Читать книгу Essential Concepts in Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 46

Given the rapid rise of globalization and a huge body of research exploring its contours and future direction, some argue that the concept of society (implying a series of discrete nation states) has no future. John Urry’s (2000, 2007) work on ‘mobilities’ is a good case in point. Mainstream sociology worked with the fundamental concept of society conceived as a bounded entity more or less coextensive with the nation state. The assumption was that states were powerful enough to regulate and control their own development so that nation states embarked on different trajectories. However, as global networks and flows become more effective and powerful, they tend to cross national boundaries, which are more permeable than they once appeared. In this globalizing context, the concept of society becomes less relevant for sociological analysis. Urry argues that the task for sociologists today is to devise ways of understanding these flows and the range of ‘mobilities’ that exist, and what kind of social life they are producing.

On the other hand, Walby (2020) argues that the macro concept of society should not be dispensed with but is in need of development to meet the challenges posed by globalization, colonization and Europeanization. She maintains that two central sociological traditions need to be combined if this is to be achieved; one (from Durkheim) based on society as a set of institutions, the other (from Marx) viewing society as a set of relations of inequality. This means combining the institutional domains of economy, polity, violence and civil society with regimes of inequality such as social class, gender and ethnicity.

Walby (2020: 2–3) uses the concept of a ‘social system’, drawing on recent work in complexity science, to bring these two traditions together. Specifically, she introduces the concept of ‘societalization’, which suggests a process of movement towards closer alignment of social systems without actually reaching full integration. In this way the concept of society can still be useful for sociological analysis, as ‘Nation state building, Europeanisation and globalisation are all examples of societalization’, even though full congruence into a single ‘society’ may not be the endpoint. Perhaps it is not inevitable that globalization will kill off sociology’s founding concept after all.