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What is
Social Production?
The
term “social production” comes to us from the 19th Century social
scientists who observed the complex and interconnected
division of labor among a variety of people (as individuals and
organizations) depending on each other in the process of producing something of
value. It was the philosophers of political economy who first and foremost
concerned themselves with production, productive relations and their values as
features of economic life.
In
the classic sense, these “social relations of production” and, therefore,
“social production” could apply to any social, economic or cultural endeavor.
The result of that production could be a material output or a service. Put
simply, “social production” refers to the composite of “many scattered
production processes [that] flow into one social production process."
Referring to an activity as social production recognizes the interdependent
efforts by various actors that go into producing something, therefore making it
a social—rather than a purely individual—process.
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The
sum total of the relations of production, that is, the relations
men establish with each other when they utilize existing raw materials
and technologies in the pursuit of their productive goals, constitute real
foundations upon which the whole cultural superstructure of society comes to
be erected. Relations of production… does not only mean technology, though
this is an important part, but the social relations people enter into by
participating in economic life.
Lewis A. Coser
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To
Karl Marx, for example,
a distinctly human mode of production had two parts: (1) the means of
production and (2) the means of distribution. For Marxists, labor is the heart
and soul of the process by which people become human, in the sense of human
conscious human beings.
Franz Borkenau and
Emile Durkheim also considering that the moral essence of
"human solidarity" is found in division of labor.
Social
production continues to be a term used in political science, sociology and
economic theory today. Marx had
suggests that we may classify social production by (1) agriculture, (2)
industries and division of labour in general. However,
since his time, social scientists have studied the patterns of relationships
involved in a wide range of productive activity, examining more and more-specific
categories in the social production of tangible and even intangible creations,
including, for example:
 Social
production of "cultural capital"
Social production of urban
space
Social production of
information
Social production of
culture”
Social production of theory
Social production of food
Social production of risk
Social production of art
The
complex relations that go into any productive activity could, therefore,
qualify as social production. Hence, the term is not new or alien to most
disciplines in social science. However, more popular applications of the term
have emerged, particularly in the “social production of habitat.” For an
explanation of the meaning and application of this term, click here.
Karl Marx summarized that "the
mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.” Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto,
reprinted in MESW (1848), p.35 ‘The Critique of Political Economy,’
excerpted from the “Preface,” (1859).
Meanwhile, all these social
scientists observed a fractionated, unequal world. For Marx, the social
relations of production come into continuous crisis, however, with the exchange
of their products at fluctuating prices and the uneven distribution of the
value derived from the products of labor.
Siegwart
Lindenberg, "Social Production Functions, Deficits, and Social
Revolutions," Rationality and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 51–77;
Siegwart Lindenberg, “Individual economic ignorance versus social
production functions and precarious enlightenment,” Journal of Institutional
and Theoretical Economics, no. 142 (1986), 20–26; Siegwart Lindenberg,
“Cohorts, social production functions and the problem of self-command,” in H.
Becker, ed., Dynamics of Cohort and Generations Research (Amsterdam:
Thesis Publishers, 1992), pp. 283–305.
Gottdiener, Mark. 1994. "Urban
Ecology, Economics and Geography: Spatial Analysis in Transition " in The social production of urban space. 2nd
ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.
According to Ulrich Beck, "in advanced modernity, the
social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social
production of risks." Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in
eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986); also
published as Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (New
York: Sage, 1992).
Janet Wolff's The Social
Production of Art (London: Macmillan, 1993).
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