The Social Theory Research Network is one of 31 research networks of the European Sociological Association. It has approximately 200 active members. Whereas the other research networks’ task is to deal with specialized subfields of sociology, the mission of the Social Theory Network is to develop “concepts of orientation and outlining what can be called ‘conditional ontologies’ giving social research conceptual background”.

The research network’s Social Theory Conference on “Social Theory and the Sociological Discipline(s)” took place at the Innsbruck School of Political Science and Sociology on September 11-13, 2008. Organizer Frank Welz formulated the basic questions of the conference in the opening session: What is the role of transdisciplinarity in sociology? Is there still a general framework or discourse in sociology? Is a common or unified sociology possible? Is a common vocabulary possible or can it be developed?

Roland Robertson gave the main plenary talk, which covered the topic “Glocality and the Transdisciplinarity of Sociology”. Robertson is one of the sociologists that have coined the term globalization. His specific interpretation is that globalization processes are always accompanied by local adaptations and changes (localization). Therefore he speaks of glocalization. Robertson argued that sociology in a way has always been transdisciplinary and a meta-discipline because it covers various issues, which are subject of other disciplines, in their societal context. The intensified glocalization of the world would have brought about a need to overcome disciplinary fragmentation and to enter into a transdisciplinary dialogue in order to understand global society.

Besides Robertson’s call for a transdisciplinary sociology and the overall task of the conference, most of the presented papers dealt with very specialized topics that are relevant for subfields of sociology and social theory, but ignored the larger context of sociology and society as a whole and the academic world as a whole. Therefore the impression one could get was that many of the participants aim at a fragmentation of sociology into many different subfields such as gender sociology, economic sociology, sociology of education, sociology of law, urban sociology, political sociology, sociology of health, sociology of ethnic relations, racism and anti-Semitism, etc. Although specialization clearly is necessary in order to explain society, the question of how all these phenomena have become connected and are united on a meta-level, which is important for explaining what many now see as a global society, in which all phenomena have become networked and influence each other, should not be ignored. Social theory is a terrain that can deal with these questions.

The study of ICTs and society might be a paradigmatic case for the emergence of and the need for transdisciplines in the “global network society”. In my talk on “Critical Social Theory in the Age of the Internet”, I pointed out that the very topic of ICT&S research, the interrelationship of ICTs and society, social groups, and individuals, is one that cannot be studied by one discipline alone, but that requires the engagement of scholars from at least sociology, philosophy, media and communication science, and computer science. The subject matter of ICT&S is transdisciplinary in itself, it transcends the boundaries between the social and the engineering sciences.

Why is social theory important? Social theory produces a constitutive knowledge of the world that allows asking basic questions about the state of society and about the directions it could develop. The immanent diversity of social theory allows researchers and citizens to develop different understandings and different issues of society and to see how not only knowledge, but also interests are differing. Social theory allows us to ask new questions about the world and to use basic categories for developing understandings of the world. Social theory offers understandings and interpretations of society, social change, and societal causality. Social theory directs attention to certain issues and can help people organizing their experiences of the world and enabling useful responses to the world. Social theory in a transdisciplinary field like ICT&S allows making use of a contextual meta-knowledge about the relation of ICTs and society. People are trying to find ways of thinking about the world and its changes (such as the emergence of the Internet, globalization, etc) and ways of how to build the future of the world. Social theory can guide us in asking questions and trying to find potential answers about the state of the world.

Two sessions at the Innsbruck conference dealt with the role of critical theory in contemporary society. In my opinion critical social theory is necessary today in order to not remain fixed on knowledge that shows how society is, but deals with potential alternatives and how society could be. Critical theory therefore would be inherently normative, political, and would deal with basic questions of domination and power in society. In a transdisciplinary field like ICT&S, critical theory would be needed as complement and correction to empirical research, engineering, and design studies, because the latter three would typically operate in an instrumental way that is corrupted by dominant interests so that the focus is on technological rationality, technological fixes to societal problems, uncritical optimism about the potentials of technology for society, and economic and dominant political interests. Critical theory would remind us that there are huge problems in contemporary society, that technology alone is no solution, but frequently part of the problems, and that there is a need for imagining alternative futures, which requires a more philosophical meta-knowledge that engages with political questions.

Overall, the Innsbruck conference has shown that critical thinking and transdisciplinarity are important issues of contemporary sociology. But these issues are facing problems in their realization, talking about transdisciplinarity is in most cases easier than practicing it. Nonetheless a first starting point for alternative futures, also in academia, is a reflexive discussion about issues, which has taken place in Innsbruck.

Links:

ESA Social Theory Conference Innsbruck

ESA Social Theory Network 

European Sociological Association

Global warming would be related to energy supply. The USA, which account for 5% of the world population, account for 25% of carbon emissions. What Jeremy Leggett calls the empire of oil and transport would be important influencing factors. Zygmunt Bauman argues that mobility is one of the most important values today and that it is an unequally distributed commodity. Urry stressed especially that neoliberalism has generated new forms of mobility that have generated an excesses that have caused high carbon consumption.

As a result, sociology would have to take the future more serious than in the past and there would be a need for sociology to imagine alternative futures. Alternative systems would be needed. Potential negative scenarios for future society would for example be oil, gas, and water wars and the restriction of travel to the super-rich. Nicholas Stern, an anti-neoliberal thinker, has argued that climate change is the greatest market failure. The problem according to Urry is that 20th century capitalism has generated unprecedented levels of carbon emissions.

I liked about this talk that John Urry abstracted a specific problem and analyzed it within its societal and capitalist context. He gave a realistic and materialistic analysis. In comparison, Castells – who covered another issue (the network society), but nonetheless a comparison in respect to the means of analysis can be made – did not see capitalist development as a problem and was not much concerned with problems of current and future society and the role of the economy. Urry talked about the need for alternative systems and an interventionist sociology, whereas Castells was keen to draw a separating line between political action and sociology and was mainly concerned about the development of new sociological methods for the future of sociology. It is alarming that someone, who is considered as one of the most important sociologists by many, is mainly talking about new rigorous research methods and not about global societal problems when addressing the future of sociology in a society that is full of global problems. John Urry’s talk differed radically in this respect.

I discovered and found interest in John Urry’s work on “Global Complexity” some years ago, when in the EU-funded research project “Human Strategies on Complexity”, I tried to apply the notion of self-organization that we had developed in the project to the phenomenon of globalization (”Globalization and Self-Organization in the Knowledge-Based Society“). I found interesting the connection of social theory and complexity theory that Urry has made because I have also had a comparable endeavour in the past 8 years, which has resulted in my recent book. I lost sight of Urry’s work in the past years. His talk given in Barcelona has renewed my interest in reading some of his works that have ever since been published.

One question remained unanswered for me: Does building new systems only mean to establish new forms of consumption, or does this also involve the need for new economic forms of production? Mobility based on neoliberally caused excesses today surely not only means that people move globally, but also that commodities move globally because the practice of globally outsourcing and diffusing production has become so common in order to reduce capital investment costs (constant and variable capital in Marxian terms). For me the primary problem concerning travel is not personal travel by private people, but commodity transport and business-related travel. Also according to statistics energy production itself is the highest source of carbon emissions today, not transport. It might not suffice to change consumption, there might be a need to find alternatives to capitalist production. A pure focus on consumption could even distort the analysis of the importance of the role of production. I did not get from the talk in how far what Urry was saying about the problems’ causes and building alternative systems is related to production as well.

In the final plenary session, Michael Burawoy spoke about “Whose Knowledge? Varieties of Public Sociology”. He distinguished four types of sociology: Professional sociology is instrumental in producing knowledge and addresses an academic audience. Policy sociology produces knowledge for a client external to the academic system. Critical sociology is reflexive and tries to provide alternative foundations to sociology. Especially value foundations are discussed. Public sociology engages in dialogue with publics. The typology based on the distinction between academic and non-academic audiences and instrumental and reflexive knowledge. The latter is taken from Horkheimer and Adorno. Burawoy added another dimension: Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals would address the public with the help of public media such as newspapers, whereas organic intellectuals would have unmediated relations to the public and would conduct a more activist type of sociology. As examples for traditional public sociologists, Burawoy mentioned Bourdieu, Mills, and Giddens, as examples for organic public sociologists; Gramsci, Freire, Touraine, and feminism. He concluded by arguing that all four types of sociology are important and should be connected and that his work has focused on building space and acceptance for critical and public sociology within sociology.

Alberto Martinelli, a former ISA president, criticized Burawoy. He argued that Burawoy sometimes makes a clear hierarchy between the four types. The most important form would then be public sociology, followed by critical sociology, professional sociology, and policy sociology. The latter would then be presented as corrupted by money and power. Martinelli called such a distinction fundamentalist and saw the focus on subordinate groups as rather dangerous. There would be dangers of dogmatism, elitism, and vanguardism. Martinelli stressed the importance of policy sociology and called for a connection of sociology to the natural sciences.

Alain Touraine on the one hand argued that it is important to defend the autonomy of sociology because it would have been distorted and limited by ideological interests in the past. Sociology would have to be protected from ideology. But contemporary society would be dominated by violence, war, and an extreme gap between the rich and the poor. Therefore on the other hand a second type of sociology would be needed, one that defends human rights for all. Sociology would have to uncover and eliminate the presence of hell in society. Sociologist would be responsible for the whole world and society would be full of forces that destroy human rights. Sociology would have to connect to the new generation that is eager to intervene and attack. This should be accompanied by the necessary reconstruction of many concepts of sociology. Touraine’s statements were closer to Burawoy than to Martinelli.

The debate showed that the issues that were underlying the positivism dispute between Popper and Adorno in German sociology in the early 1960s, are still at the core of discussions on the current and future state of sociology more than 45 years later. There are some who want to directly connect sociology to social struggles and the problems of the time, whereas others (including not only Martinelli, but in my opinion also Castells) claim that sociology can and should be neutral and value-free.

For me, Burawoys position is good, but not radical enough. He argues that public sociology has no intrinsic normative valences and that it can also be conducted in the interest of Christian fundamentalism. Burawoy bases his distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge on Horkheimer and Adorno. But for Horkheimer (in essays like “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie” or “Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft”) the distinction was between instrumental and critical knowledge. The latter is a specific form of normative knowledge, it operates according to Horkheimer with categories such as class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, misery, and breakdown, and is oriented on a “society without injustice”, “man’s emancipation from slavery”, and “the happiness of all individuals”. Therefore Horkheimer would consider a sociology conducted in the interest of Christian fundamentalism always as an instrumental type of sociology and would argue for a left-wing sociology. So in my opinion Burawoy should either drop his reference to Horkheimer or reformulate his concept of public sociology as critical public sociology. In my opinion Burawoy has a too positive picture of NGOs, the public sphere, and civil society. NGOs frequently support also conservative values. And the public is not automatically rational and willing to discuss, especially under neoliberal conditions, where people first of all have to struggle to survive and might not find the time and energy needed for engaging in public discourse. Horkheimer: “It is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology, however much, for its circumstances, it may be bent on truth. For all its insight into the individual steps in social change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except con¬cern for the abolition of social injustice”. In my opinition, public sociology means a public interest sociology, a sociology that defends public interests, i.e. provides intellectual means and arguments for establishing conditions that benefit all. An such a public defense should also be made, if there is no or only a small critical public. When speaking about public intellectuals, my first example would be Marx, and my second, and most important one, Herbert Marcuse.

Also political reforms of society, the political system, the economy, and the public sphere might be needed. Civil society alone is not enough. It needs to be combined with progressive institutional politics. Public sociology has to confront the situation of a disinterested public and the role of ideology in public life. Burawoy hardly gives attention to these phenomena. Public sociology should not be seen as a solution to all problems, it has many difficulties. If I were to describe myself as being a public academic due to my intellectual and political engagement in the basic income movement, then I would mainly reflect about the difficulties involved, the notion of a limited public with limited consciousness, limited resources, etc. Failure and defeat are permanent features of civil society under contemporary conditions. Civil society also has a role of legitimating domination, as Gramsci already knew. This can for example be seen in the outsourcing of welfare functions from the state to civil society under neoliberal political conditions. Burawoy’s picture of civil society is too idealistic. Nonetheless his typology is very important because it has started a debate in sociology that could open up new spaces for critical, radical, and progressive theories and studies.

Manuel Castells’s talk was presented as one of the main events of the entire conference and several hundred people were attending. Castells defined sociology as the scientific study of society. He argued that the status of sociology in society is at an all-time low. One of the reasons would be that sociologists would have engaged in ideology and politics and would have therefore abandoned their duties as analysts. He argued for a distance between analysis (is) and morals (ought). Objective knowledge would be needed in sociology. Therefore it should be rooted scientifically. This means that Castells argues that it is possible and desirable to focus on empirical social research and to deny that sociology is always (to certain degress consciously and unconsciously) shaped by political interests. Immanuel Wallerstein in contrast has argued that sociology always has an intellectual, a moral, and a political dimension, and that it is honest not to deny that all three are always present. Castells believes in the possibility of a neutral and value-free sociology. In my opinion this is never the case. So for example also the choice of a central model or concept – such as Castells’s network society – tells us something about political values that shape a scholar’s work.

Castells argued that sociology should study processes of the constitution, organization, and change of the new society. He claimed that the network society is a new society.

Castells identified seven axes of change of the network society: 1. Digital communication networks (ICTs) as new technological paradigm. 2. Globalization as social systems that work in real time on a planetary scale. 3. The culture of real virtuality. 4. The network state. 5. The crisis of paternalism and patriarchy that has resulted in new lifestyles. 6. Resistance identities and project identities as results of the loss of basic securities. 7. The emergence of global ecological consciousness. One can ask some questions about this analysis: Why are there exactly seven axes? On which theoretical foundations and categories of society are they based? What is the underlying model of societal change? How are the seven axes connected? Why isn’t there a logic that establishes connections and a certain unity of these seven dimensions?  What about economic issues? Isn’t the economy a central axis of society? Aren’t global war, class divisions, neoliberalism, poverty, unequal income distribution, and surveillance also important?

Castells’s argued that three independent variables shaped the emergence of the network society accidently: 1. The crisis of capitalism and state socialism. 2. The technological revolution. 3. The influence of counterculture on software engineers. To assume that causes are fully independent, means to engage in ontological dualism. It cannot account for the connections of phenomena and show how they are adequately grounded. Dualism violates a fundamental logical and philosophical theorem: the law of ground. Technologies do not diffuse accidentally, but because there are societal situations in which there are concrete needs for these technologies. In stratified societies, such as the modern one, these diffusion processes are connected to economic interests and power and therefore to Castells first variable. Also culture is not independent of economy and politics. 1960s counterculture did not emerge in a vacuum, but in response and in interaction with certain conditions of the economic and political system.

Castells said that if society changes, sociology would have to change, it would have to change its tools in order to analyze society. The network society would be non-linear, but the tools used by contemporary sociology mainly linear. He therefore suggested three modifications of sociology: 1. The usage of complexity mathematics, non-linear dynamics, and mathematical modelling. A hardening of sociology would be needed. Sociologists according to Castells should stop using 19^th century philosophy in the 21^st century. A hardening of sociological education would mean that sociologists “would have at least to do some work”. Aren’t theory construction and social philosophy also hard  and complex academic work? 2. Open-source sociology: networked, co-operative forms of production in which ideas and data are shared and co-produced. 3. Applied sociology: Sociologists should engage in qualitatively, rigorous, relevant empirical research, not in politics and social movements, which should be aspects of citizenship, but not of sociology.

Castells calls for a natural science model of the social sciences. It seems to be no coincidence that he calls for a focus on the productive of “objective knowledge”, which is also the title of one of the most successful book by Karl Popper.

Open source sociology can be a good approach for advancing co-operation and new forms of dissemination and publication. But in a neoliberal world that is dominated by heavy competition also between academics, open source sociology could well result in an increase of gaps between influential and less influential academics if the first manage to make use of open source data and knowledge for publishing papers in high-reputation journals, by which they gain even more reputation. So just like in open source software, there should have to be a requirement that new knowledge that makes use of open source academic knowledge must be published in academic open source platforms. The availability of such platforms would not solve the problems that the academic world is facing today due to the colonization by economic logic. In my opinion, open source sociology would only work in a decolonized world, otherwise it could increase academic inequality based on the Matthew effect, as was shown by Robert Merton in the 1960s. One of the connected problems is that the academic system is today based on status competition and the individual accumulation of academic capital. There is a lack of co-operation and openness. Open access online journals and archives are today in most cases not acknowledged as important academic publications (e.g. they are hardly covered by the Social Science Citation Index, Sociological Abstracts, or Scopus). For open source sociology to work, we not only have to change academia, but society at large.

On days 2 and 3, I had the pleasure to listen to two papers that just like my approach deals with new media and the “knowledge society”/”network society” from a Marxian perspective:
Eran Fisher: Digital de-alienation: information technology, work, new spirit of capitalism
Peter Kennedy: A Value Theory of Labour Critique of the Knowledge Economy and the Expansion of Post-Compulsory Education Industry.

Also on day 3, Craig Calhoun and Donatella della Porta discussed the topic of “Prospects for Democracy”. Calhoun argued that US hegemony, global war, surveillance, inequality, the displacement of people, and corporate power limit the prospects for democracy. NGOs would be celebrated as the saviors of democracy by many, but most of them would support business and lack accountability. States would be the primary actors that can pose limits to capital, not NGOs. Therefore Calhoun called for strengthening and rebuilding public institutions. Donatella della Porta other than Calhoun gave a more positive assessment of new social movements (such as the movement for democratic globalization) and NGOs. She argued that many of these actors practice participatory democracy and that such democracy from below has potentials for releasing potentials for transforming society and its institutions towards more participatory structures. This debate was interesting, but lacked a clarification of how the two positions could be combined. In my opinion the problem for Calhoun’s approach is that although he is right that capital can only be limited by policies, there currently are no or hardly parties on the left that are willing to carry out such policies. But in civil society, critical actors can be found. This is what della Porta stresses. But for her approach, the problem is that civil society activists are frequently unwilling to engage in institutionalized political work. Therefore they frequently remain in an non-influential ghetto. Calhoun was right that he renewed Rudi Dutschke’s call for the march through the institutions. But what might first be needed is the creation of an institutionalized wing of critical social movements in the form of political parties.

The session on “Economic Sociology as Critique” with more than 60 participants was one of the most successful parallel sessions at the conference. Andrew Sawyer and Sylvia Walby in their two talks discussed Amartyra Sen’s capabilities approach as potential foundation of critical economic sociology. They argued and opposed relativistic and postmodern interpretations of Sen and suggested that a progressive political interpretation of Sen’s capability approach that can be used as foundation for critical economic sociology can be made. Sawyer argued that such an approach could be connected to Aristotle and early Marx’s notion of the well-rounded individual’s realization of all faculties. Michael Burawoy argued to ground critical economic sociology in the works of Marx and Karl Polanyi. The grounding concept should be commodification and not exploitation and the decisive group that should be addressed as potentially struggling subject should be civil society because it could struggle for human rights. John Helmwood based his type of critical economic sociology on Durkheim and argued for a capitalism of production combined with a socialism of distribution. I doubt that such a system is possible because already Marx had shown that production and distribution are dialectically connected and cannot so easily be separated. I do not understand why Burawoy is so strictly focusing on civil society and counter to Calhoun seems to be rather opposed to the idea of left-wing political parties. He does not see that civil society, as Gramsci stressed, legitimizes domination and under neoliberalism is used as a means for outsourcing social labour that was in former times organized by the state. I disagree with Sawyer’s and Walby’s focus on Sen because his concept of capability is strongly focusing on a subjectivistics, individualistic free choice model of freedom and neglects relational issues of freedom such as class. He is so much preoccupied with stressing that GDP per capita is not the only aspect of freedom, that he leaves out an important socio-economic variable: income inequality. He argues that a poor person can be happier than an ill, old or disabled. But if you are ill, old or disabled and poor, then you surely are worse off than ill, old, disabled rich persons. Sen mentions that life expectancy in China is higher than in South Africa and Brazil, although its GDP per capita is lower. He does not mention that income equality is much higher in the latter two countries, which might drive down life expectancy. Material wealth is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for freedom. And it is a relational category because today the wealth of some is based on the poverty of the rest. Distribution is a foundational issue of freedom. Sen’s approach is uncritical and neglects class and distribution. In the end, Sen tells us that the poor can be happier than the non-poor, that therefore no alternatives to capitalism are needed, and that everything can stay the same.

I share the idea that basic human faculties should be distinguished. For doing so, one does not need Amartyra Sen. A good point of reference can be Marx’s early writings, in which he identified basic human capacities as human Essence that can only be realized if the class individual is abolished, which means to overcome private property relations. This work was continued by for example Herbert Marcuse and Crawford B. McPherson.

Christian Fuchs: “Critical Theory in the Age of the Internet”, ISA World Forum, Barcelona, September 6, 2008, Part 1

Christian Fuchs: “Critical Theory in the Age of the Internet”, ISA World Forum, Barcelona, September 6, 2008, Part 2