ABSTRACT
This book has addressed in different ways the question of the appropriateness of sociological theory for understanding globalization and everyday life. Beck has argued that sociology clings to ‘zombie categories’ such as nation, class and gender that are dead (that is, removed of content and relevance) but are still living. They embody nineteenth-century horizons of experience, horizons of the first modernity that still mould our perceptions and are blinding us to the real experience and ambiguities of the second modernity (Beck 2000b). Further, his claim that there has been a ‘democratization of risk’ and consequent obsolescence of traditional sociological concerns with structure is one of fundamental claims of risk society thesis. This underpins the claim shared by many writers discussed here that globalization poses a challenge to conventional sociology because it entails the fragmentation of society and state systems, an implosion of boundaries and a new permeability of borders, such that the previously established divisions of nature/society, bodies/
culture no longer apply. Indeed the distinctiveness of the social itself is called into question, and Law (1994) and Urry (2003: 106) argue that social ordering is ‘not simply social’ but is ‘materially heterogeneous’ combining ‘talk, bodies, texts, machines, architectures’. This book takes issue with these views. In relation to Urry and Law, one may ask which among talk, bodies, texts, machines and architectures are not ‘social’? All these activities (talk, bodies, texts, machines and architecture) are ordered, organized, placed within sometimes stable and sometimes contested frames of meaning, become objects of discourse and the resources around which sociality can occur. Sociology concerns itself with the forms of sociality that constitute the global as an object of reflection and intervention and maintain the substratum of global relations. Goffman (1983) argued that the ‘human condition is that for most of us, our daily life is spent in the immediate presence of others’ so all our ‘doings’ will be socially situated. To this we might add that this is true too in global interactions through the medium of digital communications technologies as I argued in Chapter 4. Further, the concepts of structure, class, bureaucracy, gender, ethnicity, power and commodity are crucial for understanding the ways globalization is embodied in locales, as the analysis of global inequalities in Chapter 5 attempted to demonstrate. Nonetheless, the collapse of traditional social forms and divisions engendered by globalization (combined with the appearance of new ones) means that the experience of fluidity, fragmentation and, above all perhaps, permeability has multiple effects on patterns of everyday lives. Among these the dislocations of living every day with new real and imaginary terrors has changed perceptions of living in the global. It is to these issues that this chapter turns.
