Contemporary Sociological Theory: Micro, Macro, Integrative

[00:00:00]♪ 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.

[00:00:19]Several sociologists then present the key ideas of specific contemporary theorists.

[00:00:24]Dr. Dana Fisher discusses Giddens idea of structuration which combines structure and agency and then to Habermas' notions of deliberative democracy.

[00:00:33]Dr. Lori Peek summarizes symbolic interactionism highlighting the focus on symbols and their interpretations based on individual and social experience.

[00:00:41]Dr. Andrew Jorgenson presents world systems theory from the Chase-Dunn perspective and focuses on trends and interstate relationships and structures.

[00:00:49]Finally, myself, Dr. Kristal Jones discusses Polanyi and Bourdieu's theories about the institution and maintenance of economic structures embedded in social systems.

[00:00:58]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.

[00:01:11]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.

[00:01:44]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.

[00:02:02]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.

[00:02:18]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.

[00:02:31]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.

[00:02:40]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.

[00:02:59]Nevertheless, the goal of this diagram or schematic is to create some order out of chaos.

[00:03:05]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.

[00:03:30]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.

[00:03:44]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.

[00:03:59]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.

[00:04:10]Parson's body of work was grounded in Durkheim and Weber and essentially ignored Marx completely.

[00:04:17]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.

[00:04:29]The first of these perspectives, coming out of Europe, is the critical theory approach associated with the Frankfurt School.

[00:04:35]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.

[00:04:50]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.

[00:05:07]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.

[00:05:24]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.

[00:05:43]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.

[00:05:57]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.

[00:06:14]Symbolic interactionism builds on the work of George Herbert Mead as we heard that the actual name was coined by Herbert Blumer.

[00:06:22]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.

[00:06:46]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.

[00:07:08]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.

[00:07:52]It is also worth noting that theorizing on both of these topics also spans the classical contemporary divide.

[00:08:00]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.

[00:09:13]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.

[00:09:38]Okay.

[00:09:41]Having set up this schematic I can now orient you to the presentations of the other panelists for this session.

[00:09:48]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.

[00:10:00]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.

[00:10:43]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.

[00:11:07]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.

[00:11:20]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.

[00:11:33]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.

[00:11:50]Thank you very much and with that I hand it off to Dana.

[00:11:53]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, <i>The Structural</i> <i>Transformation of the Public Sphere</i> 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.

[00:12:26]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.

[00:13:40]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.

[00:14:23]One of his most recent theoretical works was a work call <i>The Third Way</i>, 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 <i>The</i> <i>Politics of Climate Change</i>, 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.

[00:15:42]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.

[00:15:49]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.

[00:16:05]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 <i>The Theory of Communicative Action</i>.

[00:16:13]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.

[00:16:47]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.

[00:17:16]I did want to make one comment about his <i>Legitimation Crisis</i> 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.

[00:17:29]The <i>Legitimation Crisis</i>, 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 <i>Legitimation</i> <i>Crisis</i>, 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.

[00:17:57]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.

[00:18:13]So now I come to my favorite work of Habermas', which is the work on the public sphere.

[00:18:20]So let's see Habermas wrote <i>The</i> <i>Structural Transformation of the Public</i> Sphere in the 1990s at some point.

[00:18:29]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.

[00:19:03]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.

[00:19:51]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.

[00:20:17]What was very interesting is this idea of, is there a time when people can come together and really have a discussion about democracy?

[00:20:24]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.

[00:21:38]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.

[00:22:12]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.

[00:22:19]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.

[00:22:49]Okay, thank you Simone for the introduction to this and thank you Dana.

[00:22:54]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.

[00:23:34]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.

[00:24:01]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.

[00:24:39]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 <i>Mind</i> <i>Self and Society</i>, 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.

[00:25:20]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.

[00:25:38]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.

[00:26:18]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.

[00:26:41]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.

[00:27:04]So what's the first word or idea, again get it in your mind please.

[00:27:08]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.

[00:28:03]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.

[00:28:25]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.

[00:29:07]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.

[00:30:15]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.

[00:30:26]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.

[00:31:49]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.

[00:32:09]And so just in conclusion, when we think about how do symbolic interactionists, how do they look at the world?

[00:32:15]What is the lens, the magnifying glass that they bring to everything that they do?

[00:32:20]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.

[00:32:43]There's also a society for the study of symbolic interactionism that it's its own disciplinary organization.

[00:32:50]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.

[00:33:21]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?

[00:34:04]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.

[00:34:17]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.

[00:36:03]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?

[00:36:13]Really from a systems perspective, we're talking about a system of societies, we're really talking about interaction networks.

[00:36:18]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.

[00:37:00]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.

[00:37:16]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.

[00:37:43]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.

[00:37:54]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.

[00:38:37]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.

[00:39:15]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.

[00:40:48]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.

[00:41:19]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.

[00:41:45]This idea of international economic integration, this is a fancy way of saying economic globalization frankly, which I'll talk about more tomorrow.

[00:41:54]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.

[00:42:06]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.

[00:44:43]I'm Kristal Jones.

[00:44:44]I'm an assistant research scientist here at SESYNC.

[00:44:47]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.

[00:45:53]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.

[00:46:02]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.

[00:46:14]His sort of seminal work is a book called <i>The Great Transformation</i> which he actually wrote at Bennington College in the U.S.

[00:46:20]in Vermont, which is sort of interesting.

[00:46:21]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.

[00:46:33]and he ended up his professional career as a professor of economics at Columbia University.

[00:46:39]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 <i>The Great Transformation</i> 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.

[00:47:20]And the basic, one of the key ideas in <i>The Great</i> <i>Transformation</i> 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.

[00:47:58]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.

[00:48:44]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.

[00:48:52]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.

[00:49:40]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.

[00:50:18]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 <i>Distinction</i>.

[00:50:58]One of the things he's really interested in across all of his work and particularly in this work, the <i>Distinction</i>, 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.

[00:51:54]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.

[00:52:31]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.

[00:52:54]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.

[00:53:12]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.

[00:53:31]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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