Chapter 1 ON BEING SOCIOLOGICAL.

Chapter 1 ON BEING SOCIOLOGICAL

Everyday Life is Social Life
Sociology tries to answer the question ‘how is social life possible?’ This means that it treats society and the way we live our lives within it as a puzzle to be explained. The technique of thinking first in terms of the group (ie of the SOCIAL dimension) and only afterwards in terms of the individual is the essence of what we mean when we talk about thinking sociologically. The structural, institutional, and behavioural dimensions of society are social processes through which we make and maintain our world.

Being Sociological Sociologists use Sociologists look for
abstract ideas (theories) factual (empirical) evidence Sociologists look for measurable regularities underlying and invisible rules

Peter Berger in Invitation to Sociology
Pleasure and Play Peter Berger in Invitation to Sociology Sociology’s pleasure lies in seeing our familiar everyday world ‘in a new light’ This can involve: lateral thinking a sense of play recognition of ironies new ways of framing our own experiences understanding more clearly our own place in the social scheme of things

The Sociological Imagination (1)
C. Wright Mill’s book of the same name. With the sociological imagination we can see that sociological understanding takes place at the intersection of biography and history. Biography happens to individuals History happens to societies

Every individual lives out their own individual biography (autobiography) within (in the context of) the big picture of history. History is the story of the aggregation of individual lives that we call society. An individual life begins at birth and ends at death. We come, we are, we depart. The social world was there before us and remains after we die. So we live our individual lives as best we can within the social conditions around us.

When we use the sociological imagination to look at the intersection of history and biography we will see both the large structural forces which shape our lives and the small areas of self that we live inside. Our lives are lived in a complex loop between the two. The loop between inside and outside Society is inside and outside of every individual

It is outside us in all the formal institutions of government, religion, education, and the economy. These were made by humans but continue through time with a life and force separate from any single individual or even, today, any single ethnic group or nation. And it is also inside us in the form of culture, of learned knowledge, beliefs and values. People do things because they find them personally meaningful. But the thoughts that guide their actions are not isolated and random. They are learned within social life.

Sociological Revelations
illusions punctured connections and relationships revealed things do not have to be as they are – who decides and who benefits? inequalities of power uncovered

Sociology as Critique Mills ‘represented a social protest, a social anger’ in the mid twentieth century. A hundred years earlier Karl Marx had done this too. ‘I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing.’ The sort of questions sociologists should ask: who controls whom? Economically? Politically? what are the sources of social conflict? who are dependent, deprived, sacrificed?

Ghosts and Silences (1) Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination The image of haunting signifies the many ways in which good sociology looks beneath the surface of past and present arrangements to seek out what is missing, silent.

Ghosts and Silences (2) Their absences mark injustices and injuries.
women the poor slaves political prisoners colonized indigenous peoples

Ghosts and Silences (3) Where evidence is lacking, literature may tell us more than orthodox sociological methods of truth seeking. The sociological imagination draws on literary sources as sociological evidence.

Consciousness and Connections
Both consciousness and connections continually shift and change. There is always more going on than meets the eye. The story of the rock pool gives a graphic imagery to demonstrate this point. ‘What on the surface appears simple is in reality deeply complex.’ So does Sebald’s description of the post-war German economic miracle.

Modernity Sociology came into existence as an attempt to understand and explain the ‘great transformation’ from traditional to modern life. Details of sociology’s origins are in Chapter 3 Modernizing. Simmel’s essay on ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ describes how individuals experience and cope with the pace, variety, and complexity of modern urban life. Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times and Ron Fricke’s documentary Baraka both illustrate what modernity overload feels like.

Ethics and Social Theory
Sociology helps us to make sense of the world understanding how societies work is an ongoing process. There are always new developments to be understood. generalizing about how things are – what we call sociological theories – are not ends in themselves but simply means to better understanding of society. theories can help us to distinguish good from bad social arrangements – those that improve lives and those that damage them. being sociological is ultimately an ethical practice. it means searching out those made insignificant, even invisible – women, racial and ethnic minorities, outsiders – by existing power arrangements.

Films Water 2005 (Deepa Mehta) Baraka 1992 (Ron Fricke)

DOING SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Chapter 2 DOING SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Qualitative Research Most closely associated with participant observation and other less interactive forms of fieldwork. Similarly the collation of data within this methodology are usually achieved by the methods of interviews, logs and personal journals. The varied foci and findings of qualitative research are published in an equally wide variety of forms and styles.

Quantitative Research
Dominated by a particular methodology and method; the survey and questionnaire, respectively. Thus survey data are typically collected through questionnaires which are delivered to respondents using face-to-face techniques, mail, telephone and the internet. The survey involves the use of statistical analysis and now almost inevitably uses dedicated software packages. The findings of quantitative research also tend to have a more standardised format which focuses on issues of sampling, margins of error and the reliability and validity of the questionnaire.

Quantitative-Qualitative Binary (1)
The readily observed difference between numbers and words is important to the quantitative-qualitative binary. From this commonsense perspective, quantitative research generates data and analyses that are numerical in form, including counts, distributions, correlations, etc; whereas qualitative research centres on words, including stories, life histories, descriptions, etc.

Quantitative-Qualitative Binary (2)
Numbers are most commonly associated with the capacity to condense data, insofar as a number can represent almost anything amenable to sociological inquiry: an average, a rating, a correlation, etc. Words or writing, on the other hand, are prized for an opposite property, the capacity to detail and to extend. It is important to mention that most subjects of sociological inquiry can be explored through the use of either numbers or words, albeit not with equal efficiency. In this sense numbers and words represent opposite ends of a representational and analytical continuum. In practice the two mechanisms of communication are interlinked.

Cases and Variables (1) Ragin (The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies, 1987; Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method 1994) has written on the linkage of qualitative - quantitative research with the specific goals of sociological inquiry. He recasts the numbers versus words debate in terms of the elemental categories of research: cases and variables. Indeed the start point for research is always either a case or a variable (though knowing which may not be apparent at the beginning). Regardless of the subject matter, the experiences, attitudes, beliefs under scrutiny can be categorised in generating a dataset as either a case (example, instance, type, etc) or a variable (aspect, dimension, feature, etc).

Cases and Variables (1) Categories are the building blocks of sociological inquiry. Quantitative research tends to focus on large numbers of cases and relatively few variables. The capacity for numbers to condense data is most useful in this context. Qualitative research tends to focus on few or singular cases and many variables. The capacity for words to enhance data is most useful in this context.

Framing Research Framing represents an interaction on the part of the researcher between the body of sociological theory and the problem or issue they are interested in. The result is that research is always a process involving the interaction of data and theory and vice versa.

Framing Quantitative Research (1)
Ragin describes quantitative framing in terms of “fixed framing”. As noted, quantitative research tends to focus on large numbers of cases and relatively few variables. In this respect the most important categorisation is of the variables and their measurement. Of central importance is the capacity for the researcher to observe variation in variables across the cases.

For example, the explanatory power of a survey is not much affected by the addition or removal of a few cases. There is no difference in the statistical value of a survey with 1000 cases and one with Even the addition or removal of several hundred cases will have only a minor effect on the “margin of error”. Thus, the most important task for a researcher conducting a quantitative investigation is to determine the variables to describe the cases. It is variation in these variables across cases that is crucial. Finding sufficient numbers of cases to make the observation from is a secondary problem.

Quantitative research has a fixed framing insofar as decisions made around the character of variables determine its success or failure. While the categorisation of variables can be fine-tuned or even piloted prior to fieldwork, once these variables are applied to cases there is no / only limited scope to revise them. For example, if a questionnaire is mailed-out to 1000 addresses (cases) and a typo is discovered in one of the questions (variables) there is very little that can be done to rectify the mistake.

Framing Qualitative Research (1)
Qualitative research enjoys a “fluid framing”. Qualitative research tends to focus on few cases and many variables. Of central importance is the capacity for the researcher to develop a rich appreciation of the case(s).

Interaction - Theory and Data
You develop and test your theory case by case. You formulate an explanation for the first case as soon as you have gathered data on it. You apply that theory to the second case when you get data on it. If the theory explains that case adequately, thus confirming the theory, no problem; you go to the third case. When you hit a “negative case,” one your explanatory hypothesis doesn’t explain, you change the explanation of what you are trying to explain, by incorporating into it whatever new elements the facts of this troublesome case suggest to you, or you change the definition of what you’re going to explain so as to exclude the recalcitrant case from the universe of things to be explained Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You're Doing It , 1998, p.195

Chapter 3 MODERNIZING

Sociology European invention (1830s)
Early sociology was influenced by Enlightenment thinkers Aims to understand group life in modern society Modern society’s origins are to be found in the Dual Revolutions: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution Sociologists recognize positive aspects of modernity: improvements in health & lifespan, broader access to consumer good, & democratic freedoms Sociologists also recognize negative aspects: industrialized death in total wars and extermination camps, environmental degradation, & injuries wrought by colonization

The Enlightenment (1) C17th & C18th liberal intellectual movement
Germany, France, Holland, Britain, the United States Celebration of progress Celebration of culture’s domination of nature Commitment to science, critique & reason against superstition, assertion & dogma

The Enlightenment (2) Enlightenment as journey to individual and human freedom According to Jürgen Habermas (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the Enlightenment sets ‘the project of modernity’ in motion.

The Enlightenment (3) Peter Hamilton (1992) ‘The Enlightenment and the Birth of Social Science’, in Stuart Hall & Bram Gieben (eds) Formations of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, p.57: ‘The Enlightenment … is one of the starting points for modern sociology. Its central themes formed the threshold of modern thinking about society and the realm of the social. Perhaps of equal importance is that it signalled the appearance of the secular intellectual within Western society, a figure whose role is intimately bound up with the analysis and critique of society. It is from this role that emerged, amongst other intellectual positions the modern conception of the professional sociologist, based in a specific institution. [It is] to the Enlightenment that we should turn to see the emergence of the profession of sociology.’

The Division of Labour in the Social Sciences

The Industrial Revolution
Invention of modern economic life Broke humanity’s dependence on organic resources Late C18th, early C19th – beginning in Britain Rise of the factory system Division of labour Massive increase in economic output Massive increase in wealth & living standards (though unevenly distributed) Krishnan Kumar (1988, p. 4): ‘To modernise is to industrialise’

The French Revolution 1789 Invention of modern political life
Active individual citizenship The democratic impulse

Classical sociologists’ variants on the traditional/modern dichotomy

Terminology Modernism – a set of artistic practices
Modernisation – the process of becoming modern Modernity – the condition of being modern

Material Changes and Modernity
Marshall Berman (1982) All That is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 16 Scientific revolution Industrialization of production (turns science into technology) Demographic upheavals Rapid urban growth Systems of mass communication Increasingly powerful national states Mass social movements of people Ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market

Modernization Yuri Slezkine (2005, p. 1) The Jewish Century
‘…modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations).’

Marx and Modernity Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party: ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face … the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men’. Marshall Berman (1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Simon and Schuster: New York: p.21: ‘This is probably the definitive vision of the modern environment’.

Modernity’s Debit Items
Modernity’s underside: bureaucratisation & disenchantment, industrialised war, & environmental pollution Sustainability: extraction & depletion of scarce resources Social considerations: Enlightenment intellectuals were privileged European men – what of women and the working class? Cultural considerations - expanded international divisions of labour imposed ideas born in one place and time on other places around the world

Chapter 4 WORKING

Profits, Classes and Aspirations (1)
Work is the place where things (commodities) are made and where profits are generated. The fundamental driver of capitalist society is the accumulation of capital. The origin of all capital is profit. One of the great contradictions of capitalism is that while workers produce all the value of society, they receive only a portion of this value as wages from the sale of commodities.

Work is the place where the two great classes of capitalism are forged: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Bourgeoisie describes the class of modern capitalists who are owners of the means of production and employers of wage labour. Proletariat is the name given to the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.

Work is the place where aspirations are generated. Work is where all the possible things the people might find useful are given physical form (as commodities). However, the selection of commodities produced does not float free from the broader struggle between capitalists and workers. While the law of demand and supply operates it always does so in terms of class interest.

Work - a Source of Innovation
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 2004 [1848], p. 7

Control and Resistance
Management has a long history of trying to secure control at work. Frederick Taylor was a champion of what he called “scientific management”. The sociology of work has tended to focus on efforts at managerial control over work and workers’ resistance to these initiatives.

Control and Managerial Effort
Productivity. Efforts at maximising the output of workers; Efficiency, which has as its goal minimising wastage by workers in the process of production. Compliance, or ensuring that workers comply with the rules of management. Subordination. The efforts by management to ensure workers are passive in work and, in particular, not resistant to change. The goal of flexibility or ensuring that workers are accommodating to change.

Deskilling Harry Braverman identified the process of deskilling as central to control. Deskilling involves the separation of mental work and manual work; Deskilling is the objective of scientific management. It is a means of securing managerial control over the labour process; Deskilling removes the skills, knowledge and science of the labour process and transfers these to management. At the same time deskilling pits manual and mental workers against each other; Deskilling facilitates the dispersal of the labour process across sites and time; Deskilling increases the capacity of capitalists to exploit workers and simultaneously reduces the capacity of workers to resist managerial control.

Fordism Deskilling reaches its zenith in the design of work called Fordism (named after Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company). The key to this re-design of work was the introduction of the assembly-line into factories. The assembly-line allowed Ford to determine the pace and order of work, to drastically deskill the work involved in making cars and to hire the cheapest labour needed to complete the range of tasks.

McDonaldization George Ritzer suggests that the success of the fast-food company McDonalds is the result of the dissemination of Fordist principles and deskilling. In this sense, a McDonald outlet is one big assembly-line, used to deliver a range of pre-assembled food. “McDonaldization”: ‘the process by which the principle of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world’ Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life ,1996, p. 1

Panopticon ‘The Panopticon should facilitate the collection and storage of (useful) information, provide the means of supervision (through instructions or physical architecture) and monitor behaviour and compliance with instructions. The Panopticon does this by providing a physical superstructure of control based on visibility. Meanwhile, compliance of the subject population is achieved via economic, coercive or normative sanctions. A well-developed system of surveillance at once increases the capacity to identify any breach of rule deserving sanction, and reduces the likelihood of the necessity to invoke the sanction’ Sewell and Wilkinson, ‘‘Someone to watch over me’: Surveillance, Discipline and the J-I-T labour process’,1992, p. 274

The Labour Process as a Game (1)
Michael Burawoy’s main contribution to the control and resistance debate was to re-imagine the labour process as a game in which the struggle for control takes unexpected turns.

The Labour Process as a Game (2)
‘In identifying the separation of conception and execution, the expropriation of skill, or narrowing of the scope of discretion as the broad tendency in the development of the capitalist labour process, Harry Braverman missed the equally important parallel tendency toward the expansion of choices within those ever narrower limits. It is the latter tendency that constitutes a basis of consent and allows the degradation of work to pursue its course without continuing crisis. Thus, we have seen that more reliable machines, easier rates, the possibility of chiseling, and so forth, all increase the options open to the operator in making out’ Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism ,1979, p. 94

Michel de Certeau’s la perruque (the wig)
‘La perruque is the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary's writing a love letter on “company time” or as complex as a cabinetmaker's “borrowing” a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room...’ Du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work, 1996, p. 147

From Work Ethic to Aesthetic of Consumption
Zygmunt Bauman argues that capitalist societies are experiencing a shift from a “work ethic” to an “aesthetic of consumption”. This mirrors the rise of consumer society.

Development of a Consumer Society (1)
Ideal Citizen in Producer Society Ideal Citizen in Consumer Society Endures monotony Seeks pleasure Is habituated to routine Looks for difference Defers gratification Advances gratification Is deliberate Is compulsive Respects tradition Is eager for experience Is loyal Is fickle Is readily satisfied Is insatiable

Development of a Consumer Society (2)
The development of a consumer society is also associated with “disenchantment” of both workers and consumers. There are some possibilities for resistance and re-enchantment in workers and consumers becoming ironic and subversive agents.

Chapter 5 CONSUMING

Consumption Acts of consumption can be broken down into two levels:
The material – the thing actually being consumed The symbolic – what it means to consume it The former may be individual and physical; the latter is indisputably social (and frequently pertains to status).

The Focus of Sociology (1)
Sociology tends to focus on the symbolic aspects of consumption, but for most of human history (and today for most of the planet) consumption has primarily been about staying alive. There are massive disparities: Vertically – between different social classes and groups within countries (upper and lower classes) Horizontally – between different countries (Global north and South)

Zygmunt Bauman (1993:214) Postmodern Ethics:
‘However far and wide it spreads, the emancipation which modernity brought in its wake (liberation from nature, friability of traditional constraints, infinity of human potential, possibility of an order dictated solely by reason), has been from the start and will remain forever an ultimately local phenomenon, a privilege achieved by some at somebody else’s expense; it can only be sustained, for a time, on the condition of unequal exchange with other sectors of global society. What we came to call “economic growth” is the process of expropriation of order, not of its global increase’.

West and Rest: the former are so rich because the latter are so poor. When considering the ability to consume we should be mindful of: class age gender ethnicity sexuality

Because people in the same social strata tend to share: Lifestyles Life chances

Multiple Meanings of Consumption (1)
Anthony Giddens’ example of a cup of coffee Fluid intake – source of refreshment Ritual – act of meeting up with significant others Social distinction – you are what you drink (identity) Socially acceptable drug – culture, power and the law

Multiple Meanings of Consumption (2)
Coffee drinking as a series of relationships: 1. Physiological Addiction – the need for a “fix” 2. Personal Opportunity to catch up with others 3. Socio-economic Necessity of global networks of production, transportation and distribution to make this possible (grounded in colonialism)

Consumption and Identity (1)
Fashion and modernity: shared etymology Fashion as the stylistic expression of the modern: ‘Fashion is the supreme expression of that contemporary spirit’ Ulrich Lehmann (2000:xii) Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Gilles Lipovestsky on Fashion: ‘In less than half a century, attractiveness and evanescence have become the organizing principles of modern collective life’ p. 6. ‘…modern fashion stands out as the earliest manifestation of mass consumption: homogenous, standardized, indifferent to frontiers’ p. 59. ‘A society that hinges on the expansion of needs is above all a society that reorganizes mass production and consumption according to the law of obsolescence, seduction, and diversification; this is the law that titls the economy into the orbit of the fashion form’ p. 134.

Fashion as a form of communication: • Who you are • Who you identify with → Social cohesion through consumption

Consumer Society (1) John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, p.6: 1) Availability of choice and credit 2) Social value defined by purchasing power 3) Desire for the new → “I buy therefore I am”

Consumer Society (2) ‘In this country [America] there is no difference between a person and that person’s economic fate. No one is anything other than his wealth, his income, his job, his prospects. In the consciousness of everyone, including its wearer, the economic mask coincides exactly with what lies beneath it, even in its smallest wrinkles. All are worth as much as they earn, and earn as much as they are worth. They find out what they are through the ups and downs of their economic life’. Max Horkhiemer & T.W. Adorno (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 175.

Consumer Society (3) The role of advertising: To get us to buy things
Two strategies: Creation of desire (sex appeal – you can be this attractive) Creation of anxiety (personal inadequacy – you are this unattractive) Underlying message: you are how you look (identity = image)

Other Points to Note 1.) The Continuing Spread of the Consumer Ethic
• Privatization of public life • Shoppers rather than citizens • The sacralization of consumption • “Affluenza” 2.) Relationship to Production • Things are the products of human labour • Our consumption is someone else’s production • Production presumes consumption & vice versa • Some consume more than others (disposable income)/some work more than others (division of labour)

Films Black Gold 2006 (Marc & Nick Francis)
Maxed Out 2006 (James D. Scurlock) They Live 1988 (John Carpenter)

Chapter 6 TRADING

Trading Has existed for most of human history
Rudimentary division of labour based on gender Little exchange of surplus – mostly subsistence

Adam Smith (1776) Civilisation comes through “truck, barter & exchange” Expansion of the division of labour Specialisation of tasks

Invention of Money Storage without waste (John Locke 1690)
Measure of value Expands division of labour From local to global currencies Increases interdependency

Impersonal Markets Now the primary mechanisms of exchange
Require Commodification Allocate resources Do not satisfy the conditions of modern price theory

Problems With the Market (1)
Buyers and sellers have imperfect knowledge (transaction costs) There can be qualitative differences in the “same” product Markets do not clear, they find equilibrium It is not free: it requires contracts, standards & conditions Giant corporations dominate production & sales Consumption is manipulated by producers Demand for many commodities is inelastic

Problems With the Market (2)
Non-price competition often dominates Path dependence Private markets cannot satisfy public goods (free rider problem & merit goods) Production can be efficient & destructive, e.g. it destroys the environment (externalities) The isolation paradox: self-interest may motivate action but the actions of others complicate outcomes

Labour Markets (1) Distinctive feature of capitalism (Karl Marx, Max Weber) Increase in human toil Creation of “free” labour markets began in Europe End of worker land rights Outside Europe this process often involved colonial projects Workers are compelled to sell their labour power Wages: difficult assessing individual worker’s skills & contributions

Labour Markets (2) Talk of markets collapses a very complicated struggle by a host of parties – capitalists, workers, households, states and organizations – into a misleading abstraction. Granovetter and Tilly, 1988

Capitalists Seek to Lower Wage Costs
Labour-saving technologies (“downsized” workers) Move capital from country to country → Globalised labour market South’s increased involvement in labour-intensive production North’s increasing quest for niches of hi-tech production Dependent & uneven development: massive disparities between CEOs & workers, division between Global North & Global South

Current Trends Downsizing Subcontracting
Increase in part-time, benefit-less work

Globalisation (1) Refers to flows of people, finance, commodities, images and ideas beyond the borders of nation states. These flows are by no means recent. Processes of globalization are uneven and they do not form a coherent whole.

Globalisation (2) → Annihilation of space through time David Harvey
→ The “global village” Marshall McLuhan

Globalisation (3) “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western World is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned”. Quoted in Harvey, 1989, p. 293

Globalisation Thomas Friedman
‘globalization involves the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before’(1999, p. 7). “the earth is flat” (2005)

Globalisation and Americanisation
Americanisation is an important feature of globalisation because: The US is the world’s dominant military power US corporations are major players in the global economy US cultural features are global (film, television, popular music etc)

The Future of Capitalism Newton Gingrich
‘More and more people are going to operate outside corporate structures and hierarchies in the nooks and crannies that the Information Revolution creates. While the Industrial Revolution herded people into gigantic social institutions-big corporations, big unions, big government – the Information Revolution is breaking up these giants and leading us back to something that is – strangely enough-much like Tocqueville's 1830s America’ Quoted in Dawson and Foster, 1996, p. 40

Digitisation of Trade The internet & virtual capitalism
Electronically mediated home work Direct marketing, data gathering & decision-making done online

Digitisation of Trade, but…
Information superhighway planted on top of existing structure of highly corporatised global capitalism Material production functions will stay place-based Retail stores fight back against online competitors, e.g. Niketown, super malls

The Future Capitalism will not become friction free
A system subject to recurring booms & busts But here, as always, the future will be the product of decisions made by all of us. It is an important goal of this book to give citizens some of the tools needed to be thinking participants in this yet-to-be future.

STRATIFYING: CONTESTING CLASS
Chapter 7 STRATIFYING: CONTESTING CLASS

Marx’s Classes as Production Relations
Karl Marx defined capitalist society as a relationship between two social classes – wage-labour and capital. Wage workers and capitalist employers are involved in constant struggle over the rate of exploitation. Class struggle was the ‘motor of history’ (Marx, Capital Vol , pp ). The separation of workers from the ownership of the means of production hid from view the actual process of exploitation. Marx called this “commodity fetishism” and ‘false consciousness’ in which workers saw themselves as being potentially equal with the capitalists (Marx, 1976, Capital Vol 1 pp ). Class consciousness would arise only as a result of the intervention of revolutionaries.

Weber’s Classes as Market Relations (1)
Max Weber’s concept of capitalism was of that of market society in which individual actors exchanged commodities. He viewed economic classes in terms of individuals owning more or less economic ‘assets’ than others. Individuals also differed according to their access to political power (party) and according to their ability to consume (status). Weber did not think that individuals were assigned to classes as production relations since they could change their class, status and party positions.

Weber’s Classes as Market Relations (2)
Weber saw individuals as having social mobility, acting to change their position in society. What motivated individuals to try to increase their market share was their rationality; their ability to act as rational actors in the market. The capitalist market represented a progressive shift from non-rational society to a rational society where progress was measured by an increasingly efficient division of labour. Weber regarded socialism as a return to the non-market irrationality of serfdom.

Neo-Marxism Marx’s prediction of socialist revolution was falsified by events. Many Marxists drew the conclusion that economic interests alone were not sufficient to make the working class revolutionary. Some theorists concluded that the proletariat was no longer the ‘historic agent’ of socialism. The working class appeared to be in decline relative to the middle class. Antonio Gramsci and the German Frankfurt School highlighted the dominance of capitalist ideology in neutralising class consciousness. Eric Olin Wright and Pierre Bourdieu, are prominent Neo-Marxist who attempted to combine Marx with Weber.

Neo-Weberians Weber’s theory explained not only the existence of economic classes, and the relative autonomy of economics and politics, but also allowed for individuals to escape particular classes and exercise choice without the inconvenience of overthrowing capitalist society Neo-Weberians like Frank Parkin or Anthony Giddens claim that capitalism has outgrown the nineteenth and early twentieth century economic scarcity that required classes to compete for zero-sum shares in the national wealth. The persistence of social, national and cultural barriers to equality is reflected in both the upward movement of individuals into skilled occupations and a downward mobility of individuals into a casualised workforce and a residual marginalised underclass.

A Marxist Response to Marx-Weber hybrid classes
There are at least two important objections to Marx-Weber hybrid theories of class formation. Classes are defined by their relation to the means of production and not by market share of revenue. Fetishism of the Intellectuals: the role of bourgeois intellectuals who reproduce the sanitised, inverted ideology of capitalism as a matter of fair shares’.

Social Movements (1) Social movements are the product hybrid theories of class formation that substitute actual groups of individuals in the marketplace (revenue classes) for social relations of production (Crompton, Class and Stratification: An Introduction to Current Debates 1998, pp.18-19). Disadvantaged groups are mobilised ideologically and politically to challenge the cultural alibis for inequality. Their rationale is: If the problem of inequality is caused by unequal distribution, or exchange, then the solution must involve a political strategy to equalise distribution or exchange.

Social Movements (2) However, the women’s movement, and movements around gay and lesbian, black, immigrant, indigenous rights have been remarkably unsuccessful in securing the recognition of rights and in equalising revenue shares (i.e., upward mobility). A recent attempt to rescue social movements as agents of global change is that of Hardt and Negri (Empire 2000; Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire 2004). They define the Multitude as the “common” element of all the singular social movements capable of challenging the Empire of capitalism.

USA, Australia and New Zealand: Lands of White Settlement
European settler states test the explanatory power of race and gender independently of class relations. The claim is that the United States, Australia and New Zealand are relatively open, fluid societies comparatively free of class barriers. However systemic gender and racial oppression originated with the impact of the capitalist mode of production on pre-existing lineage, slave and domestic modes of production so that they became “surrogates” of class relations (Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour 1987, p.44).

Argentina: The “Multitude” Versus the Proletariat
In the case of Argentina, Hardt and Negri suggest that the working class disappears when factory jobs disappear, leaving the unemployed and self-employed as the “vanguard” of the Multitude. However arising out of these surrogate working class movements, it is not the Multitude that poses the real threat to global capitalism. Rather it is the potential power of the organised proletarian and peasant masses that capital fears. This is why in an attempt to avoid popular insurrections the dominant capitalist powers are prepared to allow despotic regimes to be replaced by popular regimes that allow the masses a voice.

Iraq: Nation and Religion against Class
Iraq is the obvious test case where a progressive, secular nationalism combines with a fundamentalist Islamic nationalism to over-ride the class interests of peasants and workers. It is a country in which class seems the most unlikely source of social solidarity and change. Yet if we look at the modern history of Iraq we find a history of class struggle. We find that the capitalist classes in the West have conspired with the local ruling class to maintain regimes hostile to the mobilisation and political power of the working class. We find that same class re-emerging and reforming itself out of sheer economic necessity: unions have been revived; strikes for basic rights and conditions.

Chapter 8 GOVERNING: POWER

Defining Power the ability to do or act
political or social ascendancy or control personal ascendancy authorization, delegated authority

Characteristics of Sociological Theories
Theory is the name we give to the abstract ideas that structure the way we understand and think about the practical things we study. Sociological theories attempt to organize the apparently random nature of social life into coherent social knowledge. Sociologists use theories as their ‘sociological maps’ to help them explain what societies are and how they work and change.

Quantifiable Power Max Weber’s definition of power:
‘the chance of a man or a number of men to realise their own will even against the resistance of others’ Quantity concepts of power see it as capacity: Some people, or categories of people have more of it than others. How much you have greatly depends on your place in society –gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, wealth or poverty etc.

Legitimate Power - Leadership
Max Weber defines domination (a specific form of power) as “the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons.” Economy and Society p.53

Max Weber Three sources of legitimate power which rulers exercise over those they rule: Type of Domination Grounds for claiming obedience Traditional Obey me because this is what our people have always done Charismatic Obey me because I can transform your life Legal-rational Obey me because I am your lawfully appointed superior Frank Parkin, Max Weber, 1982, p.77

Legitimate Power - Leadership
Two competing accounts of political power in the United States in the 1950s Robert Dahl Who Governs Pluralist power Groups (business, workers, taxpayers, consumer groups etc) compete for power on equal terms and all get to exercise some No single interest dominates

Pluralist or Elite Power? In direct contradiction
C Wright Mills The Power Elite One power elite dominates – a combination of political, military, and business people Many of these had not been democratically elected The citizen consent necessary for legitimate rule in a legal rational democracy was under threat

Legitimacy and Globalized Power
Present day globalization processes are undermining the sovereign power of the nation state. Manuel Castells: network society and the network state globally linked organized crime Carolyn Nordstrom: international shadow powers – networks of goods and services operating outside formal state and legal channels trading in legal and illegal commodities

Capillary Power – Michel Foucault
Power as action. Not exercised over people but generated in interactions between them. EXAMPLE OF POWER EXERCISED OVER PEOPLE The Sentence against Damiens 1757

The Parlement declares “the said Robert-François Damiens has been convicted of having committed a very mean, very terrible, and very dreadful parricidal crime against the King. The said Damiens is sentenced to pay for his crime in front of the main gate of the Church of Paris. He will be taken there in a tipcart naked and will hold a burning wax torch weighing two pounds. There, on his knees, he will say and declare that he had committed a very mean, very terrible and very dreadful parricide, and that he had hurt the King.... He will repent and ask God, the King and Justice to forgive him. When this will be done, he will be taken in the same tipcart to the Place de Grève and will be put on a scaffold. Then his breasts, arms, thighs, and legs will be tortured. While holding the knife with which he committed the said Parricide, his right hand will be burnt. On his tortured body parts, melted lead, boiling oil, burning pitch, and melted wax and sulfur will be thrown. Then four horses will pull him apart until he is dismembered. His limbs will be thrown on the stake, and his ashes will be spread. All his belongings, furniture, housings, where ever they are, will be confiscated and given to the King. Before the execution, the said Damiens will be asked to tell the names of his accomplices. His house will not be demolished, but nothing will be allowed to be built on this same house.” Source: Anonymous, Pièces originales et procédures du procès, fait à Robert-François Damiens (Paris: Pierre Guillaume Simon, 1757)

Techniques and Tacitcs of Power
Foucault wanted to upset the way of understanding power that sees it as a) residing principally in the state, and b) being the equivalent of repression. He argues that: • Power doesn’t start from one central point. • It is experienced in a multiplicity of relations. • Power relations are specific, reversible. • Power is always and everywhere present in human interactions.

Discipline The idea of discipline indicates the existence of a whole complex of techniques of power that do not rely on force and coercion. From the 19th century onwards, discipline becomes the distinctive form of modern power. New ways of controlling and training people – ‘technologies of the body’. The disciplines operate through the institutions of incarceration, prisons, asylums, factories and schools.

General Characteristics of Disciplinary Power
Hierarchical observation Normalising judgements Micro-penalties and rewards

Self-discipline Practices – Examples in Everyday Life (1)
Weitz, Rose, Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation. Gender and Society, 15, 5, Cecelia Some days I have good hair days, and some days I have bad hair days. On good days I feel like, you know, my hair does make me powerful. If my hair looks good, I feel beautiful. And if I look beautiful, and another man is attracted to me, then, (laughs) I have got power over him.

Self-discipline Practices – Examples in Everyday Life (2)
Johns, David and Jennifer, Surveillance, Subjectivism and Technologies of Power: An Analysis of the Discursive Practice of High Performance Sport, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 32, 2, Athletes learn to be intensely aware of the importance of the body and adopt technologies that permit themselves to effect ‘operations’ on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.’ Foucault (Technologies of the Self).

Films Richard III 1995 (Richard Loncraine)
The Road to Guantάnamo (Michael Winterbottom)

Chapter 9 RACIALIZING

Introduction (1) Because there is no scientific foundation for using the term ‘race’ as a biological description of human populations, when sociologists need to use the term they often put it in quotation marks. The nineteenth and early twentieth century was the period of imperialist expansion which laid the foundation for the development of many of today’s racial issues. But the early sociologists were not aware of this and did not explicitly address the significance of ideas about race in their work.

Introduction (2) Today the ‘problem of race’ and issues of racialization are quite central to sociology. In a globalizing world, conflicts and patterns of violence and disorder are increasingly defined in racial terms. The vocabulary of race is an element of everyday language, part of the stock of cultural capital we draw on to organise our world, ascribe or claim identity, and guide our interaction with others.

Globalization Processes (1)
The dimensions of the globalisation process relevant to contemporary forms of racism lie in: the disjunctions between the working of the global economic system (which creates economic interdependence through multiple systems of exchange in production, trade and finance) and the political autonomy of the nation states that make up the system.

In the processes of globalization Increased mobility brings previously separate populations into close contact in their everyday life and work and increases competition for resources. Power and resources are not distributed equally among core and peripheral states. (Wallerstein)

This results in growth of distinct ethnic minorities within modern democracies re-emergence of claims for local identity in both core and peripheral states new forms of racism which may be masked as ‘cultural incompatibility’

The United Nations defines an international system of universal standards which contributes to the process of political integration. 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights International and regional organizations e.g. UNESCO, ILO, the Council of Europe, NAFTA, the International Court of Justice 1965 Covenant on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination European Union 1999 Amsterdam Treaty – members required to take appropriate action to counter discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin.

Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism
These are interconnected terms Each of these ideas can be the basis for social action Processes of racialisation – discrimination on the basis of supposed biological distinctiveness and the institutionalisation of economic, legal and political arrangements based on these assumptions draw on and employ all three concepts.

Nationalism and Nationality
Nationalism and nationality are today associated with the ‘nation state’. All nation states have ‘ethnic minorities’. Nationality is always socially constructed. Not all ‘nationalities’ have achieved a nation state. Nationalism is an inclusive concept (cf ‘race’ which is an excluding concept). Nation states control political power and the legitimate means of force within a defined territory. National movements generally aim for some form of political independence. National identity is the identity acquired by membership of the political community. National identity is the basis for the acquisition of citizenship that allows full participation in society.

‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’
The definitions and everyday use of the terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are complex and varied. The term ‘race’ has an ascriptive quality and is mostly used to describe a population rather than a social group. The term ethnic emerged in the 1960s (Glazer and Moynihan) and was used to distinguish between white populations within a multi ethnic state, in terms of their countries of origin. In contemporary multi-ethnic states, a sense of common origin can provide a basis for identification and mobilisation for social, communal or political action. Ethnic minorities may embrace their ethnic identity and group membership. The term racism now describes unacceptable behaviour toward ‘ethnic’ groups as well as racially identified populations. Discrimination on the basis of cultural (ethnic) difference has been described as ‘new racism’. (Miles)

Sociological Analysis of Race
Race, ethnicity and nationality make up a set of contested concepts. A variety of theoretical approaches can be identified. Concern with race developed in Britain in the 1960s in response to the increasing presence of migrant ethnic groups from the colonies and recognition of changes taking place within the society. American sociologists initially examined issues of segregation, immigration and perceptions and awareness. In the 1960s they began to focus on the dynamics of ethnic groups. Marxist tradition. ‘Race’ as ideology and seen in historical and economic context (see the work of Robert Miles). Miles – focus on racialisation – the social construction of race as a process located within the capitalist mode of production. Weber on status groups (see John Rex and Michael Banton). Gramsci, theory of hegemony. Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre. Cultural studies approach. Racism as ideology.

Racialisation and Identity
Contemporary identity is de-centred and fragmented. Race and ethnicity provide the starting point for the narrative construction of identity through negotiation with others. In a mass society where ‘strangers’ are brought into close proximity, presumed common origins become a source of instant recognition and identification. Local ethnicities can threaten national identity. Identities are never completed; they are always in the process of becoming through negotiation and interaction with the other. There is a contemporary explosion of forms of cultural expression from migrant cultures in art, literature, film, mass media and theatre which explore the lived experience of migrants in interaction with the culture of the others.

Conclusion Race, ethnicity and nationality are social (and cultural) constructs which provide the basis for the systems of symbolic representations we draw on in constructing the social groups we inhabit and in ordering relationships with other groups.

Chapter 10 GENDERING

Gender The concept of gender is complex and contested.
Gender, like sexuality, must be seen as something that is produced socially, in complex ways and in struggles between those who have power to define and regulate, and those who resist.

Why Study Gender? Because it’s inevitably and unavoidably always with us. Because commonsense taken for granted notions like ‘men’and women are different’ ‘everybody knows what ‘a man’ is and what ‘a woman’ is ‘gender differences are natural’ are all too simple to be sociologically accurate or true. Because it is complex and therefore interesting.

Gender in Sociology – Individual Level
Individuals act toward reality on the basis of the meanings they give to it and these meanings are constantly modified in social interaction. The meanings of terms like 'male' and ‘female’ must be found in the meanings persons bring to this category of experience.

Gender in Sociology – Social Level
Gender is a significant element in the way social arrangements and the social order work. government and laws family structures and arrangements paid and unpaid work education medicine religion literature media and popular culture In each of these areas there are gendered activities and expectations in the way we live.

Gender as a Difference (1)
When people say that men and women are ‘different’ they usually mean an innate, inherent, biological difference. The biological is also social. Most cultures allow for only two socially sanctioned sexes. But the physiology of sexing works along a continuum. The social may also have biological aspects. Gender roles and identities are seen as being produced through culture.

Gender as a Difference (2)
Gender socialization teaches us the behaviours considered in our time and culture to be appropriate for whether we are male or female. But there is neurophysiology evidence of physiological differences in men’s and women’s brains.

Making a Distinction – “Sex” and “Gender”
Feminist theorizing made a strong distinction between sex – biological and gender – social. It was a politically useful distinction to make their point about inequality but doesn’t really cope with the way biological and social aspects are interwoven in gender identity.

Gender as ‘doing’ Can also be described as ‘performing’ gender.
Erving Goffman suggests that particular ways of being ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ are made available to us by our cultures. We adopt, modify, or resist these as we ‘do’ our gender. Harold Garfinkel says there are codes appropriate to masculine and feminine. Appearance, activities (including jobs), talk, dress, attitudes, emotions. Don West and Candace Zimmerman say that gender can be seen as a routine, methodical and recurring accomplishment, guided by social expectations and notions that particular ways of doing gender are the most natural.

Doing Masculinity R.W. Connell, Masculinities (1995).
There are prevailing forms of masculinity in each society. Some men are better positioned than others to practice the dominant form of masculinity in that society. This most powerful masculinity is described as ‘hegemonic masculinity’. It has been challenged by feminism and by other less valued forms of masculinity.

Defending Hegemonic Masculinity ‘The Gun Lobby’
Asserts a man’s right to defend himself and his family and other possessions. Strategy is based in a belief and assumption that dominant masculinity is a universal and natural norm. Sees challenges to dominant masculinity as evidence of feminism, communist plots, an invisible enemy. Defence may be phrased as a moral obligation and supported by fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

Doing Femininity Mansfield, Louise and Joseph Maguire 1999 “Active Women, Power Relations and Gendered Identities: Embodied Experiences of Aerobics” in Practising Identities: Power and Resistance ed. Sasha Roseneil and Julie Seymour, Macmillan, London. Elaine (explaining how she feels about exercise and her body): I became so obsessed with the fact that I wanted to be thin and so I didn’t hardly eat anything … and I exercised a lot and I just thought that if I became thin everything would be a lot better…. [I wanted to] show that I could model clothes just like people thought was ideal.

Films Water 2005 (Deepa Mehta) Offside 2006 (Jafar Panahi)

Chapter 1 ON BEING SOCIOLOGICAL.

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