Contemporary Social Theory

What is society?
One answer to the question ‘to which society does Natalie belong?’ derives
from common sense: she belongs where she lives, her homeland, her
nation. In social theory as in everyday life, this answer emphasizes that social
life must be constructed within the province of the nation and its assured
rights of belonging – the entitlements and duties of citizenship. On this view,
Natalie is an American citizen, one who now lives and works in the UK, and
who holds a permanent British visa. Talk about the connections between
nations and societies in the social sciences tends to be fairly general, and yet
it remains the case that nations have been regarded as providing societal
homes for a remarkably long historical period. Nations of course have many
different powers and forms at any given historical time, but one reason why
they might no longer provide a good enough societal home in our age of
intensive globalization is that people are 
on the move
as never before. Just
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think of Natalie’s existence. As already noted, she grew up in Brooklyn and
now lives in the UK, but she spends part of every week in France, and many
weekends in Finland. In which national homeland that we call ‘society’ does
she 
belong
? Still further, we might also wonder, how it is that her multi-
dimensional experience of nations and the world actually affects both her
experience and conception of society.
Perhaps a better answer to the question then of ‘to which society does
Natalie belong?’ is that of the 
globe
. Globalization is an answer to this
question when, like Natalie, we universalize the daily operations of our lives,
compressing the dimensions of time and space through new technological
innovations in such fields as travel and communications. On this view,
Natalie emerges as a ‘global citizen’, one with a cosmopolitan appreciation
of the complexities of living in an age of transnationalism, and thus becomes
defined as 
one at home
wherever she happens to find herself. A citizen, in
other words, of global society. But whether it is meaningful to speak of global
society in the same manner in which we might speak of national society is
a contentious issue – as we will see in the discussion of globalization in
Chapter 10. For while there is a very specific sense in which we might say that
Natalie is a citizen of America or the UK, in what sense is she actually a
citizen of the globe? To define society in purely national terms is to circum-
scribe its operations in terms of, say, territories, boundaries and geopolitical
spaces. To define society beyond the terrain of the nation seems to open
the textures of human belonging and association in ways which appear to
have no limit, pushing the boundaries of social and political understanding
to the edge. In one sense this may be described as a core and intractable
problem of our time – a problem that preoccupies social theorists, but one
that also arises at the centre of public political debate today.
These considerations bring us to the heart of a core issue in contem-
porary social theory – namely, the nature of society. There is, to date, no
single adequate definition of society in social theory – and indeed one
objective of this book is to trace the various definitions of society that have
emerged in social theory during the course of the twentieth century and into
the early 2000s. To indicate the range of meanings attached to the notion
of society that we will encounter throughout this book, consider the
following random list of definitions currently emanating in social theory:
1 the institutionalization of unequal power relations and domination;
2 the conjuncture of reason and repression;
3 the structuring of social institutions and social interactions;
4 the process whereby linguistic structures are converted to social
regulation;
5 the social forms in which signifiers and signifieds are interwoven;
6 forms of thought structured by social differences;
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7 ideas and ideologies governed by patriarchy, promoting unequal rela-
tions between the sexes;
8 the gendered process of encoding sexual signs and human bodies in
social life;
9 systematically distorted communication;
10 reflexively orientated social practices;
11 liquidity;
12 the networks or flows in which self-reflective social actors organize their
daily activities;
13 the globalization of the social, involving an interweaving of global and
local happenings.
There are a number of points that might be noted about this list of defi-
nitions. For one thing, some of these definitions view society positively,
others negatively, and some are clearly ambiguous. The more positive of
these definitions see society as an indispensable medium for the production
of social relations, emphasizing the benefits of interpersonal relationships
and the potential gains from intercultural communication. In this sense
society is viewed in a largely technical way, as a process that facilitates not
only the constitution of identity and elaboration of forms of thought but also
the reproduction across time and across space of social interactions (think,
for example, of family life across generations) and of social institutions
(think, for example, of schools, hospitals or prisons). Some of these defini-
tions, however, view society pejoratively – as the inculcation of false beliefs
or ideology – and thus emphasize the role of economic and political forces
in various forms of human exploitation. 
Another point is that this list of definitions carries a range of impli-
cations for understanding the world in which we live: not just in academic
terms but for everyday life. Some formulations identify profoundly trans-
formative processes, such that the very existence of a thing known as
‘society’ appears as either an illusion or an unnecessary hangover from
classical social theory. This is a fertile line of social enquiry which emerges
out of structuralist social theory, in which society is recast as a language or
linguistic process, and runs through our own time to postmodernism and
other forms of critical social thought. A number of conceptual approaches
in this respect, from post-structuralism and postmodernism to globalization
studies, suggest that the social sciences must radically rethink its subject
matter – as a world of ‘bounded’ societies no longer exists, if indeed it ever
once did. Other traditions of thought are much more cautious. Some argue
that the so-called ‘openness’ of the social has been exaggerated: society,
according to some critics, is alive and well, and it is only in the writings of
obscure social theorists (particularly the French) that the notion recedes into
the shadows.
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