Commentaries

When Weber moves the ethic of the Kantian’s moral philosophy to social sciences, he takes the risk to move away from the practical reason’s concept in being concentrated precisely on the historical process of rationalization, considered initially as positive and as the essential features of the modern society. His attention focus on converting the cultural rationalization (destruction of the sacred, demythologization) in the social rationalization (economy, law, and public administration).

From the theory of action, Weber explains that the rational life’s management linked the two components of the practical rationality: the instrumental rationality and the moral rationality. The instrumental rationality is the protestant countries’ mean to achieve their economical growth’s aim. The moral rationality is the protestant countries’ mean to protect values of their ascetic aim. These two rationalities are the main tool to understand a Calvinist’s usual life.

Durkheim (see previous article published on the 20th November 2007) shares the idea according to which the rule wanting that our reason should accept as true what it recognizes as such, and not only a rule of logic, but also a rule of moral. He pursues in affirming that the practice could not be different, the idea having for aim and for reason to guide the action, “It doesn’t matter that the thought is free, if the action is slavish” (The moral education, page 91, Durkheim 1902). But in a mean time, he shares the sociological position that each personality takes its source in the society, and approves that the moral conscience has the right to claim its autonomy. Moreover, he refuses to see the autonomy of the person as a hallucination of the public conscience.

No one more than Kant (see previous article published on the 19th June 2008) has felt the imperative nature of the morale law, and has firmly refused that the will could be fully moral when it is not really autonomous. According to Durkheim, the moral law is invested of an authority, which commands respect as much to reason as to our sensibilities. Our reason as well as our sensibility needs to be limited and contained.

To Kant, the moral law is immanent to reason and to the will of the moral person. To Durkheim, the moral law is not the product of the reason and of the will, but of the society as the guardian of the ultimate authority and of the collective conscience, the only source of spirit in the human being. It is by the society that the human being acquires the moral conscience. To think about these divergences in between Durkheim and Kant is still, with no doubt, relevant today.

I recently participated to a conference organized by Silpakorn University about “Sustainable management: beyond the global economic recession”. Dr. Sompid Kattiyapikul, Director of Silpakorn University International College, open the conference in being very pleased with the quality of various international speakers from Europe, USA, and Thailand.

David Hind, head of tourism at Leeds Metropolitan University in UK, presented a case study explaining how the employability and management skills are developed in his institution. These skills are integrated into all curriculums, where modules include variety of innovative assessment, learning and teaching strategies to facilitate the students’ skills development.

Chris de Boer, lecturer at Silpakorn University, raise the question of the Buddhist spirituality influence the practices of Thai managers to think and act in a sustainable way. According to Chris, In Buddhism, respect for life is an important issue, and preaches a life in harmony with natural resources, moderation and simplicity.

Steve Burns, senior lecturer at Liverpool University in UK, discussed about the findings of a survey of hospitality SMEs, regarding their current trading conditions and marketing responses. Facing a predicted future of reduced business in UK in 2009, this study suggests that SMEs are responding to changing market conditions by increasing their marketing activity and utilizing technology, particularly the Internet, to seek new ventures.

My paper was about the importance for large company to audit their organization in order to optimize their performances. Thanks to our management tools we are able to give a clear and concise picture of the organization and explain the social behavior of the actors in the system. My conclusion was to sustain qualitative management, managers have to read the informal organization and adjust it, before to realign their strategy to their structure.

Nishapat Meesangkaew, lecturer at Silpakorn University, examined the impact of globalization on tourism industry, which effects the development of international programs in Thai University. According to Nishapat, despite the economical crisis, international investors are active in hospitality development. Also, Thailand still facing a labor shortage and consequently international hospitality programs has become a popular choice in Thai higher education.

We conclude this conference in sharing point of views about the future of the globalization system, which deregulate society, and we were all agreed that Andre Malraux was right 50 years ago, in predicting that the 21st century will be spiritual.

Since the very beginning of his work Durkheim is concerned about the right direction to give to moral if we want to raise it to the rank of science. The scientific facts are based on lifestyles, customs, the positive law’s prescription, the juridical purview controlling the economical life. To Durkheim, moral facts are to be connected with the psychic and social facts. But moral is not an annex discipline of psychology and sociology, it is a social science in the middle of the others.

The education and the implementation of this field of research, its potential itself let open the question of the freedom antinomy and the determinism deal by Kant (see previous article on the 19th June 2008). It is from that perspective that Kant creates the concept of the practical reason. From Kant, the practical reason means that the reason is by itself able to determine the will if the law is a law of the freedom and not a law of the nature. Durkheim attaches too much importance to the society to purely and simply, on behalf of science, assigns in a radical naturalization of sociology.

Nevertheless, we could ask ourselves if in attaching more attention to what is the practical reason, Durkheim won’t have more firmly distinguished moral law and law of the nature, and if would have not, more easily, better ensured the specificity of the human and the society’s sciences.

In the actual proliferation of the moral’s philosophy, I will choose, as general framework, the debate about the priority given either to the right or to the good. The imperative conception of moral gives the priority to the right over the good, and the attractive conception gives the priority to the good over the right.

In the first case, the moral is defined by what is imposed to the person, whatever his wishes. In the second case, the moral is defined because the person would really like, if he would know what its wishes are. In the first case, the problem it’s about the rightness of the norm, in the second, it’s about what a good life is, the aim of a fulfill life. The ancient moral adopted the attractive perspective, the modern adopt the imperative one. All the positive sociology’s form, even the utilitarian or functionalist, as the one from Talcott Parsons (see previous article published on the 20th November 2007), could bring their contribution to the questions’ clarification asked by the attractive moral, in other word, the identification of the fundamental needs for the human being.

If to treat relation in between moral philosophy and sociology, we choose a historical point of view, we note, in the case of sociology, the validity of the distinction is done in between founders, classical and contemporary. Among founders, each author makes their choices.

Raymond Aron (see previous article published on the 26th April 2009) explained his choices in its book “Les étapes de la pensées sociologique”. But also, Montesquieu (see previous article published on the 26th December 2007), Comte (see previous article published on the 18th November 2007), Marx (see previous article published on the 18th April 2008), Tocqueville (see previous article published on the 13th December 2007), Saint-Simon (see previous article published on the 18th May 2008), Proudhon, Spencer (see previous article published on the 18th November 2007). Each of them has a different relation with the moral philosophy, but they have in common to stay close to philosophy, with a particularity to study a domain generally under that discipline, but progressively abandoned by it, and to which they will give a new characteristic: a concern and a moral reflection linked to the raise of social’s specificity.

Rural societies have been radically distinguished from the others traditional societies by the facts that they are included in a larger society, where power and authority are located. In other word, as soon as there is no city, there is no peasant. The peasant is defined in relation to enclosing society and in its absence we could have an agrarian society, an antique city but not a peasantry.

Five features constitute the ideal type of the rural society, and we note that the first three are common to the traditional societies:

1. An economical system according to the auto-subsistence, which not distinguish production and consumption
2. The business and family confusion is central
3. The local collectivity form an inter-knowledge society
4. The local collectivity is relatively autonomous toward the enclosing society
5. Important mediation toward the outside

By contrast we would like to describe first the industrial society, then the pre-industrial society. The setting out of the following five essential features constitutes the ideal type of the industrial society:

1. The business is radically separated from the family, as working and leisure;
2. The working organization is directed by the technological demand
3. The business is based on the capital’s accumulation
4. The economical calculation governs the business management
5. The manpower’s build-up in urbanized zones forms a working market

These economical construct are predictive and the different elements are mutually dependent.

A contrario pre-industrial society is characterized by the following five elements:

1. The mix-up of the business and the family and the indissolubility of the production and consummation
2. The working organization is governed by the social structure and techniques are part of the cultural heritage
3. The capital is considered as a saving that is not dedicated to be multiplied
4. The economical calculation doesn’t exist; other rationalities govern behaviors, as believes, values, tradition, etc.
5. The society is organized in a small perimeter and in a given territory

This construct is more social than the first one, but more than that, there is no coherence. Each element is not mutually dependent of the others. It shows that essential features are not considered and is not an ideal type of society.

The ideal type of industrial society, like it has been built by many authors, as Raymond Aron, tries to cover the main features of the industrialized society from USA, Europe, Japan and Russia. The others remain an indistinct mass, which we should try to order compared with this ideal type. Some people think that we can build another ideal type, which would be the opposite of the industrial society: the ideal type of the traditional society. It remains to be seen if by traditional society, we could cover societies called “primitives”, “rural”, “Antiquity”, “classical”, the great Chinese and Mongol empires, the nomadic societies, etc. and if there are not radically different types that we cannot line up within the same label.

A traditional-industrial continuum, along which we line up all societies from the most traditional to the most industrial, is the last mishap of the simplistic evolutionism, which threatening sociologist. And, it could only have continuum, when we measure feature, or a group of features, which characterizing elements from zero to hundred, from white to black via all grays, and from ice to boiling water.

The analysis in term of system, structure and function, and the construction of models deal with society like a group of which we try to understand the layout without thinking about individuals. From Marx (see article on the 17th April 2008) to Durkheim (see article on the 20th November 2007), to structuro-functionalists and to culturalist, the main sociologic stream was keeping with this ambition to deal with society as “a thing”, hence the analogies with machine or a living body. It is what we call holism. The holist approach has for main drawback to make the mechanism of social change very difficult to understand and to reject the analysis of individuals’ behavior in the field of the social psychology where there are dealt outside their social context.

The social systems’ analysis allows making comparison between social groups, and the comparative analysis remains the essential instrument of sociologist. In the past, we most of the time tried to make comparisons between elements took arbitrarily within different societies. It is the favorite game of traditional politic sciences and in particular the comparison of the constitutional law.

Comparing the system of the Prime Minister choice in different constitutions without referring to the fact that the Prime Minister doesn’t have the same role, that the political spirit and the parliament functioning are not the same, is an obvious methodological mistake, and frequent, which consisting to compare elements in a system without sufficient reference to a system, to its structure and to its coherence. If we accept the previous premise that the elements have sense only according to the structure, we cannot compare legitimately separated elements, abstract of their structure: we must compare structure between them.

Let’s illustrate this premise. One day a Polish politician explained to a French sociologist the necessity to introduce the English parliamentary system in Poland, to what the French sociologist answered “and you haven’t though yet to put some water around Poland?”

Sociologist works with intellectual model and not with reality itself. This nominalist attitude is the most fruitful for empirical research and for the theoretical development. For example, it is impossible to measure, to define, to count members from a social class which does not physically be comprehended in a society. On the over hand, it is possible to build the model of a social class in a given society, from the ideal type of the social class devise by Marx (see article published on 17 April 2008), and understand the functioning of that society in organizing observed facts in the scheme of the classes war.

According to Marx we could neither give a priori definition, nor a nomenclature, of social realities. We simply could, from case studies, extract the relevant elements and rebuild a conceptual scheme from that reality. That is the fundamental notion of structure. Having said, where to use it? How to find the relevant elements and their relations? How to define the elements and give them a signification?

There is cause when A is anterior to B and if all modification of A goes with B modification, all the others variables remaining constant. But in practice, the anteriority is difficult to establish in social functioning; in consequence, we observe a relation in between A and B; and, this relation could be interpreted differently:

1. A lead to B;
2. B lead to A;
3. A and B are in circular relation;
4. The third cause C influence in a same time A and B

In society, a phenomenon is never influenced by one cause; in consequence, the causality scheme is always complex. The isolate cause A or B are not important, what is important is the relation in between A and B in a whole, in a structure. The circular causality shows relation in between causes and the relation is reciprocal and not univocal.

Lately cybernetic has shown a particular aspect: what we call feedback. Feedback is like the thermostat of stoves: the oven heat up and when is hot enough, it works on the thermostat, which stop the oven heat. Then, the oven cool down, the thermostat cool down and turn on again the heat. Society comprises many feedback systems.

Any social element must be put in relation with a given social unit. There is never relative function to the entire society, as there is always a function of something for something. As well as, there are dysfunctions of something for something. The same element could be functional toward a social unit, dysfunctional toward a second unit and afunctional toward a third one.

Let’s take an example, the secular divides in between conservative and revolutionary about religion. In the nineteen century, Liberal, nonbelievers themselves, thought that priests were the best policeman for the society. To which Marx (see article published the 17 April 2008) answered that religion was the people’s opium. Thus, everybody was agreed to think that one of the main function of religion is to integrate society, and to reinforce its cohesion.

On the 31st of March and the 1st of April, I have attended a seminar about “French in Tourism: status, teaching and cooperation in South East Asia”. This seminar was organized by Kasetsart University and coordinated by Mrs. Supanni Chantkran, assistant professor.

The vice rector of Kasetsart University welcomed participants and especially the 12 Thai Universities teaching French language, the French Embassy and the Agency of the Francophone Universities, which participated to the co-organization of that seminar. This seminar was to initiate an international platform to exchange experiences and lecturers teaching French and tourism, and from this platform create a regional cooperation to develop French language.

Several Universities from the region participated to that seminar, as the University of Danang Vietnam. Its representative Mr. Dung LE VIET, spoke about the necessity to teach French language in order to support the tourism industry growth in South East Asia where more and more French tourist favored that destination. To conclude, he strongly supported the idea to create the regional platform and would like to include consultant and professional form the tourism industry.

The representative and Dean of the “Ecole superieure de Langues et Etudes Internationales” from the National University of Hanoi Vietnam, Professor Dinh Hong Van, said that its institution was educating for the last 50 years, the French teacher for the Vietnamese educational system. Recently, he have seen the professional demand to have well educated graduated students increase. The reason, it’s the booming of the French tourist in the region. To cope with such demand, its institution is planning to cooperate with a French Universities specialized in French Tourism. Mrs. Lan Chi NGO THI, from the University of Pedagogy in Ho Chi Minh, shared her experience to develop the quality of the French Tourism teaching, in collaborating with other regional institutions, as the Royal University of Phnom Penh and the Corse University.

The representative of the National University of Laos, Mrs. Kinsoukhone SIPASEUTH, noted the imbalance in between the increase of the French tourists and the decrease of the number of students interested in learning French language. She proposed more involvement from the tourism industry to promote the job of touristic guide for French tourist. This fact has also been observed by Mrs. Kerya SUN, from the Royal University of Phnom Penh. She added that the old generation who learn French early in their childhood, are better prepared to guide French tourists. One of the solutions is to organize students exchange with French University and expose the youth to the French culture.

The coordinator of this seminar, Mrs. Supanni Chantkran, exposed the long tradition in Thailand to promote French language in different Universities, and indicated the website for the self-learning of the French language. She also expressed her concern about the lack of programs taught in French, and the difficulties to develop synergies with professional from the tourism industry. One of the last speakers, Mrs. Sodchuen CHAIPRASATHNA, introduced the Silpakorn University initiative to launch, in June 2008, a Master Degree in “Cultural Tourism” taught in French. Initiative welcomed by the audience.