The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (12 page)

Sociological diagnosis suffered from such a divide during the 1980s and

1990s. As a field, sociology has lost much of its appeal to those who take the

so-called postmodern challenge seriously; they have just moved to other genres

of inquiry. And within sociology, partly as a consequence of this withdrawal, the consolidation and application of established methods and concepts has regained

priority over the questioning of the mode of investigation and interpretation in the face of an often recalcitrant and unpredictably changing social world.

Against this background, I intend to demonstrate that there are other ways out

of this situation. In particular, I want to show that some strands of the soci-

ological debate about ``modernity'' have tried to live up to the full impact of the so-called postmodern critique without abandoning the attempt to analyze contemporary societal configurations. My presentation proceeds along the lines of

the issues at stake in this recent debate. By and large it moves from the more

easily treatable issues toward the more difficult and risky ones. I start by coming back to Hobsbawm's question: has there been a major transformation in

Western societies during the second half of the twentieth century, or can

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35

sociology work on the assumption of some basic continuity? And if there was a

transformation, where have Western societies gone from there?

Continuity or Rupture?

Looking again at Hobsbawm's assertion, we find that he gives little attention to institutional restructuring but looks at phenomena that formerly were termed

``socio-structural'' and `àttitudinal.'' That is why it is possible to diagnose a major transformation during the period in question despite the great stability of institutions. At the same time, this asymmetry helps us to understand why a

more institutionally oriented sociology was rather reluctant to acknowledge

major change ± beyond its theoretical predilection to rule out the possibility of such change. This observation, however, still leaves open the question as to how one can diagnose a major social transformation ± such diagnosis is always also a theoretical act ± without any major institutional change. Surveying sociological literature that compares the closing decades of the twentieth century with the

years following the end of the Second World War, one finds that recent emphasis

is placed on the changing ways in which human beings relate to institutions.

Those changes are considered to be more important than the constancy of

institutional form.

In substance, such comparison shows that thè`modern society'' of the 1950s

was characterized by a high standardization, even institutionalization, of the life course, not least due to state regulation in conjunction with economic rationalization. This order, however, has tended to break up in more recent years, when

stages in the life course were destandardized and biographical perspectives

emerged more strongly. During the 1970s and 1980s, thosè`highly standardized

life trajectories have been `shattered' by structural and cultural developments in all major social institutions.'' And such ``transformation of the life course

regime'' can be connected to the emergence of ``the formation of a highly

individualistic, transient, and fluid identity,'' which is increasingly observed in Western societies (Buchmann, 1989, pp. 187±8).

Elsewhere (Wagner, 1994) I described this and related changes as the breaking

up of a highly institutionalized social arrangement, namely `òrganized modern-

ity.'' The institutions of organized modernity were formed as a response to the

crises of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, with industrialization, urbanization, and ``the social question.'' They were erected such that the

increased demand for participation could be granted, in terms of both universal-

ized political rights and broadened access to consumption. At the same time,

such participation was channeled and, indeed, organized in such a way that the

viability of the social order was not put into question. It was basically this social arrangement that Talcott Parsons and others described as ``modern society'' and

mistook for a more general and universal model than it actually was. Their

concern about (accomplished) functionality tended to overemphasize the con-

sistency of the well ordered set of ``modern'' institutions and saw human beings as living their autonomy within that institutional framework. ``Modernization''

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Peter Wagner

was then predominantly conceived as the building of functionally differentiated

institutions and the securing of a consensus about compliance with rules.

The changes since the 1960s can then broadly be interpreted as a weakening of

the grip of those institutions on human beings, or, vice versa, as a liberation of human beings from the institutionally suggested standards of behavior. More,

however, needs to be said about the nature of the transformation and its impact

on the overall societal arrangement. Much of current sociological observation

converges on this weakening of the institutional grip on human beings, a process called `ìndividualization,'' and a simultaneous weakening of the coherence of

nation-and state-bound institutions, called ``globalization.'' Both of these terms have created more confusion than clarification. Taken together, they tend to

suggest that social phenomenàìn between'' human beings and the world are

disappearing. This, however, is a claim that can hardly be empirically supported.

The earlier overemphasis on a coherent social system within the boundaries of a

state-bound society finds here its counterpart in a conceptual overreaction in the opposite direction. Significantly, such conceptualization of the transformation

continues to carry implicit assumptions about the driving forces of social change.

Whereas in Parsonsian structural-functionalism the maintenance of the social

system was the key requirement, current revisions tend to see the requirements

for the maintenance of the individual in the social order in a competitive

environment as the driving force of social change in thèènterprise culture'' of

thè`new individualists.'' Rather than organizing and planning, markets and

flexibility are the means toward that end.

Like in the earlier period, different theoretical attitudes toward the new

situation can be distinguished. The successorship to the affirmative theory of

industrial society has been taken over by ``neo-modernization'' theories, which

see individualization as a new expression of the emancipatory promise of mod-

ernity. The critical position now considers, in the overemphasis on the indivi-

dual, the risk of a breakdown of social order. In older terminology, such a view would have been called conservative. Nowadays, however, it is often known as

communitarianism, and it includes many authors who would not want to see

themselves as conservatives. A third position ± now also associated with the

political slogan of thè`third way'' ± recognizes the risks of the loss of `òntological security'' (Anthony Giddens), but finds in the increase of reflexive monitoring of social arrangements also a possible remedy. Accordingly, the approach has become known as theorizing on ``reflexive modernization'' (Beck et al., 1994).

All three positions, which are necessarily presented somewhat schematically

here, have one problematic feature in common. They all claim to understand

what the ground-rules of the new societal configuration are. Each tries to re-

establish intellectual hegemony and, as a consequence, epistemic certainty. In

this sense, they mirror the intellectual constellation before the social transformation and they refuse the insight from the experience of the transformation that

the ways to sociologically analyze contemporary society may also have to

undergo a reflexive turn.

Such reflection on sociological knowledge itself (a question to which I return

below) needs to address the question of what a sociological diagnosis of the

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37

present can achieve, in particular in terms of the possibilities for the future. In my own proposal, I suggested that the demise of organized modernity opens up

the perspective of an `èxtended liberal modernity.'' This would be a societal

configuration that, unlike nineteenth-century societies of ``restricted liberal

modernity,'' is fully inclusive, but at the same time needs no longer to rely on the channeling of human desires for the expression of interests and the realization of selfhood into pre-organized forms. Rather than providing a sketch of a

likely ± or desirable ± future, however, I developed this image to demonstrate

basic probleÂmatiques of human social life that do not disappear under conditions of alleged ``late modernity.'' Major social transformations change the ways such probleÂmatiques are addressed; they do not solve them for good.

Convergence

Convergence or Persistent Diversity?

It is an understandable desire of human beings to be able to predict the future.

However, sociology should not give in to the temptation to satisfy that desire.

The former theory of industrial society claimed to know that ``modernization''

was the direction of history, and convergence of societies would be its outcome.

This convergence theorem was based less on empirical observations than on the

theoretical assumption that superior ways to meet the exigencies of industrial

organization would eliminate inferior ones.

During the Cold War period, the convergence theorem took two forms. Some

theorists held that socialism had made some achievements in terms of the

conscious organization of society and that market societies were not unequi-

vocally superior. Convergence would then take place somewhere between the

two existing forms of social organization, though not necessarily in the middle.

Others, including Parsons, insisted that socialist societies had not developed a sufficient degree of institutional differentiation and that their inferiority would become apparent once a higher state of development was reached. Convergence

would take place towards the Western model, in this view. The collapse of

socialism after 1989 is sometimes seen as a confirmation of the latter assessment.

Such an interpretation, however, is superficial, not least because it overlooks

both the intellectual change and the social transformation since the 1960s. The

convergence theorem resided on the requirement for social systems to function-

ally cohere. Now, both the social transformations in the West and the collapse of socialism can be interpreted as the breakdown of such coherence. And in its

stead, as we have seen above, sociological theory came up with a new driving

force and a new functional requirement ± individualization and flexibility ± that were now to explain the occurrences, but after the fact. Significantly, this

adapted theory contains a version of the convergence theorem, although none

would call it by that discredited name. On the one hand, exchange-oriented

`ìndividualization'' is seen as the universal trend to which all collective arrangements have to adapt and which thus will make them all alike. And the outcome is

described as ``globalization,'' in the very name of which convergence is already presupposed.

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Peter Wagner

If the idea of convergence outlives such major intellectual and societal trans-

formations, should we then accept it as indubitably valid? One reservation is

based on the observation that the telos of the convergence trend has not

remained unchanged over the period in question. In addition, however, we

should also ask what it is about this theorem that allows it to outlast those

transformations. My answer to that question is that both versions of the theorem are based on a problematic conception of modernity, and it is this conception

that tends to limit the possibility of conceptualizing societal diversity. In the first version, ``modern society'' is the social entity that contains institutional forms of autonomy. At the same time, the differentiation of those institutions allows the effective mastery of the social and natural world in its various aspects. In the second version, ``modernity'' is the societal condition under which human beings realize their autonomy and, by doing so, increasingly master and control the

world. The main difference between the two versions is the reference point ± a

collectivity or social system, on the one hand, and the individual human being,

on the other. Otherwise, the two views work with rather similar understandings

of modernity.

The reference to autonomy and mastery, which we find here, is indeed a

fruitful starting point to conceptualize modernity, but it has to be rethought.

Following Cornelius Castoriadis (1990, pp. 17±19, and elsewhere; see also

Arnason, 1989; Wagner, 1994, chapter one), I consider modernity as a situation

in which the reference to autonomy and mastery provides for a double imaginary

signification of social life. More precisely, the two components of this signification are the idea of the autonomy of the human being as the knowing and acting

subject, on the one hand, and the idea of the rationality of the world, i.e. its principled intelligibility, on the other. Conceptually, to put it briefly, modernity refers to a situation in which human beings do not accept any external guarantors, i.e. guarantors that they do not themselves posit, of the certainty of their knowledge, of the viability of their political orders, or of the continuity of