The Spatial Spanning of the Social
Transnationalism as a challenge and chance for social sciences
Ludger Pries
Paper presented at the International Workshop
Transnationalism: New Configurations of the Social and the Space
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 6th and 7th of September 2002
Working address:
Prof. Dr. Ludger Pries
Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaft
44780 Bochum
Tel: 49(234)32-25429
Fax: 49(234)32-14446
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The Spatial Spanning of the Social
Transnationalism as a challenge and chance for social sciences
Ludger Pries
The dust of globalisation discourse had not blinded yet the very instructive reflections on the relation between the Social and the Space, when David Gregory and John Urry edited the book Social Relations and Spatial Structures in 1985. The editors wrote in their introduction that “spatial structure is now seen not merely as an arena in which social life unfolds, but rather as a medium through which social relations are produced and reproduced” (Gregory/Urry 1985, p. 3). It seems that, since the powder of globalisation debates is coming down at the beginning of the 21st century, it is worth to reflect again more explicitly on the relation between the Social and the Space.
New information, communication and transportation technologies let the world shrink together. In the 21st century, an average individual of the rich countries and of the upper classes of all countries of the world is able to visit all continents of the globe physically at least once in his or her life. This person also can participate in the global flow of information as receptor (viewing TV or radio, reading newspapers or books) and as actor (using the telephone or internet). The spatial scope of human action is becoming wider or global, the margins for human spatial mobility are shrinking. But first of all, this is a real option only for almost half a billion or a tenth of world population, more than half of the human beings could not afford a daily newspaper. And second, the societal (economic, ecologic, social, political and cultural) preconditions and consequences of this ‘segmented globalising of opportunities and shrinking of mobility margins’ are distributed quite unequally all over the globe.
In general, increasing spatial mobility goes hand in hand with a wider action scope to cope with the societal implications of globalisation: somebody who can afford an eight cylinder high fuel consuming car probably could better protect him- or herself against the global consequences of earth warming. And vice versa: Poor action resources for living and surviving normally also limit the geographical radius of mobility. A common conclusion could be: Shifts in the spatial spanning of the social are accentuated by the existing patterns of social life and inequality. But, at the same time, it seems that the very nature of new patterns of the spatial spanning of the social are influencing deeply the scenery of social classes and stratification, in a broader sense: of the social units of observation and analysis itself.
It seems to be promising to understand the globalisation discourse and corresponding concepts like glocalisation, transnationalism etc. as different figures of change and new combinations of the relations between the Social and the Space.[1] But what do we understand as spatial or the Space and what as social or the Social? Both terms refer to concepts people have of the world and use as orientations and to make demarcations and differences, in everyday life as well as in scientific observations. Whatever the understanding in particular may be, obviously there exists a dialectic connection between both: there is nothing Social without a spatial dimension, and there is nothing Spatial without a social dimension. All Spatial is social, because it is constructed by human beings, physically or at least mentally – the universe exists (or most of us hold that I does exist), but it makes no difference between its Social and its Spatial, it just is. And all Social has spatial dimensions: as bodies of those who act socially, as spatial sediments of social action (e.g. in architecture, technical artefacts, housing and travelling), and quite all mental constructions we use own spatial characteristics like distance, location, movement from place to place etc.
Speaking of the Spatial at any time is a social construction. This becomes very clear if we take, for instance, the 29 different main concepts of Space which Alexander Gosztonyi (1976) distinguishes in his monumental work on “The Space. History of his problems in philosophy and sciences”. He outlines that there simply is no scientific discipline (sciences, philosophy, economics, political or social science etc.) without concepts of the Space. For Gosztonyi, one starting point is the space of experience as that space in which people find and move themselves physically and mentally „in a natural way“ (p. 36), that is: without deeper reflection on its special structure and classification or the arrangement of its parts. This space of experience is primary in a double sense: it is the space which human beings – as babies – learn and ‘conquer’ first in time, and it is primary in a methodological sense that it is the ‘basis’ (also a term with a necessarily spatial dimension) for every further experience of space.
One could distinguish different levels or scopes of spaces of experience which quite all people know and live: the family, the community, the society, and perhaps the global world. For the majority of people these four levels of experienced spaces represent a sort of concentric circles in which their social existence spans spatially. We will coin these experienced spaces of everyday life (Schütz 1993; Berger/Luckmann 1980) and of the world of living (Habermas 1981) as social spaces. During centuries social spaces as the coexistence amongst people and processes of socialization became more and more tied, in reciprocal exclusiveness, to more or less clearly definable and known geographic spheres. In this sense, a defined geographic space extending over a physical area (a 'territory' or 'locale') is supposed to correspond to one and only one socially compressed space (for example, a community or a national society) in a double sense. First, every social space seems to ‘occupy’ precisely one geographically specific space; social spaces such as families, communities or societies are not distributed over several geographic spaces, but located in just one coherent territory. And the other way round: in one geographic space as ‘socially occupied territory’ there is place just for one and only one corresponding social space; in a department or house there lives only one family, two communities could not exist in the same place and one national society has one national state territory.
Epistemologically it is important that modern social sciences emerged together with the nation states and national societies. Whereas during centuries Latin, Arabic or French were used as lingua franca in the extend geographic spheres of a continent, several continents or in the catholic world all over the globe, with the 19th and 20th centuries as a period of nationalisms (Hobsbawm 1991) the notion of national container societies became prominent, first in Europe and than – with the modernisation theory – all over the world. The ‘evolution’ from community to society was a major topic and key concept in sociology, and society in quite all its possible significations is conceptualised as a ‘container-society’ in the sense of the reciprocal exclusiveness of social and geographic spaces:the geographic space and the social space are embedded exclusively in each other.
Globalisation and transnationalism challenge this container-concept of society which in deed had and still has its explanatory power. But for a growing number of people everyday life and social practices, frameworks of symbols and perceptions, the physical and imagined mobility and use of artefacts is not one-place-limited or one-exclusive-territory-based. Transnational migrants, managers and expatriates of transnational companies, political experts and activists span their lives pluri-locally between different places. By this way transnational social spaces – which by no means are completely new – are getting stronger. Hand in hand with this, political, military, economic, cultural, ecologic and social problems are increasingly perceived as multi-sited and transnational.
In order to demonstrate the container-thinking-dominated approach of space in social sciences we will discuss some prominent concepts of community and society as developed in Sociology (section 1). As community and society (in its nation state or world society reach) are important and necessary but not sufficient concepts for characterising the spatial spanning of the Social in the 21st century, we will make a proposal of different ideal-types of international and boarder spanning processes of socialization (section 2). Finally, we present some considerations of developing a concept of social spaces as an increasingly relevant unit of analysis for sociological thinking which could make up the community and society model (section 3).
1.Community and (national) society as sociological key concepts
Since the very beginning of Sociology (and social sciences in general) the two terms of community and society represent core concepts of the sociological thinking for three reasons. First, community and society refer to important figures of human existing and living in special and complex groups. Community and society refer to human networks with a certain durability in time, with a definable expansion in space and with a special quality of the interlacing ties between the people. The Harper Collins Dictionary of Sociology (1991, p. 66) defines community as “any set of social relationship operating within certain boundaries, locations, or territories.” And it distinguishes two notions of society: “1. the totality of human relationships. 2. any self-perpetuating human grouping occupying a relatively bounded territory, having its own more or less distinctive CULTURE and INSTITUTIONS, for example, a particular people such as the Nuer or a long- or well-established NATION-STATE, such as the United States or Britain.” (p. 467). In a similar way, the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (1998, p. 625) states: “society, generally, a group of people who share a common culture, occupy a particular territorial area, and fell themselves to constitute a unified and distinct entity.”
As Sociology deals with the living together of people and treats social action, social order or social figurations, social conflicts and social change, besides the terms group and – in more recent times – network the concepts of community and society are without any doubt central markers of social realities (in the Durkheimian sense of faits sociaux) and of the specific nature of social interrelationships as “Verflechtungszuammenhänge” in the sense of Norbert Elias. It is hard to imagine any sociological paradigm or school of thinking which would not refer to both words. In short, community and society indicate central objects of sociological reflection.
A second reason for the prominence of community and society in Sociology is related to the diagnostic aspects of social change which could be indicated by the (opposition of the) two terms. Community and society not only represent important objects of sociological analysis, but also could indicate different types of socialization whose importance varied and varies over time. Since Emile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) dualism of mechanic and organic solidarity, the terms community and society or – in their dynamic perspectives and German connotations – Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung represent the correspondent dominant ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ mechanism of social integration. Meanwhile in the traditional and small community (as a tribe or village community) social cohesion among people was based on subjective and felt ‘mechanic solidarity’ (Durkheim), traditional or emotional feelings and values, ‘the cement’ (Elster 1989) of modern society is the functional division of labour, the ‘organic solidarity’ (Durkheim) between people in addition to the integrative and reproductive functions of multiple roles and achieved positions.[2]
Even if at the present time most sociologists would admit that (supposed) ‘traditional’ communities where much more differentiated and sophisticated in terms of their social institutions and of the prevailing mechanisms of social integration, stability and change – a general pattern of sociological thinking is the assumption that social change could be characterised by the opposition of traditional living together in communities and modern living together in nation-state-bounded societies. This is not only the argument of modernization theories but also of critical views. Even if the term community is not used explicitly, the understanding of social change as transition from Vergemeinschaftung to Vergesellschaftung in the sense of rationalisation and modernisation could be found quite everywhere. Anthony Giddens (1996, p. 42f) describes the formation of modern industrial and nation-state-bound societies as follows: “The industrialized, or modern, societies differ in several key respects from any previous type of social order, and their development has had consequences stretching far beyond their European origins. … The industrialized societies were the first nation-states to come into existence. Nation-states are political communities with clearly delimited borders dividing them from each other, rather than the vague frontier areas that used to separate traditional states.”
A third aspect of the importance of community and society is the fact that both terms not only indicate central objects of sociological reflections and serve for analysing social change, but represent the most important units of analysis and reference of sociology. From the initial general notion of ‘the Social’ as positive-scientific and opposed to the fictive-theological and the abstract-metaphysical (Auguste Comte, 1798-1857) the concept of society emerged more and more as a key reference to indicate and delimit the main object of sociological reflection. In his famous definition of the ‘fait social’ Emile Durkheim (1927, p. 19) states: “Notre définition comprendra donc tout le défini si nous disons: Est fait social toute manière de faire, fixée ou non, susceptible d´exercer sur l`individu une contrainte extérieure; ou bienencore, qui est générale dans l `étendue d´une société donnée tout en ayant une existence propre, indépendante de ses manifestations individuelles.“(italics L.P: but what defines a given society? How is it given and by whom).
In this context, the relation between the concept of society and the nation state needs special attention. Sociology grew up with and to a certain extend is a result of the modernization and nation building process of the last two centuries. At the beginning of its development, Sociology focused on the inter-individual specificity of ‘the Social’. The term society was used – if it even was explicitly mentioned – in a very broad sense. Social theorists of the 18th and beginning 19th century used the word society to refer to humankind or to the human society as opposed to nature and animals in general. Society also indicated specific – distinguished and distinguishing – social groups as reflected in the term to be or have a party ‘in good society’. Adam Smith (1723-1790) and Karl Marx (1818-1881) used the term ‘liberal-bourgeois society’ in the general sense of a specific historic formation of productive, socio-cultural and political relations between people. Early German sociologists like Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Max Weber (1864-1920) were very cautious in using the term society. They preferred the concepts of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung to characterize the integrative mechanisms of ‘traditional communities’ and of ‘modern societies’ and to draw attention to the dynamic aspects of the coming together and interrelating of people in durable and dense figurations. In general, society was not seen as a primitive ‘mechanical’ but as a rationally constructed and ‘organic’ way of being together of specific circles of people.
But which was the unit of reference for this new sociological sense of the term society? The impression from a critical reading of classical and modern sociological theorists is that in the 20th century the term society became increasingly related to and fixed with the spatial unit of reference of the modern nation state. Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) used the term society on the on ehand in the generic sense of humankind, as “the human society” (see § 1), but mainly in the sense of a complex social system (see § 2066) of elements including (1) a specific and coherent geographic space, (2) external time-space elements and (3) internal elements as race, the specific patterns of non-logic action (‘residuals’) and the corresponding ‘rationalisations’ (‘derivations’):
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Leonard Hobhause (1864-1929) in Great Britain as well as for instance William Sumner (1840-1910) in the USA prepared the structural-functional and evolutionist focus on society as a functionally differentiated and integrated product of the evolution of humankind. In this view, society is a special type of organism with individuals as their basic units and ‘cells’. As developed by a later thinker in this tradition, Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), societies could be distinguished from one another as social systems with specific social stability and order. Their durability and survival is guaranteed by their specific mechanisms of (individual actors’) adaptation to the environment, goal attainment in structural differentiation, integration and inclusion in socio-cultural action systems and latency of general norms and values.[3] Not only for structural functionalism, but also for the interpretative paradigm the term society became more and more linked to the notions of nation states as “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) and as compact sets of more or less coherent formations of symbolic systems like culture, values, myths etc. For instance, Erving Goffman refers to the efforts to combine three levels of social analysis: the individual personality, the social interaction and the society and points out: “In this report, use has been made of illustrations from societies other than our Anglo-American one. In doing this I did not mean to imply that the framework presented here is culture-free or applicable in the same areas of social life in non-Western societies as in our own. We lead an indoor social life.” (Goffmann 1959, p. 244).
Especially current sociological thinking refers to society and to specific societies as the frame of reference in time and space. We could think of Ronald Inglehard’s analysis of the changes in value orientations, of Talcott Parsons AGIL-scheme, of Anthony Giddens’ concept of societies, of Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action or of Pierre Bourdieus vision of social space and classes – we always can identify national societies as the unit of analysis and frame of reference, where specific figurations of values and norms, of dynamics of integration and adaptation, social differentiation and integration, of system worlds and life worlds and of distribution of different kinds of capital are observed and explained.