Social Theory and Modern Sociology

Anthony Giddens

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialtheorie

In this book Anthony Giddens addresses a range of issues concerning current developments in social theory, relating them to the prospects for sociology in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Composed of closely integrated papers, all written over the past few years, the book includes seven essays not previously published, plus two have not appeared in English before.

In assessing the likely future evolution of sociology in particular, and the social sciences in general, the author both draws upon ideas established in his more abstract theoretical writings and examines critically competing traditions of thought.

Those looking for an accessible introduction to Gidden's writing will find in this book a set of clear expositions of his basic ideas. By situating these ideas in relation to the critical assessment of the views of others, however, the author provides new sources of insight into the distinctiveness of his own claims.

1

What do sociologists do?

Sociology has been an established discipline — in most universities the world over — for many years.¹ Yet the subject is a worrying one to some people in a way that other academic endeavours are not. It would be overstating the case to say that it rouses the passions, but it would probably be fair to hold that it quite often produces feelings of disquiet which do not seem to attach to most other fields of academic enquiry. There is something about sociology that tends to raise hackles which remain undisturbed by most other academic pursuits. Disciplinary chauvinism is a familiar enough phenomenon in universities. One may legitimately suspect that it is rather rarely based upon a deep acquaintance with whatever areas of study happen to be the objects of disparagement. But there does appear to be something more involved in reactions to sociology than the commonplace expression of resentment and ignorance for which universities are unhappily on occasion the breeding-grounds.

What is the source of the unease which the presence of sociology in the academy in some degree creates? One rejoinder to such a question might be that there is no clear-cut field of study to which it corresponds — no subject-matter which can be definitely pointed to as delimiting its province of investigation. There is surely very little indeed in this view. Sociology is concerned with the comparative study of social institutions, giving particular emphasis to those forms of society brought into being by the advent of modern industrialism. There might be differences of opinion as to how modern societies should best be studied, but to suggest that such societies are not worthy of systematic enquiry seems more than faintly absurd.

In any case, there is more emotion involved in antagonistic responses to sociology than is compatible with an intellectual worry over how well-defined its field of study may be. Could the prompting impulse therefore be fear? Perhaps, however vaguely, there is some sort of threat implied in subjecting our own social behaviour to academic scrutiny? This is closer to the mark. If it is at all interesting, sociological work is bound to unsettle some people some of the time. Yet anyone who knows anything about sociology will affirm that it is very far from unsettling all of the people all of the time. There are some who naively associate sociology with political radicalism, with a shaggy horde pouring over the barricades to overturn all that every sensible citizen holds dear. However at least as many sociologists have been conservatives as radicals, and the probability is that most are political middle-of-the-roaders in much the same proportion as any other discipline. It would demand a piece of extended social research in its own right to validate this assertion properly. But no one having a developed familiarity with the subject is likely to suppose that its leading traditions of thought are located in a particular corner of the political spectrum.

No, it is surely not primarily a sense of brooding opposition to the status quo that can explain the attitude of reserve which sociology seems to provoke. Maybe it is that sociology is felt to be unenlightening? Perhaps we tend to feel that we already know enough about the sources of our own conduct, and that of others in societies like ours, not to need anything further? Let me put it in a provocative way. The sociologist, it might be said, is someone who states the obvious, but with an air of discovery. You might think it unlikely that anyone who would accept the designation ‘sociologist’ would be at all happy with this, because it would seem straight away to put him or her out of a job. In fact I think this is really the nub of the issue, and it gives particular cogency to the question: What do sociologists do? Putting the question in a slightly more elaborate form — What kind of enlightenment can sociologists offer about the origins and nature of our own social conduct? — turns up some very real problems. They are problems that are shared in some part by all the social sciences, and indeed the humanities too. But they are posed in a peculiarly acute way in sociology.

The matter can be put quite simply. One of the distinctive things about human beings, which separates us from the animals, is that normally we know what we are doing in our activities, and why. That is to say, human beings are concept-bearing agents, whose concepts in some part constitute what it is that they are up to, not contingently, but as an inherent element of what it is that they are up to. In addition, human actors have reasons for their actions, reasons that consistently inform the flow of day-to-day activities. Neither reasons nor act-identifications need be expressed discursively for them to govern the content of behaviour. Yet in general I think it valid to hold that agents virtually all the time know what their actions are, under some description, and why it is they carry them out. There is a further consideration. It is intrinsic to human action that, in any given situation, the agent, as philosophers sometimes say, could have acted otherwise. However oppressively the burden of particular circumstances may weigh upon us, we feel ourselves to be free in the sense that we decide upon our actions in the light of what we know of ourselves, the context of our activities, and their likely outcomes. This feeling is not spurious. For it is arguable that it is analytical to the concept of agency that the actor in some sense ‘could have done otherwise’ — or could have refrained from whatever course of action was followed.

These remarks seem doubly to compound the difficulties of sociology. For the persistent critic may push the argument beyond that mentioned previously. Not only are sociologists prone to state the obvious, but they tend to dress up what they have to say in terminology which seems to deny to agents the freedom of action we know ourselves to have. They may suggest that what we do is impelled by social forces, or social constraints, independently of our own volition. We believe ourselves to be acting freely, and in cognizance of the grounds of our actions, but really we are moved by compulsions of which we are quite unaware. This sort of claim does not ring true, for it transgresses what we feel ourselves to be — in my view rightly — as human actors. Sociology might therefore seem to be a doubly redundant discipline, not only telling us what we already know, but parading the familiar in a garb which conceals its proper nature.

However I am fairly confident that this is not all there is to it. I am not about to suggest that sociologists should all quietly pack their bags and slip away to pastures new. I am willing to accept, and even to accentuate, the claim that large segments of the discipline of sociology are concerned with things we think we know. But far from rendering the subject, or its practitioners, redundant, or their ideas without bite, this makes sociology in some ways the most challenging and the most intricately demanding of the social sciences. I do not want to say that there do not exist versions of sociology that I find either objectionable, or essentially uninteresting, or both. My speaking of ‘what sociologists do’ has something of an optative sense to it. I do not by any means approve of what all sociologists do. I wish only to give examples of what the discipline can accomplish, to show why, as an area of study, sociology is both intellectually compelling and of great practical importance.

Sociology and Lay Knowledge

In analysing what sociologists do, let me start from the observation that what seems obvious, or what ‘everyone knows’, may not only not be obvious at all, it might actually be wrong. Not many of us today belong to the flat-earth society, although it seems obvious enough when you look at it that the earth is as flat as any pancake. In the case of our presumed knowledge about social institutions, it might be argued, we are particularly inclined to error. At any rate, examples are very easy to find. It is commonly known — or believed — for example that there has been a steep rise in the number of ‘broken homes’ or one-parent families over the past century. Thus if we look back to Victorian times, we see a dramatic contrast between the stable, integrated families of that era and the disarray of the current period. In fact the proportion of one-parent families was possibly greater in the Victorian epoch than it is today — not as a result of divorce, but mainly as a consequence of higher rates of mortality in relatively youthful age-groups. Or again, it is common knowledge that the United Kingdom is particularly strike-prone, its tendency to industrial disruption even being taken by some to be the main origin of its shortcomings in respect of economic performance. However, in terms of any accepted measures, the incidence of strikes in Britain is not especially high as compared with various other industrially-developed countries. To take another example, it is well-known — or imagined — that Sweden has an extremely high rate of suicide. Something in the gloomy Nordic character, or the long years of having had to tolerate a socialist government, creates a disposition to melancholy or to despair. In actuality Sweden does not display a particularly elevated suicide rate, and never has done so.

One should not underestimate the contribution which social research can make to identifying false or slanted beliefs widely held about social phenomena. For such beliefs may often take the form of prejudices, and hence contribute to intolerance and discrimination, or might inhibit social changes that would otherwise be seen as desirable. It surely must be one of the tasks of the sociologist to seek to discover how far commonly-held views about given aspects of social life are in fact valid, even if they appear obvious to everyone else. And this is bound to mean that the results of social research may now and then seem uninspiring, since what is thought to be obvious may indeed prove to be the case. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that a good deal of what is now taken to be among the things everyone knows about social institutions is the result of sociological analysis and social research. An enormous amount of social research — often carried out by government bodies or survey agencies, not only by sociologists in a university context — goes into the routine running of a modern society. We tend to take this for granted, but without it much that is involved in what everyone knows would not be part of our awareness at all. We all know that rates of divorce in most Western countries are higher that they were two or three decades ago; but we tend to forget the very considerable amount of continuing social investigation involved in charting such trends.

If this were all there were to sociology, there would probably not be too much to get excited about. Sociology is not just in the business of correcting false beliefs which we may hold about social phenomena — although some of its advocates have in fact seen it only in this role. Let me return to the theorem I stated earlier. To be a human agent is to know, virtually all the time, under some description, what one is engaged in and why. There is a sense in which we cannot be wrong about what our actions are, or those actions would not exist. I cannot, for instance, write a cheque without knowing not only what it is I am doing, but without also knowing a complex array of concepts and rules, defining what ‘credit’ is, what ‘having an account’ is, what a ‘bank’ is, and so on. The formula that human agents always in a certain sense know what they are doing, and why, necessarily involves a range of elements in the broader institutional context within which a particular action is carried on. We do not need social research to tell us what these elements are, since not only do we know them already, we must know them already for the action in question to be possible at all.

This sort of knowledge — knowledge of the social conventions involved in the societies in which we live — cannot, therefore, be subject to illumination by sociology. Or so it might seem. Only a little reflection is required to see that such is not the case. I want to propose, in fact, that there are no less than four types of question that one might legitimately ask about social conduct, none of which contravenes the assertion that human individuals always know what their actions are and why they engage in them. These four kinds of enquiry, which have a logical unity with one another, supply the keys to understanding what sociologists do — to what the discipline of sociology is all about.

Consider again the example of signing a cheque. Everyone in a modern society knows what signing a cheque is, but someone from a culture in which there are no banks, and perhaps not even a monetary system at all, would not. What is familiar convention to one individual or group, in other words, is not necessarily so to another. This is true not only between different societies, or forms of society, but within them too. All of us live our lives within particular sectors of the societies of which we are members, and the modes of behaviour of those in other milieux may be largely opaque to us. Showing what it is like to live in one particular cultural setting to those who inhabit another (and vice versa) is a significant part of what the sociologist does. This might be called the anthropological moment of social research, and it is worthwhile noting some of its implications. Notice, for example, that the identification of the cultural diversity of social life is simultaneously often a means of disclosing the common rationality of human action. To provide an account of the conventions involved in a given cultural milieu, or a given community, allows a grasp of the intentions and reasons the agents have for what they do, which may entirely escape us in the absence of such an account.

There are complicated problems of a philosophical sort involved here, and I do not want to underestimate them. But it is fairly easy to develop the point. In a world riven with conflict and embedded hostilities, and yet increasingly interdependent, mutual comprehension across diverse cultural settings becomes of the first importance. The sine qua non of such cross-cultural communication is the effective prosecution of the ethnographic tasks of social research. This is just as true of the cultural distance which separates West Indian communities in Brixton from affluent white suburbs (and from Whitehall) as it is, for example, of that which separates the Islamic Revolution from the culture of the West. Of course, bridging the spaces of cultural dissimilarity does not inevitably lead to a reduction of pre-existing conflicts. The better one knows one’s enemies, the clearer it may become that hostility towards them is justifiable or unavoidable. But this should not lead us to doubt what an elementary part the ethnography of culture plays in forging mutual understanding.

Its natural counterpart on the level of academic disciplines is the close meshing of sociology and anthropology.

Without seeming unduly mercenary, let me revert to the instance of signing a cheque. We all know what it is to sign a cheque, but this is not the same as saying we know all there is to know about it. Would a cheque be valid if I wrote it on the back of a bus ticket, rather than on the printed slips the bank so thoughtfully provides? Most of the knowledge we have of the conventions which define our actions is not only contextual, it is basically practical and ad hoc in character. In order to have a bank account, and cash cheques on it, we are not required to have an elaborate understanding of the banking system. Nor could everyone necessarily put into words what a ‘cheque’ or an ‘account’ is, if asked to do so. We all know (in modern societies) what money is in the sense that we have no trouble handling monetary transactions in our day-to-day lives. But as any economist will attest, giving a clear definition of what money is tends to be far from unproblematic. As St. Augustine remarked in the course of his celebrated observations about time, we all know what time is — until someone asks us.

Various inferences might be drawn from this, but I want to concentrate only upon one of them. This is that our discourse — what we are able to put into words — about our actions, and our reasons for them, only touches on certain aspects of what we do in our day-to-day lives. There is a highly complex non-discursive side to our activities which is of particular interest to sociology, and to other social sciences as well. It is not paradoxical here to say that sociology in this respect does study things we already know — although ordinarily we do not know them in the sense of being entirely aware of them. To put the matter another way, a good deal of our knowledge of social convention, as Wittgenstein famously observes, consists of being able to ‘go on’ in the multifarious contexts of social activity. The study of how we manage to accomplish this is a matter of great interest — and has potentially profound consequences, or so I shall try to indicate later.

We might offer as an illustration Erving Goffman’s brilliant observations about body idiom.² To be a human agent, one must not only know what one is doing, but must also demonstrate this to others in visible fashion. We all expect each other to maintain a sort of ‘controlled alertness’ in our actions. We do this through the disciplined management of bodily appearance, control of bodily posture and of facial expression. Goffman shows how dazzlingly intricate are the bodily rituals whereby we ‘exhibit presence’ to others, and thereby routinely and chronically defend our status as agents. The best insights into how tightly controlled our public exhibition of self ordinarily is can be gained by analysing circumstances in which it lapses. Thus we might investigate the behaviour of young children from this point of view, because it takes children years to acquire the controlled bodily idiom of their elders. Or we might study inadvertent interruptions in body management — slips of the tongue, lapses in control of posture, facial expression or dress. In this regard there are intriguing connections between Goffman and Freud, although I shall not pursue them here.

The social world never seems the same again after having read Goffman. The most inoffensive gesture becomes charged with potential associations, not all of them pleasant. But why should this be? What accounts for the fact that, for most of his readers, Goffman’s writings tend to produce a feeling of privileged insight into the mundane? It is, I think, because they deal with what is intimate and familiar, but from its non-discursive side. They enhance our understanding of ourselves precisely because they reveal what we already know and must know to get around in the social world, but are not cognisant of discursively. There is from this perspective no paradox in saying that what we already know warrants detailed study, yet that the outcome of such study is far from self-evident. We could make the same point about the investigation of language. Linguists spend their professional careers studying what we already know, and indeed must know to be competent language speakers at all. But this in no way compromises the importance of linguistics, or makes it less demanding than other areas of research.

I have so far distinguished two qualifications to the proposition that we all know most of the time what our actions are, and why we perpetrate them — that all of us inhabit restricted milieux within a culturally variegated world, and that we are normally able discursively to identify only little of the complex conventional frameworks of our activities. To these we now have to add a third: that our activities constantly, I would even say routinely, have consequences that we do not intend, and of which we ...