The Dictionary of Human Geography (189 page)

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social theory
This term refers to a constel lation of theories about what Giddens (1984) terms ?the constitution of society ?, specifying the mechanisms or the forms of social power that lend society some overall shape and cohe rence, however precarious, within given terri torial limits (extending in some theories to the whole globe). Callinicos (1999, p. 1) states: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Social theory . . . has concerned itself . . . (NEW PARAGRAPH) with the three main dimensions of ?social (NEW PARAGRAPH) power' economic relations, which have (NEW PARAGRAPH) reached their furthest development in the market system known as capitalism; the ideologies through which forms of special power are justified and the place in the world of those subject to them defined; and the various patterns of political domination. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Social theory can be distinguished from philosophy, which addresses epistemo logical and ontological issues pertaining to the nature of knowledge that we acquire, develop and relate about the world, its social contents included. In practice, however, social theoretic and philosophical questions run closely together, and in many reviews of human geographical theorizing the two are presented in an entangled (and perhaps on occasion confused) manner. Different social theories embrace a raft of varying assump tions, arguments and models about how econ omy, politics and culture play out in social power, and perhaps too bringing in claims about psychology, mythology and many other domains of human being and endeavour. All manner of economic, political, cultural and other theories abound, deriving from diverse disciplinary fields, alongside theories about how these different domains interrelate, influ ence or even determine one another in the social. All of this complicated material com prises the ?house? of social theory that has been repeatedly visited, borrowed from, critiqued and reworked by geographers down the years. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ?predisciplinary history? of social theory can be traced to europe in the period 1750 1850 (Heilbron, 1995), anchored in how the enlightenment encouraged abstracted reflec tions upon the social character of the times, but its origins are usually identified with sev eral major thinkers who continue to cast a long shadow over the contemporary academy. The pantheon here includes the ?big three? of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the key figures of so called ?classical social theory?, as well as various others Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, G.H. Mead, Talcott Parsons, the Frankfurt School theorists bridging for ward into ?modern social theory', and then another cast list Anthony Giddens, Richard Rorty, Ulrich Beck and various French intellectuals deemed, if a touch misleadingly, exponents of ?postmodern social theory? (see postmodernism: for equivalent periodiza tions, see Lemert, 1993; Callinicos, 1999). The term ?social theory? was clearly in use by the early twentieth century, and it appeared in modern sounding guise when Merton (1957) talked about ?social theory and social structure?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The level of engagement between geograph ers and social theorists has been highly uneven: Marx receiving far more explicit attention than, say, Durkheim and Weber; or the French ?postmodernists? (Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault) more than, say, the Frankfurt ?modernists? (Adorno, Habermas, Horkheimer). Through Giddens (1979), a binary distinction is sometimes detected between the social theories on offer, cleaving a deterministic, structuraL functionaList pole of explanation from a voluntaristic, interpretive hermeneutic pole of understanding, and this distinction has been usefully mapped into critical accounts of human geography?s underlying social theoretic allegiances (e.g. Thrift, 1983). In return, geog raphers have been injecting a spatial sensibility into the heart of social theory, a project that, while initially formulated within the latter by Giddens (1979, 1984), has now announced geography as a ?player? within social theory. The Gregory and Urry (1985) and Benko and Strohmayer (1997) collections indicate how far and quickly this project developed after the late 1970s: contributions from the likes of Soja (1989), Gregory (1994) and Massey (2005) have also been pivotal; and many other geog raphers, both well known and less heralded, have all worked on advancing space in social theory (see geographicaL imagination). The founding of the journal Society and Space in (NEW PARAGRAPH) configured as a meeting place between social theory, human geography and cognate ?spatial? disciplines, embodies how something new, social theoretically driven, was to become (for many) what necessarily lies at the heart of a human geography escaping from disciplinary isolation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Unsurprisingly, the pantheon of social the orists listed above has attracted criticism, in part from those objecting to a too easy eliding of social theory with the ostensible goals and exclusions of Enlightenment: namely, its trumpeting of (certain visions of) progress, reason and scientific protocols, together with the predominantly bourgeois, white, male identities of the thinkers involved. Alternative, anti Enlightenment social theo rists of the period are hence erased from the history (Mestrovic, 1998), as too is the awk wardness that the original social theorists often felt themselves about both the emerging modern world and the intellectual tools available to them. More starkly, the classed, raced and gendered dimensions of social theory, embedded within a Euro Americanism, are now highlighted (Slater, 1992). Lemert (1993, p. 10) dissects the issues here, linking with the ?culture wars? afflicting North America (and to an extent elsewhere in the west too): (NEW PARAGRAPH) There are those who insist that, whatever has changed, America and the world can still be unified around the original Western ideas that Arthur Schlesinger described as ?still a good answer still the best hope? . . . Schlesinger white, male, Harvard, liberal, intellectual, historian is the most persuasive of those in this camp. Against them are others who say, ?Enough. Whatever is useful in these ideas, they don?t speak to me.? Audre Lorde black, feminist, lesbian, poet and social theorist put this opposing view sharply in an often quoted line: ?The master?s tools will never dismantle the master?s house.? Between these two views, there is more than enough controversy to go around. In large part, the controversy is between two different types of social theorists and over how social theory ought to be done. (NEW PARAGRAPH) One result has been the rise of feminist, anti racist and post coLoniaL versions of social theory, perhaps deriving from ?other regions? (Slater, 1992), alert to the fundamen tal structuring of the social by the criss crossing of unequal power relations at a range of spatial scales and in/through a variety of places. A further implication, resonating (if a shade ironically) with the ?postmodern social theorists?, has been to challenge all versions of social theory (old and new) by suggesting that their claims are always too grand, totalizing, inflexible and insensitive to the specificities of (the ?real? histories and geographies of) every day life (cf. grand theory). Consequently, ?social theory is often seen in contemporary intellectual debates as an outdated form of understanding,? which means that, ?[t]hough ... no one has yet announced the end of social theory, someone is bound to get round to it sooner or later? (Callinicos, 1999, p. 1). In effect, such a move has occurred in recent geographical texts, with calls for ?minor the ory? (Katz, 1996) and ?modest theory? (Thrift, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , thereby leaving social theory in an odd place, demonized but still indispensable, if only as the ever present horizon of what needs to be argued against or at least around (the spirit ofPryke, Rose and Whatmore, 2003). In this fractured intellectual landscape, social theory does not disappear: it is not wholly redundant, but it does acquire a curious character as a resource to be quarried for cautious insights into this thing, society, that is now acknowledged much more than ever before as a complicated, provisional, never fully formed, always becoming object. cp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Benko and Strohmayer (1997); Callinicos (1999); Giddens (1979); Slater (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
social well-being
The degree to which a population?s needs and wants are being met. In a well society operated on market principles (see economic integration), people have suf ficient income to meet their basic needs plus additional money to be used for discretionary spending, are treated with equal dignity (see human rights), have reasonable access to all pubLic services, and have their opinions heard and respected (cf. democracy). Levels of social well being vary across groups and places within societies. Measuring variations in those levels was part of the social indicators move ment initiated in the 1960s and taken up by geographers with analyses of territorial social indicators. (See also quaLity of Life.) rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Smith (1979a). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
socialism
Modern socialisms have their ori gin largely in nineteenth century European working class struggles against the predatory, unequal and degrading consequences of industrial capitaLism and twentieth century industrial and agrarian struggles against imperiaLism. Thus, if capitalism is a social and economic system in which ?the ownership and control of real capital are vested in a class of private ??capitalists??, whose economic decisions are taken in response to market influences operating freely under conditions of laissez faire? (Crosland, 1970, p. 33), socialism seeks to change the ways in which capital labour relations are organized and social surplus is distributed (see anarchism; marxism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Historically, the socialist allocation of social surplus has sometimes been organized through collective ownership or by the state (state socialism), and has required planning and control mechanisms to regulate the economy. Since the nineteenth century, some socialists have supported the complete nationalization of the means of production, others have been more interested in worker democracy and decentralized ownership (either in the form of cooperatives or work ers? councils), and yet others have proposed selective nationalization of commanding heights industries in the context of mixed economies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Recent neo conservative and neo liberal theories and policies have greatly weakened the popular legitimacy of socialism in many parts of the global north, but political move ments in the global south (notably in South Africa, Venezuela and Bolivia) have renewed commitments to socialist parties and prin ciples. In countries such as Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy, Argentina and Mexico, socialist movements have emerged deeply suspicious of political projects that seek to seize the state and, instead, have articulated new claims for socialist autonomous political projects in which vanguardist theories of social action have been reworked and inflected with new alignments of socialist theory with anarchist and autonomous practices (what Derrida (NEW PARAGRAPH) called the ?New International? and Hardt and Negri (2004) refer to as the new communism). Partly as a result of these broader movements in socialist practices and stimulated by the consequences of increasing integration into the global economy, reformed socialism has also emerged in former (post sociaList) and current state socialist societies throughout europe and asia, perhaps most notably in China. In Europe, discussions of alternatives to neo LiberaLism correspond with strong debates about the possibility of a social Europe, predicated on protections for social rights, social cohesion and a social market, while in China experiments with mar ket socialism and Deng Xiao Ping?s advice that ?To get rich is glorious? are rapidly transform ing the conditions of social life and environ ment throughout the country. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The impact of socialist thought and practice among geographers has been significant, par ticularly in their analyses of the geographies of social movements and socialist politics. Geographers such as Peter Kropotkin, Elisee Reclus and others were closely engaged in debates about socialism and anarchism, while others such as the English socialist J.F. (?Frank?) Horrabin (1884 1962) worked to construct a socialist geography through the Labour party, the Fabian Society and groups involved in working class education, such as the Plebs League and the National Council of Labour Colleges (Hepple, 1999). In the post war era, particularly with the emergence of strong civil rights, anti colonial, anti war and anti nuclear movements, socialist geographies emerged in a wide range of arenas, generating strong interest in the institutional and (NEW PARAGRAPH) intellectual development of socialist approaches to geography (through the Union of Socialist Geographers (started in 1974), Antipode, the Socialist Specialty Group in the Association of American Geographers, and the International Critical Geography Conference) (see Dear, 1975). At the centre of many of these developments in geography has been the towering figure of David Harvey. Since the 1970s, Harvey has systematically argued for the importance of the geograph ical imagination for understanding capital ism and socialist (Marxist) critique. From the 1990s, he increasingly extended these efforts beyond geography through his writing and speaking engagements with the Socialist Register, New Left Review, Monthly Review and the Brecht Forum, among many others (Castree, 2007). jpi (NEW PARAGRAPH)
society
A widely used term whose meaning remains frustratingly vague, but that descri bes the organization of human beings into forms that transcend the individual person, bringing them into relations with one another that possess some measure of coherence, stability and, indeed, identifiable ?reality'. The one time UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher infamously declared ?there is no such thing as society', offering a populist version of a position in social science known as methodological individualism (Werlen, 1993 [1988], pp. 40 52) that ultimately lodges all social enquiry in the attitudes, goals, decisions and behaviours of individual human actors. Even within critical strands of social THEORY/social science, however, the notion of society remains curiously taken for granted, under theorized and even an embar rassing guest that certain perspectives within the contemporary theoretical landscape vari ous forms of post structuralism, for instance, or actor network theory (ant) and non representational theory (nrt) might wish had never arrived. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Many concepts of society set it apart from economy, politics and culture, such that it (or something called ?the social') becomes a distinctive ?level? for analysis, apparently made of ontologically different stuff, with questions prompted about whether it exists in relations of influencing, co influencing or being influ enced by these other levels. More specifically, notions such as civil society have been devel oped to distinguish a sphere of human concern and activity that cannot be reduced to either the dynamics of economic production or the machinations of the state (Urry, 1981), although debate then rages about whether a ?capital logic? or ?state centric? account of civil society is more appropriate (a question that arguably can only be answered by researching particular forms of [civil] society found in par ticular times and places). Alternatively, many social theories tackling what Giddens (1984) terms ?the constitution of society? discuss how dimensions of the economic, the political and the cultural all bolt together to create society, wherein society appears as the product, articu lation or condensation of all of these dimen sions rather than as something somehow separate (and separable) in its own right. Inevitably, though, different social theories suppose differing balances between these con stitutive dimensions of society, with some leaning towards economic determinism and others towards what might be called political or cultural determinism. Other perspectives, meanwhile, query the very construct of ?soci ety?, regarding it as at best a name for a loose assemblage of objects people, to be sure, but also diverse non human actors (books, bullets, newspapers, telephones, hospitals, streets etc.) (NEW PARAGRAPH) that have to be constantly enlisted by people in practices that produce, sustain and render with some semblance of ?reality' a patterning that can be understood and re presented (to others) as ?society?. Although proceeding with different (post structuralist and practice attuned) theoretical tools, Thrift (1996, pp. 30 5) draws out the implications of Copjec's (1994, pp. 8 9) psychoanalytically informed insistence that ?society never stops realising itself, that it continues to be formed over time', a claim rebounding in various ways on the static ontologies and epistemologies inherent to many conceptualizations of society. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Thrift (1996, p. 56), reflecting upon his early borrowings from Giddens' social ontology, still finds things here to praise but concludes that ?one cannot fill out all of a society in the way Giddens sometimes . . . seems intent on doing?. This being said, through his struc turation theory, Giddens has arguably done more than most to dissect the different elem ents that many writers, geographers included, continue to take as indispensable for any account of something called ?society?. The elements here include: the agency of individuals, socialized into certain habits of thought, conduct and action, if always possessing the capacity to think and do things differently; insti tutions, entailing formal entities with written constitutions, regulations, memberships and so on (e.g. schools, firms, clubs) as well as informal but enduring entities such as family and religion, reproduced every day by the repeated practices of many individuals (a notion of sociaL reproduction); systems, or regularized patterns of interaction between individuals often but not always functioning to keep institutions going (and in some voca bularies, ?institution? and ?system? become interchangeable); and structures, or ?deeper? structural forces underpinning systems, insti tutions and (the being and doing of) individ uals, often understood in terms of unequal relations ofpower, status and influence travers ing axes of social difference (notably of cLass, ethnicity and gender, but also the likes of ageing, sexuaLity and disabiLity). In such Giddensian theorizing, the focus is on how society arises is ?instantiated? in the coming together of agency and structure, made real by actions mediated through institutions and sys tems, and there is also a recognition that time space relations are crucial to the precise manner in which this coming together occurs (Giddens, 1979, 1984; Gregory, 1981, 1994; Thrift, 1983; Werlen, 1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH) There has long been a relationship between geographical scholarship and notions of soci ety, and one simple point is that geographers have often had a sharper sense than others of the exact worldly spaces to which different picturings of society commonly attach. On one reading, this means nothing more than recognizing that accounts of society are nor mally referencing particular territorial units (Pain, Burke, Fuller and Gough, 2001, p. 3): perhaps (nation ) states with known bouNd aries (i.e. ?Bulgarian society?); perhaps com monly understood regions large or small (i.e. ?Mediterranean society? or ?Appalachian society?); or perhaps still smaller, more local areas (i.e. London?s ?West End society?). The implication of moving down spatial scaLes, as here, is to reveal that dangers accompany any identification of one society (with allegedly distinctive features) occupying or filling a large spatial extent, and that closer geographical scrutiny will always require a more nuanced portrayal of the different societies there present. On another reading, geographers have been prominent in acknowledging that urban and rural LocaLities possess different sorts of societies, with the classic distinction drawn by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies between Gemeinschaft (close knit society or community, based on repeated face to face contacts) and Gesellschaft (weakly bound society, based on impersonal, contr actual relations) mapped on to, respectively, the countryside and the city. Such a mapping has to be treated with caution, however, and many practitioners of urban and ruraL geography would insist that any given urban or rural area, wherever located, is unlikely to possess just one, homogeneous, internally consistent society. Crucially, what emerges is the appreciation that society is not a singular entity, undifferentiated from one place to the next, and that scholars not just geographers, but all informed intellectuals should think in terms of many societies in the plural. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In works of geography, it is possible to find countless casual references to ?society?. As one instance, Kariel and Kariel (1972) define sociaL geography as the ?study of the spatial aspects of characteristics of the population, social organisation, and elements of culture and society? (p. v, footnote; emphasis added), but never define nor explain what society means for the remainder of their text (which deals with the spatial patterns displayed by a range of phenomena such as food, buildings, language and religion). The lack of a definition of society is also true of more recent social geography texts (Valentine, 2001; Panelli, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , although the explicit concern here for social groupings, categories and relations means that the reader arguably emerges with a greater sense of what the social entails. One current text does provide a definition, how ever, noting how: ? ??Society?? denotes the ties that people have with others. . . . Societies are usually perceived as having a distinct identity and a system of meanings and values which members share?, (Pain, Burke, Fuller and Gough, 2001, p. 3, box 1.3). It is possible to find geographers leaning towards all of the theoretical positions laid out above and more, but many have been drawn to the loosely Giddensian formulation, complete with its alertness to time space relations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Finally, it is interesting to reflect upon how different geographical traditions have worked, unwittingly or more knowingly, with different conceptions of society, and in the process started to theorize in different ways the rela tions between society (the social) and space (the spatial). Tracing such differences across the twentieth century history of human or, more narrowly, social geography is the task that Philo and Soderstrom (2004, esp. p. 106) set themselves, probing ?the work ofgeograph ers trying to make sense of ??the social?? by their own means, including their own bricolage of elements culled . . . from a diversity of sources in social theory, other disciplines and popular discourses?. Environmental, regionaL, spatial, radicaL, humanistic and (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?culturally turned? geographies are all exam ined, drawing from Anglophone and French literatures, and questions are asked about how and why particular scholars on particular occa sions have chosen to talk about society or the social, and with what consequences for the varieties of human geography practised. More overtly, it is now possible to identify diverse strands within human geography over the past quarter century that have been expli cit in seeking to theorize the relations between society and space. Following Soja?s (1980) statement of the ?socio spatial dialectic?, a range of contributions, at first chiefly based in a Marxian tradition, but subsequently enriched by insights from feminism, post colonial the ory, cultural theory, psychoanalysis and else where, have illuminated the problematic of simultaneously articulating ?the societal con struction of space? and ?the spatial construc tion of society? (see feminist geographies; marxist geographies; post coLoniaLism; psychoanaLytic theory). In so doing, the very referents ?society? and ?space? have been subjected to intense questioning, in some literatures being deconstructed to the point at which the terms appear to be under per manent erasure; but they will persist, their names will be invoked, and the problematic of ?society space? will continue as an unavoid able challenge to generations of geographical theorists to come. cp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Giddens (1984); Philo and Soderstrom (2004); Smith (2005c). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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