Transcript Contemporary Societies in Global Perspective

Philosophies of Social Science Research
Nicholas Gane
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Tended to analyse social relations or social
institutions as bounded by the nation-state, eg
class in Britain, education in France.
A clear statement of this is to be found in C.W.
Mills’ Sociological Imagination:
‘In terms of power, and in many other
interesting terms as well, the most inclusive
unit of social structure is the nation-state. The
nation-state is now the dominating form in
world history and, as such, a major fact in the
life of every man’ (SI, p.150).
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Mills continues: ‘The nation-state has split up
and organized, in varying degree and manner,
the “civilizations” and continents of the world’
(SI, p.150)
Ulrich Beck accuses this type of approach of
‘methodological nationalism’. Society is seen as
being ‘contained’ within the nation-state
He says that classical social science thinkers
‘shared a territorial definition of modern
society, and thus a model of society centred on
the national-state’ (What is Globalization?,
p.24).
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Ulrich Beck: ‘The national state is a territorial state:
that is, its power is grounded upon attachment to a
particular place…The world society which, in the
wake of globalization, has taken shape in many
dimensions is undermining the importance of the
national state, because a multiplicity of social
circles, communication networks, market relations
and lifestyles, none of them particular to any
particular locality, now cut across the boundaries of
the national state’ (What is Globalization, p.4).
National boundaries define the limits of
societies
Globalization is defined by connections and ‘flows’
rather than borders or boundaries
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Two main features of recent approaches to
globalization are:
1). An interest in movement or mobility, and in
transnational social relations and movements.
See, for example, John Urry’s Sociology Beyond
Societies (2000).
2). A focus on complexity. For example: Urry’s
Global Complexity (2003) and pp.26-31 of
Mobilities (2007)
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The basic argument here is that globalization
brings new levels of complexity to social life
Many social relations now play out across
nation-state borders, often aided by new
communications technologies
Often these relations are fast-moving and
constantly changing
New forms of social complexity emerge
through the meeting of different cultures
Blockages and flows: new tensions
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A new focus on the latter: the mobilities of
people, commodities, information, signs,
money that make the world today so
complex
Urry: ‘What is important is to try to
shift…from the study of society to the study
of movement…one of the things I am keen
to show is the importance of networked
relationships across the globe’ (FST, p.109).
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‘It is predicted by 2010 there will be at least
one billion legal international arrivals each
year (compared with 25 million in 1950);
there are four million air passengers each
day; at any one time 360,000 passengers
are…in flight above the United States,
equivalent to a substantial city…’ (Mobilities,
p.3)
More thank ever: the social world is not static
but dynamic and fast-changing
Epistemologically, how do we cope with this?
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Someone might live ‘in Britain as a taxi driver
while at the same time working in New Delhi or
relating to their family there…But you cannot
understand how a British Indian taxi driver is
living a transnational life-form if you only look
at this life from a national, British point of view.
Instead, you have to relate this world of
experience and acting to a place and position in
the Indian class system as well. You have to
make these interconnections…’ (Ulrich Beck in
Gane, Future of Social Theory, p.153).
Not just the mobilities of people but
also of things, commodities, signs,
objects and data
 Once things become mediated by
digital technologies, how do we study
them?
 A focus on infrastructure and/or
media
 An example: the market
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Urry argues for a ‘mobility turn’: ‘a different
way of thinking through the character of
economic, social and political relationships’
This turn ‘emphasizes how all social entities,
from a single household to large scale
corporations, presuppose many different
forms of actual and potential movement’
For Urry, the ‘mobility turn is postdisciplinary’ (p.6). Is this the case?
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Urry presents mobilities thinking as changing
the very basis of social science: it forms a
new paradigm
He says: ‘a mobilities paradigm is not just
substantively different, in that it remedies the
neglect and omissions of various movements
of people, ideas and so on. But it is
transformative of social science, authorizing
an alternative theoretical and methodological
landscape…’ (Mobilities, p.18)
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Urry maps out some methodological rules for
studying these new mobilities
The first of these is: to develop through
appropriate metaphors a social science ‘which
focuses upon movement, mobility and
contingent ordering, rather than upon stasis,
structure and social order’ (SBS, p.18).
Question: where do the metaphors come from
in your own research? What work do they do?
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Urry talks about mobile methods at further
length in Mobilities (2007)
He says that research methods ‘also need to
be “on the move”’ (p.39)
Traditional social science:
1). Observation of people’s movements
2). Participation in patterns of movement –
moving with people (ethnography)
3). Time-space diaries
4). Study of movement through key nodes
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Urry says that ‘methods need to be able to
follow around objects’ (p.41)
Thinkers such as Lash and Lury have argued
for a ‘cultural biography of objects’ (see, for
example of Global Culture Industry, 2007)
How is this possible?
What are the methodological and
epistemological challenges of trying to keep
track of a fast-moving and complex world
(inhabited by not just by humans but
increasingly ‘intelligent’ machines)
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A real challenge: should social science keep pace
with and understand a world that is moving so
quickly?
Unlimited, real-time data?
A methodological problem but also a problem for
theory
Part of the problem is the underlying media of
social science research (including the PhD)
Slowness could potentially be advantage?
Not just mobility in terms of space: we also need
to be aware of the time-sensitivity of our work
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The world of fast media technologies poses a
set of daunting challenges to social research
But it also presents a number of
unprecedented opportunities:
‘The tools and devices for research craft are
being extended by digital culture in a hyperconnected world, affording new possibilities
to re-imagine observation and the generation
of alternative forms of research data’ (p.7).
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What is the ‘empirical’? What ‘sense’ of the
social world do we have?
Back and Puwar: ‘Commercial organizations
are continuously re-calibrating their products
and our senses for new markets; market
research consultancy firms specialize in being
attentive to the senses. We have to train
ourselves to be alert to what uses the sensory
has been put already, as well as where else
we can take it’ (p.11).
Research needs to be alert and lively
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The tendency to be dazzled by the new
Need to think across longer time-frames and
retain a sense of history
The danger is that we become ‘Lost in the
‘latest’, ‘newest’ and ‘most recent’ ‘plastic
present’, caught up in the nets of a relatively
small time horizon’. They add: ‘In this genre of
digital research ‘people remain stuck in the traps
of now’, and are quashing the development of
sociology and its ability to identify historical
trends’ (p.8).
Research that is sensitive to continuities – not
just historical discontinuities/ruptures/breaks