The British Journal of Sociology
Volume 51 Issue No. 1 January/March 2000
pages 1-4
Abstract
Y2K is of course an arbitrary date stemming from the widespread power of certain calendar- and clock-times within western societies. However, although arbitrary, there is a widespread sense that social-material transformations are occurring around the millennium that indicate a break in the development of human societies, a break which in turn transforms the possibilities and opportunities of any 'science' seeking to interrogate such societies. The contributors to this Issue were invited to consider just what the millennium might indicate about the history of 'human societies' and especially how 'sociology' is facing up to the challenges and opportunities posed by what many see as the millennial changes taking place. Some contributors interrogated the general character of the social sciences while others focused upon millennial change through the prism of a particular field or domain of the social-material world. The contributors were chosen so as to provide contrasting but related analyses of some such transformations. In particular, because of their previous seminal contributions it was thought they would be well-placed to examine just how 'sociology' might be positioned in relationship to a world apparently undergoing widespread transformations. The contributors were thus confronted by an awesome task, to provide original analyses of just what might be 'sociologically' changing and how such changes are transforming the positioning of 'sociology', whatever might still be meant by that term as we enter, as Therborn notes, sociology's second century.
Many contributors in this Issue refer to the most ambitious recent analysis of such major social-material transformations, namely Castells' three-volume account of the 'information age'. It is therefore fitting that this Issue begins with Manuel Castells' detailed examination of the development of 'information networking' and its dramatic consequences for the development of the 'network society'. He shows how relations of production, consumption, power, experience and culture are all re-shaped through such networks. Immanuel Wallerstein more specifically details how three developments, of 'globalization', of complexity analyses of non-linearity and system bifurcation, and of cultural studies, have transformed the very context within which sociology has developed (especially of the problematic effects of the 'two cultures'). He argues that sociology should be transformed into a re-unified, historical social science involving intellectual developments from across the globe.
Göran Therborn tries to analyse in particular how sociology in its second century will be different from its first, with an analysis of the space of disciplines, a space of everyday practice, and a space of imagination and investigation. He documents the shift from a 'universal sociology' to a 'global sociology', noting that sociology's first century has provided an important legacy which should not be lost. Gösta Esping-Anderson, also responds to this widespread sense of epochal change, considers the parallels with 'classical sociology' and how it examined an emerging but not yet visible industrial society. He argues against 'post'-theories and advocates establishing various leitmotifs so as to facilitate different forms of empirically-based comparative study so as to examine such transformations. Ulrich Beck similarly argues against 'post'-theories in his analysis of the 'second age of modernity'. This 'second age' involves the development of processes indifferent to national boundaries including universal human rights, and the necessity for a sociology that is attuned to the 'cosmopolitan perspective'. Beck elaborates diverse indicators and the relational character of 'cosmopolitan societies'.
In most of these analyses of epochal change such transformations are viewed as much material as social. Bruno Latour examines more systematically the role of objects in sociology. He suggests that the sub-field of 'science and technology studies' might provide the 'physical sociology' which would correspond to the already established 'social sociology'. Such analyses would bring out the hybrid, complex and resistant quality of things as social facts. Some such powerful objects, namely the development of GM foods, are examined by Barbara Adam, in the context of a thorough-going temporal gaze. She shows the enormous temporal complexity of socio-environmental phenomena and in particular how all such phenomena involve the irreversibility of time, often stretching into an immensely long and unknowable future.
While Adam emphasizes the importance of time for sociology facing the millennium, Saskia Sassen investigates the changing spatial form of the city. She notes how the study of cities was at the heart of classical sociology. Since then however urban sociology has lost this privileged role. But now, at the end of this century, cities and their global connections are once again emerging as a strategic site for understanding epochal trends, especially related to the development of cultural diversity on a global scale. Mike Featherstone notes however that Simmel raised such themes of cultural diversity and overload at the beginning of the century. Featherstone goes on to examine the 'digitalization of culture' and asks whether the changing archive of culture can be subjected to a meaningful ordering. He considers what transformations of the human sensory apparatus and habitus will occur as cultural production and consumption becomes increasingly mediated through information technologies and networks and people have to learn to 'inhabit' technological cultures.
Finally, John Urry draws together many themes by advocating a 'post-societal sociology', that draws on notions of networks, fluids, time, space, complexity and cosmopolitanism. Central to such a sociology is a concern not with the 'social as society' but with the 'social as mobility'. Sociology's brief should be to interrogate large-scale, unpredictable and partially ungovernable, social-material hybrids that 'roam' the globe in various time-space scapes (such as cosmopolitan rights, migrant cultures, informational networks, GM foods, digital cultures, scientific laboratories, global markets and so on). Such hybrids will through their awesome spatial and temporal interconnections result in complex and non-linear changes stretching way beyond the parochial concerns of late twentieth century sociology.
John Urry
Dept. of Sociology
University of Lancaster