♪ Music ♪
In this collaborative presentation, Dr. Simone
Pulver provides a summary of contemporary
sociological theory organizing theorists and schools
of thought based on their historical Genesis
and the levels of analysis at which they operate.
Several sociologists then present the key
ideas of specific contemporary theorists.
Dr. Dana Fisher discusses Giddens idea of structuration
which combines structure and agency and then to
Habermas' notions of deliberative democracy.
Dr. Lori Peek summarizes symbolic interactionism
highlighting the focus on symbols and their
interpretations based on individual and social experience.
Dr. Andrew Jorgenson presents world systems
theory from the Chase-Dunn perspective and focuses
on trends and interstate relationships and structures.
Finally, myself, Dr. Kristal Jones discusses
Polanyi and Bourdieu's theories about the
institution and maintenance of economic
structures embedded in social systems.
My name is Simone Pulver, I'm an associate
professor of environmental studies at UC
Santa Barbara, and it is my pleasure to preface
and provide an introductory overview to this
panel, so this is going to be a panel format.
Contemporary social theory is considered to include
the work of social theorists from around 1935ish to
the present; it's essentially defined in opposition to
classical social theory, I think a metaphor to describe
the relationship between the two bodies of thought
that I find useful is the idea of roots classical theory
and branches contemporary theory and while there
is mostly agreement about the canon included in
classical theory, who is considered a key contemporary
theorist and sociology is much more debated.
From that perspective, contemporary sociology
is best described as multi-paradigmatic unlike
economics with the majority of economists working
within a single shared paradigm, contemporary
social theory is a collection of multiple paradigms.
There are scholars whose work is in the direction
of synthesis, so I'm going to, Habermas I think
fits into this, Giddens, Bourdieu, but there is
no quest for one grand unifying contemporary
social theory, right, no one's trying to do that.
When deciding the best way to provide an overview
of contemporary social theory, I opted for
the overly crowded, text heavy slide advised
against by all PowerPoint instruction manuals.
This slide is intended to give you a visual
depiction of key approaches and individuals
that fall within the category of contemporary
sociological and/or social theory.
As soon as I put this together, I was arguing with
myself about these categorizations, so recognize
that the boundaries are fluid, some of these
individuals would self-identify as sociologists,
but others are political scientists, anthropologists,
philosophers, or more broadly public intellectuals
who don't affiliate with a particular discipline.
Nevertheless, the goal of this diagram or
schematic is to create some order out of chaos.
There are both time and levels of analysis
dimensions to this schematic, broadly we go from
earlier to later and then also macro to micro and
then those folks essentially work or those areas
are more integrative across the macro micro divide.
Most textbooks on contemporary sociology will
start with the structural functionalism of Talcott
Parsons, an economist turned sociologist at
Harvard, and his most prominent student Robert
Merton, who spent his career at Columbia.
Parsons, who is described as a towering figure
of American sociology, was interested in
discovering the fundamental social laws that
govern society, so harking back to the biophysical
sciences in the search for fundamental laws.
In particular, he developed a grand theory
of society and social stability centered
on how different subsystems in society
function together to maintain social order.
Parson's body of work was grounded in Durkheim and
Weber and essentially ignored Marx completely.
So as a result, several critiques emerged grounded
in or mirroring Marx's theories of conflict challenging
Parson's work and its emphasis on stability and order.
The first of these perspectives, coming out
of Europe, is the critical theory approach
associated with the Frankfurt School.
Key names associated with this school are
Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, who's,
and the last of which his work has received most
attention I think of that list of critical theorists.
Second, there were conflict and power theories
developed by Dahrendorf, Mills respectively; those
are both U.S. based scholars, sort of they didn't
really know about Marx when they were developing
their theories, but they're in line with sort of
Marx's traditions or Marx's conflict approaches.
And then, finally, a robust critique of Parson's idea
of linear modernization and stability was led by a
group of Latin American scholars under the umbrella
of dependency theory, so we had Parsons and
then these critiques to Parson that emerged.
Despite their differences, all these strands of theorizing
share a focus on macro level structures, be it the
economic trajectories of nations or the function
of critical reason and political debate in regulating
society, alright, they all focus at the macro-level.
Concurrently, there were also significant theoretical
developments on the micro side where theorists were
interested in explaining the behavior of individuals
and here three strands are worth mentioning.
The theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism
that you heard about a little bit this morning which
focuses of the interpretive work of the self in social
interaction; the core idea being that the self is
not given, but emerges out of social interaction.
Symbolic interactionism builds on the work of
George Herbert Mead as we heard that the
actual name was coined by Herbert Blumer.
Also in this direction is Erving Goffman's work on
dramaturgy, which emphasizes how much of social
life is a performance and then there's the work in
phenomenology and ethnomethodology which both
focus on the everyday realities and actual practices
by individuals and how those practices work to
create an ordered and organized social reality.
And then finally, taking micro theorizing in a totally
different direct- or, no, in a different direction,
exchange in rational choice theory were developed,
drawing on economics and psychological behaviorism,
focusing on the costs and benefits of choices and
for each of these theoretical traditions I've listed
some key names if you're interested in following up.
Okay, so, so far I've covered the macro and micro
levels, now I just want to introduce you to a set of
theories or approaches or even topics that span these
levels, so for example, theories of feminism and gender
inequality and race ethnicity and nationalism focus
simultaneously at the macro and micro levels, right,
scholars are concerned both with the lived experience
of individuals and the larger social structures that
perpetuate gender inequality or racism and it's not
that every single theorist who's a feminist theorist
works at the micro macro level, the feminist theory
is a body of work spans that micro macro divide.
It is also worth noting that theorizing on both of these
topics also spans the classical contemporary divide.
Questions of race and gender inequality have
animated sociologists since the classical period and
sociology has discovered early feminist and race
theorists like Harriet Martineau and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, who are contemporaries of Marx, Weber, and
Durkheim, so the discipline has sort of gone through
an evolution about who's included in that classical
canon, not just white men, European white men;
however, the heyday of gender and race theory has
been in the contemporary period in part to responses
and changes in political and social worlds and that's
why they are sort of lumped under contemporary
social theory; other more recent developments also
showcase that theory in sociology is a response to
changes in society, for example, post-structuralists
and post-modernists are both reacting to new
developments in social life such as the end of trust
in the key institutions of modernity or the incursion
of media into society, likewise theorizing about the
drivers in effects of globalization arose alongside a
sense of increase in conductivity across the globe.
Now the final part of this schematic are theorists
who have been explicitly doing some integration
of macro and micro approaches; some of the most
important theorizing in sociology has been done
by individuals working in this vein, in this list, I
would include Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu,
Anthony Giddens, Manuel Castells and I'm sure
others could be put into, on that list.
Okay.
Having set up this schematic I can now
orient you to the presentations of
the other panelists for this session.
Dana is going to get us started, she's going to talk
about Habermas, sort of a lead scholar in the critical
theory Frankfurt School, as well as Anthony Giddens,
one of the sort of more integrative thinkers.
She's going to be followed by Lori talking about
symbolic interactionism, followed by Andrew
who's going to talk about Christopher Chase-Dunn,
who I've put into the sort of globalization school,
he works in the, at the sort of global level in the
world systems theory tradition, and then finally
Kristal is going to close out our panel talking about
Polanyi, who I did not really know where to put,
but I put him in globalization cause arguably
Polanyi is used to sort of think about globalization,
one of the earliest globalization theorists and
then Pierree Bourdieu who's a real integrative
theorist spanning the macro and micro worlds.
The final thing I wanted to close out on today
is I wanted to finish by identifying that, what
I think are the cutting edge of, or what I think
is the cutting edge of contemporary social
theory and the Ritzer reading, which was
assigned for this particular session points to
developments in queer theory and critical race
and racism theory as being at the cutting edge.
I think there's really interesting work in actor-network
theory and practice theory, both of which focus on
the interface between the human and social and the
physical and technological worlds; I think there's
some really interesting work being done there.
Sociologists have long been interested in inequality,
but there's been a real resurgence of theorizing on
this topic in part once again because changes in
the sort of, you know, I, inequality in society.
And finally, and I'm a little biased here, but I would
argue that climate change has pushed theorizing
about society and the environment to the forefront,
beyond the bounds of environmental sociology to
sociology in general, so to me these are the sort of
cutting edge of contemporary social theory.
Thank you very much and
with that I hand it off to Dana.
I thought I would take you through some, kind
of an overview of the works of Giddens and
Habermas and then I'm going to dig down into
my favorite work of Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere to get a
sense of the ways that it is conceptualized and
the ways that it might be useful and cause
originally I started out kind of throwing up very
texty slides and I wasn't sure how the utility of
that, so I went this route, it's we'll call it a third
way in honor of Giddens' somewhat recent book.
So Anthony Giddens is alive today, he was the head
of the London School of Economics, until recently; he
is, actually I should call him Sir Anthony Giddens and he
has, like these other theorists who've come before him,
well he's a white male as well, but I don't believe he has
a beard right now, but he has written many, many works
with many, many big ideas in them, so I just thought I
would talk about some of the works that are well known,
but also that I think are particularly useful for thinking
about the society environment interaction and his
probably most well known for his work on modernity
and on structuration theory and so, I think Lori
talked a little bit about how there was this discussion
about agency versus structure and thinking about
which should be privileged more within traditional
social theory and what Giddens did and he wasn't
necessarily the first to do this, but he perhaps did it
in the most aggressive manner, he basically argued
that what was necessary was to think about looking
at the interactions between agency and structure
and he came up with this novel term structuration
theory which basically means that we look at
agency and structure together as an interaction
and he became quite well known for that work.
At the same time, he also is one of the fathers
of reflexive modernization which I'm going to be
talking about later today perhaps its most well
known as a work by Ulrich Beck who recently
passed away, but Giddens was one of the people
who was initially involved in the conversation
about reflexive moderniza-, modernization and
how to use, their term not mine, so don't roll your
eyes at me, a modernization of modernity would
lead to alternative ways of thinking about society,
technology, and the environment and I'm going to
talk about that more later, so I didn't want to
spend too much time on that given my limited time.
One of his most recent theoretical works was a
work call The Third Way, which I think is, it's
theoretical, but it also was specifically applying
some of his thoughts to thinking about Europe and
where Europe was going and to where democratic
societies could go moving forward and that came out
in 1998 and from then he actually turned very much
towards a, an applied approach and he wrote The
Politics of Climate Change, which was really not
theoretical at all, but I thought I should mention it
since we are talking about society environment and
he is a social theorist who has tried to weigh in and
I think it's interesting because in some ways this
goes back to what Simone was talking about before
and I think that while we are moving into a period
where there are these theoretical opportunities for
thinking more about social theory moving forward,
I also think there is the challenge of a lot of people
deciding that they want to stomp in the small pool
that is society and the environment with their ideas
without actually building on the scholars that have
come before them and I think that Giddens and other
people who have read this, if you don't agree, but I
think that in a lot of ways he represents one of a long
line of people who have tried to do this in the past 10
years, so that is, that's all I have to say about Giddens.
So since I have to also talk about Habermas and
what I basically wanted to do was I thought I
would start with a little background on Habermas.
Now Habermas is, he's a scholar of the Frankfurt
School, he is very well known for his work
originally on legitimation then moving forward
looking at civil society and what's called the
public sphere, which I'll talk about in a minute.
I think it's, the other thing that he's extremely well
known for is he wrote a two volume very, very dense
work called The Theory of Communicative Action.
Habermas' whole work is embedded in notions
about communication, right like communication
like how we talk to one another and it's worth
noting that Habermas is also, was born with a very
significant substantial speech impediment and to
date people have a very hard time understanding
him; he has a very big harelip and as a result,
it's actually very interesting to think about the
ways that he then has spent much of his time
trying to understand communication and how we
communicate as individuals as well as within society,
so I thought that was worthwhile background.
Let's see he, when he talks about theory of
communi-, the theory of communicative action,
one of the big things he's thinking about is
how we can have communication free from
domination and non-power base dynamics
among communication which obviously is an
ideal and not reasonably achievable, but he
starts from there and then spends as I said
before, two volumes trying to pull apart how
that works and how it is situated and what the
powers that pull in different ways on communication.
I did want to make one comment about his
Legitimation Crisis which was an early book of his,
it's actually in contrast to TCA, we call it TCA cause,
you know, it's easier that way, which is like this.
The Legitimation Crisis, a nice little book, it fits in
your back pocket if you want to open up a little
Habermas I suggest that one and in the Legitimation
Crisis, Habermas very much is engaging with Weber's
work on rationalization here and what he basically,
the main question that drives that work which
was one of his earlier works is a question of how
does a state, so like a government, maintain
legitimacy when it's very clear that there is an
unequal contribution of resources and power.
And so the whole work is this conceptual framework
for thinking about how legitimation is maintained
and even furthered within, you know, the common,
the modern state where we do have unequal
distribution of everything, so there's that work.
So now I come to my favorite work of Habermas',
which is the work on the public sphere.
So let's see Habermas wrote The
Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere in the 1990s at some point.
It was not translated into English until I think
'96 and that's when there was this explosion of
work around the structural transformation of
public sphere, so I just thought the public sphere
is basically seen as this domain where people
come together and communicate again and the
idea is that there is this opportunity for rationalized
communication free from domination where people
can actually communicate and discuss and that is at
the heart of democracy and I thought it was great
that Tom was also talking about Dewey because
in a lot of ways this then connects also to some of
the Deweyian ideals about democracy as well.
His work itself, the book that, it was the foundation
for the structural transformation or that is the
structural transformation that then there's all this
other work that has comes since on it, talks about
first the emergence of the public sphere and then
the transformation is actually how it basically
falls apart and I'll give it away quickly which is it
emerges as a place where the learned people
otherwise known as men, by the way, could get
together and talk in, about politics and have
discussions and initially he pointed out that it was
this wonderful place where it, to some degree
power was more equalized, so that people who
weren't very landed could talk with people who
had a lot of land and discuss and debate politics,
and it was this idea and in some ways the book
beginning of deliberation came from this idea.
The transformation happens when you get the
real riff-raff capable of reading and you also have
women entering the public sphere and you also have
people of color to some degree entering the public
sphere and that's where the whole thing is seen as
falling apart within the work and the transformation
itself, I mean, so there are lots of things to criticize
about the structural transformation of the public
sphere and I can give a list of all the things that
have already been written to criticize it.
What was very interesting is this idea of,
is there a time when people can come together
and really have a discussion about democracy?
And he argues that it's possible, excuse me, when
there is homogeneity among the actors involved,
right, and the problem is that he says that once
you get a more diverse crowd involved, it, the
power differentials make it not possible to have
this communication that's free from domination
where you can really have a conversation about
democracy in a real way, which I know can sound
kind of crazy, but it's really interesting in terms of
thinking about communication and discussion and
the role that discussion can play and deliberation
can play in democracy, which was very, very, in
some ways groundbreaking when he wrote it for
thinking about the way that society interacts and
the interaction itself, not just these structures,
these, you know, these static structures of the
state that you change, but how do they change
and, you know, for Habermas they changed
through communication and communication
yields social change in many different ways
and there are lots of works that he has written
that talks about the different ways that change
happened, but I think is most important for my,
you know, my cliff notes version here, is to think
about the fact that it's this interaction that's
communicative amongst people who know what's
going on that enables us to move forward.
I mean I can give a, I'll give an example that's,
you know, an example today would be that
Habermas would say that the Trumpism of American
politics today shows this decline and failure of the
public sphere because all of a sudden you no
longer have learned experienced people who
have been in government, who know how to talk
about state making, they instead all of a sudden
we have, you know, these crazy statements
that are being made for media attention and
it's no longer a deliberation about how to solve
the actual problems that are going on in society,
but rather just grandstanding to get attention.
So I mean I think that's how he would do it
and he, since he is still alive, he may very well
weigh in on Trump if he ends up being the
Republican nominee, so stay tuned for that.
But again, so the public sphere itself was originally
this idea around the bourgeois public, it was originally
in this period of time for, many people were very
powerful, but a lot of people have embraced the idea
because it fits very nicely into thinking about democracy
and thinking about citizen participation, but also kind
of participation in politics and the way you get from
an individual, who just votes to being an individual
who participates and discusses and then potentially,
then democracy reflects the opinions of the populace.
Okay, thank you Simone for the
introduction to this and thank you Dana.
So again I'm Lori Peek and I'm a sociologist at Colorado
State University and I'm going to spend a few minutes
with you today talking about symbolic interactionism,
which is a micro level perspective that you are all
now familiar with after this morning's discussion, so
just again a brief reminder when we talk about micro
level theories or perspectives, we're really talking
about close-up on the ground studies of oftentimes
social interaction as well as human behavior and
how individuals interpret and respond to and ascribe
meaning to interactions and to particular behaviors.
And so as Simone introduced us to several of these
thinkers earlier, George Herbert Mead and Charles
Horton Cooley are often two of the thinkers that
are sort of considered foundational, but as Simone
said Herbert Blumer was actually the first scholar
to use the term of symbolic interactionism in
his written work and Blumer was a student
of Mead's at the University of Chicago.
Robert Park as well as Erving Goffman are also
oftentimes names that you will see in this tradition
and it's interesting sort of as Simone was aleading,
alluding to when you're working in a contemporary
theoretical space figuring out who were those founding
thinkers and so Mead sometimes gets included as
a classical thinker in sociology because oftentimes
he is the one that, like I did this morning, people
point to as sort of a foundational thinker of the
micro interactionist approach, but also is oftentimes
taught in contemporary theory classes as well.
And so a few of the central premises of symbolic
interactionism and these first three, I'm going to put
up several premises or ideas that really help anchor
this theory, so while Mead is oftentimes sort of the
person who's pointed to as one of the grand founders
of this theory, he, actually his most read book Mind
Self and Society, he actually did not write, his students
at the University of Chicago were so taken by him and
his ideas and the things that he shared, that after he
passed away his students actually assembled that
book based on notes from his lectures in his class.
Blumer, his student, was much more systematic in terms
of his writing about what symbolic interactionism is and
recall Mead was a philosopher, a psychologist, and
also a sociologist as to where Blumer was a capital S
sociologist and so these first three premises are his.
So the first thing he would say is that people act
towards symbols and so this notion of symbols is
key in symbolic interactionism and when we use the
concept of symbols we're really talking about first
and foremost words and language, but we're also
talking about material goods we may be talking
about actual physical objects or items or things
and so people act in relation to symbols and they
do this on the basis of those meanings that those
symbols have for them and so for instance we
have some people who are U.S. born and bred in
this room, we also have many people who are not.
We also likely have many people of many different
political and ideological stripes sitting in this room and
so what a symbolic interactionist would, their starting
point would recognize this flag is a symbol, it's an
object and a symbolic interactionist would maybe
put up a symbol like this and would never assume
that all of us ascribe the same meaning to this.
Instead a symbolic interactionist would look at
this room and would want to try to understand,
so there's this symbol, what meaning do each of
you attach to this symbol, so if you would let's
take five seconds and I'd like you to think about
what is the first word or idea that comes into
your mind when you see the American flag and
no need to share it because we're being recorded.
So what's the first word or idea,
again get it in your mind please.
Second tenant or premise of symbolic interactionism
is that the meanings that we acribe to symbols, they
come through interactions with people and so think
about that word that you just put into your mind
to describe your feeling or how you might respond
to the American flag, where did that idea come
from for you?, Was it your family?, Was it your
broader cultural context? Was it the media?, etc.
Third key premise of symbolic interactionism is that
people don't just internalize meanings, it's not that
meanings aren't all around us, but we don't just
internalize them, we're able to actually interact with
them through an interpretive process and so at all
times symbolic interactionists see people as active,
critical, engaged beings who are able to think critically
and actively about the symbols around them.
Fourth key premise that one of the things that
symbolic interactionists argue, separate us
from the animals and we'll love to hear our
veterinarian weigh in on this is that we are
unique in our ability to use and rely on symbols;
we are not just driven by our instincts, instead we
are very much active and interactive in our society.
Fifth key premise is that people only become human
through social interaction and so some symbolic
interaction is to actually argue that we are not
actually human until we acquire the ability to use
language because language is so central to the
symbolic interactionist perspective and so it's
through language and through interaction that we
actually become fully human and so a lot of early
interactionists actually wrote about feral children and
children who had been raised by wolves to argue
that they weren't actually fully human because
they had not developed this capacity to interact
with their environment and the symbols around them.
Sixth key premise that people are conscious and
capable of reflecting on themselves and what they
do and thus they're therefore capable of shaping
their actions and their interactions with others and
so this small graphic up here of the looking glass
self, this is sort of Cooley's who's one of the founding
thinkers, this is oftentimes the idea that oftentimes
gets most cited and associated with him and so the
looking glass self is this idea that we're able to hold
a mirror up to ourselves and realize that our parents
may see us in a particular way, our partners may see
us in a particular way and the ways that our partners
see us can change across time and space based upon
our behavior and so while the mom may see the person
with a halo around their head and while the girlfriend
may generally see the person as okay, later in time
the girlfriend may see the person as horns on their
head because they did something bad and so this
looking glass self is this idea that we're constantly able
to understand and interpret how people are seeing
us and then we behave in ways in response to that.
Seventh key idea is that people define situations,
they give them meaning, and then they
act toward them and so reality is socially
constructed and it's constantly being constructed.
Oftentimes people teaching the symbolic interactionist
perspective in an intro class to make this point about
people defining situations as real and then they become
real in their meaning, a lot of times intro classes use
the example of someone who is anorexic and so if the
person defines a situation as real, so an anorexic we
know that oftentimes when they look at themselves
they see themselves as being heavy even if objectively
out there in the so-called real world other people are
looking at that person and saying oh my goodness you're,
you know, you are drastically dramatically underweight,
your life is being threatened, it doesn't matter what that
objective reality is out there for that anorexic person
if that anorexic person defines his or her reality as
being I am heavy, I am atrociously overweight, I am
not going to be able to eat, then that is how that
person is going to respond in reaction to their socially
constructed reality and so symbolic interactionists this
morning we heard the word objectivity several times
out there, symbolic interactionists tend to be less
interested in big O objectivity as floating out there in
the world somewhere and instead much more interested
in subjective interpretations of our social world.
And eighth key premise is that people produce
society and so that structure agency debate that
we talked about this morning, that society is seen
very much as a bottom up construction made by,
made as a result of these ongoing interactions
between people with symbols, selves, and society.
And so just in conclusion, when we think about how do
symbolic interactionists, how do they look at the world?
What is the lens, the magnifying glass that
they bring to everything that they do?
And so these are generalizations symbolic
interactionists like many other sociologists
have many other stripes look at the world in
many different ways, but generally speaking
symbolic interactionists tend to look at
individuals as well as small groups in terms
of their unit of analysis and hence have
a lot of overlap with social psychologists.
There's also a society for the study of symbolic
interactionism that it's its own disciplinary organization.
In terms of methods, because symbolic interactionists
tend to be interested in that kind of micro level group
behavior, they tend to, although not exclusively,
tend to use qualitative participatory methods, so
interviews, observations, small group interviews,
and they tend to be inductive in their forms of
analysis and the questions that they ask tend to
be focused on identities, interactions, behaviors,
attitudes, values, and group affiliations.
And so in terms of implications for a group like this
and thinking about where might a micro sociology
or a symbolic interactionist perspective really assist
or aid people working in this kind of space, so
we might ask questions like, how does someone
develop an identity as an environmental activist?,
What does it mean to become an activist?, How do
environmental activists interact with one another
and how is that conditioned by race, class, gender,
and age?, What are particular environmental
values that people hold and how are those values,
how might they be changed by interactions with
institutions, with political systems, and so forth?
And so these are some of the questions that
people working in a symbolic interactionist
frame, working in an environmental space
have asked and have shed a lot of light on
environmental attitudes and environmental change.
Hello, I am Andrew Jorgenson, professor of sociology
and environment studies at Boston College, so I'm going
to talk briefly about world systems theory and I'm going
to focus particularly on the Christopher Chase-Dunn
approach to world systems theory, but first more broadly
I do want to mention that this kind of a larger tradition
with different perspectives within it and it's a tradition,
that's multidisciplinary, most of the founders of this
broader theory, and there's even a debate whether
this is a theory or a perspective and I really don't want
to engage in that right now, but there's a, but and its,
has its roots in historical sociology, Immanuel Wallerstein
is probably the most well-known world systems scholar
and so some of you've probably heard that name before,
you're probably more likely have heard that name rather
than Chase-Dunn, but I did not want to talk about
Chase-Dunn because I think that his work on the modern
world system has a lot of implications for sustainability
types of research, so a little bit about Chris Chase-Dunn,
he's a distinguished professor of sociology at University
of California Riverside and he's the director of what's
called the Institute for Research on World Systems
and he's the founder of the Journal of World Systems
Research, so he's really, takes this very seriously, and
one of the things that he's known for and it reminds me
of some of the questions that came up earlier today is
some of his other theoretical work that I'm not going to
really talk about in-depth, it's collaborative work with
Tom Hall, who's a sociologist and kind of a sociologist and
anthropologist, they've done some work on comparative
world systems, they're, they have a book called Rise
and Demise: Comparing World Systems which has been
really well received by archaeologists and anthropologists
and historians and that particular perspective is used
to analyze systems of societies throughout human
history, so going back to the pre-modern world.
Most world system scholars focus on what is
referred to as the modern world system, which
I'll focus on in particular in a minute, but a brief
definition, well, what is a world system?
Really from a systems perspective, we're
talking about a system of societies, we're
really talking about interaction networks.
Someone earlier today talked about interaction
networks of I think ecological interaction networks
I think was the concept that was brought up this
morning, well that really caught my attention because
Chase-Dunn uses this concept of interaction networks
to talk about interactions between a different scales
of social organization from the individual all the way up
to the international and the global, so we can broadly
think of a world system as a system of interactions
between humans at multiple scales from the local to
the global and the global though from world systems
perspective, pre-modern world system would be just
a system of societies that was sort of independent of
other exist, potentially existing systems of societies.
Now when we think of the modern world system though,
this is when we really do have a truly global social
system, I think this is something that we all kind of all
recognize and now there's an assumption about the
modern world system, this idea of the core/periphery
hierarchy that some of you've probably heard of.
Now this is an assumption for the modern world
system about a stratified interstate system; we have
this idea, of course, semi-periphery and periphery
nation states and you can think about it in terms
of international inequality from a multidimensional
perspective, but this assumption about the modern
world system is actually treated as an empirical
question in comparative world systems analysis
when you're comparing systems of societies
and different historical periods, but this is
an assumption of the modern world system.
Now Chase-Dunn's work on the modern world
system is theoretical work that is most, kind of
I think recognized influential as his work in a
book Global Formation and I highly recommend it.
It's, he draws a lot from political science and
macroeconomics and history in this as well and
in this theoretical work, he attempts to specify
these basic and normal operations of the system,
which allows for a lot of modeling and a lot of
hypothesis testing, which is something that has
come up in discussions today, so these structural
constants that are theorized to exist in the modern
world system are things that I think a lot of us
probably take for granted, this idea of we have a
capitalist world system, but I would say capitalisms,
the idea that we have multiple forms of capitalism
and that's something that's debated within the world
systems community, but Chase-Dunn, I would argue
that we do have multiple forms of capital, capitalism,
that a, sort of fluid type of constant in a sense.
We have this interstate system, something that
political scientists spend a lot of time studying,
so we have this idea of an interstate system that
is part of this stratified interstate system between
more powerful and less powerful nation states;
core powers and core nation states and more
peripheral nation states and one of the things that
is often overlooked in this perspective though is it's
assumed that this is primarily about just economic
power, but it's really about multiple forms of
power including geopolitics and military power
and that's something that Chase-Dunn greatly
emphasizes that I think has a lot of implications
for environment, society types of research.
So we have these systemic cycles; these are a bit
more controversial, so we have this thing called the
Kondratieff Wave; just think of these as large-scale
business cycles or other kinds as well and I had to be
honest, so I had to put this up there, but I wasn't all
that excited to talk about Kondratieff Waves because
I think that among these sorts of assumptions that
Chase-Dunn has put out there and others have put
out there, I think the Kondratieff Wave or the business
cycles, is one of the most controversial and debated
ones among world system scholars and other historical
social scientists, but you can think of these sort of
large-scale, sort of world economic cycles, an upward
trend and a downward trend and Kondratieff Waves
is one of them and then we have something called a
hegemonic sequence and some of, have argued that
Kondratieff Waves and had the hegemonic sequence
are interrelated in different sorts of ways; this is
something that's also debated, but the hegemonic
sequence is really this idea of the rise and fall of
global superpowers; you could think about it in
that context within the modern interstate system,
that we have this cycle of the rise and fall of kind
of a global core power, which is a nation state and
they tend to be powerful globally in the context of
economic power and military power, but there are
also qualitative differences in each of these cycles
that occurs that if you look throughout human history,
well I mean history, if you look through the last few
sorts of cycles of the hegemonic sequence, you'll
see that the global hegemon from this perspective
has things that are qualitatively unique to it that,
that'll make it different from prior global hegemons.
Okay, then we have these systemic trends and
all of these have been studied quite a bit using
statistical modeling techniques, trying to sort of
map these sorts of things out, this idea of the
expansion and deepening the commodity relations,
a lot of folks think about this in the context of
global production networks and there's a huge
school of social science on global commodity chains
that's directly tied to this, that has sort of had
a renaissance recently, it's getting quite popular.
Again, this idea of state formation that came up
earlier, the emergence of the power of states over
their populations has generally increased through
time, even though within these trends there might
be a long-term trend with different sorts of cycles,
so of course, you know, the emergence of states
and state power can be somewhat cyclical, but
the idea is there's sort of a longward upward trend;
the general increase size of economic enterprises
in general, that the big ones have gotten bigger.
This idea of international economic integration,
this is a fancy way of saying economic globalization
frankly, which I'll talk about more tomorrow.
The growing gap, this idea of the growing gap in
the context of international inequality between the
core and periphery, that depending on different
metrics that you look at you, you're likely to
see this growing gap between core and periphery.
And also this emergence of kind of global governance
and this is something that I think often gets overlooked,
this idea that we have this emerging and unfolding type
of international and then global governance and you can
sort of look at this historically, you know, these common
examples that are thrown out that the League of Nations,
the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and what I wanted to
say about this though based on some of the conversations
that had come up earlier, is this is also, I think shows where
this perspective overlaps with the world society tradition in
some important ways that was brought up earlier and it's
kind of a genealogy of these perspectives where Chase-
Dunn's mentor and advisor was John Meyer, who is the
founder of world society theory, who in turn had many
other successful students that have developed the world
society perspective and oftentimes world system theory
and world society theory are treated as being at great
odds with one another, but if you look at the Chase-Dunn
perspectives you'll see that actually they're really not
as at odds with one another as you might think and just,
I'll talk about this more tomorrow, but just to give some
validity to what I said about using historical quantitative
data to try to look at some of these long-term cycles and
trends, this top slide here is from a study of looking at,
historically, hegemonic rise and decline looking at historic
quantitative data on levels of economic development,
which is, there's a lot of, this is tricky stuff using data
like this going back centuries, but from this perspective
though there appears to be some general evidence of
sort of this cycle of a Dutch hegemony then a British
hegemony then U.S. hegemony and then there's been
a big debate within this perspective about have we had
another recent round of U.S. hegemony or have we had
something else, has the world sort of changed, perhaps
we're no longer going to have like a nation that's the
global hegemon, maybe we're going to have a regional
superpower now and then the bottom here, this is
looking at this idea of increasing global economic
integration looking at trade globalization through time
using some, a pretty creative methodology and also
counting for the size of domestic economies in the world
economy and how that shifts through time and looking
at trade relationships and when you do this though and
this really gets at a kind of an ongoing, well I guess
it's still an ongoing debate in the social sciences about
is globalization new or not and this type of a analysis
suggests that yeah it is, but at the same time in earlier
historical periods we had cycles of trade globalization
that peaked quite high and then declined and you sort
of see the time frame and you see that this is all, also
tied to, well the occurrence of some world wars too.
I'm Kristal Jones.
I'm an assistant research scientist here at SESYNC.
My background is in rural sociology, which there's
a range of discussion about whether that's really
sociology or something else or a sub-discipline or
whatever, but for the purposes of this presentation
we read all the same theory and from my perspective,
it is a sub-discipline of sociology focused on rural
issues and so for me, my interest in rural issues
and kind of rural economic and rural international
development issues has led me to some of the
contemporary theorists who come out of this or
who build on the kind of Marxian tradition and in
this conflict theory tradition, so if you think back to
Lori's slides this morning about the kind of schools
of thought and then that Tom continue to build
on of the classical theorists, conflict theory is really
an idea that originated with Marx and this idea
of class conflict, but now has been built upon by
a range of contemporary theorists to talk about
conflicts that exist based on social differences
and really categories of social difference and
often those different categories are defined by
different access to material resources or different
levels of access and levels of material resources.
So I'm going to talk briefly about Karl Polanyi,
who's already been mentioned, and who's actually
a bit more straightforward and then talk also
briefly about Bourdieu, who is less straightforward.
But Karl Polanyi is a bit of a bridge maybe between
classical and contemporary theory; he was born
in Hungary in the, or I guess he was born in
Austria, but he's Hungarian, in the late 1800s.
His sort of seminal work is a book called
The Great Transformation which he actually
wrote at Bennington College in the U.S.
in Vermont, which is sort of interesting.
He, like many thinkers I guess, at the end of the
1800s in Europe fought in World War I and then
made his way west, so he went from Hungary
to Austria to the U.K. and eventually to the U.S.
and he ended up his professional career as a
professor of economics at Columbia University.
I don't really know, he has a law degree, so again he's
a, the sort of classical social thinker whose disciplinary
background doesn't necessarily help identify where they
ended up, but his ideas are really trying to articulate
alternative, understandings of alternative economic
systems and so The Great Transformation focuses on,
maybe not the political economy of World War I and II,
but more like political economy in the context of World
War I and World War II, so trying to understand
how the world in this capitalistic system that had been
hypothesized to create great stability ended up in two
world conflicts in the space of 20 years or 30 years.
And the basic, one of the key ideas in The Great
Transformation is this idea of the double movement,
which I think Tom alluded to earlier and it really
comes out of this idea in this frame of the conflict
school, the idea that the self-regulating market in
fact creates differences, social differences based
on material realities and then those differences will
create conflict and then as, sort of as a corollary
to that the internal logic of the capitalist system
is to maximize efficient use of inputs and so labor in
particular is one of those inputs, the maximal efficient
use of individual labor will lead to social exploitation.
That is socially not acceptable for moral or legal
or stability reasons, right, and so there actually
need to be law, politics, and morality that kind
of condition a self-regulating market, so a fully
self-regulating market with no kind of limits or
bounds or other kinds of structures would actually
self-destruct; it would both consume all of them,
all of the inputs or all of the inputs to production
and it would be socially sort of devastating to
create a bit of a sort of state of chaos, so he
had this idea of the double movement as the
back and forth between the logic of the market
playing out in the social space and society reacting
to the negative impacts of that logic and therefore
creating new types of structures and institutions.
And so moving from some of those ideas about what
are those institutions and those structures that are
built to kind of counteract these negative externalities.
His other main contribution, that came a bit later
in life when he was in the United States in an
economics department, was the idea of substantive
economics and it's actually been taken up a lot more
by economics, sociologists, and anthropologists,
although it was sort of generated in a sort of
more neoclassical economic space, but the idea of
substantive economics is that economy broadly is
an instituted process of interaction between man
and his environment and this is part of why I think
Polanyi is a really interesting theorist to use in the
socio-environmental space because I think he was
a lot of his sort of historical economic or economic
history work looked at both the natural and the social
environment within which economies are instituted,
and then the institutions that would be appropriate
and different both social and natural environments.
And so his idea of substantive economics really
is that there are distinct organizing principles of
economies and that utility or efficiency or maximization
are not the only principles that could organize a
system of exchange to meet material needs, that
there could be equity concerns that would be
dominant over efficiency, there could be redistribution,
there could be emphasis on community versus
individuals, so the different kind of internal logics
of a system are going to reflect the social or natural
environment within which that system is being
instituted by individual actions and that over time
structures that are created by those actions.
So that's Polanyi, in a nutshell, or at least a
few of his ideas and then, so another and
much bigger, much higher impact contemporary
theorists in the, who also comes out of this or
fits into this conflict school is Pierre Bourdieu,
who is a bit more contemporary, but is also
like the classical theorists has written voluminous
amounts and more in French that's not been
translated to English, so there's constantly new
things to read in English by Bourdieu, he didn't
die that long ago, so there's a lot of papers that
are still being put out, anyway, so I'm going to
touch on just a few of his key ideas, his sort of
classic masterpiece is a book called Distinction.
One of the things he's really interested in across
all of his work and particularly in this work,
the Distinction, is really trying to understand
social stratification and the different cate-, the,
so the differences across individuals and groups
of individuals, those categories being defined by
different access to material resources, but also
different access to power and that's really where
he again fits into this conflict theory frame where
there are differences in terms of the resources
people have access to, those resources are not
only material and those systems are not only
based on modes of production, but they're also
based on other types of capitals, so he really
takes this economic language and expands it out
to include not just economic capital or material
capital, land and labor, right, but also to include
other types of capital like social, cultural, and
symbolic capital, being the kind of key three.
And so his sort of framing of capitals are
that there are social categories that we,
that one can access depending on where
one starts from and that in turn gives one,
that gives one the ability to leverage further
power, so a really good example is if you
walk into a job interview wearing a suit,
that gives you a little bit of cultural capital,
if it's a situation where you're supposed to
be wearing a suit, like the economics meeting
where you're trying to get a job, right, you
wear a suit, you have some cultural capital
because in that cultural setting that's
expected and you can then leverage that
to start a conversation with the person
you're hoping's going to interview you.
If you're the same individual with the same
record and brilliant mind, but you walk in
wearing a hooded sweatshirt and cargo pants,
they're probably not going to give you the time
of day because you haven't sort of given them
that que, but really you haven't leveraged this,
you don't have the cultural capital, you haven't
leveraged this cultural space effectively, maybe
that's cause you don't have the money to do
that and then that comes back to this question
of what other resources do you have access to.
But the basic idea is that we have these different sort
of abstract worlds to which we can appeal differently
depending on where we come from and that in turn
gives us a leg up or not a leg up to continue to
change those sort of abstract or symbolic worlds.
And so again, this comes out of his interest in sort
of broadening out the universe of exchange from
only being about material exchange to being about
exchange of social relationships of cultural knowledge
or, for, in, the symbolic capital is more about things
like honor or bravery, it's a bit more lofty I suppose.
The other big idea, another big idea from Bourdieu,
there are few and this is only one more, is this idea
of habitus, which is very complex and I am not an
expert on it, so I'm not going to try to tease it all
apart, but the basic idea is that he again draws on
the dialectics that kind of do come out of the same
tradition that Marx and the conflict theories come
out of, this dialectic interaction between objective or
external reality and our internal subjective experience
of that reality and how over time that back and forth
mediates the structures within which we live and
then how we therefore experience our lived reality
and so it is this back and forth that helps to kind of,
this is why he's a bit of an integrative contemporary
theorist because he's trying to pull together the
structure and agency or the objective and subjective
both in theory and also then a lot for sociologists and
for social scientists, there's a lot, he writes a lot about
how to do that methodologically and that's part of why
I think it's a fairly interesting perspective to include.
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