The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (4 page)

RubeÂn G. Rumbaut is Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University. He is

the Founding Chair of the Section on International Migration of the American

Sociological Association. He has two new books based on the Children of

Immigrants Longitudinal Study, which he directed throughout the 1990s in

collaboration with Alejandro Portes: Legacies: The Story of the New Second

Generation, and Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America.

Mike Savage is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at the

University of Manchester, UK. His recent works include Social Change and the

Middle Class (edited with Tim Butler, 1995), and Gender, Careers and Organ-

izations (with Susan Halford and Anne Witz, 1997).

Joseph E. Schwartz is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science

at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. While trained as a sociolo-

gist, his recent research is mostly in the area of behavioral medicine. He is the senior investigator of a longitudinal study of the relationship of work-related

stress to blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

Pepper Schwartz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington in

Seattle. She is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and author of books on intimacy and relationships, including American Couples

(with Philip Blumstein), Peer Marriage, and The Gender of Sexuality (with

Virginia Rutter).

Christian Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina,

Chapel Hill. His studies of religion and social change include The Emergence of

Liberation Theology, Resisting Reagan: The US Central American Peace Move-

ment, Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism, and

American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving.

Lynn Smith-Lovin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. She is a former chair of the American Sociological Association section on the Sociology

of Emotions and is currently co-editor of Social Psychology Quarterly and chair

of the American Sociological Association section on Social Psychology. Her

research focuses on identity, social interaction and emotion. She is currently

completing a National Science Foundation funded study of identity and con-

versational interaction.

Carola SuaÂrez-Orozco is co-director of Harvard Immigration Projects and a

lecturer in education in the Human Development and Psychology area. She is

co-author (with Marcelo SuaÂrez-Orozco)of Transformations and Children of

Immigration.

xxii

Contributors

Alain Touraine was appointed Directeur d'eÂtudes in 1960 at Ecole Pratique des

Hautes Etudes, which later became Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

He has also taught at Paris-Nanterre University and in Chile, Brazil, the United States and Canada, and has served as President of the French Association of

Sociology and Vice President of the International Sociological Association. The

most recent of his many books that have been translated into English include:

Return of the Actor, Critique of Modernity, What Is Democracy?, Can We Live

Together? Equal and Different, and How to Get out of Liberalism?

Donald J. Treiman is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. His research focuses on the comparative study of social stratification

and social mobility. For many years he has carried out large-scale worldwide

comparisons of systems of social stratification, and recently conducted sample

surveys in South Africa, Eastern European nations, and the People's Republic of

China, all designed to explore the effect of abrupt social change on stratification outcomes.

John Urry is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, and author or joint author of various books, including The End of Organized Capitalism (1987),

The Tourist Gaze (1990), Economies of Signs and Space (1994), Consuming

Places (1995), Contested Natures (1998), and Sociology Beyond Societies

(2000). Research areas include service industries, the environment, leisure and

tourism, urban sociology, and social theory. He is Chair of the UK's Research

Assessment Exercise Sociology Panel in 1996 and 2001.

Peter Wagner is Professor of Social and Political Theory at the European Uni-

versity Institute in Florence and Professor of Sociology at the University of

Warwick. Before 1996 he taught at the Free University of Berlin, and has held

visiting positions at various European and American universities. His publica-

tions include Le travail et la nation, A Sociology of Modernity, and Der Raum

des Gelehrten (with Heidrun Friese).

Immanuel Wallerstein is Director of the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton

University; author, most recently, of The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty- first Century; and Chair of the Gulbenkian Commission

for the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1993±5), whose report is Open the

Social Sciences.

Robert Woodberry is a sociology graduate student at the University of North

Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research interests include global religious transformations, and he has also done research on the sampling and measurement of

religious groups on surveys.

Part I

Referencing Globalization

1

The Sociology of Space and Place

John Urry

Introduction

In this chapter I shall show that space (and place) should be central to sociology.

But the history of sociology in the twentieth century has in some ways been the

history of the singular absence of space. This was an absence that could not be

entirely sustained. Here and there space broke through, disrupting pre-existing

notions which were formed around distinctions which had mainly served to

construct an a-spatial sociology. Societies were typically viewed as endogenous, as having their own a-spatial structures. Furthermore, societies were viewed as

separate from each other, and the processes of normative consensus or structural conflict or strategic conduct were conceptualized as internal to each society,

whose boundaries were coterminous with the nation-state. There was little

recognition of the processes of internal differentiation across space.

This was so although the beginning of the twentieth century saw a series of

sweeping technological and cultural changes which totally transformed the

spatial underpinnings of contemporary life (Kern, 1983; Soja, 1989). These

changes included the telegraph, the telephone, X-rays, cinema, radio, the bicycle, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the passport, the skyscraper, relativity theory, cubism, the stream-of-consciousness novel and psychoanalysis.

However, these changes were not reflected within sociology at the time and

they became the province of a separate and increasingly positivist science of

geography that set up and maintained a strict demarcation and academic divi-

sion of labor from its social scientific neighbors.

In the next section I summarize some of the early ``classical'' writings on space which developed within the context of geography's colonization of the spatial. In the section following I show what in the late 1970s changed this and brought

space into sociology and social theory more generally. In the final section

4

John Urry

analysis is provided of the recent emergence of a research program of a sociology of place, which brings out the importance of diverse spatial mobilities across,

into, and beyond such places.

Thè`Classics''

``Classics'' and Space

The sociological classics dealt with space in a rather cryptic and undeveloped

way. Marx and Engels were obviously concerned with how capitalist industrial-

ization brought about the exceedingly rapid growth of industrial towns and

cities. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels describe

how fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away, all newly formed relations

become antiquated before they can ossify, and `àll that is solid melts into air''

(1888, p. 54; Berman, 1983). Marx and Engels argue inter alia that capitalism

breaks the feudal ties of people to their ``natural superiors''; it forces the bourgeois class to seek markets across the surface of the globe and this destroys local and regional markets; masses of laborers are crowded into factories, so concentrating the proletariat and producing a class-for-itself; and the development of trade unionism is assisted by the improved transportation and communication

that capitalism brings in its wake. In his later works, especially Capital, Marx analyzes how capitalist accumulation is based upon the annihilation of space by

time and how this consequently produces striking transformations of agricul-

ture, industry, and population across time and space.

Some similar processes are analyzed by Durkheim, although the consequences

are viewed very differently. In The Division of Labor in Society it is argued that there are two types of society with associated forms of solidarity, mechanical

(based on likeness or similarity) and organic (based on difference and comple-

mentarity). It is the growth in the division of labor, of dramatically increased specialization, that brings about transition from the former to the latter. This heightened division of labor results from increases in material and moral density.

The former involves increases in the density of population in a given area,

particularly because of the development of new forms of communication and

because of the growth in towns and cities. Moral density refers to the increased density of social interaction. Different parts of society lose their individuality as individuals come to have more and more contacts and interactions. This produces a new organic solidarity of mutual interdependence, although on occa-

sions cities are centers of social pathology. Overall Durkheim presented a thesis of modernization in which local geographical loyalties will be gradually undermined by the growth of new occupationally based divisions of labor. In Elemen-

tary Forms Durkheim also presents a social theory of space. This has two

elements: first, since everyone within a society represents space in the same

way, this implies that the cause of such notions is essentially ``social''; second, in some cases at least the spatial representations will literally mirror its dominant patterns of social organization.

Max Weber made very few references to space, although his brother, Alfred

Weber, was a seminal contributor to the theory of industrial location. Max

The Sociology of Space and Place

5

Weber was relatively critical of attempts to use spatial notions in his analysis of the city. He rejected analysis in terms of size and density and mainly concentrated on how the emergence of the medieval city constituted a challenge to the

surrounding feudal system. The city was characterized by autonomy and it was

there for the first time that people came together as individual citizens (Weber, 1921).

The most important classical contributor to a sociology of space and place is

Simmel (Frisby, 1992a, b; Frisby and Featherstone, 1997). He analyzed five basic qualities of spatial forms found in those social interactions that turn an empty space into something meaningful. These qualities are the exclusive or unique

character of a space; the ways in which a space may be divided into pieces and

activities spatially ``framed''; the degree to which social interactions may be

localized in space; the degree of proximity/distance, especially in the city, and the role of the sense of sight; and the possibility of changing locations, and the consequences especially of the arrival of thè`stranger.'' Overall Simmel sees space as becoming less significant as social organization becomes detached from space.

In ``Metropolis and the City'' (in Frisby and Featherstone, 1997), Simmel

develops more specific arguments about space and the city. First, because of

the richness and diverse sets of stimuli in the metropolis, people have to develop an attitude of reserve and insensitivity to feeling. Without the development of

such an attitude people would not be able to cope with such experiences caused

by a high density of population. The urban personality is reserved, detached and blaseÂ. Second, at the same time the city assures individuals of a distinctive type of personal freedom. Compared with the small-scale community, the modern city

gives room to individuals and to the peculiarities of their inner and outer

development. It is the spatial form of the large city that permits the unique

development of individuals who are placed within an exceptionally wide range

of contacts. Third, the city is based on the money economy, which is the source

and expression of the rationality and intellectualism of the city. Both money and the intellect share a matter-of-fact attitude toward people and things. It is money that produces a leveling of feeling and attitude. Fourth, the money economy

generates a concern for precision and punctuality, since it makes people more

calculating about their activities and relationships. Simmel does not so much

explain urban life in terms of the spatial form of the city as provide an early

examination of the effects of ``modern'' patterns of mobility on social life

wherever it is located. He shows that motion, the diversity of stimuli, and the

visual appropriations of places are centrally important features of the modern