ABSTRACT
The final portion of this study focuses on institution building for social control, and therefore the emphasis of analysis shifts. 1 Our strategy has stressed a “contemplative perspective” that is a reflective examination of trends in societal change. 2 The contemplative standpoint makes primary use of variables derived from technological, ecological, and economic processes to chart and account for these societal developments. But our systemic analysis has also been based on a clear recognition that at any given moment or period, leaders struggle to influence the structure of social organization and the direction and content of societal change. In this final portion it becomes more appropriate and necessary to focus on competing leadership groups—that is, to adopt a “manipulative” standpoint, to examine social processes as seen by leaders, both political and professional. This strategy implies a stronger and more explicit emphasis on the normative and voluntaristic dimensions in leaders and subleaders and their operating procedures and networks. In short, the underlying question is to assess the prospects for reasoned direction of societal change. As one seeks to explain the emergence of weak political regimes in the parliamentary nation-states, the elite dimensions become indispensable. The manipulative standpoint (again, used nonpejoratively) is an essential aspect of professional groups. The result of using it analytically need not be a diffuse eclecticism; it can be a reasoned and patterned “multivariate” analysis. The intellectual objective is to search for an imputed causal configuration 400which avoids the excessive abstractions of “materialist” or “idealist” interpretations of societal organization which have been stimulated by the Hegelian influence on social research. 3
