ABSTRACT
Accounts of ‘industrialization’ and of ‘globalization’ were responses to unprecedented social novelty and both attempted – in very divergent ways – to answer the question of the day: ‘What’s going on and where is it leading?’ The biggest difference between them is, that 250 years later, there are no redoubts providing shelter from the brunt of change even in the less developed parts of theworld. Today, there is general unease that things are in a mess, such a complicated mess that critique has quavered and utopianism withered. In their place are facile and conflicting proclamations of New Ages by social scientists. If ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’ (T. S. Eliot), perhaps the most unbearable aspect is the longdrawn-out state of ‘transition’, without any assurance of eventual ‘transformation’. This is not a reassuring chapter, but rather an attempt to disentangle the generative
mechanisms at work, their interplay and their inevitable interweaving with contingency in the open system that is global society. That the present state of affairs is indeed complicated does notmean that it becomesmore comprehensible or tractable by borrowing ‘complexity theory’ from the natural sciences (any more than the ‘organic analogy’ helped to explain the lineaments of industrial society). Nor can its complications be understood or explained by sweeping them under a portmanteau term such as ‘detraditionalization’, which falsely homogenises past diversity by calling it all ‘tradition’ (seeHeelas et al. 1996). Nor can it be explained by grasping at some overt empirical patterning of events and holding one factor responsible for it, be that Structural (global capitalism), Agential (institutionalized individualism) or Cultural (information society) (Archer 2013a). It is only by drawing upon a stratified social ontology and advancing generative
mechanisms that causality is no longer wrongly seen as an empirical relation between events, even a complicated series of events. Instead, when Critical Realism ‘speaks of causal mechanisms, then it speaks of what makes things work. Generally, that involves a reference to some kind of causal structure’ (Porpora 2011). Gorski offers a succinct definition of generative mechanisms ‘as emergent causal powers of related entities within a system’ (2009). In turn, ‘related entities’ are defined as ‘entities and relationships that are necessary to the recurring effects of the mechanism in question’.1
