Introduction to Social Analysis Lecture 8

1. Introduction to Social Analysis Lecture 8 Giddens’ reflexive society

2. Does contemporary society give new ways to understand and control social situations? • Look in this lecture at how Sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, and also Ulrich Beck and others seeking to build on classical sociology have tried to answer this question. • Also look at examples of how contemporary empirical sociology has used their ideas.

3. Studies Introductions to the theory: • Beck, Ulrich, Giddens, Anthony and Lash Scott (1994) Reflexive Modernisation: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press. (in particular pp. 184-197.) 301.01 BEC • Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and self-identity : self and society in the Late Modern AgeCambridge : Polity,  301.157 GID • Pip Jones 2003 Introducing Social Theory. Polity Press, Chap. 10. Critical Responses to Post-modernity and Postmodernism. Empirical studies: • Burrows, Roger and Nicholas Gane (2006) “Geodemographics, Software and Class” Sociology 40(5):793-812. • Green, Eileen and Carrie Singleton (2006) “Young Women Negotiating Space and Place” Sociology 40(5):853-872.

4. Three key points of reflexive modernity. 1. • Giddens position is an attempt to deal with the post-modern critique without throwing out key elements of classic sociology - hence a revised rather than a post modernity. • This is summerised in his table of contrasts [slides 13-15 ]

5. Three key points of reflexive modernity. 2. • Individuals have dramatically increased knowledge about themselves and thus to manipulate and control aspects of themselves which were not previously possible. • This is manifest is such issues as self-monitoring and shaping of the body.

6. Breathaliser

7. Fertility monitor

8. Three key points of reflexive modernity. 3. • Society has dramatically increased knowledge about itself and thus some institutions have the ability to manipulate and control aspects of social life that were not previously possible. • This is manifest in such issues as evaluating and dealing with risk.

9. Technologies of surveilance • www.ctcdevon.co.uk/exeter.htm • http://www.letopweb.net/webcam-du-monde.html • Baby alarms

10. Whose watching?

11. Who is watched?

12. Choice, risk, reflexivity • “As part of the well-known thesis which cites risk as an organizing principle of the late modern industrial society, Beck and Giddens suggest that risk has far reaching effects on the construction of contemporary identities (Beck 1992; Giddens, 1991). • Paralleling the argument that identity is increasingly articulated through differing dispositions towards risk, contemporary risk theorists also claim that a number of traditional features of industrial society, such as class, community and family are decreasing in influence, and relationships with strangers, encountered through greater national and global flows of people and cultures, are taking on greater signficance. • Characteristics of this change are postulated as increased reflexivity and ‘individualization’ in the processes of identity formation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1996), resulting in individuals experiencing greater choice and determination in the construction of the ‘project of self’. Contemporary individuals are construed as being more able to build and fashion identities through self-monitoring and choice.” (Green and Singleton 2006: 855)

13. Burrows, Roger and Nicholas Gane (2006) “Geodemographics, Software and Class” Sociology 40(5):793-812.http://ejscontent.ebsco.com/ContentServer/FullTextServer.asp?format=fulltext&ciid=AFF6FE0D2C11B5AD33A5C39287A4498B12358FD79662C83E5A73A26C0C5BCAFCA32BCF1055F90842&ftindex=1&cid=F35D3D648505FA48F6657AA16B59DF7E37A882374E0FF73373CA921EDDA876B9&ext=.pdf • About modern data bases and software which are primarily designed for marketing, which classify and label micro localities with detailed socio-metric data. • They make explicit links to key figures of modern social theory - Bourdieu (Distinction) ,Beck (Risk Society) and Bauman.

14. Choice, risk, reflexivity • The success of such classification systems lies in their ability to map out and structure patterns of consumption that in turn aid both the enhancement and regulation of the capitalist market. …businesses and policy makers alike use geodemographic classifications extensively to inform the targeting of goods, services and policy interventions. • But at the same time, systems such as ACORN and MOSAIC are successful with the consuming public because they are designed to make individuals feel at home somewhere, both socially and physically: ‘You are where you live.’ The classifications these systems produce, like the endless TV programmes dealing with house moves and makeovers, essentially promote a feeling of belonging, What this really means is belonging to place: to places through which we can identify ourselves and be identified and placed (in a social landscape) by others. ‘One’s residence is a crucial, possibly the crucial, identifier of who you are’. • social ascriptions of identities are becoming increasingly complex, particularly as identities are created increasingly through acts of consumption, define new forms of ‘class’ and ‘class relations’. Now more than ever before, for example, the places in which we choose to live, eat, holiday, and more generally consume are key factors in defining who we, as individuals, are, and the social groupings to which we aspire to belong. • Burrows, Roger and Nicholas Gane (2006) “Geodemographics, Software and Class” Sociology 40(5):793-812. pp807/8

15. Choice, risk, reflexivity • This, then, is the most striking feature of geodemographic classification systems and their migration into software: they map consumer habits onto territory, and in so doing recast class and status as spatial categories. On the one hand, this appears to give the consumer unprecedented freedoms, for as long as there are suitable material resources available, these classification systems can be used to aid self-positioning in both physical and social space. • This is very much a part of what Bauman and Beck call individualized society, in which identities become the responsibility of individuals rather than state-run institutions, and where we are left to ‘sort ourselves out’. • The other side to this, however, is that the classification systems considered in this article offer ready-made ‘class’ identities that have been generated from consumer surveys and the like. This means that identities are shackled to and to some extent ascribed from real and desired patterns of consumption (desires that in themselves are, of course, products of capitalism). • At the same time, these classification systems are automated through complex algorithms that remain hidden from the user’s eye, so that the sorting mechanisms that underpin the classifications themselves are all but invisible.

16. Green, Eileen and Carrie Singleton (2006) “Young Women Negotiating Space and Place” Sociology 40(5):853-872.

17. Choice, risk, reflexivity • “In the accounts that we have presented, risk is depicted as an organizing principle of daily routines and leisure practices that dictate young women’s use of time and space. Because certain times of the day and spaces are perceived as risky, their own position or place in time and space is continually under negotiation.” (Green and Singleton 2006: 867)

18. a revised rather than a post modernity • Gidden's summary diagramme which contrasts his position to that of post-modernity. • Try and locate examples given within his framework.