Contemporary Social Theory

Key themes in contemporary social theory
Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction
is organized around a number
of key themes, to which we will turn at various points throughout the
chapters that follow. The first key theme is that of 
the relation between the
individual and society
, or between human action and social structure. This
is perhaps one of the most vexing issues in social theory. Most of the social
theorists we examine throughout this book, from Theodor Adorno, Hebert
Marcuse, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to a variety of contemporary
authors including Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, Julia Kristeva and Judith
Butler, resolve this issue either by emphasizing the agency of individuals or
the power of social structures – or, indeed, through a conceptual combi-
nation of these opposing orientations. What side you take in this debate
depends on whether or not you favour the idea of individuals-first, or society-
first, in understanding how practical social life comes about and is sustained
throughout history. For those sympathetic to the idea that it is the agency
of individuals that creates patterned social life, the systematic study of the
reasons, motives, beliefs, emotions and desires of people is regarded as
the most appropriate way in which to develop critical social analysis.
Understanding what motivates individual human interests, and particularly
the complex ways in which individual actions lead over time to collective
social habits, is essential from this standpoint if social theory is to engage
adequately with the society in which we live and the fundamental conflicts
in values, ethics and morality of our own time. A response that focuses on
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they are not unimportant. They may seem inconsequential just
because they come to us so naturally. But think of what life would
be like if we regularly encountered people who were sociologically
incompetent.
What Lemert underwrites is the very fact that social theory is implicated
in how we live in the present. The present for us is always filtered through
certain social-theoretical assumptions, precepts and ideas – however basic
or elementary – of the social realities all around us. Thus we cannot choose
to live non-theoretically: social life, its regulations, orderings and struc-
turings, is quite as much theoretical as practical.
How useful do you find the idea that all social actors possess ‘practical
sociologies’? How would you describe your own ‘basic social theory’ on
life?

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social structure, by contrast, refuses the emphasis on the agency of indi-
viduals and instead concentrates on the institutions or organizations of
modern societies as the key ingredient of social explanation. On this
approach, it is mistaken to believe that people are the source of the common
will. Rather, it is social institutions – from the impact of families, schools and
prisons to capitalist organizations and large-scale bureaucracies – which
ensure that individual practices conform to collective ones. One reason why
society-first explanations of social life hold great appeal is that we live in a
society where a great many people have to undertake activities they would
prefer not to do – such as holding down a dull job, tidying up one’s bedroom
when angry parents insist, or looking after a sick relative. Understanding
how structures determine our individual actions – in the above cases, as a
result of the powerful structures of economics, socialization or morality –
is vital for grasping how power operates and unequal social relations are
sustained in modern societies.
Whenever one is pondering the dynamics of social relations, it is always
useful to raise the question of the relation between agency and structure.
Is society reproduced by the impersonal structures of politics, culture and
the economy as these forces press down on the activities of individual
agents, or is it rather the variety of choices and decisions which individuals
make in their daily lives that make up social structures? Throughout this
book, we will consider various judgements of social theorists on this issue
– from those critical of the individualistic bent of a soft subjectivism to those
wary of a steel-hard objectivism. My own view is that both individuals-first
and society-first standpoints have their uses, and much simply depends on
the social practices under examination as to which is the most appropriate
approach to adopt. If one wishes to understand an individual’s response to
a particular film, absorption in popular music or love of a book, then it no
doubt makes sense to consider those theoretical approaches – from psycho-
analysis to post-feminism to postmodernism – that adopt strands of the
individuals-first case. If one wishes to study, by contrast, political voting
systems or the economic trading patterns of multinational companies, then
an emphasis on how structures shape activities is understandable enough.
As will become evident throughout this book, this contrast as I have drawn
it here is overstated – and certainly part of the current debate in social theory
is that social theory cannot adequately engage with social life by focusing
only on structures (which thereby liquidates individuals) or only on indi-
vidual agents (which thereby downgrades the impact of social systems upon
individuals). One way out of this impasse, as examined in Chapter 5 when
we turn to the contributions of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, is to
blend the two opposing approaches – examining how action is structured
in everyday life, and how the structured features of action are thus repro-
duced in modern societies. 
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A second, related theme of the book is that of 
the degree of consensus
or conflict in modern societies
. This concerns the debate in social theory
about the hold of values or norms which are dominant in society. Such
values or norms, according to some social theorists, may effectively unify
societies – such that individuals come to agree with one another in either
open or tacit ways. From the import of early socialization in the family and
at school through to the propagation of dominant values or norms in
communications media, the idea is that the reproduction and legitimacy of
the social order is sustained through such mechanisms for the transmission
of unifying beliefs and values. To say that society is a successfully achieved
unity is to say that we live in a world where people are effectively drawn into
the bigger social forces surrounding them, such that individuals come to
imbibe the expectations others have of them and the norms that cultural
life lays down for them. There is no need for students of society to assume,
however, that such an internalization of the dominant values of society
involves the full consciousness or understanding of human agents. After all,
many people’s experience of the world, especially today, is that of increasing
social complexity, cultural diversity and political conflict. Accordingly,
sensitivity to the diversity of society and the subtleties of culture is necessary
to ensure that social theory does not over-simplify the mixed, ambiguous
experience individuals have of their own identities and of the wider social
world.
In examining issues surrounding consensus and conflict in modern
societies, we will explore various social theories throughout this book in
terms of what they have to say about the reproduction of social formations
and the transformation of culture. Some analysts of social theory argue that
the unity of society is to be sought in the economic contradictions of
capitalism; members of the Frankfurt School, for example, discern in the
blending of rationalization and repression that operates in modern culture
a unity they term the ‘totally administered society’. Some analysts, by
contrast, contend that the unity of society is to be found elsewhere. For some
social theorists, we cannot conceive of social relations apart from how
people talk about them, which means focusing on language. In this linguistic
turn of social theory, which we will focus on in detail in Chapters 3 and 4, how
we see the world around us and ourselves is constituted in and through
language. On this view, it is language which unifies society – even if, as we
will see, this ‘unity’ is illusory to its roots. Still other critics question whether
social order presupposes some kind of consensus. This questioning of the
so-called unity of society takes a number of forms. One approach is to
suggest that social reproduction involves less an explicit than a practical
consensus: in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, for example, the unity of society
arises from a ‘cultural unconscious’ which gears individual practices to
objective social conditions. Another approach underscores the dispersal or
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fragmentation of social formations. Such a fragmentation of beliefs, values
and norms, it is argued, serves not to produce opposition to the current
social order but the reproduction of society as a dispersed, postmodern or
liquid orchestration. 
A third theme is that of 
change
, or social transformation. We live today 
in an era of enormous social change. Globalization, new information tech-
nologies, the seemingly unstoppable growth of consumerism, the techno-
industrialization of war: such transformations are taking place not only 
in modern institutions but also within the very textures of everyday life.
Contemporary social theory has been concerned to assess the pace of
change occurring in our lives today, as well as to critique the large-scale
institutional forces driving such social change. Some theorists of modern
societies place an emphasis on capitalist transformations in explaining 
the emergence of a new – post-industrial, post-Fordist or postmodern –
economy. The shift away from industrial production (of factories and large-
scale assembly plants) in the West during the 1980s and 1990s, and the
subsequent outsourcing of manufacture to low-wage economies in develop-
ing countries, is considered key by many social theorists to transformations
in the whole capitalist system. For other social theorists, the economy has
now become effectively cultural – in the sense that industrial manufacture
has been traded throughout the West for a wholesale move into the service,
communications and finance sectors. Still other critics see more cultural 
or institutional factors as central to explaining the recent changes. The
establishment of commercial satellites above the Earth during the 1970s,
facilitating in time the spread of instantaneous communication through, 
say, the Internet, is at the heart of the communications revolution that has
redefined our age. Or, the crisis in scientific or expert knowledge during the
final decades of the twentieth century has been viewed by some as heralding
new cultural attitudes – loosely called ‘postmodern’ – towards society,
culture, the arts and lifestyle issues. In all of these standpoints, change or
social transformation is essential, and this theme will provide a framework
for the review of social theories offered within the chapters that follow. 
A fourth theme concerns 
gender issues
. Social theory has long engaged
with feminism, particularly the feminist argument that women’s personal
troubles should in fact be seen as broader social and political troubles that 
arise from living in male-dominated societies. Classical social theory by no
means sidelined issues of gender and sexuality, although much of the
analysis it offered was woefully insufficient. Contemporary social theory, by
contrast, has directly engaged with the social, political, psychological and
cultural inequalities between men and women – and in many cases has
played a direct role in the women’s movement and its search for social
justice. Chapter 7 specifically explores developments in both feminist and
post-feminist social theory, concentrating in particular on the gendering of
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feelings, desires, behaviours and social roles in modern societies. Nancy
Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Flax, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and
Judith Butler are arguably the central voices in feminist and post-feminist
social theory that have brought to prominence the complex ways in which
sexual desire is entangled with broader questions of pleasure and power,
with the politics of the body, and the reproduction of individual and collective
identities. Issues of gender and sexuality, as feminist and post-feminist
analysis highlights, must be urgently engaged with in social theory, and
accordingly the chapters that follow return regularly to this most vital matter.
A final theme concerns the relation between the 
social
and the 
emotional
,
between our public and private worlds. Contemporary social theory power-
fully questions many of the oppositions in both mainstream social science
and broader public life governing the relationship between public and private
life. Instead of viewing, say, tumultuous political events or the forces of
globalization as outside happenings in society, there are various traditions
of social theory which critically examine the complex ways in which social,
cultural and political processes come to be anchored, regulated and lived at
the levels of identity and emotional life. In fact, the ways in which public life
organizes the private domain, while in turn being reshaped by the emotional
responses and reactions of individuals, has bulked large in many traditions
of recent social theory. Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Lacan,
Roland Barthes, Anthony Giddens, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Judith
Butler have all explored, in very different ways, the meshing of the social and
the erotic, the symbolic and the unconscious, cultural conditions and lived
experience, the global and the local. As a result, questions of identity, desire
and emotion have certainly emerged as fundamental concerns in social
theory. Consequently, throughout this book, I emphasize that to critically
study a social situation means analysing it at both the cultural and personal
levels – looking at how the public and private interlock.
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