What Is a Pluralistic Society?

In this chapter and in the course, the assumption is that society as a whole represents the environment in which businesses exist and operate. In the previous section, we have seen that by implication, businesses today have to interact with numerous entities within the society. The important question at this point is that if society represents the overall business environment, then what are the key elements of the society, and what are its constituting units?

Society as a Macro-Environment

At the broadest level, society as a macro-environment is divided into four interrelated and overlapping segments:

1. social environment (population demographics, culture, values, and traditions);
2. economic environment (the overall nature of the economy, e.g., labor intensive vs. capital intensive, and the direction of the economy);
3. political environment (laws, court systems, political processes, type of government, and inclination of governments, e.g., pro business or pro labor); and
4. technological environment (level of technology, use of technology, and speed of technological changes).

These four macro-environments do overlap and can be further subdivided into several sections. The main purpose of this delineation is that it proposes that the society is composed of many segments, and if we want to understand the relationship of business and society, then we do need to have an understanding of the constituents of the society.

A Pluralist Society

Each segment of the society can be composed of several entities. For example, the social environment can be composed of organizations that represent different ethnicities, religions, races, and genders, e.g., women's rights groups, civil rights groups, etc. Social environment can also be subject to change; for example, the U.S. workforce is increasingly becoming diverse. For organizations, this demographic change means that they should create policies that avoid discrimination, and they should create structures and organizational cultures that will allow the minorities in the workforce to be more productive. The economic environment is represented by different industries that make up the economic outlook of a country.  In essence, societies in most developed and industrialized nations represent many groups and their interests, making them pluralist societies. 

The term "pluralism" comes from the discipline of political science. Scholars who have written on democracy have exalted pluralism and its benefits for establishing viable democratic systems. Robert Dahl, in his seminal work Pluralist Democracy in the United States (1967), enumerates the following attributes of a pluralist society: 

• multiple centers of power where no one section of the society is wholly sovereign over others (this feature will diffuse power in the society and allow consent to arise from the tug-of-war between different interests, and would lead to peaceful conflict resolution),
• procedural consensus (culture of constitutional democracy),
• cross-cutting solidarities (somewhat like today’s situation of multiple memberships and loyalties of individuals to different causes),
• open access to the political arenas, and
• balance of power (sufficiently large number of groups so that no one group can dominate).

The main benefit of pluralism is that it diffuses power into several power bases; hence, it restricts concentration of power into one or a few groups.  Under pluralistic conditions, democratic societies will thrive as a pluralist society, as it 

• prevents concentration of power in few hands,
• allows freedom of expression,
• creates a system with inherent checks and balances, and
• creates diversified sets of loyalties that allow for no one leader of any organization to get out of control. 

On the other hand, a pluralist society can also become a special interest society, where a society becomes a collection of groups that only pursue their specific interests (e.g., different types of advocacy groups). Interest groups do make a pluralist society more complicated and make decision-making slow and difficult; however, this downside is compensated with the benefits that come from the absence of tyranny.

Applied to our course, this would mean that societies in most democratic and industrialized nations today have become increasingly plural. This means that there are several entities in the society that may be interested in what businesses are doing, and they may try to affect businesses or influence them to cater to their specific needs and interests. By extension, this would mean that if we are looking at the relationship between business and society, from the business point of view, this relationship becomes increasingly complex because of the multiplicity of parties and entities that exist in the macro-environment of the society.