Transcript Lecture 7 - University of Exeter

Introduction to Social Analysis
Lecture 8
Giddens’ reflexive society
Does contemporary society give new ways
to understand and control social situations?
• Look in this lecture at how Sociologists
such as Anthony Giddens, and also Ulrich
Beck and others seeking to build on
classical sociology have tried to answer
this question.
• Also look at examples of how
contemporary empirical sociology has
used their ideas.
Studies
Introductions to the theory:
• Beck, Ulrich, Giddens, Anthony and Lash Scott (1994) Reflexive
Modernisation: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern
Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press. (in particular pp. 184-197.)
301.01 BEC
• Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and self-identity : self and
society in the Late Modern Age Cambridge : Polity, 301.157 GID
• Pip Jones 2003 Introducing Social Theory. Polity Press, Chap. 10.
Critical Responses to Post-modernity and Postmodernism.
Empirical studies:
• Burrows, Roger and Nicholas Gane (2006) “Geodemographics,
Software and Class” Sociology 40(5):793-812.
• Green, Eileen and Carrie Singleton (2006) “Young Women
Negotiating Space and Place” Sociology 40(5):853-872.
Three key points of reflexive modernity. 1.
• Giddens position is an attempt to deal with
the post-modern critique without throwing
out key elements of classic sociology hence a revised rather than a post
modernity.
• This is summerised in his table of
contrasts [slides 13-15 ]
Three key points of reflexive modernity. 2.
• Individuals have dramatically increased
knowledge about themselves and thus to
manipulate and control aspects of
themselves which were not previously
possible.
• This is manifest is such issues as selfmonitoring and shaping of the body.
Breathaliser
Fertility monitor
Three key points of reflexive modernity. 3.
• Society has dramatically increased
knowledge about itself and thus some
institutions have the ability to manipulate
and control aspects of social life that were
not previously possible.
• This is manifest in such issues as
evaluating and dealing with risk.
Technologies of surveilance
• www.ctcdevon.co.uk/exeter.htm
• http://www.letopweb.net/webcam-dumonde.html
• Baby alarms
Whose watching?
Who is watched?
Choice, risk, reflexivity
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•
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“As part of the well-known thesis which cites risk as an organizing principle
of the late modern industrial society, Beck and Giddens suggest that risk
has far reaching effects on the construction of contemporary identities (Beck
1992; Giddens, 1991).
Paralleling the argument that identity is increasingly articulated through
differing dispositions towards risk, contemporary risk theorists also claim
that a number of traditional features of industrial society, such as class,
community and family are decreasing in influence, and relationships with
strangers, encountered through greater national and global flows of people
and cultures, are taking on greater signficance.
Characteristics of this change are postulated as increased reflexivity and
‘individualization’ in the processes of identity formation (Beck and BeckGernsheim, 1996), resulting in individuals experiencing greater choice and
determination in the construction of the ‘project of self’. Contemporary
individuals are construed as being more able to build and fashion identities
through self-monitoring and choice.” (Green and Singleton 2006: 855)
Burrows, Roger and Nicholas Gane (2006)
“Geodemographics, Software and Class” Sociology
40(5):793-812.
http://ejscontent.ebsco.com/ContentServer/FullTextServer.asp?format=fulltext&ciid=AFF6FE0D2C11B5A
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F35D3D648505FA48F6657AA16B59DF7E37A882374E0FF73373CA921EDDA876B9&ext=.pdf
• About modern data bases and software
which are primarily designed for
marketing, which classify and label micro
localities with detailed socio-metric data.
• They make explicit links to key figures of
modern social theory - Bourdieu
(Distinction) ,Beck (Risk Society) and
Bauman.
Choice, risk, reflexivity
•
•
•
•
The success of such classification systems lies in their ability to map out
and structure patterns of consumption that in turn aid both the enhancement
and regulation of the capitalist market. …businesses and policy makers
alike use geodemographic classifications extensively to inform the targeting
of goods, services and policy interventions.
But at the same time, systems such as ACORN and MOSAIC are
successful with the consuming public because they are designed to make
individuals feel at home somewhere, both socially and physically: ‘You are
where you live.’ The classifications these systems produce, like the endless
TV programmes dealing with house moves and makeovers, essentially
promote a feeling of belonging, What this really means is belonging to
place: to places through which we can identify ourselves and be identified
and placed (in a social landscape) by others. ‘One’s residence is a crucial,
possibly the crucial, identifier of who you are’.
social ascriptions of identities are becoming increasingly complex,
particularly as identities are created increasingly through acts of
consumption, define new forms of ‘class’ and ‘class relations’. Now more
than ever before, for example, the places in which we choose to live, eat,
holiday, and more generally consume are key factors in defining who we, as
individuals, are, and the social groupings to which we aspire to belong.
Burrows, Roger and Nicholas Gane (2006) “Geodemographics, Software
and Class” Sociology 40(5):793-812. pp807/8
Choice, risk, reflexivity
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•
•
•
This, then, is the most striking feature of geodemographic classification
systems and their migration into software: they map consumer habits onto
territory, and in so doing recast class and status as spatial categories. On
the one hand, this appears to give the consumer unprecedented freedoms,
for as long as there are suitable material resources available, these
classification systems can be used to aid self-positioning in both physical
and social space.
This is very much a part of what Bauman and Beck call individualized
society, in which identities become the responsibility of individuals rather
than state-run institutions, and where we are left to ‘sort ourselves out’.
The other side to this, however, is that the classification systems considered
in this article offer ready-made ‘class’ identities that have been generated
from consumer surveys and the like. This means that identities are shackled
to and to some extent ascribed from real and desired patterns of
consumption (desires that in themselves are, of course, products of
capitalism).
At the same time, these classification systems are automated through
complex algorithms that remain hidden from the user’s eye, so that the
sorting mechanisms that underpin the classifications themselves are all but
invisible.
Green, Eileen and Carrie Singleton (2006) “Young Women
.
Negotiating Space and Place” Sociology 40(5):853-872
Choice, risk, reflexivity
• “In the accounts that we have presented,
risk is depicted as an organizing principle
of daily routines and leisure practices that
dictate young women’s use of time and
space. Because certain times of the day
and spaces are perceived as risky, their
own position or place in time and space is
continually under negotiation.” (Green and
Singleton 2006: 867)
a revised rather than a post modernity
• Gidden's summary diagramme which
contrasts his position to that of postmodernity.
• Try and locate examples given within his
framework.
A Comparison of Conceptions of "Post-Modernity" (PM)
and "Radicalised Modernity" (RM)*
Post-Modernity
Radicalised Modernity
1. Understands current transitions in 1. Identifies the institutional
epistemological terms or as
developments which create a sense
dissolving epistemology altogether. of fragmentation and dispersal.
2. Focuses upon the centrifugal
tendencies of current social
transformations and their dislocating
character.
2. Sees high modernity as a set of
circumstances in which dispersal is
dialectically connected to profound
tendencies towards global
integration.
3. Sees the self as dissolved or
dismembered by the fragmenting of
experience.
3. Sees the self as more than just a
site of intersecting forces; active
processes of reflexive self-identity
are made possible by modernity.
A Comparison of Conceptions of "Post-Modernity" (PM)
and "Radicalised Modernity" (RM)*
Post-Modernity
Radicalised Modernity
4. Argues for the contextuality of
truth claims or sees them as
"historical."
4. Argues that the universal features
of truth claims force themselves
upon us in an irresistible way given
the primacy of problems of a global
kind. Systematic knowledge about
these developments is not
precluded by the reflexivity of
modernity.
5. Theorises powerlessness which
individuals feel in the face of
globalising tendencies.
5. Analyses a dialectic of
powerlessness and empowerment,
in terms of both experience and
action.
6. Sees the "emptying" of day- to6. Sees day-to-day life as an active
day life as a result of the intrusion of complex of reactions to abstract
abstract systems.
systems, involving appropriation as
well as loss.
A Comparison of Conceptions of "Post-Modernity" (PM)
and "Radicalised Modernity" (RM)*
Post-Modernity
Radicalised Modernity
7. Regards coordinated
political engagement as
precluded by the primacy
of contextuality and
dispersal.
8. Defines post-modernity
as the end of
epistemology/the
individual/ethics.
7. Regards coordinated
political engagement as
both possible and
necessary, on a global
level as well as locally.
8. Defines post-modernity
as possible
transformations moving
"beyond" the institutions
of modernity.
*From Consequences of Modernity by Anthony Giddens (p. 151)