally & Co., 1965,XII - 316 p. A collection of essays on a variety of subjects in the sociology of American religion. It includes purely methodological work, commentaries on contemporary religion and interpretations of survey data. Gustafson, J.M., ed. 'The sixties: Radical change in American religion', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 387 (January 1970). A good selection of specialist articles on major aspects of religious change in the USA over the previous ten years. Knox, R. Enthusiasm. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1950, VIII - 622 p. A history of spiritual 'eruptions' in ecclesiastical orderliness with particular reference to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. There are some comments on modern religious revivals, but the majority of case studies concern Quakers, Jansenists, Moravians and Wesleyans. It is not a sociological work but contains some valuable ideas on doctrinal 'deviance'. Le Bras, G. Institutions ecclésiastiques de la chrétienneté médievale, 2 vols.

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Paris, Blond & Gay, 1959 and 1964, 237 p and 359 p. (Part I, Books I, II-IV of Histoire de l'église depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours). A magisterial survey of history, canon law, social history and the sociology of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The organizational dynamics are explained in terms of an unceasing alternation of hierarchical expansion and horizontal consolidation. Canon law forms the framework for the whole study, but there are some valuable sociological insights as well. Marty, M.E. 'The American situation', in Cutler, D.R., ed., The world year book of religion: The religious situation, vol. 2. London, Evans Brothers, 1970: XXI - XLVII. A wide-ranging account of theological and sociological changes in American religion since 1960 with special attention to the decreasing usefulness of the classification of groups as mainstream churches, sects and para-religious phenomena. If the 1950s were centripetal, the 1960s are viewed as strongly centrifugal. Mehl, R. The sociology of Protestantism. London, S.C.M. Press, 1970, XII - 324 p. (First published in French by Delachauz & Niestlé, Neuchâtel, 1965). A wide-ranging review of concepts, theories and data whjch contains particularly good and original chapters on the sociology of missions, ecumensim and the concept of the minority church. Moberg, D.O. The church as a social institution: The sociology of American religion. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1962, VI - 569 p. In addition to providing a comprehensive description of the morphology, functions and processes of American religious groups, this book contains a lengthy discussion of typologies of religious organization. In the main it follows the arguments of Yinger [46] but is insightful in perceiving the needs for greater theoretical sophisitication and for a better understanding of the developmental sequence in religious groups. Mol, J.J., ed. Western religion. The Hague, Mouton, 1972. A country-by-country compendium of sociographic and sociological information (gathered in a uniform manner) on a limited number of aspects of religious groups in the West. It contains no systematic treatment of the topic of religious organization. But it is an invaluable reference-book on many other topics. Morgan, R.E. The politics of religious conflict: Church and state in America. New York, Pegasus, 1969, XV - 156 p. A summary of the major areas of friction between churches and the state with special regard for constitutional law. There is a particularly interesting report of a lengthy dispute in New York about a proposal to grant aid to denominational schools. Niebuhr, H.R. The social sources of denominationalism. New York, Holt,

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Bibliography Rhinehart & Winston, 1929. Reprinted Cleveland and New York, World Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1957, VIII - 304 p. A classic indictment of American denominations for ignoring the universal, prophetic message of the New Testament and adapting themselves to the 'caste system' of American society. It is the source of much subsequent theorizing about sect-to-church dynamics but is somewhat lacking in conceptual rigour. Niebuhr, H.R. The kingdom of God in America. New York, Harper, 1937 (reprinted 1959), XVII -215 p. A follow-up to The social sources of denominationalism paying closer attention to the process whereby the creative vitality of fresh religious insights allegedly becomes necessarily institutionalized, thereby representing the very antithesis of what was originally intended. The argument is that the churches could avoid the snares of institutionalization by becoming aware of the social influences acting upon them and by concentrating narrowly on their prophetic message. Nisbet, R.A. 'The impact of technology on ethical decision-making', in Lee, R.; Marty, M., eds., Religion and social conflict. New York, Oxford University Press, 1964: 9-23. An interesting argument for the view that technological changes affect social processes through the increasing imposition of criteria of rationality. This is manifested through the growth of abstraction, generalization, individuation and rationalization. Ethical decision-making is thereby removed from its immediate social context and rendered more vague and diffuse. Pope, L. Millhands and preachers. New York, Yale University Press, 1942, XLIX - 369 p. This study of the relations between economic interests and religious groups in a mill town of North Carolina has become a classic in the sociology of religion. It emphasizes the social class differences between various denominations and sects, highlighting the role of mill owners in sponsoring what they considered to be worthwhile religious initiatives. It embodies a fully worked out version of the church-sect conceptual tradition, thus establishing itself as a taken-for-granted reference in most American work in this field. Robertson, R. The sociological interpretation of religion. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1970, VIII - 256 p. This apparently conventional textbook on the sociology of religion actually contains some novel ideas — particularly in its critical summary of major theories and its proposals for greater clarity in conceptualization, definition and explanation of religious phenomena. It pays close attention to problems of secularization and to the cultural relations between religion and science.

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Schroeder, W.W. 'The development of religious research in the United States: Retrospect and prospect', Review of Religious Research 13,(1, 1971): 2-12. An unusual insight into the history and character of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Religious Research Association and the American Catholic Sociological Society (recently re-named the Association for the Sociology of Religion). This 'sociology of sociologists' identifies some of the institutional constraints imposed on research and publication in this area. Sibley, M.Q.; Jacobs, P.E. Conscription of conscience. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1952, X - 580 p. An invaluable compilation of statistics and descriptions of organized Christian resistance to, or ways of coping with, military conscription principally in the USA at the time of World War II. Simmel, G. 'A contribution to the sociology of religion', American Journal of Sociology 60 (6, May 1955): 1-18. (Reprint of an article originally published in the American Journal of Sociology, November 1905, translated by W.W. Elwang.) Religion is said to have become an autonomous phenomenon through the hypostatization of relations of faith and trust in formerly non-religious contexts. The process of religion's 'autonomization' is examined in depth. Smith, D.E. India as a secular state. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1963, X I X - 5 1 8 p. An extremely well-documented review of the history and problems of religion-state relations in India. It contains full details of the constitutional background of India's laws on religious matters and of their effects on the relations between religions in different parts of the country. Smith, D.E. Religion, politics and social change in the Third World. New York, The Free Press, 1971, XV - 286 p. A useful collection of documents (with introductions) on state/religion relationships in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. It examines legal, political, ethnic, socio-economic and ideological concomitants of each national attempt to solve the problems of minority group relations and state legitimization. A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain. London, S.C.M. Press, published annually since 1968. Stark, R.; Glock, C.Y. American piety: The nature of religious commitment. Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1968, X - 230 p. This is a sophisticated secondary analysis of data that were originally collected for a study of anti-Semitism in two large samples of American church-goers. It contains the celebrated conceptual analysis of the five dimensions of religiosity, a statistical breakdown of the correlations

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Bibliography between the dimensions and an interpretation of the emergent patterns. It has very little to say about matters of religious organization. Troeltsch, E. The social teachings of the Christian churches, 2 vols. English translation by 0 . Wyon, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1931, 1019 p. An unparalleled survey of the principal social forms that Christian social ethics assumed from the New Testament time to the twentieth century. Recent critics have tended to attack the work's methodological validity, but its basic insights into the relation between social ethics and social conditions remains unimpaired. Underwood, K. Protestant and Catholic. Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, XXI 484 p. A lengthy narrative of an incident in 1940 when the Roman Catholic forces of the pseudonymous Paper City tried to exert pressure on civic and Protestant authorities to prevent a public talk on birth-control from taking place. The study has become famous for its subtle insights into community power relations and the differential mobilizing capacity of Protestants and Catholics. Wach, J. The sociology of religion. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1944. (Phoenix Books ed., 1962, IX - 448 p). This was the first systematic presentation of a sociological perspective on world religions. Its analytical categories still retain great usefulness for the contemporary study of religion, and the breadth of the author's erudition enhances its value as a source-book of information. Wilson, B.R. Religion in secular society. London, Watts & Co., 1966, XIX 252 p. Quantitative and qualitative indications of secularization in Britain are skilfully woven into a sociological interpretation of the declining fortunes of different types of religious groups. The book broadly predicts increasing polarization between weak denominations and vital, but small,, sects. It contains scattered insights into the sociological problems of religious organization. Yinger, J.M. Religion in the struggle for power: A study in the sociology of religion. Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1946. (Reprinted, New York, Russell & Russell Inc., 1961, XIX - 275 p.) This is a treatise on the sociological significance of the interaction between religious and secular institutions in the past and the present. Special emphasis is given to the differences between church-like and sect-like behaviour, and this dynamic is pursued through the Reformation period into contemporary problems of economics and warfare. It is very much in the mould of Troeltsch's work, but sociologists have tended to read other intentions into it.

Sociology of Religion 47.

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Yinger, J.M. The scientific study of religion. New York, MacMillan, 1970, X - 593 p. A highly comprehensive textbook with special emphasis on the interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious phenomena. Its treatment of religious organization follows the pattern of the author's other work [46] in centring around the typology of the ecclesia, denomination/class church, established sect, sect and cult. Sects are further divided into acceptance, aggressive and avoidance sub-types. But the underlying theoretical tradition of deprivation and compensation limits the potential applicability of this typology in organizational studies.

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Absalom, F. 'The Anglo-Catholic priest: Aspects of role conflict', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 4. London, S.C.M. Press, 1971,46-61. Contrasts late nineteenth century authoritarian paternalism of the AngloCatholic clergy with their modern situation which includes declining social distance from parishioners, increased rates of geographical mobility and loss of ritual and doctrinal distinctiveness.

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Allcock, J.B. 'Voluntary association and the structure of power', Sociological Review 16 (J, 1969): 59-81. A valuable examination of the process whereby the state takes over areas previously administered by voluntary associations through the mechanism of co-optation. The history of religious broadcasting in Britain is considered from the point of view of the committee structure which was intended to serve mediating functions between the state and the public but which has been undermined by the co-optation of elite representatives of supposedly independent religious groups. Allen, P.J. 'Growth of strata in early organization development', American Journal of Sociology 68 (1962): 34-46. An historical examination of the proliferation of organizational strata that accompanied the Methodist Church's growth in size in America. In the periods 1773-1780, 1781-1784 and 1785-1789 one new stratum was added to the developing hierarchy. The process of 'occupational' differentiation within the church is shown to have had the effect of making the elite shrink in relative size. The outcome is said to illustrate the processes whereby charisma becomes institutionalised and a sect becomes a church. Aquina, M. 'A sociological study of a religious congregation of African sisters in Rhodesia', Social Compass 14 (1, 1967): 3-32. Description of the 'missionary farm' of the Sisters of the Child Jesus at

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Bibliography Fort Victoria, emphasizing the dependence of the African sisters on the patronage of foreign, white Fathers. Control over the congregation's affairs is shown to be dependent on control over financial resources. The relative superiority of European personnel is extremely evident in an institution set up specifically for African nuns.

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Ashbrook, J.B. "The relationship of church members to church organization', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5 (1966): 397-419. Results of a survey of six denominations in Rochester, New York, show that the nature of church members' commitment may be understood in three distinct types: ( 1 ) Moral commitment to both expressive and instrumental group activities, ( 2 ) calculative commitment to instrumental activities only and ( 3 ) calculative commitment to both expressive and instrumental activities. Other findings showed suburban churches to be more lively and expansive than neighbourhood churches; the intensity of activity tended to be higher in small churches; and the evaluation of the minister's performance depended on his own orientation to either expressive or instrumental functions. The statistical sophistication of the study seems unwarranted by the triviality of the research objectives and findings.

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Baan, M.A. 'Structural and cultural changes in the Dutch Franciscan province', Social Compass 13 (3, 1966): 245-256. Diachronic study of changes in the size and distribution of Dutch Franciscans from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present day. These changes are related to wider social changes in Dutch society and to internal adjustments in the Franciscan order itself. The changes highlight

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strains that have arisen between the outlook of Franciscans and the traditional framework of the order's organization. The rising social status of lay brothers is one of the most important features of the present situation. Bachelet, V. „L'organisation administrative du Saint-Siège et de la Cité du Vatican' Revue internationale des Sciences administratives 21 (2, 1955): 231-274. Analysis by canon law of the Vatican's division of labour and authority. It is highly complex and detailed but completely inattentive to problems or unanticipated consequences of the formal arrangements. A sociological perspective was badly needed. Baerwald, F. 'American seminarians in a time of transition', in Conférence' International de Sociologie Religieuse. Clergy in church and society. Actes de la I X e Conférence, Montreal, 1967. Results of a questionnaire and interview study of 83 Catholic high school seminarians. Broad confirmation of hypotheses linking a disposition towards a priestly vocation with strong family influence, good relations with

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parents, ease of adjustment to seminary life, and avoidance of relations with girls. Barrett, D.A. Schism and renewal in Africa: An analysis of six thousand contemporary religious movements. Nairobi, Oxford University Press, 1968, X X - 3 6 3 pp. A description and sociological analysis of the phenomenon of religious independency in Black Africa through a sophisticated statistical examination of the national, tribal and familial correlates of independency. The resultant theory is tested in the case of Luo independency. The book is a valuable mine of information, although there are strong grounds for doubting the validity of the explanatory apparatus. Bechert, H. 'Einige Fragen des Religionssoziologie und Struktur des siidasiatischen Buddhismus' (Some questions about the sociology of religion and the structure of South Asian Buddhism), Internationales Jahrbuch fur Religionssoziologie 4 (1969): 251-295. An extended critique of Max Weber's understanding of Buddhism leads to an attempt to account for the development of an hierarchical form of the religion in Ceylon and South East Asia. The complementary objectives of political rulers and leading monks are said to have fostered both the hierarchy and the development of social ethics. The Little Tradition of popular religion in Buddhist countries is explained as a necessary focus on mundane affairs in complementarity to the other-worldly orientation of the Buddhist hierarchy. Modernism is shown to be aggravating this complementary relationship in different ways in Ceylon and Burma. Bechert, H. 'Sangha, state, society, "nation": Persistence of traditions in post-traditional Buddhist societies', Daedalus 102 (1, 1973): 85-95. An outline of three forms of Buddhism: Canonical, traditional and modern. The effects of the transition from one form to another in each country of South East Asia is shown to depend on the pattern of tensions between six crucial areas: State control vs. Sangha autonomy; monastic landlordism vs. ideal of renunciation; universalism vs. nationalism; independence of religion vs. ideal of religion as defender of national traditions; juridic Sangha vs. charismatic Sangha-ideal; and political indifference vs. contributing towards national independence. The different outcomes of these tensions are illustrated in Ceylon, Burma and Thailand. Beckford, J.A. 'The embryonic stage of a religious sect's development: The Jehovah's Witnesses', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 5. London, S.C.M. Press, 1972: 11-32. A description and sociological analysis of the process whereby a loose aggregation of sympathizers was systematically transformed into a cohesive and instrumentally efficient group of evangelists and literature salesmen. The dominant role of a small administrative elite was shown to

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Bibliography have influenced the pattern of events in the transformative process and to have laid the basis for a mass movement. Beckford, J.A. 'A Korean evangelistic movement in the West', in Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse The contemporary metamorphosis of religion? Actes de la XII e Conférence, The Hague, 1973: 319-335. An attempt to explain the growth of public interest in an Easternoriginated religious movement among British youth in terms of some organizational characteristics. The common belief that Oriental religions are loosely structured as membership groups is confounded in the present example. Comparative references to other Oriental movements also confirm the necessity to revise some widespread views about the relationship between religious ideology and forms of organization. Beckford, J.A. The trumpet of prophecy: A sociological study of Jehovah's Witnesses. Oxford, Blackwell, 1975. A study by participant observation, questionnaire and content analysis of the sociological structure of an expanding religious movement. It reviews critically the kind of theories that have usually been invoked to explain affiliation to this group and proposes an approach which highlights the role of an assertive, centralized organization in mobilizing and co-ordinating a mass movement. Bennett, J.W. Hutterian Brethren: The agricultural economy and social organization of a communal people. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1967, IX-298 p. An intensive study (largely by participant observation) of the 'social ecology' of six Hutterite colonies in Saskatchewan between 1964 and 1965. In addition to describing the Hutterites' history, beliefs, type of settlement, ecological relations, kinship systems and modes of social control the author describes the colonies' formal organization. There is a unique combination of rule by elders and by competent young men. The rules are so clear that one can talk of the 'bureaucratic framework' of all decision-making. Solidarity and survival are attributed to the way in which this formal organization cross-cuts the kinship groupings, thereby weaving a durable fabric for social relations. Berger, M. Islam in Egypt today: Social and political aspects of popular religion. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, VII - 138 p. A unique collection of statistics and survey data on resources and administrative reforms of mosques in contemporary Egypt. The main argument is that since the late 1950s the government has pursued a policy of imposing policies on Islamic institutions and of taking more and more private mosques under its direct control. There is interesting documentation on the declining vitality of Sufi organizations and voluntary benefit associations.

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Berger, P.L. 'Charisma and religious innovation: The social location of Israelite prophecy', American Sociological Review 28 (6, 1963): 940-950. In the light of recent advances in Old Testament scholarship and fresh archaeological evidence, it is persuasively argued that the pre-Exilic prophets, far from being estranged from the normal cultic institutions, were in fact dependent on them. The implication is that the traditional distinction between charisma as a freefloating anti-institutional challenge should be more accurately portrayed as a potential force for radicalization from within an organization. Berger, P.L.; Luckmann, T. „Aspects sociologiques du pluralisme religieux", Archives de Sociologie des Religions 23 (1967): 117-127. An extended argument that under conditions of free competition between religious groups there is a tendency for immense ecumenical bureaucracies to come to arrangements among them. The policies of the bureaucracies take over the interests of the groups which support them and assume an autonomous dynamic. The outcome is that cartels agree to curb excessive competition and that only marginal differentiation separates formerly distinctive religious products. Bibby, R.W.; Brinkerhoff, M.B. 'The circulation of the Saints: A study of people who join conservative churches', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 12 (3, 1973): 273-283. The findings of a study of twenty major conservative churches in western Canada were broadly consistent with the findings of Stark and Glock on the rates and direction of inter-denominational switching in the U.S.A. The relatively rapid growth of support for conservative churches was found to be primarily a function of the 'reaffiliation' of many former members. In contrast, the number of 'proselyte-type converts' amounted to less than 10% of the sample. There is a circulation of people who are already familiar with evangelical culture. But the conservative churches also lose large numbers of members to the liberal churches. Blizzard, S. 'Role conflicts of the urban Protestant minister', in Knudten, R., ed., The sociology of religion: An anthology. New York, AppletonCentury Crofts, 1967: 212-217. From a sample of 345 urban ministers in America it was discovered that the diffuseness of their role created three principal sources of ambiguity: Believer or saint vs. prophet; practitioner vs. scholar; and professional vs. extra-professional. The article is useful in summarizing many of the findings of previous research in this area and in bringing together their essentially similar conclusions. It represents a locus classicus of the kind of roleanalysis that Pickering [187] criticised so forcefully. Bock, E.W. 'The female clergy: A case of professional marginality', American Journal of Sociology 72 (5, 1967): 531-539.

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Bibliography American census data are used to demonstrate the inferiority of female ministers of religion in relation to other professionals in terms of their proportional size in the society, age, educational attainments and marital status. The argument suggests that since their opportunities for employment are more limited and since the level of their public acceptability is lower, they must be professionally marginal. The data are more interesting than the interpretation. Bodo, J.R. 'The pastor and social conflict', in Lee, R.; Marty, M., eds., Religion and social conflict. New York, Oxford University Press, 1964: 159-172. A thoughtful examination of the dilemmas of Protestant pastors in America who find themselves in conflict with their congregations. The constraints imposed on the pastor are considered to issue from his role, structural position and local responsibilities. Bormann, G. „L'organisation sociale de l'église évangelique du Wurtemberg", Social Compass 16(2, 1969): 185-226. A long and detailed explication of the problems that confront religious organizations when their theoretical objectives get out of phase with their practical organization. Although the Lutheran Church's doctrines link these • two things through the dual ideas of territoriality and the contrasting harmony of minister and community, it was found that the maldistribution of pastors and the recent overloading of the parish system (1815-1964) have made it difficult for the church to propagate the faith. Boulard, F.; Rémy, J. Pratique religieuse urbaine et régions culturelles. Paris, Editions Ouvrières, 1968, 213 p. An extended interpretation of extensive statistics of religious practice in France. The main argument is that the distribution of crude rates of mass-attendance in towns is correlated with only one variable, i.e., the level of religious practice in the surrounding region. The intervening effects of a large range of personal and group variables were found to be negligible. The explanation of present-day Catholic practice is therefore presented in terms of each region's religious history. Braude, L. 'Professional autonomy and the role of the layman', Social Forces 39(1966): 297-301. Interviews with 24 rabbis in the Chicago area led to the delineation of six types of role: Teacher, pastor/counsellor, spokesman to non Jews, preacher, educator and organizer. The effects of disappointment after the initial confrontation with the exigencies of synagogue service are reflected in changing conceptions of the rabbi's role. The changefulness and ambiguity of the rabbi-role means that it receives no clear professional mandate and is therefore a source of psychological strain. Brewer, D.L. 'The Mormons', in Cutler, D.E., ed., The world yearbook of

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religion: The religious situation, vol. 1. London, Evans Brothers, 1969: 518-547. An explanation for the Mormon Church's resistance to recognizing racial equality in terms of the advanced age of its leaders, the lack of intellectuals among them and the recent resurgence of an ideology of rugged individualism in the church. There is an excellent characterization of the Mormons' current syndrome of ethical themes and of the mechanisms for preserving this outlook intact. Brothers, J. Church and school. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1964, V I - 187 p. A detailed study of the effects of schooling in a Roman Catholic grammarschool on children from working-class homes. The principal thesis is that their access to superior educational facilities weakened the children's attachment to the traditional institutions of the parish and led them to compartmentalize religion in their lives. The priest's typical reaction to the grammar-school educated rebels against his exercise of authority in the parish was one of hostility. This was a pioneering study of the sociological aspects of Roman Catholic parish life in Britain. Bryman, A; Hinings, C.R. 'Participation, reform and ecumenism: The views of laity and clergy', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 7. London, S.C.M. Press, forthcoming. Data from a large study of attitudes towards the new deanery synods of the Church of England showed that the laity's participation in the church was restricted largely to social affairs. Their feelings of dissatisfaction were canalised into arguments for the reform of the deanery synods and against the church's energetic pursuit of ecumenical goals. The conclusion is that the synodical form of government has failed to remove some persistent sources of lay/clergy distinctions. Buckle, R. 'Mormons in Britain', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 4. London, S.C.M. Press, 1971: 160-179. Findings of a statistical survey of Mormon congregations in Herefordshire and Glasgow. Responses to questions on attitudes are compared with the findings from similar surveys of Anglicans, Catholics and Nonconformists. Burchard, W. 'Role conflicts of military chaplains', American Sociological Review 19 (October 1954): 528-535. Celebrated study by interview of the role conflict problems of military chaplains in the San Francisco Bay area. Responses to the problems took two main forms: (a) Rationalization of the conflict (usually in favour of the military) and (b) compartmentalization of role behaviour. There was no evidence that either the religious or the military aspect of the integral role was ever completely eclipsed or abandoned. This article has become one of the most taken-for-granted references in the literature on roleanalysis in religious organizations.

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Bibliography Calley, M. God's people: West Indian Pentecostal sects in England, London, Oxford University Press, 1965, XIV - 182 p. A comprehensive and pioneering study by an anthropologist of the origins, history, internal organization and economic base of West Indian Pentecostalist groups in England. It contains some interesting observations on the process of fission and the modes of leadership which characterize this branch of Pentecostalism. Campbell, C.B. 'The cult, the cultic milieu and secularization', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 5. London, S.C.M. Press, 1972: 119-136. A useful proposal for developing studies of the milieu in which cults flourish rather than studies of individual cults because they rarely last long enough to allow the sociologist to conduct the necessary research in time. A four-fold typology of cults is used as an introduction to some remarks about organizational problems in 'societies of seekers'. A three-fold typology of 'seekers' highlights their different expectations of cults. Campbell, E.Q.; Pettigrew, T.F. 'Racial and moral crisis: The role of the Little Rock ministers', American Journal of Sociology 64, (March 1959): 509-516. An interpretation of the findings from interviews with Protestant ministers caught in a moral dilemma about civil rights in the late 1950s. The theoretical argument was that the ministers' different reference systems pulled in different directions; their self-reference system favoured moral courage in opposing segregation, but their professional reference-system favoured (albeit ambiguously) preserving social support for the church. Their membership reference-system was solidly anti-integration. This study aroused much interest and comment at the time of publication and still contains some indicators of fruitful research projects in the area of religion and controversial values. Caporale, R. 'The dynamics of hierocracy: Processes of continuity-in-change of the Roman Catholic system during Vatican II', Sociological Analysis 28, (2, 1967): 59-68. An ingenious attempt to explain the process of change within the Roman Catholic Church in terms of the adaptation to strains resulting from interrelations between the power structure, the ethico-dogmatic system and the characteristics of the membership. Vatican II is seen as a crucial turningpoint in the church's history: It could have turned towards even more centralization in an effort to increase its capacity for tension-management, or it could have preferred individual freedom and collective responsibility. As a result of 'prophetic breakthrough', the Council favoured a return to a previous model of collegiality. The article tends to skip over some of the outstanding problems for the church and for the sociological task of

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understanding it, but it is valuable in raising provocative questions. Carlton, E. 'The predicament of the Baptist minister', New Society 7 (January 1965): 9-11. Despite its brevity and its orientation towards a non-specialist audience, the article underscores an important source of difficulties in the Baptist ministry in Britain. The 'lack of fit' between the theological college syllabus and the demands of service in a parish encourage an apathetic response from the new minister. The situation is aggravated by the authority that the congregation can exercise over him. Ritualism , evangelicalism and retreat into auxiliary ministries are said to be the main patterns of ministerial response to these predicaments. Carroll, J.C. 'Structural effects of professional schools on professional socialization: The case of Protestant clergymen', Social Forces 50 (1, 1971): 61-74. An exceedingly well-conceived and conducted piece of research into the lasting influences that seminaries exert over their students. Typologies of seminary goals and individual outlooks are constructed from the findings of two questionnaire studies of more than 14,000 ministers from six denominations in 1965. The differential effects of seminary types were found to persist in the respondents' outlooks even when an extensive range of potentially intermediary variables were held constant. These findings mark an important point in the development of sociological knowledge about the determinants of career-outcomes in the Protestant ministry and are a useful complement to the work of Hall and Schneider [124] on career-outcomes in the Catholic priesthood. Coxon, A.P.M. 'Patterns of occupational recruitment. The Anglican ministry', Sociology 1 (1, 1967): 73-79. A statistically-based history of the changing social composition of the Anglican clergy in Britain since the middle of the nineteenth century. It emphasizes the recent innovation of 'late recruitment', i.e., of men who have already had a career outside the church before seeking ordination. The late recruits are shown to be distinctive in terms of educational qualifications, family status and social class. The organizational implications of these changes are not specifically examined. Cumming, E; Harrington, C. 'The clergyman as counsellor', American Journal of Sociology 69 (July 1963): 234-243. Findings of a survey of ministers from 61 churches in New York State who were all engaged in counselling activities showed that the practice of referring cases to outside agencies was unknown among the Fundamentalists but widely practised in middle-class congregations by ministers who enjoyed high social status and who were very active in counselling. Ministers referred clients to outside agencies far more frequently than the latter did to

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Bibliography ministers. This reflects the difficulties that are inherent in the minister's counselling role. Currie, R. Methodism divided. London, Faber and Faber, 1968, 348 p. A history of Methodism centring around the antithesis between authority and freedom. It highlights the process whereby Wesley and some of his successors undermined the originally voluntary basis of the class system and substituted a more authoritarian and hierarchic form of organization. It is an excellent source of information on many aspects of organizational formalization. Davidson, J.D.; Schlagen, J.A.; D'Antonio, W.V. 'Protestant and Catholic perceptions of church structure', Social Forces 47 (3, 1969): 314-322. Report of the findings of a study in 1965 among churches in Oklahoma to test the general hypothesis that church members' perceptions of their churches' structure were conditioned by the kind of church to which they belonged. In the main people from churches with congregational-type polities perceived them as democratic, whereas people from episcopal-type polities perceived them as hierarchical. But there were some interesting differences between the denominational patterns of responses. The authors acknowledged the need to make a further study of the discrepancies between perceived types of structure and actual patterns in the exercise of authority and power. De Craemer, W. 'The Jamaa movement in the Katanga and Kasai regions of the Congo \ Review of Religious Research 10,(1, 1968): 11-23; Report by a member of an official Roman Catholic enquiry into the activities and structures of a syncretistic movement which had managed to remain within the Catholic fold despite widespread suspicions about its doctrinal and ritual propriety. From an organizational point of view it is unique in combining practising Catholic priests with lay-leadership and in confounding most of the categories devised to accommodate such phenomena. The author called it an 'acculturative reform movement'. Dekkers, H. „Les vocations religieuses feminines aux Pays-Bas", in Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse. Vocation de la sociologie religieuse et sociologie des vocations. (Actes de la V e Conférence, Louvain, 1956), Tournai, Editions Casterman, 1958: 233-241. The statistical results of a survey in 1954 of about 90% of all nuns in Holland documented the sharp decline that had occurred in almost all aspects of their work and strength. Hypotheses are tentatively advanced to explain the phenomenon. Dellepoort, J; Greinacher, N; Menges, W. „Le problème sacerdotal en Europe occidentale", Social Compass 8 (5, 1961): 425-446. This is a translation of an extract from their collection of conference papers under the title Die deutsche Priesterfrage. It is a cross-cultural comparison

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of the personnel needs and resources of the Catholic church in (a) Germany, Austria, Portugal (where priests are urgently needed), (b) Britain, Scandinavia and Iceland (which rely on imports of foreign priests), (c) France, Spain and Italy (which can supply their own needs), and (d) Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Ireland and Malta (which enjoy a surplus of priests). There is an insightful summary of factors that affect the priest's social status, the perseverence of seminarians and the age of ordination. Delcoz, P. „Pourquoi ne seront-ils pas prêtres?", Nouvelle Revue théologique 86 (avril 1954): 392-412. An early attempt to discover by questionnaire study of 2,000 Belgian schoolchildren why they had either abandoned or retained a vocation for the priesthood. Retention of vocation correlated with 'classical' studies, devout families, large family size and active participation in parish youth activities. Celibacy seemed to be the main obstacle to retaining the idea of vocation. Demerath III, N.J. 'Social stratification and church involvement: The church-sect distinction applied to individual participation', Review of Religious Research 2 ( 2 , 1961): 146-154. A secondary analysis of questionnaire data on Lutherans in large cities of the USA in 1956 allegedly shows that the 'secular needs' of the lower classes 'propel them into sects'. They are said to 'feel' their religion rather than 'doing it'. The latter is used as a characterization of middle-class religiosity. Demerath III, N.J. 'Irreligion, a-religion and the rise of the religion-less church: Two case studies in organizational convergence', Sociological Analysis 30 (4, 1969): 191-203. The history of the Society for Ethical Culture and the American Rationalist Federation illustrate in different ways how the predictions that were made in the nineteenth century for the disappearance of religious organizations have been confounded and how the contemporary religion-less groups are experiencing difficulties in surviving. These two different groups are shown to have retreated to a safe middle position (like the 'religion-less churches') in order to solve their problems of recruitment, goal-attainment and finance. The analysis is useful in indicating the value of treating all ideological organizations as members of one class for the specific purpose of understanding organizational dynamics. Demerath III, N.J.;Thiessen, J. 'On spitting against the wind: Organizational precariousness and irreligion', American Journal of Sociology 71 (May 1966): 674-687. Contrasting history of two branches of the rationalist, anti-clerical Freiegemeinde of Wisconsin. The city-based Milwaukee branch retained

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Bibliography its working-class social composition and affiliated with the American Rationalist Federation, but the Sauk City branch became more and more closely identified with the community's middle-class and eventually affiliated with the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship. The divergent organizational and ideological evolutions of the two groups are explained in terms of the members' social status, the position of the group in the local community and the specificity of the ideology. Dempsey, K.C. 'Conflict in minister/lay relations' in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 2. London, S.C.M. Press, 1964: 58-74. A study of social relations in rural Australian Methodist churches is used to illustrate the structural imcompatibilities between the expectations that laymen and ministers hold of one another. These are aggravated by differences in their social background and by the migration of middle-class people away from the rural areas. Dhooghe, J. 'Organizational problems with regard to different types of membership in the church', Social Compass 15 (2, 1968): 93-99. A long-overdue critique of some of the assumptions underlying Etzioni's typology of reasons for compliance with authority in social organizations. The article stresses the need to separate analytically the reasons that people have for commitment to the values, beliefs or norms of religious groups. A four-fold typology is presented as a way of accounting for the variations in patterns of commitment to ideational elements and in differing degrees of activity or passivity in involvement in the organization. It is a helpful complement to Kanter's [271] refinement of the notion of commitment in religious organizations. Dobbelaere, K. „Une typologie de l'intégration à l'église", Social Compass 15 (2, 1968): 117-141. Using structural, cultic and moral criteria, the author devised a seven-fold typology of types of member-integration in the Roman Catholic church. The validity of the typology was claimed to be reflected in the finding of a high degree of correlation between high levels of integration (as defined by the author) and conformity with the church's ruling on birth control. Donovan, J.D. 'The American Catholic hierarchy: A social profile', American Catholic Sociological Review 18 (2, 1958): 98-112. Basic demographic data indicating an upward trend in social status of bishops but refuting the view that they were drawn from a social elite. Dumont, F. „Recherches sur les groupements religieux", Social Compass 10(2, 1963): 171-191. A subtle study of the texture of social relations in different sub-sections of a Canadian Catholic parish. The unitary notion of a 'church' is broken down into more meaningful elements by examining the ideology of small cliques, the views of parishioners about the formal structure of the groups to

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which they belonged, their ways of participating and their relations with wider, diocesan groups. It was found that some groups qualified as 'sects' while others were more akin to 'family circles'. Eister, A.W. 'Quasi-groups and religious movements: Some theoretical considerations and some empirical findings', in Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse. Contemporary metamorphosis of religion? Actes de XII e Conférence, The Hague, 1973: 435-449. A complex argument in favour of restricting 'cult' to groups having identifiable interests in common, a recognisable structure and a genuinely communal focus of interest. The usefulness of this definitional convention is illustrated by reference to a wide selection of data on contemporary religious movements in the U.S.A. Essien-Udom, E.U. Black nationalism: The rise of the Black Muslims in the USA. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books Ltd, 1966, 282 p. (First published by University of Chicago Press, 1962.) A pioneering descriptive study of the contemporary Black Muslims. Particular attention is devoted to their history, doctrines, organization and ideology. Evers, H.-D. 'The Buddhist Sangha in Ceylon and Thailand: A comparative study in two non-industrial societies', Sociologus 18 (1, 1968): 20-35. An anthropologist's account of the social structure of the Sangha in two societies with widely differing types of kinship system. An excellent example of the effects produced by the social environment on religious organizations. Farr, A.D. God, blood and society. Aberdeen, Impulse Books, 1972, 119 p. A little-known, but valuable, study by a professional worker in the public blood transfusion service of the historical, legal and scriptural arguments of Jehovah's Witnesses against the transfusion of blood. Fiawoo, D.K. 'From cult to "church": A study of some aspects of religious change in Ghana', Ghana Journal of Sociology 4 (2, 1968): 72-87. A study of the syncretistic Blekete movement in Ghana with some incidental remarks about the rudimentary form of organizational hierarchy among the full- and part-time officials of the cult. Fichter, J.F. 'The marginal Catholic: An institutional approach', Social Forces 32 (1953): 167-173. A seminal typology of church participants under the headings nuclear, modal, marginal and dormant. The data on which the typology is based were interpreted in a sociological frame of reference to show how the varying degrees of participation were linked with Catholics' roles, values and institutional connections. Fichter, J.F. 'The parish and social integration Social Compass, 1 (1, 1960): 39-47.

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Bibliography This article was among the first important signs of the recognition by Catholic sociologists that the parish in an industrial society could no longer create the community feeling of earlier periods. A realistic appreciation of religious pluralism and social mobility patterns was shown to call forth ideally a greater willingness of Catholics to participate in local affairs and desert the ghetto mentality. Fichter, J.F. Religion as an occupation. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1961, XVI - 295 p. A wide-ranging study of the.priestly profession in America based on secondary analysis of empirical studies and on conceptual discussion. It covers vocations, seminaries, social class, training programmes, effects of shifting social status, role-performance, organized social relations, apostolic works and the functions of superiors. Subsequent work has improved sociological knowledge on these topics, but this book remains a base line for studies in this field. Fichter, J.F. 'A comparative view of the parish priest', Les Archives de Sociologie des Religions 8 (16, 1963): 44-48. Report of a nationwide survey of over 2,000 Catholic priests, and 2,200 laymens' notions of how the typical priest spends his time and what the order of priority is among the priest's own activities. Major discrepancies were shown to exist between priestly and lay ideas and attitudes. Fichter, J.F. America's forgotten priests. New York, Harper, 1968, 254 p. An extensive analysis of the results of a questionnaire survey of 3,000 American curates regarding their attitudes to a wide range of personal and occupational topics. Age differences correlated strongly with differences in attitudes on almost every topic, and the type of attitude was found to be affected strongly by the nature of the respondents' relations with their superiors in the ecclesiastical hierachy. The book is a very interesting complement to Hall and Schneider's study of factors affecting priestly career opportunities [124], Fichter, J.F. 'Catholic church professionals', Annals of the American Academy of political and social Science 387 (January 1970): 77-85. A brief review of the statistics of change in the numerical strength of American Catholic personnel since 1960. The implications for the church's activities of the current trends are analysed, and the long-term significance of organizational changes is estimated. Foster, J.G. Enquiry into the practice and effects of Scientology. London. Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1971, VI -191 p. The report of a British government's official inquiry into Scientology and into the practice of psychotherapy outside professional organizations. It contains a valuable summary of the findings of other official inquiries of the same kind.

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Francis, E.K. 'Towards a typology of religious orders', American Journal of Sociology 55 (March 1950): 437-449. It is argued that the history of Christian monasticism has witnessed the gradual emergence of gesellschaftlich orders and the relative decline of gemeinschaftlich communities of religiosi. Despite its age, this article has remained a standard reference in the sociology of religious organizations. Genet, J. „Genèse et lignes directrices de recherche sur l'administration de l'église", Res Publica 10(1, 1968): 51-60. An intensive study of the style of administration in a sample of four French Catholic dioceses. It stresses the personal and multifunctional nature of the tasks accomplished by diocesan personnel. This is part of a larger, international project on church administration at diocesan level. Gibbs, J.O.; Ewer, P.A. 'The external adaptation of religious organizations: Church response to social issues', Sociological Analysis 30 (4, 1969): 223234. An application of an open-systems approach to the study of 209 churches in the Northwest Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in the U.S.A. The findings showed how a church's involvement in social issues affecting the local community depended on the size of the community, the size of the congregation, the educational attainment of its members, the rate of turn-over of membership on the board of trustees and the length of the pastor's ministerial experience. Gilsenan, M.D. 'Some factors in the decline of the Sufi orders in Modern Egypt', Muslim World SI (1, 1965): 11-18. An organizational analysis of Sufi orders revealed that their structural weakness was a consequence of the power of local charismatic leaders. The formal centralisation of the orders was only superficial, and there was no distinctive ideology. Sufism was found to be still popular, but the orders were vulnerable (as organizations) to hostile forces in their environment. Glasse, J.D. Profession: Minister. Nashville, New York,Abingdon Press, 1968, 174 p. A conceptual analysis of the concept of profession and a discussion of its applicability to the contemporary status of the clergy in the U.S.A. The book concludes with some practical suggestions for improving ministerial status and the level of professionalisation through the creation of an Academy of Parish Clergy. Glock, C.Y.; Roos, P. 'Parishioners' views of how ministers spend their time', Social Compass 9 (4, 1962): 373-378. Results of a questionnaire survey of the members of twelve urban Lutheran congregations in the East and Midwest of the U.S.A. It showed that parishioners believe that their ministers spent most of their time on the more visible aspects of their job. This highlights the ministers' dilemma

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in choosing between administrative and more overtly 'religious' roles. Goddijn, H.P.M. 'The sociology of religious orders and congregations', Social Compass 1 (5-6, 1960): 431-447. A brief history and statistical analysis of the strength of the major religious orders in Holland. The argument is that it is the 'active' orders that are at present in serious decline because their work involves extensive contact with the secular world and a consequently greater risk of ideological contamination. There are some comments on the problems of retaining novices and of up-dating seminary syllabi. 119 Goddijn, W. 'Catholic minorities and social integration' Social Compass 1 (2, 1960): 161-176. A study of the position of Catholic minorities in parts of the Netherlands showed that the church's organizations were important in conditioning the kind of treatment that they received from the majority community. Excessively strong Catholic organization and consciousness were a provocation to hostility from Protestants. 120 Gollin, G.L. Moravians in two worlds: A study of changing communities. New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1967, VIII - 302 p. A justly celebrated examination of the sociological factors that caused the Moravian communities at Herrnhut in Saxony and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania to adopt widely different paths of development in spite of a common set of doctrines. The divergence is explained in terms of a mixture of organizational and environmental factors. 121 Greinacher, N. 'The development of applications to leave the church and the transfer from one church to another', Social Compass 8 (1, 1961): 61-72. The statistics of applications to change, or be relieved of, the tax burden of church membership in Germany are viewed in an historical perspective. The sharp rise in rates of withdrawal since the 1950s is interpreted as a sign that the churches have failed to adapt their forms of organization and pastorate to the conditions of industrial societies. 122 Gusfield, J. Symbolic crusade: Status politics and the Temperance movement. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1963, VIII - 198 p. A conceptually sophisticated study of the Women's Christian Temperance Movement with the accent on the fear of losing status that motivated many of its members and leaders. 123 Hadden, J.K. The gathering storm in the churches: The widening gap between clergy and laymen. Garden City, New Jersey, Doubleday, 1969, XXIX - 257 p. A presentation and interpretation of the findings of a large-scale questionnaire survey of the beliefs and attitudes of campus and parish clergy in the U.S.A. These are compared with the results of recent surveys 118

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of the laity's beliefs and attitudes, and the comparison reveals sharp differences from the clergy. The clergy are in general so much more liberal on civil rights that the author anticipates a deep gulf between them and the laity. This is said to be the culmination of a three-fold crisis in Protestantism: Meaning and purpose, belief and authority. Hall, D.T.; Schneider, B. Organizational climates and careers: The work lives of priests. New York, Seminar Press, 1973, XIX - 291 p. A systematic study by questionnaire and interview of a sample of American priests of their chances of psychological success in the priestly career. The low chance of such success among curates is attributed to their structural exclusion from positions and tasks demanding autonomy and a sense of challenge. Pastors and priests in special assignments were better positioned to experience psychological success. The findings corroborate those of Fichter [109], Hammond, P.E. 'The migrating sect: An illustration from early Norwegian immigration', Social Forces 41 (March 1963): 275-283. A comparative study of the fate of Haugean and Quaker communities in the early nineteenth century in the U.S.A. Disorganization of the community was shown to occur in the case of those groups which relied solely on ideological consensus and ignored the need to cope with material problems by becoming partly dependent on their socio-cultural environment. Hammond, P.E. The campus clergyman. New York, Basic Books, 1968, XVI- 171 p. A large-scale investigation into the structural conditions of service in the campus ministry in the U.S.A. It revealed serious problems for the minister and for the sponsoring denomination. High rates of turn-over were attributed to lack of special training for the tasks and low levels of institutionalization of the role in universities. The results cast doubt on the belief that special ministries in Protestantism encourage innovatory outlooks among the incumbents. Hammond, P.E.; Mitchell, R.E. 'Segmentation of radicalism: The case of the Protestant campus minister', American Journal of Sociology 71 (2, 1965): 133-143. An analysis of the campus ministry as an organizational 'safety valve' for the harmless regulation of radicalism among ministers. The positive functions of this type of ministry are examined from the point of view of both ministers and their churches. Harris, C.C. 'Reform in a normative organization', Sociological Review 17 (2, 1969): 167-185. An insightful critique of the usefulness of Etzioni's three-fold typology for compliance with authority in organizations in the context of lay resistance to schemes for rationalizing the clerical manpower distribution in a rural

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Bibliography diocese of the Church in Wales. It suggests that instrumentalities may be invested with sacredness in the same way as ideas and symbols; the sources of normative power in religious organizations therefore require closer inspection than Etzioni appears to encourage. Harrison, P.M. Authority and power in the Free Church tradition: A social case study of the American Baptist Convention. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1959. (Reprinted Carbonsdale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, Arcturus Books, 1971, XIX - 248 p.). This is probably the first full-length study of a religious organization that argued successfully for the need to examine the ways in which purely organizational exigencies can bring about a state of affairs which is not legitimated by the group's doctrines. Not the least of this book's many excellent features is its clear discussion of the inability of Max Weber's three-fold typology of claims to legitimate authority to accommodate claims based on rational-pragmatic grounds. These are shown to have peculiar importance in the organization of this Baptist group. Harrison, P.M. 'Church and laity among Protestants', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 332 (November 1960): 37-49. A provocative treatment of the reasons why the clergy have allegedly lost their traditional authority over the laity. It stresses the underlying conflict of interest between clergy and laity and relates the conflict to basic theological assumptions and sociological realities. Harrison, P.M. 'Religious leadership in America', in Cutler, D.R., ed., The world yearbook of religion: The religious situation, vol. 2. London, Evans Brothers, 1970: 957-979. An extended answer to the question, 'Is the Protestant ministry a profession?' On all of the five criteria of professionalism that the author puts forward the evidence shows that the current ministry enjoys only a quasi-professional status. Hawthorn, H.B.' A test of Simmel on the secret society: The Doukhobors of British Columbia', American Journal of Sociology July 1956: 1-7. Qualitative data on the Doukhobors show that Simmel's analysis of their early behaviour was correct but that he was mistaken about the reasons for the group's eventual disintegration. Hill, M. The religious order. London, Heinemann, 1973, VII - 344 p. A systematic analysis of the concepts 'charisma', 'tradition', 'authority' and 'monastic order' in their combined application to the 'revolution by tradition' which was accomplished by the Methodist church and the Tractarian movement in England. The book contains much useful information on the history and social structures of Christian monasticism,

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the Anglican Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the development of some key terms in the sociology of religious organizations. Hill, M; Wakeford, P. 'Disembodied ecumenicalism: A survey of the members of four Methodist Churches in or near London', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 2. London, S.C.M. Press, 1969: 1946. The results of a questionnaire survey of Methodists in four London congregations showed very clear patterns of association between enthusiasm for ecumenicism and such variables as age, frequency of attendance at church, whether baptised as a Methodist or not, etc. Hill, R. „L'appartenance religieuse chez les Mormons', Social Compass 12 (3, 1965): 171-176. A study of the organizational structure of the Mormon church reveals a large number of posts of responsibility and three types of members: Converts, 'born into' members and marginals. The strength of member commitment is explained partly in terms of their incorporation into a religious organization lacking professionals, the remarkable processes of socialization and the overriding importance of proselytism. Hillery, G.A. 'The convent: Community, prison or task force?' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8 (1, 1969): 140-151. Adopting Parsons' distinction between formal and communal organizations, the author distinguishes between 'apostolic' (formal) and 'monastic' (communal) types of convent. By itself, the analysis leads to nothing, but Scalf, Miller and Thomas [273] have recently applied it profitably in designing a theoretical model of church organization. Hostetler, J.A. Amish society. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1963, XVIII - 347 p. A well-documented account of the history, migration-patterns, settlement and present-day condition of the Old Order Amish in the U.S.A. The author's decision to consider the group as an embodiment of a folk culture rather obscures its purely organizational aspects. But there is some valuable information on the informal regulation of property, morals and religious beliefs. Houtart, F. „Physionomie sociale et religieuse des grandes villes de l'Europe occidentale", Social Compass 8 (6, 1961): 483-501. A small number of generalizations are distilled from the history of European urbanization with a view to assessing their effects on the changing pattern of religious behaviour. This is a useful summary of facts and interpretations that are dispersed through a wide variety of social scientific sources. Houtart, F. „Vers une pastorale urbaine" Social Compass 8 (6, 1961): 559-565. A review of the Roman Catholic priest's pastoral functions leads the author

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Bibliography to suggest that it is nowadays impossible for the priest to be all things to all men. Complex developments in the structure of urban social relations necessitate a special pastorate for migrants, maintenance of the liturgy as a central source of integration and the closer involvement of the laity in church affairs. Houtart, F. 'Critical decisions and institutional tensions in a religious institution: The case of Vatican II', Review of Religious Research 9 (3, 1968): 131-146. The history of the Roman Catholic church is analysed in terms of an alternation between emphases on value-infusion and organization. Vatican II is said to have been almost unique in its concern for values and its relative indifference towards questions of organization. Yet, it is anticipated that unless these questions are answered, problems of authority will create large-scale disorganization in the church. Houtart, F. 'Conflicts of authority in the Roman Catholic church', Social Compass 16(3, 1969): 309-326. Global social change and internal strains are shown to be at the root of many organizational problems for the church today. The legitimacy, the values and the sacramental system are being challenged by both individual and joint movements of protest against the present distribution of authority. Vatican II changed some of the church's values, but not its underlying forms of organization — hence the need for further agitation. Hymes, E. 'The parish in the rural community', in Nuesse, C.J.; Harte, T.J., eds., The sociology of the parish. Milwaukee, Bruce, 1951. A description of the strength of rural American Catholicism and a brief account of its tendency to produce a disproportionately large number of priestly vocations. Some of the material problems of rural parishes are outlined. Isichei, E.A.'From sect to church in English Quakerism', British Journal of Sociology 15 (3, 1964): 207-222. Reprinted as chapter 5 in Wilson, B.R.; ed., Patterns of sectariarism. London, Heineman, 1967. An extremely well-documented argument to show that English Quakers did not begin to evolve into a denomination in the way that H.R. Niebuhr might have expected until at earliest the middle of the nineteenth century. Even then, there were periodic strains towards a sectarian posture. The influence of the external environment was felt strongly in the changing postures of the Quaker organization. Isichei, E.A. 'Organization and power in the Society of Friends', Archives de Sociologie des Religions 19 (1965): 31-49. Reprinted as chapter 6 in Wilson, B.R., ed., Patterns of sectarianism. London, Heineman, 1967. The informal concentration of power in the hands of an oligarchy of leading English Quakers is shown to have by-passed the theory of Quaker

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'democracy' and to have ensured the ascendancy of conservative interests in the Yearly Meeting. The analysis of formal and informal authority patterns is admirably subtle and incisive. Jacobs, N. Modernization without development: Thailand as an Asian case study. New York, Praeger, 1971, 430 p. An encyclopedia survey of recent work on development in Thailand with the general theme that the superstructure of modern civilization has been suddenly grafted onto a stock of relatively undeveloped institutions. Jud, G.J.; Mills, E.W.; Burch, G. Ex-pastors. Boston, Pilgrim Press, 1970, XIII- 191 p. An intensive analysis of the results of a questionnaire survey of ministers and ex-ministers in the United Church of Christ. The main findings were that there is no 'crisis' of ministerial drop-outs but that problems in the ministerial career and family situation are forcing some men out of the active pastorate. The structural position of ministers is carefully analysed in ways that are comparable with those used by Hall and Schneider in their study of Roman Catholic priestly careers [124], Kelly, H.E. 'Role satisfaction of the Catholic priest', Social Forces 50 (1, 1971): 75-84. A study of diocesan priests in Oklahoma revealed that role satisfaction depended on their ability to maintain a constant theological outlook throughout the career. Those who became either more liberal or more conservative in their views were subject to cognitive dissonance and to greater frustration of expectations. Klein, J. 'Structural aspects of church organization', Internationales Jahrbuch fur Religionssoziologie 4(1969): 101-121. A long discussion of the ways in which Church of England parishes could be better adapted to their changing environment. Some interesting comments are made on the way in which present-day interest groups crosscut territorial divisions, but the level of strictly sociological analysis is low. The thrust of the argument is that church organizations should embody built-in flexibility in order to be adapted to a diverse and constantly changing environment. Kloetzli, W. The city church - death or renewal. Philadelphia, Muhlenberg Press, 1961, X I - 2 2 4 p. A survey of eight urban Lutheran churches in 1957 revealed clear patterns of correlation between apparently diverse characteristics. The sociogeographic location of each church was strongly determinant of their evangelical and material success. Kokosalakis, N. 'Aspects of conflict between the structure of authority and the beliefs of the laity in the Roman Catholic church', A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 4. London, S.C.M. Press, 1971: 21-35.

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An in-depth study of parishes in Liverpool revealed that among the post-World War II generation of Catholics the conflict between current beliefs and the formal teachings of the church is sharp. This is explained in terms of socio-economic changes in the parishes which have entailed growing resistance to the unquestioning exercise of priestly authority. 151 Kraemer, P.E. 'A missionary structured congregation in a metropolitan setting: Some sociological preconditions', Sociological Bulletin 17 (4, 1963): 109-125. From the assumption that the processes of concentration, differentiation and mobility characterize the contemporary social context of urban churches, the author attempts to devise an appropriate structure for them. It entails the installation of many more specialist ministries and the relative run-down of parish-based pastorates. The sociologist may distill some valuable information on the situation of the urban church from this avowedly non-sociological work. 152 Lalive d'Epinay, C. Haven of the masses. London, Lutterworth Press, 1969, XXXIII - 263 p. A remarkably clear account of the historical and socio-cultural conditions for the growth in the twentieth century of Chilean Pentecostalism. There is a particularly good exposition of the organizational structure of the churches and of its implications for other aspects of church life. 153 Lauer, R.H. 'Organizational punishment: Punitive relations in a voluntary association — A minister in a Protestant church', Human Relations 26 (2, 1973): 189-202. A novel and stimulating approach to the question of ministerial roles. It argues that the structure of Protestant churches leads the laity to hold unrealistic expectations of their ministers and consequently to encourage among them a very low degree of self-esteem. 154 Lee, R. The social sources of church unity. New York, Abingdon press, 1960, 238 p. Full documentation of the trends towards socio-cultural division and unity in the U.S.A. The latter trend is said to be prevailing and to be producing effects in the convergence of organizational types among churches. The main reasons are that the general democratic context encourages lay participation and broad leadership and that the 'organizational revolution' has imposed changes on all kinds of groups. 155 Luecke, R.H. 'Protestant clergy: New forms of ministry, new forms of training', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387 (January 1970): 86-95. An interesting summary of some major changes in the philosophy and practice of ministerial training. The main idea is that experimental training programmes have turned into new ways of discovering new forms

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of ministry. The effects of this change may be to complicate the traditional division of church organizations into conservative sects and acommodated churches. Macdonald, F. 'The development of parishes in the United States', in Nuesse, C.J.; Harte, T.J., eds., The sociology of the parish.Milwaukee, Bruce, 1951. [179] An historical account of the struggles within American Catholicism for freedom from control by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, for the right of church trustees to own church property and for the independence of 'ethnic'parishes from territorial jurisdictions. Maclnnis, D.E. 'Maoism and religion in China today', in Cutler, D.R., ed., The world year book of religion: The religious situation, 2 vols. London, Evans Brothers, 1970: 3-24. A description of the stages by which the Chinese State attempted to check, infiltrate, co-opt and finally destroy religious institutions from 1949 onwards. It emphasizes that the organizational aspects of religion were perceived to present a no less serious threat to the state than its ideological aspects. Makler, H.M. 'Centralization/decentralization in formal organizations: A case study of American Protestant denominations', Review of Religious Research 5 ( 1 , 1963): 5-11. A study of the organizational location of 'critical' decision-making agencies in eleven American denominations showed a high degree of consistency in the agency pattern between them all. Mandelbaum, D.G. Society in India, vol. 2: Change and continuity. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1970, IX - 665 p. + 37 p. bibliography + 14 p. index.

This volume examines the place of the village and the region in determining the pattern of Indian social relations, the importance of competition between the jatis for social mobility and the way in which religious groupings (native and imported) function as mediators of social change. It is particularly interesting in the accounts of western influence on new forms of religious sociation. 160 Manwaring, D. Render unto Caesar: The flag salute controversy. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1962, X - 322 p. A highly detailed and impressive history of resistance among American religious groups to the obligation to honour symbols of the state in the twentieth century. It deals principally with the running battle between Jehovah's Witnesses and the Supreme Court in the 1930s and 1940s. 161 Martin, D.A. 'The denomination', British Journal of Sociology 13(1, 1962): 1-14; This article has now become a 'standard' reference in the sociology

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Bibliography of religion. It argues that the denomination constitutes a type sui generis of religious organization by virtue of its rejection of the exclusivism of the sect-type and its embodiment of pragmatic principles of organization and worship. It is treated as the outgrowth of both its internal logic and its socio-cultural environment. The thesis that denominations evolve from sects is therefore rejected. Martin, D.A. Pacifism: An historical and sociological study. London, Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1965, XII - 249 p. This was a pioneering attempt to work out the logic of relations between sect-like and denomination-like groups in both religious and political institutions. It examines labour politics and pacifism as basically denominational groups containing sectarian enclaves. The opposition between the two types is expressed in terms of the difference between extremism and pragmatism. Martin, D.A. 'The Methodist local preacher', in Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Réligieuse. Clergy in church and society. Actes de la IX e Conférence, Montreal, 1967: 3-15. An insightful review of the problems of status and role confronted by the local preacher in an organization which has become increasingly dominated by professional ministers. Martini, F. „Organisation du clergé bouddhique au Cambodge", FranceAsie 114-115 (nov-déc. 1955): 416-424. A brief history of the two major orders among Cambodian monks with details of their organizational hierarchies and their patrimonial links with the royal household. The administration of pagodas is described in some detail. Not a sociological analysis but a useful indication of the need for such in this area of study. Mehl, R. „ Modifications dans la structure et le comportement des églises Protestantes de France á la suite du mouvement oecuménique, Archives de Sociologie des Religions 22 (1966): 81-88. The effects of ecumenical co-operation in some Reformed and Lutheran Churches in France are said to have encouraged liturgical revival, emphasis on mission and new forms of pastoral arrangements. The creation of high-level integration-agencies is said to have stimulated local initiatives. This 'optimistic' view of ecumenism might be profitably contrasted with that of Séguy [201], Moos, F. 'Leadership and organization in the Olive Tree movement', in Palmer, S.J., ed., The new religions of Korea. Seoul, Transactions of the Korea Branch. Royal Asiatic Society, XLIII, 1967: 11-27. One of the rare studies of contemporary Korean religious movements. It describes the social conditions that seem to favour the 'new religions' and the biography of the founder of one of the most prestigious, Park Tae Sun.

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The account of the Christian Towns in which Olive Tree followers live their religion provides a fascinating insight into new forms of community life. 167 Morgan, D.H.J. 'The social and educational background of Anglican bishops — continuities and changes', British Journal of Sociology 20 (3, 1969): 295-310. Homogeneity in family background and continuity in educational experience are shown to characterize the Anglican episocopate since 1860. Changes in their role and position in the church have outstripped the continuity in their social backgrounds. 168 Morrow, W.R.: Matthews, A.T.J. 'Role-definitions of mental-hospital chaplains', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5 (3, 1966): 421-434. The main hypothesis in this study of a sample of 301 Protestant chaplains to mental hospitals was that their extremely broad role definitions were associated with a disapproving attitude towards evangelism in mental hospitals, a humanistic, non-custodial view of treatment and a nonconventional religious ideology. The hypothesis was confirmed, thereby supporting other findings on the innovative and unconventional aspects of special pastorates. 169 Moulin, L. „Les formes du gouvernement local et provincial dans les instituts religieux", Revue internationale des Sciences administratives 21 (1, 1955): 31-57. This is the first of three separate articles on the distinctiveness and surprising efficacity of Christian monastic organizations. It shows that the Dominican order displays greater democracy than the others and a more elaborate system of checks and balances on powerful positions. The approach is hardly sociological, but it has immense usefulness for sociologists who would not find it difficult to read sociological insights into the wealth of information that the author makes available. 170 Moulin, L. „L'organisation du gouvernement local et provincial dans les constitutions de Jésuites", Revue internationale des Sciences administratives 21 (3, 1955): 485-523. The second article on monastic organization emphasizes the principle of monarchical centralization upon which the Jesuit congregation is founded, its quasi-military notion of obedience and the life-long autonomy of its General. Unfortunately, the value of this piece has diminished as rapid changes have supervened in the Jesuits' increasingly imperfect conformity with the formal rules of the congregation. 171 Moulin, L. „Le regroupement des autonomies abbatiales chez les Bénédictins", Revue internationale des Sciences administratives 21 (4, 1955): 787-823.

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Bibliography The third article in the series on monastic orders emphasizes the increasingly confederal nature of the Benedictine system. The original autonomy of each abbey gave way under pressure from external and internal pressures to primitive confederations and, more recently, to formalized co-ordination. Moulin, L. „Pour une sociologie des ordres religieux', Social Compass 10 (2, 1963): 145-170. A magisterial historical summary of the emergence of democratic processes, among successive reforms of European monasticism. This is followed by a synchronic analysis of the executive powers of Superiors in religious orders. Murphy, R.; Liu, W.T. 'Organizational stance and change: A comparative study of three religious communities', Review of Religious Research 8 ( 1 , 1966): 37-50. A study of three women's orders which were all founded in one area of the U.S.A. in the nineteenth century showed that their original constitution (organizational character) had a determining effect on their subsequent capacity to change. The variations in their respective patterns of recent evolution were explained in terms of their differing organizational character. Murvar, V. 'Russian religious structures: A study in persistent church subservience', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7 ( 1 , 1968): 1-22. The author contrasts the genuine hierocracy of the Christian West with the interdependence of politics and religion that characterizes the Eastern Orthodox church. Data are adduced to prove that the strength of religious legitimization for absolute political power varies directly with the degree of structural-functional interdependence between church and state. Neal, M.A. 'Factors affecting the spirit and structures of religious communities', Pro Mundi Vita 16 (1967): 18-22. Six conditions of modern societies are examined systematically for their effects on the viability and relevance of religious orders. The article is useful for the way in which it synthesizes a lot of material which is not commonly expressed in sociological language. Neal, M.A. 'A theoretical analysis of renewal in religious orders in the U.S.A.', Social Compass 18(1,1971): 7-25. An intriguing account of some ideological problems that emerged from the Sister Formation Program in respect of social science teaching. Needleman, J. The new religions. London, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1970, XII - 243 p. On the basis of observation and analysis of literary sources, the author describes the beliefs and activities of adepts of a number of contemporary cults in California. They include Zen Buddhism. Meher Baba, Subud, Transendental Meditation, Krishnamurti and Tibetan Buddhism. The

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analysis is far from sociological, but the observations provide much-needed information for use in sociological work. Nelson, G.K. Spiritualism and society. London, Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1969, X I - 3 0 7 p. A history and organizational analysis of the Spiritualist movement principally in Britain. The information is useful to the student of minority religious movements, but the analytical framework lacks sociological rigour. Nuesse, C.J.; Harte, T.J., eds., The sociology of the parish. Milwaukee, Bruce, 1951, X I I - 3 5 4 p. This is essentially an historical and sociological account of the variety in forms that the parish unit has assumed in the U.S.A. It considers urban, rural and ethnic parishes as the basic types. The book is now out-dated, but no more recent study has replaced it fully. O'Brien, L. 'Some defining characteristics of the Hare Krishna movement', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 9 (2, 1973): 72-73. A very brief sketch of findings taken from a study of Hare Krishna in the headquarters at Melbourne. It includes data on members' background, outlook and consequences of membership. O'Dea, T.F. 'Mormonism and the avoidance of sectarian stagnation: A study of church, sect and incipient nationality', American Journal of Sociology 60(1955): 285-293. Extensive historical and sociological data are adduced to show that the Mormons are a mixture of sect and church with an added dimension of symbolic nationality. The method of the study stresses the necessity to understand Mormon dynamics in terms of historical contingencies, values and concepts — not exclusively sociological factors. O'Dea, T.F. The Mormons. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957, XII - 289 p. This is still the most comprehensive sociological study of Mormons. It considers them from the viewpoint of doctrines, organization and values. It is a model of conceptual clarity. O'Donovan, T.; Deegan, A.X. 'Some career determinants of church executives', Sociology and Social Research 48 (1, 1963): 58-68. An investigation into Roman Catholic pastors' perceptions of their careerchances in the U.S.A. and the processes of promotion in the church. It revealed some interesting discrepancies between the criteria that they applied to themselves and to their fellow-priests. The most favourable perceptions of the career structure came from priests whose own career experience had been happy. Palmer. S.J., ed. The new religions of Korea. Seoul, Transactions of the Korea Branch, Royal Asiatic Society, XLIII, 1967. 211 p. A useful collection of articles on several new religious movements in Korea.

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Bibliography It deals with the Olive Tree movement, Jingsan-gyo, Sindonae, Ch'ondogyo and Tong-il. Peel, J.D.Y. Aladura: A religious movement among the Yoruba. London, Oxford University Press, 1968, XIII - 338 p. This is a comprehensive description of Yoruba society and of the position of independent churches within it. It analyses in depth the history, teachings, activities, social composition and organization of one of the larger churches. The organizational analysis stresses the capacity of the Yoruba to adapt to new circumstances quickly, the strange relationship between 'prophet' and church and the complications of the system of age-stratification for voluntary associations. Pfautz H.W. 'A case study of an urban religious movement: Christian Science', in Burgess, E.W.; Bogue, D.J., eds., Contributions to urban sociology. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964: 284-303. Social movements (regardless of content) are said to evolve through four stages of development: Germinal, cult, sect and institutional. Religious movements are not treated differently from secular ones and are explained in terms of collective responses to perceptions of dissatisfaction with available institutions. The history of Christian Science is analysed as an illustration of the developmental sequence. Pickering, W.S.F. 'Problems of role analysis and social change with special reference to the parish ministry', in Conférence International de Sociologie Religieuse. Clergy in church and society. Actes de la IX e Conférence, Montreal, 1967 A lengthy and detailed criticism of conventional forms of role analysis as applied to the Protestant ministry. Linguistic and conceptual confusion can only be eliminated, according to the author, if the general notion of a role is abandoned and if more precise concepts of role demands, role strain and role conflict are retained in modified form. In this way, the static implications of 'role' are avoided. Poggi, G. Catholic Action in Italy: The sociology of a sponsored organization. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1967, XV 280 p. (First published in Italian, 1963). On the assumption that the Catholic church's chief strategy for maintaining some control over the world is to adjust to everything without conceding the tiniest element of principle, the author considers the Catholic Action movement (historically and contemporaneously) as a clear instance of the church's ability to concentrate decision-making at the top of the organization whilst appearing to allow laymen control over a lay movement. The imposition of ever more central control over Catholic Action, the movement's efficient recruitment organization and its ideological flexibility are the main foci of the study.

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189 Potel, J.; Huot-Pleuroux, P.; Maître, J. Le clergé français. Evolution démographique, nouvelles structures de formation, images de l'opinion publique. Paris, Centurion, 1967, 268 p. A storehouse of information about the French clergy from many different points of view. The documentation is ample (especially on changes in seminary syllabi), but the interpretation does not raise thorny problems; it tends to paper over some of the cracks. 190 Poulat, E. „Le Catholicisme français et son personnel dirigeant", Archives de Sociologie des Religions 19(janv-juin 1965): 117-124. A sophisticated analysis of the demographic characteristics of French bishops in the past 60 years. It stresses the trend towards a greater degree of collegiality in the exercise of authority, the broad social base for episcopal recruitment, the advent of consultation as a normal process in decision-making and the increased likelihood of public controversy about the decisions made (see also Sutter [210]). 191 Rémy, J. „Lesïnstitutions ecclésiastiques en civilisation urbaine et industrielle", Social Compass 13 (1, 1966): 39-52. This article examines only factors external to the Catholic church which exercise influence over its organization and functions in industrial society. The factors include the separation of residence and work-place, the influence of the mass media, competition with other social agencies and the general loss of a sense of the sacred. The full implication of these factors still needs to be more fully calculated. 192 Richardson, J.T. 'Causes and consequences of the Jesus movement in the U.S.', in Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse. The contemporary metamorphosis of religion? Actes de la XII e Conférence, The Hague, 1973. A review of literature on many forms of the new religious movements in the U.S.A. The author applies Smelser's structural strain model of collective behaviour to the proliferation of farm communes in the Jesus movement. 193 Rinvolucri, M. Anatomy of a church: Greek Orthodoxy today. London, Burns & Oates, 1966, 192 p. This is one of the few recent attempts to analyse the Greek Orthodox Church in social terms — not strictly sociological. It describes the role of the priest and monk in both village and town and examines the contribution made by bishops and lay intellectuals to solving problems of social change. 194 Robbins, T.; Anthony, D. 'Getting straight with Meher Baba: A study of mysticism, drug rehabilitation and postadolescent role conflict', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (2, 1972): 122-140. American devotees of the Indian mystic, Meher Baba, are analysed in terms

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Bibliography of their desire to drop out from social institutions embodying instrumental rationality to the highest degree. The cult is said to offer the opportunity for 'loving' relationships in a world that no longer allows for such expressive needs. It also helps refugees from the drugs 'scene' to be gradually rehabilitated into normal work roles and social relationships. Roberts, B. 'Protestant groups and coping with urban life in Guatemala City \ American Journal of Sociology 73 (6, May 1968): 753-767. An estimated 20% of the residents of Guatemala City are said to be affiliated with Protestant groups (mainly Pentecostal). Their affiliation does not lead directly to improvements in their economic situation, but it does offer some measure of security through the provision of a network of religious relationships in place of kin or business relations. There is a sharp contrast between the structure and functions of Protestant and Catholic groups. Robertson, R. 'The Salvation Army: The persistence of sectarianism', in Wilson, B.R., edPatterns of sectarianism. London, Heinemann, 1967: 49-105. A long analysis of the social composition and organization of the British branch of the Salvation Army. Its militant organizational style is said to be one factor in accounting for the movement's resistance to the denominationalizing process which affects most conversion-oriented groups. Rogerson, A.T. Millions now living will never die: A study of Jehovah's Witnesses. London, Constable, 1969, 216 p. This is probably the best general account of the historical origins and development of the Watch Tower movement. The amount of sociological analysis is minimal, but the description of doctrines and practices is very reliable. Ross, J.C. 'The establishment process in a middle-class sect', Social Compass 16(4, 1969): 500-507. The process whereby an informal group of Quakers in an American university developed into a formal organization is presented in considerable detail. It stresses the importance of the formal organizational context of the university in determining an equally formal response on the part of the Quakers whose ideology specifically militated against such a process. Rymph, R.C.; Hadden, J.K. 'The persistence of regionalism in racial attitudes of Methodist clergy', Social Forces 49 (1, 1970): 41-50. An examination of southern ministers' attitudes towards civil rights questions showed that they have not changed significantly since 1939. This is explained partly in terms of the structural inducements for liberal ministers to migrate to the North and for the illiberal to migrate to the South. Schreuder, O. 'The parish priest as a subject of criticism', Social Compass 8(2, 1961): 111-126.

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Changing sources of criticism of priests is taken in this article as an indicator of changes in the structure and needs of the Catholic Church's organizations. The fact that the priest is obliged to accentuate his so-called sub-roles evinces the growing social heterogeneity of the church's membership. Seguy, J . Les conflits du dialogue. Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1973, 116 p. A novel interpretation of ecumenism as a recurrent theme of protest within all Christian groups. But this phenomenon is clearly distinguished from the ecumenism of the large, bureaucratic inter-faith machines whose main aim seems to be to negotiate terms for peaceful competition between churches. 'Genuine' ecumenism is denied a voice in mainstream churches. This little book throws a stimulating and controversial light on an illresearched topic. Singer, M. 'The Radha-Krishna bhajans of Madras City', History of Religions 2(1963): 183-226. An anthropological study of emerging forms of 'congregational' worship among urban Hindus. Sklare, M. Conservative Judaism: An American religious movement. Glencoe, 111., The Free Press, 1955, 298 p. A model sociological analysis of the adaptations made by immigrant Jews during the later stages of their period of settlement in the U.S.A. It explains the inappropriateness of Orthodoxy to the new situation outside the ghetto, the limited appeal of Reform Judaism and the social roots of Conservatism. The new-found importance of the synagogue, the emergence of Congregationalism and the concomitant changes in rabbis' roles are related to changes in the social context of Conservatism. In some respects the book is now out of date, but the value of the sociological analysis of the roots of Conservatism remains unimpaired. Sklare, M. 'Church and laity among Jews', in Knudten, R.D., ed., The sociology of religion: An anthology. New York, Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1967: 270-280. (First published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 332 (November 1960): 60-70). The changing roles of rabbis are related to changes in the social composition and position of Jews in contemporary America. The synagogue is analysed as the new centre of Jewish community life, thereby creating an unwanted distinction between 'clergy' and 'laity'. Smith, J.O.; Sjoberg, G. 'Origins and career patterns of leading Protestant clergymen', Social Forces 39 (May 1961): 290-296. A random sample of clergymen listed in Who's Who in America? was examined for their career pattern and social background. The study showed that the sample was drawn mainly from middle-class homes in the North, South or Midwest. Elitist forms of education and marriage with women from equally middle-class backgrounds were both common.

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206 Smith, T.L. Called unto holiness: The story of the Nazarenes, the formative years. Kansas City, Nazarene Publishing House, 1962, 413 p. The doctrinal and organizational development of the Nazarenes was not characteristic of a sectarian rebellion. In fact, the author emphasizes this group's early accomodation to some of the outward signs of American church-like traditions. The analysis of styles of leadership is very subtle, and the discussion of the inadequacy of the church-sect theoretical tradition is illuminating. 207 Steeman, T.S. 'The underground church: The forms and dynamics of change in contemporary Catholicism', in Cutler, D.R., ed., The world yearbook of religion: The religions situation, vol. 2. London, Evans Brothers, 1970: 713-748. The community is said to be by-passing the parish as the modern focus of interest in Christianity and thereby causing a deep crisis in authority and organizational structure. This is illustrated by reference to the social roots of pressures for reform of the Catholic church. 208 Stewart, J.H. 'The changing role of the Catholic priest and his ministry in an inner city context: A study in role change', Sociological Analysis 30 (2, 1969): 81-90. Interviews with a small number of American city priests showed that they regard 'service' as their key function, that they consider formal ecclesiastical structures as an impediment to their work and that the nascent priests' organizations are a help in effecting necessary changes in the priestly conditions of work. 209 Struzzo, J.A. 'Professionalism and the resolution of authority conflicts among the Catholic clergy', Sociological Analysis 31 (2, 1970): 92-106. Evidence from a questionnaire study of Catholic diocesan priests in Washington D.C. showed that high levels of professional attitudes of priests towards their tasks were associated with a readiness to bypass traditional norms in solving authority conflicts within the church. The 'professional' priest tends to choose normative reference-groups among fellow-priests and in the notion of the 'profession' itself. 210 Sutter, J. „Analyse organigrammatique de l'Eglise de France", Archives de Sociologie des Religions 31 (1971): 99-149 (Part I). This is the most systematic attempt to present an organizational analysis of changes that have taken place in French Catholicism since the disestablishment of 1905. Following the example of Poulat [190], the author stresses the importance of an emergent sense of collective interests among the bishops. This has led to the proliferation of episcopal and apostolic agencies for the control of activities which might have threatened to achieve autonomy from hierarchical authority. This article (and the promised sequel) is one of the most informative contributions to

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the sociological knowledge of Catholic religious organizations. Takayama, K.P. 'Centralization of administrative structures in Protestant denominations'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Chicago, October 1971, mimeo., 30 p. This piece of research vindicates the practice of testing taken-for-granted knowledge. It shows that the widely presumed relation between large denominational size and a high degree of organizational centralization does not actually exist; large denominations tend to be geographically dispersed over many congregations and to be controlled by regional agencies rather than central organs. It also shows that, contrary to many expectations, denominations with congregational-type polity tend to have highly centralized organizations.

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Takayama, K.P. 'Results of administrative rationalization in Protestant denominations'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Boston, October 1972, mimeo., 42 p. + tables. This study of 29 denominations in the U.S.A. showed that bureaucratization follows from certain organizational conditions rather than from a religious group's ideology or chosen policy. The general implications of bureaucratization as rationalization are examined for American religion.

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Tambiah, S.J. 'The persistence and transformation of tradition in S.E. Asia, with special reference to Thailand', Daedalus 102 (1, 1973): 30-84. In order to show that Max Weber's inductions from Buddhist texts about the otherworldliness of monks were misiaken, the author underlines the variety in the relation between politics and the Sangha in S.E. Asia. Thus, Ceylon and Burma are very different in this respect from Thailand for largely historical reasons. But he points out that the centralized, military regime in Thailand has now begun to mobilize monks for its own political purposes by manipulating traditional Buddhist symbols.

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Taylor, R.W. 'Missionary societies and the development of forms of association in India', in Robertson, D.B., ed., Voluntary associations: A study of groups in free societies. Essays in honor of James Luther Adams. Richmond, V a „ John Knox Press, 1966: 189-206.

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It is argued that there are grounds in the similarity between Hindu and Christian ethics for the possibility that Indian forms of voluntary association might come to resemble the types of association imported by Christian missionaries. The argument is supported by a mass of evidence from case studies of western influence on Indian social patterns. Thompson, K.A. Bureaucracy and church reform: The organizational response of the Church of England to social change 1800-1965. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970, XXIII - 264 p. This is the first systematically sociological analysis of the changes that have

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occurred since 1800 in the Anglican Church's organizational structure. It emphasizes the clash between the instrumental rationality of proposed measures for increasing the church's efficiency in administration and the substantive rationality of the church's traditional goals and values. The solution to this problem was a complex division of powers within the Church Assembly, but this in turn caused difficulties of co-ordination. The compromise between out-and-out bureaucracy and complete traditionalism has been the cause of considerable conflict, but it has also ensured that the church has maintained its theoretical inclusiveness in English society. 216 Towler, R. 'The social status of the Anglican minister', in Robertson, R., ed., The sociology of religion. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1969: 443-450. Evidence of ministerial shrinkage, loss of social status and role uncertainty is interpreted as proof that the contemporary ministry is hardly a profession with distinctive competences. Three possible solutions are briefly reviewed. 217 Turner, B.S. 'Institutional persistence and ecumenicalism in northern Methodism', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 2. London, S.C.M. Press, 1969: 47-57. A survey of 600 Methodists in Northern England revealed their deep-rooted aversion to certain aspects of ecumenicalism. This is explained in terms of the strong familial and geographical links between Methodists and their local congregations. Wesleyans were found to be least averse to ecumenicalism and 'low' Methodists most strongly averse. 218 Vallier, I. 'Church, society and labour resources: An inter-denominational comparison', American Journal of Sociology 68 (1, 1962): 21-33. A comparative study of mainstream Mormons and schismatic Reorganites underlines the importance of environmental factors in conditioning a religious group's organization and missionary structure. The sharply contrasting forms of organization within two groups holding very similar doctrines are explained in terms of the differences between their respective strengths in the local communities where they settled between 1855 and 1880. 219 Vallier, I. 'Roman Catholicism and social change in Latin America', Abstract of a paper delivered to the 58th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Los Angeles, August 1963. Reprinted in Social Compass 10(6, 1963): 541. Data from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru are interpreted to imply that the Catholic Church is adopting sect-like responses to its environment in order to 're-establish religion on a communal basis in the working and lower classes'. The argument is that the church is abandoning its 'hierarchical, priestly, passive emphasis'.

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Vallier, I. 'Religious elites in Latin America: Catholicism, leadership and social change'. America Latina: 93-115. The historical context within which the Catholic religion was implanted in Latin America is said to account for the church's subsequent difficulties in establishing autonomy from secular authorities. New interest groups are undermining the old power structure (of which the church elite was an integral part) by promulgating new values, sponsoring trans-local movements and stimulating international consciousness of Latin American problems. 221 Vallier, I. Catholicism, social control and modernization in Latin-America. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1970, X - 172 p. A systematic examination of the potential for social control held by the Roman Catholic Church in Latin-American countries. The potential is shown to vary with the type of relations that the church has had with civic and political powers. The author also studies the church's new; strategies for adapting to rapid social change in different institutional areas. 222 De Vaucelles, L. „La dynamique du processus décisionnel dans l'église Catholique. Etude des facteurs fondamentaux à la lumière des solutions concernant la rémunération du personnel écclésiastique'. Rapport présenté au IX e Congrès Mondial de Science Politique, Montreal, 1973, 27 p. An analysis of the old and new systems and rates of payment for the clergy in France with some incidental and insightful remarks on the decisionmaking process in the French Catholic Church. 223 Vié, E. „Le mécanisme de la prise de décision dans l'église Anglicane, avec l'accent mis sur la rémunération du clergé'. Rapport présenté au IX e Congrès Mondial de Science Politique, Montreal, 1973, 10 p. The history of Anglican treasury arrangements and the statistics of clerical payments are set in the organizational context of changes in the church's type of polity. The author looks ahead to impending conflicts in the new forms of synodal government following the decision to implement universal payment norms. 224 Vosper, C. The mind benders. London, Neville Spearman, 1971, 190 p. This is one of the rare 'insider's' accounts of life in the Church of Scientology. It lacks a sociological perspective but is particularly useful in describing the group's internal control mechanisms and punishments. 225 Walker, A.; Atherton, J. 'An Easter Pentecostal convention: The successful management of a "time of blessing" ', Sociological Review 19 (3, 1971): 367-387. A study by participant observation of the mechanisms of social control that served to direct Pentecostal activity along lines approved by the conveners of a weekend convention in the north of England. 226 Wallis, R. 'A comparative analysis of problems and processes of change in two manipulationist movements: Christian Science and Scientology', in

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227

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Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse. The contemporary metamorphis of religion? Actes de la XII e Conférence, The Hague, 1973; 407-422. The transition from a loose to a tight organizational structure is examined in relation to three main problems: Ideological precariousness, authority and commitment. The range of attempted solutions is similar for both groups and includes transcendentalizing the ideology, legitimizing the exercise of central authority, formalization, standardization, undermining alternative commitments, etc. This approach could easily be adapted to studies of groups outside the 'manipulationist' category. Warburton, T.R. 'Organization and change in a British Holiness movement', in Wilson, B.R., ed., Patterns of sectarianism. London, Heinemann, 1967: 106-137. The history of the Emmanuel Holiness Church in Britain shows that it cannot be usefully categorized as either a sect or a denomination. The process of formalization that it underwent in the 1930s is explained largely in terms of response to external social changes and exigencies. The author prefers the term 'missionary agency'. These findings are consonant with those of T.L. Smith [206], Ward, C.K. Priests and people. Liverpool, University of Liverpool Press, 1961, X I - 182 p. One of the first sociographic and sociological studies of life in an English Catholic parish. It examines most aspects of parish life from the point of view of both laity and priests but has relatively little to say about the conflictual relations between them. The conclusions contrast strongly with more recent views of the parish unit, e.g., Kokosalakis [150] and Golomb [264], Watanabe, E. 'Rissho Kosei-Kai: A sociological observation of its members, their conversion and their activities', Contemporary Religions in Japan 9 (1-2, 1968): 75-151. An examination of the history, social composition and organization of one of the largest so-called new religions of Japan. Data from interviews with members are interpreted to highlight motives for joining and factors that bring about changes in the pattern of those motives. Westhues, K. 'The established church as an agent of change', Sociological Analysis 3 4 ( 2 , 1973): 106-123. Observation of changes occurring recently in the Roman Catholic Church in Paraguay convinced the author that, under specifiable conditions, an established church may be innovative in general humanistic terms. Vatican II stimulated changes in Latin-American churches, and a series of crystallizing events have subsequently added to the momentum of reform among the bishops. This thesis presents an interesting alternative to the

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idea of 'revolution by tradition' proposed for the Anglican Church by M. Hill [133], White, J.R. The Sokagakkai and mass society. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1970. Mass society theories provide the interpretive framework for this detailed study of the largest and most militant of the new religions of Japan. It is an extremely thorough examination of all aspects of the new movement and of its members. White, Jr., O.K. 'Constituting norms and the formal organization of American churches', Sociological Analysis 33 (2, 1972): 95-109. On the assumption that constituting norms in the wider society define the appropriate structures for certain kinds of organization, the author examined American denominations for evidence of the influence of cultural blueprints. The following norms were said to have strongly influenced church organizations: Democracy, church/state separateness, pluralism, voluntarism and individualism. White, T. A people for His name. New York, Vantage Press, 1967, 418 p. This is one of the most informative and reliable accounts of the evolution of doctrine in the Watch Tower movement. It is particularly impressive in its treatment of changing symbolic emphases during the movement's formative years. Whitworth, J. McK. 'The Bruderhof in England: A chapter in the history of a Utopian sect', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 4. London. S.C.M. Press, 1971: 84-101. A very clear illustration of the 'strategic ambiguity' in Utopian sects that. allows them to fluctuate between the advocacy of isolation and evangelism. Details of the history of the Bruderhof are welded into a coherent set of theoretical propositions about the properties of Utopian sects in general. Wilken, P.H. 'Size of organizations and member participation in church congregations\ Administrative Science Quarterly 1 6 ( 2 , 1971): 173-179. In order to test the widespread assumption that size in church membership was negatively related to the strength of member commitment, the author examined a range of other factors that might influence the relation in a sample of American Lutheran Church members in South Dakota. The findings upheld the basic assumption but also showed that the age structure of a congregation is equally important in conditioning member commitment rates. The findings are interpreted in terms of the difficulties of communication in large congregations and large donominations. Wilson, B.R. „Apparition et persistence des sectes dans un milieu social en evolution', Archives de Sociologie des Religions 5 (1958): 140-150. Using the example of the Christadelphians, the author demonstrates the

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importance of studying sects in their social context. This involves not only explaining their dynamics in relation to 'external' events but also accounting for the changing fortunes of different types of sect in terms of changes in social conditions. 237 Wilson, B.R. 'The Pentecostalist minister: Role conflicts and status contradictions', American Journal of Sociology 64 (5, 1959): 494-504. The Pentecostal minister's interstitial position between a crystallizing national leadership and the stolidly autonomous local congregation creates strains which are aggravated by the lack of public legitimacy for his position. This highlights the strange contrast within Pentecostalism between the looseness of organization at the grass-roots and the tightness at the top levels. This is a model study of role relations in an organizational context. 238 Wilson, B.R. Sects and society. London, Heinemann, 1961, X - 397 p. This is still the most comprehensive study of religious sects from a sociological perspective. It describes the history, social composition, teachings and organization of Christian Science, The Elim Foursquare Gospel Church and the Christadelphians. The explanatory framework is broadly functionalist, with an emphasis on the compensatory potential of religious sects among the variety of deprived groups in British society. 239 Wilson, B.R., ed., Patterns of sectarianism. London, Heinemann, 1967, VII - 4 1 6 p. A collection of essays on the general, but implicit, theme of the relation between sectarian ideology and organization. The contributions, grouped roughly according to the typology of sects that the editor sets out in the leading article, cover most of the major British sectarian groups. They convey a wealth of previously unknown or undivulged information, but some are rather short on analysis. 240 Wilson, B.R. 'The Exclusive Brethren: A case study in the evolution of a sectarian ideology', Patterns of sectarianism. London, Heinemann, 1967: 287-337. The history of the Exclusives' schism is interpreted in terms of the operation of various strategies and mechanisms by which competing systems of leadership could struggle for ascendancy. The theory of congregational autonomy is clearly shown to be denied by the practical imposition of a series of autocratic leaders. This group is held to represent the most clearcut disproof of the universal applicability of Niebuhr's sect-to-denomination thesis. 241 Wilson, B.R. Religious sects. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970, 256 p. The author's celebrated seven-fold typology of religious sects is elegantly illustrated by material from Christian and non-Christian religions in a systematic fashion. Whilst probably designed for the general reader, the book contains much of interest for the specialist.

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242 Wilson, B.R. Magic and the millennium: A sociological study of religious movements of protest among tribal and Third-World peoples. London, Heinemann, 1973, XI - 547 p. The full explanatory potential of the author's typology of sects is realized in this massive study of patterns in the rejection of orthodox or dominant religious traditions among non-industrial societies. It examines in great detail the importance of thaumaturgy and millennialism as the two most common responses to problems of theodicy. Introversion and rationalization are treated as the alternative outcomes to the process whereby time transforms protest movements into collective phenomena of a different kind. 243 Wilson, J. 'The relation between ideology and organization in a small religious group: The British Israelites', Review of Religious Research 10(1, 1968): 51 ff. The British Israelites are shown to fall mid-way between a sect and a cult in terms of both ideology and organization. Their position is closest to M.R.A. and can be included under Wach's category of 'collegium pietatis'. The analysis is interesting for the way in which it treats the classic typologies as heuristic devices — not as fixed shibboleths. 244 Winter, G. The suburban captivity of the churches. Garden City, New Jersey, Doubleday & Co., 1961, 216 p. A now-famous exposé of the moral and prophetic weakness of American churches which have become completely accommodated to the value system of middle-class suburbs. It has some incidental sociological relevance but lacks conceptual rigour in its use of such terms as 'sect' and '.denomination'. 245 Winter, G. Religious identity. New York, Macmillan, 1968, IX - 143 p. Taking a broad definition of 'organization' this study presents a compact, but well-documented, analysis of the dominant forms of organization in contemporary Protestantism. Catholicism and Judaism in the U.S.A. The analysis itself is creative, but the access that it allows to little-known monographs on particular religious groups is probably even more useful. The arguments are admirably clear and amply supported by empirical evidence. 246 Wood, J.R. 'Authority and controversial policy: The churches and civil rights', American Sociological Review 35 (6, 1970): 1057-1069. The hypothesis that the ability of church leaders to carry through controversial policies is dependent on the degree of authority given to them by the church's formal authority structure was confirmed in a study of 28 American religious groups. Ministers were shown to be in the weakest position when their congregations had the power to hire and fire them without reference to higher bodies. Tlje findings also indicate

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Bibliography incidentally that membership apathy is transformed into solidary activity when civil rights issues are discussed in churches. Wood, J.R. 'Unanticipated consequences of organizational coalitions: Ecumenical co-operation and civil rights policy', Social Forces 50 (4, 1972): 512-521. The involvement of some American churches in the National Council of Churches in Christ is shown to have produced unanticipated and unacceptable consequences in their apparent endorsement of civil rights programmes that were actually inconsistent with their own policies. The effects of such a situation include loss of members in southern areas, decline in donations and the formation of anti-integration church groupings. The analysis highlights the importance of the disproportionately large representation.of liberals on N.C.C.C. boards and of the financial dominance of a few major churches over policy-making. Wood, J.R. 'Personal commitment and organizational constraint: Church officials and racial integration', Sociological Analysis 33 (3, 1972): 142151. The ability of organizations to resist forces that threaten their stability or survival is shown to depend on two things: The ideological insulation of the elite from forces seeking alternative policies and their structural insulation from the forces of resistance to their policies. But it is not sufficient to assume that hierarchical organizations afford better insulation for their elite than congregation-type polities: What is crucial is the role of non-hierarchical agencies within both types of polity. Wood, J.R.; Zald, M.N. 'Aspects of racial integration in the Methodist Church: Sources of resistance to organizational policy', Social Forces 45 (2,1966): 255-265. Evidence on the resistance of Methodists in the southern U.S.A. to the national church's policies of racial integration is used to make the point that strongly organized bodies can resist such forces of disruption. But the ministers of congregations in the South are under severe pressure to conform with local norms in defiance of national directives. Wright, B. 'The sect that became an order: The Order of Ethiopia', in A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain, vol. 5. London, S.C.M. Press, 1972: 60-71. Smelser's model of structural strain is employed to explain the process of schism within the Methodist Church in South Africa that resulted in the formation of a separate Order of Ethiopia under the auspices of the Anglican communion. This unusual development points to the need to be more flexible in thinking of the terms 'sect' and 'church'. Zahn, G.C. Chaplains in the R.A.F.: A study in role tension. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1969, 310 p.

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Despite the R.A.F.'s eventual withdrawal of co-operation with the author's study by interview of a sample of military chaplains, the findings from the completed part of the research constitute a refinement of previous work in this area. Like Burchard [77] the author found that the chaplain's mechanisms for avoiding the worst effects of role-tension were two-fold: Rationalization and compartmentalization. For present purposes it is unfortunate that the extent of purely organizational analysis is limited, but there are some clear indications of the importance of a military environment in conditioning the role-perception and -performance of the chaplains. Zald, M.N. Organizational change: The political economy of the Y.M.C.A. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970. A history and sociological analysis of the organizational transformations that have permitted the Y.M.C.A. in America to adapt to its changing social environment. The 'political economy' approach of this book is admirably suited to the subject and could be easily and profitably adapted for use in studying more obviously religious organizations. Zald, M.N.; Denton, P. 'From Evangelism to general service: On the transformation of the Y.M.C.A.', Administrative Science Quarterly 8 (June 1963): 214-234. The Y.M.C.A. is shown to have adapted itself to changes in its social environment and to have survived a testing period of its existence. This is explained in terms of transformation of its evangelical goals into those of a general service orientation, control over local groups by lay trustees and the prevention of an awareness of collective interests among its professional secretaries. In this way the worst drawbacks of an enrollment economy have been avoided, and flexibility has not been gained at the expense of distinctiveness. This is a model for the application of a 'political economy' approach to social organizations and has great explanatory value for studies of religious organizations. Zygmunt, J.F. 'Prophetic failure and chiliastic identity: The case of Jehovah's Witnesses', American Journal of Sociology 7 5 ( 6 , 1970): 926948. This is a sophisticated and well-documented analysis of institutionalized solutions to the problem of maintaining members' fervour in the face of evident prophetic failure. The author reviews the variety of ideological and organizational mechanisms that help to sustain member commitment and to bolster organizational stability.

Bibliography

158 RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION - FORMAL 255

256

Benson, J.K.; Dorsett, J. 'Towards a theory of religious organizations', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 10 (2, Summer 1971): 138151. A rare attempt to apply an open-systems approach to the explanation of the dynamics of religious organizations. The effect of structural incompatibilities, external pressures and external exposure is systematically assessed on four dimensions of a religious organization's internal structure: Bureaucratization, professionalization, integration and secularization. Explicit hypotheses link these four dimensions in various patterns which are used to indicate probable directions of organizational development. The pioneering value of this study is only spoilt by the choice of dimensions of organization which are highly problematic and which may not be the most useful ways of conceiving of organization.

Berger, P.L. 'The sociological study of sectarianism', Social Research 21 (Winter 1954): 467-485. Taking illustrations from American religious groups the author demonstrates the usefulness of distinguishing between (a) church and sect in terms of the ecological location of the spirit and (b) types of sect in terms of 'religious motifs' or patterns of typical religious experiences. This approach has continued to hold some attraction for sociologists, but nobody has tried seriously to apply it in empirical research. 257 Bjatt, G.S. 'Brahma Samaj, Arya Samaj and the church-sect typology', Review of Religious Research 1 0 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 23-32. A brave attempt to throw light on the dynamics of nineteenth century Hindu reform movements by using the concepts of church and sect as they were employed in the Christian tradition. It is doubtful whether the use of this device helps to convey the historical and sociological material any more easily; the same points could be made more parsimoniously by using concepts better adapted to this particular field. 258 Brannon, R. 'Organizational vulnerability in modern religious organizations', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1 0 ( 1 , 1971): 27-32. The general contentious thesis is that local churches have no autonomous power but merely act as a rubber-stamp for local interests. The explanation is in terms of the need to preserve homogeneity and harmony among the congregations if they are to provide the necessary financial resources for the churches. The structural location of lay leaders and clergy alike weakens their potential to exercise more than individual influence in local affairs. 259 Coleman, J.A. 'Church-sect typology and organizational precariousness', Sociological Analysis 29 (2, Summer 1968): 55-66. The author claims that the 'heuristic intent' of Max Weber's distinction

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260

261

262

263

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between church-type and sect-type was to account for their differential susceptibility to organizational instability. He rejects attempts to salvage the usefulness of the distinction on any other grounds and insists that a return to the allegedly .original rationale for the scheme will reap substantive benefits in accounting for modern religious phenomena. Dent, O. 'Church-sect typologies in the description of religious groups', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 6 ( 1 , 1970): 10-27. A useful review of problems in type formation, including some comparisons with similar problems encountered by psychologists. The tradition of church-sect typologizing is said to have passed through five phases — concluding with 'rejection'. It is felt that the typology may, however, still be useful if factor-analytical methods can be adapted to the task of enumerating the relations of interdependence between components of religious organization. Dittes, J.E. 'Typing and typologies: Some parallels in the career of churchsect and extrinsic-mstrinsic',/oMr«a/ for the Scientific Study of Religion 10(4, 1971): 375-383. An original piece of reflection on the value-judgments that underlie both sorts of typology, i.e., the superiority of primitive over complex religion. The typologies of Troeltsch and Allport are also justly criticized for 'formal untidiness' in their use of multiple criteria, shifting emphases and careless correlations. This is one of the few serious analyses of the classic typologies that does not proceed to present a biassed version of them for the author's own immediate purposes. Eister, A.W. 'Towards a radical critique of church-sect typologising', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 6 ( 1 , 1967): 85-90 An admirably clear and penetrating criticism of conventional usages of the church-sect typology and a sensible suggestion for breaking down the complex types into their component dimensions for the purposes of more meaningful empirical research. Eister, A.W. 'An outline of a structural theory of cults', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (4, 1972): 319-333. An extended account of the rise of new cults in terms of culture crises which betoken disturbance of the '.communicational and orientational institutions of society'. There are some brief comments on the organizational implications of the new symbols and meanings that cults convey. Golomb, E. 'Model theoretical considerations on the organization of urban pastoral work', Social Compass 10 (4-5,1963): 357-375. Strictly speaking, this is a non-sociological exercise in the design of appropriate pastoral structures for modern industrial societies, but the argument throws some interesting light on the problems of adapting church

160

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266

267

268

269

Bibliography organization to contemporary social structures. Gustafson, P. 'UO-US-PS-PO: A re-statement of Troeltsch's church-sect typology', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 6 (Spring 1967): 64-68. A dogmatic assertion that Troeltsch's distinction between churches and sects was based on two dichotomous attributes: (a) A universalistic vs. particularistic thrust in mission and (b) objective vs. subjective means of attaining Grace. It is suggested that a return to this underlying rationale will facilitate understanding of organizational dynamics in Christian groups. Gustafson, P. 'Church and sect or church and ascetic Protestantism: Ernst Troeltsch's problem', Sociological Focus 2 (1, 1968): 3-9. This is a re-statement of the author's arguments in [265] but with an added emphasis on Troeltsch's alleged manoeuvres to make his conceptual scheme fit the context of post-Reformation religion. It is claimed that the following categories are illicitly smuggled into the basic typology of The social teachings: The Free Church, Ascetic Protestantism and aggressive or nonaggressive sects. Hinings, C.R.; Foster, B.D. 'The organization structure of churches: A preliminary model',Sociology 7 ( 1 , 1973): 93-106. A pioneering exercise in specifying the relevant contextual and structural dimensions of a model of church organization. The usefulness of the approach is plausibly justified in formal terms, but its value in explaining substantive matters awaits further clarification. Johnson, B. 'A critical appraisal of church-sect typology', American Sociological Review 22 (1957): 88-92. It argues that the church-sect conceptual tradition has been too narrowly restricted to questions of organizational development. It is proposed that a better orientation would be towards the forms of 'justification' for membership employed in different types of religious group, i.e., liturgical ritual in the church-type and ethical behaviour in the sect-type. The conclusion is that the growth of sects in times of rapid social change is not evidence that they reject all social values but that they represent attempts at formulating new value-orientations. Johnson, B. 'On church and sect', American Sociology Review 28 (August 1963): 539-549. This is one of the earliest extended critiques of Troeltsch's approach to the question of typologies of religious organizations. It argues that serious methodological faults in the original formulation make it inapplicable in the study of contemporary religious groups. Instead, the author proposes distinguishing between church and sect in terms of whether they accept or reject the social environment in which they operate.

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270 Johnson, B. 'Church and sect revisited', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 10(2, 1971): 124-137. Largely a re-statement of the author's earlier position on the advisability of distinguishing between churches and sects in terms of their acceptance/ rejection of their social environment. But an interesting addition to the argument was the idea that sects (contrary to common assumptions) can influence and change their environment in the same way as churches do. 271 Kanter, R.M. 'Commitment and social organization: A study of commitment mechanisms in Utopian communities', American Sociological Review 33 (4, 1968): 499-517. A sophisticated breakdown of the notion of commitment into the constituent problem-areas of continuance, cohesion and control. The usefulness of this scheme was tested in a sample of 91 Utopian communities in the U.S.A. between 1780 and 1860. It showed that communities dealt with the various dimensions of commitment in characteristic ways which in turn, conditioned the type of problems that they faced. 272 Millett, D. 'A typology of religious organizations suggested by the Canadian " census', Sociological Analysis 30 (2, 1969): 108-119. In an attempt to devise concepts that would help to differentiate between the variety of church-type groups to which Canadians profess affiliation in their annual census, the author had recourse to Mehl's [26] idea of the minority church. Further refinements included the classification of nonChristian religions and non-religious bodies. It is shown how these conceptual refinements could improve the sociologist's analytical apparatus. 273 Scalf, J.H.; Miller, M.J.; Thomas, C.W. 'Goal specificity, organizational structure, and participant commitment in churches', Sociological Analysis 34(3, 1973): 169-184. Dissatisfaction with the tradition of church-sect theorizing encouraged the authors to devise a conceptual model for the organization analysis of religious groups as an alternative. A distinction between formal and communal groups is used as the basis for a number of interlocking, testable propositions about the relations between organizational structure and participant commitment. The findings from a study of Baptist churches confirmed the general hypothesis about the independent effects of goalspecificity and bureaucracy on members' type of belief and mode of commitment to the organization. The general approach of this study represent a major step forwards in the systematic sociological understanding of religious organization. 274 Scanzoni, J. 'Innovation and consistency in the church-sect typology', American Journal of Sociology 71 (3, 1965): 320-327. A survey of married clergy confirmed the usefulness of distinguishing between church and sect in terms of individuals' acceptance or rejection of

162

Bibliography

the socio-cultural environment. The distinction was based on four indicators: Theology, membership principle, attitudes towards social patterns and orientation towards science. According to the author the data fell naturally into two distinct groups, thereby confirming the initial assumptions. But this study completely ignores the problems of translating data on individual responses into propositions about collectivities. 275 Scherer, R.P. 'The church as a formal voluntary association', in Smith, D.H., ed., Voluntary action research. Lexington, Mass., Heath/Lexington, 1972: 81-108. A potentially fruitful approach to the sociological understanding of religious organizations emerges from this article which reviews critically attempts to apply the church-sect conceptual scheme to modern religious groups. It proposes that research into religion should begin from assumptions and insights taken from general organization theory. This is achieved in outline by describing church organizational structures under the following 'system tasks' headings: Adaptation, internal differentiation, cohesion and replenishment. This scheme also allows the author to situate religious organizations in a wider social context and to predict some new directions in their structures. This approach could certainly be refined and profitably applied on a much larger scale to religious organization in general. 276 Snook, J.B. 'Patterns of authority in unconventional religious groups'. Paper presented to the 12th International Conference for the Sociology of Religion, The Hague, 1973, mimeo., 15 p. The principal thesis of the paper is that the meaning of terms like 'sect' and 'church' must be dependent on the socio-cultural context in which they are being applied. Today, these terms refer principally to different styles of organization; it is therefore necessary to devise other terms for referring to differences in content of belief, etc. The author proposes that four dimensions of authority should function as the main criteria of conventionality/unconventionality (symbolic, structural, intensity, pervasiveness). New religious movements in the contemporary U.S.A. are then characterized by their high degrees of intensity and pervasiveness independently of the symbols and structures which have lost their authority. 277 Sommerfeld, R. 'Conceptions of the ultimate and the social organization of religious bodies', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7 (2, 1968): 178-196. In attempting to construct empirical types of religious bodies, the author perceived three main clusters of doctrinal, organizational and behavioural characteristics: (a) Familial, (b) democratic, (c) dominical. Extensive evidence is adduced to show that there are patterned variations in the way that religious groups typically arrange the diverse aspects of their total structures. But the author has selected only confirmatory evidence and has

Religious Organization

278

279

280

281

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Formal

163

not really subjected the 'implied theory of organized religion in the U.S.A.' (p. 195) to stringent empirical tests. It remains, therefore, an interesting alternative to the church-sect tradition, but it contains some of that tradition's methodological difficulties. Thompson, K.A. 'Religious organizations', in McKinley, J., ed., Processing people: Case studies in organizational behaviour. New York, Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1974. After a good review of the major contributions to the literature on religious organizations in Christianity, the author proposes that sociologists should devote more attention to the cultural and symbolic aspects of organizations. He supports the argument with insightful glimpses into Anglican organization. It concludes with some valid criticism of Etzioni's approach to understanding organizations. Wach, J. Types of religious experience: Christian and non-Christian. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951, XVI - 275 p. Chapter 9, 'Church, denomination and sect', reflects on the contemporary revival of interest in forms of religious organization. It proposes a threefold typology of ecclesiastical, independent and sectarian bodies, but it is clear that the criteria for the typology are mixed. The argument is interesting for the possibility that it raises that the internal organization of sects may assume a wide variety of forms. Westhues, K. 'An elaboration and test of a secularization hypothesis in terms of open-systems theory of organization', Social Forces 49 (3,1971): 460-469. Using J.D. Thompson's open-systems theory of organizational strategies for reducing uncertainties in their environment [292], the author accounts for the unexpectedly high degree of persistence in Catholic social and educational services in the U.S.A. in terms of their original function as protective sub-societies and plausibility structures. This was reflected in the finding that the amount of such provision for Catholics was highest in states where they constituted a small minority. Wilson, B.R. 'Religious organization', in Sills, D., ed., The international encyclopedia of social science, vol. 4. New York, Macmillan, 1968: 428437. This is a very wide-ranging examination of the institutionalised roles and procedures governing the relations of men with the supernatural order. The principal categories are authority, hierarchy, administration, training and bureaucratisation. Illustrations are drawn from most world religions. The bibliography, though short, is well chosen.

164

Bibliography

ORGANIZATION THEORY 282

283

284

285

286

287

Aiken, M.; Hage, J. Social change in complex organizations. New York, Random House, 1970, XVI - 170 p. A systematic review of the factors that affect the rate and implications of 'programme change' in social organizations. The principal independent variables are complexity, centralization, formalization, stratification, production, efficiency and job satisfaction. The recommended method of analysis is illustrated in application to a small number of case studies. Ash, R. Social movements in America. Chicago, Markham Publishing Co., 1972, V I I I - 2 7 4 p. A novel approach to the study of social movements which focusses on the dynamics of their underlying 'movement organizations'. This is a useful counterbalance to the more common 'structural strain' approach. The conceptual apparatus is shown at work in a large number of case-studies, drawn from six periods of history. Changes in types of social movement are associated with underlying substratum changes. Blau, P.M.; Heydebrand, W.V.; Stauffer, R.E. 'The structure of small bureaucracies', ^Imenca« Sociology Review 31 (2, April 1966): 179-191. A study of 150 public personnel agencies in North America showed that professionalization and managerial concentration were alternative organizational modes: They both facilitated co-ordination, but in very different ways. Although the article deals exclusively with secular organizations, it would be both easy and profitable to test the same range > of hypotheses in relation to religious organizations. The rationale of the hypotheses is a valuable source of comment on the problems associated with organizational growth and complexity. Bowey, A. 'Approaches to organisation theory', Social Sciences Information 11 (6, 1972): 109-128. A review of recent advances in theory of organizations with the underlying theme that some apparent incompatibilities in approaches and assumptions may in fact hide potential sources of complementarity. Child, J. 'Organizational structure, environment and performance: The role of strategic choice', Sociology 6 ( 2 , 1972): 1-22. A closely reasoned rebuttal of organizational theories that appear to accord deterministic power to factors in the contextual environment of organizations. Instead, the article proposes use of J.D. Thompson's [292] concept of the 'dominant coalition' to refer to decision-makers involved in the process of guiding 'strategic choices'. This suggestion has considerable importance for the study of religious organizations which are clearly not constrained by the norms of complete rationality. Etzioni, A. 'Two approaches to organizational analysis: A critique and a

Organization

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289

290

291

292

Theory

165

suggestion', Administrative Science Quarterly 5 (2, 1960): 257-278. A brilliant exposure of the logical errors that follow from exclusive focus on organizational goals and a constructive argument for the superiority of an approach to organizational analysis which relies on an open-systems model. The superiority is illustrated by reference to non-productive collectivities such as prisons, and it therefore has a special relevance for studies of religious groups. Etzioni, A. Modern organizations. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, PrenticeHall, 1964, VII - 120 p. It describes both classical and modern approaches to the study of organizations. Special emphasis is placed on the advance of knowledge in bureaucracy, professional roles, control and relations between organizations and their environment. Parkin, F. Middle class radicalism. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1968, 205 p. A historical and sociological analysis of the organization and social composition of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The author develops some interesting modifications of the conventional vocabulary of social movement analysis in order to accomodate the predominantly middle-class character of this particular movement. Payne, R.'Organizational climate: The concept and some research findings', London, London Graduate School of Business Studies, 1970. A report on the state of theorizing and research about the notion of organizational climate. It provides a useful summary of the ideational matrix from which the concept has subsequently evolved into an important sociological tool of anlysis. (For examples of its usefulness, see Hall and Schneider [124] and Hinings and Foster [267]). Price, J.L. 'The study of organizational effectiveness', Sociological Quarterly 13(1, 1972): 3-15. A thoughtful defence of the practice of analysing organizations in terms of their goals — providing that certain basic conditions are fulfilled. The conditions limit the analysis to the goals of the top management. Thompson. J.D. Organizations in action. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1967, IX- 192 p. A systematic exploration of the strategies adopted by organizations for coping with uncertainties in their environment under conditions of rationality. The analysis rests on a three-fold typology of technologies and their organizational concomitants. The 'open systems' approach focusses attention on the social context within which organizations operate and on the importance of 'dominant coalitions' in the decision-making process. While the book was clearly intended to deal primarily with productive

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Bibliography

organizations in the secular world, it does have many points of relevance for the study of religious organizations. 293 Zald, M.N.; Ash, R. 'Social movement organizations: Growth, decay and change', Social Forces 44 (3, March 1966): 327-341. In specific questioning of the view that social movement organizations usually evolve in a conservative direction, the authors list the external and internal factors that may inhibit such a process. They include such things as the ebb and flow of public sentiment, the social composition of the movement, competition with other movements, the inclusiveness/ exclusiveness of the membership, and the innovative disposition of the organization's elite. This study is a useful corrective to the 'metaphysical pathos' that pervades studies of organizational goal-transformation.

Author Index*

Absalom, F. 4 8 Aiken, M. 282 AUcock, J.B. 49 Allen, P.J. 50 Anthony, D. 194 D'Antonio, W.V. 87 Aquina, M. 51 Ash, R. 283, 293 Ashbrook, J.B. 52 Atherton, J. 225 Baan, M.A. 53 Bachelet, V. 54 Baerwald, F. 55 Barrett, D.A. 56 Bechert, H. 57,58 Beckford, J.A. 59, 6 0 , 6 1 Bennett, J.W. 62 Benson, J.K. 255 Berger, M 63 Berger, P.L. 64, 65, 256 Berkowitz, M.I. 1 Bhatt, G.S. 257 Bibby, R.W. 66 Blau, P.M. 284 Blizzard, S. 67 Bock, E.W. 68 Bodo, J.R. 69

Bormann, C. 70 Boulard, F. 71 Bowey, A. 285 Brannon, R. 258 Braude, L. 72 Brewer, D.L. 73 Brinkerhoff, M.B. 66 Brothers, J. 74 Bruner, E. 15 Bryman, A. 75 Buckle, R. 76 Budd, S. 8 Burch, G. 146 Burchard, W. 77 Burr, N. 2 Calley, M. 78 Campbell, C.B. 79 Campbell, E.Q. 80 Caporale, R. 81 Carlton, E. 82 Carroll, J.C. 83 Child, J. 286 Coleman, J.A. 259 Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse, 9, 10 Coxon, A.P.M. 84 Cumming, E. 85

* The numbers refer to the items in the Bibliography.

Author Index

168 Currie, R. 86 Cutler, D.R. 12, 13 Davidson, J.D. 87 De Craemer, W. 88 Deegan, A.X. 183 Deelen, G. 3 Dekkers, H. 89 Dellepoort, J. 90 Delooz, P. 91 Demerath.Ill, N.J. 9 2 , 9 3 , 9 4 Dempsey, K.C. 95 Dent, 0 . 260 Denton, P. 253 Desroches, H. 14 Dhooge, J. 96 Dittes, J.E. 261 Dobbelaere, K. 4 , 9 7 Donovan, J.D. 98 Dorsett, J. 255 Douglass, H.P. 15 Dumont, F. 99 Eister, A.W. 16, 17, 100, 262, 263 Essien-Udom, E.U. 101 Etzioni, A. 287, 288 Evers H.-D. 102 Ewer, P.A. 114 Farr, A.D. 103 Fiawoo, D.K. 104 Fichter, J.F. 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 Foster, B.D. 267 Foster, J.G. 111 Francis, E.K. 112 Gaustad, E.S. 18 Geertz, C. 19 Genet, J. 113 Gibbs, J.C. 114 Gilsenan, M.D. 115

Glasse, J.D. 116 Glock, C.Y. 20, 2 1 , 4 1 , 117 Goddijn, H.P.M. 118 Goddijn, W. 119 Gollin, G.L. 120 Golomb, E. 264 Greinacher, N. 90, 121 Gusfield, J. 122 Gustafson, J.M. 22 Gustafson, P. 265, 266 Hadden, J.K. 123, 199 Hage, J. 282 Hall, D.T. 124 Hammond, P.E. 125, 126, 127 Harrington, C. 85 Harris, C.C. 128 Harrison, P.M. 129, 130, 131 Harte, T.J. 179 Hawthorn, H.B. 132 Heydebrand, W.V. 284 Hill, M. 133, 134 Hill, R. 135 Hillery, G.A. 136 Hinings, C.R. 75, 267 Hostetler, J.A. 137 Houtart, F. 138, 139, 140, 141 Huot-Pleuroux, P. 189 Hymes, E. 142 Isichei, E.A. 143, 144 Jacobs, N. 145 Jacobs, P.E. 36 Johnson, B. 268, 269, 270 Johnson, J.E. 1 Jud, G.J. 146 Kanter, R.M. 271 Kelly, H.E. 147 Klein, J. 148 Kloetzli, W. 149

Index des auteurs K n o x , R . 23 Kokosalakis, N. 150 Kraemer, P.E. 151 Lalive d'Epinay, C. 152 Lauer, R.H. 153 Le Bras, G. 5, 24 Lee, R. 154 Liu, W.T. 173 Luckermann, T. 65 Luecke, R.H. 155 Macdonald, F. 156 Macinnis, D.E. 157 Maître, J. 189 Makler, H.M. 158 Mandelbaum, D.G. 159 Manwaring, D. 160 Martin, D.A. 161, 162, 163 Martini, F. 164 Marty, M.E. 25 Matthews, A.T.J. 168 Mehl, R. 26, 165 Menges, W. 90 Miller, M.J. 273 Millett, D. 272 Mills, E.W. 146 Mitchell, R.E. 127 Moberg, D.O. 27 Mol, J.J. 28 Moos, F. 166 Morgan, D.H.J. 167 Morgan, R.E. 29 Morioka, K. 6 Morrow, W.R. 168 Moulin, L. 169,170, 171, 172 Murphy, R. 173 Murvar, V. 174 Neal, M.A. 175, 176 Needleman, J. 177 Nelson, G.K. 178

Newell, W.H. 6 Niebuhr, H.R. 3 0 , 3 1 Nisbet, R.A. 32 Nuesse, C.J. 179 O'Brien, L. 180 O'Dea, T.F. 181, 182 O'Donovan, T. 183 Palmer, S.J. 184 Parkin, F. 289 Payne, R. 290 Peel, J.D.Y. 185 Pettigrew, T.F. 80 Pfautz, H.W. 186 Pickering, W.S.F. 187 Poggi, G. 188 Pope, L. 33 Potel, J. 189 Poulat, E. 190 Price, J.L. 291 Remy, J. 71, 191 Richardson, J.T. 192 Rinvolucri, M. 193 Robbins, T. 194 Roberts, B. 195 Robertson, R. 196, 34 Rogerson, A.T. 197 Roos, P. 117 Ross, J.C. 198 Rymph, R.C. 199 Scalf, J.H. 273 Scanzoni, J. 274 Scherer, R.P. 275 Schlagen, J.A. 87 Schneider, B. 124 Schreuder, O. 200, 7 Schroeder, W.W. 35 Seguy, J. 201 Sibley, M.Q. 36

170 Simmel, G. 37 Singer, M. 202 Sjoberg, G. 205 Sklare, M. 203, 204 Smith, D.E. 38, 39 Smith, J,C, 205 Smith, T.L. 206 Snook, J.B. 276 A sociological yearbook of religion in Britain 40 Sommerfeld, R. 277 Stark, R. 21,41 Stauffer, R.E. 284 Steeman, T.S. 207 Stewart, J.H. 208 Struzzo, J.A. 209 Sutter, J. 210 Takayama, K.P. 211,212 Tambiah, S.J. 213 Taylor, R.W. 214 Thiessen, J. 94 Thomas, C.W. 273 Thompson, J.D. 292 Thompson, K.A. 215,278 Towler, R. 216 Troeltsch, E. 42 Turner, B.S. 217 Underwood, K. 43 Vallier,I. 218, 219, 220,221 Vaucelles de, L. 222 Vie, E. 223 Vosper, C. 224 Wach, J. 44, 279 Wakeford, P. 134 Walker, A. 225 Wallis, R. 226 Warburton, T.R. 227 Ward, C.K. 228 Watanabe, E. 229

Author Index Westhues, K. 280, 230 White, J.R. 231 White, Jr. O.K. 232 White, T. 233 Whitworth, J. McK. 234 Wilken, P.H. 235 Wilson, B.R. 45, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241,242, 281 Wilson, J. 243 Winter, G. 244, 245 Wood, J.R. 246, 247, 248 Wood, J.R. 249 Wright, B. 250 Yinger, J.M. 46, 47 Zahn, G.C. 251 Zald, M.N. 249, 252, 253, 293 Zygmunt, J.F. 254