imagine a spherical cow...
When John Urry describes some of the assumptions of the "old" sociology in "Mobile Sociology", I am reminded of that joke about scientists--that they can figure out anything just by rounding the corners a little bit, making just a few, light assumptions. Of course, if you calculate anything based on spherical cows, your results are likely to be...ahem...manure. I can't buy his critique that sociology thought of societies as bounded before, but must see them as fluid now. Haven't trade routes and places of cultural contact been the staples of sociological study for ages? If sociologists had always calculated their studies based on the spherical cows of bounded societies, without adding any kind of nuance, I can't imagine how the field could have survived this long. Of course, I'm not a sociologist.
I think that our society is changing rapidly, and there is a kind of "global flow" or whatever coinage each theorist tries to promote to describe that phenomenon. However, Urry's claim that society doesn't really exist because everything flows and has such indistinct boundaries--well, I don't get it. Of course things must be simplified to talk about them, but then one needs to add the legs back into the cow in order to get any real picture of what's going on. Even complexity theory is a necessary simplication. But we shouldn't throw out paradigms and theories because they're simplified. Instead, we need to acknowledge their simplicity and interpolate from there.
Incidentally, I think the question of whether Urry is concentrating only on business and economics is a brilliant one. How does art function in this societyless-society? He admits that certain cultural rituals such as flag waving point to a national identity. But what about the cultural products of art? And, haven't humans always had a society with "inhuman" objects with which they interact? Think horses, wheels, fire, trains, etc. Since these objects are refractions of human society, or at least, they are so when they're used by humans, do they really disturb Berger and Luckman's claim that humans and society mutually shape each other?
I think that our society is changing rapidly, and there is a kind of "global flow" or whatever coinage each theorist tries to promote to describe that phenomenon. However, Urry's claim that society doesn't really exist because everything flows and has such indistinct boundaries--well, I don't get it. Of course things must be simplified to talk about them, but then one needs to add the legs back into the cow in order to get any real picture of what's going on. Even complexity theory is a necessary simplication. But we shouldn't throw out paradigms and theories because they're simplified. Instead, we need to acknowledge their simplicity and interpolate from there.
Incidentally, I think the question of whether Urry is concentrating only on business and economics is a brilliant one. How does art function in this societyless-society? He admits that certain cultural rituals such as flag waving point to a national identity. But what about the cultural products of art? And, haven't humans always had a society with "inhuman" objects with which they interact? Think horses, wheels, fire, trains, etc. Since these objects are refractions of human society, or at least, they are so when they're used by humans, do they really disturb Berger and Luckman's claim that humans and society mutually shape each other?
posted by advee at 8:17 PM
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