Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum: Global Resistance,Emancipation, and the Activists’ Vision of a Better World

The World Social Forum (WSF) is the world’s largest activist network to date. Its global, regional, national, and thematic events have gathered since 2001 millions of participants and thousands of civil society and social movement organisations. Its cosmopolitan vision is built on resistance to the planetary domination by neo-liberal globalisation. This paper unpacks WSF’s cosmopolitan project and reflects on its vision of emancipated individuals, convivial communities, and a just planetary society in harmony with the environment. In its open organisational space, WSF’s cosmopolitan project develops while in the process of political action rather than prior to that. At the same time, power dynamics, ideological cleavages, and pragmatic concerns about organisation and strategy challenge WSF’s ability to pursue its goals. However, it is these internal tensions that make WSF’s cosmopolitan project both more difficult to achieve and more realistic than claims of universal unity among all its participants.     

Cosmopolitan communities of climate risk: conceptual and empirical suggestions for a new research agenda

Mitigating human‐induced climate change calls for a globalized change of consciousness and practice. These global challenges also demand a double transformation of the social sciences – first, from ‘methodological nationalism’ to ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ and, second, an empirical reorientation towards ‘cosmopolitization’ as the social force of emerging cosmopolitan realities. One of these realities is the possible emergence, locally and globally, of ‘cosmopolitan communities of climate risk’ in response to a ‘world at risk’. A key research question for contemporary social science is thus: how and where are new cosmopolitan communities of climate risk being imagined and realized? In this article, we propose and explore a research agenda formulated around this key question. We both develop a theoretical perspective and provide short empirical illustrations of case studies regarding ongoing research in Europe and East Asia on such cosmopolitan climate risk communities.     

RESCUE AND REDEMPTION

In The Body Impolitic, Herzfeld (2004) develops a theory of the ‘global hierarchy of value’, according to which traditional artisans are discursively constructed as socially and economically subordinate to contemporary global capital. A pivotal consideration in understanding such discursive formations, Herzfeld suggests, is the identification of the agents through whom that discourse takes shape and becomes entrenched. Here, we advocate a parallel consideration of ‘designers,’ the professionals trained in the urban metropole and who often mediate between the aesthetic sensibilities of a global cosmopolitan elite and the parochial practices and menial labour of artisans. Drawing on the history and literature of the field of design within India and on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2009 with traditional block-print artisans in Rajasthan, we claim that dominant narratives within the field of design – narratives in which artisans and traditional craft are preserved or ‘rescued’ by designers – contend even today with the more politically charged Gandhian narrative in which traditional craft and livelihoods ‘redeemed’ the newly independent state from the threat of industrialization and the simple mimicry of Western societies. The conscious professionalization of ‘design’ by the developing state and the concomitant incorporation of a particular moral code within that emergent, predominantly middle-class profession operationalize designers as agents of a global hierarchy according to which artisans' bodies and labour are assigned a specific value.     

Climate riskscapes in world port cities: situating urban‐cosmopolitan risk communities via Ulrich Beck's comparative tactics

Building on empirical research into translocal connections among world port cities in addressing shared challenges of climate risk mitigation and adaptation, in this article I review two widespread tendencies in urban studies – methodological city‐ism and methodological globalism respectively – as a springboard for articulating a methodologically cosmopolitan alternative. This alternative, I argue, involves epistemological issues of how to interrogate ‘the urban’ as assemblages that constitutively draw together the near and the faraway, as well as more practical issues of mobile, multisited, and comparative urban research methods. Empirically, I compare the ways in which urban actors stage global climate risks on the waterfronts of four world cities – Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Yokohama and Copenhagen – to argue that such a comparative tactic of variable ‘riskscapes’ helps situate Ulrich Beck's notion of urban cosmopolitan risk communities more thoroughly into urban studies. In such ways, I suggest, Beck's methodological cosmopolitanism is germane to studying ongoing and far ranging transformation in world political geography, in which transurban networks, communities, and governance arrangements come to complement nation‐state centred institutions. Such conclusions must be tempered, however, by the deployment of Beck's equally strong impetus towards comparative attention to the varieties of second modernity; and doing so, I conclude, aligns well with ongoing transformations in urban studies itself.     

Beyond class and nation: reframing social inequalities in a globalizing world

From the start individualization theory is the investigation of the paradigm shift in social inequality. Furthermore it shows, how the transnationalization of social inequalities bursts the framework of institutional responses – nation state (parties), trade unions, welfare state systems and the national sociologies of social classes. In this essay I shall try to conceptually elucidate the ‘cosmopolitan perspective’ on relations of social inequality in three cases: (1) the inequality of global risk; (2) the Europe‐wide dynamic of inequality; and (3) transnational inequalities, which emerge from the capacities and resources to transcend borders. Before that I take up Will Atkinson's question: ‘What exactly constitutes individualization and to what extent has it really displaced class?’ ( Atkinson 2007 : Abstract)     

Organizing the organism: a re-casting of the bio-social interface for our times

I present a future-oriented look at sociology and anthropology's historical appropriation of the concept of organism. The ‘future’ of which I speak is one in which the biological and technological are blending together. In cultural and science studies, the figure of the ‘cyborg’ is often discussed in this context. But the cyborg tends to be treated as a specifically ‘postmodern’ innovation, whereas the organism has always invited the cyborg's ontological ambivalence. This sensibility goes back to the dawn of both the modern biomedical sciences and the social sciences. I begin on the relatively familiar terrain of the role that emerging medical conceptions of the organism in the mid-nineteenth century played in the formation of such founding figures of sociology and anthropology as Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas. I then move to the specific ‘relativization’ of Darwin's theory of evolution that fostered turn-of-the-century conceptions of the social organism, including that emergent entity, the ‘superorganism’, which figures prominently – albeit differently – in the attempts to characterize the uniquely ‘human’ character of culture and technology. Finally I look at one very explicitly ‘constructivist’ approach to the social organism promoted by the distinguished chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, who was in turn anathematized by Max Weber in one of the original episodes of sociology's disciplinary boundary maintenance. The pride of place that Ostwald gave to ‘catalysts’ in consolidating and enhancing social organisms – from business firms to academic disciplines – earns his perspective a second look in our time. I end with directions for further exploration, which include reviving Norbert Wiener's cybernetic vision.     

Revitalizing sociology: urban life and mental illness between history and the present

This paper proposes a re‐thinking of the relationship between sociology and the biological sciences. Tracing lines of connection between the history of sociology and the contemporary landscape of biology, the paper argues for a reconfiguration of this relationship beyond popular rhetorics of ‘biologization' or ‘medicalization'. At the heart of the paper is a claim that, today, there are some potent new frames for re‐imagining the traffic between sociological and biological research – even for ‘revitalizing’ the sociological enterprise as such. The paper threads this argument through one empirical case: the relationship between urban life and mental illness. In its first section, it shows how this relationship enlivened both early psychiatric epidemiology, and some forms of the new discipline of sociology; it then traces the historical division of these sciences, as the sociological investment in psychiatric questions waned, and ‘the social' become marginalized within an increasingly ‘biological' psychiatry. In its third section, however, the paper shows how this relationship has lately been revivified, but now by a nuanced epigenetic and neurobiological attention to the links between mental health and urban life. What role can sociology play here? In its final section, the paper shows how this older sociology, with its lively interest in the psychiatric and neurobiological vicissitudes of urban social life, can be our guide in helping to identify intersections between sociological and biological attention. With a new century now underway, the paper concludes by suggesting that the relationship between urban life and mental illness may prove a core testing‐ground for a ‘revitalized' sociology.     

From world citizenship to purified patriotism: Obama’s nation-shaping in a global era

This analysis responds to two questions in recent scholarship. The first is Ulrich Beck’s call for scholars to empirically explore how nationhood is evolving in a global context – whether and how nation-states are being cosmopolitanised. The second concerns normative debates regarding what form belonging should take in a global era – patriotic attachments or cosmopolitan ones. The rhetoric of Barack Obama provides empirical fodder for both explorations. As a leader who proclaimed and was widely noted for his cosmopolitan sensibilities, yet ultimately relied heavily on themes of patriotism and American exceptionalism, Obama’s case confirms that nationhood remains a potent form of collectivity in the contemporary era; suggests that although the conditions of globalisation may be facilitative ones with regard to cosmopolitanisation, they are not sufficient ones; and calls into question Martha Nussbaum’s recent claim that if ‘purified’, patriotism lends itself to a ‘striving for global justice and inclusive human love’.     

Transnational mobility and rootedness: the upper middle classes in European cities

Some authors argue that ‘mobilities’ form the distinctive feature of late modern societies and represent a new social cleavage between cosmopolitan mobile élites and urban residents more rooted in their local neighbourhoods. One assumption in contemporary discourses of rootedness is that this new transnational or global society entails an ongoing process of uprooting individuals and a mainly mobile élite packing up and relocating. In this article, we draw on empirical comparative research to examine the patterns and dynamics of mobility and belonging across European borders among upper‐middle‐class managers in four cities – Paris, Madrid, Milan and Lyon. We suggest that these new urban upper‐middle‐class managers display flight responses, or ‘partial exit’ strategies, which operate at various levels to enable them to protect and control their interests while holding onto the reins of power in their local communities. Our study adopts a micro‐level perspective to explore individual experiences, strategies, motivations and values based on interviews with 480 managers in these cities.     

Editorial

This paper is primarily concerned with examining how the current re‐emergence of psychosocial theory, mainly emanating from sociology, is useful for informing social work theory. Firstly it considers two extended examples of the limitations and/or contradictions in current theory for social work (that of linguistic determinism and postmodern versions of identity), and suggests how psychosocial theory offers ways forward for understanding and practice. The paper then considers two particular strengths in psychosocial theory: the ability to offer a ‘rich’ conceptualisation of the subject, and the equalising of worker and service user implicit in the theory. A further section looks briefly at the recent application of psychodynamic principles in social work practice, as ‘relationship‐based practice’. It then briefly considers some further implications for research and ‘evidence’ for social work. The paper's final section offers a discussion of two potential limitations in applying psychosocial theory in practice, before concluding that overall psychosocial theory is both productive, useful and appropriate for social work.     

Challenging Ethno-National Division: New Social Movements in Belfast

Literature on social movements in societies undergoing violent ethno-national conflict between two ‘warring factions’ has typically concentrated on civil rights, ethnic revivalists, peace and women's groups. This paper concentrates on two loose groupings – lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender, and ‘ban-the-bomb’ – that have been ignored. I argue that in the context of a ‘divided city’ like Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, these collective actors can be analysed as New Social Movements. Specifically, I look at how these new social movements have sought to experiment with forms of intercultural dialogue, expressive pluralistic communities which embrace unity through diversity and cosmopolitan, global identities which challenges the competitive, monolithic and divisive nationalisms which contribute to the sedimentation of violence and segregation of Irish Nationalists and British Unionists in the city.     

The contextual and social locations of older women's experiences of disability and decline

Understandings of disability and decline within health and social care seem to focus mainly on the bodies and function of older persons. However, the way that older people's experiences of disability and decline are fixed into rigid functional classifications such as ‘frailty’ are problematic. Drawing on the narratives of twelve diverse older English-speaking women in Montreal, Canada, I will argue that older women's experiences are more connected with the contexts within which they experience disability and decline, and the social locations they bring to these experiences, than the functional limitations of their bodies. Older women's stories – particularly those related to the home and the bus – reveal the clash between dominant understandings of ‘frailty’ and older women's contextual and social experiences of disability and decline; expose tensions within health and social care practices; and highlight the potential which exists in both context and social location.     

The dialectics of universality: The heterodox critical social theory of Robert Fine

Robert Fine was among the most original social theorists in Britain of the past 30 years, and the aim of this paper is to offer a first systematic assessment of his intellectual contribution. There are sound intellectual reasons to explore Fine’s scholarship. He maintained a problematic relation with mainstream sociology and, against the reduction of sociology to questions of method, culture, or class, he argued that sociologists must continue to ask difficult normative questions as part of the social world they ought to explain. And there are also pressing political concerns that justify a reconsideration of his writings. Global politics is currently marked by a populist wave that decries the very ideas and values that were central to Fine’s social theory: the need to uphold the rule of law at home and abroad, the politics of cosmopolitan solidarity, and the significance of antisemitism and its relationships with different forms of authoritarian politics. My main argument is that there is a dialectics of universality that drives forward Fine’s intellectual project. By this, I mean that a universalistic idea of humanity—an all-inclusive conception of all human beings—is the most important normative intuition of modern times. This idea of humanity moves forward in history through a dual process of emancipation and domination: successful forms of social, legal, and political inclusion help make visible previous dynamics of exclusion but may also create or recreate discriminatory practices. Building on the work of French historian Michael Löwy on heterodox Jewish thinkers, I explain the three main tenets of Fine’s work: (a) his reconstruction of critical social theory; (b) the notion of cosmopolitan solidarity; and (c) the significance and main features of modern antisemitism.     

Climate Change,the Quadrilemma of Globalization,and Other Politically Incorrect Reactions

Abstract

Current global climate change negotiations face some contradictions that are not always addressed as they are considered politically incorrect. These include, first, the decoupling of commitments for planetary environmental policies with the actual national strategies. A relevant example is the Bolivian administration, which presents a strong rhetoric for biospheric Mother Earth Rights, but its national development strategies generate more environmental impacts and weaken enforcement at the local level. Second, the core ideas and beliefs that explain development varieties that generate climate change are deeply rooted, so changes in political ideologies, either from traditional ‘left’ or ‘right’, do not determine policies to effectively overcome climate change. Third, accumulation of scientific information is not enough to promote the necessary changes, because these deep roots conditioned perceived and acceptable alternatives. Fourth, this lead to tensions among the pursuit of economic financial globalization, the sovereignty of the nations-states, democracy, and the basement of global environmental conservation. This is a quadrilemma, because if one or two of these objectives are pursued, at least one other is violated. Nevertheless, international negotiations rest on wishful thinking that this is possible. Uncovering these contradictions is politically incorrect for many realms.     

Social acceleration and the network effect: a defence of social ‘science fiction’ and network determinism

This essay is a response to Judy Wajcman's essay ‘Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time’ (2008: 59–77). In that article Wajcman argued that recent developments in the sociology of temporal change had been marked by a tendency in social theory towards a form of ‘science fiction’– a sociological theorizing, she maintains, that bears no real relation to actual, empirically provable developments in the field and should therefore be viewed as not contributing to ‘a richer analysis of the relationship between technology and time’ (2008: 61). This reply argues that as Wajcman suggests in her essay, there is indeed an ‘urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies’ (2008: 59) but that the most fruitful way to proceed would not be through a constraining of ‘science fiction’ social theorizing but, rather, through its expansion – and more, that ‘science fiction’ should take the lead in the process. This essay suggests that the connection between social theory and empirical studies would be strengthened by a wider understanding of the function of knowledge and research in the context of what is termed ‘true originality’ and ‘routine originality’. The former is the domain of social theory and the latter resides within traditional sociological disciplines. It is argued that both need each other to advance our understanding of society, especially in the context of the fast‐changing processes of technological development. The example of ‘technological determinism’ is discussed as illustrative of how ‘routine originality’ can harden into dogma without the application of ‘true originality’ to continually question (sometimes through ideas that may appear to border on ‘science fiction’) comfortable assumptions that may have become ‘routine’ and shorn of their initial ‘originality’.     

Democratizing Rural Economy: Institutional Friction,Sustainable Struggle and the Cooperative Movement*

Abstract Sustainable development demands institutions manage the conflicts and struggles that inevitably arise over material and ideal interests. While current cooperative theory privileges the economic element, a political economy of cooperation emphasizes cooperatives' tentative bridging of economic and political spheres with a democratic ethos. The cooperatives' democratic political structure exists in tension with a capitalist economic structure and other sites of friction. These contradictions are: in the realm of social relations, between production and consumption; in the realm of spatial relations, between the local and the global; and in the realm of collective action, between cooperatives as both traditional as well as new social movements. Where neo‐classical economic models seek to eliminate or reduce these tensions, political economy views these tensions as functional to sustainability by creating an “institutional friction” that facilitates innovation, flexibility and long‐term adaptability. This political economy of cooperation is intended as a step toward the development of a multidimensional sociology of cooperation.     

Back to Hegel? On Gillian Rose's critique of sociological reason

Thirty‐five years ago, Gillian Rose articulated a significant critique of classical sociological reason, emphasizing its relationship to its philosophical forebears. In a series of works, but most significantly in her Hegel contra Sociology, Rose worked to specify the implications of sociology's failure, both in its critical Marxist and its ‘scientific’ forms, to move beyond Kant and to fully come to terms with the thought of Hegel. In this article, I unpack and explain the substance of her criticisms, developing the necessary Hegelian philosophical background on which she founded them. I argue that Rose's attempted recuperation of ‘speculative reason’ for social theory remains little understood, despite its continued relevance to contemporary debates concerning the nature and scope of sociological reason. As an illustration, I employ Rose to critique Chernilo's recent call for a more philosophically sophisticated sociology. From the vantage point of Rose, this particular account of a ‘philosophical sociology’ remains abstract and rooted in the neo‐Kantian contradictions that continue to characterize sociology.     

Ethnomethodology and sociology: an introduction

Arising as a powerful challenge to programmatic views of sociology that sought to determine stable laws underpinning social order, ethnomethodology set out an alternative programme to reveal social order as a dynamic, contingent ‘ongoing accomplishment’. This programme was neither micro nor macro, but was concerned with different contexts of accountability in which both individuals and institutions are given identity and reproduced. Recognising everyday life as an achievement, collective sense making, and the central importance of talk as a social process, ethnomethodology had an impact on all those arenas of sociology where ordinary interaction is an element. This introduction to the special section discusses the contributions of each of the papers – which cover mundane reasoning, social learning, the early acquisition of social competence, and the application of membership categorization analysis to gender – in relation to the continuing relevance of Garfinkel's legacy to contemporary sociological theory and practice.     

Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction between Cosmopolitanism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences

Abstract In the article I outline a wide range of challenges, both normative and analytical, that the rise of globalism represents for the social sciences. In the first part, a distinction is drawn between ‘normative’ or ‘philosophical’ cosmopolitanism on the one hand and an analytical‐empirical social science cosmopolitanism, which is no longer contained by thinking in national categories, on the other. From such a perspective we can observe the growing interdependence and interconnection of social actors across national boundaries, more often than not as a side effect of actions that are not meant to be ‘cosmopolitan’ in the normative sense. In the second part I focus on the opposition between methodological nationalism and the actual cosmopolitanization of reality and outline the various errors of the former. In the third and final part of the article I outline a research programme of a ‘cosmopolitan social science’ around four topics: first, the rise of a global public arena resulting from the reactions to the unintended side effects (risks) of modernization; second, a cosmopolitan perspective allows us to go beyond International Relations and to analyse a multitude of interconnections not only between states but also between actors on other levels; third, a denationalized social science can research into the global inequalities that are hidden by the traditional focus on national inequality and its legitimation; finally, everyday or banal cosmopolitanism on the level of cultural consumption and media representation leads to a growing awareness of the relativity of one's own social position and culture in the global arena.     

Little naked pangs of the self: the real performance of the self and the function of trust in Goffman's action theory

The aim of this article is to discuss some of the leading features of Erving Goffman's action theory as an alternative to the ‘orthodox’ paradigms of sociology, viewed as a structuralist and functionalist science that defines social constructs by their shared rules and values, and as a drifting of action, in the sense of intention, toward an individualistic version. The author examines Goffman's shift of the focus of attention from the boundaries of a social sense of action to the social dialectic of ‘defining a situation’ (W. Thomas) as conducted by the social actors in a renewal of Simmel's ‘empowering covenants’ (wechselwirkung) in the multiple casual social connections that make up the ‘social buzz’ in a society. The author moreover discusses Goffman's action as a kind of playacting regulating cognitive and expressive face-to-face ‘traffic’ between the social actors. This relational dynamic creates an interactive play based on encounters – in which one's opening to another is fraught with risks of deception – regulated by trust as a central resource for social interactions. Trust, in its interpersonal and systemic variants, constitutes a universal social datum and an elementary precondition for social exchanges and the cooperation between individuals. Trust, thus, functions as comparer between reciprocal expectations and a regulator of freedom tending to the stability of the social system.