On Society E-Book

Anthony Elliott

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 355

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

‘Society' is one of the most frequently used words in public life; it is also a foundational term in the social sciences. In our own time, however, the idea has never been so much in dispute and so little understood. For some critics, society is simply too consensual for a world of intensive discord. For others, the idea of ‘society' is oppressive - the very notion, so some argue, is dismissive of the infinite social differences that shape global realities.

In this erudite and original book, two of the world's leading social theorists focus on unravelling the different meanings of society as a way of introducing the reader to contemporary debates in social theory. The authors argue provocatively that all ideas of society can be assigned to one of three analytical categories, or some combination of these - structure, solidarity or creation - and develop a fresh characterization of the nature of the social as a means of understanding global transformations.

By integrating abstract problems of social theory with empirical examples and political analysis, On Society provides lucid interpretations of classical and contemporary social theory. The book also critiques recent social theories that simply equate the demise of society with globalization, the communications revolution or multiculturalism, and in so doing provides an original insight into today's world.

Leseprobe

On Society

On Society

ANTHONY ELLIOTT and BRYAN S. TURNER

polity

Copyright © Anthony Elliott and Bryan S. Turner 2012

The right of Anthony Elliott and Bryan S. Turner to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6056-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Bembo by

Servis Filmsetting Limited, Stockport, Cheshire.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

1  

Society as Structure

2  

Society as Solidarity

3  

Society as Creation

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

The gestation of this book has been a long one. Some of the ideas contained here trace back to the late 1980s, when Anthony Elliott worked with the late Professor Alan Davies, the late Professor Graham Little and Dr John Cash at the University of Melbourne. The idea for an enquiry into society and the social initially arose when Bryan Turner and I first worked together in the UK during the early 2000s, at Cambridge and Bristol respectively. The actual development of a theory of society as a form of radical cultural enquiry commenced some years later, and our research has been sustained over recent years – mostly through virtual interaction, with occasional face-to-face meetings – between New York and Adelaide.

We are grateful to various friends and colleagues, some of whom read the book in part or whole and offered many valuable comments and suggestions. We must thank in particular Charles Lemert, Anthony Giddens, Robert Holton, Gerhard Boomgaarden, Nicola Geraghty, Jean and Keith Elliott, Atsushi Sawai, Masataka Katagiri, Daniel Chaffee, Eric Hsu, Anthony Moran, Kath Woodward, Sophie Watson, Peter Redman, Jack Barbalet, Fiore Inglese, Kriss McKie, Nick Stevenson, Carmel Meiklejohn, Paul Hoggett, Tom Inglis, Alison Assiter, Deborah Maxwell, Conrad Meyer, Paul du Gay, Robert van Krieken, Bo-Magnus Salenius, Jennifer Rutherford, Jem Thomas, Riaz Hassan, Constance Lever-Tracy, Peter Baehr, Tom Cushman, Jonathan Imber, John O’Neill, Chris Rojek, Simon Susen, Stephen Turner, Gary Wickham and John Urry. Dan Mendelson provided terrific research support throughout much of the project, and David Radford assisted in the final stages with manuscript preparation and advice. An earlier version of these ideas was sketched out at a joint Flinders University and La Trobe Masterclass, and special thanks are due to John Carroll and Peter Beilharz. To underscore our major caveat in this work that the theories of structure, solidarity and creation cross and tangle in complex, contradictory ways, it was heartening to find colleagues locating social theorists in more than one (and sometimes all three) categories. We have, perhaps unsurprisingly, not been able to cover all the traditions of social thought, nor theorists, which many readers suggested. As such, there is no discussion of, say, William James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Julia Cooper, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, C. Wright Mills, Niklas Luhmann, Frantz Fanon, Immanuel Wallerstein, Judith Butler, Edward Saïd or Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick. Such a failing is, it might be argued, entirely in line with commercial requirements to write a book that isn’t the size of a phone directory. Even so, perhaps we can address the work of such theorists – through the registers of structure, solidarity and creation – in some future study.

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council, a grant (DP0877817) from which assisted in undertaking aspects of this project. And finally thanks to staff at Polity, and also to Susan Beer for diligently undertaking copy-editing of the book.

Various aspects of the argument relating to the civil sphere in Chapter 2 appeared originally in Bryan S. Turner (2008) Rights and Virtues, Oxford: Bardwell, but these have been revised for this publication.

Anthony Elliott, Adelaide

Bryan S. Turner, New York and Sydney

Preface

The argument of this book is disarmingly straightforward, though hopefully at once intricately layered and sociologically provocative. Our central claim is that most discourses on society – emanating from the social sciences and humanities in particular, and public political debates more generally – can be located within one of the following categories or registers: (1) society as structure; (2) society as solidarity; and, (3) society as creation. Outlining these three registers, we seek to assess the strengths and defects of various versions of ‘society’ and the ‘social’ as expounded in the tradition of social and political theory. One core aim is to reflect on how these three interpretations of society, in broader socio-political and historical terms, intersect, interlock, conflict and displace each other. Another is to consider the sociological consequences of these visions of society for the major issues of our times – ranging across politics, culture, morality and religion.

The question of society – its explication, constitution, reproduction and transformation – lies at the core of sociology. The question – what is society? – is probably the first question students confront when commencing the study of sociology. In a curious paradox, however, the word ‘society’ denotes no specific identifiable or defining quality throughout the history of sociology; indeed, the concept has long posed (and continues to pose) a profound challenge to making the work of sociology intelligible. Historically speaking, the concept of society in sociology has been largely constructed as a separate, self-enclosed territorial container of social actions and social relations. This equation of society with territorial nation-states has functioned, as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has argued, as a kind of ‘methodological nationalism’ – in which the discipline has been comfortable enough when examining national institutions and state borders, but embarrassed on the whole by the existence of, say, empire, colony or transnational corporations. This may well be one reason why the discipline of sociology has embraced a plurality of terms in conceptualizing ‘society’, ranging variously across ‘social practices’, ‘social order’, ‘social system’, ‘social structure’, ‘social forces’ and ‘social worlds’. In assuming that society pre-exists the social practices and social relations it constitutes, however, these various frameworks have, in the most general terms, been unable to engage the possibility of a variety of differential forms of the social and of varied societies. That is to say, the theorization of society in sociology has, perhaps predictably, (re)produced the typical institutional patterns of Western modernity.

If it is true that ‘society’ emerges as one of the most opaque, baffling terms in classical sociological thought, it has arguably proved equally troubling to our own age of intensive globalization and multinational turbo-capitalism. For one thing, it is surely a paradox of our times that, while social relations increasingly no longer neatly fit (if indeed they ever did) within the territorial boundaries of nation-states, the discipline of sociology finds itself silent or evasive about a whole range of concrete social problems affecting contemporary societies because the notion of ‘the social’ has been recently subsumed within the interdisciplinary lexicon of globalism. Of course globalization has also been debated continuously – by neo-liberals who want to push it further, as well as anti-globalists who focus on the harm it does – particularly in the context of its consequences for national societies.1 In this connection, the common perception is that globalization erodes vulnerable communities and corrodes national socialities. Negative public perceptions of the many problems relating to globalization have been intensified by the economic and social upheavals that have attended the global financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent worldwide credit crunch. Just as the emergence of industrialism in the nineteenth century was judged destructive of family and community, many critics today lament the erosion of a common culture and communal co-operation as a consequence of globalization. Communitarianism, as we show subsequently, has become influential precisely at the point at which community appears to be disappearing. However, the idea that we have moved from a generous world of the caring community or supportive society to a wholesale corrosion of social organization is equally a myth. Blinded by nostalgia for a bygone age, this viewpoint ignores the considerable evidence of flourishing global socialities and transnational communal loyalties. These include, to list just a few, socialities of global protest (such as Make Poverty History), worldwide socialities for the protection of human rights (such as Amnesty International) and socialities for the protection of the environment (such as Greenpeace). More recently, in early 2011, the waves of the Jasmine Revolution appeared to show the survival of social networks and communities despite years of state repression.

From one angle, it is hardly surprising that, as a consequence of globalization, multiple communal loyalties and diverse social interconnections are on the increase for contemporary women and men of the polished, expensive cities of the West. This matters because globalization brings lifestyle changes – new ways of engaging with others, relationships, work and politics – into the heart of what society actually means. Indeed, our day-to-day experience of ‘society’ seems now to have less to do with geographic location or place. In our third chapter, on creation, we explore a concept that we term Elastic Society, by which we seek to capture the many ways in which social relations are stretched over time and space. To continue with this metaphor, Elastic Society may be thin as social networks are extended through space, but it does not automatically follow that they are fragile. Elasticity can also imply resilience and versatility.

More and more, women and men are getting involved with communities – and developing new kinds of sociality (both face-to-face and online) – in non-traditional ways: participating in online voluntary networks, setting up community blogs or creating visions for sustainable futures, rather than just joining established political parties.2 We have to recognize the paradox that anti-globalism is the basis of a worldwide community that is itself a product of the globalizing forces that it opposes. Such global changes, we argue in this book, present sociology with a fresh challenge. If it is to engage adequately with transformations in the scope and structure of society, it must develop an integrated and comprehensive theorization of the social at every level of social theory. It cannot simply recount nostalgic narratives of the corrosion of society, because the critics of these global developments have also to recognize the new forms of the social that are emerging from these crises around the environment, the climate, and the city. That said, nor can sociologists remain silent about a whole host of vital political issues which challenge contemporary societies – from migration to marginalization, and multiculturalism to militarization. Here sociology needs to chance its arm. In the age of the Internet, for example, will off-line communities contract continuously as online social relations expand? With the world’s population expected to reach around nine billion people by 2050, what kind of social relations are most likely in the major mega-cities? Against the backdrop of people living in sky-high, multiplex apartments and with work carried out online, will sociality be eroded or renewed? This book seeks to open up such a line of sociological enquiry and to outline new theoretical perspectives for the critique of contemporary societies.

Our book is intended for students as an introduction to debates about society in the social sciences, but also for general readers who might find the topic interesting. This necessarily means we tread a precarious line between specialist debate and broad-brush presentation. We hope that some of the more demanding parts of the book do not come at the cost of lack of accessibility; if any such difficulties arise we would like to think this is partly a consequence of certain current trends in social theory which tend towards obscurantism or jargon, rather than to our presentation of the post-societal turn in social theory itself. In the end, our aim has been to engage sociological thinking about society with the most urgent global issues of our times.

Introduction

The golden age of ‘society’ is long dead. The foundational sociological perspectives on society developed by Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Georg Simmel – while still clearly of immense conceptual importance to the discipline of sociology – have been seriously challenged by the communications revolution and the world of intensive globalization. In our own time of corporate downsizings, out-sourcing, leveraged buyouts, just-in-time deliveries and gated communities, can we still read classical sociology with some intellectual benefit in order to understand the contours and consequences of twenty-first-century society? The Internet world is perhaps equally problematic for more recent social theorists, such as Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman, C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner. Their perspectives on industrial capitalism were of outstanding value, but, we now face a deeply disturbing issue – is the very foundation of society as such changing so rapidly and so deeply that we can no longer draw fully and comfortably from the legacy of sociology? Many of their ideas on ‘society’ remain of incomparable significance, but our purpose in what follows is to acknowledge the extent to which society has changed in the the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To be more precise have the social changes of the last half century rendered the idea of society in American sociologist Talcott Parsons’s The Social System1 of 1951 wholly obsolete? Why, for example, has the notion of ‘society’ come in our own time to appear so problematic? Is it the case that society is no longer a vital preoccupation of the contemporary age? There is certainly no shortage of contemporary critics of ‘society’– whether, say, theorists of globalization who see in the advent of the global electronic economy the dissolution of nation-state based societies, or postmodernists who promote a view of sociality that is progressively particularistic rather than ‘society’ writ large, which is viewed as repressively universalistic.

Consider the following critical voice on the concept of society, a critic chosen more or less randomly from the vast treasure trove of ‘anti-society’ literature. The ‘category of society’, so our critic reflects, ‘is merely a term of convenience’. Whereas ‘the term “society” was once supposed to fix bounds’, designating an internally integrated unity, it in fact functions as ‘merely an indefinite range of partially or wholly articulated associatings’. In the face of such sociological particularism, our critic goes one step further – in lifting sociological deconstruction to the second order. Society ‘makes itself known to us in the form of incessant repersonalizations of persons’. We say ‘society’, but what we really mean to underscore are ‘provisional co-operatings’. We say ‘society’, but what we mean to say are ‘the rearrangings of arrangements’. ‘Society’ (read: a social situation or condition) is, in fact, the upshot of ‘individualizings’. Who, exactly, is this critic? The voice sounds like an example of postmodern deconstructionism or a ‘micro’ theorist of everyday interaction? Hardly. In fact the author of these sentiments was American sociologist Albion W. Small, and his reflections on the imprecision of the concept of society date to 1912 – from an article published in . While in our own time the discourses of postmodernism and globalization present themselves as troublesome for the concept of society, let us note from the outset then that ‘society’ – both as an analytical category in social science and as lived experience – has long caused conceptual strife.