As a sociologist - indeed as arguably the founder of modern sociology - Emile Durkheim was interested in understanding all aspects of society - but especially in those social especially the institutions that bring individuals together into collective groups and by doing so allow us - or force us - to function as part of a larger whole. In the industrialized milieu world of the 21st century, the institution that is most often responsible for such unifying measures is the workplace.
Durkheim's model of the workplace and its importance to society as a whole is not an overly cheery one: Indeed, it is his ability to understand the limitations of social structures both in terms of a functionalist critique (i.e. the ways in which they fail to carry out the ends for which they were designed, or fail to do so efficiently) as well as his ability to understand how institutions fail individuals (usually by neglecting individual needs) as well as to understand the ways in which social structure were functional and efficient is what marks him as such an important social theoretician (Durkheim, 1973, p. 143).
Very early in his career, Durkheim became convinced that societies are not necessarily progressing - that changes in social structure joined with developments in science and technology were not necessarily leading to the overall to a better - either more efficient or more compassionate - society. A large part of what led him to believe this was his understanding of the ways in which the workplace proved to be - for most people - a force for regression rather than progress.
Durkheim believed that because the workplace is so central in the lives of so many people in our industrial age that one of the most effective ways in which to understand the relationship between the individual and the group (as a general phenomenon) was to study the relationship of the individual to the workplace: His 1893 doctoral thesis addressed this topic. Titled...