Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

Mechanical and organic solidarity is a distinction drawn by the sociologist Emile Durkheim in his 1893 book The Division of Labor in Society to describe two different bases on which a society can hold together. Mechanical solidarity, which Durkheim associated with smaller, traditional societies, arises from the similarity of its members: people share the same beliefs, values and ways of life, forming what Durkheim called a strong collective conscience, and social cohesion follows from that likeness. Organic solidarity, by contrast, characterizes larger, more complex industrial societies in which an extensive division of labor has made individuals highly specialized and therefore dependent on one another to meet their needs, so cohesion arises from interdependence among people who are now quite different from each other rather than from shared sameness. Durkheim argued that as societies grow in size and population density, the division of labor intensifies and social organization shifts from the mechanical toward the organic form, a transition he treated as a defining feature of modernization. The pairing remains one of the foundational conceptual tools structural-functionalist sociology uses to describe how social order is possible in societies of very different scale and complexity.