ABSTRACT
Spencer's legacy is still with sociology but, more importantly, much of this legacy has yet to be fully mined by contemporary scholars who continue to poor over the works of other classical figures with little new to show for their efforts, whereas if they shifted their attention to Spencer, they would discover what can only be described as a hidden legacy of useful ideas. Compared to early European sociologists, the early founders of American sociology adopted Spencer's vision of evolution, and today the essential theoretical argument persists in a variety of literature, including the analysis of organizations as they grow and differentiate, communities as they differentiate into sectors and neighbourhoods, and macro-level theories of societal evolution. Whether or not the dynamics of differentiation occur in societies and their subunits, such as organizations and communities, they represent a manifestation of Spencer's general principles about growth, differentiation and integration of the matter constituting superorganisms, or systems organizing organic bodies.
