Mrs Fiorini that is great you are interested in a sociological perspective on JWs. I try to start conversations on those issues sometimes but not many here seem all that interested. The Stark article is interesting but it has a number of flaws I feel. He borrowed from the old thesis about strict churches growing faster, which is fair enough. But the fact is JWs are not growing as fast as Stark predicted, and he failed to identify things that currently inhibit JW growth, such as the lack of a firm endtime expectation since the "generation" teaching was dropped, and the impact of disaffected former members. He wrote a similar article proclaiming phenomenal Mormon growth too - yet much of the data indicates the Mormon church is having serious trouble making and retaining members these days. The number of active members of the Mormon church is actually declining.
If you found the Stark article interesting I am sure you would find James Beckford's book The Trumpet of Prophecy fascinating. It's a bit dated now, but it is still the best sociological analysis of the Witnesses there is in my opinion.
I think you are right it would have a detrimental effect on Witness growth and commitment levels if they got rid of disfellowshipping. But I am not saying the Society would imagine they would benefit from dropping the practice. It is about making hard choices. They had to make a decision like this before, remember when they scrapped the literature charge.
Everyone knows that the Society is short of income these days. And it seems pretty clear the rot started in the early 1990s when they stopped charging for the literature. So why did they do it? If they kept on charging they wouldn't they have fewer financial problems today? Well they never dropped it just because it seemed a nice idea. They faced a hard choice because of the legal situation over whether they wanted to acknowledge they were a publishing company and start paying taxes, or whether they would drop the charge and hold on to their image of being a religion rather than a business.
Similarly the lawyers may now present the Governing Body with a stark choice: either they can stop disfellowshipping or else face the possibility of running out of money fighting lawsuits over the issue. They may dislike the idea of stopping disfellowshipping, but likely they would view it as preferable to going bankrupt. Another scenario is that governments might threaten to restrict or remove religious status from Jehovah's Witnesses unless they get rid of disfellowshipping. That was sort of what happened in Bulgaria over the blood issue wasn't it?
Sir82 may be right, they could try and engineer a removal of the disfellowshipping system in print but try to keep it in practice. On the other hand if the legal/financial threat to the organization is great then they may decide such a strategy is too high risk and go all out for a complete change.
They could make the change with much fanfare, claim a deep spiritual insight has prompted it, or insist they are making the change because Armageddon is "so near" as another poster mentioned above.
