Analysis of Roger and Me Concepts of Marx and Durkheim essays

Analysis of Roger and Me Concepts of Marx and Durkheim essays Michael Moores Roger and Me is about Moores home town of Flint, Michigan. He shows the viewer first hand the breaking down of what was once a booming town. The town of Flint was home to General Motors which employed many of the towns residents. General Motors was a key contributor to the town socially and economically. Many of the residents were bonded by their ties to General Motors and the parades and other festivities that GM supplied that kept the locals loyal to the company. That is why it was so devastating when GM closed 11 of their plants in Flint and moved their business to Mexico in order to gain profit and stay competitive. In the movie Moore shows us the consequences of the closing of the GM plants in Flint as well as his underlying quest to talk to GM chairman, Roger Smith, to get him to spend a day in Flint and meet the people that lost their jobs. Durkheim and Marx would have different views on what happened in Flint. Durkheim would say that Flints disintegration as a community was due to its lack of social order where Marxs theories would solely revolve around the economic system. Durkheim would say that GM played such a major role in the lives of all of its workers that when GM left no one knew what to do. He would also say the reason Flint was doing so well before the closing was because of its great collective conscience. The fact that many families were being supported by the same wages from the same company and the parents of the families worked together made the local families feel connected in some way. The manifest function of GM was that it produced cars and jobs and its latent function was that it provided community identification through parades and other family functions. Durkheim measured the degree of collective conscience through suicide rates. Durkheim probably would have found that after the plants i n Flint closed there were a higher number of suicides, esp...