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.     

The cosmopolitan contradictions of planetary urbanization

This paper explores the empirical, conceptual and theoretical gains that can be made using cosmopolitan social theory to think through the urban transformations that scholars have in recent years termed planetary urbanization. Recognizing the global spread of urbanization makes the need for a cosmopolitan urban sociology more pressing than ever. Here, it is suggested that critical urban sociology can be invigorated by focusing upon the disconnect that Henri Lefebvre posits between the planetarization of the urban – which he views as economically and technologically driven – and his dis‐alienated notion of a global urban society. The first aim of this paper is to highlight the benefits of using ‘cosmopolitan’ social theory to understand Lefebvre's urban problematic (and to establish why this is also a cosmopolitan problematic); the second is to identify the core cosmopolitan contradictions of planetary urbanization, tensions that are both actually existing and reproduced in scholarly accounts. The article begins by examining the challenges presented to urban sociology by planetary urbanization, before considering how cosmopolitan sociological theory helps provide an analytical ‘grip’ on the deep lying social realities of contemporary urbanization, especially in relation to questions about difference, culture and history. These insights are used to identify three cosmopolitan contradictions that exist within urbanized (and urbanizing) space; tensions that provide a basis for a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan investigation of planetary urbanization.     

Sports Sociology’s Still Untapped Potential

Following up on Zirin’s (2008) challenge that sports sociologists “get off the bench,” and Karen and Washington’s (2001) plea to make sports sociology more central to analyses of social power, this article empirically reviews and assesses the sociology of sports from 1977–2008. Using a sample of 441 articles selected from the three major sports sociology journals during that period, we conclude that sports sociology exhibits a strong and increasing bias toward micro‐level analyses of (for example) how the content of sports frames and constructs the social world. A smaller and shrinking body of work examines more macro‐oriented issues such as the economics and politics of sports, and there seem to be few attempts to meaningfully synthesize these micro and macro orientations. We think this partiality toward micro‐oriented frameworks is rooted in factors unique to sports sociology while also reflecting larger trends within sociology as a whole. As advocates of popularly accessible public sociology, we respectfully suggest that sports sociologists try harder to weave macro analyses into their work, not necessarily replacing micro‐level approaches, but complementing them. We believe that sports sociology is well‐positioned to become a standard bearer for public sociology, but only if it pays more attention to the way organized sports intertwines with the organizational, political, and economic forces that perpetuate and exacerbate social inequality.     

Vision and Mission of Sociology: Learning from the Russian Historical Experience

The present study demonstrates that the path of the “organic public sociology” (proposed by Michael Burowoy in his famous call of the 2004) as the dominating mode of sociological practice in the national context can be menacing with the serious pitfalls manifested in broad historical perspective. We reveal the four pitfalls basing on the analysis of the Russian experience through the last 150 years. First, the over-politicization and ideological biasness of sociological activities; second, the “personal sacrifice” of sociologist as a romanticized practice, potentially harmful for the discipline; third, the difficulties of the professional sociology institutionalization; fourth, the deprivation of the policy sociology development. Analyzing the history of Russian sociology in the context of the current international discussions, we give particular reference to the idea of the “Scientized Environment Supporting Actorhood” elaborated by John Meyer. We suggest the mode of communication between sociology and society, which, in our view, could be helpful for improving their interactions in various local, national and global contexts in the XXIst century. This mode escapes the political emphasis and ideological claims but rather concentrates on the more fundamental ethical issues. It also tries to overcome the limitations of the contemporary professional mainstream (instead of idealizing it). Finally, it presents itself to the publics in the understandable way, while remaining properly scientifically validated (however, avoiding the exaggerated accent on the statistical procedures and fitishization of the natural science’ principles (“numerology” and “quantofrenia”)). The public activities of the prominent sociologist Pitirim Sorokin in the American period of his career are a good example of this approach to the interactions with society.     

What is the Main Significance of Economic for Sociological Theory?

This paper reconsiders classical and neoclassical economics’ significance for or affinity and convergence with sociological theory. The paper identifies certain types or elements of classical and neoclassical economics that are potentially significant or convergent with sociological theory: pure market economics, the economics of society cum the “rational choice model”, and social or sociological economics. First, it argues that as pure economics economic theory’s significance for or affinity and convergence with sociological theory is low because the first is inconsistent with or divergent from the latter, notably theoretical economic sociology. Second, the paper suggests that as the economics of society economic theory’s significance for or affinity and convergence with sociological theory is non-existent or minimal, because the “rational choice model” is missing or an exception within conventional economics. Third, the paper proposes and demonstrates that classical and neoclassical economics’ main significance for or affinity and convergence with sociological theory lies in social economics as its second ingredient, alongside market economics. The paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between economic and sociological theory and economics and sociology overall.     

Social focus on health and children’s well-being

This special section on children’s health and well-being is an outgrowth of the 2010 International Sociological Association’s (ISA) World Congress in Gothenburg, Sweden. Within the Congress, the Research Committee 53, Sociology of Childhood, organized a panel focused on the health and well-being of children. Together, this collection makes two distinct contributions: first in terms of considering children’s health disparities as an area of concern within sociology, and second by considering children’s health as a factor that shapes other areas of children’s well-being. In addition, these papers offer novel empirical research on children’s health and varied methodological and theoretical orientations. Each paper also makes contributions to social policy, first in the area of infant health affecting later educational outcomes, second in the area of family structure and children’s health, and additionally in understanding type 2 diabetes for children at the individual and structural levels. Finally, these studies highlight the interplay—between the individuals’ health on the one hand and structure and culture on the other—as children’s life chances are shaped.     

Globalization,social exclusion and the possibilities for global social work and welfare

Social work practice in Europe has developed disparately in the context of separate nation states. Yet it has at the level of professional organization a potentially international orientation. Practice can be understood as having a dual configuration: on the one hand it is idiosyncratic to the culture of nation states; on the other it has a dynamic which incorporates an impulse to include broader supranational concerns. This dual configuration is of importance at a time when social work and social policy are increasingly affected by global political and economic processes and compelled to view what were previously national concerns through analysis that is global (cf. Mishra 1999; Deacon et al . 1997; Townsend 1995). Welfare and economic issues are now almost wholly cast in systems that involve a multiplicity of nations, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and regional trading blocs that are intricately involved in making decisions that have profound welfare implications. This article will identify the challenge that these developments pose for social work and consider how the social work profession can reflect on a response. We argue that the dual configuration in which it is situated enmeshes social work within a dual set of politics. The first is the politics of the macro-political economy noted above. The second is the micro-cultural politics of identity that are being played out in various national settings but which also contain global impetuses. Thus both contemporary macro- and micro-politics mitigate against practice and analysis situated solely at the level of the national. We argue that a social work that is central to an emerging social development practice based on empowerment and located within a transnational organizational base is best placed to meet the challenges we describe.     

A view from above: The evolving sociological landscape

How has sociology evolved over the last 40 years? In this paper, we examine networks built on thousands of sociology-relevant papers to map sociology’s position in the wider social sciences and identify changes in the most prominent research fronts in the discipline. We find first that sociology seems to have traded centrality in the field of social sciences for internal cohesion: sociology is central, but not nearly as well bounded as neighboring disciplines such as economics or law. Internally, sociology appears to have moved away from research topics associated with fundamental social processes and toward social-problems research. We end by discussing strategies for extending this work to wider science production networks.     

On Diversity,Empathy, and Community: The Relevance of Johann Gottfried Herder

Abstract The writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) foreshadowed several of the dominant theories of sociology, social psychology, aesthetics, linguistics and literary theory. His ideas impacted generations of thinkers, but today he is uncelebrated, mostly unknown. His writings on populism, expressionism, and pluralism are relevant to contemporary sociology, especially community sociology. Here we consider his views on the nature and meaning of community, and his methods of studying and interpreting communities. These include an emphasis on the essential particularity of human communities and their connection to wider systems and networks. Herder urges special attention to the elements of context (place, time, language, culture) within which communities are situated. Herder's is an embedded particularism, a focus on individuality and diversity within larger unities. He also sensitizes us to the multivalence and multiplicity of social phenomena. As the proper stance for community research he counsels involvement and empathy rather than objectivity and emotional distance, and he urges researchers to be sensitive to data from all of their senses, not merely sight. Drawing upon Herder's writings, we conclude with several important methodological principles relevant to improving current work on the nature and conceptualization of communities.     

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.     

Nationalist Ideas and the Colonial Episteme: The Antinomies Structuring Sociological Traditions of India

The paper traces the growth of sociology in India through three phases. The first phase, it argues, begins in the 30s with the slow consolidation of the discipline. In this phase, sociology was associated with the Indological perspective and the social was perceived in culturist terms and analysed through the prism of the past, in and through Sanskrit texts. In the second phase, which begins in the early 60s, when University education expands in India, this indigenous perspective is re-framed. There is a shift from textual studies to empirical investigation and the village becomes the site for studying Indian civilization. This paper makes a detailed analysis of the social anthropological perspective of M.N. Srinivas whose theories on village and caste influenced the sociological imagination in this phase. The third phase starts in the late 70s with the growth of social movements of the subalterns which challenge the received culturist nationalist sociological imagination. Today sociology together with other social sciences are at crossroads in India due to the impact of neoliberalism. The latter has encouraged privatisation of education, decreased state funding in material and human resources and an increased state control on academia. All three have affected the autonomy of the teachers and as well the University system and thus the efforts to chart a new sociological imagination in which the Indian social is perceived in global comparative terms. It is difficult to assess which turn sociology in India will take in these circumstances.     

Interface methods: renegotiating relations between digital social research,STS and sociology

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called ‘interface methods’. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasized the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that (a) highlights the dynamism and relative under‐determinacy of digital methods, and (b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research – thinking methods as ‘interface methods’ – and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co‐occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualize ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to some of the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its maladjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium.     

Integration of migrants — an extraordinary undertaking? An analysis of Swiss policy and handling of resident immigrants; a municipal example—Bern

Migration and multiculturalism are key topics in politics, in the media, in education and in the social sciences. It is a phenomenon that has been discussed again and again during the last fifteen years with the aim to find solutions. A theoretical set of points of consideration is established in the first chapter in order to understand how migration is running counter to the ‘normal’ condition and development of society, and tends to cause problems in various contexts. Case histories in the second chapter show how communities are handling the consequences of immigration in practice and in the framework of the specific prevailing national and welfare state structures, and especially how communities are meeting the challenge politically and with their system of social services. In the final chapter the most important findings are summarized.     

Socially Responsible Roles of Professional Ethics: Inclusivity,Psychotherapy and ‘the Protection of the Public’

The remit of the apparatus of professional ethics in the field of psychotherapy can be appropriately expanded so as to make the profession more socially responsible and thereby contribute to the ‘protection of the public’ that is said to be the main purpose of statutory regulation. Using ideas culled from the sociology of the professions, political theory and ethical discourse, it is proposed that ethical psychotherapy cannot take place if its overall social framework is itself profoundly unethical. Inclusivity and diversity are reframed as ethical professional practices. Questions of wealth, gender, sexuality and ethnicity are not only ‘social’ or ‘political’—they are also part of a morally imaginative expansion of what we mean by professional ethics. Attention is paid to the dangers of self-righteousness and moral tyranny.     

Live tweeting and building the digital archive; #NFQLR – who and what is it for?

This paper examines the temporal and ethical affordances of commercial social media platforms, such as Twitter, as tools for engaging in social research and knowledge exchange. Drawing on activity that took place during the New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research seminar series, the article reports on using Twitter and other social media platforms to document, share and archive ‘data’ from a series of research events. It also experiments with new modes of research writing, using fragments of ‘data’ from Twitter to distil research knowledge and ideas, whilst also capturing the pace and form of this live method of social documentation and knowledge exchange. Bringing together conversations within digital sociology about how to ‘do’ time in digital research, with methodological debates among qualitative longitudinal researchers about how to research social and biographical continuity and change, the paper argues that the presentist focus in digital research is far from inevitable. Attending to time in digital media demands that we are alert to questions of authorship, audience and co-production, recognizing the labour of research and the provenance of research knowledge, ‘data’ and ideas.     

Authoritative Knowledge and Heteronomy in Classical Sociological Theory

This article traces the impact of philosophical questions regarding the grounds of moral autonomy and heteronomy (rule-from-another as opposed to rule-from-oneself) on classical sociological theory, arguing that both Weber and Durkheim understood sociology to have a contribution to make in the debate with Kant over the grounds of ethical action. Both insisted that the only possible ethical action was one within the bounds of rational knowledge that was inherently authoritative, but this sat uneasily with their focus on the relation between concrete social authority and the authoritativeness of beliefs in the sociology of religion. In rejecting Comte's explicit avowal of the embodiment of moral authority in the secular priesthood of sociologists, Weber and Durkheim had to paper over the social authority supporting the formulation of this rational knowledge. Each then produced a sociology of knowledge without a well-specified mechanism, in turn encouraging the development of the sociology of knowledge as a flawed sub-discipline.     

Beyond anonymity: temporality and the production of knowledge in a qualitative longitudinal study

Anonymisation processes are an embedded, if contested, element of ethical research practice. Current debates, highlighting various challenges to anonymity, suggest the importance of situated ethics and negotiated solutions. However, the strategies adopted are necessarily mediated by the researcher’s epistemological positions. Longitudinal studies with their extended timeframes and intensive research relationships tend to amplify ethical dilemmas and highlight the contingency and fluidity of ethical processes. Here we explore how temporality intersects with epistemology in a qualitative longitudinal (QL) study of organisations located in a contemporary policy context. We reflect on the confidentiality and anonymity dilemmas that develop and change over time, the strategies adopted and the implications of these for the type of knowledge produced. We suggest that QL studies entail flexibility within epistemological frameworks. These issues have particular resonance and consequences for researchers in light of contemporary pressures around public scrutiny of academic performance and wider debates around public sociology.     

Put to the test: For a new sociology of testing

In an age defined by computational innovation, testing seems to have become ubiquitous, and tests are routinely deployed as a form of governance, a marketing device, an instrument for political intervention, and an everyday practice to evaluate the self. This essay argues that something more radical is happening here than simply attempts to move tests from the laboratory into social settings. The challenge that a new sociology of testing must address is that ubiquitous testing changes the relations between science, engineering, and sociology: Engineering is today in the very stuff of where society happens. It is not that the tests of 21st-century engineering occur within a social context but that it is the very fabric of the social that is being put to the test. To understand how testing and the social relate today, we must investigate how testing operates on social life, through the modification of its settings. One way to clarify the difference is to say that the new forms of testing can be captured neither within the logic of the field test nor of the controlled experiment. Whereas tests once happened inside social environments, today’s tests directly and deliberately modify the social environment.     

THE MICRO-ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

In this article I offer an unfashionably ideological critique. I argue that, in the USA, ideology now appears in the form of the narratives that capitalism tells itself about itself, in particular at sites of commodity consumption. I examine three everyday sites in which capitalism constructs an Imaginary version of itself as it exhorts contemporary consumers to consume ethically: during a visit to a Target Superstore; on an overnight stay in a hotel room; and while purchasing a bag of fair trade coffee. In these moments and at these sites, corporations instruct us in the ‘ethical’ use of their commodities, and obeying those instructions promotes us to the rank of ‘consumer activist’. This article attempts to explain how this ‘ethical consumption’ – a form of what I call ‘micro-ethics’ – has displaced more social, or ‘macro’, forms of ethical action. To make my case, I argue that globalized capitalism denies many of us the social coordinates, or handholds, that are necessary if we are to feel that we can act meaningfully within the Symbolic Order, or social reality itself. This ‘deworlding’ effect, as Alain Badiou calls it, encourages us to reject social forms of ethical and political life and to retreat to a careful policing of the Imaginary boundaries of our ‘inner selves’ instead. In other words, global capitalism logically produces, as its own ideological support and supplement, a micro-ethics that attends only to what the single person can do, and only within the realm of consumption. We participate in this fantasy version of ‘eco-capitalism’ that advertising, publicity and other discourses establish to the extent that we accept consumption as the ultimate horizon of our ability to intervene in problems of ecological depredation and the exploitation of labour in the First and Third Worlds.     

Research,policy and funding – academic treadmills and the squeeze on intellectual spaces1

In recent years, there has been a great deal of collective rumination about social scientists' role in society. In the post‐1997 UK context, public policy commitments to ‘evidence‐based policy’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ have further stimulated such reflections. More recently, Michael Burawoy's 2004 address to the American Sociological Association, which called for greater engagement with ‘public sociology’ has reverberated throughout the discipline, motivating a series of debates about the purpose of sociological research. To date, most such contributions have been based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. In contrast, this paper responds directly to Burawoy's suggestion that we should ‘apply sociology to ourselves,’ in order that we ‘become more conscious of the global forces’ driving our research ( Burawoy 2005 : 285). Drawing on an empirical research project designed to explore of the relationship between health inequalities research and policy in Scotland and England, in the period from 1997 until 2007, this paper discusses data from interviews with academic researchers. The findings suggest that the growing pressure to produce ‘policy relevant’ research is diminishing the capacity of academia to provide a space in which innovative and transformative ideas can be developed, and is instead promoting the construction of institutionalized and vehicular (chameleon‐like) ideas. Such a claim supports Edward Said's (1994 ) insistence that creative, intellectual spaces within the social sciences are increasingly being squeezed. More specifically, the paper argues we ought to pay far greater attention to how the process of seeking research funding shapes academic research and mediates the interplay between research and policy.