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Character and Social Structure (1953) is seminal to an overall understanding of the works of C. Wright Mills. Mills, by focusing upon roles played in various institutional orders, and how these various institutional orders combine in a given society to form historical types of social structures, is able to formulate the general model of a social system he had been calling for since his graduate student days.1 In short, he synthesizes the social behaviorism or personality formation of the pragmatists with the emphasis upon social structure of Max Weber and the German sociologists.

The basic concept in Mills’ working model approach is that of role. Roles by definition are interpersonal; that is, they are oriented to the expectations of others. These others are also playing roles, and our mutual expectations set up patterns of social conduct. The individual’s psychological functions are thereby shaped by specific configurations of roles which he has incorporated from his society. The most important aspect of personality is, of course, the individual’s conception of self, or "his idea of what kind of person he is."2 The image of self we hold is formulated through an interpersonal context by taking into account what people think of us. The approval or disapproval of others acts as a guide in the learning of both assigned and assumed roles. The internalization of these attitudes of others enables the individual to gain new roles, and ultimately an image of self. Roles and one’s self-image are entrenched within a social context. The concept of role through its relationship to institutions provides a link between the psychology of the individual and the controls of a society. The model shows the type of person selected and formed by the enactment and internalization of these roles chosen. Roles make up the social person; institutions, defined as "…an organization of roles,…one or more of which is understood to serve the maintenance of the total set of roles,"3 form the society.

Institutional orders, in the model, are delineated according to function: an institutional order consists of all those institutions which have similar consequences and ends or which serve a similar function. Five major institutional orders make up the skeletal structure of the total society:

1. The political order…consists of those institutions within which men acquire, wield, or influence the distribution of power and authority within social structures.

2. The economic order…is made up of those establishments by which men organize labor, resources, and technical implements in order to produce and distribute goods and services.

3. The military order…is composed of institutions in which men organize legitimate violence and supervise its use.

4. The kinship order…is made up of institutions which regulate and facilitate legitimate sexual intercourse, procreation, and the early bearing of children.

5. The religious order is composed of those institutions in which men organize and supervise the collective worship of God or deities, usually at regular occasions and at fixed places.4

As stated, symbols, technology, status, and education are the four main spheres of the model. These spheres are defined as follows:

Symbols include signs, emblems, ceremonies, language, music which sustain the order. Technology includes tools, apparatus, machines, instruments, and physical devices. Status consists of agencies for the means of distributing prestige, deference, or honor. And the educational sphere includes activities concerned with the transmission of skills and values to persons who have not yet acquired them.5

They are designated spheres because they are rarely autonomous as to the ends they serve, and any of them may be used within any one of the five orders.

A social structure, therefore, consists of institutional orders and spheres; its unity depends upon the relative importance of each institutional order and sphere, and their relation to each other. (See Figure 4.1 for a diagram of Mills’ working model.)

Now that Mills’ working model has been briefly sketched, we can begin to look at it in depth, focusing first upon his notions of personality formation and then upon his conception of the total model.

Personality of Character Structure

Implicit in Mills’ model is a model of man. Personality is understood as being anchored in institutional orders which combine to form historical types of social structure. Man is a social creature; biological explanations are inadequate for a full understanding of human beings. Motive rather than stimulus and response are crucial for a comprehensive sociological analysis. "Will," "volition," and "impulse" are the terms of inquiry to be used, and always in a social context. The fundamental question asked is: How, from the standpoint of society, can a person be produced who desires what is socially desirable? Mills’s answer is that a cycle is present—a cycle involving undefined impulses and socially available goals. By repetition and suggestion, punishment and reward, impulses are finally integrated with goals. Persons incorporate goals and link them with impulses which sustain the continued operations of the conduct patterns that form various institutions. Human emotions are socially defined. This is the key to Mills’s conception of character structure and requires further elaboration.

Emotions

Impulses are shaped and defined by the social situation. The two are linked in that the social situation furnishes an opportunity for the satisfaction of the impulse. The individual internalizes socially defined values and objectives which give direction to impulses, indeed, even set the intensity of these impulses. Impulse becomes purposeful, and conduct is deemed rational.

The meaning of the situation always sets the tone for an individual’s emotions. These meanings vary according to the past experiences of the person and are explained in terms of the person’s position within given social structures.

Language is the most important mechanism through which the individual becomes aware of his social situation; it is the major avenue for an individual to gain a knowledge of self. Language is a system of signs which are responded to by other persons and also indicate the future actions of the speaker. A given symbol or word can only define the situation of another if it evokes a similar response in that individual. (This, of course, is George Herbert Mead’s concept of a significant symbol.)

A person thus consists of an internalization of social roles, with language as the mechanism through which this occurs. The individual internalizes the vocal gestures of others and thereby takes on the important features of an interpersonal situation. He draws into his own person those gestures which indicate to him what others expect and require of him. These expectations provide the basis for the development of a self-image.

Images of Self

One’s self-image develops and changes through social experiences. The individual is rewarded for certain types of behavior, punished for others. "The self-image which we have at any given time is a reflection of the appraisals of others as modified by our previously developed self."6 The image a person holds of himself and that held by significant others become integrated and form an individual’s self-image. Three basic principles determine the individual’s selection of significant others: (1) cumulative confirmations; (2) selection by position and career; (3) the confirming use of the intimate other.

The three principles are integrated in that the social position of the person sets limits for the selection of significant others.

Although these three principles are not the only ones, it is through them that institutions form the personalities of individuals. Put simply, in order to know another’s self-image, we must find out those who are significant in his life. The convenient way to gain this knowledge is to look at the circle of significant others with whom the individual comes in contact as he lives out his life in institutional contexts.

When the attitudes of significant others are internalized, they form the "generalized other." As shown previously, Mills modifies somewhat Mead’s concept of the generalized other by relating it to institutional orders. As Mills uses the term generalized other, it represents the total number of significant others in different institutions. It also follows then that individuals who occupy similar institutional positions would most likely have similar generalized others.

Social types can thus be deduced from roles played in institutions. However, because the concept of role carries with it variations of individual actions, more is needed to understand an individual’s character structure. That is, an individual may try to balance out the traits he is called upon to manifest, and he may exhibit different public and private ones. The examples most often given of this are the browbeaten office worker who is a tyrant at home, or the authoritative boss who cowers when his wife speaks. In order to better understand the different types of persons, the model focuses upon motivations.

Motivations

Motives, like emotions, are socially defined. The study of motives revolves around an understanding of the specific directions that human conduct takes. Motives are subjective formulations of action; or, in Max Weber’s words, "a motive is a complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor himself or to the observer and adequate ground for the conduct itself."7 The problem here is how an investigator can get at these subjective motives. Merely to ask the individual what his motives are might result only in rationalizations. Mills attempts to solve this problem by constructing what he refers to as typical vocabularies of motive which are linked to situated actions. The sociologist simply looks at the typical justification of motives in terms of particular societal frameworks. Examples of this are given in an early paper by Mills:

Individualistic, sexual, hedonistic, and pecuniary vocabularies of motives are apparently now dominant in many sections of twentieth-century urban America. Under such an ethos, verbalization of alternative conduct in these terms is least likely to be challenged among dominant groups. In this milieu, individuals are skeptical of Rockefeller’s avowed religious motives of his business conduct because such motives are not now terms of the vocabulary conventionally and prominently accompanying situations of business enterprise. A medieval monk writes that he gave food to a poor but pretty woman because it was "for the glory of God and the eternal salvation of his soul." Why do we tend to question him and impute sexual motives? Because sex is an influential and widespread motive in our society and time. Religious vocabularies of explanation and of motives have been debunked on a rather wide scale, certain thinkers are skeptical of those who ubiquitously proclaim them. Religious motives have lapsed from selected portions of modern populations and other motives have become "ultimate" and operative. But from the monasteries of medieval Europe we have no evidence that religious vocabularies were not operative in many situations.8

Motives, therefore carry with them specific terminologies which are societally defined for different situations. In order to better understand how motives, as well as emotions and other psychological traits, are defined by one’s society we now turn to the social structure part of Mills’ model.

Social Structure—Institutions and Persons

Institutions form persons. An individual’s personality is shaped by the various roles he enacts in an institutional framework. Character traits, for instance, are defined by particular institutional orders. What may be considered selfishness in one context might be seen as initiative in another. In Mills’ model there are no general psychological traits existing as universals in the character structure; psychological traits are shaped by specific contexts.

The key to the institutional formation of persons lies in the circle of significant others formed by institutions. The individual, in order to succeed in an institution, internalizes the expectations of the institutional leaders; this in turn acts as a means of social control. In time this produces a change in the generalized other of the institutional member. The individual begins to pattern himself after the institutional head, who in the process becomes a significant other. The role and the constraints carried by it become generalized and in this manner become linked psychologically with particular institutions. The ways in which specific traits are joined to institutional contexts can be seen through what Mills calls the theory of premiums and traits of character. This theory has four basic tenets:

1. A general trait that is generally premiumed has a high chance to be presented by the person and to be firmly organized into his character.

2. A specific trait that is generally premiumed will tend to spread, to become a general trait.

3. A general trait that is specifically premiumed will tend to become a specific trait, or, if kept general, to be modified or camouflaged in all contexts except the one in which it is specifically premiumed.

4. A specific trait that is specifically premiumed will tend to be stabilized; a person predominantly composed of such traits will be a compartmentalized specialist.9

Institutions place premiums and, of course, taboos on certain traits. For example, educational institutions premium competitiveness. Grades, which are a means of reward in the educational institution, are received by those who compete. The student internalizes the institutionally defined premiums and taboos, sometimes without being aware of their impact upon his personality. The outcome, whether he is aware of it or not, is a competitive individual.

The individual learns these premiums and taboos through the use of language. Language is linked to the institutional contexts through the communication process, or, as Mills refers to it, the symbol sphere.

The Symbol Sphere

The symbol sphere, by socially defining the situations an individual confronts, also fives clues to his fears, anxieties, and other psychic elements. Roles are rejected or accepted by means of symbols. Symbols provide the person with a frame of reference to understand his social experience, a frame of reference which is thereby related to the operation of specific institutions.

There are different types of symbols. The most important are master symbols, which justify the institutional arrangement of an institutional order and are used by those in authority to justify their rule.

Symbols, since they involve specific modes of conduct and the integration of these modes, give rise to special vocabularies. This is discussed in six contexts:

1. The vocabulary is a major element in the style of life which sets off different status groups…

2. In the economic order, the jobs that people do together give rise to specialized trade jargons…

3. Families may develop special terms understood only by its members…

4. The symbols of the political order may be visual or auditory, like the flag or the national anthem, or they may be sentimentalized places like the Capitol or written documents as in the constitutional states of modern democracies…

5. The symbol spheres of the military order and of the political order are blended in the modern national state…

6. In the religious order the symbol sphere is very important, since the contents with which religion deals and the sanctions it employs are "psychic."10

The Status Sphere

There is very little difference between what Mills calls the status sphere and Max Weber’s famous conception of stratification. All Mills does is round out Weber’s unfinished dimension of occupation and add it to the class, status, and party trichotomy. The four dimensions of stratification are related to institutional orders and to the social structure in that they represent ways of focusing upon specific features of roles in various institutional orders. They are both interrelated and interdependent.

An occupation is any set of activities that provide a livelihood. Occupations are economic roles and, although founding other institutional orders, they are usually located in the economic institutional order. Occupations are skills that are marketable from the individual’s standpoint and functional from the standpoint of society. Mills’s primary interest here is with occupational shifts in American society, as witnessed in White Collar, where he traces the decline of the old middle class (the independent entrepreneur) and the rise of the new middle class (the salaried employee).

The class structure is anchored to the amount of wealth, to property institutions, and to the occupational roles found within the economic institutions. In Mills’s scheme, laws of property are part and parcel of the political order of society. Those classes which can be labeled property classes could not exist only in terms of economic institutions; they must be dealt with as facts of a political economy.

The status sphere involves prestige claimed by certain individuals as well as others who honor the claim. Status can be claimed in any order, and because individuals enact roles in more than one order, their status usually rests upon a combination of roles. Of the four dimensions of stratification, status is the most relevant to the psychology of the individual. It is directly connected to the self-esteem of the person.

Power, the last of the four dimensions, while intertwined with the other three, more often than not defines them. Power is almost always political power. Class, status, and occupation are spokes; power, the wheel.

The Unity of Social Structures

Mills, always the sociologist, demonstrates his concern with total social structures by advancing four ideal type models of integration.

The institutions composing a social structure may be unified by correspondence (the several institutional orders develop in accordance with a common principle), by coincidence (various institutional developments lead to a similar resultant end) by coordination (one institutional order becomes dominant over the others and manages them) and by convergence (in their development, one or more institutional orders blend).11

Correspondence is best exemplified by the classic liberal society which prevailed in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. An example of coincidence is best seen in Max Weber’s famous treatise on Protestantism and capitalism.

The example given by Mills for coordination is America in the 1950s. (This is what The Power Elite is all about). Frontier America in the nineteenth century illustrates convergence.

Critics of the Model

Up to now I have not offered any criticism of Mills’ general model. My reason, quite simply, is that Mills’ integration of the individual’s personality with his social structure if fundamentally a viable one. Where Mills went wrong was not with the model but with certain applications of it. The working model itself is an excellent heuristic device which can be used to interpret why man acts as he does in given situations. This interpretation is, of course, not the only one. Elliot Mishler, for instance, sees Mills’ working model as extremely sketchy, offering an inadequate treatment of personality, only one major descriptive construct (the self), only one mechanism (language), and only one "crude" behavior law (a form of reward learning).12 Basically, Mishler’s criticisms are too harsh. First of all, while Mills does offer only one descriptive construct, it is made up of three other constructs: organism, psychic structure, and person. An integrated character structure is postulated, something rare among most sociological views of man. As for the use of only one mechanism, language, this is a misinterpretation of Mills. Mills’ position was that the use of language is the most important mechanism and the major source of the individual’s knowledge of self, not the only one. The importance of language in coordinating social behavior is so generally accepted that we need not concern ourselves with it here.

This brings us to Mishler’s last point, that Mills uses only one behavioral law (reward learning). In Character and Social Structure, Mills not only does not postulate behavioral laws, he specifically relativizes what passes for such in the psychological literature. Take, for example, Mills’ theory of premiums and traits of character. There are no general principles of character structure in terms of how one trait will lead to the selection of other traits. There are no general principles of character structure in terms of how one trait will lead to the selection of other traits. There are no general character traits which exist as universals; they must be seen as tied to given ranges of social situations. Even anxiety, which is central to the theory of interpersonal behavior of Harry Stack Sullivan, from whom Mills borrowed the concept of "significant other," is seen as being socially relative. In Sullivan’s theory the individual develops a self-system whose basic function is to avoid anxiety. Mills takes what is a behavioral law for Sullivan and shows that anxiety is better understood in relation to an institutional framework. Fear and anxiety cannot be separated from the object feared. What to fear, that which produces the anxiety, is historically given and socially learned. Anxiety might range from that produced by the fear of illegitimate children in the kinship order to the fear of bankruptcy in the economic order. Social conditions lead to conditions of anxiety and, on the other side of the coin, also channel those compensations which relieve anxieties. In a word, Mills’ "laws" cannot be understood in terms of reward and learning.

A more valid criticism is offered by Ernest Becker, who writes that "an adequate theory of personality must show man pulling and straining against himself; it must reveal a man who is somehow less than fully socialized—which amounts to the same thing."13 Does Mills offer, then, what amounts to "an oversocialized conception of man?"14 Perhaps so. But this need not detract from the usefulness of the model, for Mills offers a paradigm for the formation of social types, with the implication that the social psychologist focus upon polar or extreme types. While Mills may not specifically have left us a picture of an individual straining against himself, as Becker calls for, his paradigm of social types shifts the level of analysis to the social-psychological rather than the purely psychological. And herein lies Mills’ contribution. Like Weber before him, Mills is interested in the historical formation of social types. His working model enables him to focus upon these social types. If he does not present a fully integrated theory of personality, he certainly defines the direction it must take—it must consider the biological organism, the psychic structure, and the person.

In sum, Character and Social Structure represents Mills’s attempt to combine the pragmatist’s conception of personality with the sociologist’s notion of social structure. Mills offers a full-blown model of man and society, an historical social-psychological framework which tells us why man acts the way he does in any given epoch. After Character and Social Structure his works take on a different slant. The Power Elite, for instance, written three years after Character and Social Structure, is an application of the theory of power based upon the model, as is The Causes of World War III. The Sociological Imagination and The Marxists represent critiques of other models using he general model of a social system as a basis for the critiques.

Mills’ work, then, after Character and Social Structure, move in a definite direction. After the model was completed, the next step was to use it.

Character and Social Structure

Scimecca (1977, p. 39)