The Relevance of Modernity to Contemporary East Asia: An Outline

This article offers a framework for exploring the relevance of modernity to contemporary East Asia. I first examine different conceptualizations of modernity, paying special attention to Eisenstadt's influential concept of multiple modernities. Second, I point out the limitations and flaws of Eisenstadt's theory by drawing on nationalist politics in East Asia as an illustrative case. In particular, I examine the so-called “history perception problem,” which has been created by war and shaped by the legacies of war, to demonstrate the peculiar features of modernity in East Asia. Third, I use the works by three scholars as examples to show how intellectuals in China, South Korea, and Taiwan respond to the tensions between universalism and particularism, which, as a whole, reflect what can be called “East Asian modernity.” And finally, I try to respond to the controversial but fashionable question that is peculiar to East Asia: can modernity be overcome? It is argued that East Asia can be understood through the lens of modernity, and vice versa. Nowadays, modernity has become a global condition in both geographical and topological senses. It is not something to be overcome, but a condition that we all live in and should learn to live with, here and now.     

Modernity and the development of PR in Norway: Influences and interactions

This article examines the relationship between Norwegian PR history and the development of modernity. The theoretical starting point is based on historical sociology and especially theories of modernity as formulated by Anthony Giddens and Jürgen Habermas. The study concerns the period from 1800 to 1913, where Norway may be defined as a modern capitalist society. The study shows that there is a mutual interaction between PR history and the development of modernity in Norway: in the same way that PR is a product of modernity, PR activities are also important for the development of modernity. Basic concepts in this development are rationalism (science and technology), nationalism, parliament, law/justice, democratisation, freedom of speech, public spheres, individualism, elitism, discipline/control, civil society, capitalism, industrialism, political parties, and mass participation in politics.     

Japanese Modernity and Media Studies of Screens

This article aims to construct a new perspective for analyzing the recent omnipresence of screens, the diversity of images, and their impact on our daily lives. Because of the diversification of digitalized images today, research based on film and television studies is unable to grasp the fluid relationships among screen images, spaces, and the bodies of their audience, and important task for recent scholarship is to determine how to include these screen images in media and cultural studies. In response to this issue, this article seeks to reconstruct the concept of screen practice, guided by the perspectives of Jonathan Crary and Friedrich Kittler on media and practices; Koji Taki and Ai Maeda's historical research on Japanese modernity; and Erkki Huhtamo and Yussi Parikka's media archaeological perspectives for screen and visual culture. Although the notion of screen practice was originally proposed in the field of film history, it should be expanded for broader screen cultures as the sites at which scientific discourses and technologies act on the bodies of viewers. Taking the experiences of Japanese modernity as its subject, this is a critical issue, because at these sites we can find traces of dynamic negotiations between the circulation of science and media derived from Western modernity, and existing physical and cultural vernacular practices. Moreover, going back to the screen cultures at the end of the 19th century will make clear how the process of our contemporary media environment was formed.     

Making Modernity in China: Employment and Entrepreneurship among the New Generation of Peasant Workers

China is experiencing urbanization and modernization at the largest scale in human history. An army of over 280 million “peasant workers” are an integral part of this great transformation to modernity. Drawing on different data sources, including national representative random samples and the authors' first-hand survey data, we provide systematic comparisons between the older and the younger generation of peasant workers and between young peasant entrepreneurs in cities and young returnee entrepreneurs. We found that, compared with the older generation, the younger generation of peasant workers is better educated, holds more stable jobs, has a higher income, lives a happier life and is more optimistic about the future. Our analysis of the two types of peasant entrepreneurs shows that they are the elites among peasant workers, running successful business and making handsome profits. We also note that discrimination and institutional obstacles, especially the hukou system, remain to be overcome in the peasant workers' transition to modernity.     

Unthinking Modernity: Historical‐Sociological,Epistemological and Logical Pathways

Modernity remains the privileged theoretical frame and narrative for long term processes at the global scale, notwithstanding the heterogeneously contested definition of its spatiotemporal coordinates, the irreconcilability of contradictions inherent to its alleged emancipatory power and the accusations of complicity with Eurocentrism. This article explores some logical, epistemological and historical‐sociological contradictions inherent in the effort to produce non‐euorcentric categories of social and historical analysis, and explains why such an effort is doomed to failure if modernity keeps on being accepted as the epistemic territory within which such an effort is located. Eurocentrism is thus defined as palingenetic, to the extent it constantly shifts its contextual meaning while reformulating European centrality in different and ever‐changing modalities; such properties of Eurocentrism as a paradigm are conceptualized in terms of its ability to operate by means of consequential isomorphism. Evidences from recent debates in history of scientific modernity are considered, in order to articulate analytical tensions between connected histories and dialogical civilizational narratives of East and West relation at the global scale. The impossibility to explain the ‘why’ of modernity according to a coherent ‘how’ of modernity without falling into Eurocentric structures of thinking is assessed. Finally, theoretical project of “unthinking modernity” is introduced as a possible way to reframe the problem of Eurocentric limits in historical and social sciences.     

Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the morbid resolutions of Modernity*

Abstract Why is India treated as the standing menace to the public health of the world? Is it something peculiar to Indian tradition which prevents India from enjoying the fruits of universal modernity? Or perhaps, is it the emergence of institutions and of other politically organized subjections in a history of colonialism which endowed India with a brand of colonial modernity? By using the cholera epidemic of 1832 and the efforts to rebuild and restructure everyday life in Europe and in India, this essay attempts to answer such questions. It is in the aftermath of the epidemic that various ideological positions are clarified, with the result that bourgeois culture demonstrates its limit in colonialism.     

Modernity and Fertility Preference in Taiwan*

Data from interviews with 973 Taiwan women between the ages of 15 and 44 having at least one child and living with husbands are used to study the effects of modernity and social status on fertility preferences. The modernity attitude contributes significantly to the explanation of fertility preferences independent of social status variables. Social status variables also contribute directly to the explanation of fertility preferences. But there is little evidence to support theories that modernity acts as an intervening variable between social status and fertility preference.     

Murakami Haruki and the Naturalization of Modernity

Walter Benjamin famously portrayed the shock sensation as the cause of a "heightening of consciousness" in modernity, a process which in turn causes the disintegration of the "aura" and the suffocation of "experience" under the "protective shield" of consciousness. When applied to the cultural space of Murakami Haruki's novels a discrepancy comes into view that calls for sociological elucidation. Here modernity is a "naturalized" space characterized by tranquillity and stillness, a low consciousness, and a fusion of reification with re-enchantment. This naturalization is made possible by a process of privatization whereby libidinal energy becomes transferred from objective human relations to the interior of the self. Murakami struggles with the dilemma of how to affirm naturalization while counteracting privatization. While the prime cultural contradiction according to Benjamin was the conflict between "the aura" and the heightening of consciousness, in the naturalized modernity portrayed by Murakami another contradiction emerges which revolves around the conflict between painless solitude and the struggle to regain auratic human relations.     

Modernity: a non-European conceptualization

In the light of insights drawn from historical sociology and Parsons' theory of differentiation/modernization, an attempt is made to conceptualize modernity in such a way as to avoid both eurocentrism and the total rejection of the concept by those who view it as an ideological means for the further advancement of western cultural imperialism.     

Modernity as Masquerade: Representations of Modernity and Identity in Turkish Humour Magazines

This article aims at an alternative analysis of Turkish “modernity” by analysing the representations in a popular humour magazine. This study departs from the idea that representations in “low” discourses in Turkey can provide us with a text other than those of the official-dominant discourses in order to see how the certainty and positivity attributed to the modern identity in the dominant ideology is elaborated, demystified, and subverted as well as contained. Essentially, in the magazine, one of the main sources of humour derives from the clash of two main identities, between those who are modern, civil, urban, and effeminate and those who are traditional, uncivil, rural, and super-masculine. In the modern urban space, the modern and traditional become a stake in the power struggles between groups. This struggle operates through tastes, styles, and the body, which are at the same time means of identity construction as well as marks of identity. This duality and the concomitant dualities have come to structure all significatory practices to such an extent that everything gets symbolically overloaded by these series of dualities. In this struggle, the essence and appearance duality is the main framework within which Turkey's modernity and identity are represented. “Modernity” is signified as a masquerade, a play of appearances and a stake in the power struggles among groups rather than as a measure of progress. Bodies, sexuality, and masculinity become the nodal points of the expression of identity struggles, not only of social groups but also of the Turkish nation.     

Humbling Turkishness: Undoing the Strategies of Exclusion and Inclusion of Turkish Modernity

Kurds make up about a fifth of Turkey's population. Turkey has taken steps – albeit slowly and reluctantly – towards increased recognition of Kurdish cultural and linguistic rights. However, within Turkey there is also a steeply rising tide of Turkish nationalism, prejudice and intolerance towards Kurds, and increasing anti-Kurdish sentiment. This article brings studies of Kurdishness and Turkishness into a single conversation and traces the relationship between Turkish modernity, Orientalized Kurdishness and the construction of Turkishness as the efendi (master) identity. It does this by drawing attention to “strategies of exclusion and inclusion” in the construction of official Turkish history, and relates these to the way in which the tense borders between Kurds and Turks are maintained and currently reproduced. It also presents a normative argument in favour of “humbling Turkishness” and “solidarity trading zones”.     

Public Relations and Chinese Modernity: A 21st-Century Perspective

ABSTRACT

This study approaches the history of China's public relations (PR) industry from the perspective of modernity. Coupled with China's modern transformation and modernization since the late 1970s, Chinese PR industry and practitioners sought to establish legitimacy in the following 30 years. Three developmental stages are identified: Introduction and Enlightenment (1978–1992), Marketization and Professionalization (1992–2003), and Diversification (2003–present). In each stage, the theme and practice of PR interplayed with China's modernization and modern transformation. Situated under unique political, economic, and social contexts, China's PR faced, and is still facing, crises in reputation, utility, social values, identity, legitimacy, and professional ethics.     

The Gargantuan Project and Modernity in Provincial Thailand

Many leaders in Asia have competed to build public goods of superlative size. Focusing on an observation tower in Suphanburi, an agriculture-based rural province of Thailand, this paper shows that a seemingly wasteful and pretentious public project serves as the site where collective pride is forged. The tower, the tallest observation tower in provincial Thailand, has made an otherwise lacklustre and ‘backward’ Suphanburi famous throughout the country. The tower has thus become the unique symbol of Suphanburi's modernity, and many residents have come to identify with it as such. This paper highlights a ceremony held by Banharn Silpa-archa, the creator of the tower and Member of Parliament from Suphanburi, to advertise the distinctiveness of the tower and to mobilise provincial pride around it.     

The comfort of strangers: social work,modernity and late Victorian England—Part I

In these two related articles the history of social work in late Victorian England is understood by aligning it not with self-consciously held ideologies of, say, bourgeois capitalism, patriarchy, evangelical Protestantism, or liberal humanism, but with the complex cultural system of modernity. It is hoped to problematize both the genealogy and the substance of early social work that now so decisively shapes our interpretations of the influences of late Victorian philanthropy. The history of social work has to be treated seriously if we are to properly understand the present day situation in terms of modernity and investigate its orientation more thoroughly. This first paper offers a history of social work which draws attention to the imbrications of a secular modernity and how its governing ideas, texts and discourses of the time influence philanthropy. It examines dominant modernist themes that had a significant impact on the emergence of social work and the important role of the Charity Organization Society. It is suggested that these themes form part of a shared European heritage. Whilst the influences of modernity on social work are likely to have been uneven, there were common conditions faced by people in Europe and shared developments that gave way to the rise of social work in the nineteenth century.     

Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism,Meritocracy, Modernity

This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English language dictionaries and encyclopaedias, using a method of ‘conceptual history’. I show how the concept, its grammatical forms, and characteristic associations have evolved substantially since the eighteenth century. This finding is placed in a broader explanatory context, arguing that it is the combined rise of a set of core institutions of modernity, not just capitalism but also democracy, adversarial law, science, and civil society, that deeply embeds competition in the modern world. The decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the national subordination of martial power, opened the way for more ‘liberal’ forms of society in which authority is routinely contested through competition, across economy, politics, culture and beliefs. Appreciating this is a necessary step towards truly grappling with the effects of competition on modern life.     

Turkish Capitalist Modernity and the Gezi Revolt

In this paper an attempt is made to reassess how and why the laic/Islamic dual opposition has come to be a decisive factor in the politics of Turkish capitalist modernity. The question as to whether this opposition may survive into the twenty‐first century is briefly discussed. It is noted that in the aftermath of the prolonged confrontation between the emergent imagined community of the Gezi Revolt and the Islamist AKP government, a religiously neutral political identity came into sight in public life, which can be considered as the harbinger of a new kind of social individuality, one which is incommensurate with the laic/Islamic dual opposition.     

Atoms for Peace,Atoms for War: Probing the Paradoxes of Modernity*

Macrostructural analyses have long dominated the field of social theories of modernity, with the work of Habermas, Giddens, and Beck providing influential cases in point. Empirical studies, however, have raised questions about the applicability and empirical soundness of macrostructural approaches to risks, technology, and nature, and U.S.‐based sociologists have offered alternative theories that have been identified in some studies as providing better predictions and explanations than the macrostructural analyses. Informed by all of the above theories, this article examines the “Atoms for Peace” program, which established the civilian uses of nuclear energy, providing one of the central scientific and technological achievements of modernity. Given the mixed results of nuclear technology development, the mid‐range, structurally informed perspectives of Short and other U.S.‐based sociologists do appear to provide the best interpretations, both for the “Atoms for Peace” program and for the broader legacy of the technological and environmental risks of modernity.     

Critical Thoughts on American Social Work and the Crisis of Modernity: Lessons From Theory and Current Events

Social work in America is at a curious junction: continue down the status quo path of professionalization or embrace an antagonistic and critical, political stance toward global institutions and the logics of injustice. This article defines the junction as a crisis of modernity wherein the institutions and logics reflecting modernity’s primary forms—capitalism and democracy—suffer material and affective setbacks. The New Social Work Left movement is advocated as a useful response to the crisis of modernity, and initial strategies are offered for fostering a New Social Work Left in the United States.     

Constitutionalizing Modernity: Forging the Modern American State

Who makes decisions when an essential, constitutional 'handbook' has failed to describe any exceptional situation? Is it fair to place power in the hands of a few specific people to decide? This article illustrates how the US Supreme Court has modernized and reconstituted the US Constitution to make it compatible with an emerging twentieth-century regulatory state and the attendant public functions within the 'state'. The article examines the relationships among legal, social, political, and economic changes in the process of the modern evolutionary state. The paper represents a theoretical attempt to relate constitutional growth and evolution to the development of a constitutionally legitimized 'positive', 'regulatory', or 'welfare' state, and concludes that constitutional fluidity and flexibility are potential sources of empowerment, while incremental constitutionalism with regard to the welfare state is probably the best possible strategy to adopt in American modernity.     

Japanese Historical Experience and Japanese Modernity

Abstract  It has long been recognized that Japanese modern society, policy and economy exhibit some very distinct characteristics, a distinct mode of structuration of modern institutions and organizations which are structured in ways radically different from those which have developed in other —especially Western— societies. Such differences are not just local variations. They pertain to the very basic ways in which the various modern institutional arenas are regulated, defined, and the broader social and cultural contexts in which they operate.
The common denominator of these characteristics is a very high level of structural differentiation. mobility, openness and dynamics grounded in conceptions of service to social contexts, ideally (as promulgated in the Meiji ideology) to the national community. Neither the emphasis on equality nor the strong emphasis on achievement were grounded in any conception of principled transcendentally oriented individuality or of transcendental legitimation of different functional (e.g. political or economic) activities.
Such a rather strong structural similarity, together with a distinct institutional dynamics. can be identified in comparing Japan and Western Europe already in the premodern period, when there were only but minimal contacts between them.
The analysis in a comparative framework of this unusual combination is of central importance for the understanding of Japanese modernity and in the following pages I would like to present some preliminary steps for such analysis.