Sociology Australia

Judith Bessant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247350
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sociology gives us the tools we need to understand our life and the lives of the people around us. It reveals that our commonsense view of the world isn't always right, and enables us to find out what actually shapes our experiences.In this widely used and very readable introductory text, Judith Bessant and Rob Watts show us how to develop a sociological perspective on what is happening in Australia today. Rapid and far-reaching social changes are taking place which affect us all: globalisation is impacting on our economy and culture; technological developments increase the pace of life; and many people worry about the decline of traditional values and about environmental and personal security. Using a sociological perspective we can explain why different groups of people experience these changes as exciting, unsettling or devastating. Sociology Australia is structured around six key questions: * What is sociology?* Who are we and how do we come to be who we are?* How do we know the world in which we live?* Can we make our lives as we want them?* Who makes the decisions that shape our society?* What changes are taking place in Australia today? Sociology Australia is an ideal introduction to the discipline of sociology and to the dynamics of Australian society today. This third edition of Sociology Australia has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new chapters on religion, education and sustainability.

• • • PART ONE
WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?

The idea that Australians now live in a time characterised by endless change has become a cliché. Indeed, the permanence of change has been accepted among social theorists ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto back in 1848 and pointed to the way the European middle classes were creating a modern capitalist economy that set loose a permanent condition of change so total that ‘everything that is solid melts into air’. That combination of economic change and political reform driven by the middle classes kick-started a permanent process of revolution in modern societies. It has become conventional to talk about this process of change by using terms like ‘the modernising process’ or ‘modernity’. This in turn has led to much talk about the way we have moved into a period described as ‘post-modern’. More recently, the word ‘globalisation’ has been used to define or describe this latest manifestation of change.

There is no doubt that those of us who live in Australia now, as well as those who have been writing sociology for the past two centuries, have been part of complex processes of social, economic, political and intellectual change. Yet what does this idea of permanent change mean? And what does ‘modernity’ mean, let alone ‘post-modernity’ or ‘globalisation’?

Given that the development of social sciences like sociology took place in societies that were going through often-dramatic processes of social change, the claim of sociologists to be able to explain change takes on an extra level of interest. How, for example, have sociologists talked about processes of change, and have they anything useful or important to say?

What was an important sociologist like Zygmunt Bauman (1991) thinking when he attempted to explain the effort by the Nazi state after 1941 to kill as many of Europe’s Jews as it could? This is the event widely referred to as ‘the Holocaust’—a process that led to the murder of over five million Jewish people. Bauman used the idea of ‘modernity’ to explain this awful crime against humanity. Bauman (1991: 15) argues that features of modernity such as bureaucracy, science, technology, a modern army and modern political advertising can be used to explain the Nazi Holocaust. Is this an example of using an idea like modernity to obscure things rather than to illuminate or explain them?

In the first part of this book, we pay attention to sociology as a social science. In Chapter 1 we discuss the emergence of sociology as a distinctive way of thinking about the world, indicating some of the ways this developing intellectual tradition connected with the process of modernisation that was set loose some centuries ago.

In Chapter 2 we ask a basic question that anyone coming to sociology might find useful: how should we read sociology? Far from assuming that reading is a simple, uncomplicated activity, we outline a disciplined approach to reading that emphasises the need to be active and analytical, and to take nothing for granted.

In Chapter 3 we consider some of the ways sociologists have ‘done’ sociology. As with every other social science discipline, there are many different ways people who call themselves sociologists approach sociology. While we pay attention to some of these differences, we also offer a broad overview of how what C. Wright Mills called the ‘sociological imagination’ works.

In Chapter 4 we sketch out some of the ways in which this ‘sociological imagination’ can work to inform good research practices. We consider how sociological research can inform and promote change that is careful and respectful of people as well as being both effective and reflective.

Finally, in Chapter 5 we look at some of the issues at stake in the relationship between ethical ideas and values and the practice of sociology. As we argued in the Introduction, the question of ethical values is as significant as any issue when it comes to the search for truth.

1.
SOCIOLOGY IN AN AGE OF INSECURITY

• Summary

• Sociology in an age of insecurity

• From pre-modern to modern society: The big picture

• The modernising project

• The Great Transformation

• Sociology and the Great Transformation

• Intellectuals, sociologists and the Great Transformation

• Thinking about frames

• Conclusion

• Discussion questions

• • SUMMARY

The idea that Australians now live in a period of accelerated change, leading to an experience Alvin Toffler (1974) called ‘future shock’, has become commonplace. In this context, there is also a lot of talk about how we are entering into new kinds of relationships with the rest of the world. To describe this process—which includes new technologies, the expansion of communication media and economic policies like free trade—many people have started using the word ‘globalisation’. Whether ‘globalisation’ is a useful concept or a mischievous metaphor is one question to which we will return at the end of the book.

To place the discussion of globalisation into a larger context, we explore the idea that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, societies like Britain, Germany, France and later the United States began transforming themselves. They shifted from being societies and economies based on ‘pre-modern’ religion, peasant-farming economies, small-scale communities and traditional cultures to what is referred to variously as ‘capitalist’, ‘industrialist’ or simply ‘modern’ societies. We draw on Polanyi’s (1973) model of the ‘Great Transformation’ to represent some of the key economic, political, demographic and intellectual changes that occurred.

It was in the context of the ‘Great Transformation’ that some people began speculating about why the process of change was happening and how it was happening. One result of that speculation was sociology.

• SOCIOLOGY IN AN AGE OF INSECURITY

After a long period of being relatively isolated from the rest of the world, Australia now has a much closer relationship with many countries. We can be in near-instantaneous contact with people around the world using a mobile phone or email, and we have access to non-stop global TV news services. Dramatic changes have taken place in the way we do business with the rest of the world—think of our reliance on Chinese imports for clothing, computers or foodstuffs. And, since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, there is a sense that we are no longer safe because terrorism has assumed a global dimension.

To describe these kinds of relationships, academics began to use the word ‘globalisation’. They also used it when talking about economic policies like free trade or a deregulated financial system, which it is believed promote these closer links between Australia and the world. We also appear to believe that globalisation is a radically new feature of our daily lives. Sociologists like Bauman (1998), Giddens (1999), Beck (2000) and Pakulski (2004) have all used the concept and helped to give it considerable currency.

Some sociologists tend to adopt a generally favourable view of globalisation, like Giddens (1999), who argues that globalisation is just the latest phase of a larger process that sociologists call ‘modernity’. Others tend to be more sceptical about such claims—for instance, Jan Pakulski (2004), who argues that globalisation increases tendencies towards social inequality as well as promoting trends associated with modernity like ‘universalistic orientations, rationalism, individualism and egalitarian values, trends reinforced by a popular culture hostile to hierarchy’ (2004: 14).

As our earlier reference to terrorism suggests, the word ‘globalisation’ has been connected to many aspects of modern life typically defined as problems. From global sex tourism, global drug trafficking and the rise of global criminal networks to the restructuring of economies and the consequences of economic change with respect to poverty and unemployment, globalisation has had many negative features attributed to it. A decade ago, commentators like David Leser (1996: 4) were arguing:

To be Australian today is, for many people, to be deeply insecure about the future. You … see this trauma in … the faces of those in the dole queues, in companies being downsized, in workplaces of increasing stress and competition, in traffic snarls, in isolated country towns, behind the walls of disintegrating family homes. It’s no secret that the changes in Australian society have been staggering. No aspect of life remains unaltered. The catchwords have been globalisation and restructuring. The results have been declining wages, growing job insecurity, changing labour markets, soaring technological advancements, altering work practices and a redefinition of leisure. The Australian psyche has taken a pummeling.

In the new millennium, commentators like Lois Bryson (2001) continued making the link between the restructuring process associated with globalisation and serious social inequalities. According to Bryson, ‘the gap between men’s and women’s wages has widened as have differences between women in strongly and weakly organised sections of the workforce’ (2001: 96).

So are contemporary Australians right to believe that, after decades of being isolated, we have now entered a closer relationship with the rest of the world, and that this is a really new feature of our experience? How should we think about globalisation? Does it explain the things it is often used to explain?

As we will demonstrate, many beliefs rely on assumptions that may not be useful or credible. An assumption is an initial belief without which we cannot even ask a question, let alone answer it. As George Lakoff (1999, 2005) has observed, all our knowledge claims rely on assumptions that are built from simple but powerful metaphors and moral values. On what assumptions do our beliefs about globalisation rest?

We should recall, for example, that in The Tyranny of Distance, Geoffrey Blainey (1966) argued that Australians had always suffered due to the distances they had to travel to get to anywhere ‘important’. This thesis relied on an evaluation of where British settlers saw the ‘important’ places as being. It failed to acknowledge that the region in which Australia was located—Southeast Asia—was less than 100 kilometres away by sea and was home to the world’s longest-lived civilisation. Those who use the globalisation concept may similarly be relying unconsciously on an array of moral values and metaphors.

At the least, the current vogue for talking about ‘globalisation’ requires us to think about how sociologists have understood the past few centuries, which undoubtedly had involved major and persistent experiences of change in many societies. So, rather than engaging with the various debates about globalisation, we believe it is more useful to consider the ‘big picture’ of change over the past two or three centuries. We return to think critically about our various accounts about ‘globalisation’ in Chapter 16.

The idea that ours is a period of important change belongs to a larger story of change, which sociologists have referred to as the modernising process. That there is a close relationship between the emergence of sociology as certain ways of thinking and researching the social world and the experience of far-reaching changes in the way people have organised their economic, social and political and cultural activities is a core assumption which informs this book. Indeed, in several important ways the origins of sociology are to be found in the attempt to understand or explain the nature of large-scale change.

• FROM PRE-MODERN TO MODERN SOCIETY: THE BIG PICTURE

The kinds of societies we now live in are the results of a dramatic process of total change that has been taking place over the past 300 years. In the eighteenth century, members of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Adam Ferguson and Dougald Steuart, talked about the emergence of ‘civil society’, while Adam Smith talked about the growth of ‘commercial society’. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx wrote about the transition from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode of production. In the 1880s, Ferdinand Toennies referred to this process of change as the shift from gemeinschaft (or ‘community’) to gesellschaft (or ‘society’). Around the same time, Arnold Toynbee wrote about the growth of ‘industrialisation’ while Werner Sombart described the evolution of ‘capitalism’. In our own time, Anthony Giddens (1997) has written about the rise of ‘modernity’.

Any attempt to generalise about processes of change in societies as different as China, Great Britain, Greece, the United States or Australia across a number of centuries must balance the need to simplify with a respect for complexity and difference—a balance not all sociologists have achieved. What the various models and stories of change all attempt to capture and describe is how societies in which people once lived a ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-modern’ way of life became ‘modern’.

Traditional lifestyles

If we travelled in a time machine back to the Australian continent at the start of the eighteenth century, we would find Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living a settled and traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle. They would have been doing this for at least 40 000 years. They harvested the land, waterways and seas to feed, clothe and shelter themselves. Their lifestyles were rich and diverse, complete with complex and sophisticated religious and spiritual belief systems. Moreover, Aborigines and Torres St...