Theorizing Society in a Global Context

A. Krossa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137003171
• eBook ISBN: 9781137003188
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Using Europe as an example, this book readdresses and updates the concept of 'society', exploring society in the context of both globalization and conflict theory to develop a new theory of society for our times.

Part I

Concepts and Framework

Three indicatory questions structure this section, the initial one having been analyzed in Section 1.1 ‘Theory and Concepts’: what are the main concepts we need for an advancement of the concept of society, and how might they be most usefully defined and deployed? The second question, as addressed in Section 1.2 ‘Globalization’, is: what is the best way of thinking about globalization, both in principle as well as when related to the chosen focus on society? And against this background, Section 1.3 ‘Europe’, begins to develop the discussion of the question: how is or might Europe be imagined as society?

1.1 Theory and Concepts

The reason for society’s continuous ‘pull test’ is its situatedness right at the nerve centre of human existence, where the most fundamental dynamics of generality and particularity, homogeneity and heterogeneity, the collective and the individual, come together. Discussions and academic framings of society’s genuinely challenging, inescapably mobile position – and this paradox puts it all in a nutshell – characteristically reflect just this issue. Here, instead of relying on contrastive assumptions, such as opposing collective and individual, structure and actor or harmonious integration and confrontational disintegration, a new, more theoretically integrative perspective is being developed.

Whenever the question ‘society?’ is posed a vast number of related concepts immediately come to mind. Therefore, it is imperative to make a considered selection of terms and their understandings according to the desiderata of each specifically chosen perspective. Here, instead of arguing in a strictly linear form, I suggest opening up a conceptual discursive space on the general basis of the following terms and their dynamics: the relation between individual and collective, integration/disintegration versus inclusion/exclusion, all set against the general background of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Discussions of these terms are being provided in Section 1.1.1 ‘The General Conceptual Space’. A critical elaboration on this basis takes place on ‘Community Versus Society’ (Section 1.1.2). Section 1.1.3 ‘A Preliminary Concept of Society’ offers a first working definition of the main concept that serves as a starting point for further theoretical elaborations throughout the text. By gradually developing theory-led working definitions and hypotheses, this section aims at preparing for the subsequent parts of the book which conversely presuppose a certain set of shared understandings of the most fundamental aspects and categories.

1.1.1 The General Conceptual Space

I follow Georg Simmel’s path by assuming that the fundamental unit for analyzing society is interplay [Wechselwirkung] on a micro-level, thought of as a process on meso- and macro-levels, and termed sociation [Vergesellschaftung]. In this sense, the primary focus is on forms of exchange that happen between human beings.¹

This is already embodied in the supposition that the most general essence of the human species is its quasi natural social interdependence. This may be particularly obvious both in young and old ages and/or in highly differentiated societies, but it is a universal principle. The human being is a social being, and that fact applies to such degrees and in such a variety of expressions that limits its comparability to other animals. This reaches right down to the very foundations of human self-definition. On the basis of the understanding that “human existence, at all levels, is one vast and complex tissue of relationalities” (Gifford 2010, 14), it is immediately clear that we are looking for self-placing, usually by the means of comparison. Accordingly, Smith assumes: “Society is the mirror for the individual’s assessment of him- or herself” (quoted in Frisby and Sayer 1986, 25–26).² As important as this nature-related argument of the basis of mutual human dependence certainly is, it is only one side of the coin. If this were all, we would not even have invented the term (social) integration, let alone be discussing it heatedly, both in its theoretical scope and in its empirical forms. There would simply be a ‘natural society’, where social relations were like an automatic meshing of gears, but this is obviously not the case. Instead, social life is characterized by ongoing, complex deliberations and controversy about exactly how we should relate to each other. In this sense, ‘everything is culture’.³ This is the flip side of the nature/culture coin. The common principle of human society is expressed and organized in a wide variety of forms.

The fundamental vehicle of social relating is communication.⁴ Due to its generality, communication in whatever form is a constitutive element of society in the broadest sense, which makes it a near universal tool for social research. Seen from a theoretical-methodological perspective, communication is a relatively neutral term, as it does not determine the direction of social exchange, and therefore offers a very general instrument for social analysis, independently of the contents of exchange or even its potentially integrative or disintegrative direction. In this sense, it is able to give the required general depiction of flows of the social. The broad assumption that “[b]elonging today is participation in communication more than anything else” (Delanty 2003, 187–188) is the basis of a wide range of research, of general theoretical work as well as of more specific studies, for instance on social institutions, mobilities or political norms, to mention but a few. Accordingly, both the power of the individual and the power of groups are subject to communication in its various forms. Understood in relation to power, communication is obviously important as transporter of conflicts, and often discussed with respect to the public sphere, for instance when we assume that being human means to participate.⁵ Then society is “– irrespective of any other characteristics it might possess – a communicative community, a symbolic order, a universe of shared (or at least, of intercommunicable) meanings” (Frisby and Sayer 1986, 79; with reference to Durkheim). Such meanings are, Frisby and Sayer add, mediated by language and its inter-subjective quality, as “language conditions how we see and experience the reality of society” (Frisby and Sayer 1986, 80; with reference to Winch 1958).

Communication’s specific quality for this book’s perspective is broader, though, and lies in its inherent combination of all the above-mentioned oppositions and in its ability to transport them socially: the general and the particular, homogeneity and heterogeneity, inclusion and exclusion, the collective and the individual. As the quote of Smith on the role of society for individual self-assessment has just illustrated, we draw on sometimes explicitly but mainly implicitly agreed and understood forms in order to communicate, and simultaneously to shape and express ourselves. Accordingly, the effects are, and at one and the same time, both collectivizing and individualizing.

Another one of the core questions in relation to communication is how it has changed over the past generations in particular, and what the shift from face-to-face communication to largely indirect and far more abstract forms means for the concept of society. Garnham assumes that it is “clear that human social development has been, from a very early stage, in part dependent upon the development of technologies and institutions of social communication which break out spatially and temporally from face-to-face interpersonal communication based upon speech and gesture. How we choose to explain that relationship between communication and other social structures is precisely a key matter for theoretical dispute” (Garnham 2004/1998, 166).

Based on the notion of contending forces, a central question of sociological research for many decades has been how to integrate societies, and in a stricter sense, how to bring the aspect of heterogeneity under some control. Integration in its traditional sense means ‘restoration of an entirety’ (assuming that there actually has been ‘a whole’ at some earlier point in time!), based on convergence and alignment and measured by the degree of consensus, or by the severance of social control and respective sanctioning. Accordingly, the classic question was how to make those individuals ‘sufficiently similar’ that were to constitute a society, that is, to make them converge in order to reach a largely harmonic state of co-existence and cooperation. The assumption underlying such ideas is typically: the more homogeneity and subsequent coherence there exists, the more stable and ultimately better the emerging society will become. In line with this assumption, difference, divergence and potential disintegration are seen as problems that are to be avoided in principle.

In much current sociological thinking, though, the more conventional terms of integration and disintegration have been substituted by inclusion and exclusion. This indicates a step away from absolute and rigid ideas of belonging and to some degree also from the traditional link between nation-state and society as preliminarily described in the Introduction (and discussed, more extensively, in Section 2.1.1). The newer antipodes take into account the fact that the belonging of individuals to groups is multiple, can assume many shapes and underlies change. Belonging to one (national) society only, and particularly aiming for full individual integration as some kind of ‘complete’ human being, irrespective of specific functions or social roles, is not considered an option or even an ideal anymore in most current sociological theory. In this sense, the segmentation into Us and Others has become far more flexible, too. Who the Other is to me changes from one social constellation to another, so that who has been an Other in one situation can well be part of Us in the next situation. This fact may have become rather obvious in contemporary, functionally highly specialized and individualized societies, but it is important to underline that a multiplicity of roles is a principle of individuals’ social lives and, therefore, of societies as such.

Against this general background, the relation between Self and Other will be looked at in more detail now. The general assumption underlying the idea of an “identitarian binome ‘Self and Other’ ” is that it is “constructed and deciphered from the viewpoint of some first person subject, singular or collective – some represented or implied ‘I’ or ‘we’ ” (Gifford 2010, 13). This definition puts the main elements of the dyad in a nutshell. Firstly, it can work on both the individual and the collective level; secondly, it constructs simultaneously the internal and the external; and thirdly, it is closely linked to the concept of identity. Following on from the second point, it is important to acknowledge that the apparently strict separation between inside and outside, Self and Other, underlying this construction is ideal-typical. The image of two stable, mutually exclusive units, which come into some kind of clear-cut, sterile contact and result in clearly separate realities of inside and outside, is not what we find empirically, that is, as real types. Instead, we see that identifications – both individual and collective – are in a process that includes exchange, overlapping and forming new and often hybrid forms. The fact that we have “as many potential ‘Others’ as we have facets [ … ] of selfhood or ipseity” (Gifford 2010, 14) needs to be recognized in theory, too. This does not mean, though, that it is senseless to use Self and Other as ideal types. This is because such a combination of ideal types opens up a variety of fruitful perspectives on the construction of the social. Expanding on the first definition given above, this contrast functions as “a spontaneous form of rational structuring which seeks to order and make sense of the world” (Gifford 2010, 14). On the one hand, this relieves the individual of potentially extremely complicated and psychologically costly processes of categorization in each and every situation of social contact. On the other hand, however, by partly imagining and partly ‘knowing’ in which respects the Other is different from one’s Self or Selves, it continuously reflects back to the individual (or the group) what oneself is, via a kind of negative derivation of what one is not.

Beyond this more obvious effect, though, the I or the Us in a second theoretical perspective receives a reflection of its own, inner strangeness, as well as of the likeness between the Self and the Other. By the Other functioning as a mirror, we get “the impression that we see our own likeness strangely mirrored in the Other, in a way that links the recognition of the Other’s difference to a differential self-recognition. The effect of this ‘mirroring-in-strangeness’ is consequently dynamic” (Gifford 2010, 15; italics A.S.K.). In other words, what derives from the starting point of Self and Other is the potential for cognition of ‘oneself as an-other’ (Ricoeur), “uniting the two judgements of sameness (Latin: idem, ‘one-and-the-same’) and ipseity (or ‘very-one-ness’– from Latin ipse)” (Gifford 2010, 14; with reference to Ricoeur 1990). The understanding that human beings include elements of strangeness to themselves also offers the opportunity to redefine identity: “in the course of the human encounters [ … ] human groups [ … ] have sometimes come to recognize this excluded other in turn as something rather like an ipse, that is, as a valorizing and complementary realization of humankind [ … ]. The perception ‘they’ and ‘them’ at this point modulates into something akin to the perception of a ‘Thou’ (to borrow the personalist language of Martin Buber), thus tending to confer on the Other the same status and worth as oneself” (Gifford 2010, 16). This is a crucial step – and ever more obviously so in times of quantitatively increasing and qualitatively changing encounterings of the Other – as “what might most define human beings anthropologically is [ … ] a programmed potential for increasing relationality” (Gifford 2010, 18). Although the evolutionary undertone of this comment is not necessarily useful, the underlying idea of relationality and also its potential for contextualization with conflict certainly is.

1.1.2 Community Versus Society

How much belonging, inclusion, even integration or maybe flexibility is needed both individually and collectively in order to reach a functioning society consisting of as-many-as-possible–as-happy-as-possible co-existing individuals? This debate has a long-standing tradition, and today the classic starting point for this discussion is still Ferdinand Tönnies and his elaborations on community versus society (originally: ‘Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft’). Although Tönnies’ differentiation has been simplified and partly distorted even, we do encounter the basic thought over and over again: good social solidarity in closely integrated societies versus bad individualization and anonymous social constructs, and more generally, good homogeneity versus bad heterogeneity. Before a first step towards reframing the homogeneity/heterogeneity relation is taken, it is therefore instructive to look at the traditional discussion on community versus society in more detail. It contextualizes all the above-mentioned terms in an admittedly specific, but certainly very telling way.⁶

Ferdinand Tönnies differentiates between two ideal types of belonging. The first social form – society/Gesellschaft – is based on atomized individuals who are unable to integrate fully into a single, harmonious group, a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Concepts and Framework
• Part II: Relation Homogeneity/Heterogeneity
• Part III: Counterproposal: Theorizing Society on the Basis of Conflict
• Conclusion
• References
• Index