Sociology Beyond Societies

Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century

John Urry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134655441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this ground-breaking contribution to social theory, John Urry argues that the traditional basis of sociology - the study of society - is outmoded in an increasingly borderless world. If sociology is to make a pertinent contribution to the post societal era it must forget the social rigidities of the pre-global order and, instead, switch its focus to the study of both physical and virtual movement. In considering this sociology of mobilities, the book concerns itself with the travels of people, ideas, images, messages, waste products and money across international borders, and the implications these mobilities have to our experiences of time, space, dwelling and citizenship. Sociology Beyond Society extends recent debate about globalisation both by providing an analysis of how mobilities reconstitute social life in uneven and complex ways, and by arguing for the significance of objects, senses, and time and space in the theorising of contemporary life. This book will be essential reading for undergraduates and graduates studying sociology and cultural geography.

Chapter 1

Societies

At the present moment of history the network of social relations spreads over the whole world, without any absolute solution of continuity. This gives rise to the difficulty … of defining what is meant by the term ‘society’ … If we say that our subject is the study and comparison of human societies we ought to be able to say what are the unit entities with which we are concerned.

(A.R. Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 193)

Introduction

In this book I seek to develop the categories that will be relevant for sociology as a ‘discipline’ as we enter the next century. I seek to present a manifesto for a sociology that examines the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these diverse mobilities. Hence the subtitle of this book – the investigation of mobilities into, and for, the next century.

I show how such mobilities transform the historic subject-matter of sociology within the ‘west’ which focused upon individual societies and upon the generic characteristics of such societies. I consider how the development of various global ‘networks and flows’ undermines endogenous social structures which have generally been taken within sociological discourse to possess the powers to reproduce themselves. I interrogate the concept of the social as society and show that, whatever its value in the past, it will not in the future be especially relevant as the organising concept of sociological analysis. I try to develop a new agenda for sociology and make set out a manifesto for its reformulation in its ‘post-societal’ phase.

The concept of society will in the future be one particularly deployed by especially powerful ‘national’ forces seeking to moderate, control and regulate these variously powerful networks and flows criss-crossing their porous borders. New rules of sociological method are necessitated by the apparently declining powers of national societies (whether or not we do in fact live in a global society), since it was those societies that had provided the social context for sociological study until the present. If there are no longer powerful societies then I try to establish what new rules of sociological method and theory are appropriate. In particular I elaborate some of the material transformations that are remaking the ‘social’, especially those diverse mobilities that, through multiple senses, imaginative travel, movements of images and information, virtuality and physical movement, are materially reconstructing the ‘social as society’ into the ‘social as mobility’.

Three arguments might be made against these claims. In the first, it is said that society has never been the key concept in sociology; that has been provided by other notions, such as meaningful action, agency, interaction or world-system. In the second, it is claimed that societies are still powerful entities and that nation-states are able to undertake important actions, both externally and internally, in order to sustain existing patterns of power. In the third, it is argued that since ‘globalisation’ undermines the very basis of sociology as a separate discipline that loses its central concept of society, so sociology with nothing to put in its place should wither on the vine.

Against these points it is shown that sociology in north Atlantic rim societies has been historically organised around the discourse of ‘society’ and hence of the conditions which sustain their characteristic structuring (such as functional integration, or social conflict, or base and superstructure). This societal structuring has been bound up with notions of what it is to be a member or citizen of a given national society and of the particular societally guaranteed rights and duties of citizenship.

Second, mobilities on an enormous scale involving diverse technologies and objects do problematise the powers of society. I consider how and to what degree ‘social governmentality’ is put into question by mobilities organised through complexly organised times and spaces. Analysis is provided of whether such mobilities undermine societal borders and of the degrees and forms of their permeability. Comprehending such mobilities is not straightforward and in part requires the employment of various kinds of metaphor of movement, especially of networks and flows.

Third, these mobilities criss-crossing societal borders in strikingly new temporal–spatial patterns hold out the possibility of a major new agenda for sociology. This is an agenda of mobility. And there is here an irony. Much twentieth-century sociology has been based upon the study of occupational, income, educational and social mobility. In some sense British sociology has presumed that the differential rates of upward and downward mobility, within generations and across generations, is the defining question of the sociological enterprise. So to stretch a point – one might say that sociology has always regarded mobility as its ‘core business’ but in the formulation I develop there are various breaks with this twentieth-century vision of a sociology that is organised around social/societal mobility.

Most obviously, mobility is taken to be a geographical as well as a social phenomenon. Much of the social mobility literature regarded society as a uniform surface and failed to register the geographical intersections of region, city and place, with the social categories of class, gender and ethnicity. The existing sociology of migration is incidentally far too limited in its concerns to be very useful here. Further, I am concerned with the flows of people within, but especially beyond, the territory of each society, and how these flows may relate to many different desires, for work, housing, leisure, religion, family relationships, criminal gain, asylum seeking and so on. Moreover, not only people are mobile but so too are many ‘objects’. I show that sociology’s recent development of a ‘sociology of objects’ needs to be taken further and that the diverse flows of objects across societal borders and their intersections with the multiple flows of people are hugely significant. Finally, mobility is predominantly understood in a horizontal rather than the vertical sense common within the social mobility literature. I explore further the fruitfulness of horizontal metaphors as the basis of a reconfigured sociology.

Why, it might be asked, should sociology be the discipline principally concerned with the study of these horizontal mobilities? Does not such a focus imply a post-disciplinary social/cultural/political science with no particular space or role for any individual discipline? Indeed maybe the very industries responsible for these global flows will not need the academy anyway since they can reflexively know (or think they know) what is involved in their particular domain and can themselves interrogate the main processes (albeit researched in-house or in private think-tanks). So why can and should sociology analyse these intersecting horizontal mobilities?

First, most other social science disciplines are subject to much more extensive forms of discursive normalisation, monitoring and policing which make them poor candidates for such post-disciplinary reconfiguration. Indeed theories, methods and data may be literally expelled from such disciplines since they are too ‘social’ and outside the concerns of that particular policed discipline (see Urry 1995: chap. 2). Second, sociology’s discursive formation has often demonstrated a relative lack of hierarchy, a somewhat unpoliced character, an inability to resist intellectual invasions, an awareness that all human practice is socially organised, a potential to identify the social powers of objects and nature, and an increasing awareness of spatial and temporal processes. While all these wreak havoc with any remaining notion of society tout court, sociology may be able to develop a new agenda, an agenda for a discipline that is losing its central concept of human ‘society’. It is a discipline organised around networks, mobility and horizontal fluidities.

In the rest of this chapter various notions of society and their constitutive role in the historical development of sociological discourse are examined. Such notions of society are linked to an examination of borders, mobilities and governance. I discuss a range of ways in which a ‘sociology of mobilities’ disrupts a ‘sociology of the social as society’.

In Chapter 2 I show the importance of different metaphors of the social, particularly considering those appropriate for examining various mobilities. I interrogate the metaphors of net/network and of flows/fluids, and contrasts will be drawn with the metaphors of region and structure that have been central to the society concept. Also some consideration is paid to the spatial and temporal organisation of networks/flows and to their complex consequences for what have been historically viewed as societal processes.

In Chapter 3 I consider diverse socio-spatial practices of mobility. I consider corporeal mobility and especially walking, travelling by train, car-driving and air travel; object mobility as objects are constituted through mobilities and are themselves mobile; imaginative travel through radio and television and its effects in reconstituting the public sphere; and virtual travel and its connections with communities and corporeal mobility. In each of these mobilities it is demonstrated that there are complex mobile hybrids constituted through assemblages of humans, machines and technologies.

This last point is further developed in Chapter 4 where it is shown that in order to investigate these relationships of humans and things we need to consider the role of the various senses, something neglected in most sociology. It is the analysis of the senses that embodies sociological analysis but it is necessary to do this in a way that connects such embodiments to larger-scale cultural processes. Particular ‘actants’, it is shown, depend upon particular senses, and that mobilities to, and from places, rest upon specific ‘ways of sensing’. The changing relationships between the different senses are elaborated.

Chapter 5 is concerned with time and especially with outlining and critiquing the distinction between so-called social and natural time. It is shown that apparently ‘natural’ clock-time is in fact socially produced and yet has exerted a powerful role in the subduing of nature. Examination is then provided of instantaneous time that is implicit within, and in turn transforms, various mobilities that are concerned with the saving of brief moments of time. The social consequences of such instantaneous time are shown to be profound and underexplored within mainstream sociological debate.

In Chapter 6 attention is paid to the nature of dwelling. It is considered just what is involved when we say that people dwell within communities, whether given or constructed, and how most forms of dwelling depend upon various modes of real or imagined mobility. Particular attention is focused upon local communities, bunds, collective enthusiasms, virtual communities, nations and diasporas. It is argued that the sociological concept of community should be replaced by that of dwelling and dwellingness, many forms of which presuppose diverse mobilities.

In Chapter 7 a critique is provided of existing notions of citizenship based upon the national society and the limited rights and duties that that entails. It is increasingly hard to sustain a societal model of citizenship with the development of diverse forms of mobility rights and duties, including those of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship. Such a citizenship is analysed in terms of new practices, risks, rights and duties; these transcend individual national borders. A central role in this citizenship is played by shame as the public sphere is transformed into a ‘mediatised’ and partially globalised public stage.

In the final chapter an agenda for a sociology beyond societies is developed, organised around the distinction between gardening and gamekeeping metaphors. The emergence of gamekeeping involves reconsidering the nature of a civil society of mobilities; seeing how states increasingly function as ‘regulators’ of such mobilities; dissolving the ‘gardening’ distinction between nature and society; and examining the emergent global level that is comprised of roaming, intersecting, complex hybrids.

‘There is No such Thing as Society’

I begin with the concept of the social as ‘society’. When former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared that ‘there is no such thing as society’, sociologists led the charge to critique her claim. They declared that there is obviously such a thing as society and that Thatcher’s claim indicated the inappropriateness of her policies based upon trying to reduce the societal to the interests of what she termed ‘individual men and women and their families’.

In this book I shall not install Thatcher as a major figure of individualist social theory (her views were loosely derived from Hayek). But the smug riposte to Thatcher from the British sociological community was not justified. It is actually unclear just what is meant by the term ‘society’. Although there is something ‘more’ in social life than ‘individual men and women and their families’, exactly what this surplus amounts to is not obvious. Most sociologists would not agree on the nature of this surplus. Yet this is particularly ironic since if sociology does possess a central concept, it is surely that of society (even when alternative terms are used, such as country, social structure, nation or social formation).

First then, I argue that the concept of society has been central to sociological discourse. I then argue that if there is any agreement on the concept of society this is embedded within notions of nation-state, citizenship and national society, working through a ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995). But then I show that it is this sense of ‘nation-state-society’ that contemporary mobilities call into question and which suggest that maybe Thatcher was oddly right when she said there is no such thing as society. But she was at the same time quite wrong in that she ignores many ‘post-societal’ processes that lie beyond individual men and women, including especially those of the global marketplace. She also omits to consider the enduring ideological power of the nation presumably because she would regard this as ‘natural’ and not ‘societal’. I will now expand on these points.

Sociological discourse has indeed been premised upon ‘society’ as its object of study (Billig 1995: 52–3; Hewitt 1997: chap. 1). This was especially so from the 1920s onwards as sociology was institutionalised especially within the American academy. MacIver and Page’s standard Society: An Introductory Analysis argues that sociology is ‘“about” social relationships, the network of relationships we call society’ (1950: v). The radical Gouldner in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology talks of ‘Academic Sociology’s emphasis on the potency of society and the subordination of men [sic] to it’ (1972: 52). In the definitive The Social Science Encyclopedia, Shils talks of sociology’s knowledge being ‘gained through the study of the whole and parts of society’ (1985: 799), while Kornblum defines sociology as the ‘scientific study of human societies and human behaviour in the many groups that make up a society’ (1988: 4). The world system theorist Wallerstein summarises the overall situation: ‘no concept is more pervasive in modern social science than society’ (1987: 315).

This construction of the discourse of sociology around the concept of society in part stemmed from the relative autonomy of American society throughout the twentieth century. It thus represents a universalisation of the American societal experience. The theorist of the US as the prototypical modern society, Talcott Parsons, defined ‘society as the type of social system characterised by the highest level of self-sufficiency relative to its environment, including other social systems’ (1971: 8). Such self-sufficient societies are of course empirically rare and generally rely upon their domi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Societies
• 2. Metaphors
• 3. Travellings
• 4. Senses
• 5. Times
• 6. Dwellings
• 7. Citizenships
• 8. Sociologies
• Bibilography
• Index