Concept
atomisation
The assumption that individuals are cut off from intermediate ties such as family, neighbourhood and association and isolated from one another; the base of mass-society theory and its most criticised claim.
Atomisation is the idea that people are cut off from intermediate ties such as family, neighbourhood, community, association and trade union and become isolated “atoms”. In mass-society theory this is the second pillar: scale erodes community, eroded ties mean atomisation, and the atomised person is open to elite mobilisation and manipulation.
Hamilton criticises the claim because he says it contradicts the evidence: most migration is collective and chain-like, most migration is short-distance, cities also grow by annexing rural areas, and the person who comes to the city is not left alone. Kornhauser’s own entry admits that postwar research found primary relations in the factory, the army and the neighbourhood; he refines the theorists’ claim: primary groups have not disappeared, but as they are isolated from the rest of society they lose their function as sources of meaning and support for the individual.
According to Kornhauser’s entry the concept draws on reports by American sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s that stressed the anonymity and atomisation of persons in modern life; after the war this portrait was considerably criticised.
When you use the term, do not mix “atomisation” with “feeling lonely”: one concerns social structure, the other a person’s experience.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) A migrant worker who loses both job and trade union when a factory closes, and is a stranger in the neighbourhood, fits the theory’s image of the ‘atomised individual’; if he has gone to live near relatives, he does not.