Sociologists in a Global Age

SOCIOLOGISTS IN A GLOBAL AGE

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Sociologists in a Global Age Biographical Perspectives

Edited by MATHIEU DEFLEM University of South Carolina, USA

© Mathieu Deflem 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Mathieu Deflem has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sociologists in a global age : biographical perspectives 1. Sociologists - Biography I. Deflem, Mathieu 301'.0922 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sociologists in a global age : biographical perspectives / edited by Mathieu Deflem. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN: 978-0-7546-7037-7 1. Sociologists--Biography. 2. Sociology. I. Deflem, Mathieu. HM478.S66 2007 301.092'2--dc22 [B] 2006033547 ISBN 978-0-7546-7037-7

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents About the Editor List of Contributors Introduction: Sociologists in a Global Age Mathieu Deflem

vii viii 1

PART 1

TRAVERSING WORLDS

1

Unfinished Work: The Career of a European Sociologist Martin Albrow

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Going Global Karin Knorr Cetina

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Between Worlds: Marginalities, Comparisons, Sociology Joachim J. Savelsberg

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2 3 4

The Urban is Political: My Journey from the Midwestern Suburbs to the World’s Largest Cities (and Back?) Diane E. Davis 65

5

Going Digging in the Shadow of Master Categories Saskia Sassen

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PART 2

EVOLVING WORKS

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Sociology—Passion and Profession Richard Münch

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The Making and Remaking of a Sociologist Ewa Morawska

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A Serendipitous Career Leon Grunberg

131

7 8 9

Towards a More Democratic and Just Society: An Experience of a Sociologist from Korea Hyun-Chin Lim 145

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Building a Relational Theory of Society: A Sociological Journey Pierpaolo Donati 159

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For a Better Quality of Life Ruut Veenhoven

175

PART 3

(TRANS)FORMING SELVES

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Coming in from the Cold: My Road from Socialism to Sociology Piotr Sztompka 189

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My Sociological Practices and Commuting Identities Eiko Ikegami

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A Journey into Sociology Horst J. Helle

219

My Efforts to Explore the Secret of Chinese Development Tiankui Jing

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Have Sociological Passport, Will Travel Edward A. Tiryakian

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14 15 16 Index

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About the Editor Mathieu Deflem is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina and previously held positions at Kenyon College and Purdue University, all in the United States. Raised in Belgium, he studied sociology and anthropology at the Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, Belgium, and the University of Hull, England, before obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, U.S.A. His research interests include sociology of law, social control, comparative-historical sociology, and theory. He is the author of Policing World Society (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the editor of Sociological Theory and Criminological Research (Elsevier, 2006), Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism (Elsevier, 2004), and Habermas, Modernity and Law (Sage, 1996).

List of Contributors Martin Albrow, Visiting Fellow, Centre for Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics, U.K: London School of Economics, c/o 4 Lawrie Park Crescent, Sydenham, London SE26 6HD, U.K., [email protected]. Karin Knorr Cetina, Professor, Department of Sociology, Universität Konstanz, Germany, and Visiting Professor, Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Chicago, U.S.A: Universität Konstanz, Department of Sociology, Box D-46, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany, [email protected]. Diane E. Davis, Professor of Political Sociology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Building 9-637, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A., [email protected]. Mathieu Deflem, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, U.S.A: University of South Carolina, Department of Sociology, Sloan College 217, Columbia, SC 29208, U.S.A., [email protected]. Pierpaolo Donati, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Bologna, Italy: Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Sociologia, Strada Maggiore 45, 40125 Bologna, Italy, [email protected]. Leon Grunberg, Professor of Sociology, Department of Comparative Sociology, University of Puget Sound, U.K: University of Puget Sound, Department of Comparative Sociology, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma WA 98416, U.S.A., [email protected]. Horst J. Helle, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Institute for Sociology, LudwigMaximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Institut für Soziologie, Konradstrasse 6, 80801 München, Germany, horst.hellle@ soziologie.uni-muenchen.de. Eiko Ikegami, Professor, Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York, U.S.A: The New School for Social Research, Department of Sociology, Room 320, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, U.S.A., [email protected]. Tiankui Jing, Professor and Senior Researcher, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Sociology, Beijing, China, [email protected].

List of Contributors

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Hyun-Chin Lim, Dean of Faculty of Liberal Education and Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Seoul National University, South Korea: Faculty of Liberal Education, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Republic of Korea, [email protected]. Ewa Morawska, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, U.K: University of Essex, Department of Sociology, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, U.K., [email protected]. Richard Münch, Chair of Sociology II, Department of Sociology, Otto-FriedrichUniversität Bamberg, Germany: Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Lehrstuhl für Soziologie II, Lichtenhaidestrasse 11, D-96045 Bamberg, Germany, richard. [email protected]. Saskia Sassen, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, U.S.A: University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A., [email protected]. Joachim J. Savelsberg, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, U.S.A: University of Minnesota, Department of Sociology, 909 Social Sciences, Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A., [email protected]. Piotr Sztompka, Professor, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Poland: Jagiellonian University, Institute of Sociology, ul. Grodzka 52, 31-044 Kraków, Poland, [email protected]. Edward A. Tiryakian, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, Duke University, U.S.A: Duke University, Department of Sociology, Box 90088, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0088, U.S.A., [email protected]. Ruut Veenhoven, Professor of Social Conditions for Human Happiness, Department of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Erasmus University Rotterdam, Department of Social Sciences, POB 1738, NL-3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected].

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Introduction

Sociologists in a Global Age Mathieu Deflem

This anthology brings together a diverse group of well-known sociologists from various parts of the world to share their personal experiences in becoming exemplary practitioners of our discipline. The collected autobiographical essays emphasize the authors’ respective journeys into the discipline and profession of sociology in special relation to the intellectual and social-political contexts in which their works have matured and in which they will surely continue to flourish. Edited books containing biographical representations of sociologists have been more readily available in recent years. But besides offering reflections from contemporary representatives of the discipline, the present volume has a unique approach in not only bringing together sociologists with distinctly international and/or comparative perspectives in terms of their research and other work experiences, but also in gathering sociologists from across different parts of the world. As such, the thematic orientation and personal scope of this book are, in however modest a sense, global and, hopefully, will also be able to appeal to a global audience of readers. When planning this book, it was conceived as an attempt to bring together scholars from various countries to talk about their personal journeys in becoming sociological professionals. What was perhaps most striking about working to complete this work

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was the ease with which sociologists from across the globe could be identified and contacted. Sociology has become an activity that is more readily than ever global in nature. The global dynamics of contemporary sociology are less a function of any specific theoretical or thematic focus of one’s work, but instead characterize the organization of sociology itself. Not only could many sociologists across the world readily be found, most all of them were likewise enthusiastic about writing for this book. Besides the usual constraints of time and energy, the willingness to contribute to this book is different from most scholarly activities in writing as the contributions contain a distinctly personal side. This willingness to reveal aspects of one’s self may relate to the present-day more readily recognized insight that work and life need not, and perhaps cannot, be as readily distinguished as some decades ago. A few words on the use of auto/biography in the development of sociology may clarify the evolving role of the self in sociological work and will also clarify how this book situates itself relative to the relevant literature and what some of the specific ambitions are that this book hopes to accomplish. Sociology and Auto/Biography Reviewing the literature on auto/biography and sociology, it is clear that scholars of society have always been well aware of the rather unique place that one’s biography plays in the development of one’s work, particularly because the theme of analysis pertains so closely to the human condition. As practitioners of the discipline, we are fond to discover and talk about the details and trajectories of the lives of our discipline’s founders and major representatives. Biographical materials can minimally serve to introduce a body of thought, but are sometimes also intertwined with the exposé of an oeuvre. Biographies exist on some of sociology’s major classic scholars, such as Emile Durkheim (Lukes 1985), Max Weber (Marianne Weber 1926), Ferdinand Tönnies (Carstens 2005), Karl Mannheim (Woldring 1987), Jane Addams (Deegan 1988), Robert E. Park (Raushenbush 1979), and Alfred Schutz (Wagner 1983), as well as contemporary classics, such as C. Wright Mills (Horowitz 1983) and Talcott Parsons (Gerhardt 2002). Occasionally we are fortunate to have available for our reading and learning sociologists’ autobiographies and other primary sources of personal experience, such as the book-length autobiographies of Pitirim Sorokin (1963), W.E.B. DuBois (1968), Robert M. MacIver (1968), George C. Homans (1984), Irving Louis Horowitz (1990), Charles H. Page (1982), Leo Lowenthal (1987), William Foote Whyte (1995), and Edward Shils (2006). The biographical and autobiographical excursions of sociologists—especially when they concern some of our discipline’s most cherished representatives—have intrinsic merit to our understanding of an important body of work but will also satisfy our all-too-human curiosity, particularly in an age of ubiquitous surveillance and routinized self-revelation, to know more of the other. Moreover, although sociologists and other scholars have not always been as eager to embrace the autobiographical form, there has over the years developed a growing sense that revelations of the self also contribute to the understanding of one’s work. As such, autobiography fulfils an intellectual role intimately tied to professional goals. More broadly, sociological

Introduction

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autobiographies also tell stories of the trajectories of the discipline and profession of sociology and the sociologist’s relation to the evolving field of sociology and the surrounding social order (Cain 2005; Killian 1994; Mills 2000). Most autobiographical sketches by sociologists are available not as book-length treaties but as shorter essay-style contributions. Even a relatively modest delving into the relevant literature reveals that there are many such autobiographical accounts available. In the English language alone, the number of sociologists reflecting on their lives and works runs easily in the multiple hundreds. Many of these autobiographies either form part of an author’s book or collected works (e.g., Merton 1996) or are available in sociological journals, especially those that focus on the sociological profession and the history of sociology. For instance, The American Sociologist, the journal that was founded by Talcott Parsons to be devoted to the sociological profession, regularly incorporates autobiographical contributions (e.g., Berger 2004; Hollander 2001), as do other sociological journals (e.g., Blau 1995; Coser 1993; Marshall 1973). For present purposes most interesting are those essay-length autobiographies that have appeared as part of an edited volume aimed at presenting a coherent set of sociological portrayals of selves. As this volume fits among these collections, a brief review may illuminate the scope and aims of such books as well as situate our own contribution. Reflecting the nation-bound contexts of our respective sociological careers and their cultural-linguistic implications, this review is restricted to books that appeared in the English language. A slant towards predominantly American publications should be additionally noted, as the reader will understand this Introduction to be framed in the context of an American career with European ancestry. To my knowledge the oldest collection of autobiographical essays of sociologists is Sociological Self-Images, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz in 1969. The book includes autobiographical sketches by more than a dozen well-known American sociologists (George C. Homans, Llewellyn Gross, James Short, Seymour M. Lipset, Wendell Bell, and others). The set-up of the book as a whole is relatively conventional in presenting not primarily a collection of personal life histories and reflections of self, but an overview of the authors’ respective theoretical perspectives and research activities as well as their intellectual influences. Yet, although the aim of this book is thus primarily methodological, it does in many instances also reveal the subjective and personal sides of the sociological endeavor, in a manner, moreover, that was particularly meant to be useful to students of our discipline. Not until the late 1980s would the next autobiographical collection of sociologists appear when Matilda White Riley edited the volume Sociological Lives as part of the American Sociological Association Presidential Series (Riley 1988). By 1988, female sociologists and other disciplinarians from more diverse backgrounds were no longer excluded. On the contrary, a deliberate effort was made for the represented scholars to represent a more diverse group. Amongst others, Alice Rossi, Bernice Neugarten, William Julius Wilson, and Theda Skocpol contributed their respective stories to make for a rich mélange of sociological lives. The collection was also focused in offering stories that reveal the interplay between sociologists’ lives and their surrounding social structures.

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Arguably the most ambitious and best collection to date, Authors of Their Own Lives, edited by the late Bennett M. Berger (1990), brings together autobiographical insights from no less than twenty sociologists, including leading scholars, such as James Coleman and David Riesman; iconoclasts and scholars on the move, such as Andrew Greeley, Gary T. Marx, and Donald Cressey; as well as women and émigrés, including Jessie Bernard, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Guenther Roth, and Reinhard Bendix. The advantage of this collection is that the sociological authors are let loose to tell their own stories free of any restriction of a guiding orientation beyond the attempt to bring out the relevant personal sides of the authors in relation to the development of their work. This collection is as such clearly a very modern work, appearing around the time when questions of identity and self had been marching on to the forefront of sociological inquiry, sometimes even with the aim of debunking the objectivity and universality of academic thought altogether. While such a hyperrelativizing stance will surely not have been shared among all the book’s authors and its readers, it only behooves a sociological analysis mindful of structural constraints and opportunities to observe the correlation. The resolute focus towards identity-oriented personal narratives marks the more recently published collections of sociologists’ autobiographies. Not surprisingly, two volumes published in the mid-1990s focused specifically on the lives of female and feminist sociologists (Goetting and Fenstermaker 1995; Laslett and Thorne 1997). Unlike some of the prior collections, these volumes are very explicit in focusing on autobiography in terms of gender and feminine roles, class and academic mobility, community activism and personal isolation, and professional conflict and camaraderie. Instead of straightforward methodological lessons, these books present queries that are meant to be “sensitive” and “unsettling” interpretations of the self that are open to the multiple interpretations of others and straddle the boundaries of “fiction” and “truth”. At least such are the self-stated ambitions. The most recently published volumes of sociologists’ autobiographies have likewise taken on a radical turn towards the explicit portrayal of life stories involving an intermingling of personal questions of self and broader, often political questions of society. The volume, Our Studies, Ourselves (Glassner and Hertz 2003), groups its twenty-two authors in sections on race and class, gender, and evolving identities. And the recent collection, The Disobedient Generation (Sica and Turner 2005), includes self-images of well-known social theorists who were educated during the roaring times of the late 1960s. Most of the contributing authors lock their narratives intimately into discourses on bureaucracy, gender, race, class, and politics, in terms that often betray the ideological bend of their initial aspirations. The shift towards an interest in the subjective lives and identities of major contributors to the sociological discipline can today also be observed from the manner in which theoretical ideas are presented in scholarly textbooks. It is currently more often than ever the case that the personal stories of scholars are brought into play to contextualize the development and meaning of their thought. Several textbooks in sociological theory, for instance, are explicitly devoted to placing theoretical ideas in the context of the biographies of the theorists who have developed them (Fernandez 2003; Pampel 2000; Salerno 2004). Other textbooks contain short autobiographical excursions that are added to the theoretical exposé (Ritzer 2000).

Introduction

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Also to be noted, finally, is the increasing interest in sociological auto/biography as it is manifested on the internet. Besides the online availability of biographical materials on sociologists that can very easily be retrieved through search engines, several websites include biographical materials on famous sociologists (e.g., SocioSite; Wikipedia), with the occasional website even exclusively concerned in presenting such biographical information (e.g., AGSÖ). Although fewer controls exist to ensure the quality of internet contributions, the accessibility of such websites is less restricted by the boundaries of nationally distinct cultures to allow for a more global view of sociological lives. Objectives The ease with which the internet and email communications have opened up the boundaries of national cultures has directly contributed to making the present volume possible. As indicated by the subtitle of this volume, our contributors were purposely selected from various nations across the world to present a modest but concrete effort in global sociology. The authors represent a diverse range of nations, extending from Germany to Korea, the Netherlands to the United States, China to Italy, and Poland to the United Kingdom. To be sure, practical and other limitations still prevented a wider diversity of scholars to be represented, but nonetheless it can be rightly claimed that the degree of internationalism that has been attained in this volume has not been matched by any similar volume. In consequence, also, it is hoped that the stories presented here may resonate widely as well. Besides representing a variety of national contexts, all scholars in this volume have explicit and varied professional involvements with international and/or comparative issues, be it through a focus in their research activities and/or through the development of their own lives and careers. The contributors have engaged in research on international structures and processes or have undertaken comparative investigations of social issues in geographically dispersed societies. There is also a sharp awareness among the contributors of the localization of one’s work in distinct socio-geographical terms, and there are manifold personal experiences in engaging in dialogue with scholars and sociological work from many different countries. Several of the contributing scholars have also enjoyed international journeys on a personal level as they have moved across countries in the course of their lives and careers. When the authors were contacted about the prospect of this book, they were asked to write autobiographical accounts that addressed some of the following issues: • • • •

Provide an autobiographical account of yourself and how, why, when, and where you developed your academic interests in sociology. Acknowledge significant individuals and mentors, as well as the social, political, cultural, and economic events that prompted your interests and inspired your sociological work. Share with us your theoretical and/or methodological orientation and how it was influenced by the social and intellectual context you enjoyed. Comment on the direction in which you see your work, your area of research,

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and sociology in general heading. Authors were told to freely place variable emphases as they saw fit and to add any dimensions they considered relevant within the general scope and aim of the anthology. Authors were asked to be mindful to write essays that were especially useful for students of our discipline who are still in the process of developing their activities in the sociological enterprise. Students may be facing opportunities and challenges similar to the ones experienced by the contributors. While surely not so intended, the sociological life experiences recounted here contain lessons for others who can still primarily look forward to rather than back on a career in sociology. Besides the explicit global and student-oriented focus, this book is also different from other works on sociological lives inasmuch as the autobiographical reviews here presented are highlighted in terms of the triple nexus: self–society–sociology. However it unfolds in a specific context, a scholar’s personal sociological journey never takes place in isolation from the social world, involving others and their societal surroundings. Besides mere psychological leanings, the context of one’s society and the professional and scholarly contours of influential intellectual traditions will also shape the course and outcome of a biography. As such, the chapters in this volume endeavor to bridge the distinction between a sociologist’s autobiography and a sociological autobiography (Merton 1988) as they offer reflections on person and work that are not only written by a sociologist but are also sociological in kind. The chapters are intellectual autobiographies so that the usual restrictions of the specific form of a biography of the self will apply, especially in terms of empirical adequacy criteria. However, the narratives are also sociologically framed in the contexts of their respective socio-historical settings and professional fields, avoiding narcissism and irrelevance alike (Wacquant 1989). What unites these authors is their commitment to a sociological career that is always much more than just a career. Overview The solicitation for contributions to this book did not follow any specific logic or plan besides the stated purpose of collecting sociological biographies of globally oriented scholars from around the world. In all other respects, the authors could be as diverse from one another as they might be. The inclusion of certain categories of scholars along the lines of gender and ethnicity is in the present-day context not something that has to be expressly attempted. Diversity in such respects is today a mere function of being a sociologist who is positioned in the profession as it exists and acknowledges the structure thereof. It is therefore fortunate that the authors’ contributions strike a range of themes that nonetheless hint at certain common elements which can be used as a guide to introduce the chapters. The chapters in this volume are divided into three parts. This division of chapters, however, is not to suggest that each author does not address at once several of the issues highlighted in each part, but rather that they place different emphasis upon certain elements from the varied experiences of their respective sociological careers. Opening our book are chapters in which the traversing of national boundaries is a central formative element of the authors’ sociological lives. Martin Albrow provides a

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very useful start to this book by recounting his journey as a European sociologist with increasingly global interests and significance. Beginning his career as an Englishman in Germany who was to become a leading figure in British sociology, Albrow’s journey nicely illustrates the border-crossing trajectory of sociologists working in an increasingly international sociological field. Karin Knorr Cetina recounts her trajectory in creating a global self by working in various places in Austria, Germany, and the United States. Professional interests and personal experiences combined to create a story, narrated by Knorr Cetina in a beautiful manner that betrays her ethnological sensibilities, which reveals the enormous rewards of having colleagues in a horizontal rather than in a vertical structure of collaboration. The academic story of Joachim Savelsberg, a German who has spent most of his career in the United States, likewise reveals the cross-border dimensions of contemporary sociological life. Academic and personal motives meshed in Savelsberg’s life journey and also greatly affected the comparative nature of his research interests. Diane Davis built an academic career in the country in which she was raised, but her research interests have extended beyond the boundaries of the United States to focus particularly on the urban realities of Mexico City. In the United States, also, Davis traveled from one city to another, crossing borders often no less dramatic than the ones that separate entire nations. Saskia Sassen’s career is as globally transformative in its origins and further developments as are the cities she has been studying as one of the leading experts in globalization. Having gone through all kinds of twists and unexpected turns, Sassen also shows us how early rejections need not hamper a career that is built on a genuine interest in the study of social issues. The second part of our book includes chapters that particularly highlight the evolving nature of sociological work. German sociologist Richard Münch attended the University of Heidelberg, like Max Weber and Talcott Parsons before him. Like Weber and Parsons, also, Münch never avoided the big questions of sociology during his academic travels from one German university to the next. Ewa Morawska was born in Poland, earned her Ph.D. in the United States, returned to Poland, but subsequently received political asylum in the United States, the country where she also worked most of her career until she recently moved to the United Kingdom. Under such conditions of high mobility, it is perhaps no wonder that Morawska’s research is heavily involved in the study of immigration and ethnicity. Raised in Cairo and London, Leon Grunberg eventually went to the United States to become a professional sociologist. There, he developed his interests in economic activities and workers’ conditions in a distinctly comparative manner that was well aware of internationalization trends. In South Korea, Hyun-Chin Lim has observed drastic changes in a society that went from having third world status to becoming an economically highly modernized nation. Lim’s interests in the sociology of development accompanied these changes handsomely, as did his keen humanitarian devotion to improve the conditions of his society. In Italy, Pierpaolo Donati became immersed, via the work of Talcott Parsons, in dealing with important questions of modernity. Once these questions were asked, Donati developed his own perspective of relational sociology that has taken him beyond functionalism. Also in Europe, Ruut Veenhoven is a Dutch sociologist who as a student was deeply immersed in social issues and who has devoted his sociological work to a resolutely scientific

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analysis of some of the hot topics that initially moved him and his generation politically. Purposely oriented at disseminating his work very broadly, Veenhoven’s research on the conditions of happiness has also involved intimate cooperation with scholars from other nations. The final part of this book includes chapters in which transformations of sociological identities become paramount topics of reflection. Piotr Sztompka’s early career involved important moments of movement, not across nations, but across worlds of interests, from music to academics. Once Sztompka had taken up the global language of sociology, he traveled outside the boundaries of then-Communist Poland to learn the ideas of Western scholars, yet he remained firmly committed to work in and about his homeland. To become a sociologist, Eiko Ikegami not only traveled from Japan to the United States; she is also a scholar who has built a commuting identity through her continued travels between her native and adopted countries. Ikegami has thus been able to develop a sociology of Japanese society that does not intellectually subjugate Japan to the West, in terms of a comparative research, but more independently highlights the role of culture in state formation, in a manner, moreover, that is historically informed. Horst Helle is a German sociologist in every sense of the term, yet he underwent substantial border-crossing experiences through his deep knowledge, ideal and personal, of American sociology and societies beyond the borders of Germany. As such, his intellectual journey has been in every sense international as well. Tiankui Jing is one of the leading sociologists in China who has seen his country undergo important changes in terms of economic and political conditions. Processes of transformation have been so much a part of China’s history that the country provided Jing with a wealth of transformations that beckoned for sociological analysis. Finally, Edward Tiryakian provides a thorough tale of his journey from New York to southern France and back to the United States, where he became a sociologist who would see a lot of the world. As much as he has seen, Tiryakian has also engaged himself with many pressing sociological questions, especially in matters of religion, nationalism, and ethnicity. An introduction can help set the tone of a work and clarify its intentions. But the real value of this book can only be determined by its readers. Irrespective of their individual judgments upon examining this book, however, I hope that the readers will recognize that the authors have honestly and with the very best of intentions conveyed a meaningful sense of their ongoing journeys into and within the sociological enterprise. These personal accounts should at least serve to show the variety of ways in which one can become and be a sociologist in the hopes that the narratives of such a becoming and being will also inspire other aspiring scholars to take on their own sociological career paths. I am extremely grateful to all contributing authors for taking the time and courage to write so candidly and usefully about their lives and works. I know that much will be learned from their works. I thank Mary Savigar at Ashgate Publishing for her tremendously helpful feedback throughout the preparation of this book and for undertaking its production. I thank Samantha Hauptman and Gary T. Marx for reading and commenting on a prior version of this introduction. I am grateful to Shannon McDonough for helping to prepare the index. Finally, I acknowledge the wonderful help in getting this book into publishable shape by my research assistant

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Lisa Dilks, who, as a student of sociology, was ideally placed to comment on the true value of this book. References AGSÖ (Archiv für die Geschichte der Soziologie in Österreich), website. “50 Klassiker der Soziologie.” Online: http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/sozwww/agsoe/ lexikon/index.htm (date accessed: November 10, 2006). Bendix, Reinhard. 1985. From Berlin to Berkeley: German-Jewish Identities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. Berger, Bennet M. 2004. “Geezer Talk: An Emeritus Professor Looks Back.” The American Sociologist 35(3): 64–70. ———, ed. 1990. Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blau, Peter M. 1995. “A Circuitous Path to Macrostructural Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology 21: 1–19. Cain, Leonard D. 2005. A Man’s Grasp Should Exceed His Reach: A Biography of Sociologist Austin Larimore Porterfield. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Carstens, Uwe. 2005. Ferdinand Tönnies: Friese und Weltbürger. Biografie. Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand. Coser, Lewis A. 1993. “A Sociologist’s Atypical Life.” Annual Review of Sociology 19: 1–15. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892– 1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. DuBois, W.B.E. 1968. The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life From the Last Decade of Its First Century. Ed. H. Apetheker. New York: International Publishers. Eaves, Lucile. (1928) 2000. “My Sociological Life History—1928.” Sociological Origins 2(2): 65–70. Fernandez, Ronald. 2003. Mappers of Society: The Lives, Times, and Legacies of Great Sociologists. Westport, CT: Praeger. Gerhardt, Uta. 2002. Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Glassner, Barry, and Rosanna Hertz, eds. 2003. Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists’ Lives and Work. New York: Oxford University Press. Goetting, Ann and Sarah Fenstermaker, eds. 1995. Individual Voices, Collective Visions: Fifty Years of Women in Sociology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hollander, Paul. 2001. “From a ‘Builder of Socialism’ to ‘Free Floating Intellectual’: My Politically Incorrect Career in Sociology.” The American Sociologist 32(3): 5–25. Homans, George C. 1984. Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books. Horowitz, Irving L., ed. 1969. Sociological Self-Images: A Collective Portrait.

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Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. ———. 1983. C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian. New York: The Free Press. ———. 1990. Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on a Harlem Childhood. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Killian, Lewis M. 1994. Black and White: Reflections of a White Southern Sociologist. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall. Laslett, Barbara and Barrie Thorne, eds. 1997. Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lowenthal, Leo. 1987. An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Available online: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8779p24p/ (date accessed: November 10, 2006). Lukes, Steven. 1985. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, a Historical and Critical Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. MacIver, Robert M. 1968. As a Tale That is Told: The Autobiography of R.M. MacIver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, T.H. 1973. “A British Sociological Career.” The British Journal of Sociology 24(4): 399–408. Merton, Robert K. 1996. “A Life of Learning.” Pp. 339–359 in his On Social Structure and Science. Ed. Piotr Sztompka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mills, C. Wright. 2000. Letters and Autobiographical Writings. Ed. K. Mills and P. Mills. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Page, Charles Hunt. 1982. Fifty Years in the Sociological Enterprise: A Lucky Journey. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Pampel, Fred C. 2000. Sociological Lives and Ideas: An Introduction to the Classical Theorists. New York: Worth. Raushenbush, Winifred. 1979. Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Riley, Matilda White, ed. 1988. Sociological Lives. London: Sage. Salerno, Roger A. 2004. Beyond the Enlightenment: Lives and Thoughts of Social Theorists. Westport, CT: Praeger. Shils, Edward. 2006. A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography: The History of My Pursuit of a Few Ideas. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Sica, Alan and Stephen Turner, eds. 2005. The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. SocioSite, website. “Famous Sociologists—Strong Shoulders to Stand on.” Online: http://www.sociosite.net/topics/sociologists.php (date accessed: November 10, 2006). Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1963. A Long Journey: The Autobiography of Pitirim Sorokin. New Haven, CT: College and University Press. Wacquant, Loïc J.D. 1989. “Portraits Academiques: Autobiographie et Censure Scientifique dans la Sociologie Americaine.” Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie (1–2): 143–154. Wagner, Helmut R. 1983. Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Marianne. (1926) 1988. Max Weber: A Biography. New Brunswick, NJ:

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Transaction Books. Whyte, William Foote. 1995. Participant Observer: An Autobiography. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Wikipedia, website. “List of Sociologists.” Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_sociologists (date accessed: November 10, 2006). Woldring, H.E.S. 1987. Karl Mannheim: The Development of His Thought. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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PART 1 Traversing Worlds

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Chapter 1

Unfinished Work: The Career of a European Sociologist Martin Albrow

From History to Sociology Max Weber was emphatic about this—in science we must expect even our best achievements to be surpassed (Weber 1948a: 138). To have contributed to the flow is the most we can hope for. He was cut off with no warning, all kinds of projects incomplete, but what a legacy! Incompleteness signifies continuity, a consolation for those fortunate in having others pick up the threads before their time is over. I made no deliberate attempt to model my work on Weber, distancing myself from him as often as not, but he is the entry point into my story as a sociologist. Return to a small rented room in a working-class apartment in Cologne one evening in October 1958. You find there a twenty-one-year-old Englishman with a German/ English dictionary laboriously learning German by translating, line by line, Marianne Weber’s (1926) biography of Max Weber. He is a teaching assistant in a German school, fresh from Cambridge, England, with a B.A. in History, and the promise of a postgraduate scholarship the next year at the London School of Economics to begin a Masters in Sociology. He is the beneficiary of a scheme that took new British and French graduates into German

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schools for a year to help in the post-war reconciliation of the warring nations of Europe and to share with young Germans the enthusiasm for rebuilding a country. But why Germany, and why Max Weber? My father was a soldier serving in Germany in the Second World War. On his rare army leaves, he would bring back mementoes: postage stamps; currency notes overprinted with bizarre millions from the inflation era; Nazi insignia; and no bitterness. Germans were people just like ourselves, perhaps even too similar, was his account, and the vividness of the war to a child left me with a permanent interest in Germany and our interwoven pasts. I was brought up and went to high school in Norwich, a historic city eclipsed only by London in mediaeval England. It was heavily bombed in the war, but the ancient Norman cathedral, under the walls of which I went to school, escaped. There seemed nothing unusual to me that my school history teacher would propel me to study history at his own alma mater, the oldest Cambridge college, Peterhouse, founded in 1284. Without knowing how or why, I had arrived in a core institution of the British establishment. My father was a railway clerk, he and my mother both from seafaring backgrounds, but a generous state system of scholarships allowed me to go to a selective school and then to a famous university where, like many others of my generation, I found the real divide was between the scholarship boys and those from wealthy families. Britain in the mid-1950s was the time when the “angry young men” emerged. At Cambridge we saw John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger performed before it went to the West End, similarly Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. We were the generation in waiting for the explosion of aspiration, emancipation, and reform that consumed the 1960s. Until then we contented ourselves with the student satire of the Cambridge Footlights, Peter Cook and David Frost, that became the trademark of British humor: ironic, surreal, and detached. If I turned from history to sociology, it was more for personal and intellectual reasons rather than from a sense of social responsibility. I was not a class warrior; only insecure in a society I needed to understand. There are many possible reasons for turning to sociology. It can be adjunct to revolution, policy tool for government, or preparation for social work. For me it has been the site for the exploration of ideas that rule society, rather than a route to ruling. Undergraduate study of history stirred, but left unsatisfied, desires to know why civilizations rise and fall, how social class determines life chances, whether there are laws governing society. One of my teachers was Maurice Cowling, subsequently famous as the mentor of many renowned right-wing politicians in Britain. His mocking of my immature attempts to bring theory into history, resulting usually in incomplete assignments, only stiffened my resolve to show that there was more to the past than events. Max Weber was the tipping point. Here I found by reading beyond the lecture course a heady mix of theory and history, coupled with an agonizing, ambivalent, existentialist involvement in the politics and culture of the time that was becoming the inspiration for a whole new generation of post-war sociologists. I told them at Peterhouse I wanted to study Weber for postgraduate work before returning to

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history. They told me to go away to the London School of Economics, but, before that, to learn German. A Graduate Garden of Eden The LSE had a popular reputation as a hotbed of left-wing radicalism, but then, as now, this was the exception rather than the rule. None of the notable figures there in my time from 1959–1961 were firebrands. Of the younger faculty, Tom Bottomore and Ralph Miliband were Marxists, but they were more than matched by Ernest Gellner or Maurice Freedman. The great figures were Karl Popper in philosophy, Raymond Firth in anthropology, Lionel Robbins in economics, Michael Oakeshott in political theory, Richard Titmuss in social policy, and David Glass in sociology, and I flitted in and out of their lecture courses at will. This intellectual freedom was what I had come to London for, and straight sociology was less compelling, though Bottomore’s history of sociological thought, Gellner’s social philosophy, and Claus Moser’s social survey methods deserved and got weekly attendance. My thesis supervisor was Morris Ginsberg (1889–1970), revered but also more often discounted by his younger colleagues. He regarded himself as guardian of the British sociological tradition, successor to L.T. Hobhouse, the first professor of sociology in Britain, who in turn had known Herbert Spencer. In his presence it was unimaginable that I might one day seek to emulate his little introductory book Sociology (1934) with my own Sociology: The Basics (1999). The first meeting was disconcerting. Ginsberg listened coolly to my enthusiasm for Max Weber and suggested it would be more worthwhile to study Hobhouse. His was a jaundiced wisdom. “They say that I haven’t read the new people, like Ayer and Ryle,” he told me, “I have, and they’re no good!” He recalled at length how he had invited Karl Mannheim to the School and then finally felt driven to give an ultimatum to the Director: “Either he goes, or I do”, and Mannheim had to move to the Institute of Education. Ginsberg could not stand Popper either. I had read him (Popper 1957) at Cambridge and recalled how he had also rejected Mannheim (1940), advocate of rational social reconstruction. The spectacle of three famous mid-century upholders of liberal values and open debate unable to tolerate each other made a lasting impression. Shared values cannot mask—indeed in some ways they expose—egos, a perception that fitted easily with my lasting temperamental inability to belong to any school of thought. My studies of Weber continued off and on for thirty years before I felt able to commit myself to a book-length assessment (Albrow 1990). I never saw myself, or indeed Weber, as a Weberian. Like unaligned leftists such as C. Wright Mills or John Rex, I found inspiration in his quest to combine intellectual integrity with political relevance, not in his national liberal politics. Weber took me from history to sociology, because he lived theory, and you could read its workings in his self and surrounding society. It was not a decision then to become a sociologist, but the acquisition of a way of life.

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Mills called it The Sociological Imagination (1959). Later it became the sociological worldview, and, as sociology became a more visible part of British public life, it surfaced as the sociological lifestyle. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Posy Simmonds’ cartoons in the Guardian newspaper depicted a shambling, bearded lecturer, devotee of all good causes, effective in none, and named with delightful irony, George Weber. A long way from Max and his austere, even ascetic intellectualism, as generations of students since have found. Now, with hindsight we can see the route from Max to George in the spirit of the 1970s. Then not so easily, and I recall saying then to my first wife, Sally, that to understand me she had to read “Science as a Vocation” (Weber 1948a). I was naïve enough to be nonplussed by her reaction to one of Weber’s most personal statements. It just hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could find it alien. Would her reaction have been different to “Politics as a Vocation” (Weber 1948b)? Probably not. Her subsequent active engagement in the peace movement demonstrated there are other routes to political responsibility than through sociology. One of the joys of the LSE, then and now, was the graduate student community. This was anticipatory socialization for academic life, the sharing of common problems and finding a balance between work, personal relationships, and life. Bob Pike might be working on scientists, Roland Robertson on the Salvation Army, Tony Giddens on sport, but it was not these studies we shared, but something bigger. Thirty years later Robertson, Giddens and I were to be found independently converging on globalization as the big idea of the time. I am at a loss to identify any feature of the LSE or our contacts then or later to explain this convergence. Coincidence? Sociologists are rightly loath to accept the unexplained; historians rather more prepared. I never made a decision to become a professional sociologist, but towards the end of my second year at the LSE there was a critical turning point. A new Centre for European Sociology had just been established by Raymond Aron, Tom Bottomore, Michel Crozier, and Ralf Dahrendorf, a stellar combination if ever there was one, and they advertised in the Times for a British researcher to conduct a study of the place of the civil service in post-war Germany. My astonishment at being appointed was reduced on learning that a retired clergyman was the only other candidate! Sociology was still a rare pursuit in Britain at that time, and by the standards then this was an esoteric position. Perhaps I should have guessed that the following three halcyon summer months in Baden-Württenberg, interviewing top German officials, was too good to last. Suddenly there was a summons to Paris to meet Raymond Aron who, with great courtesy, told me that the financial basis of my appointment was a Ford Foundation grant channeled through the French government, and it was no longer possible for the French ministry of education to support an Englishman to research in Germany. This could have been an early straw in the wind that Britain would not find it so easy to join the European project. For Tom Bottomore it meant I arrived one morning in early September 1961 literally on his doorstep with no job, no money, and an unfinished thesis. The research material I had left behind in Tübingen, and I was glad to learn later that Dahrendorf and Wolfgang Zapf were able to make good use of it. Bottomore was embarrassed,

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because he had appointed me, but, as always, was immensely helpful. He loaned me money and called his friends. The result was, only a month later, I found myself on the road to Leicester in a cabriolet Morris Minor, with Tony Giddens at the wheel. Entirely by accident we found ourselves together, sharing a house, each in our first teaching post in what was becoming the most exciting young department of sociology in Britain. I had not aspired to lecture. Ideas, women, sport, politics—in that order—shaped my life in those days, and after years of state funding backed by vacation work, it was sobering to realize I had to have a regular income. The careers service at Cambridge had advised me to join the Bank of South America. Perhaps I should have known more about the realities of earning a living, but they certainly didn’t know me. Unwittingly, I had now stepped on the first rung of a career as an academic sociologist. Teaching as Permanent Crisis Leicester in the 1960s anticipated the coming huge expansion of British sociology. Under the canny headship of Ilya Neustadt, a refugee from Roumania, and graduate of Louvain in Belgium, the department effectively became a European training school for future British sociology professors. Bryan Wilson, Jo and Olive Banks, and John Goldthorpe had just left, but Richard K. Brown, Eric Dunning, and Percy Cohen were there, while Keith Hopkins arrived with Giddens and me. Supreme was a charismatic German refugee from the Nazis, Norbert Elias (1897–1990), not to be recognized outside Leicester until much later, though already sixty-three years of age, and author of a masterpiece on the civilizing process (Elias 1969), published over twenty years before. The great thing about Leicester sociology was that for the first time I found the European sociological tradition alive and flourishing and directed towards researching contemporary society. It was the equivalent of the botanist finding the tree that had hitherto only been known from fossil deposits. Elias left the teaching of classical sociology to Neustadt, but when you heard him introduce sociology to new students through the world population situation you realized this quaint little old man was the living personification of a classic theorist at work. The most challenging book review I ever did was a few years later when Maurice Freedman, as managing editor of The Jewish Journal of Sociology (Ginsberg was editor), asked me to tackle the post-war re-issue of Elias’ civilizing process book. I applauded its scope and scale, arguing that it was “a more important empirical study than any which have issued from Parsonianism” (Albrow 1969: 236), but also suggested that anthropological work should caution us from inferring an invariable relation between state development and personal behavior from European data. It was, I believe, the first article-length review of Elias in English, unnoticed by the later school of figurational sociologists who celebrate his work. The last occasion we met was when he was ninety-two years old in Amsterdam, and over dinner we engaged in the same kind of intense and joyous discussion as if thirty years had not elapsed since those Leicester days.

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British sociology was in the take-off period. Between 1962 and 1964 the number of chairs in the subject increased from five to twenty-nine. Young lecturers were propelled forward at a giddy pace and sociology was the vogue subject in the 1960s. I soon moved from Leicester to Reading in 1963 to be the first, and during my first year there, the only, lecturer in sociology. Departments were built overnight; students flooded in. Those were exciting times when European thought, British society and American radicalism (yes!) came together and the product was a kaleidoscope of ideas. Berger and Luckman (1967), Garfinkel (1967), and Schutz (1967) made 1967 a pivotal year, while Marcuse (1964) was to become the text for the student revolutions of 1968. I was privileged to form close relations with the many European scholars who contributed so much to the ferment. At Reading, the Polish scholar of military organization, Stanislav Andreski, became the first chair holder and he appointed Viola Klein, originally from the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, to the staff. Her doctoral thesis (Klein 1946) was already a feminist classic. Karl Mannheim had supervised her, as he had her Hungarian friend Paul Halmos. He became the first professor of sociology in Cardiff and recruited me as a senior lecturer in 1967. I moved with a young family to South Wales. It attracted me because it was the heartland of British industrial and labor history, a marvelous social ecology for the now committed sociologist—but it was also a minefield, literally and metaphorically. Halmos was a deeply serious student of the human condition, working on the interplay of the personal and political, the psychological and the sociological, whose thesis on solitude and privacy said much about him. He was immensely kind to me, but also relied on me to mediate between conflicting ideas and generations, and much of the departmental administration came my way. So did the teaching of research methods—regarded then as punishment for the newcomer; but it became an opportunity to begin a number of policy-related projects where students could be involved as part of their sociological education. My first research-based journal article had been an ex post facto study of the impact of accommodation on students at Reading (Albrow 1966), which was also the outcome of a student methods course project, so I could hardly complain, especially as I also was able to teach the sociology of organizations and write Bureaucracy (1970). Another collective student project was very popular, on alienation, a way I thought of focusing student interest, though it may have re-focused it too effectively on practical remedies like student participation! Halmos announced, out of the blue in 1974, while I was on study leave in Germany, that he would leave for the chair at the Open University, telling me later privately, “It will be wonderful, no students, and even better, no staff!” What he actually found there turned out to be just as stressful—course teams. Inevitably he continued there his fight against what he considered the nihilism of critical sociology, which for him infected most of the new generation of sociologists: “And much against their judgment and their true intent, the intellectual climate they create will be such that the society which shares with them their disenchantment and revulsions will have lost its powers of redemption” (Halmos 1974: 251). To my dismay, Halmos also designated me as his successor. That was not in his gift, nor was it my wish, but was just taken generally as a fait accompli. For the

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next five years I was Head of the Department and with new appointments of Geoff Mungham, a charismatic lecturer who brought the National Deviancy Conference to Cardiff, Paul Atkinson who introduced ethnographic methods, Tony Coxon in the first chair of sociological research methods in Britain, Sara Delamont pioneering women’s studies, Anne Murcott pioneering the sociology of food and eating, and, in his early twenties, David Held researching critical theory, we built up a reputation as a coming force in the discipline. The energies of the new staff went as much into teaching as research and the animating spirit was sociology as practice as much as reflection. This was in effect our answer to Halmos’ strictures, regarding sociology as social construction, of itself and society at the same time. My inaugural lecture in 1977 was entitled Theory Building and the Construction of Society. The politics of the period seeped into all our work, curriculum, teaching, research, college, and personal lives. Not for nothing was structural functionalism, with its neat partitioning of institutions by functional importance, the chopping block for sociology at the time. Student unrest found many ways to link national politics, union, and university politics. As a Dean I found myself rebutting New Statesman allegations against the faculty of political bias in examinations. We had to go to the High Court to gain an apology. These were the Thatcher years in Britain and they were bad for south Wales. There was heavy unemployment and the sympathies of the region were solidly with the local coal miners in their national strike, however ill-advised their union leadership was. It was also the beginning of intensely divisive politics within the Labour Party. In the early 1980s I would find myself as local secretary listening to my eighteenyear-old son Nick standing up at Party ward meetings arguing vehemently with the local Member of Parliament, former Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. The Principal of University College Cardiff, Bill Bevan, was quite as determined as the miners to flout Thatcherite policies on higher education. His famous reply to a lengthy Ministry questionnaire was a postcard that simply read “KBO”—Churchill’s term, “keep buggering on”. But he also snubbed future Labour leader and former student, Neil Kinnock, and found few friends when slack financial accounting finally made the College vulnerable to Thatcher’s wrath. Every university teacher in Cardiff in the 1980s took on more and more duties. While continuing as professor of sociological theory I became the temporary (for five years!) director of the Cardiff Population Centre, a multi-disciplinary postgraduate training center for Third World population program officials. Multi-tasking reached new heights. In 1986 I was additionally dean of a faculty, president of the British Sociological Association, and editor of the new International Sociology. Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the university cracked first. Ironically the Cardiff crisis was exploited by the national authorities in higher education as the exemplary case of an irresponsible higher education institution. In April 1987 it was declared insolvent. Its closure, “pour encourager les autres”, effectively ushered in a new era of increased state control of British higher education. One-third of its staff learned they had to leave in a forced merger with the neighboring college, headed by a former Oxford chemist who had attended laboratory classes with Margaret Thatcher.

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In June 1988, Coxon and I, the two professors of sociology, retired from Cardiff and took rather early Emeritus titles. My second wife, Sue Owen, lecturer in economics, encouraged me to return to the interrupted study of Max Weber. She and I had collaborated on the economics and sociology of aging in the Population Centre. If I was dreaming of a less stressful life as a professional sociologist outside universities, she was also drawing some practical lessons from our studies of the impact of early retirement. Unfinished Agendas There were other unfinished agendas apart from Weber. One was the education of sociologists. From 1981 to 1984 I was the editor of Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association, and this led to being elected president of the Association in 1985. My Cardiff experience had persuaded me that sociology was not just the necessary basis for any rational social reconstruction, but as an applied discipline could impart to students the necessary skills for a wide range of occupations, not just in social work or research, but in industry, government, and the media. My presidential address (1986) was on this theme, deliberately challenging those for whom sociology had to choose between being servant of power, or its radical critique. For me the empowered student is not obliged to go in either direction, but in that period any talk of skills roused suspicion of a sell-out to Thatcherism and it took some hard arguing before the BSA adopted my proposal to establish a curriculum committee. The other agenda took me beyond Britain. A former Reading colleague, Margaret Archer, professor of sociology at Warwick, conveyed to me that the publications committee of the International Sociological Association, of which she was chair, was keen to develop a new journal. She asked if, having finished my term with Sociology, I was free to edit it. It was a wonderful opportunity. My experience in the education of population program officials had included visits to China and Bangladesh and given me a fuller appreciation of the role of sociology in bridging cultures. Moreover, University College Cardiff, in one of its many, not always well-judged ventures, had established its own university publishing house. My editorial assistant for Sociology, Liz King, was enthusiastic. Contracts were exchanged between all concerned and International Sociology appeared in March 1986. Fernando Cardoso, president of the International Sociological Association (ISA), later president of Brazil, wrote the foreword (Cardoso 1986) to the first issue declaring that the policy of publishing papers that reflected diversity in gender, age, region, culture, would increase our sociological knowledge. It was bland, but highly controversial, for it implied an editorial policy that had concerns beyond the intellectual prowess of the individual article. I subscribed to it wholeheartedly. While editing Sociology we had been able to achieve gender balance for the first time on the editorial board, but I also discovered how difficult it was for scholars from less well financed or prestigious universities to find the resources for the polished article. This applied in spades to those from poor countries, often without English as a first language. Our policy at International Sociology was never to reject a paper

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on the grounds of language competence. We established a world-wide network of referees to judge papers in languages other than English. Some would still argue that we were using non-scientific criteria for publication. I rejected that view at the time (Albrow 1991). The contribution to knowledge is the criterion that matters as distinct from intellectual attainment. Astronomers accept the discovery of a new star even when reported by an amateur. Sociology will always challenge intellectual elitism because the advancement of sociological knowledge is not to be equated with the brilliance of the individual intellect. Sympathy with marginal, deviant, or just other people’s experiences; empathy with other cultures; and knowledge of new sects are not acquired from canonical texts or from advanced statistics, and yet they expand the knowledge base of the discipline, especially in rapidly changing social conditions. I’ve often enjoyed pitting my knowledge of Weber’s texts against another’s, but these scholastic pleasures are diversions along the way to a more comprehensive understanding of society. I once asked Elias what he thought of Simmel: “Never read him,” he said, perhaps half seriously, but you could not tell. Editing International Sociology was riding a roller coaster. No sooner had we begun than Cardiff’s crisis led to the closure of the new publishing house. Yet there were contracts, and money from a government grant to the new, refounded institution of the University of Wales, Cardiff, compensated the ISA. Sage became the new publisher. It also enabled me to remain in Cardiff for three years to see out the editorship. It was always the plan that the journal should move every four years. Finding the next editor became an early concern because of the expense of the journal’s editorial policy. It was important to find the same kind of support as Cardiff had given. Protracted negotiations resulted in an agreement with the University of Bielefeld, then home to the largest faculty of sociology in Europe, to house the journal, with Richard Grathoff as editor from 1990 and Liz King as his assistant. Bielefeld was also to become the venue of the 1994 World Congress of Sociology. That was no mean achievement and the journal editors celebrated the 1990 Madrid World Congress where its “Sociology for One World: Unity and Diversity” theme picked up on the editorial I had written for the journal in 1987. We edited a conference volume distributed to the 4,000 delegates with a selection of papers from the journal over the previous four years, entitled Globalization, Knowledge and Society (Albrow and King 1990). This kick started sociological engagement with what came to be known as the “decade of globalization”. Giddens’ Consequences of Modernity (1990) and Robertson’s Globalization (1992) came out around the same time. In 1990 my book on Max Weber was also finally published. It was the end of an era for me personally, politically, and intellectually, coinciding with the end of an era in world affairs too. I became sure that were Weber alive he would have responded to global issues, and that he would have adapted his concepts accordingly. He was the great theorist of modernity; globality requires new theory (Albrow 2004). Not all my Weberian friends agree.

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From Globalization to the Global Age “Endings” and “beginnings” became a theme of 1990s in the run-up to the millennium. So too were bridges to the next millennium, and across divides between three worlds. Sociological education and globalization became my bridges into the 1990s. Someone who had heard my presidential address on the curriculum and learned of my new freedom from employment was Graham Fennell, newly appointed head of the sociology department at the Roehampton Institute, a higher education institution aspiring to university status. He was convinced that sociology needed to promote its skill development potential and invited me to join him in shaping a new curriculum. I did not need too much persuasion, since my wife had joined the U.K. Treasury and we were keen to set up home in London, where house prices were a powerful incentive to enter new employment. I signed up to the Roehampton project to acquire university status within the decade. There began the most satisfying period of my career to date, realizing the academic dream of an integration of teaching and research, but enjoying lesser unions too, between the national and international, local and cosmopolitan. academic communities. My previous university experience became the mainspring for the aspiring institution’s research degrees program, which it needed to gain full university status, and in the Department of Sociology I had the opportunity to help recast the curriculum, not only in emphasizing skills and capacities, but also in shaping an introductory course on world society, taught through the students’ everyday experience of globalization. In the late 1990s I was a visiting professor at both Cambridge and the London School of Economics, while continuing to teach at Roehampton. The former are, of course, supernovae in the educational firmament, and, for faculty, provide enviable opportunities. They also attract very able students, but it is my firm view that in terms of added value for the student, Roehampton, and many similar institutions low in the pecking order, do a better job, certainly in sociology. There are good reasons: the power of social disclosure and the emancipatory potential of sociology for the person have far more impact on those who come from less privileged backgrounds. Privilege confers immunity, and extra cleverness may provide further protection from the uncomfortable messages sociology can convey. Roehampton, its staff and students, were challenged to deliver university education and they succeeded beyond expectation. It was an aspirational environment led by Stephen Holt, the rector, and Bryan Loughrey, director of research. They and Graham Fennell encouraged our globalization cluster, a group of young researchers that crystallized around me and John Eade. Our program of local research on globalization, with Darren O’Byrne as research assistant, resulted in the book John edited, Living the Global City, (1997) assembled entirely from the cluster’s work, while my parallel writing of The Global Age (1996) was aided by another member of the cluster, my academic assistant, Neil Washbourne. The greatest pleasure came from being able to bring my early study of theory and history into intensive interactions with this new generation. At the same time chairing the Thematic Group on the Sociology of Local-Global Relations for the International Sociological Association enabled me to engage in the widest cross-cultural critical

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examination of globalization concepts. Sociology must always involve the constant renegotiation of universalizing concepts with other cultures, drawing on their pasts as well the present. We require more expansive thinking than post-colonial and post-modern discourse, challenging enough though they are for most purposes. But the globalization of consciousness, an awareness of the threat to humankind as a whole, requires us to move towards an ethical and epistemological outlook we can call “pragmatic universalism”. Globality predates globalization and we should no more accept passively the appropriation of the idea of globalization by Wall Street than we should accept national or business ownership of the internet. The Global Age was a controversial intervention, both applauded, for instance in the award of the 1997 European Amalfi prize, and attacked for representing “hyperglobalism”. If by that is meant my assertion that globality has replaced modernity as the axial idea of the current period of history and requires us to rethink concepts of society, state, and culture in relation to global issues, then so be it. But if the suggestion is that I subscribe to a uniform process of globalization sweeping us forward to an identical global future, then the critics have not read the book, which was designed to rebut precisely this kind of modernist historiography that disfigures so much of public discourse. The term “global age” had been in the air since the late 1960s. In 1995 at Stony Brook, State University of New York, historian of science, Wolf Schäfer, applied it to the second half of the twentieth century; in Kyoto, Japan, the Korean Tae-Chang Kim (1995) argued for new values and personality formation for the global age. In the last decade it has proved its use in public discourse, used by President Clinton and others to signal a stance on global issues as distinguished from the promotion of globalization. The translation of The Global Age into German (Albrow 1998b) in a series edited by Ulrich Beck signaled the latest stage in my relationship with German sociology. I had already held a visiting fellowship at the Max Weber Institute in Munich in 1973–1974 and a visiting chair in the sociology institute at Horst Helle’s invitation in 1990. I knew Helle and Anton Zijderveld, then of Tilburg in the Netherlands, from working with them in the 1970s on an early European scheme to link our three universities. An invitation to lecture on globalization as the Eric Voegelin Visiting Professor in Munich 1997 provided a marvelous opportunity for creative exchanges with Beck whose “risk society” intervention (Beck 1992) had done so much to shake the assumptions of old modernity. I had been increasingly dismayed by Germany’s growing inability to respond to global issues. National reconstruction was subsumed in the mission to build a wider Europe, but that too has been inward looking for too long. Britain, on the other hand, in recent years has adopted a positive stance to global interdependency. This conflict of views needs to be resolved if Europe is to be an active player in shaping the coming century. The political signs are not good; theoretically, however, the foundations are almost in place. Jürgen Habermas, the most prominent philosopher of modernity, told me recently that he had underestimated British work on globalization. Beck’s second modernity aims for thorough renewal. If European public intellectuals

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promote the meaning of globality as the common fate for humankind, rather than economic globalization, then the European project will find a new momentum. For all our futures it is also crucial that Europe becomes an equal partner with the United States. It was an honor to be invited by the president of the American Sociological Association, Neil Smelser, to its annual meeting in Toronto in August 1997 to participate in his presidential panel and to debate my point of view on globalization (Albrow 1998a) with Ulf Hannerz and Roland Robertson. That turned out to be a prelude to a three-year residence in the United States, allowing me insights into a culture as different from Britain’s as Germany’s. A fellowship in 1999–2001 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. provided an exceptional opportunity to examine American uses of sociology in public policy and approaches to globalization. An invitation followed to join the department of sociology for a semester at Stony Brook, where to my immense satisfaction Said Arjomand was editing International Sociology. Since Schäfer teaches history at Stony Brook, several threads were bound together. In that period Sue Owen was economic counselor at the British Embassy. I could thus enjoy an informal access to American public policy that reinforced my Woodrow Wilson fellowship. It became clear to me that the history of the United States shows its globalism to be something very different from globality. Sociological approaches to global governance became a top priority after 9/11, and my American experience has also caused me to re-evaluate some of my older intellectual positions. In my early writing I was vigorously critical of what I considered to be overrationalistic theories of organization (e.g. in Albrow 1964), represented by Amitai Etzioni among others. I met him for the first time almost forty years later and he generously said he had taken that criticism on board. Now I am inclined to think that the early emphasis he gave to society’s goals deserves to be applied to the Millennium Development Goals even as he (Etzioni 2004) is advocating a key role for regional communities in global governance. Europe is just such a regional community and it is vital for it to contribute to global goal attainment. My close informal contacts with the public policy world build on what effectively has been a forty-year hobby, observing bureaucracy and organizations from working on the German civil service through to Do Organizations Have Feelings? (Albrow 1999). I once was offered and refused (still working on Max Weber!) a post in the Brussels Commission when Britain joined the European Community in 1973. But my wife who, as a senior civil servant, should know, assures me I would have not been a good bureaucrat, being just too intent on following my own ideas, and not someone else’s. If you do not sign up to someone else’s ideas you are in a better position to share, exchange, and collaborate. You can work better with your friends, and I am fortunate that one of them Colin Bradford, formerly chief economist at USAID (United States Agency for International Development), now at Brookings, compensates for my lack of practical experience in public administration, and together we can be more effective in working on global governance issues. Currently I find myself returning for the third time to the LSE, as a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, in an institution rejuvenated by Giddens’ period of office as director. David Held, colleague of us both when a young researcher, is now co-director of the

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Centre with Mary Kaldor. Their work, on global democracy and global civil society respectively, will help sustain the LSE’s global responsibilities for years to come. No longer teaching, as a self-employed professional sociologist, I find that the issues that brought me into the discipline remain as salient as ever. There is time for new civil society ventures but the agendas of yesterday are continually updated. Today two of my collaborators from the old Roehampton globalization cluster have been in touch: Jörg Dürrschmidt from Kassel in Germany invited me to speak at the next Global Studies Association meeting of young researchers; Willemijn Dicke from Delft in the Netherlands emailed about coming over next week to the LSE to discuss the global governance of water. Nothing is completed. References and Selected Bibliography Albrow, Martin. 1964. “The Sociology of Organizations” (review article). British Journal of Sociology 15: 350–357. ———. 1966. “The Influence of Accommodation upon 64 Reading University Students: An Ex Post Facto Experimental Study.” British Journal of Sociology 17: 403–418. ———. 1969. “On the Civilizing Process” (review article). Jewish Journal of Sociology 11: 227–236. ———. 1970. Bureaucracy. London: Pall Mall; New York: Praeger. ———. 1971. “The Role of the Sociologist as a Professional: The Case of Planning.” Pp 1–19 in The Sociological Review Monograph No. 16. Ed. P. Halmos. Keele: University of Keele. ———. 1986. “The Undergraduate Curriculum in Sociology: A Core for Humane Education. BSA Presidential Address.” Sociology 20: 335–46. ———. 1987. “Sociology for One World.” Editorial. International Sociology 2: 1–12. ———. 1990. Globalization, Knowledge and Society: Readings from International Sociology. Edited with Elizabeth King. London: Sage. ———. 1990. Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s. ———. 1991. “Internationalism as a Publication Project: Experience in Editing an International Sociological Journal.” Current Sociology 39: 101–18. ———. 1996. The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1997. Do Organizations Have Feelings? London; New York: Routledge. ———. 1998a. “Faults and Defaults: Sociological Narratives for the Global Age. ASA Plenary Address.” Pp. 8–9 in Network, Newsletter of the British Sociological Association, January. ———. 1998b. Abschied vom Nationalstaat. Translation by Frank Jakubzik of The Global Age. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1999. Sociology: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. “The Global Shift and its Consequences for Sociology.” Pp 33–50 in Advances in Sociological Knowledge Over Half a Century Ed. N. Genov.

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Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (first German edition 1986). London: Sage. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cardoso, Fernando. 1986. “Foreword.” International Sociology 1: 1–2. Eade, John, ed. 1997. Living the Global City. London: Routledge. Elias, Norbert. 1969. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, second edition (first 1939). Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag. (Translated by Edmund Jephcott (1994) as The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell). Etzioni, Amitai. 1994. From Empire to Community. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Ginsberg, Morris. 1934. Sociology. London: Oxford University Press. Halmos, Paul. 1974. “The Moral Ambiguity of Critical Sociology.” Pp. 222–251 in The Science of Society and the Unity of Mankind Ed. R. Fletcher. London: Heinemann. Kim, Tae-Chang. 1995. “Toward a New Theory of Value for the Global Age”. Pp. 320–341 in Creating a New History for Future Generations Ed. Tae-Chang Kim and James A. Dator. Kyoto: Institute for the Integrated Study of Future Generations. Klein, Viola. 1946. The Feminine Character. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mannheim, Karl. 1940. Man and Society: In an Age of Reconstruction. London: Kegan Paul. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One Dimensional Man. London: Sphere Books. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Popper, Karl. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann. Weber, Marianne. 1926. Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Weber, Max. 1948a. “Science as a Vocation.” Pp. 77–128 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1948b. “Politics as a Vocation.” Pp. 129–156 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Chapter 2

Going Global Karin Knorr Cetina

A global identity is not supposed to be possible. When people refer to someone’s identity as being of a particular kind, they bring up the place the person comes from, or the profession the person identifies with, or perhaps the language and culture that made the person how he or she is. Identity implies identification, and within our scheme of things it builds up over time; one needs prolonged exposure to something concrete like a community, a village, or an urban environment. It is in such environments that one becomes, for example a “Viennese” or a “theorist.” When we participate in them for a while they bestow upon us a sense of sharing and belonging. The classical notion of the self is a well thought-out notion. It can be linked, after all, to Mead’s ideas about how the self develops from taking the role of the other, and how the other then becomes part of the self. We take the role of the community in which we live and the community then defines our sense of self. The notion can be reformulated in a Freudian idiom if we think of the superego as an inner censor that represents the community and the moral discourse in which it engages. It can even be linked to current ideas about the late modern experience of individualization and detraditionalization. When the village is gone and communities disintegrate we become uprooted from the local context of interaction that provided a stable

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framework for the process of self-formation. When communities and environments multiply around us, and we participate in too many of them, we also become unnerved. The world then has too many faces, or so the story goes, and we no longer know which one to trust. Deprived of traditions that tell us how to act, we are left in the lurch when it comes to making difficult life-choices—without the psychological means to deal with the freedom of choice and contingency of contemporary life. The classical notion of the self not only explains the bourgeois self, but also the late modern experience of the homeless mind. Few cultural historical topics are more pervasive than the equation between identity, community, intimacy, and place. A global identity is indeed not possible if we accept this equation. How, after all, could a global world serve as an embedding environment for the individual self? Where does one find the global communities that provide the intimacy that the development of a stable self requires? What does it even mean to think of the global as a place? If identity is tied to community, intimacy, and place, the self cannot naturally emerge from a global world in the same sense in which it can naturally emerge from local contexts. And yet one can feel at ease in a global world, and homeless in the local environments one encounters. Set against the theoretical force of the above arguments are the particular experiences of individual persons that may develop a global sense of belonging as they move through the islands of their various work and life settings. My own experience is of this kind. The places I moved through were also stages of my professional life. They include Vienna, Berkeley, Bielefeld (which is located roughly halfway between Cologne and Berlin in Germany), and Princeton. There are currents that run through these stages that I now understand as leading up to an interest in the global that is on the one hand professionally motivated, but on the other also rooted in existence, in specific experiences of specific localities and what they offered. I am going to show how I came to this interest in the global by recounting these experiences. The places were islands in the sense that they did not have much to do with one another; most seemed caught up in their own experience and construction of the world. Moving from one to the other involved reality disjunctures rather than the continuities of a global world. 1. The Limits of Intimacy: Lake District Memories One of the first islands I found myself on was not a professional setting, but a setting in which I spent part of my youth. My family lived for a while in an Austrian lake district near Salzburg, a princely baroque town of classical music festivals, Mozart lore, narrow streets laced with guild signs from the middle ages, and picturesque mountains in the immediate surrounding. Some may know the area from the movie “The Sound of Music” that was originally shot in the Austrian Alps of Salzburg. Some may know it from the annual Salzburg festival that was born in the 1920s when Hofmannsthal’s play Everyman was performed for the first time in front of the cathedral—a play in which an awful figure of death hollowly shouts out to “everyone” (portrayed as another allegoric figure) what lies ahead for rich and godless souls (we loved the hollow howl!). We did not actually live in Salzburg but about an hour away

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at one of the lakes in a large hotel my parents ran. I was about fourteen. I enjoyed swimming and walking in the woods behind the house. I could see and feel that the area was beautiful—but in a dark, melancholic sort of way. It rained a lot. The rain came down in thin lines rather than in drops, weightless and slight. There were no downpours, no mudslides, no chaotic whether conditions, but the rain seemed to color everything, even the sun when it was shining. There was a malicious side to the district. Warm winds coming down from the mountains at times created sudden turbulences and changes of airflow somewhere out on the lake. Boats keeled over, and even seasoned sailors found themselves shipwrecked. People drowned in this situation, and they also apparently drowned for other reasons. There were many drowning stories—stories about finding drowned bodies, about persons lost to the water, and about cries for help from far out on the lake that nobody heard. The lakeside population savored these stories. It embellished and retold them and added on to them as new incidences occurred. People were also storied in the morbid lakeside imagination. The stories had a particular spin on intimate social relations. They reveled in cases of death by what one speculated to be slow poisoning at the hand of one’s kin or marriage partner that was covered up as something else. They discussed hunting and sailing accidents that were attempted murder. They dwelled on successful and unsuccessful suicide attempts and their likely causes, on premature deaths, and on many illicit relationships and fatal attractions. Not much seemed to go naturally well in the native human population of the lake. Not much seemed to live up to the ideals of healthy family life or marriage. One never quite knew of course how the province of gossip related to the province of actual activities and experience. I never really learned if, under the glamour of death and intrigue, people lived an unglamorous happy life. But I doubt that this was the case. In my memory, it was the stories and gossip that penetrated how life felt. One can actually make sense of the limits of social intimacy in terms of the limits of strong ties discussed in sociology. Small populations linked together by strong ties through which they live their lives with not much irritation from the outside (one did not travel much at the time) might indeed get preoccupied with, and overwhelmed by, relational desires and happenings. What saved the native population and us, who were non-natives, from deeper consequences of these negative thoughts were, I think, the tourists. The lakeside district was full of English tourists who were an ideal match for the rainy and cool season called summer at the lake. The English were used to worse weather, and not given to complaining. They occupied everyone’s attention for a while and directed the imagination toward the earthly details of service providing. I came away from the years at the lake with the distinct feeling that life in local communities was somehow sick—it was given to forms of intimacy that felt worse than the isolation and crime one had to expect in metropolitan areas. I longed, I think, for less community and different habits of the mind. But I also left the lake district with a certain love for a beautiful nature. The city I was born in and went to school in until the lake district years, Graz in the South of Austria (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s home town), had its own charms (among them a university dating back to the sixteenth century), but they were urban in character.

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2. Rehearsing the Global, in Vienna Vienna, the next stop that impressed much upon me, provided an alternative to the limits of social intimacy I had experienced. It was a much larger canvas, though it was also full of limited vistas and events of perception and observation. For one thing, Vienna had its own village culture—it cultivated its own forms of sociality and its own forms of talk that flourished within gossip circles. Vienna also offered to the young and learning its old university and a new but distinguished Institute for Advanced Study, a bounded academic environment independent from the university and oriented toward post-graduate training and research. The Institute, like the university, intersected with the local culture, but it also vastly transcended it. It allowed one to get to know international social scientists without leaving, because they came to the Institute. It made it possible for me to get to know and absorb perspectives not represented in my university and to develop a social scientific orientation shaped by analytic rather than national and language traditions. One could rehearse a more global professional existence in Vienna at the Institute and learn to act upon this experience—and I did. In all fairness, one should add that Vienna the canvas and Vienna the social and political matrix proved attractive to many of my then-fellow students—they stayed. I followed the lures of the external environment that the Institute opened up. When I arrived in the early 1960s Vienna had, in the view of many, become a somewhat wilted garden of creativity after its hothouse years from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s. There were no counterparts to the major philosophers (Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle), writers and poets (Musil), architects (Loos), composers (Schoenberg, Mahler), painters (Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka), radical political thinkers (Trotsky), and physicians (Freud) who had been concentrated there earlier. Nevertheless, Vienna remained a distinctive milieu that had what I still regard as a special ambience and blend of traits. It continued to be the Center, if you could ignore what it was the Center of after Austria lost its empire in 1918. Its inhabitants still cultivated the cynical wit, the morbid attitudes, and the rhetorical brilliance in the local idiom that had so captivated earlier writers. The Viennese still appeared to be obsessed with spectacles, whether of a “beautiful funeral”, a nicely laid out corpse, or an articulate play staged in the Burgtheater. The Viennese enjoyed scandals—in which Viennese public figures regularly got themselves embroiled. They staged their own lives—I have never seen so many “characters”, failed geniuses and sensual blondes, playing their roles with great panache while going about their mundane daily business. I never had so many friends and colleagues whose lives seemed to come directly from a Schnitzler play, given the way they talked, dressed, and comported themselves. It is not so much that the Viennese engaged in the Goffmanian presentation of the self in everyday life. It seemed rather that Vienna’s artistic past and present inundated regular life and the Viennese fitted their lives into the expression of this art. The medium in which all this thrived was an ongoing public conversation in which many seemed to participate. The relative inclusiveness of this conversation was in no small measure due to another Viennese characteristic: the close interlocking of its cultural and political classes. Politicians, artists, and intellectuals crossed one

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another’s paths on numerous occasions at all manner of venues, many of them institutional, others provided by Vienna’s still important cafés, its wine pubs (called “Heurigen”), and its cultural scene. Like Vienna’s theatrical dimension, interlocking elites were not a new feature. Edward Timms, the Cambridge biographer of Karl Kraus, who edited periodicals from 1911 to 1936 and was perhaps Vienna’s most articulate satirist, comments on the circles that had formed around the dominant avant-garde personalities of that time and the striking fact that they all intersected (Timms 1986:7f.). The circuits of the 1960s and 1970s were no longer personalitycentered but they still intersected. The circuits created a social grid through which talk flowed—and through which many other things, from little favors (like opera tickets) to position opportunities also passed. Vienna the canvas for the cultural performance of life was also a matrix for the social distribution of goods and favors that many needed and that were scarce. Vienna’s theatrical ways called forth in oneself the observer. The place demanded that one watched the presentation of selves and appreciated the art behind it. I learned, I think, my ethnographic skills from watching the Viennese long before I learned them at the university. I had come to Vienna in the early 1960s with my family, stayed on to study there, and then went on to become first a “scholar” and then an “assistant” (professor) at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Study. I was originally a stranger, and this sort of experience also turns one into an observer; I needed to learn the culture quite apart from needing to learn “ethnology”, the subject I enrolled in (I then switched to sociology). The Viennese university education was at once satisfying and exasperating. One had to assimilate a lot of content, a reasonable thing to require from the young and unknowledgeable. As with most public, mass university systems in Europe, professors tended to lecture rather than to conduct small seminars. The milieu bred good lecturers, and I got a lot out of these classes. My exasperation was with “ethnology” and its historical orientation that seemed out of touch with the need for studying modern, developing, urban societies. I had enrolled in ethnology partly by default—out of a liking for the exotic that captured my imagination, but also out of unclear professional interests and a lack of fields on offer in Vienna that I thought I might like. I was, for example, attracted by biology, which the University of Vienna did not offer at the time. Those interested in biology were asked to mesh instead zoology and botany and try to squeeze some biology out of the mix. I rejected the suggestion, sensing what the University of Vienna did not want to confront, that biology implied a paradigm shift and could not simply be distilled from earlier fields. I had also had a mild curiosity about physics but like most of my classmates, I became discouraged by the first lecture I attended. The professor busily derived un-understandable mathematical equations from ununderstandable assumptions for about two hours on a blackboard without ever once turning to the class. I am fully aware of the fact that the work must have required his exclusive concentration and attention—it seemed difficult. But the message he conveyed of mathematical primacy and rigor and of the irrelevance of the physical world did not sit well with my concept of a natural science. I never went back to physics, except many years later when I studied high-energy physics at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from a science studies perspective and found it to be of a completely different nature. My choice of ethnology also did not

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prove felicitous. My interests did not coincide with those of my teachers who were looking for historical patterns of diffusion among artifacts and similar things; the only highlight of my studies of ethnology in Vienna were two doctoral students who introduced us to ethnoscience, a new branch of American anthropology they had started to read about and trained themselves to understand. I switched to doing more and more sociology, the main courses for which were read by a then still youngish, tall professor in his mid-forties who looked like he was on top of things. Sociology was also the field of the historical moment, given that these were the late 1960s and the student rebellion was about to get in full swing. The “disobedient” generation of the time (Sica and Turner 2005) was attracted to sociology since it promised to answer some of the questions one discussed. The 1968 rebellion reached us prepared, but still surprised. One was prepared for it by earlier on-site student readings of the Frankfurt School, by one’s occasional attendance at student association meetings and the political situation these meetings hotly debated, and last not least, by various simmering and sometimes raucous disagreements between us, the young, and the parent generation over strange matters—over haircuts, the appropriateness of wearing a beard, and various social expectations (I married in black instead of in white to express my disagreement with these expectations). Still, one was gasping when one read what had happened in May 1968 in Paris. I had been holed up in the university’s library, struggling with texts, preparing for exams and my dissertation, and suffering from a lack of competent guidance. The Paris events shook me up, and I went to student meetings with greater diligence after the incidences. Yet, I remained more of a bystander to things. This changed when I joined the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna in 1970 for post-graduate studies and became adopted into a troublesome breed of politically minded idealists that were in my cohort. The Institute years (in contrast to the university years) were intense, challenging and of pivotal importance in shaping my future interests and orientation. They linked one up with “global sociology”, if by that one means prominent social scientists and philosophers from many nations. They also linked one with global politics, through the intense discussions we had of what was happening politically and on a student movement level, in other places. I came to the Institute in 1970 together with a notable portion of Austria’s most outspoken student movement leaders and participants, who were all roughly my generation, and various other recruits who also happened to be strong characters. Unlike my more fortunate colleagues, I was not yet properly politicized. My student movement classmates enlightened me on the world’s politics, and instructed me in what I ought to be battling. They also often corrected my other strange opinions. For example, I found the econometrics and mathematical modeling courses interesting and was undecided on these subjects’ virtue. But the movement practitioners had already come to a verdict on these courses, and it was negative. I was not that successful at holding my own when I tried to defend the potential value of mathematical models against them; but I disliked the moral overtones of these debates. If one was open toward numbers one got stigmatized—it felt as if one was on the wrong side of the movement, of the causes for which it fought, of world politics. I reacted defiantly to this attitude, and found my own support among those students of my cohort that had played no active role in the student rebellion. I teamed up with a hard drinking,

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hard smoking misfit who was not into politics but, as I understood him, into real knowledge. He was brilliant, and we began a many-year-long conversation and a life-long friendship and intellectual relationship. He was interested in the study of science, and this reinforced my own interests. More support came, after a while, from an Institute-mediated friendship with another colorful intellectual, Eric van Hove, a former priest, who as a professor later on in life made a brilliant career at the University of Antwerpen in applied research that put some of the Sixties’ hopes into practice and effectively helped the poor and disenfranchised. At the Institute, then, much energy went into sorting things out among ourselves and in doing so we sorted ourselves into two camps—the more academically inclined and the politically minded, who had turned tactical. The debate we conducted and that became the focal point of our split was the debate over positivism or over the epistemological status of the social sciences. It was a debate that ravaged much of social science in the 1960s and 1970s in Germany, where it became translated into an argument for the separate status of the social and human sciences advocated by Habermas against those who defended the (positivist) unity of the sciences.1 The left (myself at the time included) tended to side with Habermas, who was read as a proponent of a hermeneutic understanding of sociology. Re-enforced by other writings (e.g., Geertz’ on thick description [1973] and Kuhn’s on incommensurable paradigms in the natural sciences, 1970) the hermeneutic understanding won out, with much European social science now sharing the then discussed assumptions. The distinguished professors that came to the Institute to give intense seminars on their work may not have realized, but they also became sorted—into those who had the “correct” understanding of social science and those who did not. This didn’t quite pan out in the way it could have, since some of the more “positivistically” and quantitatively minded (e.g., Jim Coleman, Gudmund Hernes) were at the same time fascinating characters, helpful advisors and authoritative professionals—and one got to know them more personally than one ever got to know one’s professors at the university. Jim Coleman, who was also on the board of scientific advisors of the Institute, claimed to have had one of his best ideas while he attended the Vienna opera and listened to music. The philosopher Rom Harre and Frieder Naschold, a German political scientist who also came, impressed us by writing clever articles during their one-week or three-day stay at Vienna, while teaching at the Institute. Paul Feyerabend (who had the “right” understanding for the time with his “anything goes” slogan for the scientific method) was a reluctant interlocutor. He had, by the time he came and taught us, become bored, I think, by the perennial same questions of ever-new students. We all usually ended up at Annette’s, a little coffee shop around the corner from the Institute and sometimes spent long evenings there discussing our

1 The debate over positivism turned around questions of the value-laden nature of observation sentences. Proponents of a “positivist” view (the term was rejected by Popper), called critical rationalists, were Karl Popper and Hans Albert; its opponents were Jürgen Habermas and Theodor W. Adorno. The Frankfurt School defended the need to look at the “totality” of the human condition, a view that could be translated into a more hermeneutic approach interested in the referential whole of a text.

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teachers and their writings. Feyerabend refused to participate in these soul searches, and rather wanted to go sightseeing. The distinguished visitor that influenced me most during my stay at the Institute (something I realized only later) was perhaps Aaron Cicourel. With his book Method and Measurement in Sociology (Cicourel 1964) he had provided concrete, empirical testimony for the problematic character of the quantitative measurement tools we use in sociology. I was at the time involved in a six-country UNESCOorganized study on the productivity of scientists in organizations. I gained my own first-hand experience of survey research in pilot interviews I conducted—the experience was traumatic. The questionnaire was as good as these things get; it had been professionally developed, guided by an experienced survey researcher from the University of Michigan (Frank Andrews); it had been tested, standardized, adapted. And yet none of the interviewed took the questions as they should have; all attempted to negotiate their meaning; most chose different frames for their answers or edited in their particular perspective. Standardized questionnaires clearly seemed inadequate when one dealt with non-homogeneous, scientific populations. Later, data analysis also proved deeply disturbing. Correlations were low and explained less than 10 percent of the variance; they depended rather too strongly on what I did to them statistically, and quite a few made no sense. The investment of time and money had been enormous (I headed the Austrian part of the six-country study), and the theoretical revenue from the effort poor. Against this background, I learned to understand Cicourel’s arguments. Although I do not recall that he actually lectured ethnomethodology at the Institute, he somehow also gave me a sense of a broad and unorthodox ethnomethodological perspective, which I began to like as an antidote against the interpretative, “hermeneutic” tradition that was taking hold as the methodology of choice of post-positivist social science. Hermeneutic traditions text the world out, yet that sort of approach appeared at odds with the many resistances to the symbolic that I saw emerge as a characteristic feature of postmodern times. What one needed was a methodology—and theories— that could cope with behavioral and institutional orders and systems of signs without resorting to literary traditions that take reality to consist exclusively of representations. I ended up editing a book with Aaron on Advances in Social Theory and Methodology (Knorr Cetina and Cicourel 1981), the seeds of which were sown at the Institute when he lectured there. 3. Going West: Departure from the Local The eight years at the Institute, then, exposed one to strong personalities—of fellow students, of the engaged intellectuals that were our department heads (Helga Nowotny, Jürgen Pelikan), of our distinguished visitors, and of some strong-headed politicians on the Institute board. I learned to do empirical research, I learned some politics, and I learned to hold my arguments against others. Once one had survived the Institute, not much in the professional world, anywhere, felt threatening any longer. I had also married during the late 1960s, and enjoyed the experience of our first child. But the irritations I felt with Vienna’s off-putting “connection”-society and political appropriation of social power also added up. It seemed plain that to obtain a position

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in my home country (the Institute’s were temporary), it would not be enough to earn scientific credits. I would need to use, and increase, my social and political connections, “wait” on (do work for, come to the attention of) relevant decision makers and ministers of science (with whom we had contacts through the Institute board), join the ruling party, and hope that long-term loyalties would be rewarded. It was a patronage system based on party membership and informal connections. The ministerial bureaucracy was aware of the questionable nature of these practices and at times attempted to undermine them—but the old ways tended to win out as reforms became compromised or “improved upon” (the German euphemism for compromised reforms) to serve various interests. I hated the system; partly out of a general belief that things should work differently in science, and partly because I shared the values of the student movement that denounced such practices. Some of the notions of the Sixties movement were obviously demented, like the idea that the requirements of marital fidelity were a form of possessiveness and had to be counteracted by openly conducted extra-marital affairs. But others were not. Much of the experience of Vienna and its twisted ways of doing things suggested a simple alternative: straightforward ways. Its Catholic charms suggested the alternative of secular honesty; its gossip culture the rejection of rumor and nosiness; its tactfulness the virtues of frank, if discourteous, directness. The massive strategic party affiliations of the population implied that one had to refuse to join, except perhaps if one wanted to pursue a political career. My main “political” achievement at the time was perhaps that I refused to play along when the time came to either engage, or disengage from the Viennese (and Austrian) understanding of career making. I disengaged. When I left Austria, first for a year and later for good, I had few regrets. The lake district had shown the limitations of small-town relationships and small-town life. Vienna, the political and social center of Austria, made one aware of bigger and much more powerful limitations—those of misguided institutional systems and outgoing modes of life. My own post-Viennese days began when we moved for a year to Berkeley in 1976–1977, where, on top of the Berkeley Hills, one could feast on breathtaking views of the San Francisco Bay, ride into dry, sun-drenched grasslands and woods (I found them cozy and comforting; our Austrian forests had always been green, moldy, and repellently wet), and enjoy the balmy air. I thought of this at the time as my rediscovery of nature, missed since the lake district days. Berkeley of course, with its gleaming colors, was much more spectacularly beautiful than the dark Austrian lakes. Berkeley was also immensely liberating—one cared little, it seemed, about any of the features that mattered in Vienna or the larger Middle European context. I was unable at first to distinguish professors from bums when I passed them on Telegraph Avenue—clothes did not seem to be a means of signaling social status. The elaborate little conversations of glances one had on Vienna’s streets with those strolling past (first looking at the other’s face, then sideways to the partner, then back and down the first person’s entire frame to their toes, and back up till you met their eyes) did not exist. Even smoking a cigarette, which had always been a matter of reciprocity and social negotiation in Vienna (would you take a cigarette if I took one?), seemed entirely a matter between tobacco and oneself. It seemed to me one could move in with a horse in this environment without anyone taking notice or finding it strange. I

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felt free—liberated not only from the lake district’s form of social relationships, but also from Vienna’s theatrical and status oriented “society” life. Liberation somehow translated into creative impulse and I embarked on my first “laboratory study”, the study of natural science practice through the direct observation of scientists in the lab. I had been steeped in philosophy before coming to Berkeley; the University of Vienna required philosophy courses, and we had read Habermas, Gadamer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Popper, Lakatos, and later Kuhn in the context of the debate over positivism at the Institute. I developed a great interest in the natural sciences from these intense discussions (and earlier ones at home). But I had the most bizarre ideas about how the natural sciences worked—shaped by what I knew about the logic of scientific theories and the context of justification. It was unavoidable, I think, that I should get hooked on conducting a laboratory study with the first step into a lab—it was visible enough that science in practice was very different from what we all thought. Nobody, to my knowledge, had published an observation study of a laboratory science and of the epistemic side of research before. I had wanted to spend the year in Berkeley trying to “recover” my imagination from the survey research put down. The recovery was instant and sustained and led to the book The Manufacture of Knowledge, which I published in 1981. Researching natural scientific practice occupied me for the better part of the next fifteen years. I also learned that the method of direct encounter and active observation, if applied to the right setting, and if one was not chary of looking at things theoretically rather than merely “descriptively”, yielded the more innovative results—as opposed to ones that are merely routine business. This is what ethnography has been for me ever since—a reverse form of theory, so to speak, a way of processing in reverse gear, the meta-empirical nature of the social world away from its descriptive surface. The ethnographic encounter hurls at one not only surprises, puzzles and leads; it is also a violent encounter of one’s own imaginaries with the real, unmediated by the symbolic—as one’s interpretative control over the external world slowly slips away under the mangle of an auto-theoretical practice. Intensity settings are perhaps especially mangling. There must be a distinction between the ethnographic encounter that ensues when one hangs out in a big space largely empty of relevant content (think of Malinowski’s islands or the Chicago School’s urban territories) and the sort of immersion that ensues when one finds oneself in the intensely streaming professional settings of a scientific lab or a high-tech trading floor in a global bank. The fun of doing a laboratory study extended into intellectual life. The Berkeley campus and context provided a larger center of thinking than the Vienna Institute and it offered more diversity. I learned my Heidegger from Dreyfus in Berkeley, speech act theory from Searle, and the ethnography of communication from Gumpertz’s work. I became briefly fascinated with Eleanor Rosch’s cognitive psychology, Feyerabend’s breathtaking stories about the early history of science, and many student-organized activities. Berkeley had, at the time, a culture of intellectual discipleship: the wellknown professors had their changing clientele of acolytes who sat, sometimes literally, at their feet, debating what they heard intensely with their teachers and among themselves. There was also immense excitement about grand events, for example a lecture by Marcuse who came to visit. I have never seen such fellowships of enthusiastic learning spring up again at any other university—not at the University

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of Pennsylvania, where Goffman taught an excellent class I attended, deprived of an enthusiastic clientele; not at the University of Bielefeld, where Niklas Luhmann commanded some, but not the same excited attention; and not at the University of Chicago, where excellent students seem to labor rather than to excitedly enjoy the great material they are offered. The milieu of intensity and engagement must have been the afterglow of the student rebellion in Berkeley (which was over when I came). I needed the engagement, which added on to the excitement of my research experience. Aaron Cicourel, who had read my needs correctly, had advised me to go to Berkeley rather than somewhere else, and Troy Duster and his Institute for Social Change offered a home-base—I have been grateful to both of them ever since. Both my husband and I went back to Vienna briefly after Berkeley, but it was clear that we wanted to come back to the States and we did. 4. The Accidental Global Like the Vienna Institute, Berkeley happened at the right time. In its stimulating and liberating environment I was able to translate the obsessions we acquired in the late 1960s and early 1970s into another project that quickly became equally obsessive— research into the natural sciences. Research programs feed on themselves; they produce, from their own open questions and inadequacies, new research programs and obsessions, new expanded interests in what others do, and the energy to pursue this. For biologists, a major motivation and goal is heading one’s own lab. For a social scientist, it may be acquiring a research program of one’s own; I can recommend the experience. Once one has such a program, courses, conferences, and other people’s work acquire added interest: to feed the program, one starts to really learn from others. I spent roughly the next twenty years of my professional career at the University of Bielefeld, after trying out post-doc and visiting positions and finally a full professorship on the East Coast. I returned to Europe in 1983, with my family trailing behind me. Bielefeld was not quite the culture shock one might expect it to have been after Vienna and Berkeley. The University of Bielefeld had the largest and, so I was told, the best faculty of sociology in the country. Sociology had Niklas Luhmann, Klaus Offe, an excellent center for science and technology studies and sociology of development. It had the Simmel archive, Alfred Schutz’s previously unedited letters, a phenomenologically informed microsociological tradition and a thriving macrosociological equivalent—systems theory. In fact Bielefeld was a new “reform university”, a child of the Sixties, one might say,2 conceived by a renowned German sociologist, Helmut Schelsky3—with Luhmann as its first professor (appointed in 1968). Bielefeld had sociology in its genes, and this translated into the faculty’s size, rich course offerings, and manifold activities. Most importantly, perhaps, Bielefeld still had students interested in sociology—a 2 Official planning started in 1965 and the first students were enrolled (in mathematics and sociology) in the fall of 1969–1970. 3 These ideas are published; see Mikat and Schelsky 1966. Bielefeld was one the universities created during a massive wave of university expansion that lasted from about 1965 to 1980, when close to twenty new universities were established.

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first sign that the Sixties had carried over into the post-Sixties generation. During the late 1960s and the 1970s, the social sciences had been many students’ disciplines of choice. This love affair has now fizzled out, but it was still in full bloom when I came to Bielefeld. I took advantage of the situation. Some of our students (Stefan Hirschauer, Klaus Amann) recruited me as their advisor soon after I came, and I recruited them. I set up a so called “laboratory studies circle” named after my lab studies interest but not limited to science studies. For most of my years in Bielefeld we spent a day once every few weeks presenting and hotly discussing participants’ work, had many visitors from the outside,4 and kept the “circle” open for interesting qualitative work anywhere at the university and outside. The circle format meant that we had a continuity of interlocutors and discussions. It worked because my more senior students and a stream of newcomers and junior colleagues maintained their intense engagement. Hirschauer provided us with a nagging, insistent critical consciousness that he also put to good use, later, as editor of the German Journal of Sociology. Klaus Amann contributed unmatched ethnographic sensitivity. Martina Merz, the physicist turned social scientist, was the intellectual link that kept me connected, through her own work after mine ended, to high-energy physics at CERN and its fantastic experiments. Frank Mars, who in his dissertation with me did the first ethnographic study of financial analysts worldwide that I know of, provided fascinating empirical results. Alex Preda, with his clever interpretations of and dedication to economic matters, became the collaborator in spirit who helped push the new sociology of finance when I became interested in finance. And Urs Bruegger, the trader and occasional visitor to our circle, became the treasured colleague with whom I coauthored many of the later financial market papers. What emerged in Bielefeld was an intellectual and collegial conversation with “intermediary” scholars—something quite different from the teacher-student advisory communication one has with one’s class participants, and the conversations with other faculty with whom one often ends up talking only university politics. It was a protected milieu of sorts, a brainy counterforce to the administrative matters that pervaded our faculty and university life. I created another protected milieu of sorts for myself far from Bielefeld, in Geneva, through my work at CERN, the European High Energy Physics Lab, where I did my second, larger, study of scientific practice. Between approximately the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s, I spent much time in Geneva, at CERN, “fleeing” university life for up to three weeks at a time to research the epistemic culture of high energy physics (I also spent time at a Molecular Biology Lab in Germany where Klaus Amann did his work). I continued to escape to CERN even after the book that resulted from this work (Epistemic Cultures, Knorr Cetina 1999) was finished, not only to stay in touch with what was going on, but also because of the fabulous work environment CERN provided. It had housing on site; excellent computer, web and email access (existing long before these became routine); a cafeteria that was open from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m.; a library and offices that were open twenty-four hours—going 4 Eric van Hove, Jörg Rheinberger, Ted Schatzky, and Jeffrey Olick immediately come to mind—they triggered particularly intense discussions.

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there was like upgrading one’s existence to a pure research life. One lived in a bubble at CERN, but life in the bubble was exciting. I wrote some of my better articles at CERN, away from home and away from the university. When I later switched to studying financial markets in Switzerland with Urs Bruegger, trading floors and their context provided the “other place” of research focus and intensity. It is not only, I think, the escape from university routines that made these field sites so attractive. It is also that immersion into the field gets one’s analytical processing up to speed and turns the continually interrupted relationship with research one manages to have in university settings into more of a flow experience. CERN, and later the trading floors of large investment banks where I studied currency trading, were not only “other” places, they were also global locations. One finds the global world in situ, so to speak, in the high-energy physics collaborations that come together at CERN to perform their massive, technically complex and humanly demanding experiments. One also finds the global world in situ on the trading floors of the big investment banks that I later turned to. The traders on these floors “make” the worlds’ largest (more than 1.8 trillion US dollar daily turnover in 2004), technologically most sophisticated, most globally operating financial market, the foreign exchange market, in whose structures I am interested. At CERN, approximately 2,000 physicists from 200 physics institutes make the world’s most sophisticated detectors to study things like the top quark or the Higgs mechanism in experiments that last between twenty and thirty years. It was an unexpected discovery to find the global world instantiated and concentrated in such sites. At Berkeley, I had originally thought I would learn nothing from watching scientists at work, since science was a thinking business and thinking could not be watched. Some fifteen years later I had similarly misplaced hesitations. I thought that global phenomena were about Charles Tilly’s big structures, large processes and huge comparisons, and could not be studied from the microperspective I had cultivated since Berkeley. I was in good company in holding these beliefs, which are still prominent today. But I was nonetheless mistaken. Global social and cultural forms, I found, are no larger in their component structures and processes than non-global forms; they are just differently organized and distributed. There is no “one” global world consisting of homogenous structures and all-penetrating connections. Assuming this neglects the sociology of the global, by which I mean the differentiated character of cultural forms that are global in nature but of limited participation and penetration. Highenergy physics collaborations are genuinely global forms, but they “connect” only high-energy physics units of certain capacities on a world-wide scale, and they do so in their own specific, historically grounded ways. The foreign exchange market is a genuinely global form, but it connects only market participants, who sit mostly on the trading floors of big (investment) banks. Though market outcomes may have consequences for some economies and countries—just like anything else may have consequences for other things— the actual arrangement of trading floors, market participants, and provider firms is a small world with its own differentiated structures. When one actually studies Al Qaeda, the globally operating terrorist group, as I did briefly (2005a), one also finds global microstructures rather than unwieldy macroprocesses.

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It was invigorating to discover that what we call the global world has microtextures of various kinds; it meant that one could bring to bear on it the methodological accoutrements of the molecular and nano-perspectives I liked and that this equipment was likely to be instrumental to the illumination of global structures and dynamics. It was also invigorating to discover, via the forays I made into high energy physics and financial markets, that one can live a dual life: that of a sometimes-reluctant member of a local setting, and that of someone who lives, and moves between, sites. Bielefeld, the old textile town that was also trans-regionally known for its baking supply industry (“Dr. Oetker”) and an often struggling soccer team, was pleasant enough as a living environment, but it did not inspire identification. The University of Bielefeld, on the other hand, with its classy social science reputation and its renowned colleagues (as long as they were there; Luhmann retired in 1993 and died shortly afterward, Offe left) surely complemented one’s vanity. I always felt identified with the University of Bielefeld when I was at other universities. For me and for many of my former colleagues, the story was more ambiguous when one was in Bielefeld, or “inside”. The alienating elements were the institutional structures universities had been given in Germany as a political legacy of the Sixties’ reform movement. They were not of the political patronage kind that offended one in Vienna. Germany does not have the whole population enrolled in political parties, as Austria did, and it is a much larger country, with distances between elites. Germany believes in rule-based governance, while Austrians tend to disbelieve in rules.5 In Germany, procedures matter in the higher education system, just as Max Weber would have predicted, and they are often impeccably implemented in the country’s state universities (in Bielefeld, we had a two-volume work of code of hundreds of pages that department and committee chairs carried with them to faculty and committee meetings). The reforms of the Sixties had changed the rules; they had intended a “democratization” of the university based on a parliamentary model—complete with classification systems (who belonged to what group), voting rights (which groups could vote how on what occasion), procedural regulations (what had to be done to arrive at a vote), prescribed structures (what kind of organizational units were to exist and how they had to be managed), degree and curricula regulations, and so on. This work of reform was embedded in ideas (could they have been Maoist?) about the need for continued re-reformation. Germany is still busy today re-reforming the reforms, in an endless process that keeps happy rounds of lawmakers and administrators busy in several locations: newly elected ministers of science dabble with the system, universities warily implement the reforms, faculties and students shrug their shoulders and comply, and the unpalatable results eventually get back to the ministries, where they rekindle the process. Nobody ever seemed to have gotten the idea that democracy can be based on autonomous individuals exercising their judgment independently and reasonably. Nobody has been willing to try American or Swiss models of democracy, which place great faith in individual and institutional agency and distrust cumbersome state structures. Nobody even calculates the cost of the education-related state apparatus 5 We deconstruct the interests behind rules, the way they are applied, the legal and governing bodies that promote them—all of this breeds a cynical attitude toward rules.

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that comes on top of those of university administrations—both bureaucracies are personnel-intensive and legitimacy-oriented. Scripted into the German university system is a deep form of distrust in people. One assumes the existence of three natural academic classes (students, entry-level faculty, and senior faculty) that are pitted against each other by virtue of the class interests they share. The state’s moral obligation is to protect each class from the appetites for power and resources of the other classes. The state fulfills this obligation by tightly regulating decision-making procedures, management structures, course curricula, examination procedures, compensation systems, spending, recruitment and hiring, and everything else one can think of, except, fortunately, research.6 The individual person is, in a sense, the environment rather than the center of this sort of organization. 5. The Other Place: Princeton The worst collective effect of the system was that it actually created the classes and the distrust it assumed (Knorr Cetina 2005b). Its worst effect on individuals was that it led to one’s disaffection and “inner emigration” (this is another German euphemism). Despite the relative excellence of the university, its generous resources, and its outstanding top administration (led for twenty-two years by the mathematician Karl-Peter Grotemeyer; I learned more from him during my four years as a “ProRektor” about leading an organization than from organization theory7), one did not develop the sort of “love” for the place that my American colleagues at good schools often profess to have. I became “globalized” accidentally during my time in the North-Rhine Westphalian town and University of Bielefeld not only through my field research in global sites, but also as a consequence of this disaffection. I left Bielefeld for several sabbaticals and terms off in Princeton during the 1990s and left for good in 2001. When going to Princeton, I sought the compensating experience of being a stranger and visitor again, and it worked. It worked particularly well in 1992–1993 when I was a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in a group with other social (e.g., Michel Callon), historical (e.g., George Stocking), and philosophical students of science (e.g., Larry Laudan). Clifford Geertz had assembled the group; it split down the middle after a while as a result of a raucous controversy over relativism and the social dimensions of science provoked by a particularly cacophonous proponent of an older school of science studies. But Geertz held firm. He defended the empirical study of science in which he appeared immensely interested, invited a smaller circle of scholars to meet in his home, and created room for further conversations. Apart from the passionate feelings these events evoked, the Institute proved to be a transcendental place. It offered the silence and solitude one needs to think and write. 6 Today’s attempted changes of the system are often seen as neoliberal reforms, but these critics forget that the institution the reform movement of the Sixties had bred was overregulated, incapable of playing the role of producer of knowledge that good universities play in the U.S., and inefficient as a service provider for teaching and research. 7 He was admired even by his enemies and one of the longest serving presidents in Germany.

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The permanent members of the Institute were all off to writing some manuscript, and so were we, the year-long visiting members. One can imagine the almost spiritual peacefulness that ensued. What one feared most, after some months, were interruptions of the calm. I ended up dreading the walk from my desk to the library as an unwelcome disturbance. I wrote my first draft of Epistemic Cultures (Knorr Cetina 1999) while I was there, and never even got around to confronting Geertz on the mild quarrels I have with him on his hermeneutic views. I did take advantage, though, of the Friday morning seminars Norton Wise chaired so enthusiastically at the history department of Princeton University (my weekly excitement) and some other things Princeton offers—its civilized small-town charms, excellent theater (I have seen a better performance of the opera Turandot in Princeton than in Berlin), its Nassau Square coffeehouses, its voluptuous health-food stores, and the nearness to New York, which is reachable by frequent trains in roughly one hour. Princeton, of course, is the quintessential global village, a small town in feel and yet global in charisma by virtue of its international inhabitants, its multinational restaurants, arts, and other fare, and the global allure of Princeton University. It is also a town in which the evolution and differentiation of the epistemic species, that of knowledge workers and their acolytes and representatives, can be observed in concentrated form. There are of course a great number of ordinary disciplinary specialists in Princeton, but one can also find many hybrid, compound, and geeky strains. There is for example, the successful department head and music lover who runs a hedge fund on the side, thus bridging the gap between academia, art, and commerce (how, I ask myself, does he manage all that?). There is the computer-modeling astrophysicist who also models Far Eastern philosophy—a far-out extravaganza for his conservative colleagues. There is the faculty member and international mogul paid by a European country who connects the policyoriented side of the campus to transatlantic politicians. There is the ambassadorial academic; the member of the academic league of honor, so to speak, who gives distinguished lectures and advises foreign countries and institutions to which he or she is connected. There are the politicians turned academic—the former minister from Europe, member of the Sixties’ generation and high-school drop-out, that now teaches the Ivy League elite. There are the professorial power-couples in which both are equals in position and standing—and various less equally paired couples. There is the teamed-up-with-the-wife male that is lucky to find in the wife the private secretarial help the university does not pay for (I did not encounter in the male population an equivalent secretarial helper). There is the male that finds in the wife a conspicuous enhancement of his own body and spirit—her functions are beauty, adornment, wit, and the aesthetic consumption of a non-working life (again, so far no male equivalent). There is the commercially employed variety of the knowledge species. Orbiting around the university are start-up companies and venture capitalist firms with family and partners on the faculty. Clever founders and inventors who sold their company also live in Princeton—and continue to dream up ideas in the basements of their lake-side mansions. There are many researchers from other countries in the Princeton area who are not with the university and spend their lives doing most interesting and useful things: launching commercial satellites, testing the DNA of 9/11 victims, inventing medical

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test kits, researching the vast area of pharmacological biochemistry, and advising companies that want to expand their business to the U.S. There is something of a psychology scene. One can find at Princeton dinner parties the Jungian psychiatrist and dream analyzer from New York and the female therapist who connects one to one’s deceased ancestors—should one feel the urge to converse with them. One can find celebrated yoga teachers that offer weekend seminars to the overworked. And one can find the equivalent of the Viennese wine pub (which in Vienna substitutes for the psychoanalyst’s couch)—there was a pub called the Yellow Rose of Texas where people dressed in Western gear folk-danced in groups to find relief from their stressful lives. Princeton also has an art scene and, most importantly perhaps, a host culture. Princeton’s good hosts are those admirable members of the educated classes that are at the same time accomplished cooks, art lovers and connoisseurs—and owners of spacious homes. The real host of many generations of visitors to the Institute for Advanced Study was Franz Moehn, the Institute’s long-time chef, who held a degree from Princeton University but then decided to earn his living through his cuisine. Franz’s food creations were art; he served them at the Institute’s dinners and official occasions, but he also served them at home, to select groups of members and friends of the Institute and visitors from the outside that he wanted to connect. Through his food events, Franz personally created one’s relationship with the place. There are other hosts. There is the art curator and antique collector who offered wine at home in ancient Greek vessels and let me try on 2,000-year-old necklaces—a neverforget, awe-inspiring experience. There is Michaela de Lingerolles, the generous woman who attracts to her fantastic dinner parties friends from the art, ambassador, and academic circles of Princeton and its New York and Washington backyard and acts as a benefactor of the art and trustee world. There is Nupur Lahiri, the Bengali-American psychiatrist devoted to the artistic and cultural traditions of her home country who spends her spare time and money cooking for and organizing ethnic festivals around which she brings part of the community together. And there is Andor, the artist and Renaissance man whom I often think of as the master mediator of Princeton’s circles. He single-handedly connects the most diverse elements of the Princeton (and New York) scientific and humanist multitude through his avant-garde works, philosophy, music, and integrative sociological ambitions. Like Berkeley, Princeton had a lasting effect upon me; for more than ten years and in fact until now, it has been for me the other place I escaped to from Europe when I needed a shot of American disorganized capitalism and globalism—experienced, admittedly, from the comforts of Princeton’s pricy and protected environment. In Princeton I laid the foundations for my recent work on global financial markets. Market events regularly make the front pages of the New York Times, of which I am an avid reader. I noticed the language of utopian conquests and invasions, the tales spun of twisting daggers and bleeding emotions, the images of the market as an animal and a vulnerable being. It seemed plain that this was not simply what Marx had been talking about when he declared the economy the productive base of society. It seemed also plain that the area of finance (that I identified as such only later) was beginning to define our future more than Marx’s economic infrastructures of the past. I have always been interested in the future more than in the past, and I am fascinated

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by how the contemporary world breaks out of modernity and rearranges itself around different principles and structures. When I went back to Europe in 1993, I was still finishing the Epistemic Cultures book and had no time to begin a market study. But I had been hooked, and started the research when I could in 1996 with Urs Bruegger in the headquarters of one of the ten top banks of the world in Zurich. I returned to Princeton in 1997 for a year as a visitor to the department of sociology and mainly spent my time reading economic sociology—aided by sociology’s lecture series on the topic and an enlightening seminar conducted by Viviana Zelizer. On some level, I owe my interest in global financial markets to my Princeton stays—and the seductive prose of the world’s best newspaper, the New York Times. I find myself less critical of Princeton than I had been of other localities. This is, I assume, because Princeton resolves some of the tensions between the global and the local by fostering a global intercourse in a village setting. In Bielefeld, in Konstanz and Chicago (where I now teach), and in many other European and U.S. settings with great universities, the hinterland dominates. This is perhaps as it should be, but it is not my preferred power relation between the knowledge-oriented world and one oriented to other goals. If I find myself less critical of Princeton it is also because I have remained a visitor there. Those, like the permanent members of the Institute, stuck there for good do get bored, find the ever changing scientific and humanistic multitudes of Princeton just more of the same, and look forward to taking their sabbaticals in grander places. Remaining a visitor can be a strategy of choice that complements one’s commitment to a home institution. It is also a strategy that supports the global research agenda I have now and want to pursue in the years to come. References Adorno, Theodor W. et al. 1988. Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie. Darmstadt: Luchterhand. Cicourel, Aaron Victor. 1964. Method and Measurement in Sociology. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mikat, Paul and Helmut Schelsky. 1966. Grundzüge einer neuen Universität: Zur Planung einer Hochschulgründung in Ostwestfalen. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Sica, Alan and Stephen P. Turner. 2005. The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Timms, Edward. 1986. Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Selected Bibliography Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press. ———. 1997. “Sociality with Objects. Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies.” Theory, Culture and Society 14: 1–30. ———. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. “From Pipes to Scopes: The Flow Architecture of Financial Markets.” Distinktion 7: 7–23. ———. 2005a. “Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies.” Theory, Culture & Society (Special Issue on Complexity) 22(5): 213–234. ———. 2005b. “Culture of Life.” In The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties. Ed. Alan Sica and Stephen Turner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knorr Cetina, Karin, and Aaron Victor Cicourel. 1981. Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Knorr Cetina, Karin, and Urs Bruegger. 2002. “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets.” American Journal of Sociology 107: 905–995.

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Chapter 3

Between Worlds: Marginalities, Comparisons, Sociology Joachim J. Savelsberg

Introduction: A Migrant’s Standpoints René König, my first sociology professor at the University of Cologne in 1973–1974, had spent the Nazi era in exile, teaching in Switzerland. After the war he accepted a professorship at Cologne, driven to establish and institutionalize an empirically based sociology in Germany. There is little doubt that he was extremely successful in doing so. König understood such sociology to be a prime weapon against ideologically driven world views, while maintaining that the basic concepts sociologists work with are pre-scientific in nature (König 1967). In one of his more speculative essays he addresses the prominent role of Jews such as Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel in the foundation of sociology (König 1971). Possibly motivated by his own refugee experience (and by his French mother raising him in East Prussian Danzig, now the Polish Gdansk), he argued that the marginality experience of religious and/or ethnic minorities challenges the common sense assumptions with which most people approach their everyday worlds. Once such assumptions are

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challenged, the scholarly exploration of the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966) becomes a meaningful adaptation strategy. These arguments correspond with Simmel’s (1950) observations about the stranger to whom others attribute a particular sense of objectivity. Marginalities come in many forms. One of the more visible forms in which I experienced marginality was as an expatriate who first visited the United States at age thirty-one, spent eighteen of the next twenty-four years in that country, is married to an American citizen, has two American daughters, and is the only non-US citizen, only “Goy,” and only male in my new family. Having visited this country twice on year-long fellowships and finally emigrating from Hanover, Germany, in 1989 to take my current position in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, I experienced America as an outsider within. During earlier visits to Baltimore and Cambridge I was thrilled by the host country’s diversity and by an ease of communication I barely knew from Europe; an experience to be expected for a German visitor in light of differences between American and German interaction forms beautifully diagnosed by Stephen Kalberg (1987). I was also amazed by the country’s stability despite obvious and dramatic forms of social inequality, at times separated by little more than railroad tracks or a major avenue. Three observations would eventually motivate three lines of research. First, I encountered an astonishing, and rather asociological, optimism regarding the effects of social activism and policy innovations, prompting my own research on clashes between policy tools and social conditions, which I explored in a study on sentencing guidelines, published in the American Journal of Sociology (Savelsberg 1992).1 Second, I was exposed to an amazing rapidity in ideological and policy change despite a basically stable political system. This experience sparked my research on the specific institutional conditions that allow for such changes, the first product of which also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology (Savelsberg 1994). Finally I experienced a kind of “good conscience” that allows Americans, at times in vast majorities, to stand up against world opinion. This experience motivated a recent turn to research on collective memories, a first co-authored product of which was again published in the American Journal of Sociology (Savelsberg and King 2005). Much of the current essay spells out biographical, methodological, and substantive aspects of the latter two lines of my work. But my experience of marginality and the encounters (and clashes) of different social worlds did not begin with my emigration. It took less visible, but influential forms earlier in my life course.

1 I interpreted guidelines as an attempt at reestablishing formal rational law in disregard of the structural impediments to such law that Max Weber (1976: 882–895) had alerted us to in the final section of his Sociology of Law. Having tied this research to my experience as a foreign visitor to the United States elsewhere, I will not return to it here (see Savelsberg 2006).

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Growing up: Conflicting Worlds in Small-Town Germany I was born in 1951, the eldest of four children, into a conservative Catholic family in the medium-sized town of Ahlen in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. My mother had ended school after eighth grade as was common, especially for girls, in her cohort. She became an apprentice in the local labor administration, but I only knew her as a housewife and mother. Her father, a book keeper in the enamel industry, died during a bombing raid in 1945, and one of her brothers was killed as a soldier in France in 1940. Things were not much luckier on my father’s side. My paternal grandfather, a low-level civil servant for the Imperial Railroads, had been gravely injured during World War I. He died during a 1921 flu epidemic before my father turned one year old, leaving his wife with two sons and a most modest pension. Yet my father became the first in the family to attend the university, receiving an engineering degree in mining surveying. His early strong patriotism, never completely overcome, was cultivated during the Weimar Republic, especially when traveling by train through the French-occupied Ruhr Region to visit his father’s side of the family in small-town Herzogenrath, near Aachen, on the German-Dutch-Belgian border. The Versailles Treaty would always remain an important issue for him. His conservative Catholicism and his brother’s involvement in an outlawed Catholic youth organization helped him maintain marginality status during the Nazi era. He was the only student of his Gymnasium not to join the Hitler Youth. This kept neither him nor his brother, however, from being drafted into the military. His brother was killed in Russia in 1943, and my father served as a soldier from 1940–1945, first in France and subsequently on the eastern front. Not surprisingly thus, the distinction between a Nazi soldier and a Wehrmacht soldier,2 too subtle for many, was to become an important issue in our family as I was coming of age during the late 1960s. Many heated debates during those years were not, however, aggravated by my decision to become a conscientious objector. Despite my parents’ conservative orientation, their war experiences may have created some sympathy for my step. I thus grew up with almost no extended family, with few mediators between my nuclear family and the outside world. I believe this condition enhanced affective attachment as well as later intergenerational conflicts. Yet I also grew up in a threegeneration household. Oma (grandma) Savelsberg, a professional cook, lived with us and ran the family kitchen until the end of her life in 1968. The cultivation of a large garden that had helped her survive and raise her two sons became part of my family’s world as well. My grandmother continued to be aware of the (late) Emperor’s Birthday, not surprising in light of Mannheim’s (1952) arguments about the shaping of generations. Our household with three generations thus brought together three markedly distinct sets of collective memories.

2 “Wehrmacht soldier” suggests an (ideological and/or functional) separation between the German military and the Nazi regime itself. “Nazi soldier” may refer either to units of the Nazi party within the German military (e.g., SS units), or it may postulate (ideological and/or functional) unity between the military and the Nazi regime.

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I believe that two other early experiences became important for my life course. When I turned seven, my family had already moved twice. Between ages three and eleven I lived in two company towns, first in industrial Lünen, then in the “divided” town of Werne. The northern part of Werne was characterized by farmers and small merchants almost all, like my family, conservative and Christian Democrats in their political affiliation. Yet, until I turned eleven we lived in the southern part of Werne, in the (highly stratified) mining town that was almost fully Social Democratic with some Communist splinters.3 Economic stratification was marked, cultural and linguistic distinctions highlighted, and boundaries enforced. Polish sounding names such as Malinowski, Nakielski, and Orlowski symbolized the other side. Their carriers were grandchildren or great-grandchildren of those who had immigrated into the industrializing Ruhr Region to find work in the coal mining and steel industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I remember Nobel Laureate Günter Grass campaigning for Willy Brandt’s SPD on the open square leading up to the mine, with global themes and some degree of helplessness in light of the miners’ local concerns. Another form of intercultural encounter occurred in the context of school exchanges with French Lycées, initiated in 1963 by French President de Gaulle and German Chancellor Adenauer to help overcome a century of mistrust and hatred between the two peoples. Exchanges brought me to Bailleul, a small town near Lille, and to Lyon. I attended French schools, lived with French families, the Vandenameles and Sommets respectively, and in return hosted one of their sons, Jean-Pierre. I learned, among other things, that meals may have five courses and last three hours, at least on Sundays, that types of cheeses abound and that “strange” tastes may become desirable, even for the fifteen-year olds, especially when accompanied by wine and followed by one of grandpa’s self-made calvados. Childhood and youth in a small town may be monotonous and boring at first glance; a closer look, however, reveals encounters between distinct worlds, with occasional mutual explorations, but also clashes: war versus post-war generations, miners versus (petty) bourgeoisie, Christian Democrats versus Social Democrats, and French and German. Emotionally attached to my parents, but sharing the different experiences and world views of my own generation; entering the much smaller homes of working-class school friends, but being admonished to keep my distance from their language and politics; being born into a strictly Christian Democratic family, but becoming a cautious Social Democrat; and experiencing the different world views of my new French friends never allowed me to settle into one world and its common sense assumptions too comfortably. Did this predestine me to becoming a comparative sociologist? Other peers experienced some of these fields of tension as well and pursued very different paths. Yet, the particular constellation was mine. I believe it contributed to my intellectual path, especially in combination with later experiences in higher education and ever so important contingencies.

3 The Christian Democratic Party is the major center-right party, with historical roots in Catholicism and a free market platform that is moderated by a conservative welfare state agenda. The Social Democratic Party is center-left with a stronger redistributive program.

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Academic Training at Cologne and Trier—and Moves toward America Graduating from my Catholic Gymnasium, after exposure to considerable doses of both conservatism and liberation theology, I entered a sixteen-month interlude of community service as a conscientious objector, gaining experience in activities such as sweeping sidewalks, unclogging toilets, collecting dirty laundry from nurses’ dormitories, disposing of daily food wastes, and mowing lawns. In the fall of 1973 I enrolled in a combined sociology-economics-public policy program at the University of Cologne. After my early exposure to René König, I took further sociology classes with Erwin Scheuch, later president of the International Sociological Association, but first introduced to me as a “fascist” by flyers and activists of the KBW (Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland), the main Maoist student organization on campus. I learned about organizations from Renate Mayntz, later the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; the sociology of art from Alphons Silberman, a former émigré to Australia from Nazi Germany and a fervent opponent of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno’s work on culture; social networks from Franz-Urban Pappi; science theory from Richard Münch (fellow author in this volume); “differentiation” and “integration” from Friedhelm Neidhardt, later the president of the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung in Berlin, and Helmut Willke, then his assistant and now a professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld; and urban sociology with Neidhardt and Jörg Siewert, another among his assistants. Neidhardt and Siewert also hired me as a student assistant at the Research Institute for Sociology, where my first assignment was data entry and analysis of a community power study on the southwest German town of Reutlingen. My Diplom (master’s) thesis was on the effects of varying degrees of municipal autonomy on community power structures (Savelsberg 1980). I list many names here because my work was indeed inspired by multiple relationships rather than by one particular advisor. The years at Cologne were a time of considerable turmoil, with the BaderMeinhof group slipping ever more into a terrorist trajectory. One of the major abductions, resulting in the murder of Hans-Martin Schleyer, a former Nazi and then head of the German industry federation, occurred only a couple of miles from my student apartment in Cologne. Terrorism, media reporting on the issue, and government responses were among the foci of our student debates. Some of the spirit was captured in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the film based on a book by Cologne citizen and Nobel Laureate for literature Heinrich Böll, the main action of which takes place in the massive high-rise apartment building barely a hundred yards from the Research Institute of Sociology building, my workplace at the time. After my 1978 Diplom graduation, I accepted what turned out to be a series of short-term contracts in sociology at the provincial University of Trier, in the ancient Roman settlement near the German-French-Luxembourgian border. Some two millennia ago it had been the part-time residence of the Emperor Konstantin; in the early nineteenth century Karl Marx was born and raised there. At Trier I worked as an instructor and research assistant with Roland Eckert, Alois Hahn, and Bernd Hamm, while writing my doctoral thesis on the criminalization of minority youth under the supervision of Hans Braun.

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I defended my dissertation at the University of Trier in the spring of 1982, during a period of blocked opportunities with few openings in the academic job market. German universities had reopened after World War II, but the social sciences expanded late, especially during the late 1960s. By the early 1980s, when few new positions were added, most professorships were taken by cohorts of relatively young scholars. Thus began a nomadic life stage: a one-year fellowship, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service, at the Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where I examined communitybased delinquency prevention programs (1982–1983); two-and-a-half years as a research scientist under the direction of Hans Haferkamp in the Division for Social Problems Research at the University of Bremen, conducting a German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) funded study of whitecollar crime legislation in the German federal government (1983–1986); a research scientist and associate director position at the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony in Hanover where I collaborated with Christian Pfeiffer, then and now its director after an interlude as justice minister of that state (1986–1989). The Hanover time was interrupted by a one-year John F. Kennedy Memorial fellowship at Harvard University where I conducted research on the making of the United States sentencing guidelines (1987–1988). Beginning with my Baltimore year, while changing jobs about every other year, I also became a commuter in another sense. In 1982, I had met Pamela Feldman, a fellow musician in the Johns Hopkins University Orchestra, a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and a beginning graduate student in anthropology. Several years of visits across the Atlantic and across the Sahara, where Pamela conducted her field research in rural Cameroon in the Bangangté chiefdom, strengthened my ties to America; visits to Cameroon gave me insights into the intricacies of maneuvering between conflicting norms of tribal society and the modern state. We married in Hanover on December 30, 1986, not without resistance (but later with embrace) by our respective German Catholic and American Jewish families. Pamela is now a professor of anthropology at Carleton College. Changed Meanings, Changed Practices, and American Institutions I had first arrived in the United States in July of 1982. Yet the country was not an alien place to me. I had grown up in a world where big bands, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin; American writers from James Fennimore Cooper via Mark Twain to James Baldwin; not to mention American TV shows, news about the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King’s writings, the Vietnam War, the Kennedys, and the actual presence of American military and many American consumer goods were part of everyday life. Later I immersed myself in American sociological literature. Before I ever set foot on American soil, I had made many mental visits to this country’s towns and cities, especially places such as Middletown, Boston’s Little Italy, and many of the diverse Chicago neighborhoods. But now the real thing was to come.

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Just having completed my doctoral dissertation on minority delinquency in Germany, I came to America, like Alexis de Tocqueville one-and-a-half centuries earlier, to explore an innovation in criminal justice and, like this famous predecessor, I ended up learning much broader lessons about democracy in America. My interest in criminal justice innovations was evoked when I encountered a line of literature on community-based delinquency and crime prevention programs in the United States. These programs had been developed first under the Kennedy administration and, as part of the “War on Poverty”, during the Johnson administration. They were partly inspired by Robert Merton’s ideas about the causation of crime by blocked legitimate opportunities and related work by Albert Cohen and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. I ventured out to meet with social workers, people in Baltimore’s city hall, staff at the National Institute of Justice in Washington, and criminal justice scholars. I traveled to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago. Yet it took a long time before I began to understand that a growing sense of frustration resulted from miscommunication. The signifier had remained the same but the signified had changed. “Community-based prevention” now referred to collaboration between neighborhood organizations and police departments, “target hardening”, defense of public spaces, and group homes for delinquent boys. The focus was no longer on opening up legitimate opportunities but on tightening control, away from programs for disadvantaged minorities to ones aiming at their control. I was amazed not only by the rapid change of meaning, but also by the collective amnesia about the past meaning of the concept. It seemed as though strangers, whose information about the host society may be lagged, experience the clash of two eras— the old one that is fresh in the visitor’s mind and the new one that has taken shape in the host society. Had it not been for the hospitality and intellectual generosity of scholars and new friends such as Herbert Gans, Bob Kidder, Ed Laumann, Ewa Morawska (another author in this volume), Morton and Elizabeth Rubin, Gerald Suttles, and Ralph and Michelle Taylor, I may not have progressed from frustration to insight. The shift in meaning of one concept coincided with radical changes in practice that had just begun, but matured only in subsequent decades. Capital punishment had been reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976, resulting in more than 1,000 executions since that time. The imprisonment rate had begun its rise from 100 per 100,000 population, not much above the average of Western democracies, to a rate of more than 600 today (or near 1,000 if we include the jail population), a level unknown anywhere in the Western democratic world, and mostly at the expense of minority populations, primarily African Americans, where the male imprisonment rate reached above 3,000 by 2004. Such transformation in the culture and practice of control provoked questions about its conditions. Literature focused on the United States and missed out on the uniqueness of what occurred here. Scholars pointed to the rise in crime rates during the 1960s and 1970s, the slowing of the economy and the resultant breakup of liberal coalitions of the 1960s, and on related elite strategies. Most recently, David Garland (2001) argued that the rise of late modernity, accompanied by the breakdown of

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traditional and modern institutions, was a crucial condition for the new culture of control, of which the return to punitive measures is a central component. All of these approaches appeared too limited to the continental European immigrant, first because many of these causal factors also applied to Europe. Conservative elites also had gained power in European countries; crime rates had experienced massive increases, albeit more moderate than in the U.S.; the economy had slowed after the 1973 oil shock; and signs of late modernity did not differ dramatically on the two sides of the Atlantic. Yet in Europe rates of punishment remained relatively stable. Second, my exposure to Max Weber’s sociology had alerted me to the uniqueness of historical situations, resulting from the complex intersection of a multitude of causes, and to the particular, historical, institutional conditions in different nation states (Kalberg 1994). An impressive body of comparative literature, much of it written in the Weberian tradition and often addressing German–U.S. contrasts, by authors such as Reinhard Bendix, Stephen Kalberg, Günter Roth, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, further inspired my search for institutional conditions to explain the changes I had observed. The available literature seemed to be plagued by two theoretical weaknesses. First, most scholars drew causal links from macro conditions such as unemployment rates, crime rates, or divorce rates to macro outcomes such as imprisonment rates. They disregarded the micro-level, the fact that social actors must act before any macro-level force can have a macro-level effect. Second, they disregarded actors’ institutional contexts. My search for answers led me to examine institutions in which producers and distributors of ideas and political and legal decision makers are embedded. American institutions turned out to be much more market-driven than European, especially German, ones. This certainly applied to mass media, where German radio and television during much of the post-war era were dominated by large neocorporate organizations, supervised by boards on which major societal groups were represented. Fees were mandatory for all who owned radios and TV sets, stations had a secure material basis, barely relied on advertisements, and were hardly exposed to competition (conditions have changed somewhat over the past two decades). Responding to and enhancing public sentiments neither contributed to journalistic success nor to profits for the stations. Greater competitiveness also applied to the American state sector, where not just knowledge construction but also decision-making are at stake. Candidates for elected office are selected by primary elections in the U.S. but through decisions of party committees in Germany. No wonder that American candidates are more oriented toward sentiments of their constituents and their German counterparts more toward party platforms. Public opinion polls and focus groups accordingly also played a greater role in American politics. Further, presidents and governors are elected through direct popular votes in the U.S., while heads of the executive branch in European countries—chancellors or prime ministers—are elected by majority factions in the legislature. The pattern repeats itself in the judicial branch of government, where most judges and prosecutors in the U.S. are elected for terms (or, at the federal level, appointed and confirmed in a highly political process for life), but selected (based on academic performance) into life-tenured positions in

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Germany. Obviously, American judicial decision-makers have to be more concerned than their German counterparts with the sentiments of the public. Add to this: referenda, the jury system, and the much more porous lines between civil service and the private sector in the U.S. (Bendix 1949), all of which translates into a smoother transmission of public sentiments into political and legal decision-making. I first developed these arguments in “Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment” (Savelsberg 1994). I do not argue that institutional conditions alone explain the punitive turn in the United States. Social-structural conditions, inter-group conflict, rising crime rates, and peoples’ growing uncertainties about their everyday lives are crucial for explaining that turn. Yet, the institutional particularities are necessary for these conditions to translate into the kind of punitive outcomes with which my observations began (see also Sutton 2000). While observing, and experiencing, many of the institutional differences in everyday life, I earned my living in the academy. I liked the presence of a critical mass of scholars, even in relatively specialized areas, that allows for a diversity of positions to be represented and to compete (it takes a large country and language area for that). I also liked many features that are the outcome of greater competitiveness in the academic sector: a teaching culture that is at least supported by the competition for enrollment and tuition benefits, a more established peer review system (even though European journals have recently caught up in this respect), merit-based salary increases, and ranking systems that encourage programs to excel. Yet competitiveness has problematic side effects in academia as well. The field of crime and crime control research (and teaching), it appeared to me, had moved ever closer to the increasingly punitive premises of the public and the political sector. The collective amnesia I had observed in 1982–1983, even among scholars, was just the first in a series of observations. I thus sought funding from the National Science Foundation to study the nature and conditions of knowledge construction about crime and crime control in American academia. The grant we received allowed us to content analyze some 1,600 articles in leading sociology and criminology and criminal justice journals published between 1951 and 1993, coding factors such as their substantive, theoretical, and methodological orientation and information about the time of publication, the disciplinary or specialized nature of the outlet, funding on which the research was based, and the author’s institutional location. The historical record had already shown that universities had responded to the call for more academic training of criminal justice workers and funding opportunities by the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency of the U.S. Department of Justice by setting up ever larger numbers of specialized programs, departments, schools, and colleges. Also the number of specialized journals increased dramatically as did a substantial criminal justice textbook industry. Finally, more funding was provided by political agencies, some of which (like the National Institute of Justice) increasingly shifted from researcher-initiated to strategic funding programs. Our descriptive and multivariate analyses showed that publication in specialty outlets, location of authors in specialty programs, and political funding significantly affected the thematic and theoretical orientations of articles—albeit not their empirical conclusions (for details see recent publications with graduate advisees: Savelsberg, King, and Cleveland 2002; Savelsberg, Cleveland, and King 2004; Savelsberg and Flood 2004). The point

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is this: the highly competitive, institutional nature of American academia contributed to a growing adaptation to thematic and theoretical preferences of the political and policy sectors that supply academia with funding, data, and access to the field. The marginality status of a migrant scholar is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for discovering national particularities of practices and their institutional conditions. Yet such status is likely to direct scholarly attention to the kind of differences discussed above. It nourishes profound mistrust toward approaches that formulate general laws based on the observation of one society. It also evokes skepticism toward evolutionist approaches, of the modernization or post-modernity types alike, as they disregard country-specific institutional and cultural conditions. Yet as sociologists we are not typically satisfied with descriptive accounts of single cases. Instead we seek insights on macro-sociological patterns, which migrant scholars are especially likely to do, in a Weberian tradition, by comparing specific cases with ideal types. Good American Feelings, Collective Memories, and their Consequences Lewis Coser (1992) reports an experience in his introduction to Maurice Halbwachs’ work on collective memory. Not sharing such memory with his American hosts, to whom he had escaped from the Nazi and Vichy terror with the help of Rose Laub, later his wife, contributed to his experience as an outsider. I empathize, being especially reminded of the difference between the collective memories of my home and host societies when teaching American students (the awareness was enhanced when I took leaves to teach German students in Munich in 2000 and Austrian students in Graz in 2003). Whenever I refer to historic examples in the classroom, be it Luther’s Reformation, the French Revolution, Italian Fascism, the Holocaust, or the Civil Rights movement, student responses demonstrate generational distance on either side of the Atlantic, but —much more pronounced— additional cognitive and affective distance in the United States. We know differently and we feel differently about those events. As an immigrant I was thus alerted to differences in collective memory. Preparation of a new graduate course in the sociology of knowledge in 2000 was one response to this challenge. Output from this course included collaboration with Ryan D. King, my advisee at the time, now on the sociology faculty at SUNY Albany, to examine the effects of collective memory on legal institutions and decision-making. Ryan, himself exposed to a study abroad experience in Austria and married to a Czech, incorporated a collective memory perspective into his doctoral dissertation on the uneven enforcement of hate crime law in the U.S. (King 2005). He found that those counties that commemorate the Holocaust through a memorial site and in which sizable populations are represented as carriers of memory of grave injustice are more likely to enforce hate crime law. In addition, Ryan and I collaborated to examine collective memories and the framing of hate crime law comparatively for Germany and the United States. To compare collective memories we examined national holidays and important memorial sites in and around the nations’ capitals. Differences between holidays and

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memorial days are noticeable but moderate. Both countries like to commemorate domestic achievements, foundational events, and symbols of the nation. In the U.S. this includes President’s Day, Flag Day, and Independence Day; in Germany anniversaries of the passing of the Basic Law (Constitution), the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Day of German Unity, when the Eastern states joined the Federal Republic. Domestic resistance against injustice is also celebrated in both countries. Yet a day of commemoration of national evil is missing in the United States, while it is represented in Germany with the Day of Commemoration of the Victims of National Socialism, on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, and the memorial day for the Reichspogrom-Night, the night of murder and destruction against Jews, synagogues, and Jewish property. Memorial days for the war dead also exist in both countries; they are supplemented by Veteran’s Day in the U.S. Differences are dramatic, however, when comparing government and tourism websites to identify important memorial sites in and near the nations’ capital cities. Celebrations of domestic achievements and important leaders comparable to the Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt memorials did not show up on the German sites. Memorials of national evil, represented in the United States only by the Ford Theatre where President Lincoln was assassinated, abound on German government websites, including the Anne Frank Center, the Plötzensee Memorial Center, the Sachsenhausen Memorial Center and Museum, the House of the Wannsee Conference where the Holocaust was planned, and the most recent addition, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the massive site in the heart of Berlin. Missing on the German websites but massively represented on the American ones are memorials for different units of the military and diverse wars, typically celebrating sacrifice and the liberation of foreign lands from foreign evil. Differences we found certainly strike a chord with a German visitor to the United States of my generation. Barely ever having sung his national anthem or seen his national flag, except in front of government buildings, the common display of the national flag in front of private homes and on private businesses and the regular singing of the national anthem in the United States create an unease that is hard to overcome. Also the weekly reminders on prominent national television programs of horrors of the nation’s history are missing. The point is that Americans are much more at ease with their nation and its history than are Germans with theirs. While I am aware of critical textbook chapters on the history of slavery and the “Indian Wars”, the overwhelming sentiment is one of the ease and trust that Americans invest in those government institutions that specialize in the use of force, domestically and internationally. Our research traces causal links between such differences in collective memory and hate crime laws and their enforcement in both countries. Space does not allow for a presentation of these findings. I will instead suggest that future research trace the links between collective memory and the rituals that strengthen it on the one hand; and the overwhelming support of Americans for the death penalty, unparalleled imprisonment rates, and finally the fact that the military ranked higher in public trust than any other government institution in the early 2000s, on the other hand. In combination with the institutional particularities discussed above, such cognitive

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patterns should also help explain policy decisions that advance the use of force, from death penalty decisions to decisions on the initiation of war (Smith 2005). Collective memories, of course, are just one component of culture. The weight of religion (Gerhards 2001; Savelsberg 2004), egalitarianism (Whitman 2003), and political culture (Münch 2001) must also be taken seriously. Importantly, such cultural particularities interact with institutional conditions discussed above to color national laws and policies. It is even unlikely that globalization will neutralize these forces and lead to identical outcomes across nation states (Carruthers and Hallidays, 2006; Fourcade-Gourinchas and Savelsberg, 2006). Conclusions One note to prevent misunderstandings: I describe the United States, especially the market-driven nature of its institutions and the resulting flexibility of knowledge and practice, as well as its good conscience, with some of the problematic consequences they engender. This is not to say that all consequences are negative or that the counter-model, approximated by the much more bureaucratized and less flexible German institutions and by that country’s institutionalized bad conscience, will necessarily yield positive outcomes. In addition, the sequence of forms of government throughout the past one hundred years of German history and the natural experiment of two German states in the post–World War II era illustrate the instability of basic institutional arrangements within one nation (for consequences in the realm of criminal punishment see Savelsberg 1999). A 7,000-word essay that links autobiography with scholarship has to be selective on both counts. I had to leave out several lines of work, including work on whitecollar crime legislation (e.g., Savelsberg with Brühl 1994) and on the East European transformation of the 1980s and 1990s. I also had to skip over numerous biographical facts, desirable and undesirable ones alike. Most damningly, while discussing some of the divergent worlds I encountered, I did not mention those who helped me move from one world to the other or mediate between them, primarily my wife Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, but also colleagues such as Bill Chambliss, Al Cohen, Gary Fine, John Hagan, Stephen Kalberg, Bob Kidder, John Meyer, Jim Short, Ralph Taylor, and Michael White. The late John Clark was world open enough as search committee chair, to invite me across the ocean for an interview, and Joe Galaskiewicz, then acting chair, supported him. Those who helped me settle into the new world include several welcoming colleagues at Minnesota and many in the professional associations who will remain unnamed. Professional associations, in fact, did some of what Emile Durkheim ([1897]1951: 378–384) expected of them, serving as new integrating forces in modern, highly mobile and differentiated societies. Finally, autobiographies, like all written history, are constructed. We are tempted to select from the past those aspects of our lives that are in line with our current identities and interests. Explaining our research histories through our biographies in an academic outlet is even trickier as it involves the presentation of our lives and work to an audience that is sitting in judgment on our scholarly reputations. Despite

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such reservations, I have used autobiographies of scholars (e.g., Berger ed. 1992; see also Roth 1983: 246–282; Bendix 1986), in combination with selections of their work, in my honors seminars at Minnesota to help students understand that there is some link between the lives we live and the scholarship we do most successfully, before they settle on their final thesis topics. Such use of this essay would please me the most. Acknowledgments I dedicate this essay to Anna and Rebecca, on whom we imposed lives between worlds. Thanks for comments on an earlier draft to Jeylan Mortimer, life course scholar and wonderful colleague; James F. Short, Jr., model sociologist and Mensch; Gerhard Weiss, leader in German studies and fellow emigrant (albeit much earlier and incomparably more trying); and Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, travel companion between worlds. Comments are welcome. References and Selected Bibliography Bendix, Reinhard. 1949. Higher Civil Servants in American Society. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. ———. 1986. From Berlin to Berkeley: German-Jewish Identities. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Berger, Bennett M., ed. 1992. Authors of their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty Sociologists, edited and with an Introduction by Bennett M. Berger. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City: Double Day. Carruthers, Bruce, and Terrence Halliday. 2006. “Negotiating Globalization: Global Templates and the Construction of Insolvency Regimes in East Asia.” Law and Social Inquiry 31: 521–584. Coser, Lewis A. 1992. “Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs, 1877–1945.” Pp. 1–34 in Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dixon, Jo, Aaron Kupchik and Joachim J. Savelsberg, eds. 2006. The Social Organization of Criminal Courts. Aldershot: Ashgate. (The International Library of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Penology). Durkheim, Emile. (1897) 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Edited with an introduction by George Simpson. New York: The Free Press. Fourcade-Gourinchas, Marion and Joachim J. Savelsberg. 2006. “Law between the Global and the Local.” Law and Social Inquiry 31: 513–519. Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerhards, Jürgen. “Einleitende Bemerkungen”. Pp. 7–13 in Die Vermessung kultureller Unterschiede: Deutschland und USA im Vergleich, edited by Jürgen Gerhards. Oplanden: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Kalberg, Stephen. 1987. “West German and American Interaction Forms: One Level of Structured Misunderstanding.” Theory, Culture, and Society 4: 603–18. ———. 1994. Max Weber’s Historical-Comparative Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. King, Ryan D. 2005. When Law and Society Disagree: Group Threat, Legacies of the Past, and the Organizational Context of Hate Crime Law Enforcement. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. König, René. 1967. “Einleitung.” Pp. 1–20 in Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung, Vol 1. Ed. René König. Stuttgart: Enke. ———. 1971. “Die Juden und die Soziologie.” Pp. 123–136 in René König. Studien zur Soziologie. Frankfurt: Fischer. Mannheim, Karl. 1952. “The Problem of Generations.” Pp. 276–320 in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, edited by Paul Kecskemeti. London: Routledge. Münch, Richard. 2000. “Politische Kultur, Demokratie und politische Regulierung: Deutschland und U.S.A. im Vergleich.” Pp. 15–32 in Die Vermessung kultureller Unterschiede: Deutschland und USA im Vergleich. Ed. Jürgen Gerhards, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Roth, Günther. 1983. Politische Herrschaft und persönliche Freiheit: Heidelberger Max Weber Vorlesungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Savelsberg, Joachim J. 1980. Kommunale Autonomie: Macht, Autonomie und Entscheidungen in Gemeinden. Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen. ———. 1982. Ausländische Jugendliche: Assimilative Integration, Kriminalität und Kriminalisiertung und die Rolle der Jugendhilfe. München: Minerva. ———. 1984. “Socio-Spatial Attributes of Social Problems: The Case of Delinquency and Crime.” Population and Environment 7: 163–181. ———. 1987. “The Making of Criminal Law Norms in Welfare States: Economic Crime in West Germany.” Law and Society Review 21: 529–561. ———. 1989. “Materialisierung des Strafrechts: Funktionen, Folgeprobleme und Perspektiven.” Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 10: 1–27. ———, ed. 1989. Die Zukunft der Kriminologie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Materialien zu einem DFG-Kolloquium. Stuttgart: Enke. ———. 1990. “Crisi del Dret Penal: Atzucacs I Sortides.” Pp. 91–116 in Justícia I Canvi Social. Ed. Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Justicia, Barcelona (pp. 95–122 Castellan edition). ———. 1992. “Law That Does Not Fit Society: Sentencing Guidelines as a Neoclassical Response to the Dilemmas of Substantivized Law.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 1346–1381. ———. 1994. “Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment.” American Journal of Sociology 99: 911–943 (German translation in: Forschungsthema Kriminalität Ed. Christian Pfeiffer and Peter Wetzels. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996). ———. 1995. “Crime, Inequality, and Justice in Eastern Europe: Anomie, Domination, and Revolutionary Change.” Pp. 206–225 in Crime and Inequality. Ed. John Hagan and Ruth Peterson. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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———. 1996. “Normenerosion? Rechtsnormen und Sozialnormen zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne.” Pp. 33–56 in Normenerosion. Ed. Monika Frommel and Volkmar Gessner. Baden-Baden: Nomos. ———. 1998. “Controlling Violence: Criminal Justice, Society, and Lessons from the US.” Crime, Law, and Social Change Vol. 30, pp. 185–203 (revision and translation into English of Portuguese text originally published in Sao Paulo sem Medo-Um Diagnostico da Violencia Urbana. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, pp. 209– 226; German translation in Forschungsthema Strafvollzug. Ed. M. Bereswill and W. Greve. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001). ———. 1999. “Knowledge, Domination and Criminal Punishment Revisited: Incorporating State Socialism.” Punishment and Society 1: 45–70. ———. 2000a. “Kulturen staatlichen Strafens: USA und Deutschland.” Pp. 189–209 in Die Vermessung kultureller Unterschiede: USA und Deutschland im Vergleich. Ed. Jürgen Gerhards. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 2000b. “Contradictions, Law and State Socialism.” Law and Social Inquiry 25: 501–527. ———. 2002. “Dialectics of Norms in Modernization.” The Sociological Quarterly 47: 277–305. ———. 2006. “Sociological Theory in the Study of Sentencing: Lighthouse for a Traveler between Continents.” In Sociological Theory and Criminological Research: Views from Europe and the United States. Ed. Mathieu Deflem. Oxford: Elsevier Science. ———. Forthcoming. “Punitiveness in Cross-national Comparison: Toward a Historically and Institutionally Founded Multi-Factorial Approach.” International Journal of Comparative Criminology 4. Savelsberg, Joachim J. and Peter Brühl. 1988. Politik und Wirtschaftsstrafrecht: Eine soziologische Analyse von Rationalitäten, Kommunikationen und Macht. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Savelsberg, Joachim J. (with contributions by Peter Brühl). 1994. Constructing White-Collar Crime: Rationalities, Communication, Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Savelsberg, Joachim J., Lara L. Cleveland, and Ryan D. King. 2004. “Institutional Environments and Scholarly Work: American Criminology, 1951–1993.” Social Forces 82: 1275–1302. Savelsberg, Joachim J. and Sarah M. Flood. 2004. “Criminological Knowledge: Period and Cohort Effects in Scholarship.” Criminology 42: 1009–1041. Savelsberg, Joachim J., Bernd Hamm, Manfred Fischer, and Karl-Heinz Simon. 1988. Soziale und Psychische Wirkungen der Stadtplanung. Trier: Universität Trier (Trierer Beiträge zur Stadt- und Regionalplanung, Vol. 14). Savelsberg, Joachim J. and Ryan D. King. 2005. “Institutionalizing Collective Memories of Hate: Law and Law Enforcement in Germany and the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 111: 579–616. Savelsberg, Joachim J., Ryan D. King, and Lara L. Cleveland. 2002. “Politicized Scholarship: Science on Crime and the State.” Social Problems 49: 327–348.

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Savelsberg, Joachim J. and Robert J. Sampson, eds. 2002. Mutual Engagement: Sociology and Criminology? Special issue of Crime, Law, and Social Change 37(2) (introductory essay: pp. 99–105). Simmel, Georg. 1950. “The Stranger.” Pp. 402–408 in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press. Smith, Philip. 2005. Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, The Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutton, John. 2000. “Imprisonment and Social Classification in Five Common Law Democracies, 1955–1985.” American Journal of Sociology 106: 350–386. Weber, Max. 1976. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitman, James Q. 2003. Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 4

The Urban is Political: My Journey from the Midwestern Suburbs to the World’s Largest Cities (and Back?) Diane E. Davis

The foundations and trajectory of my research interests over the last several decades can be traced to an abiding fascination with cities and a preoccupation with politics and history, coupled with a series of mentoring relationships and grounded experiences that guided me from the study of cities to an examination of comparative urbanization, urban political economy, the city-nation nexus, and cities in conflict. A Fascination with Cities Perhaps because I grew up in a suburban milieu, I always felt that the hustle and bustle of big cities would offer an escape from the mundane trappings of suburban life that marked my youth. Maybe this feeling owed to the fact that my suburb,

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Webster Groves, bordered St. Louis. This was a city in steady decline whose downtown nonetheless held the exciting promise of different peoples, races, and cultures mingling, an environment experienced during annual family shopping trips at Christmas time and for supplies and clothes at the start of the school year. When I prepared to leave home for college, I knew where I did not want to be—certainly not in the sleepy small Ohio town where my folks had identified a first-rate liberal arts college. I wanted the big city. And in the social geography of my Midwestern childhood, that was Chicago. Having spent many summers driving from St. Louis to Milwaukee, where both sets of my grandparents lived, I could never forget the breathtaking excitement I felt as a child at approaching Chicago from the south on Lake Shore Drive, and feeling myself dwarfed but drawn to the amazing high rises that loomed on the horizon as our car entered and exited the city on its path northward to Wisconsin. When at age eighteen I was admitted to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, perched on Chicago’s northern border, even my parents’ admonition that I would have to work to pay the difference in tuition between Northwestern and their preferred small Ohio school did not stop me from packing my bags and heading to what William Cronon called “nature’s metropolis”. My fortunes at Northwestern doubled when I took my first urban sociology class with Janet Abu-Lughod during my freshman year. I had entered the university as an economics major and immediately enrolled in an introductory micro-economic class taught by George McGovern’s principal economic advisor. This course selection was fueled by my so-called “radical” political ambitions (this was September 1972 and I was newly liberated from the Republican constraints of my family background and eager to follow my own political trajectories) as much as my commitment to economics as a discipline. Yet, despite the draw of taking a course offered by a man close to the presidential candidate who promised to end the Vietnam War and transform American politics, Janet Abu-Lughod’s urban sociology class was too much of an enticement. Her course single-handedly transformed me into a dedicated sociology major, committed to the study of cities, and I never looked back. Much of my conversion had to do with the longstanding desire to understand more about Chicago and the Chicago School of Sociology, concerns which did not feel like abstract curricular subjects but concrete frames that came to life for me because I was living in the city that served as the actual reference point for so many urban sociological theories. In retrospect, I would identify my subsequent intellectual commitment to grounded empirical research, and my ongoing attempts to deconstruct grand theory through the lens of the tangible historical context in which it is produced, as emerging out of the experience of first studying urban sociology while living in the city of Chicago. But it was not just the opportunity to juxtapose theory against grounded empirical evidence during my undergraduate years at Northwestern that attracted me to the study of cities. Janet Abu-Lughod also drew me to the subject through personal example and her role as mentor and life model. In the early 1970s, the numbers of female full professors—even in sociology—were pitifully small. Janet was one of the few women in the department. Still, her influence on me owed not to her gender so much as her obvious love for and equal fascination with cities. As she sat chainsmoking in front of a class of eager young students, brilliant and funny and sardonic,

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I could not help but be carried into her world. Several years later, while working as a summer volunteer for Citizens Action Program in Chicago (a Saul Alinsky-founded organization that mobilized against redlining and other urban problems in the city), I knocked on the door of a home in an affluent North Shore neighborhood where we were canvassing, and faced Janet’s husband, an esteemed Palestinian political scientist who also taught at Northwestern. The opportunity to understand that Janet was a wife and mother as well as professor, and to have a glimpse into the nuts and bolts of her daily life as part of an academic couple, was a powerful emotional experience for me. When more than a decade later I also married a fellow academic from another country, I could not help but surmise that Janet’s own example had opened a door for me too, albeit perhaps subconsciously. Janet’s curricular decision to develop a new course on third world urbanization during my senior year at Northwestern sealed my trajectory of study, and set me on an intellectual path that would guide me for the rest of my academic life. In the mid1970s, the Americo-centrism of sociology was as alive and well in urban studies, as in most other sub-disciplinary areas of sociological study. When Janet—whose personal life had inspired her own appreciation and study of Middle-Eastern cities— developed the course on third world urbanization, she was among the first in U.S. academia to combine urban sociology with the study of economic development and to draw attention to urban patterns outside America.1 Upon entering this new course, students were instructed to select a city for further empirical examination. I chose Mexico City because it was the only city outside the U.S. that I had ever actually visited and because I already spoke Spanish quite well, having studied it for six years in high school. My capacity to visualize the city and its urban conditions, and to be able to read detailed accounts of its development in Spanish, greatly helped me in the course, whose aim was to critically examine the biases of American urban sociology and to seek alternative (i.e., non-functionalist, more political economy) logics for explaining urbanization in third world cities. Again, I was brought to understand the importance of grounded empirical research and the necessity of critically examining the value of applying grand theory produced in one context to an entirely different one. I also got my first exposure to political economy, both through this course with Janet and a related course on internal colonialism and urban development taught by John Walton. From Urban Studies to the Political Economy of Development I chose UCLA—located in an even larger metropolitan area—for graduate study because it was a top-ranked sociology school and because my sense of adventure inspired an escape from my traditional Midwestern roots and a desire to explore the part of the country associated with freedom and the avant-garde. After all, I considered myself part of the post-1968 generation and, for those of us who were in 1 Janet did have several predecessors who laid the foundations for this area of study, including some of her own teachers and mentors from the University of Chicago. For more on the study of cities in global context, and the intellectual history of this subfield, see Davis (2001).

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college during the post-Watergate years, California beckoned as a place of political and cultural rebellion. The decision to head west would continue to open new intellectual doors and alternative research opportunities in ways that I could not have imagined in advance. For starters, the move from Chicago to Los Angeles challenged all my assumptions and understandings about cities, even in the advanced capitalist world, as the dynamics of urbanization in Los Angeles differed greatly from those in Chicago, where I had just spent four years. Los Angeles surely was a city (despite the fact that many called it a parking lot), but it looked different and felt different from the Midwestern cities I knew. What intrigued me most was the fact there was little in the classical Chicago School of Sociology that could readily explain the alternative spatial patterns and social dynamics that I confronted in Los Angeles. Clearly, the limitations of urban sociological theory applied as much to some of our own nation’s twentieth-century cities as it did to Mexico City. In order to explain some of these differences, I began to cultivate a greater interest in history, or the timing of urbanization, as well as the impact of the global context. Of special interest to me were the region’s connections to Mexico, via cross-border migration, and its networked trading relations with the Pacific Rim through alternative commodity chains and new capital flows. This line of thinking was fine-tuned through coursework in the sociology department and through the direct influence of urban scholars like Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, for whom I worked as a research assistant on their study of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in global capitalism. But it was most brought to my attention through courses offered at UCLA’s renowned School of Urban Planning. The urban planning department contained a number of leading scholars of comparative urbanization (Ed Soja, a geographer who focused on Africa; John Friedmann, whose expertise was Latin America; and Michael Storper, who studied comparative industrial geography), and its normative commitment to a critique of capitalism meant that it offered a variety of courses that supplanted my interest in political economy and its relationship to urbanization. In the UCLA Urban Planning department I took several courses with many of the founding scholars of the so-called “LA School of Sociology”, including Soja and others like the geographer Allen Scott—although that nomenclature was not on anyone’s tongue back in the late 1970s and early 1980s while I was in residence at UCLA. But I was studying for a doctorate in sociology, not urban planning, and this posed an institutional and curricular challenge. My main interest was Mexico City and Latin American urbanization more generally, and the leading scholars of third world urbanization lay directly across the courtyard. In Haines Hall, however, where the sociology department sat, the urban sociology faculty were focused primarily on the U.S. context, as were most urban sociologists in American academia at that time.2 On a purely intellectual level I may have been interested in understanding why Los Angeles looked different than Chicago, but for my own doctoral research I was still very interested in turning my gaze south. With Mexican people, culture, 2 This pretty much holds true today, with few exceptions. For more on the reasons why American sociologists turned to cities outside our borders and how they examined them, see Davis (2005a).

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and history permeating daily life in Los Angeles, this desire only grew stronger. Yet the resources in the department, with the exception of the distinguished urban demographer of the Middle East, Georges Sabagh, did not provide me what I needed for the study of Latin American urbanization. What the sociology department did provide was Maurice Zeitlin, perhaps the foremost scholar of Latin American political economy and one of the academy’s most respected historical sociologists of development. A charismatic professor with a fiery political profile and activist past, Zeitlin boasted a deep scholarly knowledge of Cuba and Chile and a powerful grasp of history as method. He was held in awe and adoration by many of his graduate students, myself included. I soon turned to him for principal guidance. As I started taking his classes on the political and developmental history of Latin America, and working with him as my doctoral advisor, my interests shifted more to the political economy of development in Latin America. This of course meant that my longstanding interest in cities was in danger of being eclipsed by a preoccupation with the nation-state and its relationship to classes, both domestic and international. But I did not worry about this. Instead, I eagerly started to take history and studies of class power much more seriously, again at Zeitlin’s encouragement, and as a continuation of my own natural interest in the ways that history explained urban differences even in the U.S. As I steadily incorporated historical sociology and political-economy paradigms into my doctoral coursework, I did not forget cities. On the contrary, as time passed I sought to better integrate these multiple interests. Two things allowed me to keep a fascination with cities and urbanization in my scholarly orbit. One was the fact that the neighboring School of Architecture and Urban Planning continued to offer wonderful courses on third world urbanism. One class in particular, called Urban Approaches to National Development taught by John Friedmann, synthesized my interests in cities and national development (it also introduced me to my future husband, an urban planner with similar interests in third world development). The second and more academically significant reason I was able to mold these divergent interests together owed to the arrival of Manuel Castells. Castells joined the University of California system just at the moment I was preparing for exams. He was already seen as an urban superstar in political economy circles, and his seminal book, The Urban Question, had just become available in English. Although he took a position in the School of Urban Planning at Berkeley, not UCLA, and not in a sociology department, he was a long-time friend of my advisor Maurice Zeitlin. Maurice’s knowledge that I was an unreconstructed urbanist at heart, despite my efforts to focus on Latin American development questions, inspired his successful efforts to coordinate a reading course for me with Manuel, and I spent a semester commuting to Berkeley for regular meetings with Castells. The University of California’s acceptance of cross-campus collaboration between students and faculty also made it possible for me to put Castells on my dissertation committee, as cochair along with Zeitlin.3

3 Manuel was just new enough (it was his first year) to say yes to this arrangement. I found out later how lucky I was, because soon thereafter he started turning down the masses

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With Zeitlin and Castells on my dissertation committee, my intellectual trajectory was even more firmly set. I worked in the interstices of urban and national development with a focus on Latin America, and highlighted the role that classes (drawn from Zeitlin’s influence) and social movements (drawn from Castells’ influence) played in linking city to nation. Further joining these substantive concerns was a growing appreciation for space and dialectics that was reinforced when I subsequently put the geographer Edward Soja on my dissertation committee. From the outside, this dissertation committee appeared to be a dream team, especially for someone with my scholarly interests and a commitment to critical thinking and political economy. But it was not problem-free. While I assumed that shared political sentiments of Zeitlin and Castells would keep them seeing eye to eye on my dissertation, this was not always the case. Where they differed slightly was in methodological approaches and standards of evidence. Zeitlin insisted on grounded, historical research about the state and class power, while Castells thought knowledge of these dynamics was a given. Accordingly, Castells was more willing to seek large general principles about cities, classes, and social movements (rather than documentation of them), for the purposes of understanding strategies of political action and social change. He also thought the aim of a dissertation was to contribute to theory and political action as much as evidence. Zeitlin, for his part, saw the “theory in the telling” and felt that political critique and nuanced empirical understanding were a pre-requisite for action. As a graduate student, these differences sometimes confused me, and led to much anxiety as I sought to craft a research design that would make both of these eminent scholars content with my progress. In retrospect, I realize that their differences in approach were something to be celebrated, as they led to a tremendously creative tension in my own thought processes and intellectual formation, and thus made me a better sociologist. For one thing, I was forced to learn how to speak with my own voice, in order to craft a “third way” between the methodologies and substantive expectations of the two of them. To be sure, cultivating independent thinking may be every doctoral student’s primary objective to a certain extent. But I was pushed to reason and defend my positions quite early on, even before completing my dissertation, and with two major sociologists as real (and not merely theoretical) reference points. As a result, I believe I was pushed towards thinking creatively and innovatively both earlier and more conscientiously than might have occurred had I worked with only one mentor or dissertation advisor. For another, the give-and-take among the three of us led me to cultivate a particular sociological sensibility, which I would characterize as a “hybrid” inter-disciplinary path of sociological inquiry built around an interest in history, cities, classes, and nations, that remains my trademark today. The “hybridity” of my intellectual formation builds on a clear embrace of the “theory is in the telling” historical methodology of Zeitlin. Yet it also is peppered with an interest in explaining and critically exposing the dynamics of class and power relations of the present that emerged from the historical trajectories I of requests from students even at Berkeley, let alone another campus, eager to study with the single most important urban sociologist of our times.

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analyze. Further, under the influence of Castells, the question of what grounded historical developments say about where societies are heading, both politically and economically, also remains central to my own sociological mission, although I write much less about this and do not consider myself a theorist. But my interest in taking a step back from the historical narrative and trying to understand what my research says about large scale urban, political, and national changes gives my own work an elective affinity with larger sociological paradigms that address the nature and meaning of social transformation, even as it also resonates with Castells’ appreciation for grand narratives and larger theoretical propositions. To a certain extent, I tried to bring most of these aims together in my dissertation research, which started in the early 1980s as an empirical study of the politics of urban policy in Mexico City, and which was eventually published as Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. My narrative built on an historical understanding of why small-scale bus company owners had achieved sufficient political power to thwart the policy interests of foreign capital and national politicians who sought to build a subway. To the extent that theories of class or elite power dynamics seemed incapable of explaining such a quixotic state of affairs I needed an alternative explanation. This led me to a greater appreciation of Mexico City’s history and how local urban conflicts and their “resolution” in prior historical periods established the political power of particular urban actors in subsequent years. In this story, social movements were key protagonists, as were middle classes, two sets of social forces that I continued to study in subsequent scholarly endeavors. Yet equally important in sociological terms was the book’s main methodological premise: an overturning of conventional understandings of the relations between cities and national development, and a claim that conflicts in and over the capital city established the larger political and economic trajectories of Mexico’s national development, as much as vice-versa. The Promise and Pitfalls of Urban Historical Sociology The deep historical scholarship and grounded empirical study that went into Urban Leviathan had the paradoxical effect of both widening and narrowing my visibility in academia, bringing with it new professional stumbling blocks as well as opportunities. On the positive side, the book pushed me into an ever wider circle of social, political, and economic historians, as well as scholars of Mexico from a variety of disciplines; and by so doing, opened my eyes and my research proclivities to debates and discussions outside the more conventional departments of sociology. This profile undoubtedly got me my first university lectureship, in the Social Studies Program at Harvard University (an interdisciplinary program headed by the eminent economic historian David Landes), where I taught a course on urban politics to a selected group of undergraduate honors students who were being exposed to classical works in history and social science. More negatively, my interest in third world cities and their history and politics severely limited my visibility within American sociology as a discipline.

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Part of my marginalization within the larger discipline owed to my relentless commitment to displaying the historical facts on the ground, so to speak, which peppered the pages of Urban Leviathan and made my study of politics and urban development in Mexico City very dense and difficult to summarize in purely sociological terms. Owing to a historically crafted narrative that spanned almost six decades of urban political conflict, the book read as a work of social history as much as of sociology, and sociologists not familiar with Mexican politics or Mexico City found it almost impenetrable. Indeed, it found its largest audiences among historians of Mexico and urban planners. Further sidelining the work and my visibility in sociology was that fact that despite its claims about trajectories of national political and economic development, most categorized the book as a study of a third world city, a topic that fell outside the sub-disciplinary frameworks employed in mainstream sociology. Had I written a historical study of revolution in Mexico, I might have found a more welcoming place for myself in the comparative-historical world of American sociology—though if truth be told, most comparative-historical sociology of the prior decades, if it was focused outside the U.S., focused primarily on Europe not the global south. Even so, the study of revolutions or social movements or state formation was considered a legitimate subject of inquiry for a small but growing number of American sociologists. The same cannot be said for the historical study of cities, let alone the historical study of a city outside the United States. American sociology may be notoriously ethnocentric; but its parochialism pales in comparison with the narrowness of research in the sub-discipline of urban sociology, where neither history nor political economy nor studies of third world urbanism found much of an audience when I began to teach. As a consequence, my book fell between the cracks of several sociological sub-disciplines, creating a major professional roadblock for a young scholar who sought professional advancement in a competitive academic world. All was not lost, however. The single most important opportunity that presented itself after completing the dissertation and lecturing for one year at Harvard was the opportunity to take a full-time teaching position at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1987, in a newly revived sociology department attached to a new program on historical sociology. In many ways, I received that job precisely because my work was historical, inter-disciplinary, and focused outside the United States, showing that sometimes barriers can be turned into opportunities. In sub-disciplinary terms, the New School sociology department offered a new assistant professor like me a match made in heaven, because its curriculum focused on five areas of which three were my stated expertise: urban, political, comparativehistorical, cultural, and theoretical sociology. As a small school of social science and philosophy comprised of only six graduate departments, the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research also housed some of the leading lights in historical sociology, urban political economy, economic history, urban studies, and Latin American studies. They included Charles Tilly and Janet Abu-Lughod (who was hired the same year as I, allowing me to come full circle in many ways from my undergraduate years in urban sociology at Northwestern), both in my own department, plus Ira Katznelson in political science, David Gordon in economics, Eric Hobsbawm in history, and William Roseberry in anthropology. The New School

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corridors were a revolving door of esteemed American and European and Latin American scholars, whose high level historical and theoretical work were a constant source of stimulation and intellectual challenge. In professional terms, joining the New School was not cost-free; and some might have considered taking this as my first job to be a major academic misstep. For one thing, the New School was considered so non-mainstream that few sociologists felt that good sociology could emanate from there. I remember running into old teachers from UCLA asking questions about our program. What type of courses we offered and what types of degrees we granted (the answer: only graduate, both M.A. and Ph.D.) and what did our students do after graduating? For another, the nature of debate and dialogue that drove our graduate student curriculum and dominated faculty seminars, projects, and hiring decisions were very different than those that prevailed in most other sociology departments. While many of my peers complained about being ensconced in departments where the quantitative-qualitative divide colored their experience and tenure prospects, at the New School this division was practically non-existent. Almost none of my sociological colleagues reified quantitative sociology, and if they used these techniques it was in the service of historical or political claims. The biggest division in our department was between normative or interpretive sociology, on one hand, and empirical sociology on the other. This was a division I could live with, after all; and my years studying under Manuel Castells and Maurice Zeitlin were good preparation for this schizophrenia. Despite the constraints imposed by inter-personal conflict among the faculty that represented these two traditions, the absence of strong pressure to conduct quantitative research ultimately liberated me sufficiently from the standard dilemmas that my assistant professor peers were facing in more mainstream schools. Thus I felt free to pursue a variety of important historical and political questions that probably would have eluded me had I been teaching in a more traditional sociology department. In retrospect, I would say that taking my first tenured job at the New School was the smartest and most intellectually rewarding decision of my academic life, despite the challenges it also posed. On the positive side, the opportunity to teach at the New School reinforced my profile as an inter-disciplinary and historical sociologist working on cities in the developing world. The school’s small size enabled considerable joint teaching, which kept me engaged in the debates of a variety of disciplines. In addition to joining Chuck Tilly’s pro-seminars in historical sociology, I co-taught courses on the history and political economy of Latin America with anthropologists William Roseberry and Deborah Poole, on Latin American political development with Anthony Pereira, and on the political economy of development with the economists Alice Amsden and Lance Taylor. These experiences allowed me to stay current in more fields than just sociology, and to develop new arguments by constantly introducing debates from one field into another. For example, some of my own work on the Latin American state owed to my embeddedness in discussions of capital, coercion, and state formation as formulated by historical sociologists like Tilly and in parallel but distinctive discussions of “everyday forms of state formation” by anthropologists. To a certain degree this particular hybridity, developed around a focus on the inter-relationships between politics, economics, and history, continued to keep my

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work somewhat outside the sociological mainstream, mainly because this interdisciplinary framing remained attached to the studies of cities in the developing world. Thus I was still relatively “invisible” to mainstream urbanists. But this set of interests brought me into a new, albeit small, circle of historical sociologists and political economists, especially as I worked harder to link my own writing on cities in Latin America to state formation. And it was this combination of interests that probably led to my appointment as editor of Political Power and Social Theory, a historically oriented journal concerned with politics and class power that I first coedited with my old friend and fellow UCLA graduate, Howard Kimeldorf, starting in 1993, and that I still continue to edit today. The concerted efforts to deepen my understanding of the relations between cities and state formation owed not just to the towering presence of Charles Tilly at the New School, whose seminal writings (especially The Vendee and Capital, Coercion and European States) pretty much helped establish this particular subject of inquiry among modern sociologists. It also owed to the fact that the New School’s sociology department, located in one of the world’s most complex and cosmopolitan cities, hosted some of the most broad-ranging work in the field of urban sociology of any single university in the country. In addition to Tilly, the department counted on Janet Abu-Lughod, Arthur Vidich, and Terry Williams, plus myself. While most other sociology programs in the country defined urban research primarily in terms of race or employment questions, with this range of faculty, the New School sociology department approached urban questions from practically every methodological vantage point and scale of analysis. From Janet Abu-Lughod’s work on cities and global history to Chuck Tilly’s study of cities and state formation to Arthur Vidich’s examinations of community and class in an urban world to Terry Williams’ ethnographic analysis of neighborhoods and the underworld, there was almost no question about cities that eluded our reach. My own focus on the city as a unit of analysis, and the attention given to mayors and urban politics as part of my understanding of how cities grew, added yet another dimension to the department’s broad-ranging scholarship on cities, one that complemented the work of my colleagues in political science and economics, Ira Katznelson and David Gordon. In this rich intellectual environment, I was constantly inspired to maintain my interest in cities, but to integrate my research concerns with equal attention to history, politics, and economics. History vs. Theory with Politics as Conjoiner There were also drawbacks. The New School did not merely provide an auspicious scholarly environment for deepening my longstanding interests in history, cities, politics, and development. It also offered a major challenge to my way of thinking and conducting research, by exposing me to a normative sociology that found much elective affinity with philosophy and that was better appreciated in European than American sociological circles. While this posed its own problems, the overall result

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was my cultivation of a wider understanding of the theory and practice of sociology, and an appreciation for the different national traditions in the field of sociology.4 As a “refugee” institution founded in the early twentieth century by intellectual exiles from Columbia University who sought a more socially just, less mainstream academic environment, the New School was hardly your typical academic institution. It later became known as a haven for eminent political theorists, philosophers, economists, and sociologists in exile or retreat from Nazi Germany during and after World War II, and it continued to serve as an intellectual home to generations of European political and intellectual exiles, including Hannah Arendt, from that period and subsequent decades. While I taught there, émigré scholars from Eastern Europe, such as Agnes Heller, continued to grace the classroom, bringing their unique experiences and an appreciation of European scholarly traditions to an American setting. Likewise, the sociology department was firmly embedded in a more Europeanstyle of social science, which entailed more concerted attention to philosophy and normative theorizing than I had been exposed to previously. Colleagues like Andrew Arato insured that questions of theory and political praxis were part of the graduate curriculum, and that interpretive sociology was recognized as a legitimate method of inquiry, perhaps even preferable to mainstream empirical sociology. While I clearly did not see myself as mainstream, in training or political orientation, nor was I a quantitative sociologist, preferring to find empirical evidence in history, neither was I an interpretive sociologist nor did I have much knowledge of normative theorizing. In this environment, I faced my first set of intellectual tensions since completing my dissertation, and struggled to both learn from these new traditions while also reinforcing my commitment to grounded historical sociology. In many ways, this could be considered a replay of the situation with my dissertation advisors, and I had some skills and experience to tread carefully through this epistemological minefield. The difference—not a trivial one—was that now my promotion and advancement was dependent on how well I could manage this challenge. My learning curve was enhanced by the fact that my European-oriented colleagues were applying their normative theorizing to the impending democratic transition in Eastern Europe. As a Latin American scholar with an expertise in Mexico, the issues of regime change, transitions from authoritarianism, and democratization rang close to my heart as subjects worthy of study. The velvet revolutions of 1989 and thereafter offered me a unique opportunity to engage in discussion with colleagues who took a different methodological perspective, but were concerned with similar substantive questions, albeit as applied to Eastern Europe rather than Latin America. While my own preferred analytical toolkit privileged classes and the state as central protagonists of change, for some of my more “normatively-oriented” colleagues these actors were merely remnants of a troubled past that democratization was intended to eliminate. As we pursued these different points of entry, then, the normative theorizing of some 4 This, in fact, was a “sociology of knowledge” point I pursued in my 1992 article for the Annual Review of Sociology and much later in my 2005 article titled “Cities in Global Context”, in which I compared American and European approaches to the study of third world cities.

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of my colleagues hit up against my historical and empirical sensibilities. As a junior, non-tenured faculty member with just a couple years under her belt, such dissonance was often difficult to bear, on both personal and professional levels. But in purely intellectual terms, it was a highly productive discord and one that kept me on my toes while also expanding my scholarly horizons. For one thing, I learned more about Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, as well as the possibilities and limits to comparative research on democratization. For another, as a result of collegial influence and the real-world transformations rippling through Eastern Europe in the post-1989 epoch, I began writing more seriously on social movements, and how they linked to democratic change in postauthoritarian environments. Both sets of inquiries soon began to define my research as much as urban political history; and many of the dissertations I supervised focused on these topics in the Mexican context. I continued my own writings on the city, but as the years passed at the New School, I found myself moving away from questions about urban development and growth and more towards the politics of transition, be it political or economic. With a larger number of Latin American graduate students coming to the New School interested in promoting democratic change in their home country, and with Chuck Tilly leaving our department, this trajectory also made institutional sense. When I became chair of the department of sociology in the mid- to late-1990s, I became even more committed to working within the existent intellectual milieu, and facilitating dialogue among the faculty of divergent epistemological orientations. Still, in my own research and writings, I continued to study Mexico’s social movements and that country’s political transition through the lenses I knew best, never really retreating from my inter-disciplinary, historical study of cities, politics, and development. Among other things, I began to focus on the ways urban dynamics fueled struggles in and over the democratization of Mexico City. The fact that conditions on the ground in Mexico were moving in a more democratic direction, evidenced by the fact that in 1995 Mexico City finally was granted the democratic rights to elect local legislators for the first time in seventy years, further pushed me to study these connections. Conversely, I also studied the ways that democratization affected urban development policies and trajectories. This was especially so after 1997, when Mexico City’s first democratically elected mayor in decades came to power on a leftleaning political party ticket that rose to power through social mobilization and a call for citizen participation in local government. These studies naturally focused on social movements, political parties, and mayoral politics as mediating both democratization and urban development trajectories, further reinforcing the intellectual engagement with my European-oriented colleagues, who were looking at similar questions about democratization in Eastern Europe, and my urban colleagues, who continued to pursue an interest in cities. This unique combination of interests and the influence of the New School environment also pushed me to develop a new area of inquiry, relating to violence and the role of irregular armed forces in urban and national development, a topic of study that first grabbed my imagination in the mid-1990s. The origins of this new topic of inquiry traced to both institutional dynamics at the New School and to changing empirical conditions in Mexico City. In particular, in 1995 I worked with

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Louise Tilly and Anthony Pereira to write a grant proposal for a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, selecting a topic that would unite an inter-disciplinary group of sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists at the New School behind a common theme. We selected the idea of irregular armed forces and their impact on politics and state formation because it allowed us to use some of the central ideas drawn from theories of state formation, but to transcend the preoccupation with standing armies and to analyze “coercive” actors and institutions internal to states. This was a topic that made sense to scholars of Latin America like Tony Pereira and myself, because we knew that internal political conflicts or “domestic war-making” were as central to politics and state formation in Latin America as were external wars. At the same time, the decision to explore this dynamic was equally influenced by my own recent experiences in Mexico City, where problems of police violence and political policing were becoming ever more visible to the population. I had almost fifteen years of deep quotidian knowledge of the city under my belt, but had never see the problems of police violence, corruption, and coercion that were becoming endemic to urban life starting around 1995. Since this was precisely the period when democratization was deepening, and the PRI-run Mexican party-state was being transformed in historic ways, I began to wonder about the relationships between the actions of these “irregular armed forces” and state de-formation. So once again, I was studying the relations between conditions in cities, politics, and national development, but entering the picture through the lenses of police and violence rather than social movements or urban policy. This combination of interests led to the co-edited volume (with Anthony Pereira) called Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in State Formation, and to published work on demilitarization and its role in Mexico’s democratization, as well as the impact of the latter on police corruption and violence. One other new area of expertise began to materialize during my last years at the New School: the study of comparative macroeconomic development trajectories. My interest in this topic was probably influenced by my exposure to economists like Alice Amsden, Lance Taylor, and William Milberg during co-teaching experiences at the New School, and to my longstanding interests in political economy. Yet the study of macroeconomic development trajectories, and why some countries were more successful than others in achieving economic gains, also derived from my newfound interest in comparative political development (emerging out of the constant comparison of Latin America and Eastern Europe among sociology department faculty and students). Further, I was advised by my senior colleagues to move somewhat beyond my focus on Mexico, in order to be able to demonstrate to the sociological world that I knew more than one place. The ethnocentrism in this suggestion notwithstanding (after all, how many sociologists who focus on the US are advised to study other countries in order to validate their worth or credentials), it was good advice filled with challenge and opportunity. The challenge lay in immersing myself deeply in the history and politics of other countries, while the opportunity derived from the new material and knowledge generated in the process. In perhaps an overly ambitious move on my part, I selected three new countries to compare to Mexico (Argentina, South Korea, and Taiwan). This entailed immersing

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myself in volumes of literature on the history, politics, economy, and society of three new countries, and using the standard of Mexico (which I had been studying for more than a decade already) as a benchmark. It took years to prepare this second book. In developing a research question to account for East Asia’s successes and Latin America’s “failures,” I turned not just to my old companions history and political economy, and examined the historical foundations of the state and which class actors were most central in the period of early modern state formation (1930–1960 for Latin America and 1940–1970 for East Asia). I also recast my longstanding interest in the relations between cities and national development, and examined the balance of rural and urban class power—particularly as they affected middle classes—and how this also affected policymaking. The result, a book published in 2004 called Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America, can be considered another quintessential Davis hybrid: a synthesis of history, politics, classes, patterns of urbanization, and national development. But rather than considering urbanization merely as urban growth and form (i.e., intraurban patterns), as I had in Urban Leviathan, in this second book I began to examine the relations between city and countryside (i.e., inter-urban patterns) and how they affected national development. From Cities to Nations and Back Just as my book on comparative macroeconomic development was nearing completion I faced a major new opportunity, which also was a challenge: the offer of a tenured position in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT. This posed a dilemma. As a committed historical sociologist grounded in politics and social science debates, I was somewhat concerned about leaving a sociology department and one of the premier graduate social science institutions in the country to join an architecture and planning school in one of the nation’s premier science and engineering universities. From the heights of abstract social science to the heights of rocket science is how one of my colleagues presented the institutional comparison. While MIT did not even have a sociology department, the urban studies and planning department had several appealing attributes, which paralleled those of the New School in surprising ways. For one, DUSP was an inter-disciplinary department which housed faculty trained in politics, economics, sociology, as well as architecture, planning, and engineering. For another, like the New School, its student population was mainly masters and doctoral students, with most of these students sharing with New School students a desire to make the world a better place. At MIT this meant learning skills about how to act in the world and create new urban conditions and institutions, while at the New School this usually meant learning new social critiques. But the larger pedagogic aims of the places were surprisingly similar, even if the training strategies and intellectual discourses differed. Finally, like the New School, DUSP offered a small cadre of faculty who were considering many of the same scholarly questions that had long captivated me. Almost everyone in the department was interested in cities; and in the subgroup that I joined, called International Development and Regional

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Planning, most of my colleagues were interested in the developing world, including Alice Amsden who was in the department before I joined. All this meant that once I moved to MIT, I was in an even better environment to be able to pursue my own research on comparative development and the role of cities in national political and economic transformations than I had been at the New School. Icing on the cake came in the form of the opportunity to co-teach with a major urban historian, Robert Fogelson, and to return to questions of urban history. And in a fortuitous but unanticipated way, my move from a sociology to a planning department echoed the same journey taken by Manuel Castells more than a decade and a half earlier when he moved to Berkeley’s planning department. I had always accepted Manuel as a principal influence on my intellectual development. Even the initial choice of my dissertation topic—the decision to study the building of Mexico City’s subway, had owed substantially to his advice, counsel, and networks. As I came full circle by also joining a planning department, I was even more thrilled to find that shortly thereafter Manuel was appointed a visiting recurring professor at DUSP too. So, in much the same way that Janet Abu-Lughod served as a starting and ending point in my intellectual development, influencing me as an undergraduate student enough that I followed her intellectual (and personal) trajectory, and ending up in the same department I joined as a new assistant professor, Manuel Castells has been the same for me. My graduate advisor is now my colleague, and I am all the happier for it. It has been great to re-connect with one of the leading lights of urban studies and political economy, a man perhaps even more influential because of his growing interest in globalization and the internet society, two areas of interest that I am just beginning to explore as well. Upon arriving at DUSP, I continued with several of my longstanding scholarly interests, including urban politics and the relations between urbanization and national development. But I also dropped some old ones, like social movements and state formation, and cultivated some new ones, ranging from the impact of globalization in cities in the developing world to the rise of violence and police corruption within them. These decisions were molded by the new institutional context in which I was working. As noted above, with Castells back as a colleague I began to shed my apprehension toward globalization paradigms. This was a position I had cultivated over the years working with Zeitlin, who pitted his nation-state and class-centered focus against the rising tide of Wallerstein’s world system theories, and which fitted with my interest in domestic power structures and the relations between classes and the state. But by the time I was finishing Discipline and Development, I knew that I had to be able to address the criticisms of world-system theorists who would offer a different more global explanation for divergent development trajectories. The world also was quite different in 2000 than it was in 1976 when I first started studying the political economy of development. My growing interest in globalization came late, then, but it did finally arrive and come to dominate the final chapter of Discipline and Development. As a consequence, I began to think about the ways that global context has changed for developing countries and their cities over the last several decades, especially since I first started studying them as a senior at Northwestern and then in graduate school at UCLA. I have since then directly examined this theme

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in several publications that examined the historical evidence on the relationship between urbanization, globalization, and development. Normative Sociology in New Packaging? While a newfound interest in globalization developed when I came to MIT, perhaps the biggest shift in my thinking owed less to Castells’ presence on the planning faculty (which is only recurring) and more to the department’s larger curricular agenda. At DUSP the fact that cities and urban questions defined our collective enterprise was important, but it was less a motivator for new projects than the fact that many of my colleagues were concerned with real practice and grounded action, not merely theory. The institutional pressure from both students and colleagues to think about the practical implications of my research has further pushed me to refine old topics and develop new ones. This challenge—to integrate a concern with action with my social science orientation—has served as a major intellectual provocation, and one of the most difficult tasks I have faced in years. One way I have tried to respond is to focus more scholarly attention on those problems that seem to demand some urgent practical action, even if I am not offering the desired solutions. My current work on police corruption, violence, and rule of law questions in cities in the developing world falls into this category. The problems of endemic violence, police impunity, and deteriorating rule of law have come to define many large cities in the so-called developing world, meaning they are on the top of the urban policy-making agenda. In my own work on this topic, which now revolves around deeper study of Mexico City, Moscow, and Johannesburg, my skills as a comparative and historical sociologist have allowed me to trace many of these problems to the double transition of political and economic liberalization (including the shift from authoritarianism to democracy) in ways that harken back to my prior interests. I continue to draw from my past writings and analytical frameworks both substantively and in terms of case-study selection. Both were combined in a recent project in which I compared the problems of policing under conditions of regime change, offering an examination of Mexico in the decade immediately following its 1910 Revolution as a comparative basis for understanding conditions in Iraq, where questions of consolidating police control over the security situation are key to consolidating both regime change and political transition. This study fits very nicely into the framework on irregular armed forces and state formation that I developed years ago at the New School. Still, I continue to use my insistence on grounded empirical research to examine changing conditions on the ground, and not merely the larger political context of transition. This line of research may be best exemplified in my current work on the parallel shift from public to private policing in these “transition” cities, a state of affairs that I hypothesize is contributing to problems of lawlessness, violence, and police corruption and thus produces new questions about relations between micro and macro-sociological transitions. In any case, the focus on the pros and cons of public and private policing, and where these patterns come from, allows my work to have relevance for urban policy makers (from mayors to legislators to police

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chiefs) as well as sociologists interested in fundamental historical and political transformations, thereby helping me accommodate the practice/social science nexus that I seek to develop over the next several years. A second way I have tried to integrate research and action is through another project here at MIT, called Just Jerusalem: Visions for a Place of Peace. This project best embodies my most concerted efforts to use social science methodologies and frameworks to address the intractable urban problems of our times. I developed this project through a series of graduate seminars, beginning with one focused on “Cities in Conflict” in which we examined the conditions under which cities with “tolerable” differences became wracked by violent conflict. This was a topic of great concern to many students at MIT, especially those who came from contested areas of the world where religious or ethnic conflict limited urban or national development. One of the findings generated by the comparative and historical research on what transformed cities of difference (based on ethnic or religious division) into cities of conflict was the intervention of the nation-state. As a result, we then offered a new seminar called “Cities Against Nationalism”, focused especially on Jerusalem, and the ways in which the forms of sovereignty proposed or implemented in the city will affect the likelihood of urban conflict. Building on these ideas, and the social science methodological give-andtake used to arrive at them, I then mounted a hands-on project intended to move discussion from the world of theory to that of practice. The result is Just Jerusalem, an initiative to mount an international “vision” competition to solicit global efforts to re-imagine Jerusalem as a place of peace shared by both Palestinians and Israelis. In keeping with its sociological roots, this project is premised on the desire to transcend competing nationalists projects for Jerusalem, seen in Charles Tilly-like blueprints for the city that have been developed with war-making and state-making aims more than urban life and livelihood in mind, and to solicit imaginative views about what could make the city a vibrant, prosperous, peaceful place independent of which nation’s hegemony limits the realization of these aims. It relies on citizen involvement and civil society visions emanating from below, not merely those plans generated by diplomats or professionals with the nation-state in mind, an idea that probably traces to my earlier writings on social movements, democracy, and urban politics. Last, it suggests that one way to enable peace between the competing Israeli and Palestinian nations is to work on giving all residents of Jerusalem, no matter their national identity, the “right to the city”, a concept drawn from the urban philosopher and theorist, Henri Lefebvre, whose writings I have taught for years. Overall, the project aims to encourage new ideas for developing institutions, practices, and spatial plans—real actions with real consequences—with the hope that the proper practices can guarantee all residents the right to the city. In the lexicon of my earlier research, it is a project that takes seriously the city-nation nexus, but works to understand how best to separate city from nation, and to build on urban theory, the vibrancy of civil society, and the potential of urban policy-making to lead to more peaceful and prosperous conditions for residents of the city and the nation(s).

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Where to Now? The journey from Webster Groves, Missouri, to Jerusalem via Mexico City, Taipei, Seoul, Buenos Aires, and with a detour to Moscow and Johannesburg, has been an exciting one. I have not yet finished all the projects that I started since coming to MIT, particularly the history of Mexico City police, while the Jerusalem project also remains a high priority because the social justice concerns that inspired it are ever more important to me as time passes, as is my continued preoccupation with citynation relationships. But if there were one new project looming on the horizon for me it would entail a scholarly return to St. Louis, my home town. I am intrigued by this city not just because my personal roots lie there. I also think it is a fascinating case for study because its history tells us much about all the issues that I have examined over the last two decades, and continue to massage from new methodological and practical angles. St. Louis could be considered a divided city, albeit much less intractably than Jerusalem, because race has detached the city from its suburbs and led to racial conflict, violence, and destruction of the built environment. It is the home to a quintessential failed public housing project, called Pruitt Igoe, that had to be torn down because it was crime-ridden and disastrously planned, as was the city’s larger urban renewal projects, which still leave burned out buildings and gaping holes in the urban fabric. Further, the fate of St. Louis—home to the famous Dred Scott decision—seems directly tied to the fate of the U.S. nation. America’s civil war divided the city from within, setting immigrant groups of different religions and ethnicities against each other, and creating new splits between the north and south of the state. The latter divide paralleled the North-South conflict in the Civil War, with southern Missouri plantation owners supporting the Confederacy, northern urban and industrial populations supporting the Union, and the state capital (in the south of the state in a city called Columbia) siding with the South enough to starve St. Louis of funds, thereby leading to its urban demise. So this is exactly my favored scholarly terrain: a city whose historical origins sealed its development trajectories, whose connection to the nation determined the fate of the city’s residents, where conflict and violence are key parts of the story, and where normative sociology just might lead to some policy action to remedy the urban disaster that is now St. Louis. If only I had the time to give this city and this research its due. Then my career would really come full circle, and I would have found a wonderful way to return home after being away for so many years. References and Selected Bibliography Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. Davis, Diane E. 1989. “Divided Over Democracy: The Embeddedness of State and Class Conflicts in Contemporary Mexico.” Politics and Society 17(3): 247–280. ———. 1992. “The Sociology of Mexico: Stalking the Path Not Taken.” Annual Review of Sociology 18: 395–417.

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———. 1993. “The Dialectic of Autonomy: State Actors, Class Actors, and the Roots of Economic Crisis in Mexico, 1964–1982.” Latin American Perspectives 20(3): 46–74. ———. 1994a. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press (Spanish translation, 1999). ———. 1994b. “Failed Urban Democratic Reform: From Social Movements to the State and Back Again.” Journal of Latin American Studies 26(2): 1–34. ———. 1995. “Uncommon Democracy in Mexico: Middle Classes and the Military in the Consolidation of One-party Rule, 1936–1946.” In Herrick Chapman and George Reid Andrews (eds), The Social Construction of Democracy, 1890–1990. London: Macmillan. ———. 1997. “New Social Movements, Old Party Structures: The Discursive and Organizational Transformation of Party Politics in Mexico and Brazil” In Roberto Korzeniewicz and William Smith (eds.), The Politics of Social Change and Economic Restructuring in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. ———. 1999. “The Power of Distance: Rethinking Social Movements in Latin America.” Theory and Society 24(4): 589–643. ———. 2001. “Development and Urbanization.” In Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier Science. ———. 2002. “From Democracy to Rule of Law? Police Impunity in Contemporary Latin America?” ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America (Fall) 21–25. ———. 2004a. Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Economic Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004b. “The State of the State in Latin American Sociology.” In Charles Wood and Bryan Roberts (eds), Rethinking Development in Latin America. Pennsylvania State Press University. ———. 2004c. “Reverberations: Mexico City’s 1985 Earthquake and the Transformation of the Capital” In Lawrence Vale and Tom Campanella (eds), The Resilient City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005a. “Cities in Global Context: A Brief Intellectual History.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(1): 92–109. ———. 2005b. “Contending Planning Cultures and the Built Environment in Mexico City.” In Bishwapriya Sanyal (ed.), Comparative Planning Cultures. New York: Routledge. Davis, Diane E. and Arturo Alvarado. 2004. “Citizen Participation, Democratic Governance, and the PRD in Mexico City: The Challenge of Political Transition.” In The Left and the City: Attempting Participatory Democracy in Latin America. Ed. Benjamin Goldfrank and Daniel Chavez. London: Latin America Bureau. Davis, Diane E. and Anthony Pereira, eds. 2003. Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Diane E. and Viviane Brachet-Marquez. 1997. “Rethinking Democracy: Mexico in Historical Perspective.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31: 86–119.

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Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Translated by Eleanor Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell. Tilly, Charles. 1967. The Vendee. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Tilly, Charles. 1992. Capital, Coercion, and European States: AD 990–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press.

Chapter 5

Going Digging in the Shadow of Master Categories Saskia Sassen

Growing up in three countries and in five languages must have had something to do with my choice of academic subjects, or so I am told. But it is not a self-evident proposition. It might be the case—and it might be interesting to study whether it is indeed so—that such beginnings lead necessarily to an interest in international or global subjects. Conceivably, it might lead on in the opposite direction: a search for clearly demarcated subjects, where closure is primary and the fuzziness of the international is evicted from the category. More interesting, perhaps, is whether or not knowing a single language perfectly inflects one’s way of thinking. In my experience, imperfect knowledge of all the languages I work in is consequential. I keep running into conditions not well captured in any of these languages. The result is a proclivity to invent terms or to use existing words for unexpected or unusual applications. Language is seeing. Juxtaposing different languages is seeing differences in that seeing. When you throw into that mix the third component, imperfect knowledge of the languages in play, you get my experience: little gaps across these languages, gaps that point to interstitial spaces where there is work to be done. One possible move, and it was my move, is to compensate imperfect knowledge of language with

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theory. It is this indirect connection, rather than the fact itself of growing up in more than one country, that captures the influence of my life on my scholarship, on my way of thinking. It has shaped my perhaps peculiar way of theorizing—theory gets constituted through the text itself rather than through a model that stands outside the specifics of the subject under consideration. And it has shaped my need to develop new categories for analysis, such as that of the global city, and, more recently, the denationalized state. There was a second early framing that came to inflect my future work. Being out of place, slightly but permanently, led me to see conditions and to seize on actions that were not of the place. My own sharpest memory of this—though I am told there were many more and earlier such incidents—is of me at age eight sneaking out of the house with a huge suitcase full of clothes and food to bring to a flooded disaster area. It was an expedition. And it was extremely irregular for a child to do this alone, not to mention unbeknownst to her parents. There were more or less annual floods in Buenos Aires that hit the poor, who could only find a place to build a shack in the city’s areas that no one else wanted. I readied my very own plan for when the season arrived: I started “collecting” (from my own home, of course) clothes and food a few weeks before the floods could be expected. Taking the bus was a major event—not just because of my age and the size of the suitcase, but also because of the bus itself. This was a very popular bus line, in all senses of the word. Crowded does not begin to give the feeling of it. It was also a very long bus ride. I had studied the precise location of where I was meant to go: a particular poor area where the church in the neighboring district was accepting donations—details I had identified from newscasts. I was a voracious newspaper reader as of a very young age, partly because my father every day bought the major five newspapers in the country. In retrospect, I think that two aspects of the event were consequential. One was that I allowed myself to fully experience the recognition of poverty and misery and my desire to help. I think these feelings are probably fairly common in children. But less so is the possibility of experiencing them fully, and acting on them runs into obstacles, notably one’s parents (and society’s) sense of what is appropriate for a child. The other was that planning and implementing my little expedition gave me a sense (albeit elementary) of “making”, in the Greek meaning of poesis. A little person could act and intervene into what seemed a function of major forces. These two framings hold the answer to a question I have often been asked: What led me to focus on cities, a sub-national scale, when I started my research on globalization? The more expected focus would have been on self-evidently global institutions. This question of the scaling analytics in my work has recurred. Today, the question is reframed in terms of the scaling that organizes my new book—the importance of focusing on the sub-national in the form of the executive branch of government and its growing alignment with globalization. I am hearing the same type of surprise: why focus on the executive branch of government to understand globalization? One way into this intellectual biography is to start by elaborating on these two questions, and then move back into what is the third major scaling issue in my research of the last twenty years—immigration as contained in and constitutive of specific global systems. This is also the subject where it all started—my choice of

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dissertation subject, the rejection of that dissertation, and my move back to Europe to study philosophy. Why Focus on Cities When Researching Globalization? Focusing on cities has the effect of bringing the global down, down into the thick environments of cities, down into the multiple work cultures through which global corporate work gets done. And it inserts into the notion of the global a concrete space for politics, including the politics of the disadvantaged. In so doing it also makes legible the complexity of powerlessness—it is not simply a matter of not having power. It is precisely the coexistence of the sharpest concentrations of the powerful and the powerless that gives the global city also a strategic political character. If we consider that large cities harbor both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations—immigrants, many of them disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the mega-cities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers—then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. We can then also think of cities as one of the sites for the contradictions of the globalization of capital. This brings us back to some of the earlier historical formations around questions of citizenship and struggles for entitlements, and the prominent role played by cities and civil society. The large city of today emerges as a strategic site for these new types of operations. It is one of the nexi where the formation of new claims materializes and assumes concrete forms. The partial loss of state power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the sub-national level. The national as container of social process and power is partly cracked. This cracked casing opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links sub-national spaces. Cities are foremost in this new geography. One question this engenders is how and whether we are seeing the formation of new types of politics that localize in these cities. The global city allows, it enables, that amalgamated disadvantaged workforce to emerge as a social force. You can have a lot of immigrants working in some large corporate firm, but in such a setting they cannot emerge as a social force. Same thing with the suburban workplace. These are workplaces that reduce them to labor, that collapse everything that these immigrants might be into the laborer. The global city is a productive space, both in terms of the production of the specialized capabilities needed by global capital, and in terms of its political productivity: in making both global capital into a social force, and enabling that amalgamated disadvantaged workforce also to emerge as a social force. Let me elaborate on this by using Henri Lefebvre and Max Weber to put it in historical context. There is a productivity of space, of the environment itself. Max Weber finds that the medieval towns enable burghers to emerge as a social force, as political actors. In the 1950s, Henry Lefebvre looks at the industrial cities of the time, and he argues that the bourgeoisie does not need the city anymore. These are not the cities of the burghers anymore, but the cities of the organized working class, where the working class can emerge as an actor, as a political subject, as a social

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force—the city where workers can make claims for the apparatuses of collective consumption, from public transport to health and housing. Cities have not always played this role. At the height of industrial capitalism, crucial sites of struggle were the mines, the large factories; areas that were not cities—like northern France. I look at global cities and find they are no longer the cities of the organized working class or of that older notion of a bourgeoisie that finds in the city the place for its self-representation and projection of its power (including its civilizing power). I see in global cities a space that enables two other types of strategic actors. Global cities are where that increasingly elusive, privatized, digitized category we call “global capital” hits the ground, and for one moment in its complex trajectory becomes men and women. These are men and women who want it all and get it all. Thereby they project their daily work and lifestyles onto the city. This takes a lot of space, so it invades other people’s residential areas (gentrification) and other firms’ areas (new glamorous office buildings replacing older urban economies). It is through this projection and invasion, the concreteness of daily life of high-income households and high-profit firms, that global capital reveals itself to be a social force. On these terms it can be engaged directly. The other social force emerges from the fact that the amalgamated workforce (and thus “disorganized” as opposed to, for instance, “organized labor”) is part of the city’s globalized economic sectors, and, no matter how contingent and transitory, it also projects its work and survival strategies on urban space—immigrant communities, the banlieue in Paris, low-cost commercial areas, cheap restaurants, street vendors, and so on. This, I would argue, is also one kind of structuration of the multitude. I use social force to capture both of these emergent actors, because they are not classes, or not yet. This is a far more disorganized, situated, concrete process than the more complex meaning Marx had for social class. There is also no common program. These are emergent social forces. But one effect is to make global capital concrete, not a spectral global category. And it gives the amalgamated disadvantaged workforce a political shape beyond the laboring subject. This in turn enables various types of political practice—from the theatricalization of the political as in immigrant parades to the successful organization of cleaners through Justice for Janitors. Whether they’re foreigners or nationals is almost secondary in the formation of this amalgamated workforce. Many third-generation immigrants and minoritized citizens are part of this emergent social force. Minoritized citizens, in this context, get the option of experiencing themselves as something akin to stateless or denationalized in that they can exit subjective membership from the collective entity of the national state. Here I do not only mean the economically disadvantaged: they can be middleincome minoritized citizens, or they can be anarchists, or gay, lesbian, and queers who feel alienated, or for that matter every kind of person or identity not fully part of the national “we”. What begins to happen here is the whole notion of diasporic as a tool, an instrumentality, a way of identifying a new kind of political subject. The global city connects all these subaltern struggles or identities, a mix of people who mostly do not transact with each other, who mostly don’t even talk to each other, but who emerge as an amalgamated social force. The same mix in a different kind of site—a university, a hotel, a hospital, a suburb—would not necessarily be enabled to emerge as a social force because they would lack systematic positioning.

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There are many globalizations. Each has a particularized geography and architecture. When it comes to corporate economic globalization I argue that its organizational side is quite different from the consumer side. Most attention has gone to consumer multinationals: McDonald’s, Nike, and so on. The project for the consumer firms is the more consumers worldwide, the better. In contrast, the organizational side does not need to go everywhere and reach as many consumers as possible. The organizational side is strategic: it services the global operations of firms and markets, both those selling to consumers and to other firms. The organizational side makes itself visible only when it really has to. It does not advertise in consumer markets; it only advertises to other firms. The network of global cities is a strategic geography for the organizational side of global capital. Global cities have the mix of resources to produce specialized capabilities for global capital. I want to emphasize that global capital needs to be made, to be produced, serviced, it needs legal and accounting services, etc. The global city represents this one very legible moment where the capabilities that global firms and global markets need to be global, get produced, invented, made. The key economic function of the global city is that it is a sort of Silicon Valley for inventing and producing specialized capabilities for global operations, operations which to a very large extent are electronic. I like this juxtaposition of global electronic networks and the massive concentrations of materialities (buildings, infrastructure, the fact that professionals and executives need houses, food … the materiality of it all). More generally, we know that there have long been cross-border economic processes—flows of capital, labor, goods, raw materials, travelers. And over the centuries there have been enormous fluctuations in the degree of openness or closure of the organizational forms within which these flows took place. In the last hundred years, the inter-state system came to provide the dominant organizational form for cross-border flows, with national states as its key actors. It is this condition that has changed dramatically over the last decade as a result of privatization, deregulation, the opening up of national economies to foreign firms, and the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets. In this context we see a re-scaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the new system. With the partial unbundling or at least weakening of the national as a spatial unit come conditions for the ascendance of other spatial units and scales. Among these are the sub-national, notably cities and regions; cross-border regions encompassing two or more sub-national entities; and supra-national entities, i.e. global digitized markets and free-trade blocs. The dynamics and processes that get territorialized or are sited at these diverse scales can in principle be regional, national, and global. There is a proliferation of specialized global circuits for economic activities that both contribute to and constitute these new scales and are enhanced by their emergence. The organizational architecture for cross-border flows that emerges from these re-scalings and articulations increasingly diverges from that of the inter-state system. The key articulators now include not only national states but also firms and markets whose global operations are facilitated by new policies and cross-border standards produced by willing or not-so willing states. Among the empirical referents for these non-state forms of articulation are the growing number of cross-border mergers and

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acquisitions, the expanding networks of foreign affiliates, and the growing numbers of financial centers that are becoming incorporated into global financial markets. As a result of these and other processes, a growing number of cities today play an increasingly important role in directly linking their national economies with global circuits. As cross-border transactions of all kinds grow, so do the networks binding particular configurations of cities. This in turn contributes to the formation of new geographies of centrality that connect cities in a growing variety of cross-border networks. It is against this larger picture that I see cities as strategic sites today. A focus on cities does force me to see that the global is not simply that which operates outside the national, and in that sense, to see also that the national and the global are not mutually exclusive domains. The global city is a thick environment that endogenizes the global and filters it through “national” institutional orders and imaginaries. It also helps render global internal (national) components of the economy and, especially, the imaginaries of various groups. Studying globalization in this manner means you can engage in thick descriptions and do empirical research in specific sites rather than having to position yourself as a global observer. Now that I have been at it for a while I can see that no matter what feature I am studying, over the last fifteen years or more I have gravitated towards these thick environments. It feels like a hundred years of digging. Bringing the National Back In My concern and engagement with the specifics of place also led me to contest the common notion that the national and the global are mutually exclusive, and that what one wins the other loses—in a sort of titanic zero-sum struggle. We are living through an epochal transformation. But the usual term used to describe this transformation, globalization, does not capture enough. I argue that because this transformation is indeed epochal, it needs to engage the most complex, and accomplished structures we have constructed. The national state is one of them. It is not the case that sovereignty is going away; it is becoming partly de-nationalized. Sovereignty today has to accommodate the human rights regime, and NGOs both at home and internationally. It has to recognize the scattered sovereignties of First Nations people and the historically nurtured claims of the subaltern. These and other dynamics evident today have the effect of disaggregating what we had come to think of and experience as a unitary category, the nation-state. Further, the national state is no longer the only formally recognized actor in the international domain. The state can no longer claim to exclusively represent all of its people in international forums. Economic corporate globalization is a system of power that uses some of the old capabilities that come out of the national state, but redeploys them. In this redeployment, what may have been oriented towards national economies and national interests shifts to the narrower global interests of particular actors. There is not a total rupture with the national state, not at all. But it does signal the formation of a type of institutionalized space that deborders the inter-state system.

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What is it we are trying to name with the term “globalization”? In my reading of the evidence it is actually two distinct sets of dynamics. One of these involves the formation of explicitly global institutions and processes, such as the World Trade Organization, global financial markets, the new cosmopolitanism, the War Crimes Tribunals. The practices and organizational forms through which these dynamics operate are constitutive of what is typically thought of as global scales. But there is a second set of processes that does not necessarily scale at the global level as such, yet, I argue, is part of globalization. These processes take place deep inside territories and institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national terms in much, though by no means all, of the world. What makes these processes part of globalization even though localized in national, indeed sub-national settings, is that they involve transboundary networks and formations connecting or articulating multiple local or “national” processes and actors. Among these processes I include cross-border networks of activists engaged in specific localized struggles with an explicit or implicit global agenda, as is the case with many human rights and environmental organizations; particular aspects of the work of states, e.g., certain monetary and fiscal policies critical to the constitution of global markets that are hence being implemented in a growing number of countries; the use of international human rights instruments in national courts; non-cosmopolitan forms of global politics and imaginaries that remain deeply attached or focused on localized issues and struggles, yet are part of global lateral networks containing multiple other such localized efforts. A particular challenge in the work of identifying these types of processes and actors as part of globalization is the need to decode at least some of what continues to be experienced and represented as national. In my work I have particularly wanted to focus on these types of practices and dynamics and have insisted in conceptualizing them as also constitutive of globalization even though we do not usually recognize them as such. When the social sciences focus on globalization—still rare enough deep in the academy—it is typically not on these types of practices and dynamics but rather on the selfevidently global scale. And although the social sciences have made important contributions to the study of this self-evident global scale by establishing the fact of multiple globalizations, only some of which correspond to neoliberal corporate economic globalization, there is much work left. At least some of this work entails distinguishing (a) the various scales that global processes constitute, ranging from supra-national and global to sub-national, and (b) the specific contents and institutional locations of this multi-scalar globalization. Geography more than any other of the social sciences today has contributed to a critical stance toward scale, recognizing the historicity of scales and resisting the reification of the national scale so present in most of social science. This would suggest that globalization is not only an extension of certain forms to the globe but also a repositioning of what we have historically constructed and experienced as the local and the national. In addition, this happens in many different and specific ways and in a growing number of domains—economic, political, cultural, ideational. It does mean for me that we need new conceptual architectures. But it does not mean that we have to throw all existing research techniques and data sets out the window. I use the term conceptual architecture with care: an organizing logic

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that can accommodate multiple diverse components operating at different scales (e.g., data about various localized dynamics and self-evidently global ones) without losing analytic closure, at least ensuring a modicum of such closure. Studying the global, then, entails not only a focus on that which is explicitly global in scale, but also a focus on locally scaled practices and conditions that are articulated with global dynamics, and a focus on the multiplication of cross-border connections among various localities. Further, it entails recognizing that many of the globally scaled dynamics, such as the global capital market, actually are partly embedded in sub-national sites and move between these differently scaled practices and organizational forms. For instance, the global capital market is constituted both through electronic markets with global span, and through locally embedded conditions, i.e., financial centers. A focus on such sub-nationally based processes and dynamics of globalization requires methodologies and theorizations that engage not only global scalings but also sub-national scalings as components of global processes, thereby destabilizing older hierarchies of scale and conceptions of nested scalings. Studying global processes and conditions that get constituted sub-nationally has some advantages over studies of globally scaled dynamics; but it also poses specific challenges. It does make possible the use of long-standing research techniques, from quantitative to qualitative, in the study of globalization. It also gives us a bridge for using the wealth of national and sub-national data sets as well as specialized scholarships such as area studies. Both types of studies, however, need to be situated in conceptual architectures that are not quite those held by the researchers who generated these research techniques and data sets, as their efforts mostly had little to do with globalization. One central task we face is to decode particular aspects of what is still represented or experienced as “national”, which may in fact have shifted away from what had historically been considered or constituted as national. This is in many ways a research and theorization logic that is present in global city studies. But there is a difference: today we have come around to recognize and code a variety of components in global cities as part of the global. There is a broader range of conditions and dynamics that are still coded and represented as local and national. They are to be distinguished from those now recognized as global city components. In my current research project I focus on how this all works out in the realm of the political (Sassen 2006a). Most of the globalization literature has suffered deeply from what I would call the endogeneity problem in the social sciences. We are explaining x in terms of its own features: globalization is “explained” as growing interdependence. This is not explaining; it is describing. One of my obsessions became the constructing of an analytics that allows us to explain. It began with The Global City (Sassen 2001) and now with the book I have just finished, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Sassen 2006a). To avoid falling into the trap of two master categories—the nation-state and globalization—I take three transhistorical categories: territory, authority, and rights. They are transhistorical, even though they assume specific historical contents and forms, because they have been present in all our societal forms, including tribal societies. I look at how these three elements get assembled into the national, and then, the global, which to some extent entails a disassembling of what has been assembled as the national in the last century. I also examine the formation of new types of global digital assemblages of “territory”,

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authority and rights. I use digital here to describe computer-centered interactive technology. I am interested in how new forms of socialite can be constituted in digital space, with their own particular notions of authority and rights and territoriality. One of the issues I am looking at are contestatory activists. There are forms of global activism that enable localized and perhaps immobile people to experience themselves as part of a global network, or a public domain that is at another scale from the locality from which they work. As part of a larger network, human rights activists or environmental activists, who may be obsessed with the torturer in their local jail, or with the forest near their town, or the water supply in their region, can begin to experience themselves as part of a broader global effort without relinquishing their localness. It is this combination that is critical for my problematizing argument about cosmopolitanism, or rather against the widespread assumption that if it’s global it is cosmopolitan. So I talk about non-cosmopolitan forms of globality. The new information technologies, designed to eliminate distance, to produce spacetime compression, can actually also have the effect of revalorizing locality and local actors. I make that argument for a diversity of actors, for instance, financial markets as well as activists. I contest this collapsing of the global with the cosmopolitan. Financiers are non-cosmopolitan globalists, and I argue that most human-rights, or environmentalist, activists, who are actually on the ground, are that too. I want to get at the multivalence of both globalization and what it means to be a non-cosmopolitan globalist—re-inventing the local as alter-globalization. In a very different domain, I would say that there is going to be a real push towards re-localizing all kinds of markets, pulling them out of the supra-national market and making them local but inserted in horizontal global, or at least, cross-border, networks. We do not need the standardized production of multinationals that can sell you the same production no matter where you are. The Academy and Politics Throughout this way of thinking and representing the issues runs a substantive rationality centered, ultimately, in issues of social justice and the possibility that the powerless can also make history. It was in fact the protopolitics I evidently already had as a child that shaped my decision to become a sociologist. When I first heard of sociology at age thirteen, I understood it to refer to a passion for a more just world which I had discovered in myself years before. I then began to create a kind of fantasy around the term “sociology”, a utopian project for social justice (Sassen 2005a). And I kept the idea of sociology in my mind throughout the turbulence of my activism in the 1960s and on (for a detailed description of this political side, see Sassen 2005a). Mine was always a politics against the abuse of power—more so than against power per se. One struggle led to the next. These were political engagements that, while not intersecting directly with my life as an academic in the narrowest sense of the term, did shape me and inscribed my research interests. I think being a foreigner and simultaneously at home must have allowed me to survive in a peculiarly non-traumatizing way some of the potentially traumatic rejections I had early on in my academic life: having my dissertation rejected, or

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having my first book rejected by thirteen publishers. As my academic life proceeded, it somehow showed that even a multitude of rejections does not necessarily mean that you are out; you can still cross that border (Sassen 2005a). But through my years in the academy there were many who helped me along, supported me, made a critical difference to my survival. The first, and perhaps most decisive person was Bill D’Antonio, at the time the chair of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where I arrived without legal papers and without a B.A. He trusted me and put me on probation to establish whether I could manage graduate school—having never done college. It was hard, but it worked. Going to the University of Notre Dame was a somewhat devastating experience after having lived in Rome.1 Yet it was there that I got the instruments for critical analysis in U.S. social science. Several seminars stand out as being exceptional experiences that opened up the academic world to me, the world of deep scholarship rather than intellectual debate I had become familiar with in Buenos Aires and Rome. Andrew Weigert’s advanced seminar for undergrads, which I was required to take not having a college degree, introduced me to Berger and Luckman’s perspective of the construction of society, to Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, and several other classics. The experience was as dramatic as the one I had had as a young thirteenyear-old in Latin America reading my first essay in social analysis, Ortega y Gassett “Rebellion of the Masses”—a somewhat peculiar text for me, since I had become a communist at the time and was studying Russian to live up to my ideals. I had the experience that the Greeks had in mind when they used the term theoria: seeing what cannot be apprehended by the senses and hence requires a distinct construction to enable the seeing. I will never forget that seminar, even now so many decades, meetings, and courses later. I can still remember what we read in that course and the experience of discovery I had. A second very different type of experience was Arthur Rubel’s anthropological course. In that course I revisited my earlier experience at the University of Buenos Aires: I was swimming aimlessly—I simply could not really get what this was all about. I understood the English, so to speak; but the words, not the concepts. Writing the paper for that course—my first long paper ever—took day and night. I took writing this term paper as seriously as if it were my dissertation: all the classic components of a dissertation came into play. I worked day and night and weekends. I never stopped. It became my first semester’s dominant mode. (I had not had college; I had never ever written a paper, not even the shorter essays I was doing for other classes). Well, it turned out good enough that it gave me my ticket into the graduate program, pulled me out of probation and established me as a serious and able student. Despite all the other papers I wrote in my life, I remember that one most of all: I took Edmund Leach’s theories and I worked on the Ashanti. Both subjects and issues I never quite returned to at least in their named form—who knows how they worked themselves into the deeper structures of my academic thinking? I never forgot the experience of writing that paper.

1 This paragraph and material from some of the following ones are taken from Sassen 2005a. We thank the University of Chicago Press for allowing us to use these sections.

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And then there was the person who would become a key mentor, Fabio DaSilva. I sat in his theory class and I really did not know what he was lecturing about, except for some glimpses into what was, for me, an otherwise hermetic discourse. I knew that there was something there. Some of us, all with a Latin American connection except one, began to gravitate around DaSilva: we were interested in theory, critical discourses, politics. DaSilva was a great cook and wine connoisseur, definitely a civilizing presence in South Bend, Indiana. At some point he invited the five of us to come to his house where, over good food and great wine, we had our theory discussions. We met every Friday for about two years. This was a somewhat unusual group, and all of us Latin Americans had trouble getting our dissertations accepted. It was both bonding and illuminating to share this trouble. In each case there was a specific reason. But looked at from a certain distance, one cannot but sense something systemic, perhaps having to do with our foreignness and with a choice of dissertation subjects and driving theoretical concerns far too removed from the mainstream, even for sociology. For instance, one of the members was Jorge Bustamante, an already somewhat renowned lawyer in Mexico, who decided to work on Mexican immigrants in the U.S. As part of his dissertation fieldwork he entered the U.S. illegally, crossing the Rio Grande after leaving all his documents in Mexico. This was a harrowing but extremely illuminating experience about key migration issues. I remember him recounting it in full detail on one of our memorable Friday nights. This was not the type of experience the academy was comfortable with and Jorge, considered the most brilliant student in the department at the time, had to struggle to get his dissertation accepted. He went on to become one of the most distinguished immigration advisors to several Mexican presidents and founded the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, an institution specializing in border issues that is now recognized for its excellence and receives generous support from leading U.S. foundations. Another member of the group, Gilberto Cardenas, who had grown up in the LA barrio, also ran into trouble with his fellow Ph.D. students and wound up leaving the university without his doctorate, and getting it elsewhere. As I will recount later, I also had my dissertation rejected and left without a degree (which often put me in the position of having to list a high-school diploma as my highest degree, since I never got a college degree and had gone basically from high school to graduate school). The early 1970s were years of intense anti-war activity in the U.S. At Notre Dame, the antiwar struggle contained a high dose of spiritualism, both generic and particular. I remember the Catholic charismatic renewal movement organized a huge anti-war rally very much centered on Christian values. Buddhism was big. The less spiritual threw ourselves also into the McGovern campaign—even though I was a (by then legal) immigrant. The other political struggle I joined was the Cesar Chavez farm workers organizing. The Midwest is home to several migration streams from Mexico, some going back to the 1930s. One of our efforts was setting up a child-care center for the children of migrant workers. I remember receiving a Ford Foundation Dissertation Minority Fellowship and using most of the money to set up such a care center in South Bend. I felt very good about it and was certain that the Ford Foundation, always in search of bringing about more social justice, would have been delighted;

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however I did not ask them. It seemed fair that writing a dissertation on blacks and Latinos in the U.S. political economy I should use the money not to make them work more by answering questionnaires for my dissertation, but that I should help them, so much the needier. In brief, I did have a rationale for this distinctive allocation of my doctoral fellowship. My dissertation was an attempt at a political economy of the U.S. from the perspective of the condition of blacks and Latinos. It was neither sociology nor economics and evidently was a major irritant to just about every member of my dissertation committee. In individual discussions everything was fine. “Harvard civility” ruled. But when they met as a committee, the multiple detestations—between sociology and economics, between economics and my political economy stance— were too much. It got rejected. While shocking, it somehow was not devastating. When I think of a doctoral student today getting this type of rejection, I have the sense it would be far more traumatic. Well, one might say, my experience suggests it need not be. The next stop was philosophy in France. Those were heady days: Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Althuser, Poulantzas all had exploded on the scene, all in France. Given the sharp dominance of the Althuserian reading of Marx—the “rupture epistemologique”—I was convinced there was time to delve into that reading. The Hegelian reading of Marx, on the other hand, was threatened, especially when it came to the classical interpretation by Jean Hypolitte, the great French translator of Hegel. I found out that Jacques D’Hondt, one of the leading Hegelian interpreters of Marx, and the last living student of Hypolitte, was teaching in Poitiers. He also directed the Centre sur la Recherche et Documentation sur Hegel et Marx. The Centre had been a destination for many of the Hegelian Marxists from Italy, such as Lucio Colletti. Further, having grown up in Latin America, very much in a Marxist intellectual milieu as a student, we all knew of Jean Garody who had spent many years in Latin America, especially Brazil, and who was also a professor at Poitiers. So Poitiers it was for me, not glamorous Paris. I was in search of what was at risk of loss rather than what had burst onto the scene with enormous vigor and glamour. Shortly before my failed doctoral defense, urged on by my then-husband D.J. Koob, I had circulated one of my papers, part proposal, part essay, on the growing importance of cross-border migrations in the constructing of transnational relations. I vaguely remember, but am not certain, sending it to the Consortium for Peace and World Order—it had sounded like my kind of place. The end result was that I had been given a post-doctoral fellowship, no matter my lack of a doctorate. The letter found its way to Poitiers and off we were to Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Several Harvard scholars—Ray Vernon, Joseph Nye, Robert Keohane, Samuel Huntington—had been working on identifying and measuring the existence of cross-border relations that did not involve national states as key actors: multinational corporations, tourism, religious organizations, etc. My proposal on international migrations as an instance of transnational relations was a perfect fit. Working on immigration over the next decade was the beginning of a long scholarly trajectory that took me to global cities and denationalized states. Now, in my new book, I have revisited that trajectory, with new questions in mind. I would

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like to end on one of these—the repositioning of the immigrant subject as one in a growing field of new types of subjects. On the Immigrant and Other Subjects We see the emergence of various types of subjects contesting various aspects of power, of the system—people working against the market as conceived of by the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, against landmines, against the trafficking of people, against environmental destruction. These hundreds of contesting actors in different localities have wound up producing a kind of synthetic effect—they constitute the multitude. A critical question then is to understand the many informal political architectures through which the multitude actually is constituted. There is “making”, poesis, in these informal political architectures. There are many different kinds of making being built from the ground up, and there are different terrains in which new kinds of political subjects and struggles are emerging. A single city can have hundreds of terrains for political action. All of this begins to bring texture, structuration to the notion of the multitude. What I care about is the making of these specific, diverse, political architectures within the multitude. I want to capture this negotiation, the constituting of a global multitude of sorts but one that is deeply localized (and may have nothing to do with cosmopolitanism!). There is a kind of global politics in the making that has, as a critical component, multitudes that might be global even though they are not mobile. Selected Bibliography Sassen, Saskia. 1988. The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study of International Investment and Labor Flow. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the Mobility of People and Money. New Press. ———. 1999. Guests and Aliens: Europe and its Migrations. New York: New Press. ———. 2001. The Global City. Updated Second Edition (original 1991). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———, ed. 2002. Global Networks, Linked Cities. Routledge. ———. 2003. “Globalization or Denationalization?” Review of International Political Economy 10(1): 1–22. ———. 2003. “The Participation of States and Citizens in Global Governance.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10(1): 5–28. ———. 2003. “The State and Globalization.” Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5(2): 241–249. ———. 2004a. “Going Beyond the National State in the USA: The Politics of Minoritized Groups in Global Cities.” Diogenes 51(3): 59–65.

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———. 2004b. “Local Actors in Global Politics.” Current Sociology 52(4): 649– 670. ———. 2004c. “The Locational and Institutional Embeddedness of Electronic Markets: The Case of the Global Capital Markets.” Pp. 224–246 in Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (eds), Markets in Historical Context. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005a. “Always a Foreigner, Always at Home.” Pp. 221–251 in The Disobedient Generation, edited by A. Sica and S. Turner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005b. “When National Territory Is Home to the Global: Old Borders to Novel Borderings.” New Political Economy 10(4): 523–541. ———. 2005c. “Electronic Markets and Activist Networks: The Weight of Social Logics in Digital Formations.” Pp. 54–88 in Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen (eds), Digital Formations: Information Technologies and New Architectures in the Global Realm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2005d. “Digging in the Penumbra of Master Categories.” British Journal of Sociology 56(3): 401–403. ———. 2005e. “The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics.” Globalizations 2(1): 79–94. ———. 2005f. “Regulating Immigration in a Global Age: A New Policy Landscape.” Parallax 11(1): 35–45. ———. 2005g. “The Global City: Introducing a Concept.” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11(2): 27–43. ———. 2006a. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006b. Cities in a World Economy. Updated Third Edition (original 1994). Pine Forge/Sage Publications. ———. 2007a. A Sociology of Globalization. New York: Norton. ———. ed. 2007b. Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales and Subjects. New York and London: Routledge.

PART 2 Evolving Works

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Chapter 6

Sociology—Passion and Profession Richard Münch

This essay provides an impression of my affiliation with sociology as a passion and profession, from my student years up to my present-day work and my plans for the future. Having been a student at the University of Heidelberg from the middle to the end of the 1960s, the German debate on positivism and the student movement have shaped my interest in sociology. Engaged in research and teaching, my interest moved from the philosophy of the social sciences to social theory to comparative historical sociology and to the changes in social integration coming about with the emergence of a global multilevel society. Dealing with questions of this kind demands continuation and renewal of Max Weber’s program of both an interpretative and explanatory sociology. Student Years in the Exciting 1960s Sociology has been a passion to me right from the beginning. Growing further into the discipline, it has also become a profession for me. Nothing has changed until today.

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Born on May 13, 1945 in Niefern, a village close to Pforzheim, Germany, I attended primary school in Niefern and secondary school (Gymnasium) in Pforzheim. My hometown—a center of jewelry production in the southern part of Germany— was destroyed almost completely towards the end of World War II, on February 23, 1945. After having completed secondary school in March 1965, I enrolled at the University of Heidelberg—only about fifty miles away from my hometown—to study sociology, philosophy, and psychology. Heidelberg was the place where Max Weber lived from 1897 to 1919, and where he became the leading scholar for the development of German sociology. Alongside my studies of sociology, philosophy, and psychology, I also learned quite a lot by attending lectures and seminars in political science, modern history and economic and social history. Among my academic teachers, Ernst Topitsch in sociology, Ernst Tugendhat in philosophy, and Carl F. Graumann in psychology were most significant to me. Hans Albert, Rainer Lepsius, and Martin Irle at Mannheim University were further important teachers in philosophy of the social sciences, sociology, and social psychology. I attended their lectures and seminars as a guest student while being enrolled at Heidelberg University. In Heidelberg, my academic career was also significantly influenced by Wilhelm E. Mühlmann in sociology, Hans Georg Gadamer in philosophy, Werner Conze in modern history, Franz Weinert in psychology, and Carl Joachim Friedrich, Dolf Sternberger, and Klaus von Beyme in political science. Hans G. Oel—assistant at Ernst Topitsch’s chair—was my personal advisor. He contributed particularly strongly to my intellectual advancement in those student years. He taught me the meaning of analytical sharpness, and he warned me of the vagueness of Talcott Parsons’ sociology, encouraging me to read George Homans. Therefore, during my student years, I read but one article by Parsons, but most of Homans’ works. When I took up my studies of sociology, I initially intended to become a journalist. I believed that whoever wants to write about society, economy, and politics will need the necessary scientific basics to do so. Sociology seemed to meet these requirements better than any other subject. I am still convinced of this today. However, as early as my second term, I began to envisage an academic career. My years of study were characterized by the dispute on positivism in German sociology. In this debate, my academic teachers, Ernst Topitsch and Hans Albert, were directly involved by supporting Karl R. Popper’s critical rationalism. Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas represented the other side, critical theory as represented by the Frankfurt School. The controversy between critical rationalism and critical theory had a striking influence on the development of my way of thinking. Being a student of Ernst Topitsch and Hans Albert, the position of critical rationalism appeared more logical and determining to me. Nevertheless, the debates on critical theory have left substantial traces in the long run. Hence, I have learned quite a lot from Adorno, Horkheimer and, above all, from Habermas, which would not have been possible without focusing my studies on the dispute on positivism. Of course, there was the student movement, which involved fierce struggles in Heidelberg, too, but which hardly brought about any actual confrontation between teachers and students. The movement focused far more on protests against the Vietnam War and the emergency act under way in the German Federal Parliament than on

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disrupting lectures and seminars. At times, a “critical university” was established as an alternative alongside the official teaching routine. Here, mainly the works of the Frankfurt School were read, a fact that was by no means unusual at the Heidelberg Institute, since these works formed part of the official curriculum anyway. I myself supervised study groups on critical theory and on critical rationalism as a tutor from 1967 onwards. Most exciting for us in those years was the growing confidence in our ability to make a difference in the world. The First Passion: Philosophy of the Social Sciences My masters thesis in 1969 critically examined the sociological attempts that were then available to explain the student protest movement. In the sense of critical rationalism, I was looking for a general theory to explain the most diverse forms of protest behavior. The search for such a theory made me advance even more deeply into the questions of a general theory of human behavior. I expected this general theory to be found in decision theory and behavioral psychology. Between 1969 and 1971, I consequently focused my studies on psychology. Following a discussion of Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance and other theories of cognitive inconsistence, I developed a theory of cognitive incongruence. This was a theory of decision-making behavior that tried to explain individual behavior as an ongoing incongruence reduction. My dissertation Mentales System und Verhalten (Mental System and Behaviour) in 1971 worked out this theory (Münch 1972). It was later on taken up, applied in empirical terms, scrutinized, and advanced by a Bielefeldbased research group headed by Rolf Klima, and by an Utrecht-based research group headed by Reinhard Wippler and Fritz Tazelaar. Apart from the work on my dissertation, I published several articles on the philosophy of science and the methodology of the social sciences, for example, in the context of a controversy with Klaus Holzkamp and his critical psychology. Together with Hans Albert, Herbert Keuth, and Michael Schmid, I supported the position of critical rationalism. These essays were widely received and quickly earned me a series of invitations to lectures. Hence, the debate in the philosophy of the social sciences once again inched into the center of my interests. In my second dissertation (the German Habilitation to qualify for an appointment to the position of a professor) I made an attempt at stocktaking this debate. It aimed at a clarification of the positions of Marxism, critical theory, and critical rationalism. The professorial dissertation was accepted by the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences of Augsburg University as the written part of the post-doctoral examination in December 1972. Hans Albert, Horst Reimann, and Peter Atteslander acted as referees. In 1973, it was published under the title Gesellschaftstheorie und Ideologiekritik (Theory of Society and Critique of Ideology) (Münch 1973).

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The Second Passion: Social Theory I had joined the newly founded Augsburg University in 1970 as assistant to Horst Reimann. In Augsburg, the teaching schedule created an increasing interest in social theory. I therefore studied in great depth the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons “on the job”. I was mainly interested in systematizing these theories to form a general social theory. This interest in systematization inevitably lead me to the work of Talcott Parsons and its transformation in the work of Niklas Luhmann. The monographs Theorie sozialer Systeme (Theory of Social Systems) (Münch 1976a) and Legitimität und politische Macht (Legitimacy and Political Power) (Münch 1976b), which were published in 1976, give evidence of this interest in social theory. In 1973, I took over an interim professorship at Cologne University, which allowed me to pursue my research interests in teaching as well. Having served as a guest lecturer at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich and as an interim professor at Heidelberg University, I was finally appointed to the position of associate professor at Cologne University in 1974. In 1976, I took up a chair in social science at Düsseldorf University, which was not yet called Heinrich Heine University—a name taken on several years and many controversies later. I taught at that university until I joined Bamberg University in the winter term of 1995–1996. Up until the integration of the Neuß-based College of Education, I was the only head of the social science institute in Düsseldorf and was responsible for the sociology program, together with my staff. Later on, the institute was extended to encompass three chairs of sociology and three chairs of political science. In Düsseldorf, I focused my research substantially on social theory and comparative historical sociology. First of all, the reconstruction and advancement of Talcott Parsons’ action and systems theory gained in significance. In the 1950s and 1960s, Parsons held a prominent position in American sociology. By the end of the 1960s, his dominance was, however, terminated by the emergence of a wider plurality of sociological theories. In contrast, interest in Parsons grew strongly in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Talcott Parsons’ work formed an integral part of the wide-ranging debate between Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann in German sociology. I met Talcott Parsons personally at a Max Weber conference in Switzerland (Gottlieben on Lake Constance) in September 1977, an encounter that resulted in an exchange of letters. On May 9, 1979, Parsons was bound to come to Düsseldorf to present a lecture following the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of his doctoral exam at Heidelberg University. Unfortunately, he passed away unexpectedly two days before that event in Munich as the result of a heart attack. I received various requests for an assessment of his work in the wake of this sad event. Therefore, I wrote a two-part essay on the reconstruction of his work for Soziale Welt (Münch 1979, 1980a), and an essay about Talcott Parsons and Max Weber for Zeitschrift für Soziologie (Münch 1980b). In doing so, I grounded my assessment on Kant’s critical philosophy as a new tool of interpretation and attributed a central position to the concept of interpenetration of ideas and interests. The essays appeared in 1979 and 1980. The two-part essay on reconstruction was also published by the

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American Journal of Sociology in 1981 and 1982 (Münch 1981, 1982b). Both essays triggered extensive reactions in the United States and in other countries. A Spanish translation appeared in Revista Internacional de Sociología (Münch 1982c) in 1982. Following these publications, a whole series of invitations took me to lectures, visiting lectureships, and conferences in the United States, Mexico, Holland, France, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia. In the years that followed, the interpretation of Parsons’ work, as explained in the essays on reconstruction, was frequently taken up in publications and then advanced further. It aimed at renewing and continuing action and systems theory. In the monograph Theorie des Handelns: Zur Rekonstruktion der Beiträge von Talcott Parsons, Emile Durkheim und Max Weber (Theory of Action: Towards a Reconstruction of the Contributions by Parsons, Durkheim, and Weber), which appeared in 1982, I further pursued this program and extended it by including the sociological thoughts of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (Münch 1982d). An English translation appeared in two monographs (Münch 1987, 1988). Later, I tried to extend Parsons’ theory program by incorporating elements from a diverse set of other theories so as to arrive at a more comprehensive social theory. The step towards this end was a network of a variety of theoretical approaches. This work finally lead to the publication of Sociological Theory, a work in three volumes published in the United States in 1994, the result of the recurrent work on my lectures on sociological theory. From 2002 to 2004, a revised and extended German version of this work was published (Münch 2002–2004). The Third Passion: Comparative Historical Sociology Simultaneously with my work on the renewal of Parsons’ theory program, I have been increasingly engaged in the comparative historical sociology of the development of modern institutions and modern culture. This endeavor resulted in the publication of a book on Soziologie der Politik (Political Sociology) in 1982 (Münch 1982a); the monograph Die Struktur der Moderne (The Structure of Modernity) in 1984 (Münch 1984/1992); and Die Kultur der Moderne (The Culture of Modernity) in two volumes in 1986 (Münch 1986/1993a). These studies attempt to understand and explain the development of modern institutions and modern culture in an historical and comparative perspective. Special attention is focused on the U.K., the U.S.A., France, and Germany. These studies met with public response far beyond the boundaries of sociology, as indicated by numerous reviews in large daily newspapers and on the radio as well as by invitations to lectures. More recent publications have built on the results of these writings taking them as the starting point for further research. Several invitations from the University of California in Los Angeles to serve as a visiting professor helped advance the theory program in an exchange with Jeffrey Alexander. Also, a regular exchange of ideas with Edward Tiryakian, Donald Levine, and Jonathan Turner proved to be very important. At the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association I presented a variety of papers representing work in progress. Discussions at the

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Inter-University-Center in Dubrovnik (former Yugoslavia) were especially exciting. Being a board member—and having temporarily been chairman—of the theory section of the German Society for Sociology, I took part in the organization of four German-American conferences and a European Conference on advancements in social theory between 1977 and 1989 alongside the annual national meetings. All of these conferences generated widely recognized joint publications: The Micro-Macro Link (Alexander et al. 1987); Social Structure and Culture (Haferkamp 1989); Social Change and Modernity (Haferkamp and Smelser 1992); and Theory of Culture (Münch and Smelser 1992). At the beginning of the 1990s, I turned my interest mainly to the transformation of European societies in the process of European integration and globalization. Here, too, the focus is on a comparison between the European core societies of the U.K., France, and Germany and the United States. The theme has proved to be an increasing challenge for sociology’s interpretational and explanatory power. In this context, questions of social integration under the terms of pluralized forms of life, increasing heterogeneity and multiculturalism in the wake of migration as well as the globalization of markets and communication networks have assumed major significance. I have covered several aspects of these questions in my books Dialektik der Kommunikationsgesellschaft (The Dialectics of the Communicative Society) (1991); Dynamik der Kommunikationsgesellschaft (The Dynamics of the Communicative Society) (1995); Das Projekt Europa (Project Europe) (1993b). At the same time, I focused comparative cultural research on a specific subject, namely the political regulation of societally produced environmental risks. A first draft can be found in the models described in Risikopolitik (Risk Politics) (1996). This research program was consolidated further by a comparative study, financed by the German Research Society (DFG) from 1994 to 1997, of regulation cultures in the U.K., France, Germany, and the U.S.A. in the clean air sector between 1970 and 1996. The results are featured in a publication that appeared both in German and in English, namely Regulative Demokratie (Regulatory Democracy) (Münch and Lahusen 2000) and Democracy at Work (Münch et al. 2001). Furthermore, this project generated two award-winning doctoral dissertations and one award-winning second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) (Stark 1998; Jauß 1999; Lahusen 2003). Documents were interpreted, printed media were analyzed, and forty interviews with actors in the regulation process were carried out in the countries under scrutiny. We studied how the regulation cultures differ in the structure of the actors’ networks, the procedural rules of regulation, the world-views and rationality constructions of the professions involved (engineers, natural scientists, medical experts, legal experts, social scientists, economists), as well as the inherent legitimation ideas of political philosophy. We also looked at the resulting consequences for the ability to ensure innovation, integration, problem solutions, and the legitimation of decisions. The specific tensions were highlighted, which are imposed on the integrative strength of procedural rules, the experts’ ability to solve problems and the legitimation by basic values and ideas by the trend to greater heterogeneity and plurality of actors’ networks. There is a pressure of adopting elements of the American regulation culture which, however, first of all creates substantial tensions, conflicts and misjudgments and also points out the negative sides of the American model: politics being an endless

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struggle for even the smallest advantages in all stages and on all levels. A further project financed by the DFG from 1997 to 1999 examined this problem considering interest representation in the E.U.’s political process as an example (Lahusen and Jauß 1999). At the end of the 1990s, I started to basically revise and re-write the comparative study on the genesis and differentiation of the culture of modernity from 1986 for an English publication. One result of this work appeared under the title The Ethics of Modernity (Münch 2001a). It covers an intercultural and intracultural comparison of the ethical foundations of modern society, from the beginnings in ancient Judaism until the current state of globalization. My particular view is that this is not a process of release and differentiation of functional systems from their religious-ethical embrace, but rather an ongoing process of ethical transformation, where the contrast between the ethics of brotherhood within the boundaries of one’s in-group and unbrotherliness with regard to the out-group is transformed into a commitment to fairness and formal legality both within and beyond one’s group. The latter is structured in equal terms both to the inside (own group, nation) and the outside (foreigners). The globalization process is a new level of this permanent ethical transformation of modernity. This leads us to a central question of globalization, which is the theme of my current research: How is social integration possible in open spaces? Based on a cultural comparison once again, I am studying the transformation of national welfare states. In this context, the updating of the classics, above all Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel, has acquired great significance. An updated interpretation of the classics yields interesting analyses and explanations of changes in culture and society that go hand in hand with the globalization process. Sociology is taking a highly topical and exciting turn here. This fact is not least of all underlined by the great interest encountered by my book Globale Dynamik, lokale Lebenswelten (Global Dynamics, Local Lifeworlds), published in 1998, which received reviews in DIE ZEIT, FAZ, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and several broadcasting stations, amongst others. The books Offene Räume: Soziale Integration diesseits und jenseits des Nationalstaats (Open Spaces: Social Integration Within and Beyond the Nation State) (Münch 2001c) and Nation and Citizenship in the Global Age (Münch 2001b) have built on these studies. Challenges for Further Research The world is currently undergoing a fundamental change similar to that in the nineteenth century, when modern industrial and class society replaced traditional agricultural and estate society. Its development was directly linked to the emergence of the modern nation state, which has advanced to the democratic welfare state committed to the rule of law. Within this arrangement, modern capitalism underwent that sort of “taming”, which has made it the source of broadly shared affluence. In Karl Polanyi’s terms (1957), the disembedding of the economy from its traditional and corporate bonds was followed by its re-embedding in the newly formed weave of institutions of the modern welfare state. Sociology in the epoch of its classical

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foundation has explained the various features of this development in the pioneering works from Marx to Weber, Durkheim and Simmel and has pointed out their meaning. Marx’s (1867/1962) analysis of capitalism’s development dynamics, Durkheim’s (1964) study on the division of labor, Simmel’s (1900/1992) philosophy of money, and Weber’s (1920/1972) comparative-cultural studies on the formation of modern capitalism have set standards and have marked our understanding of the epochal change they observed in a lasting manner. The envisioned research program should overcome the schism existing between the research traditions established by Max Weber (1922/1973) and Emile Durkheim (1982). Methodological individualism (social action) and a focus on culture, on the one hand, and methodological collectivism (social fact) and a functional and institutionalistic focus, on the other hand, should be considered approaches that do not exclude each other, but rather complement one another. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984a, 1984b, 1989) theory of social practice (habitus, capital, field) unites both these research traditions in a procreative way. This research program needs to be continued. Max Weber (1968) himself emphasized with a glance to Marx that the cultural side of his study on the link between the ethics of ascetic Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism has to be complemented with a materialistic side. This side has to be taken into account by the integration of economic-functionalistic approaches: functionalism, neo-functionalism and neo-functionalistic institutionalism with an emphasis on the spill-over effects of market dynamics on the political, legal, and cultural dimensions of change (Haas 1958; Rosamond 2000). Emile Durkheim (1982) unmistakably pointed out that any functionalistic argument has to be complemented with an historic-genetic causal explanation, where the action of actors in historical situations will necessarily come into play; this approach turns our attention to struggles aiming at the legitimation of institutions and institutional change in a more or less power-dominated discursive field against the backdrop of an historically evolved culture. This perspective can be found in Bourdieu’s praxeological approach that is incorporated in the research program. The focus of this program should be the theory-based, interdisciplinary, and empirically grounded understanding and explanation of the transformation of social integration and symbolic order coming about with the emergence of a multilevel society superimposing itself on the segmentarily differentiated system of nation states. In this context, qualitative methods of documentary analysis—legal texts, legislation, programmatic texts from parties and associations, analyses and comments from experts and intellectuals—have to be combined with quantitative analyses—OECD, World Bank, Eurostat, Federal Statistics Office. The program should investigate three levels of the emerging multilevel society, each of them in interaction with the two other levels: 1. First, the change of the welfare state can be studied with a focus on the comparison between Germany, Sweden, and the U.S.A. representing the types of conservative, social-democratic and liberal welfare states (EspingAndersen 1990). The investigation can be carried out in three parts, each one taking account the interdependence of the national with the European and global division of labor and its political and legal embedding and discursive

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legitimation through generally shared ideas of justice: a. institutional change as functional adjustment to the internationalized division of labor (quantitative analysis); b. institutional change as path-dependent institutional restructuring (qualitative documentary analysis); c. institutional change as discursive construction of justice (discourse analysis). 2. Second, the emergence of a European society from the segmentarily differentiated system of nation states can be examined on the basis of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and on the basis of national intellectual discourses on the order of the European society in a comparison between France, the U.K., and Germany: a. the development of the European division of labor in the single European market as a foundation of the emergence of European solidarity transcending national borders (in part quantitative); b. the construction of a European legal order and society in the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (qualitative documentary analysis); c. the symbolic construction of the order of a European society in the French, British, and German intellectual discourse (discourse analysis). 3. Third, the development of the international, increasingly global labor division, which detaches itself from the intergovernmental conflict settlement by nation states, can be seen as the driving force behind the change of solidarity and the emergence of a world trade order superimposing itself on the segmentarily differentiated system of nation states and establishing the core of the emerging world society: a. the effects of international labor division on developing, newly industrialized, and transformation countries (GNP, poverty, public spending and income inequality within and between countries) (functional adjustment, quantitative analysis); b. the institutional and cultural shaping of world market integration through varieties of capitalism (patrimonial capitalism, conqueror capitalism, tribal capitalism, post-socialist capitalism) with regard to GNP, poverty, public spending, and income inequality (institutionalistic quantitative analyses and qualitative case study); c. the institutional marking of world trade by WTO, World Bank, IMF, the legal construction of the world trade order, and the intellectual construction of global justice (discourse analysis). The social sciences are characterized by an almost complete separation of mainly three internally closed paradigmatic and methodological approaches to the subject matter: the rational choice perspective and quantitative approach in econometrics and quantitative empirical social research; institutionalism and qualitative documentary analysis in political science and law; and discourse theory and discourse analysis (Habermas 1981 vs. Foucault 1972) in interpretative sociology. It should be a goal of further research to overcome this paradigmatic and methodological schism in the social sciences. The interdisciplinary approach must be complemented by the

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inter-paradigmatic and multi-methodological program in order to revitalize Max Weber’s (1922/1973) program of an interpretative and explanatory sociology on today’s level of paradigmatic and methodological development. The integration of functionalism, institutionalism, and social constructivism within one frame of reference with three interdependent parts can serve this goal (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Rosamond 2000; Mayntz 2002). The transformation from the segmentarily differentiated system of nation states to the global multilevel society should be studied as resulting from the functional adjustment to changed structural conditions (open spaces), from institutional inertia and path-dependency, and from symbolic legitimation in an increasingly Europeanized and globalized discursive field. The structure of the discursive field varies between complete power-domination and an ideal speech situation. This means that in the perspective of real-world sociological analysis, the legitimation of institutions is determined by the distribution of power in the discursive field and by constraints of justification. Consequently, Foucault’s and Habermas’ concepts of discourse have to be regarded as complementary and not as contradictory approaches. In the perspective of real-world sociological analysis, meaning is produced in a power-dominated discursive field (Foucault 1972), but cannot be manipulated at will, and even less so in an open field (Habermas 1981). It is precisely at this point that we may take up Bourdieu’s praxeological field theory. The transformation of institutions proceeds in the tension field of two intersecting axes with two poles each. The first axis runs between the poles of functional adjustment to changed structural conditions and path dependency of development in view of the inertia of institutions. The second axis marks the legitimation of institutions in the discursive field between the poles of total power-domination and the ideal speech situation (Figure 6.1). Investigating any one of the three levels of change (welfare state, European society, global division of labor), its interdependence with the other two levels has always to be borne in mind. On the national level, it is the transformation of the state, which is in the foreground; on the European level, the development of law as the ordering core of European society is given priority; and on the global level, labor division as the economic foundation of the world trading order is in the centre of interest. The welfare state’s institutional change has to be studied in the interdependence with its economically determined functional adjustment and its discursively marked symbolic legitimation. The legal construction of European society has to be investigated in the interdependence with the economically determined European division of labor and the discursively formed symbolic legitimation of the European legal order. The development of the economically driven global labor division has to be examined in its interdependence with its legal embedding in the world trading order and the discursive construction of a generally shared understanding of global justice. The study of the economically determined labor division requires a reference to its institutional (political and legal) embedding and its discursive legitimation. The institutional (political and legal) formation of labor division demands a reference to economic determinants and discursive legitimation. The discursive construction of justice needs a reference to the conditions of the economic division of labor and the institutional embedding of this process.

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Inertia vs. adjustment ←⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→ of institutions

adjustment ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→ ⎯⎯⎯⎯→ institutions

Total power domination

Pressure of adjustment through the change of structural prerequisites

Legitimation of institutions ←⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→ in the discursive field

Ideal speech situation

Path dependency of development

Figure 6.1 Two Axes of Institutional Transformation The outlined research program should prove that hermeneutic paradigms and methods provide an important contribution to understanding fundamental societal transformations and, moreover, that they can be linked with positivistic paradigms and methodological approaches in a mutually fertilizing way. If we wish to continue Max Weber’s program of an interpretative and explanatory sociology that is put to the test in terms of its adequacy of meaning and causal adequacy on today’s level of disciplinary development, today’s current methods of understanding meaning and of causal explanation have to be combined. Major contributions to this program setting standards for future research have been made in contemporary sociology by Pierre Bourdieu (1984a, 1984b, 1989). The embedding of quantitative methods in an interpretative approach focused on the construction of meaning should help overcome the instrumentalistic limitation of these methods and allow for a deeper interpretation of the results yielded by their application in a wider context of meaning. Research can only assume cultural significance, when it succeeds in making the examined processes understandable in a culture’s wider context of meaning and transformation. Vice versa, an approach focused on the interpretation of meaning can prove particular methodological relevance, when it succeeds in incorporating the results of quantitative research. In this way, it can be shown that an hermeneutic approach aiming at the understanding of meaning is not only dedicated to conceptual

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efforts, but makes an indispensable contribution to explaining real historical processes that cannot be provided by purely quantitative research. Sociology as a science investigating historical reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft) not only works with data that have to be explained by abstract models, but with historical processes that have to be explained in their concrete societal context by way of understanding their meaning. To preserve sociology as a science of historical reality sticking to its roots in hermeneutics is of fundamental significance. This anchoring in hermeneutics will be maintained even more, the better it is proved that research that helps to understand structures of meaning is essential for explaining historical reality. In a scientific world dominated by quantitative procedures, the strategy of linking quantitative methods with hermeneutic methods is of first-rate significance for sociology. In this way, we can overcome the blind alley of instrumental reason (halbierte Vernunft) pertaining to purely quantitative research (Habermas 1964). In the struggle for societal relevance and recognition of sociology such a research program is of greatest importance. This is what will keep me busy and committed to sociology as a passion and profession for years to come. In a way, a program along the lines of a Weberian comparative historical sociology cannot deny its roots in the tradition of German idealism in the broadest sense. Certainly, there is no longer a place for a Hegelian philosophy of history in contemporary sociology. However, in as much as such claims have disappeared in sociology, asking for the significance of contemporary social change in modern culture in Weber’s sense still goes beyond purely technical questions of sociological explanation, and also beyond historical story-telling for itself. Asking this Weberian question preserves at least a minimum of Hegelianism. We cannot completely escape from our intellectual roots. References and Selected Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1987. The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984a. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (first French ed. 1979). ———. 1984b. Homo academicus. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ———. 1989. La Noblesse d’Etat. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Durkheim, Emile. 1964. The Division of Labour in Society. Translated by G. Simpson. New York: Free Press (first French ed. 1893). ———. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. Ed. S. Lukes. Translated by W.D. Halls. London: Macmillan (first French ed. 1895). Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Order of Discourse: The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon (first French ed. 1971). Haas, E.B. 1958. The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces, 1950–1957. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Habermas Jürgen. 1964. “Gegen einen positivistisch halbierten Rationalismus.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 16: 636–659. ———. 1981. Theorie des kommunikativen Handels. 2 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Haferkamp, Hans, ed. 1989. Social Structure and Culture. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Haferkamp, Hans and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1992. Social Change and Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jauß, Claudia. 1999. Politik als Verhandlungsmarathon. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Lahusen, Christian. 2003. Kontraktuelle Politik. Weilerswist: Verlag Velbrück Wissenschaft. Lahusen, Christian and Claudia Jauß. 1999. Lobbying in der EU. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Marx Karl. 1867/1962. Das Kapital. Vol. 1. Berlin: Dietz. Mayntz, Renate, ed. 2002. Akteure, Mechanismen und Modelle. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Münch, Richard. 1972. Mentales System und Verhalten. Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Verhaltenstheorie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ———. 1973. Gesellschaftstheorie und Ideologiekritik. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. ———. 1976a. Legitimität und politische Macht. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1976b. Theorie sozialer Systeme. Eine Einführung in Grundbegriffe, Grundannahmen und logische Struktur. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1979. “Talcott Parsons und die Theorie des Handelns I: Die Konstitution des Kantianischen Kerns.” Soziale Welt 30: 385–409. ———. 1980a. “Talcott Parsons und die Theorie des Handelns II: Die Kontinuität der Entwicklung.” Soziale Welt 3l: 3–47. ———. 1980b. “Über Parsons zu Weber: Von der Theorie der Rationalisierung zur Theorie der Interpenetration.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 9: 18–53. ———. 1981. “Talcott Parsons and the Theory of Action I: The Structure of the Kantian Core.” American Journal of Sociology 86: 709–739. ———. 1982a. Basale Soziologie: Soziologie der Politik. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1982b. “Talcott Parsons and the Theory of Action II: The Continuity of the Development.” American Journal of Sociology 87: 771–826. ———. 1982c. “Talcott Parsons y la teoría de la acción (I). La constitución del núcleo kantiano.” Revista Internacional de Sociología—Segunda epoca, Eneromarzo, Nr. 41: 51–85. ———. 1982d. Theorie des Handelns. Zur Rekonstruktion der Beiträge von Talcott Parsons, Emile Durkheim und Max Weber. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1987. Theory of Action. Towards a New Synthesis Going Beyond Parsons, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1988. Understanding Modernity. Towards a New Perspective Going Beyond Durkheim and Weber. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1991. Dialektik der Kommunikationsgesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

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———. [1984] 1992. Die Struktur der Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. [1986] 1993a. Die Kultur der Moderne. 2 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1993b. Das Projekt Europa. Zwischen Nationalstaat, regionaler Autonomie und Weltgesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1994. Sociological Theory. 3 vols. Chicago: Nelson Hall. ———. 1995. Dynamik der Kommunikationsgesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1996. Risikopolitik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1998. Globale Dynamik, lokale Lebenswelten. Der schwierige Weg in die Weltgesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 2001a. The Ethics of Modernity. Formation and Transformation in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2001b. Nation and Citizenship in the Global Age. From National to Transnational Civil Ties. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave. ———. 2001c. Offene Räume. Soziale Integration diesseits und jenseits des Nationalstaats. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 2002–2004. Soziologische Theorie. 3 vols. Frankfurt; New York: Campus. Münch, Richard and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1992. Theory of Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Münch, Richard and Christian Lahusen, eds. 2001. Regulative Demokratie. Politik der Luftreinhaltung in Großbritannien, Frankreich, Deutschland und den USA. Frankfurt; New York: Campus. Münch, Richard, Christian Lahusen, Markus Kurth, Cornelia Borgards, Carsten Stark, and Claudia Jauß. 2001. Democracy at Work. A Comparative Sociology of Environmental Regulation in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers (Greenwood Press). Polanyi, Karl. 1957. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Powell, Walter W. and Paul J. DiMaggio. 1991. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosamond, Ben. 2000. Theories of European Integration. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Simmel, Georg. [1900] 1992. Philosophie des Geldes. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Stark, Carsten. 1998. Die blockierte Demokratie. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Weber, Max. 1968. Die protestantische Ethik II. Kritiken und Antikritiken. Munich and Hamburg: Siebenstern Taschenbuch. ———. [1920] 1972. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. 3 vols. Tübingen: Mohr. ———. [1922] 1973. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: Mohr.

Chapter 7

The Making and Remaking of a Sociologist Ewa Morawska

I was born in communist Poland five years after the end of World War II. My mother was an ecumenical Catholic publicist and my Jewish father was a philosopher, a Stalinist turned revisionist Marxist opting for “socialism with the human face” who, together with intellectuals such as Leszek Kolakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, Bronislaw Baczko, and Maria Hirszowicz, was expelled from the University of Warsaw for “Zionism” during the anti-Semitic witch-hunt organized by the Communist Party in 1968. I grew up in a home with an open-to-the-world, cosmopolitan orientation, untypical of the inward, ethno-particularistic nationalism prevalent in Poland. History has fascinated me since early high school years; we had an excellent “oldtime” (in common parlance meaning not communist) teacher who taught us to put events in their longer dure and broader contexts, to appreciate the impact of ideas on social life, and to “think complex” even if it precluded clear-cut judgments. An interest in sociology emerged in my senior year, under the influence of the

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writings of a renowned Polish social historian Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937)1 and contemporary Warsaw historical sociologists, my future university teachers, Jerzy Szacki and Jerzy Jedlicki. In 1967 I began parallel M.A.–degree studies in sociology and history at the University of Warsaw. (The B.A. degree does not exist in the Polish academic system. Instead, students enroll directly in a five-year Masters’ program.) My historical studies—I specialized in seventeenth-century Polish (political orientations of the gentry) and late nineteenth–early nineteenth century East European (mass international migrations) history—equipped me with a thorough knowledge of the region’s history and good skills in historical methods of data collection and analysis. It complemented well the solid training in badania terenowe (local community research) I received in the sociology department. My history teachers who collaborated with the French Annales school taught me to view historical investigation as a problem-oriented analysis rather than a factual narrative, and to appreciate, underlying this approach, the premise of the Zusammenhang or the interlocking nature of historical processes. Among the Annales school’s diverse pursuits, I was particularly interested in the history of mentalities or, more broadly, history of popular culture set in immediate and more remote socioeconomic contexts, and in the “possibilism” (Febvre, de la Blanche) of the analytic approach that attractively contrasted with the determinism of the official Marxist doctrine. (For good critical assessments of the Annales school, see Clark 1999; Burke 1990.) In the sociology department, where I specialized in the history of social ideas and in the methodology (not methods) of the social sciences, the earliest influences on my intellectual development, gathered from informal seminars in our professors’ homes rather than from university classrooms where the Marxist doctrine reigned supreme, included Florian Znaniecki’s philosophy and social theory of culture (the latter akin to that of American symbolic interactionism).2 I was particularly drawn to his view of the social world as “permeated with culture” and always “pulsating with change”, and of social actors as inherently creative, reproducing but also 1 Stefan Czarnowski’s collected works are published in the five-volume Dziela (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnicwto Naukowe, 1956). Between 1902 and 1912 Czarnowski lived in Paris, where he attended Durkheim’s lectures and was a member of the intellectual circle of his disciples. Durkheim’s social theory was a lasting influence on Czarnowski’s thinking, but in his own work he used a more dynamic approach, and strongly stressed the inherent historicity of the sociocultural world. His most renowned historical sociological studies concerned various aspects of collective consciousness (in particular, national, ethnic, and religious) and the social contexts of their persistence and transformation. A critical evaluation of Czarnowski’s theoretical position and research can be found in Piotr Sztompka, ed., Masters of Polish Sociology (Cracow: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1984). 2 Znaniecki’s theory of culture remains largely unfamiliar to American sociologists, although it was much more central in his scholarly work over a lifetime than his collaboration with W.I. Thomas on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Boston: Beacon, 1918– 1920). For Znaniecki’s major studies available in English, see Cultural Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1919); The Method of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); On Humanistic Sociology. Ed. Robert Bierstedt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

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originating social situations; and Znaniecki’s insistence that the fundamental task of a sociologist is to grasp and explain these processes, but to do it with the famous “humanistic coefficient”, that is, by reconstructing chains of actions-meanings as they are understood and represented by their carriers, that is, by concrete social actors. The influence of Stefan Czarnowski’s social history, Durkheimian in spirit, had endured, particularly his careful attention to the mezzo-to-micro-social embeddedness of cultural phenomena; a profound sense, exquisitely applied in research, of the temporal dimension of the social world and, as importantly, his appreciation of the inseparability of historical research and theoretical reflection, and a consistent practice thereof. Both Znaniecki and Czarnowski combined ontological humanism, i.e., a belief that the human world as predicated on symbolic communication constitutes a reality sui generis, distinct from natural phenomena, with a qualified methodological positivism, i.e., a conviction that distinct as it is, social life can and should be studied by rigorous scientific methods and explained by empirically testable theories. A similar general orientation (with humanism of the Durkheimian variety) has been represented by the third scholar whose work was significant in my intellectual development at that time, Robert Merton. My classmates and I first became acquainted, and impressed, with Merton’s work through the readings (circulated on thin mimeographed sheets) assigned by the late Stefan Nowak in his seminar on methodology of the social sciences. Merton’s elegantly argued advocacy of disciplined, value-free research, continuous dialogue between theory and data, and empirically grounded middlerange sociological theories, particularly appealed to us as an alternative to the universalist and manifestly ideologized Marxist model. A few years later, still in Warsaw, I translated into Polish Merton’s magnum opus, Social Theory and Social Structure (1968). This exercise left me thoroughly exhausted and not entirely certain that I was able to convey accurately to Polish readers the meanings of unfamiliar Americana used by the author as the empirical material for theory-building. I was nevertheless enormously impressed by Merton’s uncanny craftsmanship at cutting amorphous social phenomena into sociological diamonds by means of a rigorously applied scientific procedure. In 1973 I came to Boston University where I applied for and received a doctoral fellowship in sociology. (Individual initiatives of this kind were prohibited by Polish Communist authorities so I officially requested an exit permit to “visit my father’s friends”.) I specialized in immigration and ethnic studies and in urban sociology. I was then in love with a man in Poland—the completely wrong man as it turned out—so I returned to Warsaw immediately after obtaining the diploma. I found employment at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Historical Institute in the North American Research Center. I did not stay long, however. In 1979 I went to the United States again, this time on an officially sanctioned American Council of Learned Societies postdoctoral fellowship to conduct a comparative-historical investigation of the adaptation patterns of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Polish and Jewish immigrants in small American towns. This choice of research topic reflected both my double identity, Polish–Jewish, and my professional interests: most historical studies of these groups focused on large cities and I was curious to know whether a smalltown location made a difference (as it turned out, it very much did—see Morawska

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1985, 1996). In the following year I asked for and received political asylum. It was a difficult decision and a difficult time for me: nobody knew that the Soviet monster was going to collapse by the end of the decade, so my demarche seemed to be the final break with my family and friends in Poland. Over time, I have become more and more convinced that my emigration was probably the wisest decision I have taken in my life, reconfirmed each time I visit my now-free homeland. If asked why I feel this way, I guess I would answer that had I stayed in Poland there would be so many thoughts and ideas that would have never occurred to me and so many things I would have never written. I still have a sense of an intellectual ceiling rising over my head, which, solely because of the surrounding circumstances, would have hung much lower had I not moved. When I settled in the United States for good, with the exception of immigration and ethnic studies and urban sociology I learned during my doctoral studies in Boston, I was essentially unfamiliar with current American sociology and historiography. For months on end I intensely read in several disciplines at once: sociology, historical sociology, cultural anthropology, and American social history, learning both contents and conventions of American scholarly research. Besides the cultural anthropology of (middle phase) Clifford Geertz that easily blended with my then essentially normative conception of society, of greatest consequence for my developing theoretical orientation and research have been the cultural Marxism of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, and the sociological writings of early Anthony Giddens. Somewhat ironically considering where I came from (but how we hated official Marxism!), the works of Williams, Thompson, and other neo- and reconstructed western Marxists, have turned me, a committed culturalist with an idealist bent upon arrival, into a resolute structuralist-culturalist, with a keen eye on social structures. My American colleagues in social history and historical sociology have made a journey in the opposite direction: from (social-) structuralism to culture. So we are meeting halfway. My professional career sensu stricto, that is, my employment trajectory, since I became an immigrant in America, had been, I am very aware as I compare it with those of my émigré colleagues, certainly not less talented than myself, blessedly smooth. During the first five years of my permanent residence in the United States I was supported by a sequence of postdoctoral fellowships. My first application for a university position in 1984 brought an offer of an assistant professorship in the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania. After I accepted this job, a senior colleague congratulated me after a welcome lunch: “It is fantastic, considering that you came from nowhere ...” He was surprised when I laughed, obviously unaware that the taken-for-granted premise of his comment—indeed, I did not come from Harvard, Princeton, or another Ivy League school—could not be universally shared. I have since often wondered how it happened that I found a position in a prestigious university so easily. Of course, my hard work and determination to succeed (I joined professional associations, participated in conferences, published as much as I could) certainly mattered. But they were the necessary but insufficient conditions for success. As I reflected on the beginnings of my professional career in America and compared it with those of many other émigré academics from my part of the world, early on I abandoned—well, modified—a widespread myth around the

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world, including my home country, about “America as a (perfect) meritocracy”. In my case, these additional circumstances included a strong support from two gurus of American sociology—Robert Merton and Charles Tilly—and, as I later learned, internal departmental politics at the University of Pennsylvania: the sociology department had then a long-since-gone powerful group of old-guard humanists, including Renee Fox, Willy Decraemer, Philip Rieff, and Samuel Klausner, who apparently found my atypical intellectual pedigree attractive. The “domestication” of historical sociology (Calhoun 1996) in the mainstream of the discipline in the 1980s through the widely acclaimed works of scholars such as Charles Tilly, Arthur Stinchcombe, Theda Skocpol, Andrew Abbott, and, in his own genre, Robert Wuthnow helped my early professional career along after I became a member of the Pennsylvania sociology department (see Skocpol 1984; Calhoun 1996; Adams, Clemens and Orloff 2005 on different “waves” of historical sociology in the United States). It was, I believe, the by-then recognizable label of “historical sociologist” that facilitated my career, although the main concern of the leading representatives of this orientation were macro-level structural analyses, while my research focused on micro-level processes set in the macro-contexts. I came to the United States as a committed and well trained historical sociologist, but I learned quite a lot from my American colleagues, especially about the critical selection and systematic pursuit of the explanatory strategies in the interpretation of data (Skocpol 1984; Ragin 1987; Tilly 1984), and about the how-to of time-sensitive analysis (Abbott 1983, 1988; Aminzade 1992). I have retained my focus on the comparative-historical sociological study of immigration and ethnicity in part because of the enduring interest in the functioning “on the ground” of American multiculturalism, in part, I guess, because of my self-interest in this topic as an immigrant, and in part because over time I have established a professional name in this field of research, somewhat separately— reflecting the division between these two disciplines—in sociology and in history. My intense, multidisciplinary learning of America, facts and interpretations, and my own research of it, brought about during the first decade of my stay in that country two important changes in my thinking. The first was a gradual incorporation of the concept of gender into my personal and scholarly interpretations of the world. Having come from a society in which gender relations and gender inequality were either not acknowledged as significant issues or, if they were recognized, were seen as private and not public problems, upon my arrival in America I was not, incredible as it now appears to me, aware of either. Although, copying existing studies, I quickly learned to “include gender” in my research—I then understood it to mean collecting data and examining women’s work experience in and outside of the home and their communal activities—it took a number of years of self-education, supported by sharp critical comments on my writings by Barbara Laslett, before I internalized for good the treatment of gender, conceived of as the relationship rather than as the “women’s problem”, as a fundamental category of historical-sociological analysis. The other change, derived from both scholarly, historical, and contemporary readings and from my observations and talks with colleagues and students, was the realization of the enduring racism of American society. My dissident environment in Poland idolized American liberal democracy and took its founding values for

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everyday reality for everybody—a perfect antidote to the Soviet communism that sustained the oppositional spirit of my friends and myself alike. My transplantation to America, and especially the encounter with embedded structural inequalities entangled with the enduring cultural racism, have cured me of this idealization and built the awareness of deep class-race dividers into my scholarly thinking. Interestingly, though, my becoming a racially conscious American did not prevent one aspect of my Americanization I am not proud of, that is, my imperceptibly learning racial (skin color) distinctions. When I came to the United States, I perceived lighter-color African Americans to be of the Mediterranean origin—the only familiar cultural category I could associate their appearance with. Over time, and I never noticed when it happened, I stopped making these “mistakes”. Quite a humbling experience, this, for a sociologist and an ethnographer at that … I should note here yet another development of the 1980s. It concerned my personal life, but because it was triggered by my scholarly research and, in turn, affected my intellectual orientation, I decided to include it in this autobiographical narrative. Important personal friendships that ensued from my historical ethnographic investigation of the lifeworlds of small-town Jews in Western Pennsylvania and, in particular, the spiritual wisdom of the old people I talked with during this project and their ability to translate it into their everyday lives, made me, a resolute agnostic upon arrival in America, increasingly interested in Judaism as a religious philosophy and an ethical code. I had pursued this interest in the Talmudic study group under the guidance of the late Rabi Samuel Lachs at the Beth Hillel Temple in Philadelphia. Expounded by my phenomenally erudite teacher, the hermeneutics of the Talmudic study that opened the analysis with one question, multiplied it into several, and concluded with a multitude of answers, fascinated me. (I eventually formally converted to Judaism.) The counterpoint of my intellectual attraction to this analytic approach was the reservation I felt toward what Donald Levine called The Flight from Ambiguity (1985) or a gradual shift of Western philosophical orientation from polyvalent to zero-sum epistemological strategies. The 1990s marked the descent of postmodernism on the social and historical sciences and, with it, the conflation of the traditionally distinct notions of doxa and episteme. The resulting recognition of the “craftedness” of scholarly knowledge or its constructed nature led to the acknowledgement that there is no perfectly selfsame or transparent way to represent the (natural and social) world and that our knowledge thereof is inevitably implicated in the linguistic conventions and intellectual schematas characteristic of the multiple sociocultural words we inhabit. Although I have remained solidly within the humanistic tradition of sociology I learned in Warsaw, rethought and modified as time went by, I had by then abandoned my youthful faith in value-free sociology inspired by my early mentors. As my historical ethnographic projects (and my Judaic studies) increasingly revealed the structure of the world as murky, multilayered mother-of-pearl rather than clear-cut diamond, my commitment to the kind of scientific study of the social world my early teachers professed has largely waned as well, replaced by an option for more “plastic”, but still theoretically informed, disciplined interpretation-cum-analysis. My attraction to a view of the world as inherently plural, contradictory, and polyvalent— often cacophonous, actually—has been, I believe, additionally influenced by my

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collective and personal biography, in which in-betweenness and marginality have been consistent elements. I am an offspring of a mixed marriage, half Jew raised in a predominantly Catholic country, and in a home with a cosmopolitan rather than the prevailing nationalistic orientation; I have a double professional identity which, although recognized by my colleagues in both departments I had been affiliated with at the University of Pennsylvania for twenty years (1984–2004), nevertheless made me an “other” in each of these places; and I have a confused (though not painfully) Polish Jewish, American, and European identity. I was, therefore, naturally drawn to postmodernist interpretations, but not in their radical rendition. Not only because I had by then come to identify with the ancient insight that any judgment pushed to the extreme becomes foolishness, but also because, as a sociologist confronted with hunger, disease, and the misery of a large proportion of human society, I could not accept the Derridian “there is nothing but text” proposition. This is how I have resolved my encounter with postmodernism in the approach that still informs my position today. My fundamental, or metatheoretical, beliefs about the nature of the social world and human cognition thereof can be summarized in two ontological and one epistemological proposition. The first assumes the social world and human experience in it to really exist both within and outside of our minds and bodies (differently put, text, or representations of this social world, are the inherent aspect of human experience, but not exhaustive of it). The second views the sociocultural world and human action, joined in mutual reconstitution, as forming certain historical, i.e., time- and place-specific, patterns or regularities—ambiguous and flexible, but nevertheless discernible, at least fragmentarily. And the third assumes the ways of functioning of these “outside” and “inside” historical worlds, and their interrelations, to be knowable to human mind, although our knowledge of them is inherently incomplete and provisional, never fully reliable, and always invested with perceptions peculiar to our social situations and cultural outlooks, likewise historically contingent. John and Jean Comaroffs (1992) described their own position, containing similar elements, but with a greater emphasis on the “inside” (narrative) worlds than, as in the case of my own orientation, on the “inside/outside” reciprocity, as “neomodern anthropology” (authors’ italics). Mine, I guess, could be called “neomodern” historical sociology. The prefix reflects my resensitized epistemological (self-)consciousness, expanding on the earlier sociological awareness of the (general) social-structural and (more specific) class, race, and gender determinants of individual an collective lives. Below is a summary of the major suppositions informing my neomodern epistemological approach. The central one acknowledges the deliberate as well as unrecognized constructive activity of the narrators engaged in producing the story: the authors of historical sources (pictorial, written, or oral) used by the researchers, as well as the researchers themselves. These different narrators are involved in multiple “epistemological structuration” (to match Giddens’ “ontological” one—if anyone can stomach yet another neologism in our wordy post- and neomodern discourse). Past representations of the social world shaped the sources/actor-informants’ past narratives of that world and, in the case of the surviving actors-narrators, also their present representations

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of that past; actors-informants’ representations of the present situations influence, in turn, their narratives of the past; and present and, indirectly, past representations of the world informing the outlooks of the researcher interpenetrate the past stories he/she wishes to recover from historical sources/informants. As a result of these multiple entanglements, the story presented by the historical sociologist, that is, his/ her depiction of past and present situations and the interpretation of their meaning and implications, is inescapably fragmented, imperfect, and subjective (as opposed to objective in the social-scientist paradigm). But although I acknowledge these unavoidable limitations of knowledge, I certainly do not suffer from the “epistemological hypochondria” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991) that has afflicted some sociological and historical quarters, namely, the defensive apprehension that in view of radical criticism from the postmodernist camp (camps, rather, as they are diverse), the objectives and analytical methods of these disciplines have become entirely invalidated, and their results cognitively worthless. Rather, I believe, it is by combining these methods and objectives with the systematic exploration of the reciprocal effects of different narratives involved in creating particular pieces of the story and its final composition, and by the researcher’s sustained self-reflection on her own biases and impositions into the investigation she may be able to produce more vraisemblable, that is, more valid and reliable or accounted for from all sides best possible (imperfect and incomplete) approximations of how it is (was). This set of neomodern epistemological assumptions and practical prescriptions has informed my research for more than a decade. It is still focused on a comparativehistorical sociological examination of international migration and ethnicity, although the research agenda of this field of study has changed since the time I settled permanently in the United States, from the focus on ethnic resilience and ethnicization to the revival of assimilation redefined as a nonlinear, reversible, and context-dependent process, and immigrants’ transnationalism or sustained engagements in their home countries (for a review of changing research agendas in American sociology and history of immigration and ethnicity see Morawska 1990, 2005). For more than a decade, too, as a reflection, I guess, of my feeling securely established in the field, rather than following current, usually short-lived, theoretical vogues in immigration and ethnic studies, I have used in my studies the structuration framework as theoretically elaborated by William Sewell (1992), Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (1998), and, more recently, by my Essex colleague, Rob Stones (2005). The basic ideas informing the structuration model can be summarized thusly. Whereas the long-term and immediate configurations and pressures of forces at the upper structural layers set the dynamic limits of the possible and the impossible within which people act, it is at the level of the more proximate social surroundings that individuals and groups evaluate their situations, define purposes, and undertake actions the intended and, often, unintended consequences of which, in turn, affect these local-level and, over time, larger-scope structures. Structures, conceived of as patterns of social (including economic and political) relations and cultural formations (re)constituted through everyday practice of social actors are plural in character (different-purpose organizations, strong and weak informal networks,

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[sub]cultures), scope (global, regional/national, local), dynamics (more or less stable), and durability (longer- to short-dure). Their multiplicity imbues structures at all levels with the inherent tensions and, resulting therefrom, differential capacity to enable and constrain human agency. The complexity and interrelatedness of structures and their constitutive dependence on potentially ever-innovative human agency (see below) makes them also fundamentally mutable, “dynamic [not static], as the continually evolving outcome and matrix of a process of social interaction” (Sewell 1992: 27). Human agency, conceptualized by Emirbayer and Mische as a “temporally embedded engagement by actors of different structural environments which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing situations” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 970) comprises three analytically distinguishable components (in lived experience they closely interrelate). The iterational or habitual element refers to “the selective reactivation by actors of past patterns of thoughts and action, as routinely incorporated in practical activity”; the projective element encompasses “the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in relation to actors’ hopes, fears, and desires for the future”; and the practical-evaluative element entails “the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action, in response to the demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations”. Depending on a particular configuration of circumstances, “one or another of these three aspects might predominate” in guiding individuals’ actions (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 971–972). Each of these elements of social actors’ engagement with their environment involves schemas and resources. The former are “virtual” as an intersubjectively available “cultural kit” or repertoire of basic guideposts—general principles and strategies of action that are informed by past experience and memories adjusted to present situations and projected outcomes in the future. Schemas are actualized through their application to concrete situations. They are socially constructed in a double sense: as acquired in the process of in-group(s) socialization and as (re)created through the symbolic and behavioral practice of participating in different social networks and institutions. As a matrix of generalized orientations to action schemas are also transposable, that is, they can be applied to different and new situations. The resources, human (knowledge, skills, positions in different social structures and the opportunities derived therefrom) and nonhuman (animate and inanimate objects), are “actual”, that is, exist in time and space as specific characteristics and possessions of historical actors, and it is their actualization in people’s minds, bodies, social relations, and the physical surroundings they control that makes them resources. Like schemas, resources are transposable to new and different situations encountered by actors as they pursue their purposes and, therefore, never fully unambiguous as to their potential utility-defining meanings (Sewell 1992: 10–12). Because resources embody schemas as practice-orienting guideposts and schemas are enacted in resources and their material and symbolic products, they mutually imply and (re)constitute each other over time.

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By applying schemas—resources in their everyday pursuits as they adjust their accustomed reactions and future-oriented projects to their assessment of the practical contingencies of the moment—actors create and recreate different structures of social life. This reproduction, however, is never ideal. Inherent in all humans is “the capacity to appropriate, reproduce, and, potentially, to innovate upon received cultural categories and conditions of action in accordance with their personal and collective ideals, interests, and commitments”; its concrete forms and “contents” are shaped by sets of particular cultural schemas and resources available in timeand place- specific milieus in which people practice and by specific configurations of iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative considerations (Sewell 1992: 20; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1442–1443). Agency arises from the actors’ knowledge of schemas and (some) control of resources, which means the ability to apply these tools to new situations. New situations, in particular, enable actors to reinterpret schemas and redesign resources. As a result, as social actors innovate and devise ways to cope with the world, “thoughts, perceptions, and actions [that are] inconsistent with the reproduction of existing social patterns” occur (Sewell 1992: 13). I like this approach because it elegantly bridges the macro–micro gap that has pestered sociology for a long time, although the bridging admittedly requires the investigation informed by the conceptualization of individuals and social institutions as processes and not as fixed embodiments, and what Stones (2005) calls an ontic, or situationally anchored, phenomenological treatment of human agency. In short, it requires a researcher with the historical-ethnographic know-how and with the Sitzfleisch. It also conceives of social events and human action as multi-layered, flexible and open-ended—very much in the spirit of my intellectual orientation. Although the structuration approach clearly represents a “soft” analytical strategy, it allows four of the eight types of sociohistorical inquiry as specified by John R. Hall (1999), including applications of social theory to empirical cases, contrast-oriented comparisons, situational history and configurational history—just what in my research I practice most often. Thus, for example, I effectively used the structuration model in making sense of the initiation and persistence of international migration (Morawska 2001b); in comparing patterns of assimilation and transnational engagements among different immigrant groups (Morawska 2003a); in comparing turn-of-the-twentiethcentury and contemporary forms of immigrant transnationalism (Morawska 2001d); and in testing different theories of intergroup conflict on four cases of African American–immigrant conflict in different cities (Morawska 2001a). In 2004 I accepted a position of professor of sociology at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. There were three main reasons for this move. Beginning with the most personal one, my husband, German sociologist Willfried Spohn, lives and teaches in Europe, and we were both finding the transatlantic nature of our relationship increasingly tedious. Second, with the departure of the aforementioned group of broadly trained and theoretically oriented sociologists, the Pennsylvania sociology department has, from my perspective anyway, largely lost its vital intellectual energy, and, given my personal situation, it did not make sense to relocate to another university in North America. And third, although America was by then my home, I felt more and more alienated by the effects of the combination

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of the ongoing technological revolution and a strong drive toward the (presumably better) future basic to the American culture: the relentlessly accelerating pace of life, also academic, and the unquestioned principle supporting it that anything newer and quicker must be better than the existing arrangements. My return to Europe was to be a return to a slower-pace, more reflexive, and, as I defined it, more humane lifestyle. The Bush administration’s imperial adventures provided an additional incentive to leave. Life in England is certainly slower, perhaps even a touch parochial; and so, also, is the academic life, but I enjoy this slower pace. I now receive about thirty email messages per day instead of the seventy-odd that came in America, and students do not send me their 300-page-long dissertations as email attachments, but put hard copies of them in my mailbox. I also enjoy the intellectual climate of my new department, its interdisciplinary composition (there are on the faculty anthropologists, historians, and philosophers), and its dominant specializations in the sociology of culture, social theory, and historical sociology. What I abhor and what has been a surprise for me—I expected Great Britain to be more like her offspring the United States— is the horrendous centralization and bureaucratization of the British academic system, requiring from the faculty long hours of largely useless cooperative labor and tons of mostly superfluous paperwork. For instance, the standard duration of faculty meetings (and other administrative assemblies) is three hours. Professors have to submit their exam questions to collegial committees for advance assessment; mine were returned last year with the comment that they were “too complex”. To my protests that “I teach complex and, therefore, my questions are complex, and, besides, this is not a kindergarten”, the answer was “you must understand, Ewa, in the British system …” An example I received of the appropriately simple question on Marxist theory was “What is class?” How I miss the blessed local autonomy of the American universities! Well, I guess, one has to pay for good things by accepting some nuisance (my British colleagues take it without a word of protest). Or else I may resuscitate my long-buried homo sovieticus strategy of beating-the-system/ bending-the-law to cope with the familiar centralized bureaucratese of my everyday life. I have another long road ahead of learning the ropes of a new society and making it into my home. The stressful anxiety that accompanied my previous transplantation is gone, but the awareness of the difficulties associated with it and of the necessity for patience is very much with me. I now say “schedule” with a sh instead of a sk, I say “lovely”, and I wear spectacles instead of eyeglasses. But I continue to commit blunders and faux-pas, even though I equipped myself with a fat American-British English dictionary with illustrations; and with an amusing and instructive book by a British anthropologist, Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (2004). Quite different rules they are, British and American. In my academic work, I continue international migration and ethnic studies, now focused primarily in the European Union, although I have grown somewhat weary after two-and-a-half decades of specialization in this field, and I am ready to do something else. It would be unwise, however, to change my research area at this moment, firstly because immigration/ethnic studies have recently become central in the European, also British, mainstream social sciences and, secondly, because

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as a newcomer I have to establish myself in the local academic networks. So I am planning to conduct, in a collaboration with British colleagues, a comparative study of the symbolic and practical lessons in democracy acquired by different immigrant groups in London; to write a textbook on the sociology of immigration (to test my ability to write in a comprehensible language without the disciplinary jargon); and, what I intended for quite some time, to write a book on the how-to, theoretical and methodological, of immigration/ethnic research, illustrated with my own empirical projects. After that—I’ll then be sixty, I calculate—I would like to go back to my original specialization at Warsaw University, the history of ideas, and work on the changing images of America in Europe, a historical-comparative examination of four or five countries, from the American Revolution to the present. One seems to move in circles, let’s hope it is a movement on the inclining slope. The contributors to this volume were asked to identify the future directions in their area of research and in sociology in general. I conclude, then, this autobiographical narrative with my designations. First the important issues for sociology in general: certainly globalization with its multiple discontents—profound inequalities, economic and political, of the global society; the issues of ecology, military/terrorist threats. With it, the forms and contents of glocalization (Robertson 1992) or fusing and blending of global (Western) influences and local traditions. Next, “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2002) or multipath trajectories of (under)development in different parts of the world. Then, the mechanisms and effects of the return of religion in a modern, secularized world against the predictions of classical sociological theories (Martin 2005). And the internetization of society: its meanings and impacts on social relations, and personal and collective identities. In this context I have some wishes rather than predictions regarding my own area of research. First and foremost, my concern is that despite recognition by social scientists of the centrality of international migration as articulating the major transformations of the twenty-first century world, the field of international migration/ ethnicity may be nichifying within its own field-specific agendas, meetings, journals, and research networks—a bit like gender studies that everybody recognizes as central for the discipline, yet few non-specialist scholars read the specialty journals or attend thematic meetings. Let me put my concern in more constructive terms. The timing is perfect to make international migration into a base concept-reference in the reconceptualization of the accustomed disciplinary representations of society and its individual and institutional actors in terms of territorially bounded nation-states and their laws and policies, national cultures informed by the presupposition of the settledness of social actors, and exclusive national identities and commitments. It can also serve as a core concept in the conceptualization of glocality and in the discussions about the need to revise the classical model of secularization—two other issues that, besides the transformation of nation-state and, generally, the spatially rooted nature of social existence, today attract lively debates among sociologists. In short, it can serve as a central bridging concept in the formulation of new theoretical frameworks for the analysis of contemporary societal processes. But in order to put the concept of international migration to such uses and to “translate” this subfield’s theoretical and empirical wisdom into general sociological terms, immigration/ethnic

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scholars need to participate much more actively and visibly in these mainstream disciplinary debates. The study of international migration and ethnicity is practiced today by scholars from several disciplines: sociology, anthropology, political science, legal studies, geography, history. My second wish is that rather than multiplying conferences and edited volumes under the banner of interdisciplinarity understood as an assemblage of representatives of different academic fields who talk about immigration/ethnic issues in their own languages, scholars in this multidisciplinary field of study try first to identify the epistemological premises and theoretical goals guiding their work and, having established their differences, move on to create a more elegantly composed polyphony of knowledge about the problems they investigate. Students of immigration and ethnicity conduct their research and theorize its findings assuming their subjects constitute social groups. Taking up for an examination Rogers Brubaker’s (2005) interesting recent challenge of the premise of the “groupness” that informs immigration/ethnic studies, and his argument that the subjects of our investigations actually often represent no more than aggregates of diverse people of the same ethnic origin would be my third, most immediate wish. References Abbott, Andrew. 1983. “Analysis of Order in Social Processes.” Historical Methods 16(4): 129–147. ———. 1988. “Transcending General Linear Reality.” Sociological Theory 6: 169– 186. Adams, Julia, Elisabeth Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff, eds. 2005. Rethinking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aminzade, Ronald. 1992. “Historical Sociology and Time.” Sociological Methods and Research 20(4): 456–480. Brubaker, Rogers. 2005. “Ethnicity without Groups.” Pp. 470–492 in Rethinking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology. Ed. J. Adams, E. Clemens, and A. Shola Orloff. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burke, Peter. 1990. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929– 89. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Calhoun, Craig. 1996. “The Rise and Domestication of Historical Sociology.” Pp. 305–338 in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ed. T. McDonald. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Clark, Stuart, ed. 1999. The Annales School: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge. Czarnowski, Stefan. 1956. Dziela. Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnicto Naukowe.

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Eisenstadt, Shmuel. 2002. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Emirbayer, Mustafa and Ann Mische. 1998. “What is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103(4): 962–1025. Fox, Kate. 2004. Watching the English. The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. London: Hodder. Hall, John R. 1999. Cultures of Inquiry. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Levine, Donald. 1985. The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, David. 2005. On Secularization. Towards a Revised General Theory. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate. Merton, Robert. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press. Ragin, Charles. 1987. The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Sewell, William. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98(1): 1–29. Skocpol, Theda, ed. 1984. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stones, Rob. 2005. Structuration Theory. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. Sztompka, Piotr, ed. 1984. Masters of Polish Sociology. Cracow: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich. Thomas, William I. and Florian Znaniecki. 1918–1920. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 5 vols. Boston: Badger. Tilly, Charles. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Znaniecki, Florian. 1919. Cultural Reality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1934. The Method of Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1969. On Humanistic Sociology. Ed. R. Bierstedt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Selected Bibliography Bommes, Michael and Ewa Morawska, eds. 2005. International Migration Research: Constructions, Omissions, and Promises of Interdisciplinarity. New York: Ashgate. Morawska, Ewa. 1985 (paperback: 2003). For Bread With Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1890–1940. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1990. “The Sociology and Historiography of Immigration.” Pp. 187–238 in Immigration Reconsidered: History Sociology, and Politics. Ed. V. YansMcLaughlin. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1996. Insecure Prosperity: Jews in Small-town Industrial America, 1880– 1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2001a. “Immigrant-Black Dissensions in American Cities: An Argument for Multiple Explanations.” Pp. 47–96 in Problem of the Century: Racial Stratification in the United States. Ed. D. Massey and E. Anderson. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 2001b. “Structuring Migration: The Case of Polish Income-Seeking Travelers to the West.” Theory and Society 31: 47–80. ———. 2001c. “International Migration and the Consolidation of Democracy in Post-Communist Eastern Europe.” Pp. 163–191 in Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe: Domestic and International Factors. Ed. A. Pravda and J. Zielonka. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001d. “Immigrants, Transnationalism, and Ethnicization: A Comparison of this Great Wave and the Last.” Pp. 175–212 in E Pluribus Unum? Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation. Ed. G. Gerstle and J. Mollenkopf. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 2003a. “Immigrant Transnationalism and Assimilation: A Variety of Combinations and a Theoretical Model They Suggest.” Pp. 133–176 in Toward Assimilation and Citizenship in Liberal Nation-States. Ed. E. Morawska and C. Joppke. London: Macmillan/Palgrave. ———. 2003b. “Disciplinary Agendas and Analytic Strategies of Research on Immigrant Transnationalism: Challenges of Interdisciplinary Knowledge.” International Migration Review. Special issue on interdisciplinarity in international migration research 37(3): 611–640. ———. 2005. “The Sociology and History (Im)Migration: Reflections of a Practitioner.” Pp. 203–242 in International Migration Research: Constructions, Omissions, and Promises of Interdisciplinarity. Ed. M. Bommes and E. Morawska. New York: Ashgate. Morawska, Ewa and Christian Joppke, eds. 2003. Toward Assimilation and Citizenship in Liberal Nation-States. London: Macmillan/Palgrave.

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Chapter 8

A Serendipitous Career Leon Grunberg

My sociological career began when, by chance, I met an American professor who was on sabbatical in London. We were both regulars at the Queens, a London pub, and after months of drink-enhanced conversation he somehow became convinced that I had the makings of a sociologist and persuaded Michigan State University to offer me a research fellowship. Although it might seem as if I came to sociology somewhat by accident, I believe that my experiences, temperament, and the way I was beginning to see the world, predisposed me to accept the fellowship offer and go to the United States. This chance meeting was one of several chance occurrences that shaped my life and career, giving them a somewhat serendipitous character. Childhood and Student Years We are all at the mercy of large events and my young life was irrevocably altered in 1956, when Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt after Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. As an eight-year-old boy I was excited by the sandbags and the anti-aircraft guns at the end of our street in Cairo and the sounds of British bombers flying above our blacked-out house. But I also felt my family’s unease,

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created by the daily visits of the police, the loss of my father’s job, and my parents’ scramble to sell our few possessions at “give away” prices. We were, along with several thousand other Jews, on our way out of Egypt, carrying with us, along with our suitcases, precious memories of a world and a Levantine culture that was about to disappear forever.1 It was also by a stroke of historical chance that it was a foggy and damp Victoria station in London that welcomed us to our new home rather than Paris, New York, Tel Aviv, or Sydney (each a destination for a few of our relatives). Although my father was stripped of his Egyptian nationality and was therefore stateless, my mother carried a British passport because her father was born in Gibraltar. So it was to Britain that we went and it was there that my parents started their lives again. Adapting to this new life was difficult for my parents, as they struggled to learn English and the strange ways of the British. But for my father none of the difficulties of adaptation could shake his appreciation for Britain’s generosity to refugees or his great admiration for General Montgomery. Every time Montgomery appeared on television, my father would rise from his chair, approach the television until he was but a couple of feet from it and listen with rapt attention as the General expounded on his wondrous exploits. It was only later, when I had read the history of the war, that I learned that it was Montgomery and the British 8th army which had defeated Rommel’s Africa corps on their march towards Cairo in 1942, and indirectly saved our family and made the rest of this story possible. So it is in a very concrete sense that I understand what C. Wright Mills (1959) meant by his call for us to become “aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of [our] own lives and the course of world history”. That awareness of how large historical events and trends affect individual lives has shaped my research focus and approach, as I will illustrate below. But there was another effect on me of our sudden transplantation to England. Although we had been part of a very small Jewish minority in Egypt, I had never felt like an outsider, perhaps because Cairo in the fifties was a lively, cosmopolitan metropolis, home to a wide variety of religious and national groups. In any case, I was probably too young to have noticed any prejudice or discrimination. In the London of the fifties and sixties, being English was based on ancestry, and no matter how good my English and soccer skills became, my Egyptian birth was a source of ridicule and a marker of my separateness among my schoolmates. I grew up with a sense of shame about my accidental origins and with a powerful urge to gain entry and acceptance into my new world. Even as time and experience strengthened my feelings of Britishness (Englishness may have been asking too much), I never completely lost that sense of being different and an outsider. This feeling was and still is particularly acute in the company of “true” Englishmen, as I assume that my name, or a question about my origins, will expose me as an impostor. But in a way this lingering sense of being an outsider, even as I fully assimilated, was useful conditioning for my future vocation. It produced an insider/outsider perspective that made it easier to observe things that others didn’t 1 For a wonderfully evocative description of one slice of this disappearing culture see Aciman (1996).

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notice or took for granted. This sense of being different, perhaps along with an inborn temperamental rebelliousness, also acted as a break on a powerful and natural desire to identify closely with any one intellectual community. So although the desire to belong has remained powerful throughout my life, and occasionally produces a tinge of sadness that I cannot share in the comfort that belonging appears to confer, I seem to have a stronger, almost perverse, need to remain independent and an outsider. I have therefore never joined a political party and I have refused to accept the labels colleagues sometimes try to pin on me. In high school I was always trying to pick holes in the teachers’ arguments or in views that seemed to fit too comfortably with the conventional wisdom. Several of the young teachers at my grammar school encouraged this kind of sharp criticism and seemed genuinely pleased and stimulated by the lively, and often heated, intellectual to and fro in their classrooms. One teacher in a comment to me, which could have applied to several of my schoolmates, said I exhibited a kind of subversive intelligence. I increasingly think that having a contrarian spirit is very useful to scholars and researchers as it predisposes them to question and challenge what seem like settled findings or theories, and if they’re fortunate, to discover something new or original. I also think such an attitude enlivens one’s teaching. The hard but necessary extension of such an attitude is to apply it as rigorously to one’s own work and ideas. To my parents’ great disappointment, I went to a “secondary modern” school, a place where those not destined for university were prepared for work in the nation’s factories, offices, and shops. About eighty percent of all eleven-year-olds went to such schools; the other twenty percent went to grammar schools where they were prepared for university and careers in business and the professions. It was in secondary modern school that I got a first-hand look at the oppositional culture of working class boys so vividly portrayed by Paul Willis in Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Willis 1982). Fighting, playing soccer, and “having a laff” were powerful attractions, and I did my fair share of all three. Still, although these norms permeated the school, there was a sizeable minority of pupils, mostly Jewish, who tried to negotiate a path between the oppositional culture of the “lads” and the almost obsessive belief in academic achievement deeply embedded in the psyche of the families of my Jewish friends, as well as my own. Like any smart human sorting system, this stratified British educational system had built in an escape hatch. Every year a handful of fifteen or sixteen-year-olds who had done well at “O” levels, a nation-wide exam taken at around the age of sixteen, were transferred to grammar school. I was one of these lucky few. It was in secondary modern school, however, that I became conscious of social class divisions and developed a simmering sense of injustice at the unfairness of such an early selection process. I carried a “big chip on my shoulder” and was determined to expose the injustice of the system and, of course, to prove the faceless judges of my fate wrong. Ironically, as an adult this early failure became a badge I wore with an “in your face” pride, as did many of those angry, upwardly mobile working class young men who took Britain by storm in the fifties and sixties. But my five years at secondary modern did more than stoke my anger at the class system; they also taught me to respect the daily realities and choices of working class lives. Many,

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but by no means all of my working class schoolmates found the academic part of school a boring rite of passage, one to get through as quickly as possible so they could get on with mating, playing soccer, and earning a living. They made these choices despite the best efforts of the teachers who tried to engage them in academic learning. Willis is right that such choices often ensured the reproduction of the class positions of these youngsters, but they were choices nonetheless, even if these young men were choosing from a highly constrained set of options. I went part way down that road with them and became a passionate devotee of soccer (my wife calls such devotion a kind of madness). Playing, watching, and talking soccer consumed hours of my time and that of many of my schoolmates. I came to understand the seductive quality of soccer and other team sports. There was an intensity and an unpredictability to those few minutes on the field that heightened one’s senses, and the easy camaraderie off the field provided a haven from daily worries. In fact, I continued playing soccer well past the age when my body began to give out, partly for the joy of it, but also because it was one of the few activities where I could meet, on some basis of equality, individuals with all kinds of jobs and class backgrounds. The friendships I developed through sport have kept me connected to the aspirations and concerns of nonacademic men and their families and taught me to respect the lives these individuals made. That is why, even when I was most heavily influenced by Marxism, I have never seen working people as passive and helpless pawns pacified and distracted by clever elites. I came of age, like millions of other baby boomers, in the turbulent sixties, entering Sussex University in 1967, at the very height of that swinging, rebellious era. Sussex University in those years was known as having one of the trendiest campuses in Britain. This was where some of the famous, and the not-quite-smart-enough-to-getinto-Oxford-and-Cambridge, children of politicians, businessmen, and professionals went. The late sixties, of course, seemed like heady revolutionary times to many students. Mixed in with the pot and the parties there was also a lot of radical political activity. There were marches, sit-ins, and endless meetings and resolutions. But to my eyes there was a certain unreality, perhaps even a kind of theatricality, to all this activity. Britain sat out the Vietnam War so we were not at risk of being called to fight as were students on U.S. campuses. I am certain some of the students acted out of a moral commitment to the principle of non-intervention and to an abhorrence of the brutality of that war, but it seemed to me that for many others the protests were a form of fashionable and risk-less rebellion. There was also a fair amount of inverted class snobbery at work on our campus. How one dressed and looked became signifiers of one’s stance towards authority and class privilege. “Donkey” jackets, garments then often worn by laborers, became emblems of solidarity with the working class. Afghan coats, beads, and other paraphernalia were marks of one’s anti-materialism. Pleading poverty as you ate slices of bread smeared with free ketchup demonstrated to all that you were not part of the privileged elite. To my eyes these displays seemed frivolous and false even as they were colorful. After all, neither their class solidarity nor their consciences stopped them from riding around in the Mini Coopers and Triumph sports cars that their middle and upper-middle class parents had given them.

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I went to university with the intention of majoring in economics, but one day as I watched a tutor draw indifference curves on a blackboard, I realized I did not much care for this kind of economics, with its impoverished view of human psychology and social action. Even then I realized that homo economus was a convenient theoretical assumption and that the wellsprings of human action were far more complex and mysterious than could be captured by rational action models. And, since I was reading a lot of American literature and history at the time, I switched to an interdisciplinary major in American studies. I became fascinated by American society, by the images and stories of crime, riots, racial inequality, and brutal war but also by the physical and psychological space and openness that seemed to come through in the films I saw and the books I read. Bernard Malamud’s (1961) novel, A New Life, was particularly appealing as it told the story of a down-on-his-luck Jewish instructor of English who leaves the East Coast to take a position at a college in the Pacific Northwest. His fumbling attempts to fashion a new life for himself in the middle of the lush, verdant forests of the northwest got lodged somewhere deep in my memory and seemed to foreshadow my later transplantation from Britain to the United States and then to Washington state. After graduation and a brief interlude working in a bank, I taught working class youngsters as an instructor at one of the many technical colleges that were then providing education to some of the eighty percent of young men and women who had failed the “eleven plus” exam and not gone to university. My job was to try to inject a dose of liberal learning into the education of young apprentices training as draftsman, motor mechanics, and body shop repairmen. In their one or two days a week at college, I had one hour in which to broaden their minds and sharpen their critical thinking skills. During this time I also taught social theory, including Marx, to a small group of housewives, for that is what they were called at the time, under the auspices of the Workers’ Educational Association, the largest voluntary provider of adult education in Britain. As a young teacher in my mid-twenties, I quickly realized that I could not spout abstract ideas to people who every day dealt with very practical and concrete problems. Ideas and theories about social life had to be grounded in empirical reality and had to be expressed in a language that was transparent and readily comprehensible. This lesson was of immense value to me as a research sociologist and university instructor. Influences I did not grow up in an intellectual family. Academic achievement was important, but there was little concern in my family for the content of education, only for what worldly success it could lead to. However, though there were no more than a handful of books in the house, my father was an avid follower of current events and I would read the paper he brought home every night. As my three siblings grew and the house became too crowded a place in which to study, I spent more and more time in the local libraries. I would wander along the shelves, picking books to leaf through, often because of an unusual title or book cover. It was in this way in 1966 that I discovered the writings of the Italian holocaust survivor, Primo Levi (1987). His

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account of his year in Auschwitz in If This A Man, and of his return journey home after liberation in The Truce, deeply moved me—partly because it was my first full exposure to what had happened, but also because of the understated way he told his story, without any trace of pathos. I was also taken with his careful sociological and psychological observations as he described how individuals sought to survive and to maintain a semblance of dignity and even humor in a cruel and capricious environment. Browsing library shelves also led to the discovery of George Orwell and a lifelong admiration for his writings. Like Levi, Orwell wrote in a straightforward, direct manner about things he had experienced first-hand. His observations were hard earned and he avoided the temptation to make the facts fit preconceived ideas. Orwell had no time for orthodoxies, whether political or ideological, and he rarely romanticized those whose plight he described. Orwell and Levi, with their keen observational skills and their independent minds, were powerful influences on my approach to doing research and, in my view, are worthy of emulation by all prospective sociologists. These fortuitous discoveries began a lifelong habit of browsing in libraries, something I find myself doing less and less these days and that alas few of our current students seem to do, tied as we all increasingly are to the internet.2 It is no exaggeration to say that wandering and browsing in libraries encouraged me to read widely and to downplay disciplinary boundaries in my research and teaching. My reading of fiction and memoirs has proved to be a powerful antidote to the often necessary categorization and classification that sociological analysis demands. By making the individual the fulcrum of the action, literature rebalances the weights that sociologists assign to deterministic structures over individual agency and reminds us of how complex and even contradictory individual lives are. Not surprisingly, I have found that nothing excites the undergraduate student’s sociological imagination as much as a story of individuals grappling with powerful social and political forces and having to make choices in the face of uncertainty and obstacles. One of the joys of working in a liberal arts college is that I have been able to marry my sociological interests and my love of literature in a course, “Sociology through Literature”, that I have taught for over two decades. Theoretically, my orientation has been most heavily influenced by Marx’s analysis of capitalism. In particular, by the central role he gave the conflicts and struggles that occur between labor and capital at the “frontier of control” (Goodrich 1975) and over the distribution of the surplus, and also by his understanding that it is the dynamic nature of competition among companies that gives capitalism its revolutionary energy and creates its profound insecurities. Focusing on these two relationships still seems to me a necessary if not sufficient basis for any cogent analysis of the factors that influence how economic organizations and workplaces operate. My encounter with the work of Tilly (1978) provided a framework and concepts to explain how theoretically expected conflicts of interests were transformed 2 The internet, of course, also fosters a kind of browsing, though the speed and the multitude of connections may overwhelm the wanderer in cyberspace and inhibit the kind of careful discoveries that browsing in libraries encourages.

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into dynamic struggles for power and control. To understand what happened in firms and in the political economy of the larger society it was necessary also to examine the ability of the contending parties to organize and mobilize their resources and to assess the opportunities for action created by particular historical conditions. The intellectual excitement in graduate school was generated by the work of several neo-Marxists such as David Harvey, Harry Braverman, Paul Sweezy, James O’Connor, Nicos Poulantzas, Louis Althusser, and Bowles and Gintis, as well as by the writings of scholars such as Andre Gunter Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, who advanced a more third world perspective. Although I shared in the excitement generated by the work of most of these scholars (I seem to be constitutionally incapable of making sense of the writings of Althusser and more recent French postMarxists),3 I was much more sympathetic to those who worked within the classical Marxist tradition. Capitalism, in this tradition, is understood as an economic and social system that is often cruel, but one that also is relentlessly dynamic, producing great technological and material advances. I suspected then, and history seems to have confirmed, that it was far more revolutionary and progressive in its accomplishments than the political revolutions that had been carried out in the name of Marx. Although most neo-Marxists had soured on the Soviet version of socialism by the mid-seventies, some briefly flirted with Maoism and his cultural revolution; others looked to the self-management experiments in Yugoslavia or to other socialist experiments like the Ujamaa program in Tanzania. Learning about the horrors and failures of these attempts to consciously remake the world clarified for me that the only sane political position for someone on the left was social democracy. What was necessary was for ordinary people to have the power and ability to shape how the system operated and to distribute the fruits of its dynamism more equitably. Even as I fell under the sway of Marx and neo-Marxists, my dissertation advisor, Bill Faunce, was a quiet but insistent voice reminding me that many of the problems of capitalism, such as alienation, were actually problems of an industrial society (Faunce 1981). Moreover, he argued that many workers could escape much of the damage of what “objectively” seemed like alienating work by compartmentalizing their work and non-work lives and by seeking recognition and self-esteem outside the workplace (Faunce 2003). We had many intense conversations about his thesis over drinks in London, in East Lansing and at his cabin by Lake Superior. I argued with some conviction that this compartmentalization came at great psychological cost (a point made by Sennet and Cobb [1973] in The Hidden Injuries of Class) and that in any case it was extremely difficult for workers to avoid daily reminders of their low social ranking. However, I also sensed that if I pushed the point too far, it was but a short step to arguing that these workers not only didn’t understand the causes of their alienation but, in their responses to it, were exhibiting false consciousness. I was never comfortable with the false consciousness concept as a way to explain away the lack of militancy or revolutionary fervor of workers. Yes, 3 Apart from the opaque language, French structuralism remained too much at an abstract level, with few connections from concepts to actual individuals and groups, to appeal to my empiricist sensibilities. A witty and devastating critique of Althusserian structuralism is given in Thompson (1978).

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workers could be poorly informed or naive, but what did it mean to claim that they did not know what was in their best interests? Naiveté was certainly not confined to workers and was it so abundantly clear that the enlightened few armed with Marxist theory knew better than the workers themselves what would improve their lives? What I learned from Bill Faunce was the importance of not letting theoretically derived expectations determine what I found but rather to listen to what people told me and to be open and flexible enough to let experience and the research evidence guide my interpretations and explanations. They say imitation is the best form of flattery and I have tried, quite imperfectly to be sure, to be the kind of calm, rational and gentle mentor and interlocutor to my students that he was to me. Bill and his lovely wife, Sheila, opened their home to me, included me in many of their family events and made my graduate years and my first few years in the U.S. among the happiest of my life. Orientation My theoretical and methodological orientations are best revealed by a brief overview of my research: by the topics I choose to study; how I frame the questions I ask; how I design and conduct my research; and in how I interpret the results of my work. To simplify, I would say that, at heart, I am an empirical sociologist who freely borrows ideas from other disciplines in trying to understand how economic forces shape and affect our lives. I assume, though with somewhat less confidence now than in the past, that what happens in the workplaces in which we spend a large portion of our lives can and often does have powerful effects on our economic, social, and psychological well being. I am persuaded that the pursuit of economic output and efficiency inevitably entails social and human costs. I am persuaded as well that how we organize our economic activity is not immutable but is the result of human, and hence political, choices. That is why it is important to study economic organizations and to clarify the consequences of their decisions and activities for the millions of individuals who are affected by them. As a graduate student in the mid-seventies, a great deal of academic buzz centered on the multi-national corporation (MNC). These were seen as the leading edge of a renewed process of internationalization (the term globalization only entered the popular and academic lexicon in the nineties). Indeed, MNCs seemed to be the driving force of this process and then, as now, their activities and what they portended for the future were the focus of intense debate and controversy. But as I read pretty much everything that was then written on the MNCs I found that the “storm over the multinational” had generated a lot more hot air than concrete insights. Dozens of books engaged in speculation and grandiose predictions about the future, painting either frightening scenarios of a world dominated by MNCs or, at the other extreme, bucolic visions of an integrated and prosperous world community. But there were very few studies then that provided an in-depth, close-up examination of how these companies operated and fewer still that investigated the effects of MNC activities on workers and the communities in which they lived.

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A major reason for the absence of such studies was that MNCs had erected a very prickly shell around their operations, one that made it very difficult for outsiders to penetrate deeply into their decision-making process. It occurred to me, by analogy, that if individuals were likely to be more open when they were vulnerable and in crisis, that MNCs might also be more transparent when they were undergoing their own form of crisis. My instincts suggested they would be most exposed, despite their best efforts at maintaining secrecy, when they were undertaking divestments or closures of subsidiaries. I assumed and hoped that the controversial nature of closures and the likely associated conflicts would create openings that a dogged researcher could pursue. I wanted to get as deep inside these organizations as I could and to do that I took to the field in what I called the “long march” approach to collecting information (one of my dissertation advisers remarked that this approach was somewhat akin to “investigative journalism”, a descriptor that I was happy to accept). I began at the bottom and periphery of these organizations and gradually worked my way to the top and center, where ultimate decision-making power resided (Grunberg 1981). This involved traveling to the location of these threatened subsidiaries, in Milan, in Poissy outside Paris, and in Hull and Coventry in England to interview workers, union officials, local politicians, managers, and former managers of these subsidiaries. The former managers were particularly helpful informants as they had detailed knowledge of the financial and political bases for the divestment decision and were often quite willing to divulge crucial confidential information because of their bad feelings towards the MNC. It’s amazing how willing top executives are to meet you once you have done all this detailed legwork. As Robert Merton (1956) has pointed out, serendipity is at the heart of the research process. Studying one thing can throw up an unexpected finding that leads you to develop a new hypothesis and a new line of research, provided one is able to see the theoretically rich possibility in the unexpected finding. One of the cases of threatened divestment I had examined concerned the United Kingdom subsidiary of the Chrysler Corporation. Naturally, the question arose as to why it was the U.K. subsidiary rather than the French one that was selected for closure. The official and very plausible answer was that in making the same car, Chrysler U.K. had a productivity performance that was much worse than Chrysler France. A great deal of internal company research had been done on this difference and it seemed clear to company officials and to me that a large reason for the difference was the absence of almost any strikes at Chrysler France and the numerous, sometimes numbering in the hundreds per year, short-duration strikes at Chrysler U.K. In discussing this productivity difference with one manager at Chrysler U.K. he casually mentioned in passing that he thought the French subsidiary had a much higher accident and injury rate. The question formed in my mind: could the higher productivity be related to the higher accident rates and could both be due to the weakness of the workers at Chrysler France? This new line of investigation provided some support for this hypothesis (Grunberg 1983), although ensuring comparability of accident and injury data is fraught with difficulties, given how susceptible the production of such data is to manipulation. Fortuitously from my perspective as a researcher, major political changes occurred a few years later in Britain and France, with new governments coming to power

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with significantly different policies from their predecessors (Thatcher became prime minister of the U.K. in 1979, and Mitterand became president of France in 1981). Here was an opportunity to retest the hypothesis. Would the coming to power of the socialists in France strengthen the largely immigrant workforce at Chrysler France and thus reduce their productivity and accident rates? And would Thatcher’s assault on the power of British unions weaken the shop-floor militancy of the Chrysler U.K. workforce and result in higher productivity and accidents? Additional field work in France and Britain tended to provide affirmative answers to these questions (Grunberg 1986). This research also taught me two important methodological lessons. One was about the value of what Merton calls the “strategic datum which exerts pressure upon the investigator for a new direction of inquiry which extends theory” (1956:105). In my case it was connecting two or three seemingly disparate sets of facts because my reading of Marx had already sensitized me to the reality that economic production is a social activity with attendant human costs as well as benefits. How much power workers had in the workplace (and in society) could influence their productivity and safety. The other was how rare yet how methodologically powerful natural experiments were, experiments where most variables in a comparison are similar except the one that is central to your theoretical argument. In the Chrysler comparison the political context changed, as did the relative power of the workers, but other important factors, like the technology, the product, and the location did not. The underlying assumption of the Chrysler comparison was that conflictual capitalist relations between owners and workers lay behind the apparent tradeoff between productivity, an indicator of our efficiency; and safety, a mark of our humanity. The logic of this perspective suggested that in workplaces with nonconflictual relations, where workers were also the owners, the trade-off would be eliminated or substantially reduced. Worker ownership and control would result in more efficiency and safer and more contented workers. Selecting cases that are at the extreme ends of a causal variable (in this case the variable is the power relations between workers and owners) can speak to whether the trade-off is confined to workplaces with capitalist social relations or whether the trade-off might have more universal applicability (Stinchcombe 2005). Fortune once again was kind to me as one of the most robust experiments in worker-ownership existed in the Pacific Northwest, with several plywood cooperatives located close to the university where I worked. I spent two years visiting the coops, interviewing scores of worker-owners and other employees, and gathering data on productivity and injuries. I carried out extensive opinion surveys of the workforces and spent some time at each site observing the production process. I followed the same data collection process with conventionally organized plywood mills (which included union and non-union firms) and tried as best I could to match the mills on as many variables as I could, except the one deemed to be causal. The results of my research were surprising and disappointing to me. The cooperative mills were less productive than the conventional ones and possibly also more dangerous for the workers. Few of them exhibited the kind of positive social relations I expected; in fact several of them were quietly dying or close to disappearing (Grunberg 1991).

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While studies on cooperative workplaces report mixed and sometimes disappointing results, I have been struck by how hard it was for me and for others doing research in this area to abandon or modify very deep rooted assumptions about the organization of work and its consequences. All researchers want very much to have their hypotheses confirmed, and most can live with seeing their hypotheses disproved, if only because they are forced to explain why their predictions were wrong. But when assumptions that are derived from one’s values are challenged by the evidence, there is a powerful temptation to shore up the belief system by downplaying the evidence or undermining the design or methodology of the study that produced the disconfirming evidence. Such rigorous skepticism is an essential element in the scholarly process and it took additional research on worker owned firms (Greenberg and Grunberg 1995) to convince me that whatever benefits might flow from worker ownership and control, they were no panacea for the alienation and troubles that accompanied modern industrial work. These disappointing results echoed those found by Ed Greenberg, a political scientist at the University of Colorado. Greenberg had studied these same plywood cooperatives a few years earlier and had written an important book on the promises and limitations of workplace democracy (Greenberg 1986). We quickly realized we shared an intellectual orientation and resolved to collaborate on a future research project. It was also at this time, by chance, that Terry Blum, a discussant on a paper I presented at a conference, and her husband, Paul Roman, both leading scholars in the area of alcohol and drug abuse in the workplace, encouraged us to apply for funding that the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism was providing for studies that would examine alcohol abuse in the workplace. Although neither of us had experience in the alcohol or drug field, we saw this as an opportunity to carry out large multi-site and longitudinal studies on the workplace. Thus began a long and fruitful collaboration with Ed Greenberg, first on a study that examined whether worker ownership and participation had a salutary effect on workers’ alcohol use and abuse and more generally on their work and political attitudes (Greenberg and Grunberg 1995; Greenberg, Grunberg and Daniels 1994) and then on a study designed to investigate the consequences of the ongoing workplace changes that seemed to herald a new kind of economy. Large companies were now creating insecurity among workers not only by their international mobility, but also increasingly by reshaping and reorganizing themselves when they downsized and restructured. Once again, workers, including those with high-level skills, were subjected to the effects of remote, large, economic forces and organizational decisions. Working with Ed Greenberg and with Sarah Moore, a psychologist who joined our research team a few years into the project, has been a wonderful learning experience for me. Our collaboration has reinforced my belief in the artificiality of disciplinary boundaries and of how impossible it is to fully understand the lives of workers without examining the political and family contexts in which their lives unfold. It also confronted us with the temptation to justify our funding by bending over backwards to corroborate our guiding hypotheses and to find evidence of large effects of workplace change on workers’ wellbeing. While modern statistical computer programs enable us to do some quite amazing statistical manipulations, there is an intractability to systematically collected data that resists the most ardent

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wishes of the researcher. After tracking the responses of several hundred workers who had been subjected to repeated waves of downsizing and pervasive uncertainty for several years, we came to realize that while these organizational changes had scarred many of these workers, the deleterious effects tended to be small and seemed to have complicated etiologies (Grunberg, Anderson-Connolly and Greenberg 2000; Grunberg, Moore and Greenberg 2001).4 From the vantage point of almost thirty years of research on workplaces and workers, I now appreciate more clearly that work is but one of many sources of pain (and joy) and that individuals can be remarkably resilient and psychologically resourceful in the face of chronic and acute sources of work stress. This in no way absolves us of the responsibility to expose the causes of these stressors or of the obligation to search for more humane ways to organize our work. It is always tempting to see the current era as a revolutionary or transitional one, and sometimes scholars can magnify the significance of current changes when in fact change occurs continuously throughout history. But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that economic organizations and workplaces are being significantly reshaped today. New technologies, the integration of China and India into the world economy, the breakdown of the implicit psychological contract in many advanced economies (that traded employee loyalty for life-long job security), the trend towards “hollowed out” companies (with less and less work being done in house and more being subcontracted out), as well as the massive entry of women into the labor force, all indicate a fundamental transformation in the world of work. These are therefore exciting times for young researchers willing to pursue studies of the middle ground, with research that is empirically grounded but not overly constrained or blinkered by current orthodoxies. When there are new facts on the ground, theoretical flexibility and an open mind are most likely to produce analytic breakthroughs. Writing about myself and the factors that have shaped my interest in sociology has raised nagging questions in my mind. Have I done enough interesting work to merit such personal indulgence? Am I sufficiently self-aware to identify pivotal events or influences? Can any individual know with any degree of confidence what influenced his choices and his life course? Did I consciously or unconsciously elide unpleasant facts? Was my memory overly selective and inaccurate? Are there any useful lessons in my story for others contemplating careers in sociology? I also struggled with the temptation to fit all the pieces into one coherent and settled whole, to tell a tale that hangs together, with a few dominant themes that give shape, continuity and meaning to the story. But I don’t think that would be an accurate representation of the course of my life or career, nor for that matter of most people’s lives or careers. Chance, coincidences, accidents of family background, our geographic and sociological location and of course historical events, all create the constraints and structures that help form us and within which we exercise our will and make our choices.

4 A complete list of our work can be accessed at http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/PEC/ workplacechange/.

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank my colleagues and friends, Ed Greenberg and Sunil Kukreja, for their careful reading of the chapter and their helpful suggestions. I am also indebted to Sonia Grunberg, who kept reminding me to “tell it as it is”, and to my daughter Emma, who proved to be an astute editor. Without their encouragement and support I doubt if I would have finished this chapter. References and Selected Bibliography Aciman, Andre. 1996 Out of Egypt: A Memoir. New York: Riverhead Books. Faunce, William A. 1981. Problems of an Industrial Society. New York: McGraw Hill. ———. 2003. Work, Status and Self-Esteem: A Theory of Selective Self Investment. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Goodrich, Carter L. 1975. The Frontier of Control. London: Pluto Press. Greenberg, Edward S. 1986. Workplace Democracy: The Political Effects of Participation. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Greenberg, Edward S., Leon Grunberg, and Kelley Daniels. 1994 “Industrial Work and Political Participation: Beyond Simple Spillover.” Political Research Quarterly 49: 305–330. Greenberg, Edward S. and Leon Grunberg. 1995. “Work Alienation and Problem Alcohol Behavior.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 36: 83–102. Grunberg, Leon. 1981. Failed Multinational Ventures: The Political Economy of International Divestments. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath. ———. 1983. “The Effects of the Social Relations of Production on Productivity and Workers’ Safety: An Ignored Set of Relationships.” International Journal of Health Services 13: 621–634. ———. 1986. “Workplace Relations in the Economic Crisis: A Comparison of a British and French Automobile Plant.” Sociology 20: 503–529. ———. 1991. “The Plywood Producer Cooperatives.” In International Handbook of Participation in Organizations, vol. 2. Ed. R. Russell and V. Rus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grunberg, Leon, Sarah Moore, and Edward S. Greenberg. 1996. “The Relationship of Employee Ownership and Participation to Workplace Safety.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 17: 221–241. ———. 2001. “Differences in Psychological and Physical Health among Layoff Survivors: The Effect of Layoff Contact.” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 6: 15–25. Grunberg, Leon, Richard Anderson-Connolly, and Edward S. Greenberg. 2000. “Surviving Layoffs: The Effects on Organizational Commitment and Job Performance.” Work and Occupations 27: 7–31. Levi, Primo. 1987. If This A Man and The Truce. London: Sphere Books. Malamud, Bernard. 1961. A New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Merton, Robert K. 1956. Social Theory and Social Structure. Toronto, ON: The Free Press Mills C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. 1973. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage Books. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 2005. The Logic of Social Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, E.P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill. Willis, Paul. 1982. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 9

Towards a More Democratic and Just Society: An Experience of a Sociologist from Korea Hyun-Chin Lim

Introd'ction I began my sociological career in South Korea, which at that time was regarded as a third world country. Thus, my sociological concern has focused on how to make South Korean society more democratic and just. That is why I am specializing in the sociology of development. As a sociologist who has tried to combine theory and practice, I have done research to analyze the dynamics among political power, capital accumulation, and class relations in South Korea from a comparative perspective. Sociology is a great academic discipline because it can take a bird’s eye view of the world. Studying sociology feels like being an eagle viewing the whole world and its prey from high in the sky. Sociology also connects the micro and the macro because we use both “microscopes and telescopes” in our analysis. As we go through time and space, sociological imagination enables us to discover the past and to explore the future.

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Today South Korea is no longer a third world country. Its market economy is now one of the ten largest in the world, and its political democracy continues to become stronger. However, only forty years ago, South Korea had yet to undergo industrialization and democratization; it was a poor and oppressed third world nation in every aspect. I was born and raised in an era of poverty and repression in South Korea. At that time, I studied and dreamed about a democratic and just society, just like other students do in the third world. In this article, I will re!ect on my past intellectual development and how I began studying sociology in South Korea. The paper is divided into "ve parts: (1) my motives for studying sociology; (2) my personal experience as a student at a Korean university; (3) studying abroad in the United States and how my academic interests changed; (4) the agony of an intellectual in a situation of peripheral underdevelopment; and (5) conclusion. *y Initial Enco'nter 1ith Sociology I am currently a sociology professor at Seoul National University, South Korea’s top university and one of the world’s prominent universities. Sometimes I cannot believe that I am a professor. When I was a young boy in the 1950s, I had hopes for a future career but I had no thoughts of being a professor. At that time, most children my age wanted to become a driver. Automobiles were very precious or valuable then, so automobile-related skills were critical. This was an expression of an agricultural society longing for industrialization and it is similar to young people today dreaming about their future in an information society. At "rst I thought it would be dif"cult to embark upon a scholarly career. When I was young, it was a dif"cult time of poverty and repression under a dictatorship; it was beyond my ability to dream about becoming an accomplished and courageous scholar, like the ones we had in South Korea in those days. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why I decided to study sociology and chose this "eld for my career. In high school, I liked liberal arts. I often heard my peers say that literature, history, and philosophy were the best college majors. I was in!uenced particularly by an older brother, Dong-Chin Lim, now an attorney at a Korean law "rm, who said the same thing. That was one reason why I entered Seoul National University and majored in liberal arts. My older brother originally wanted to study philosophy, but since he always did well in his studies, he could not overcome social pressures and ended up going to Seoul National University Law School. However, he did not care for law and did not study much for his exams; instead, he spent every day reading history, novels, and poetry. I owe a lot to my brother and the books he read for my intellectual foundation today. I have been able to learn about good and evil, right and wrong, truth and deceit, themes we "nd in today’s modern literature, because I also studied the literary classics in Korea and in the East and the West. My grandfather passed his love of books along to my father, so I have carried on the family tradition of having all kinds of books in the house. In particular, I am proud to say that I have a lot of Korean history books. I was able to learn a lot about history, such as the fact that Manchuria once belonged to Korea, Shin Ch’ae-ho’s

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“the greatest event in Korea’s 1,000-year history,” and how Korea was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel, as well as the Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s speech at the Washington Press Club in 1950 where he said Korea was outside the U.S. defense parameter in East Asia. I learned about historical Korean "gures such as the nationalist Kim Ku, independence leader Y! Un-hy!ng, and the "rst President of the Republic of Korea Syngman Rhee (Yi S"ng-man). I also learned about General Douglas MacArthur and his plans to invade Manchuria, and about many other issues that are still controversial in our modern history. I became interested in sociology through literature and history. While literature is an exploration of human existence and human imagination, history is a record of facts and social transformation. Sociology is situated right between literature’s exploration of imagination and history’s recording of facts. To me, sociology is both "ction and non"ction because we do not just cite facts about people and eras, but we also re!ect and think about their meanings. This is some of the background behind my motivation to change my undergraduate major from literature to sociology. Sociology is literature + history + α. In sociology, we can utilize either “humanism” or “computers” for this alpha term. Sociology enables us to explore the human character of different times and spaces by applying the scienti"c method. Compared to the other social sciences such as political science and economics, sociology includes both personal views and social accounts, which sociology derives by exploring human imagination and society’s historical records. Sociology gains insight though differentiation and integration of social structure and social change, and we use various qualitative and quantitative methods to do our analysis. Life is a journey characterized by both optimism and pessimism. I cannot overemphasize the fact that studying sociology enabled me to escape a pessimistic viewpoint. South Korea experienced a dif"cult period between the student-inspired revolution that toppled the Syngman Rhee government on April 19, 1960, and the Kwangju uprising of May 18, 1980. You cannot imagine how valuable it was to have maintained an optimistic attitude for my future during this dif"cult period in Korea’s modern history. Of course, South Korean society has both a bright side and a dark side, and sociology reveals both the suffering and compassion that can be found on the dark side. I believe sociology has given me the opportunity to develop a sense of “re!ective pessimism” if not “critical optimism”. *y College 6ays Sociology as an academic discipline began in the West. Of course, Korea’s intellectual history reveals an abundant awareness of social science issues, including references to the ideas of Confucius and Mencius, as well as discussions on the applications of practical science and the adoption of ideas from Ching Dynasty China. However, it is embarrassing to say that sociology came to Korea from the West through Japan. Yu Kil-jun, a member of a faction that advocated the opening and modernization of Korea, introduced sociology in the nineteenth century as kunhak !!"" or the “study of groups”. The term changed to sahoehak (#$") or the “study of society” during the Japanese colonial period.

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Sociology is one of the main social science disciplines today, along with political science and economics. However, sociology was initially not received as something useful in Korea. For a long time, Korean high school education associated sociology with “socialism” or “social survey”. When I was in college, there were only "ve South Korean universities with sociology departments: Korea University, Ky!ngbuk University, Seoul National University, Seoul Women’s University, and Yonsei University. Now I feel that I am living in a different age since almost all colleges and universities in Korea have sociology departments. Sociology in Korea is presently undergoing a process whereby it must become more creative and less imitative. Korean sociology has gone through the imitation of foreign theories and critical reconstruction to a formulation of a self-generated Korean perspective, but the "eld has not been able to move beyond this second stage. Almost all concepts, theories, and methods in Korean sociology are borrowed from sociology in America and Europe. This underlines the fact that Korean sociology has an identity crisis to goes along with skepticism about its relevancy. If you look at the developmental process of Korean sociology, you will notice that it was in!uenced by Japanese sociology during the colonial period, and after the liberation in 1945 it was in!uenced by sociology in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and other Western countries. Therefore, we can say that Korea has been an “importer and consumer” of American and European sociology. Since its inception, Korean sociology has been underdeveloped because it has been dependent upon the outside world. Among the countries in East Asia, South Korea has been relatively sensitive to the changes abroad in sociology; however, South Korea has been relatively insensitive to solving its own social problems. As we record and explain facts, the next generation is burdened with the obligation of establishing an independent or autogenous Korean sociology. My time in college was characterized by endless demonstrations and de"ance against the government. In the 1960s, the per capita national income was no more than $250, and the outcomes of presidential and general elections were always in!uenced by government power and money. The Korean people desired both economic development and political democracy. There were several events that were suf"cient to elicit public indignation during those times. For example, after the military coup d’état led by Park Ch!ng-h"i in 1961, the government concluded a controversial treaty to normalize relations with Japan in 1965. Then we had the third constitutional revision in 1969, the dispatch of Korean troops to participate in the Vietnam War, the “Yushin” (literally “revitalizing reforms”) Constitution of 1972 that consolidated Park’s dictatorial powers, and the oppression of labor. Schools were repeatedly closed in the wake of continuous student demonstrations. I could not make sense of my freshman year because of our opposition and struggles against the third constitutional revision, but I continued on to my sophomore year anyway. And during my junior year I could not but !ee to the countryside after having participated in protests against Park’s dictatorial powers. I consider myself fortunate and grateful to my deceased former professor, Lee Hae-y!ng, for having learned as much as I did since we experienced many dif"culties with our school. In college, I often listened to others rather than openly express my own opinion because I was usually embroiled in some social confusion or disorder rather than

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being personally engaged in debates. Now people usually associate with like-minded people, but I remember that at that time, junior and senior colleagues had signi"cant debates and ideological disputes as Korean society was experiencing reforms and change in order to establish true independence. Of course, there were divisions between moderates and radicals on the right and the left, and there was also party in"ghting, and factionalism was quite strong. For example, some of the questions that concerned us in these debates were: Should we place more emphasis on nation or class? Should humanity or ideology take precedence? What things should we discard when it comes to individual choice and organizational unity? Between the early 1960s and the mid 1980s, South Korean society appeared to be democratic only on the surface. The constitution guaranteed freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly, but these rights were severely restricted. In particular, academic freedom was not allowed at universities. One reason was the threat of North Korean communism after the Korean War, but the government’s extreme right ideology of anti-communism did not permit academic research related to socialism. Any books with links to Marx, Lenin, or leftist thought were banned at universities, so leftist ideology was simply glossed over as too alarming to be covered in schools. At that time, it was dif"cult to expect South Korean universities to make much progress in sociology since there was no academic freedom. In those days, however, Marx and Weber were the most notable scholars in classical sociology. Since Marxism was pushed underground in South Korea, the universities emphasized Weber. It is very interesting to note that many Koreans who were trained in Weber’s approach later converted to Marxism or neo-Marxism after they were exposed to Marxism when they studied abroad. When I was in college, the dominant paradigm in sociology was structural-functionalism, which was introduced from the United States. Of course, con!ict theory, which came from Europe, was another important approach, but structural-functionalism was a central theory in explaining the structure and changes in Korean society at that time. My colleagues in the sociology department and I preferred con!ict theory to structural-functionalism because con!ict theory was de"nitely recognized as having greater explanatory power for Korean society, which has experienced con!ict and volatility throughout history. At that time, the young people in the sociology department were devoted to “sociological imagination”, which was C. Wright Mills’ alternative critique of structural-functionalism in mainstream American sociology. In particular, we could not help but read his writings that denounced the power elite in American society, as well as his writings about the Cuban revolution’s taunting of Americans. In Korea, there were hot debates among Marxist scholars over whether productive forces or production relations were more important for South Korean development, but we did not have those debates in university classrooms. Instead, we studied mainstream modernization theory, which claimed Korean development would be possible if we introduced capital, institutions, culture, and ideas from the advanced capitalist countries. Modernization theory was presented as the ultimate development theory for Korea’s future, but we were unfamiliar with dependency theory of Central and South America. Although Koreans had concerns about Westernization that

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would accompany Korean modernization based upon modernization theory and the development experience in Europe and America, we also stressed modernity’s creativity based upon a rediscovery of our traditions. Scholarly 8'rs'its9 Bet1een Theory and 8ractice I majored in the sociology of development, which includes more than just social and cultural aspects of development. Sociology of development takes a comprehensive approach that includes the politics and economics of development as well. Development actually includes several changes in a nation’s society such as urbanization, industrialization, and secularization. I was motivated to major in the sociology of development because I wanted to "nd the reasons for the underdevelopment of South Korean society. After the Western powers encroached upon East Asia in the nineteenth century, why did Japan succeed early on with development? But why couldn’t China? What were the pluses and minuses of Japan developing under capitalism and China developing under socialism? Could the different experiences of these two cases provide lessons for the development of North and South Korea? When I was discharged from the military in 1976, I was trying to "gure out what I would do, and studying abroad was one of my options. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, but there were very few jobs at the time. Furthermore, my friends and family dissuaded me from pursuing such a “spineless” position while South Korea was ruled by an authoritarian government. However, I was still anxious about studying abroad. I felt a sense of hypocrisy about studying in the United States since I had always been talking about Korean independence and autonomy. In particular, there was no way to explain it to my friends who had endured so many hardships as activists in the student movements. However, my friends encouraged me to further my study abroad. In particular, my late older brother, Gill-Chin Lim, advised me about how to get a scholarship. I was fortunate enough to get a Harvard-Yenching fellowship to do my graduate study at Harvard. I learned a lot when I studied in the United States. I am indebted to my undergraduate professors in South Korea for having taught me the basic theories and methods in sociology. I am particularly grateful to Professor Kim Ky!ng-dong, Professor Han Wan-sang, and Hy-Sup Lim. Together, my professors taught me how to survive and adapt to different situations. In the United States, I mainly wanted to do comparative study on the modernization of China, Japan, and Korea. It was a sad fact that Korea was divided into North and South, but I was motivated to do this research because of the deplorable poverty and repression that I experienced. I was thinking about how and why South Korea had been left out of the ranks of developed countries, and I thought about ways to eradicate this problem. I learned about the domestic and international factors that affected development and underdevelopment in different countries. I met internationally renowned scholars at Harvard. Professor Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s views on Eastern and Western development were very helpful in satisfying my curiosity about the contrasts and differences in development. Under Professor Orlando Paterson I was able to learn about modernization theory

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and dependency theory, as well as the correlations between economic growth, democracy, and income distribution. Also, I was able to learn how to do case studies on developing countries. I abandoned my original conceptions about doing comparative research on the modernization of China, Japan, and Korea. Professor Theda Skocpol, an authority on comparative macro-social research and an extensive reader of primary historical sources, advised me that a comparative analysis using primary historical sources would be too time-consuming. I am a little embarrassed about my doctoral dissertation, but I had to be satis"ed with a case study of South Korea. Even though my advisor, Professor Ezra Vogel, discouraged me, my analytical view was that dependency theory offered a better explanation than modernization theory for South Korean development. At that time, dependency theory was an anathema to some of Harvard’s faculty, but coincidentally we watched Park Ch!ng-h"i’s government fall, and Professor Vogel ultimately supported my point of view. I was able to study and do my research on South Korea’s development and underdevelopment from the perspective of “dependent development”, which is one of the schools of dependency theory. Instead I applied Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory and Peter B. Evan’s dependent development model as a critique of the South Korean experience, and my conclusions were that South Korea was not as successful as Taiwan but was more successful than Brazil. I learned so many things. On the one hand, late developers like South Korea are constrained by the international political and economic systems, but on the other hand, they have some advantages as late developers. I also thought about the future of late developing countries when or if the constraints of the international capitalist system cancel out the bene"ts of late development. I approach the sociology of development from the perspective of political sociology. Political economy has been better than political sociology in explaining the development and underdevelopment of weak and poor countries. There are various approaches in political economy that include Marxist and liberal scholars. The problem is that there are limits to Marxist political economy explanation despite its strengths in explaining changes in the world economy and international relations. On the other hand, liberal international political economy explanation is weak in analyzing the dynamics between domestic political power and internal class relations. Political economy considers the relations between social structure, capital accumulation, and political power in the analysis of development and underdevelopment. This provides various perspectives on how industrialization and democratization affect national power and class alliances. However, political sociology can overcome political economy’s tendency to fall into reductionism or partial analysis. Political sociology’s approach has an advantage in explaining the differences in countries’ development and underdevelopment according to their regions and positions in the international political and economic system. I was not comfortable when I completed my studies in the United States and stood in front of a classroom in Korea. The Yushin system under Park had collapsed, but only the people in power changed as dictatorship and brutality continued. But I had no regrets or disappointment in studying sociology. The sacri"ces of the students who resisted the new military government under Ch!n Tu-hwan were great, but they

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were not satis"ed with their studies. I felt that we were committing another historical crime as we sat by and watched them. But eventually there was a consensus among younger and older students as well as activists about the meaning of democratization in South Korean society. This caused intellectuals to stand up and "ght for social reform. I realized how dif"cult it is to bring about social reform when I was a founding member of civil society groups such as the Nara Association for National Policy, the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice, and the Citizens’ Coalition for Political Reform. The grass roots movements in South Korean civil society are weak. This situation has enabled activists to distort the true meaning of civil society and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for their own political objectives. In sum, this has eroded the foundation required for future NGOs’ organizational growth. I still believe that social movement organizations should strive to obtain civil power rather than political power. Intellectuals can best support social movement organizations through their critical role of providing a fair exchange between civil society and government.
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sure that progressive elements were more important than conservative ones. Now that South Korea has democratized, it is important that the two sides maintain dialogue with each other. But the conservatives do not accept the leftist ideas and the progressives "nd the conservatives distasteful. There are con!icts over the implementation of social reforms. There is no way to avoid social con!ict between political classes and societal groups because the con!ict over reform is wrapped up in democracy, economic development, and the future direction of national uni"cation. Unfortunately, there is no third way between progressives and conservatives in South Korean society. In the future I expect centrists to in!uence the leftists and conservatives to become more moderate. In South Korean society, professors are considered typical intellectuals. Intellectuals exist mainly to agonize over various social problems and then warn society about them. Intellectuals have the privilege of freely exposing falsehoods and emphasizing the truth to make society better. Weber indicated early on that people judge intellectuals on the value of their "ndings, not simply on the facts. Society’s detractors and supporters use this as a pretext to confront each other. The concept of “intellectuals” was "rst introduced in Korea under Japanese colonialism. At that time, the Russian term “intelligentsia” was introduced under the theme of “exterminating imperialism and establishing national independence”, so it is understandable why the term “intelligentsia” was more common than “intellectual”. In general, South Korean intellectuals have been adamant about being active critics of “the establishment”. The general consensus is that this inclination dates back to the period when Russia was undergoing turmoil as part of the semiperiphery in the early twentieth century. It’s obvious that the birth of Korean intellectuals can be traced back to the Japanese colonial period when the bene"ts of high school education provided young people with an exposure to Western culture and education. Among them are several intellectuals who came from backgrounds as landowners or industrialists. However, this did not provide the material base needed to sustain intellectual creativity in Korea. Under the Japanese colonial system, nascent intellectuals were all antagonized by their strong views of enlightenment, revolution, or nihilism. Throughout history, intellectual views have played the interesting role of intermediary between the masses and the political elites. Through the power of knowledge, intellectuals can give the masses the will to resist oppression, or else the public might become despondent and give up. And the role of intellectuals in!uences whether the public continues to monitor those in power and whether the people will have the disposition to participate in civil society. Intellectual criticisms fall into three general categories. First, there are technical criticisms. These include expressions of regret from the viewpoint of established power. Second, there are moral or ethical criticisms, or the admonishment of current social contradictions. Third, there are historical criticisms. These would include the denunciation of current society from an alternative social viewpoint. The American and English traditions go back and forth between technical and ethical critiques, while the French and German intellectual traditions link ethical and historical critiques. I think the South Korean case is closer to the latter than the former. South Koreans view their society through the idealistic lenses of nationalism, democracy, capitalism, national culture, the

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ecology and environment, and other civil society causes. This creates a fundamental problem, as South Koreans demand that intellectuals play their traditional role as critics while making a considerable contribution to the public discussion of social issues. Intellectuals as a group are branded as being unable to establish common ground for mutual understanding. We can "nd the main cause of intellectual diversity based on socio-economic background and career, but according to a Marxist perspective, this diversity originates in the obscure position that intellectual activity holds in its relationship with social production. The ambiguous class position of intellectual activities can bring about free or liberal thinking and independent knowledge through the “habitus” of intellectuals. But the freedom and nonconformity of intellectuals gives them the ability to understand other political classes and societal groups. After !irting with utopia, intellectuals face the constraints of returning to real world ideologies, which can reveal the self-contradictions of intellectuals. The Asian "nancial crisis of 1997–1998 forced South Korea to accept conditionality and restructuring under the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While this experience has led intellectuals to look at the costs of globalization, it opens them up to new ideas and an environment that in turn is creating a new type of intellectual with more originality and creativity. After Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Korean society and its intellectuals underwent rapid change. Sometimes the leftist masses have had their day, and sometimes the government in power has had its way. However, there is no doubt that South Korean intellectuals have been in decline because of disorganization. Of course, if you consider the heterogeneity of the intellectuals due to their different social origins, this discrepancy should be expected. However, intellectuals can become the target of South Korean public criticism even when their actions and words are limited. The vast majority of South Koreans admire the morality of intellectuals, but at the same time they feel a sense of anger towards intellectuals because they believe it is immoral and opportunistic for intellectuals to keep quiet on social issues, such as development, democracy, welfare, and reuni"cation. As I grow older, I re!ect on myself and believe I am not that kind of intellectual. Concl'ding >emar@s In the social sciences today, there is a wall between the disciplines. Political scientists, economists, and sociologists tend to be unaware of each other’s research. As the social sciences become more and more specialized, they become more distant from the public. The fact is that political science, economics, and sociology are becoming isolated. However, sociology’s strong point is that it considers a wide range of variables—political, economic, social, and cultural—in its social inquiries. Therefore, sociology can overcome barriers and present its research "ndings to the whole educational system. A number of social issues in South Korean society are now the subject of academic research, such as democracy and market economy, ethical issues surrounding animal cloning, social movements and progressive

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politics, economic growth and income distribution, and environmental preservation and the ecology. Sociology is a great academic discipline because it can take a bird’s eye view of the world. Studying sociology feels like being an eagle viewing the whole world and its prey from high in the sky. Sociology connects the micro and the macro because we use both “microscopes and telescopes” in our analysis. As we go through time and space, sociological imagination enables us to discover the past and to explore the future. That is why sociology is so fascinating. Sociology can provide an outlook and keen insight into the past and the future from a present perspective. National borders are becoming blurred because of increasing foreign capital !ows and the developments in information technologies and telecommunications. The blurring of borders is the result of globalization. The world is experiencing the antinomy of forces pushing some of it together while pulling some of it apart. The world is crying out for peace and justice, but war and injustice continue to spread. We see it in various forms —war, disputes, and con!ict. For example, the United States’ invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; countries seeking their self-interests through trade wars and environmental disputes; and con!icts between East and West, particularly the con!ict between Christianity and Islam, are all issues that teach us how important it is for humanity to coexist harmoniously. This is why sociology is important. Sociology can promote the value of being a “global citizen” by enabling people to look beyond their own societies and increase their sensitivities to cultural differences. Sociology is an academic discipline to be fond of. Antagonism and enmity are ubiquitous in human society, but sociology possesses the knowledge and power to increase social harmony and unity. In the era of globalization, con!icts are worsening between localities, nations, regions and civilizations. Fortunately, however, sociology can decrease the suspicions and con!icts that arise from social differences and "ssures, and therefore it can establish the trust needed to build a better world. Sociology is expected to play a signi"cant role in making peace and harmony in today’s globalized world. Selected BibliograBhy1 Lim, Hyun-Chin. 1985.* Dependent Development in Korea: 1963–1979. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. ———. 1987.* Modern Korea and Dependency Theory. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. ———. 1993. Political Economy of Democratization in the Third World. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. ———. 1998. Korean Development in a Global Age. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.

1 All works except those indicated with an asterisk are in Korean and are here mentioned in English translation.

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———. 2001a. The Understanding of 21st Century Korean Society. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. ———. 2001b. Whither Korean Society Go? Seoul: Baiksan Publishing House. ———. 2004. What is the Problem for the Korean Society? Seoul: Baiksan Publishing House. ———. 2005. Politics and Society of Korea in Transition: Knowledge, Power, and Social Movement. Seoul: Jipmundang. Lim, Hyun-Chin, ed. 1987. Third World, Capitalism and Korea. Seoul: Pummoon Co. Lim, Hyun-Chin, et al. 1988. Sociology Today. Seoul: Pummoon Co. ———. 1989. Capitalism and Socialism: Theory and Practice. Seoul: Saekyung. ———. 1998. Quality of Life for Koreans. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. ———. 2000a. Science, Technology, and Knowledge-based Society in the New Millennium. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. ———. 2000b. Social Science Approach to Reunication of South and North Korea towards 21st Century. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. ———. 2001. Historical Review of Korean Intellectuals: From Civilizing Thinker to Knowledge Guerrilla. Seoul: Mineum Publishing Company. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Ho-Keun Song, eds. 1995. Korean Society and Politics in Transition. Seoul: Nanam. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Hong-Ik Jung. 1987. New Trends in Social Theory: Society, Economy, and Polity. Seoul: Nanam. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Jang-Jip Choi, eds. 1993. The Challenge from Civil Society: The State, Capital, and Labor in the Democratization of South Korea. Seoul: Nanam. ———. 1997. Democracy and Civil Society in Korea. Seoul: Nanam. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Kyong-Dong Kim. 1999. The 21st Century Vision of Business Elites. Seoul: Literature and Intellect. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Kyung-Won Kim, eds. 1995. Globalization: Challenges and Responses. Seoul: Nanam. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Se-Yong Lee, eds. 2003. Risk and Safety in Korea. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Suk-Choon You, eds. 2004. What Is Network? Korean Groupism and Network. Seoul: Tradition and Modernity. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Ui-Jong Suh. 2002. Korean Venture Company and Venture Entrepreneurship. Seoul: Human Love Publishing House. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Yong-Hak Kim. 2000. Comparative Sociology. Seoul: Nanam. Lim, Hyun-Chin and Young-Chul Chung. 2005. For Unied Korea in the 21st Century: Dialectics of Division and Reunication. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Lim, Hyun-Chin, Byung-Kook Kim, and Suk-Choon You, eds. 1991. Latin American Politics and Society: Conict and Change. Seoul: Nanam. Lim, Hyun-Chin, Hong-Kyu Park, and Hong-Ik Jung, eds. 1992. Sociology of Sports: Theories and Issues. Seoul: Nanam.

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Lim, Hyun-Chin, Jong-Hoe Yang, Do-Hwan Koo, Sung-Tae Hong, and Gil-Sung Park. 2002. Environmental Issues, Movements, and Policies in Asia-Pacic Region. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Lim, Hyun-Chin, Min-Suk Ahn, and Hong-Ik Jung. 2002. New Sociology of Sports. Seoul: Baiksan Publishing House. Lim, Hyun-Chin, Tai-Hwan Kwon, and Ho-Keun Song, eds. 2001. Civil Society and Social Movements in South Korea. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.

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Cha$ter )*

B,ilding a 2elational Theory of Society9 : Sociological ;o,rney
1. A Sociological Journey into the Crucible of Late Modernity The choice to dedicate myself to sociology @as strictly related @ith the fact of haAing dee$ly shared yo,ng $eo$leBs restlessness d,ring the second half of the siCtiesD and haAing $layed an actiAe role in the $rotest action of those daysE I neither @as a reAol,tionaryD nor did I share GarCist or anarchist ideasE Sim$lyD I @anted a betterD more h,mane @orldE Sociology for me @as a Aocation to realiIe s,ch @orldD @hose Aision @as ins$ired by a,thors s,ch as the Jrench $hiloso$her ;acK,es GaritainD the Italian $hiloso$her Jelice BalboD and the Italian sociologist :chille :rdigLE LooNing bacND ho@eAerD belonging to the Ogeneration of )PQRS meant something differentD namely to liAe the destiny of a generation that @itnessed the success and the decline of modernityE I @as born right after the Second Torld TarD in an almost traditional societyE I gre@ ,$ in the moderniIation of the fties and siCtiesE TodayD I nd myself in a globaliIed society that deletes traces of times $astE To $,t it another @ayD I @as ed,cated in the c,lt,re of classics and great storytelling Ugrand récitVD @hile no@ I

)Q*

Sociologists in a Global Age

liAe in a society that is not able to selfWre$resent anymoreD celebrating the end of the great storytelling and stating the death of the h,man s,bXectE Gy researches started @ith the idea of b,ilding a ,sef,l sociology to reform society according to a h,manistic $ers$ectiAeE :ct,allyD they became a reection on the $arabolaYrising rstD and then fallingYof modernityE I had to rethinN @hat OmaNesS a societyD ho@ and @hy a societal cong,ration is born differently from the former oneD rather than st,dy the $ossible reforms of the giAen UmodernV societyE Thile I @as coAering s,ch a Xo,rneyD society became eAer more ,idD ,ncertain and risNyE B,t I did not change my aimE Titho,t sto$$ing to ,nderstand @hat $ostmodern society isD I tried to o,tline the characteristics of @hat I name OafterWmodern societySD of @hich I @ill talN laterE Gost sociologists do claim today the im$ossibility of b,ilding a Otheory of societySE Zthers assert thatD as society becomes liK,idD @e m,st b,ild a liK,id theoryE I belieAe instead that sociology co,ld and sho,ld deAelo$ a ne@ theory of society meant as a learning $rocess of social transformations @hichD as emerging from modernityBs mor$hogenesisD o,tste$ the Aery modernityE In this brief contrib,tion I @ill trace in o,tline the most signicant deAelo$ing moments of my sociological tho,ghtD informing that it tooN sha$e in steady com$arison @ith the st,dy of em$irical $henomena and eld researchE I @ill start by recollecting @hat @as my Oresearch tracNSE I @ill then highlight the main $assages that led me to ,nderstand society as a Orelational realitySD crossing s@ords @ith f,nctionalismE I @ill trace a brief synthesis of my theoryD @hich I name Orelational sociologySD @hose core lays in catching $ostWf,nctionalist Unamely relationalV forms of social differentiationE In my concl,sionsD I @ill briey reca$it,late my Xo,rney and the Aie@ of the emerging society offered by relational sociologyE 2. Searching for a New Theory of Society The Starting Point Then I started to st,dy sociologyD the $reAailing theories @ere GarCismD f,nctionalismD and critical theory UJranNf,rt SchoolVE They @ere [strongB beca,se they $ro$osed a some@hat OallWabsorbingS UholisticV idea of societyE It @as the time @hen sociology @as elaborated @ithin the frame@orN of the nationWstate and the @elfare state @as ,nderstood as a com$romise bet@een ca$italistic marNet and $olitical democracyE The iss,e at staNeD for sociologyD @as to ,nderstand the $ossible eAol,tion of that sort of societyE GarCism @as then a dominant strand in ItalyD as @ell as in a large $art of E,ro$eD b,t I considered it an ideology rather than a scientic analysis of the social realityE I g,essed thatD all aloneD it @o,ld not haAe come a long @ayD @hile it @o,ld rather haAe strengthened in symbiosis @ith f,nctionalism Ua thing thatD in my o$inionD @as later realiIedVE Since I considered GarCism and f,nctionalism as t@o considerably incom$lete @ays to inter$ret social realityD for me it @as clear that the sociology to be b,ilt in the f,t,re sho,ld aAoid both of themD as @ell as their miCE

Building a Relational Theory of Society

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In those yearsD I felt the JranNf,rt theory as Aery attractiAeD most of all for its criticism to@ards $ositiAism and ca$italismE B,t I considered that theory Aery @eaN as scientic analysisD beca,se it s,bordinated sociology to the dream of the Of,ll accom$lishmentS of modernityBs ideals UI thinN of ;]rgen HabermasVD th,s destined to $erish @ith the Aanishing of s,ch dreamE LooNing bacN todayD I thinN that things @ent eCactly as I foresa@E The a,thor that attracted me the most @as Talcott <arsonsE :ltho,ghD at that timeD his tho,ght @as act,ally marginaliIed in the Italian ,niAersitiesD I $erceiAed the charm of his theory beca,se it introd,ced the sociological disci$line in a systematic and rational @ayE It offered a Aery so$histicated theory of modernityE ThereforeD I @as com$elled to consider it a staging $ostE Gy $rimary intention @as to correct the defects of the <arsonian theoryD th,s OreAisingS itE It @as abo,t b,ilding a good theory of society by aAoiding <arsonsB mistaNesD notably the one to consider a model of society Uthe _orth :merican oneV as the most adAanced Utherefore the bestV in a s,$$osed eAol,tionary scaleE I initially started a dialog,e @ith the neoW<arsonians to Aerify their ability to s,r$ass the deciencies of <arsonsB eAol,tionistic and modernistic AisionE In $artic,larD I dialog,ed @ith ;effrey CE :leCander U@hom I met in )P`R in a$$salaVE B,t ,nfort,nately :leCander neAer abandoned the modern U<arsonianV idea of sociologyD being tied to the classics and to the f,nctionalist a$$roachE His neoW f,nctionalism co,ld not ans@er my K,estionsE :ct,allyD es$ecially as from the half of the )PP*sD :leCander did not deAelo$ a ne@ theory of societyD b,t he c,ltiAated the cultural studiesE He c,lt,raliIed the conce$tsD namely he led the reality to the symbols of Nno@ledgeE ThereforeD I addressed to a more intense dialog,e @ith the other c,rrent of the soWcalled neoWf,nctionalismD the E,ro$ean one re$resented by _iNlas L,hmannD @hom I met for the rst time in )P`` d,ring a seminar in Bologna and @ith @hom I had many $ersonal conAersations in the )PR*sE Jrom the beginningD it @as clear to me that L,hmann @as com$letely reb,ilding the <arsonian theory in terms of the emerging global society Uthat he named world systemVE He @as then the tr,e interloc,torD beca,se he $ro$osed a theory that carried <arsonsB f,nctionalist a$$roach to its eCtremesE :ct,allyD my relational theory gre@ ,$ as an alternative ans@er to L,hmannian sociologyE The more L,hmann has engaged himself in doing an antiW h,manistic sociologyD the more I haAe tried to elaborate a sociology that co,ld ,$date a h,manistic Aie@ of social realityE Jor meD to haAe a h,manistic Aision means to ,nderstand social reality not as a res,lt of ,nintended Ua,to$oieticV mechanismsD b,t rather as a h,man $rod,ctD namely of the interactions bet@een agency and social str,ct,reD eAen if social reality is neither an intentional o,tcome nor made ,$ of $eo$leD b,t of social relations Uthat eCceed the indiAid,alsB intentionsVE =,ring this Xo,rneyD I had a target in my mind that did not match any eCisting sociologyE LiNe <arsonsD I @anted to OclingS sociology to h,man reality Usociologically obserAedVD and to conceiAe it as a Nno@ledge being able to $roXect itself into the f,t,reE I @anted to be realistic rather than $ositiAisticE The analytical realism $ro$osed by <arsons in The Structure of Social Action U)Pb`V offered an interesting base of de$art,reD b,t it @as totally ins,fcient and misleading inasm,ch as it ended b,ilding a constr,ctiAistD rather than realisticD sociologyE To meet my

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needsD sociological realism sho,ld become critical and relational9 criticalD in so far as Nno@ledge is an al@aysW$roblematic relation bet@een obserAer and obserAedd relationalD inasm,ch as the obXect to inAestigate is a reality made ,$ of concrete social relations and not other things Us,ch as $sychological motiAes or material obXectsVE S,ch sociological realism sho,ld be able to Nee$ o$en bo,ndaries bet@een social reality and transcendency UreligionV on the one handD and bet@een the social arena and its material enAironment Ubio$hysicalV on the other handE I had to leaAe behind the biological f,nctionalist $aradigm emerging at that timeD in order to elaborate a $aradigm being able to catch the sui generis reality Unot biological and Omore thanS f,nctionalV of @hat is meant to be OsocialSE ThereforeD I left <arsonsD for @hom sociology is a re$resentation of successful modernityD so,ght according to schemes of social eAol,tion U@ith strong afnities to biological eAol,tionVE SimilarlyD I decided to criticiIe L,hmannD for @hom sociology is an antiWh,manistic and sNe$tical scienceD @ith the tasN to OenlightenS @hat sim$ly Oha$$ensSD leaAing aside any h,man ill,sion and $assionE =rifting a@ay from all sorts of f,nctionalismD a maXor role @as $layed by the idea that social realityD as $rod,ct and eC$ression of @hat is h,manD contains a $rinci$le of transcendency U=onati c**eaVE :s for the social actorD s,ch a $rinci$le means that eAery reality leads to another one that transcends itD beca,se it giAes it a meaning that refers to a reality OotherS Uof different NindV from the tested oneE Zn an em$irical leAelD s,ch $rinci$le becomes eAident beca,seD in eAery sociological s,rAeyD the Aariable of religio,s faith UbeliefV is al@ays the most discriminating oneE Jrom the theoretical $oint of Aie@D I conceiAe of transcendency as the latency of latencyD @ithin a $rocess that may $otentially go ad in!nitum UL of L of L ! in the :fIL schemeVE J,nctionalism leads to deny transcendency beca,se it does not consider the oAerf,nctional character of social relations UOoAerf,nctionalS means that m,ch more than a f,nction or a discrete n,mber of f,nctions is reAealed and eC$ressed in a social relationVE :ct,allyD <arsons had a Aery limited com$rehension of the transcendent nat,re that is incident to social realityD @hile L,hmann has clearly erased the sense of transcendence from sociologyE In my researchD I haAe fo,nd that sociology can be no more the selfW,nderstanding of adaptive upgrading modernity U<arsonsVD X,st beca,se s,ch historical cong,ration is bo,nd to disa$$earE :s for L,hmannD his idea of sociology may be a$t to $roAide technical instr,ments being able to dee$er obserAe reality as a $rocess UeEgED the conce$ts of selfWreferenceD a,to$oiesis and reWentryVD b,t it cannot $roAide an ans@er to the basic $roblem of the signi!cance to the social actors of $henomenaD formsD and social relationsE The $roblem of signicance eCceeds the one of senseD meant as sensible $erce$tionD beca,se it transcends @hat has been giAen yetE The enlightenment of o$eratiAe mechanisms introd,ced by L,hmann is an im$ortant cognitiAe elementE B,tD beyond itD @e m,st attach meaning to social factsD @hich are intrinsically o$en to eAerWne@er symbolic and str,ct,ral relationsE Someone @o,ld say that I might haAe searched else@hereD for eCam$le among the soWcalled $ostW<arsonian or $ostmodern theoriesE It @o,ld taNe a long time to talN of my stances on all those theoriesE EAen a$$reciating the @orN of many a,thors UliNe ;ean Ba,drillardD
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red,ctiAeD conationaryD and eAent,ally misleadingE These theories stay $risoner of Aicio,s circles and lead to $aranoiaE To my mindD the soWcalled O$ostmodernistsS do toss and t,rn in the late modernityBs
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Sociologists in a Global Age

considers relation as a $rod,ct of str,ct,resd it re$resents another sort of conation bet@een str,ct,ralism and indiAid,alismd it does not enter the social relation as s,chE BrieyD beca,se it is a form of relationism Uhandenberghe )PPPVE I do not agree @ith the relational sociology of G,stafa Emirbayer U)PP`VD sim$ly beca,se it is based on a relatiAistic $ragmatism that f,lly belongs to $ostmodernismD $lacing itself o$$osite to critical realismE In shortD I ref,se all forms of relationismD beca,se they consider the relation as a $rod,ct of a miCing of indiAid,al actions and social str,ct,resD @itho,t seeing that the relation is a sui generis realityD not able to be mani$,lated at @illD in terms of c,lt,ral relatiAism and constr,ctionismE It is no accident that o,t@ardly o$$osite a,thorsD liNe the theorists of rational choice U;ames ColemanV and of neoWGarCist str,ct,ralism U
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These st,dies led me to co$e @ith <arsonsB pattern variablesE He str,ct,red them as Ae dichotomies Ulater red,ced to fo,rV analytically artic,lating the $air Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft introd,ced by Jerdinand TjnniesE St,dying the socialiIation $rocesses occ,rring in the shift from one generation to anotherD d,ring a comm,nity research in a little to@n in central Italy called Gontegranaro U:rdigL and =onati )P`QVD I sa@ that the dichotomo,s scheme of Aal,e orientations $ro$osed by <arsons @as not tenableE The reality I had in front of me @as a OdoingS of relations combining the pattern variables according to almost neAer coherent and stable modalitiesE anliNe <arsonsD I @as not concerned abo,t @hether the balance of Aal,e orientations @o,ld tend to@ards one eCtreme or the otherD or @hether it @as more or less integratedE I @as concerned abo,t ,nderstanding the relation Uthe relational net@orNV bet@een the pattern variablesE That @as ho@ my concern for a Orelational readingS of the pattern variables @as bornE In my o$inionD they sho,ld be inter$reted not as analytical and d,alistic categories of Aal,es directing the indiAid,al actionsD b,t as relational @ebsE TaNen from the $oint of Aie@ of the concrete social relationsD the pattern variables seemed to me liNe threads $rod,cing Aery different tiss,es de$ending on ho@ they combineE To the $oint that the ideal ty$es of Gemeinschaft and GesellschaftD @hen they are meant as $,re ty$esD become $athological $henomenaE In the Aery Gontegranaro s,rAeyD the em$irical data sho@ed that Aal,es @ere g,ided by r,les and not Aice AersaD liNe <arsons hy$othesiIed in his :fIL scheme U@here value commitments legitimate and g,ide the social r,lesVE In other @ordsD <arsonsB cybernetic hierarchy did not @orNE It @as clear that I sho,ld introd,ce more contingency in :fILE Jrom thisD I got the idea to reform,late :fIL in a relational senseE Jor meD :fIL does not describe an action systemD b,t a relational formE In s,ch formD there is contingency for each element that maNes it ,$D and for each inner relation bet@een elementsE Their integration is neither ca,sed by s$ecic reg,lations UI of :fILVD nor by the system as s,chD b,t by the emerging effect coming from the elementsB combination U:D fD ID LVE In GontegranaroD it @as not $ossible to talN of an integrated action systemE The socioWc,lt,ral integration of GontegranaroBs comm,nity @as K,ite s,$ercialE :ct,allyD seAeral s,bWc,lt,res U$remodern ItalicD CatholicD comm,nistD liberalV did merge and interlaceE 2ight this merging of different and o$$osite c,lt,resD @ith neither agreement on the ,ltimate Aal,es nor o$en social conictD made <arsonsB theory of social order ina$$licableE Social order @as based on social relations @here o$$osite Aal,es coeCistedE There @as no American creed to standardiIe the coeCistent c,lt,resE The order had a sui generis relational character that eC$lained @hyD eAen in $resence of a Aery strong ind,strial deAelo$ment creating dee$ $sychologicalD c,lt,ralD socialD and $olitical imbalancesD ho@eAer there @as not an o$en social conictE S,ch direct eC$erience gaAe birth to the idea of Orelational orderSD not made ,$ of shared Aal,esD b,t stemming from the fact that the relations bet@een heterogeneo,s Aal,es are able to cong,re some sort of coeCistenceE In s,ch orderD the different elements Uincl,ding Aal,esV are not f,nctionally b,t OrelationallyS disting,ishedE In other @ordsD the social order stands on [$arallelB symbolic com$leCesD @hich neAer get a f,ll integration bet@een themD eAen if they are al@ays connected one anotherE

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The st,dies abo,t familyD @hich I cond,cted from the )P`*s to the $resent dayD @ere another eld @here f,nctionalist theoryD liNe GarCism and critical theoryD receiAed strong disclaimers U=onati )P`iD )PRQD )PRPVE :ll those s,rAeys set the $roblem of ho@ the moderniIation $rocesses @o,ld modify relations bet@een $,blic and $riAate s$heresE :ccording to <arsonsD as for many othersD modern society re$rod,ces itself and $rogresses ,sing the $,blick $riAate diAide as an o$$osition bet@een t@o $olaritiesE Jor me insteadD the $,blick $riAate distinction sho,ld be read as a relation bet@een t@o reAersible and crossable sidesE =ifferent from f,nctionalismD @hich considers distinctions as binary d,alismsD the social $henomena I @as st,dying sho@ed that the distinctions @ere act,ally relationsD and that they sho,ld be treated as s,chE Thether this @ay @as follo@edD it @o,ld become $ossible to catch realities Ne$t hidden from f,nctionalismE That @as ho@ I conce$t,aliIed the eCistence of social forms not seen by mainstream sociologyE I named them social private spheres and relational goodsE I @ill try to briey eC$lain @hat these areE In E,ro$ean sociology in the )P`*sD the $,blic coincided @ith the stateD and the $riAate referred to eAerything that the $,blic s$here left to the indiAid,alsB tastes and $referencesE It seemed that nothing eCisted in the middleE I did elaborate then a conce$t that deed both holistic and indiAid,alistic sociologyE This is the Osocial $riAateS conce$tD @hich refers to those independent social s$heres that do act neither ,nder the stateBs control nor for marNetBs $riAate $rot U=onati )P`RVE It has to do @ith all those organiIations UformallinformalVD $roAided @ith Osocial s,bXectiAitySD @hich are neither strictly $,blic Uin the E,ro$ean senseVD nor strictly $riAateD and @hich mediate the relations bet@een the t@o $oles of the state and the $riAatiIed indiAid,al U=onati )PR`VE I hy$othesiIed that the Aery moderniIing $rocesses made the deAelo$ment of s,ch s$heres necessaryD $artic,larly in those areas of social life @here the tension bet@een $,blic and $riAate generates a relational Aac,,m and $athologyE : Othird societal $oleS sho,ld be deAelo$edD act,ally made ,$ of relational s$heres different from marNet and stateE The reason for s,ch a hy$othesis @as strictly sociological9 a moderniIing society needed relational s$heres not arising to s,$$ort a $olitical hegemony Uas theoriIed by :ntonio framsciVD b,t to afrm the social a,tonomies of ciAil s,bXectsE In my o$inionD this eC$ectation occ,rred seeing thatD in the last decadesD this sort of retic,lar organiIations s$read noticeably in many adAanced co,ntries UAol,ntary organiIationsD social coo$eratiAesD social $romotion associationsD ciAil fo,ndationsD cons,mersB associationsD family associationsD and generally the associational @orld named nonpro!t by the :ngloWSaCon c,lt,reD a term that I recNon to be red,ctiAe and misleading beca,se it does not catch the relational trait of s,ch social s$heres9 =onati )PPRVE The conce$t of Osocial $riAateS had a certain fort,neD being no@ of common ,se in the Italian lang,ageE It is contained in many national and regional la@s that concern the s,bsidiary role of social $riAate s$heres in social $oliciesE The idea of the Osocial $riAateS lies at the basis of my theory of Osocietarian citiHenshipS as a form of citiIenshi$ made ,$ by associationalD and not state means U=onati )PPbVE GoreoAerD it lays at the basis of the Orelational goodsS theoryD @hich I elaborated to name those goods and serAices being neither $,blic UcharacteriIed by a mandatory sharingV nor $riAate UenXoyed in a com$etitiAe @ay by the indiAid,als

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as soAereign cons,mersVE The relational goods are those that can be $rod,ced and enXoyed only together @ith the ones @ho are concerned in them Uthey are forms of Aol,ntary sharing $,t in common bet@een staNeholdersV U=onati )PPbD Cha$ter cVE This cl,ster of ne@ conce$ts Usocial $riAateD societarian citiIenshi$D relational goodsV led to a Aie@ of society radically different from the oneD described by modern sociology as a com$romise bet@een ca$italistic marNet Ufreedom to com$eteD that is freedom as lacN of com$,lsions m libV and $olitical democracy UeK,ality of o$$ort,nitiesD that is eK,ity controls m labVE :ccording to relational sociologyD society is a cl,ster of s$heres differentiating themselAes according to their s$ecic relationsE In order to ,nderstand this @ay to read societyD a ne@ $oint of Aie@ is neededE ThileD @ithin modernityD social relations tend to $olariIe bet@een $,blic and $riAateD in the afterWmodern society insteadD social relations are s,bXected to mor$hogenetic $rocesses @hich maNe the $,blic and $riAate interactD creating ne@ intermediary s$heresE In other @ordsD the basic distinction O$,blic AE $riAateS giAes s$ace to another g,iding distinctionD namely the distinction bet@een O$,blicWprivate miCS Uor @elfare miCD modernityBs ty$ical libWlabV on one sideD and Osocietarian $l,ralismS Uor societarianismV on the other sideE I generaliIed s,ch theory as a distinction bet@een t@o relational cong,rations9 lib-lab Uty$ical of modernityV and societarian Uty$ical of afterWmodernVE S,ch dynamic is already in actionE In my o$inionD its emergence eC$lains @hy the Othird @ayS theoriIed by :nthony fiddens as a miC bet@een social democracy and liberalism Uone of the Aario,s Aersions of libWlabV has been ,ns,ccessf,l so farE I st,died those $rocesses in Aario,s researchesD @here I criticiIed the inadeK,acy of libWlab models Uand sociologiesV @hen describing the emergence of a ne@ ciAil society U=onati )PP`d =onati and ColoIIi edsE c**cd =onati c**ebVD the reforms of the @elfare state U=onati )PPPVD and the role of different forms of social ca$ital in fostering social cohesion U=onati c**baVE These are only some of the Aario,s obserAations and considerations thatD d,ring the )P`*l)PRc $eriodD led me to OdiscoAerS that society is neither a cl,ster of indiAid,alsD nor a system of actions andkor str,ct,resD b,t rather a Orelational formS that needs a sociological theory geared to its @ay to beE The IManifestoJ of My Relational Sociology S,ch a theory @as rstly eC$o,nded in my booN IntroduHione alla sociologia relaHionale UIntrod,ction to 2elational SociologyV U=onati )PRbVE That booN may be considered as my ManifestoE It comes from the criticism that I direct to@ards modern tho,ghtD namely to haAe remoAed or t@isted the [relational senseB of the social life and the Aery $rofession of sociologistE The basic theory of this booN is that modernity has beenYand still isYa big eC$eriment aimed at freeing indiAid,als from social relations Urst the ascribed onesD then also the acK,ired onesVD namely to immuniHe indiAid,als from social relationsD both as str,ct,ral linNs and symbolic referencesE Inasm,ch as s,ch intended modernity absol,tiIes its @ay to beD it is destined to become selfWdefeatingE ThereforeD the ans@ers to the $roblems created by modernity sho,ld be so,ght in a ne@ social scienceD being able to obserAe and

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handle social relations according to Oother symbolic codesSD different from those $rod,ced by modernityE The pars destruens lies in ref,sing the contra$osition bet@een action and system sociologiesD still dominating the sociological international sceneE Gore generallyD it eC$resses the ref,sal both of methodological indiAid,alism and holismE S,ch ref,sal is X,stied beca,se of the m,t,al distorted and red,ctiAe Aision that these t@o Ninds of sociologies haAe of social relationE The central $oint is that social relation cannot be eC$lained neither basing on indiAid,alsB actionD nor basing on str,ct,resB conditioning9 it $laces itself in another reality com$ared to that of agency and of o$erations UmechanismsV of social systemsE It is the $oint to conceiAe relation neither as a bridge bet@een indiAid,al and systemD nor as a miC of indiAid,al and systemic elementsD as intended by the maXority of the sociologistsE InsteadD it is the $oint to ,nderstand that social relation is the emerging effect of inter$lays bet@een indiAid,al actions and social systemD @here actionsD systems and relations are $roAided @ith inner characteristics and $o@ers @hich are $ec,liar to themE The criticism to@ards eAery form of sociologismD mainly GarCist and neoWGarCist theoriesD is based on this Uby sociologism I mean all the hy$erWsocialiIed conce$tions of the social actorVE The booNBs pars construens $ro$oses a conce$t,al frame@orN to analyIe the str,ct,re and dynamic of social relation as a $ro$er and s$ecic obXect of sociologyE Social relation cannot be considered as a s$inWoffD a contingent byW$rod,ctD beca,se it has a sui generis reality that may and sho,ld be st,died in itselfD not as a reality de$ending on something elseE The most basic ,nit of social st,ff is not the unit act Uby analogy @ith the atomVD as claimed by <arsonsD b,t the social relation meant as a Omolec,leS made of elements UactionsV and relations bet@een them Uas @ell as a molec,le of @ater is made of hydrogen and oCygen atomsD and denite connections bet@een themVE S,ch e$istemological decision @ill be later eC$ressed thro,gh the set @ording9 Oat the beginning there is the relationS U=onati )PP)9 ciVE It is a choice that stands o,t both against foetheBs DiktumD according to @hich Oat the beginning there was the actionSD and against L,hmannBs aCiomD according to @hich Oat the beginning there is the systemSE The <arsonian sol,tion of the Osystem of actionS al@ays seemed to me as a terrible messD obsc,ring the Aery OessenceS of the socialD iEeED its inner relationalityE The theorists of action Uas GaC Teber or the s,$$orters of rational choiceV do certainly enlighten the social relationD b,t only as a $roXection of @hat indiAid,als Nno@ and doE System theorists Uas <arsons and L,hmannV do certainly enlighten the social relationD b,t only as an eC$ression of the social systemE Gy Introduction U)PRbV tells @hy and ho@ @e sho,ld enlighten the relation from both sidesD @itho,t considering it as a bridge or a miC bet@een themE : cha$ter giAes an a$$licatiAe eCam$le concerning the healthkillness analysisE The social $henomenon of health is not obserAed as a bio$sychic condition of the indiAid,al Uas <arsons maintainsVD or as a $rod,ct of a health system Uas L,hmann contendsVD b,t as a social relation bet@een life@orlds and social instit,tionsE The Developments and the Articulation of Relational Sociology Gany @orNs follo@ed IntroductionE Bet@een )PRb and )PP)D I cond,cted K,ite a lot of research @hose main theme has al@ays been the same9 to redene eAery

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sociological conce$t Uor research themeV as a social relationD and to see @hat s,ch a$$roach is able to ,nderstand and eC$lainE Then it @as clear that s,ch a$$roach co,ld be a$$lied to the @hole eld of sociological st,diesD I form,lated the relational theory of society in a systematic @ay U=onati )PP)VE This theory has been f,rther im$roAed U=onati )PPRd =onati and TerenIi c**QV and it is still o$en to f,t,re deAelo$mentsE S,fce it to say that it is str,ct,red in three domains9 e$istemologyD methodologyD and $ragmaticsE 4. The Perspectives of a Relational Theory of Society @hy Should One Nmbrace Relational SociologyO To ,nderstand the rationale of the relational sociologyBs deAelo$mentD @e sho,ld asN o,rselAes9 is there any social $henomenon Uemergent todayV that is not eC$lained or ,nderstood by modern sociologyn If it eCistsD @hat sort of sociology do @e need indeedn =,ring my researchD I came ,$on a series of $henomena that are not eC$lained by any modernWins$ired sociological theoryE I @ill giAe only a fe@ eCam$lesE ECam$le )E There are Gesellschaft relations generating Gemeinschaft relationE This is ,nthinNable by modernityD b,t @e see it realiIed in formal organiIations UiEeE com$aniesV ado$ting criteria of social res$onsibility and creating a membershi$ comm,nityE Te see it as @ell in time banNsD in some $rofessional organiIationsD in associations doing ciAic actiAitiesD and generally in those life s$heres @here the $rimacy of instr,mental interests is balanced little by littleD or rather re$laced by the $rimacy of comm,nityBs identities Us,ch $rocess is obsc,red by the sociological idea of a gro@ing indiAid,aliIation of indiAid,als9 =onati c**caVE ECam$le cE Religion re-enters the public sphereE Thile the modern sociological theory sees religion as a $henomenon $rogressiAely and ineCorably nearing $riAatiIation and sec,lariIationD @e are s$ectators instead of a Aast $henomenon @here religion becomes a Aery im$ortant dimension or criterion of cond,ctD not only concerning the $riAateD b,t also the $,blic s$here U=onati c**cbVE ECam$le bE Nmerging Iethical marketsJ as alternative economies, which gainsays the modern paradigm of rationality. The modern s$lit of economic rationality UindiAid,al actingD basing on ,tilityV and ethical rationality Uacting basing on commitmentsD ,ltimate concernsD etcEV is $,t in a difc,lt $osition9 economy discoAers the $aradigm of relational sociology U=onati c**bbVE ECam$le eE Disappearance of contradictions based on class structures and the emerging of con"icts focused on IecologicalJ (of physical and human ecology) and civiliHation themes. Godern sociology em$hasiIes that the internal conicts of each society are foc,sed on social $ayoffs UclassD stat,sD and $o@erVE B,t today @e see that the biggest conicts haAe their rise in other areasD in $hysical ecology Usafeg,ard of enAironment and nat,ral reso,rcesVd in h,man ecology UbiotechD bioethicsD eK,ity bet@een generationsD etcEVd and also in themes s,ch as h,man rightsD im$lying ciAiliIationBs conicts U=onati c***bVE

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Gany other eCam$les co,ld be giAenE The K,estion is that the $henomena X,st mentioned are not eC$licable as moderniIing $rocesses or as mere reactions to themE _either GarCism nor f,nctionalism may eC$lain those $henomenaE _ot eAen the conce$t of OrationaliIation of life@orldsSD dear to critical theoryD catches the sense of s,ch metamor$hosesE I refer to $henomena that sho@ $ec,liar relational $rocessesE It is a limiting and misleading inter$retation to recond,ct them to the @orld@ide eC$ansion of modern ca$italismE That does not @orN among the mainstream of contem$orary sociological theoriesn They do not see social relations’ morphogenesisE The $henomena aboAe mentioned sho@ the decreasing marginal ,tility of f,nctionalismD and at the same time they indicate that global societies are actiAating their latent dimensions Uas in the collectiAe moAementsV @here the need for an oAerf,nctional meaning is emergingE Godern semantics based on the eK,alityk ineK,ality co,$le giAe $lace to semantics of identitykdifferenceE LibWlab logics of social incl,sion giAe $lace to @hat I name Orelational incl,sionS U=onati c**edVE This means that indiAid,als are incl,ded in society not on the basis of abstract or standardiIed rights Uor other entitlementsVD b,t on the basis of the acNno@ledgement that their differences are legitimate as$irations to belong to identitiesD gro,$sD and c,lt,res that cannot be assimilated or translated into one $atternE These differences cannot be $ro$erly treated neither as negatiAe liberties Uabsence of constraintVD nor as formal $roced,resD b,t instead as $ositiAe and s,bstantial freedoms Uthey afrm a $roXect and ,nconditional Aal,esVE Thro,gh thisD social relations are s,stained and im$roAed rather than remoAedE The rising society is after-modern beca,se it does not follo@ anymore the modernityBs directiAe distinctionsE There is a ne@ Osymbolic orderSD @ith other g,idingWdistinctionsD marNing ne@ historical discontinuities9 from linear and indenite $rogress to s,stainable and delimited deAelo$mentd from enAironment de$letion UJa,stian s$iritV to h,man ecology Ures$ect of $hysical enAironment and h,man nat,reVd from society as a dialectical system bet@een state and society to society as a net@orN of net@orNsd from national state to global m,ltic,lt,ral societyd from $olitical constit,tionaliIation to ciAil UsocietalV constit,tionaliIation of $riAate s$heresE The Idea of Relational Differentiation Te need a ne@ theory of social differentiation to ,nderstand global societyE Te need to introd,ce a ne@ form of social differentiationD namely relational differentiationD as disting,ished from $reWmodern Usegmented and stratiedV and modern Uf,nctionalV forms of social differentiation Usee =onati c**ecVE 2elational differentiation disting,ishes itself from the segmentary one beca,se it is o$en and acK,isitiAe Uit is accessible on Aol,ntary and not ascri$tiAe basisVE It is different from the stratied differentiationD beca,se it is not bo,nd to social stat,sWrolesE It differentiates from the f,nctional one beca,se it disting,ishes the relations not basing on their s$ecic f,nctionsD b,t basing on their ability to $roAide oAerf,nctional $erformancesE This is a sui generis ability @ith no f,nctional eK,iAalentsE The relational differentiation is clear today in the establishment of

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retic,lar organiIations s,bstit,ting those based on f,nctions Ufor a concrete em$irical eCam$le of relational differentiation a$$lied to the case of conciliatory meas,res bet@een family and laborD see =onati c**iVE :ct,allyD the relational differentiation corres$onds to the $henomena of relational mor$hogenesis $ro$er to the age of globaliIationE :t the beginning of modern ageD the great $hiloso$her S$inoIa ,sed to @rite9 Oomnis determinatio est negatioS Uany distinction is a negationVE Te co,ld say thatD ,$on the door of the afterWmodern ageD it is @ritten9 Oomnis determinatio est relatioS Uany distinction is a relationVE This is the g,idingWcriterion $ro$osed by relational sociology in order to catch the s$irit of the OglobaliIationS ageE This ne@ @ay to handle com$leCity becomes $ossible @hen @e ass,me that the distinction IisJ a relation Unot a denial or a binary o$$ositionD as claimed by L,hmannVE flobal society does not differentiate and socially integrate in the same @ay as modernity did U,sing the lib-lab codeVE flobal society m,st $roceed by Orelational incl,sionSD and not by Uf,nctionalV dialectics bet@een indiAid,al liberty and system control beca,seD at the global leAelD liberties and control are no more manageable thro,gh a state order of Hobbesian nat,re U=onati c***aVE The deriAing net@orN society may be named relational beca,se it enlaces OlocalS @ith OglobalSD generating life conteCts @here decisiAe is the quality of the relational patterns which constitute them in a peculiar modeE flobal society m,st be conceiAed as Orelational societySD beca,se it is characteriIed by a social differentiation eAer less g,ided by the abstract form of modernityD namely the f,nctional oneE The relational theory of society may be therefore form,lated as the theory of those societarian forms that are generated by the relational differentiation @here Uand thro,gh @hichV h,man beings can eC$ress their ,ltimate concernsD altho,gh society as s,ch is made neither of h,man beings nor of their concernsD b,t of their relationsE 5. Retrospects and Prospects 2eAie@ing my Xo,rneyD I realiIe that my ans@ers to the BQR restlessness tooN a Aery different direction com$ared to the other sociologies that reacted to the $roblems $osed by modernity by elaborating neomodernD antimodernD and $ostmodern theoriesE It is clear that my relational sociology does not belong to anyone of these ty$esE The aim of my relational sociology is to leaAe all these theories behindD beca,se they remain someho@ $risoners of the debate on modernityE In order to ,nderstand @hich sort of society does emergeD @e m,st leaAe modernityBs Aicio,s circle behindD @here the c,rrent theoriesD @hich talN of $l,ral modernitiesD m,lti$le modernitiesD and reeCiAe modernityD get entangledE In my o$inionD the t,rning $oint bet@een modern and afterWmodern is thatD @hile modern society looNs for the immuniHation from social relationsD after-modern society must act and build up itself with and through social relationsE The modern considers liberty as something eCisting only o,tside the relationD @hile the afterWmodern m,st inect it inside the social relationE The theme of the individualiHation of indiAid,als Uas meant today by :nthony fiddensD alrich BecND and many othersV is $,t in its

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right $ers$ectiAe if @e looN at it in terms of the personaliHation of indiAid,alsD @hich means that h,man beings become O$ersonsS in so far as they act thro,gh their o@n reeCiAe relationalityE J,nctional differentiation is restricted to its o@n eldD @hile afterWmodern sociological forms gro@ ,$ in the eld of relational differentiationE
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Chapter 11

For a Better Quality of Life Ruut Veenhoven

I was born in 1942 in The Netherlands, during World War II, when my country was under German occupation. I have no memories of that war, but I do remember several vestiges of it. As a child I played in the ruins of bombed housing blocks near my home and I had Sunday School in what had been a synagogue; its members had been gassed. The city where I lived had been part of the Germans’ Atlantic Wall and remnants of this fortification were all over the place, such as bunkers and an anti-tank ditch. These things fascinated me, but I was hardly aware of the tragedies behind them. I grew up in the safe post-war era in an upper middle class family. My parents were both university-educated, my father a historian and my mother an economist. My father worked as a history teacher, my mother was a homemaker when I was young and worked later as a journalist. I was the eldest of three children. Becoming an Academic I had never dreamed of being a scholar, but became one. As a youngster I did not do too well in school and an academic career was therefore one of the last things to think of. Still, in adolescence I was much concerned about my future career.

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Although I had no specific occupation in mind, I felt the urge to achieve something. This drive was partly motivated by the fear of failing; class-consciousness was still pretty strong in the 1950s and I did not want to stay behind to my parents. Another driving force was the Protestant ethic I was raised in; I felt obliged to improve the world in some way. My parents were both involved in social action, my father in right-wing politics and my mother in the consumer movement. I liked to hear them talk about what went on and I also took an interest in the wider political issues of that time, such as the unification of Europe and de-colonialization. In the 1960s, my political interest was strengthened in response to the call for social reform that pervaded the era. So having completed secondary school and compulsory military service, I wanted to prepare for a career in policy making. Why Sociology? My initial plan was to study law and specialize in public administration. Then I heard that it was also possible to specialize in policy making in sociology, so I found out all I could about this new discipline. What I found out was a nice surprise. Sociology seemed much more interesting than law and also more useful, because it addressed social problems directly. Sociology also helped me to make sense of the different world I had encountered in the army. The first sociological texts I read really illuminated these experiences. I decided to study sociology and enrolled at the then-Netherlands School of Economics in Rotterdam which had just started a policy-oriented department of sociology. I began my studies in 1964 when the department was in its second year. Professors were few and inexperienced, but the subject matter met my expectations. I worked hard and performed well. Academic Job Two of the papers I wrote as a student were published in academic journals. The first was a review of research on family characteristics and educational success of children, which I did as an assignment in my third year. The study taught me that I had personally had a good start in my rising middle class milieu with a universityeducated, homemaking mother. The second paper was published in my last year and in it I reviewed the then-scarce research literature about happiness. In both cases my professors advised me to submit my work. Another thing that pushed me towards the scholarly track was the shortage of teaching staff at that time. Lots of students streamed in, while the number of graduates was still low. Hence, well-performing students were hired for teaching chores, and I was one of them. From my third year on I assisted in the course on empirical sociology and was even charged with some lectures. I still remember my first lecture. At that time it was still customary that students stood up when a professor entered the lecture room. The room were I lectured had wooden theater seats, which clapped when tipping up, so my entrance was accompanied by the rattling of tipping chairs. “Sit down please”, I heard myself saying.

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The shortage of staff also meant that several graduates were offered jobs in the department. Again I was one of them, but since I was from the second year, the available positions as assistant professor in sociology were already occupied. Still there was a position left with the newly appointed professor in social psychology, Rob Wentholt. He asked me to take the job and I accepted. I was still not aiming for an academic career at that time. I merely accepted the position because it would enable me to write a dissertation and then enter the labor market as a Ph.D. However, things worked out otherwise. The dissertation took much longer than expected and it also took me time to become proficient in psychology. Meanwhile I discovered that my paid job at the university combined well with voluntary social action, and academic work was more rewarding than I had expected. So, finally, I decided to accept that I was a scholar, something I had actually been for quite a while. Social Action From an early age, I have been involved in clubs and on committees. I liked the game and sometimes found myself seeking a cause. Student Activism In my years as a university student I served on several boards and was editor of the local student magazine. Inspired by my mother’s work in the consumers union, I engaged in interest representation for students. Universities were pretty overcrowded in the 1960s and teaching was often poor. I was on the student council and organized a university-wide student survey on the quality of courses. This almost cost me my job as a student-assistant. Though militant in interest representation, I was a moderate in wider politics. In the late 1960s many of my fellow students radicalized and the newly established structures for interest representation became platforms for revolutionary agitation. In my first year as an assistant professor, a student revolt took place, which involved the occupation of buildings and chaotic meetings with mass voting. One of the issues at stake was student power (one man, one vote) and another was educational reform involving the abolition of exams and lectures. I then found myself in the middle, between conservative professors and anarchistic students, and was despised by both parties. It was fascinating to see this movement blaze out of hand, but it was difficult to understand the phenomenon. My sociological knowledge felt short but I found more clues in the social psychology that I had started to teach. Sexual Reform I was more wholeheartedly involved in the movement for sexual reform that also began in the 1960s. Though late in my own sexual development, I was early in joining the sexual reform association. I got involved through student matters, such as the sale of condoms in university buildings and overnight stays in student houses.

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This brought me into wider issues, such as the taboo on premarital sex, restrictions on pornography, and discrimination against homosexuals. All this changed quickly in my country; in retrospect I had witnessed the “sexual revolution”. At that time, it was fairly evident to me that the repression of sexuality created a lot of problems, but I could not understand why we had come to restrict this natural drive so much. What function did the taboo serve? Who benefited from it? Again I found no good answers in the sociology of those days, but recent reading in macrosociology has shown me its logic in agrarian society. In this light I realize that I had fought a cultural lag and also understand why the case was so easily won. Abortion One of the aims of the sexual reform movement was to repeal the law that criminalized abortion. There was a great demand for abortion at that time, unwanted pregnancies being rampant due to ignorance about sex and lack of good contraception: the pill was not yet available. Several of my fellow students had to marry prematurely and I myself was almost also hit by that fate. My girlfriend got pregnant, but we managed to escape forced marriage through an illegal abortion. It was not easy to find a doctor, it cost us a lot of money and involved some risk, but the abortion allowed us to start a family at a time of our choice, which was five years later. This personal experience gave me the case I was looking for. I committed myself to abortion law reform, in the expectation that this would be a lifelong task. I plunged into the literature on the matter and informed myself about lobbies in other countries such as the British Abortion Law Reform Association. In the context of my studies in sociology I made an analysis of the position on abortion of government agencies and political organizations in The Netherlands. I was amazed to find mostly ignorance and indecision and ended up in wondering why this problem, that wrecked the personal lives of so many citizens, had not reached the political agenda. A few months later I heard about a plan to open an abortion clinic in Rotterdam. It was an initiative of medical doctors involved in family planning, who had hoped that the mere announcement of this intention would press local hospitals to make more use of the possibilities provided for in the law. I joined the group and took responsibility for a campaign to mobilize political support. In that campaign I applied what I had learned about lobbying and pressure groups in my sociology study. Hundreds of organizations were asked to back us publicly: professional associations, churches, political associations, and women’s groups. We also started to raise money and asked newspapers and magazines to place free advertisements. This brought about a landslide of publicity and discussion, which in the end resulted in a decision by the city council of Rotterdam to support the clinic financially. Abortion was still illegal and could then only be justified as a medical decision, comparable to the amputation of an infected limb to save a person’s life. However flimsy this legal basis, it was enough to set up a policy of “toleration”, a common form of conflict resolution in Dutch political culture. We opened in 1971 and soon six more abortion clinics were established in the Netherlands. It took more time to adjust the abortion law to this new reality. Abortion had become a symbolic issue and this made it difficult to reach a political compromise.

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This political stalemate left us the room to develop the technique and to create a network of abortion clinics that also served other countries in Western Europe. The clinics were organized in an association, one task of which was to guarantee quality treatment and another to lobby for a better abortion law. I chaired the association for twelve years and in that position I benefited much from my training as a sociologist. One of the things I had learned was that information is important in pragmatic policy making and therefore we invested much in research. We ran many quantitative studies about the characteristics of our clients and how they did after treatment, and we also did qualitative studies on failed contraception and remorse. On the basis of this evidence we could expose myths and frame discussions. The law was finally revised in 1984 and legalized the situation of abortion on demand that had been created thirteen years earlier. The Dutch example facilitated abortion law reform in other European nations where the social problems of unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion have ceased to exist. Voluntary Childlessness Through my involvement in abortion and contraception I became aware of the problem that people may start a family without really wanting children. Renouncing parenthood had become technically possible after the introduction of the pill in the late 1960s, but was not yet socially accepted in the mid 1970s. I saw this as a social problem, because of my concern about overpopulation and the wellbeing of unwanted children. I estimated that an attitude campaign might be helpful and I had seen a good example in an American organization of non-parents. Together with members of the sexual reform association I established an information center about voluntary childlessness, which over a period of ten years produced a stream of information about the pros and cons of having children or not. We made books, video documentaries, information leaflets, and instructions for educators. This information was greedily picked up by the media and by ladies’ journals in particular. Voluntary childlessness is now widely accepted, but is still not seen as something praiseworthy. Research I like doing research and devote ever more time to it. In the 1970s, my research paralleled my social action, and was mainly about abortion, childlessness, and family issues. Since then I have concentrated on the study of happiness. Abortion My first empirical investigation was a survey of medical doctors. The study served to estimate the number of unwanted pregnancies in the Netherlands and assessed the support for law reform in the medical profession. The study was part of a wider attempt to bring abortion to the political agenda. When this had happened, I was commissioned to carry out a literature study about the probable consequences of free abortion. This study dealt with medical risks, effects on mental health, and

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with demographic and social consequences. One of the questions was whether the repeal of the abortion law would lead to moral decay. Later I also supervised many studies performed for the association of abortion clinics about, among other things, trends in abortion and contraception and about strategies for prevention of unwanted pregnancy. Much of this research served to denounce misinformation about abortion and to gain the upper hand in the pragmatic policy discussions. Having Children Couples who consider missing out on children are often confronted with the idea that this will violate an innate need for offspring, in particular the “mother instinct” in females. If childlessness goes against a real need, this must manifest in childless couples thriving less well. I checked this hypothesis in a secondary analysis of a health survey, but found no differences in self-reported health, psychosomatic complaints, perceived meaning of life, or happiness. The childless couples were actually doing somewhat better (Veenhoven 1975). In later studies I found that the birth of children lowers happiness somewhat, mainly because of its effect on marriage (Veenhoven 1984a). I have also considered the fate of only children. Do they grow up as unhappy eggheads? The data show that this is not the case (Veenhoven 1989). As part of my advisory activities I have also been involved in publications that address wider issues, such as the costs of children, the timing of having children, and adoption. All this was meant to correct negative stereotypes and to enable people to make wellinformed decisions. Happiness One of the reasons to opt for sociology was the expectation that this study would teach me how to improve society. Hence I was eager to learn what a good society is like. Much to my disappointment my professors could not provide a clear answer to that question. I was told that there are different views and that subjective evaluation is unscientific. Marxist fellow students told me another story, and maintained that a good society is a socialist one, even if its members fail to realize this. I found the idea that the best society is the one that creates the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” more appealing; it was something I had heard in a social philosophy course. This consequentional ethic made more sense to me than the ideological crazes of those days and I thought that it should be possible to assess happiness outcomes empirically. I had just learned how concepts such as “power” and “prestige” can be measured and could not see why happiness would not be measurable. It took some time to discover that some things called happiness are indeed immeasurable, but that happiness in the sense of overall life satisfaction is something that we have in mind and that this can be assessed using questionnaires. On the basis of that insight I wrote a paper in which I took stock of the available research on the matter, which was not very much in 1968; the available data only gave information on differences within society, while my main interest was to compare across societies. Still the mere approach was enough to get the paper published in a Dutch sociological journal.

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In the years after my graduation I used the concept of happiness in several discussions, but I did not really focus on the matter. In the debate on abortion, I claimed that the repeal of the restrictive law would prevent much unhappiness of unwilling parents and unwanted children, though I could not really prove that. In the discussion about voluntary childlessness I claimed that forsaking children does not make life less gratifying, and in this case I could substantiate the claim empirically (Veenhoven 1975). I have also used data on happiness in discussions about the future of marriage. In response to the claim that marriage is on the return in modern society, I showed that the married are typically happier than the unmarried, and that this apparent impact of marriage had grown over time (Veenhoven 1983). Life Goals and Happiness My teaching work in social psychology raised my interest in individual differences in happiness, and in the possibilities of increasing individual happiness through training and advises. My boss and Ph.D. supervisor was a psychologist and this was another reason to shift the focus. I decided to do my Ph.D. on the relationship between life goals and happiness. I wanted to prove that planning of one’s life pays off. I had intellectual arguments for this supposition, but the main reason was that I am a planner myself and assumed that people would be happier if they were more like me. One of my specific hypotheses was people with clear goals in mind function more fully and effectively and are therefore happier. Another hypothesis was that some goals are more conducive to happiness than others and in particular that people who aim at success in zero sum games are less happy on an average. I tested these hypotheses in a laborious investigation where life goals were assessed using a self-designed sentence completion test and happiness was assessed using daily records of mood. I did find the expected difference in object of goals but found no greater happiness among people with clear goals. After three years of work I realized that the cross-sectional design of my investigation was not appropriate and that the effects of life goals on happiness can only been shown in a follow-up. All in all the study was not good enough for a Ph.D. dissertation. I buried the manuscript in a drawer and reverted to my earlier approach of taking stock of research on happiness. Conditions for Happiness Meanwhile, the research literature on happiness had expanded. While I had found only some twenty empirical studies in 1968, I found about 500 in 1980. I set out to describe the results of that research systematically with the purpose of creating an evidence base for policy interventions aiming at greater happiness for a greater number. For that purpose I sharpened my definition of happiness and on that basis selected acceptable measures of happiness. I then discovered that many studies that claim to assess happiness or life satisfaction actually measure something else, mostly a mix of mental health and contentment. Only half (245) of the empirical studies in my collection appeared to fit my concept. From the reports of these studies I extracted all the findings, both distributional findings and correlational findings. I described the findings one by one in a standard terminology and then sorted them on country and subject. Thus I stripped the findings from the reports in which they had been presented. All these findings were gathered

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in the voluminous Databook of Happiness (Veenhoven 1984a), which then served as the basis for another book entitled Conditions of Happiness (Veenhoven 1984b). Together these works served as my Ph.D. dissertation. Conditions of Happiness provides a synthesis of the research on happiness up to the early 1980s. It takes stock of observed facts. Unlike most literature reviews it does not consider the interpretations the original investigators attached to these findings. It is more a meta-analysis than a narrative review. Two kinds of conditions for happiness are discerned: external environmental conditions and inner psychological conditions. The environmental determinants discussed are characteristics of the society one lives in and the position one holds in that society. Inner psychological determinants are health, personality lifestyle, aspirations, and convictions. At the time the findings did not allow a view on interdependencies between environmental and inner determinants of happiness. World Database of Happiness I continued keeping stock of the research findings on happiness and published an update in the early 1990s. This involved a bibliography (Veenhoven 1993a), a book about happiness in nations (Veenhoven 1993b), and three volumes about correlational findings (Veenhoven 1994b). In the late 1990s the collection was entered in an electronic database, called the “World Database of Happiness”, and made available on the web (http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur. nl). The database involves the following inventories: • • • •

Bibliography: Contains publications on subjective appreciation of life, even if this is a side issue. It involves a subject classification. Current contents: 5,000 titles. Item bank: Contains all acceptable measures of happiness ever used and links to the findings obtains with these. Current contents: 600 measures, mainly single questions. Distributional findings: About 3000 findings about happiness in general population samples in 122 nations over the period 1946–2005. Correlational findings: Described in standard abstracts and ordered on subject and methodology.

The maintenance of this database requires a lot of work, and money is tight. Part of the work is done by volunteers, in the beginning mainly students and unemployed sociologists, and currently foremost retired people from different backgrounds. One of them is Henk DeHeer, an IT specialist and old friend who built the data system. My university facilitates the volunteers with office room and equipment. Good Society What has all this taught me about the good society? First, that people thrive well in modern individualized society (Veenhoven 2005c) and flourish better than in traditional collectivist societies (Veenhoven 1999). Second, I learned that the greatest happiness for the greatest number is achieved in nations that allow their citizens most freedom, are best governed, and have a democratic system (Veenhoven 2000a, 2004, 2005a). Much to my surprise the amount of welfare services provided by the state does not make a difference (Veenhoven 2000b), and neither does the

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degree of income inequality in the nation. The findings are more in line with the liberal political agenda than with the social-democratic one. This begs the question of why not everybody is equally happy in modern society. The sociological reflex is to point to social position, but that appears to explain at best ten percent of the differences in happiness within modern nations. About forty percent of the difference is in the ability to cope with the problems of life; people who are psychologically well equipped for life in multiple-choice society having the advantage (Veenhoven 2001a). That psychological factors count so much does not mean that living conditions are irrelevant to happiness, but rather that social conditions are pretty good. This is also reflected in the limited role of sheer luck. Life events beyond one’s control explain only some fifteen percent of the differences in happiness.1 Social Inequality I also learned that social inequality is less of a problem in modern societies than most sociologists think. As mentioned above, comparison across nations shows no more happiness in nations where income inequality is low than in comparable nations where it is high, while comparison within countries shows only small differences in happiness between poor and rich citizens. Gender differences appear to matter more; average happiness being higher in nations where women are more equal to men. Another unexpected finding is that inequality is still diminishing in modern society. I discovered that when I used the standard deviation of happiness as an indicator (Kalmijn and Veenhoven 2005a) and considered the trend over time. Disparities in happiness appeared to have diminished in all modern nations over the last thirty years (Veenhoven 2005a), independent of the modest rise in the average level of happiness (Veenhoven 2006a). Reception of My Work My work on abortion and childlessness received much attention from the media, not in the least because it had been produced for that purpose. My findings on happiness are also well covered by the press. In the case of abortion I am pretty sure that it has influenced policy decisions, but with respect to happiness I cannot tell as yet. I met with more reservation among colleague sociologists, and in particular among those on boards that decided on my applications for research funding. Recently I got a cold shoulder from two sociological journals,2 rejecting my paper on lessening inequality of happiness in modern nations (Veenhoven 2005a). I consider the paper’s findings to be a major discovery, but the specialist referees saw it as heresy and came up with all the misunderstandings about happiness that recent research has refuted. The main problem is theoretical: sociologists tend to see happiness in terms of social construction and relative deprivation and therefore discount the matter as whimsical and culturally relative (Veenhoven 2006b). This blinds them for the evidence that 1 See Headey, B. and A.Wearing. 1992, Understanding Happiness: A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. 2 Netherlands Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review.

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happiness is a sign of human thriving, comparable to physical health, and hence a good indicator for the apparent livability of social institutions (Veenhoven 1996, 2000c). I see this as a passing problem and I am confident that the subject of happiness will find its place in mainstream sociology. What bothers me more is that there is little institutional backing for this subject; there is much curiosity about happiness, but not many organizations that have an interest in paying for the research. Hence the study of happiness will depend very much on scarce academic money. International Cooperation My earlier research on abortion and family issues was mainly meant for the domestic market and therefore involved little exchange with colleagues in other countries. However, my research on happiness does involve much international cooperation: not only do most of my data come from other countries; the users are also scattered all over the world. My ticket to the international research community was the book Conditions of Happiness (Veenhoven 1984b). I had submitted that book to Reidel Publishers (now Springer Press), a company that publishes many scholarly journals, among which is Social Indicators Research. Initially the manuscript landed on the desk of the philosophy editor, who rejected it, but finally it found its way to Alex Michalos, editor of Social Indicators Research. He helped me through and also introduced me to the working group Social Indicators Research of the International Sociological Association. This proved to be a fine bunch of people and a place where various networks met. Today this working group is closely connected to the International Association for Quality of Life Studies, in which psychologists and economists also participate. Initially, Social Indicators Research was the major outlet for papers about happiness. When the number of submissions on this subject grew, I proposed that the publisher should start a separate journal on happiness. This came to be called the Journal of Happiness Studies,3 of which I am an editor together with Alex Michalos (University of Northern British Columbia, Canada), Ed Diener (University of Illinois, U.S.A.), and Bob Cummins (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia). The journal started in 2000 and is doing well. At this moment several new scholarly journals on quality of life are in the making. My World Database of Happiness is an international clearing-house for information on happiness. I have contacts with many of the deliverers, that is, colleague investigators who inform me about their work and check whether I enter their findings correctly. I do not get to know all the users well, but I know there are many and that most of them are scholars. For all of us, the directory of investigators on happiness4 is a means to keep in touch with one another. 3 Available on http://springerlink.com. 4 This directory is part of the World Database of Happiness. It provides address information and links to publications in the bibliography of happiness.

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Selected Bibliography5 Kalmijn, Wim and Ruut Veenhoven. 2005a. “Measuring Inequality of Happiness in Nations: In Search For Proper Statistics.” Journal of Happiness Studies 6: 357– 396. Veenhoven, Ruut. 1975. “Is There an Innate Need For Children?” European Journal of Social Psychology 1: 495–501. ———. 1983. “The Growing Impact of Marriage.” Social Indicators Research 12: 49–63. ———. 1984a. Conditions of Happiness. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht/Boston. ———. 1984b. Databook of Happiness. Complementary reference work to Conditions of Happiness. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht/Boston. ———. 1993a. Bibliography Of Happiness: 2473 Contemporary Studies on Subjective Appreciation of Life. RISBO, Studies in Sociale en Culturele Verandering, nr. 1, Erasmus University Rotterdam. ———. 1993b. Happiness In Nations: Subjective Appreciation of Life in 56 Nations 1946–1992. RISBO, Studies in Sociale en Culturele Verandering, nr. 2, Erasmus University Rotterdam. ———. 1994a. “Is Happiness A Trait? Tests of the Theory That a Better Society Does Not Make People Any Happier.” Social Indicators Research 32: 101–160. ———. 1994b. Correlates of Happiness. RISBO, Series Studies in Social and Cultural Transformation. Erasmus University Rotterdam (3 vols). ———. 1996. “Happy Life Expectancy. A Comprehensive Measure of Quality-ofLife in Nations.” Social Indicators Research 39: 1–58. ———. 1999. “Quality-of-Life in Individualistic Society: A Comparison in 43 Nations in the Early 1990’s.” Social Indicators Research 48: 157–186. ———. 2000a. “Freedom and Happiness: A Comparative Study in 44 Nations in the Early 1990’s.” Pp. 257–288 in Diener, E. and E.M. Suh (eds) Culture and Subjective Wellbeing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2000b. “Well-Being in the Welfare State: Level Not Higher, Distribution not More Equitable.” Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 2: 91–125. ———. 2000c. “The Four Qualities of Life. Ordering Concepts and Measures of the Good Life.” Journal of Happiness Studies 1: 1–39. ———. 2001a. “Happiness in Society.” Pp. 1265–1314 in Jutta Allmendinger (ed.), Gute Gesellschaft? Verhandlungen des 30 Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie Opladen, Germany: Leske & Budrich. ———. 2001b. “Are the Russians as Unhappy as They Say They Are? Comparability Of Self-Reports Across Nations.” Journal of Happiness Studies 2: 111–136. ———. 2002. “Why Social Policy Needs Subjective Indicators.” Social Indicators Research 58: 33–45. ———. 2004. “The Greatest Happiness Principle. Happiness as a Public Policy Aim.” Pp. 658–678 in Linley, P.A. and S. Joseph (eds) Positive Psychology in Practice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. 5 Papers are available for download online at: http://www2.eur.nl/fsw/research/ Veenhoven.

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———. 2005a. “Return of Inequality in Modern Society? Test By Trend in Dispersion of Life-Satisfaction Across Time and Nations.” Journal of Happiness Studies 6: 457–487. ———. 2005b. “Apparent Quality of Life: How Long and Happy People Live.” Social Indicators Research 71: 61–86. ———. 2005c. “Is Life Getting Better? How Long and Happy Do People Live in Modern Society.” European Psychologist 10: 330–343. ———. 2006a. “Rising Happiness in Nations 1946–2005: A Reply to Easterlin.” Social Indicators Research, forthcoming. ———. 2006b. “Sociological Theories of Subjective Wellbeing.” In Eid, M. and R. Larsen (eds), The Science of Subjective Wellbeing: A Tribute to Ed Diener. Guilford Press, forthcoming. ———. World Database of Happiness: Continuous Register of Research on Subjective Appreciation of Life. Website: http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl (since 1984 in book form; since 1994 in initial website form [ftp]; and since 1998 in its current website form). Veenhoven, Ruut and Maykel Verkuyten. 1989. “The Well-Being of Only Children.” Adolescence 24: 155–165. Veenhoven, Ruut and Joop Ehrhardt. 1995. “The Cross-Cultural Pattern of Happiness. Test of Predictions Implied in Three Theories of Happiness.” Social Indicators Research 34: 33–68. Veenhoven, Ruut and Wim Kalmijn. 2005. “Inequality-Adjusted Happiness in Nations. Egalitarianism and Utilitarianism Married Together in a New Index of Societal Performance.” Journal of Happiness Studies 6: 421–455.

PART 3 (Trans)forming Selves

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Chapter 12

Coming in from the Cold: My Road from Socialism to Sociology Piotr Sztompka

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold —Title of a John LeCarré novel You’ve come a long way, baby —Slogan on a 1970s Virginia Slims cigarettes advertising poster, portraying a beautiful, apparently liberated young woman smoking blissfully

My Pre-Sociological Adolescence My path to sociology was not unswerving. As a child, the only son of a famous Polish concert pianist, I was naturally destined for a musical career. Indeed, I received an elementary musical education, but soon decided that my many and diverse interests precluded an exclusive focus on practicing piano at which, frankly, I was not too good. My reading of newspapers and spy stories was accompanied by a fascination with politics and sports, as well as astronomy, physics, and geography. I dreamt of

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traveling across the world. Lastly, my hobby—which paid off some fifty years later in visual sociology classes—was photography; a Soviet Zorki 4, an ingenious replica of the famous Leica, was my favorite toy. Poland at that time, in the 1950s, was not an open society, neither in the Popperian sense, nor in the simple geographical sense. However, my father, being an artist, was among the privileged few who were allowed to travel abroad. Returning from each successive concert tour, he would bring home the breath of fresh air the wider world offered: stories of prosperity, freedom, a joie de vivre, full stores, and smiling people. There were also stimulating scents and exotic souvenirs—at a time when “exotic” could mean not only Chanel No. 5 for my mother, but also simply oranges, lemons, dried figs, and Colgate toothpaste. He would bring, too, the brochures and timetables of international airlines. How fascinated I was by a miniature model of a Douglas DC7c, the propeller-driven technological marvel of the time, which had taken my father to Rio with only one stopover at Dakar. Old airline tickets and schedules were hoarded and treasured. I fantasized, as many kids do, of becoming a commercial pilot. My collection amassed over the years and was only closed after two decades, in 1972, with my own first transatlantic trip to San Francisco, on board the then recently introduced, first-generation Boeing 747, with no stopover at all, directly from Frankfurt/Main. I decided quite early on that I had to set myself free of my closed world. No, I was not thinking to emigrate (or “defect”, as it was officially called, with its bad moral taste of treason). I felt at home in my country and was ready to stay there, but wished to escape intellectually (or, as one might say today, virtually). My passport to the world was to be fluent in English. Acquiring this language became a passionate pastime in secondary school. I was soon able to read American newspapers and magazines, which were quite unavailable at that time, censored as ideologically subversive. Yet here some undeserved luck struck again, an inherited “cultural capital” saved me. Due to my father’s position in the artistic and intellectual circles of Krakow, my hometown, he was on the clandestine list of the selected few to whom the American Consulate was hand-delivering fresh copies of the International Herald Tribune, Time, and Newsweek. After my father’s early death in 1964 this invaluable service stopped. It was resumed after I had achieved my own academic distinction, ending only with the anti-communist revolution of 1989, at which point these periodicals ceased to be clandestine goods and could be had at any kiosk. Thus, upon completion of secondary school, I was in possession of at least one key to the world: a good command of a “global language”. Yet I needed another key—a profession which, by its nature, would be international. The obvious choice lay in academia. Even under communism, the scholarly community knew fewer borders than any other. But the question was which field of science should I select? My first choice was science in the strictest sense—a natural science, which would be relatively free of any political or ideological control since the period of “proletarian mathematics” or “bourgeois physics” had come to an ignominious close. Thus I applied to the Department of Physics at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, the most respected and established of Polish universities and already 600 years old. But even before the academic year had commenced I reconsidered for the same reasons for which I abandoned a pianist’s career: this field was too specialized and

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mandated an equally undivided focus and concentration if one were to become a “somebody”. By this time in my life, my interests were even more diverse than in primary school—political, social, cultural, and literary. I could not abandon pursuing them. Thus, as many young people do when faced with a similar predicament, I chose law. Enter Sociology At that time, strange as it may seem today, I simply did not know that there existed a discipline called “sociology”. Polish sociology, having formed well-rooted traditions and already well established at universities during the interwar period, was banned by the communist government as a conservative, “bourgeois” science, the enemy of Marxism-Leninism and “scientific communism”. Only after the death of Stalin and a certain thaw in the Soviet empire was it restored in Poland in 1956, significantly earlier than in the rest of the socialist bloc, and much earlier than in the Soviet Union itself. My university education was inaugurated in 1961, just six years after sociology reemerged at the Jagiellonian University; hence I had never heard of it. It was also not popular in the state-controlled media, remaining somewhat suspect. Moreover, for quite different reasons, it could not gain popularity among the broader public due to the close etymological proximity of sociology to socialism! In this situation, how could I possibly learn about its existence? Nevertheless, in a first-year course on elementary jurisprudence, I encountered two professors of law who were fascinated by sociology and smuggled bits of its wisdom into their lectures. One was a distinguished lady, Maria Borucka-Arctowa, who specialized in the sociology of law, and the other was an unruly intellectual, Marek Waldenberg, who included the classics of nineteenth-century sociology in his course on political and social doctrines. Sociology suddenly struck me as very interesting. An added attraction for me lay in a certain peculiarity: the discipline was most developed in the United States and hence most of the literature was in English. Another key to the outside world appeared at hand. Soon afterwards I took up parallel studies in sociology. Completing two degrees, in law and in sociology, my sociological adventure began in earnest. Coping Strategies (Made in Poland) Sociology was taught at the universities, but was still under considerable ideological constraints. Polish sociologists had to devise coping strategies that would permit the performance of normal, academic work. During the course of my sociological studies, two books were published, each presenting an alternative stratagem. Both were written by eminent sociologists who later became quite renowned in the West, and I happily adopted them as my earliest “distant” (because they were teaching in Warsaw, and not in Krakow!) role-models. The first book was by Stanislaw Ossowski, a dissident, non-Marxist thinker who took refuge in the abstract realms of general sociological theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. His volume On the Peculiarities of the Social Sciences (published in Warsaw in 1962) was the guiding

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model for one line of my later work. The second book was by Zygmunt Bauman, a member of the communist party, positioned high in the echelons of power. An Outline of the Marxist Theory of Society (1964) was the title, and that was where the Marxism ended. Instead the astute student could find a quite adept discussion of the works of Parsons, Merton, Lundberg, Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, and Mills. All this was adorned by some lip service given to a number of Soviet thinkers, the required dosage of “political correctness” at the time. I have to admit that this strategy was applied quite creatively in my first journal articles: selecting just two Soviet Marxists—Konstantinov and Osipov—I used the same limited pool of quotations from their works without regard for the themes of my arguments. On one occasion I even ventured to fabricate the name of a nonexistent Soviet sage. This nonetheless sufficed, fully satisfying the censors. By the way, it was only last year, in 2005, that I actually met Professor Osipov, the source of my quotations, in person. Well over eighty now, he is a highly respected member of the Russian Academy of Science. He gave me his new book, The Collapse of Western Civilization (published in Moscow in 2004), and spoke at length about the threat of American imperialism. Times change, some people much less so. In 1970 I submitted my doctoral dissertation on The Functional Analysis in Sociology and Social Anthropology (1971). I was following Ossowski’s approach, that is, escaping toward the abstract, methodological aspects of functionalism as a way of explaining social and cultural phenomena, rather than focusing on the more substantive and politically sensitive structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons. The book was very well received in Poland. Four years later my next work was published, this time on methodological issues, Theory and Explanation (1974). There I used the notions of scientific explanation as defined and analyzed by philosophers of science—e.g., Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, May Brodbeck, and others—as a tool for theory construction in this discipline. I still believed that sociology could—and should—be as precise, formalized, and empirically grounded as physics; I came to my senses only much later. Theory and Explanation was to be my last book written in Polish, until the next one, Sociology: The Analysis of Society (2002), a full twenty-eight years later. In the meantime my career took a most significant turn: my dream of living in Poland, but being present in the world finally came true. How did this happen? At the Crossroads With Ph.D. title in hand, my formal sociological education had come to a close. I was twenty-six and standing at a crossroads. One alternative was to accept an academic position at home, in a country on the periphery of the global sociological community, and strive to become a proverbial big fish in a small pond. Another was to follow my dream of escaping to the world, not satisfying myself with local recognition, and trying to match up to the more cosmopolitan standards of true sociological centers. I chose the latter and decided to dive in as a small fish—but hopefully growing big someday—immediately into a big pond. One necessary step was to win a scholarship to the Mecca of sociology, the US. There were six Fulbright

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fellowships available for Polish post-graduates in all branches of academia. In a tight competition I won one. But then don’t forget that I was living in a society that was still locked behind the Iron Curtain. The next step was crucial: to obtain a passport, something not considered a citizen’s right but rather a privilege, subject to an entirely arbitrary decision by the authorities. It could be refused for “important social reasons”, an exemplary formulation of so-called socialist law. I felt I had no chance of ending up at Berkeley or Harvard (the heavenly places to which my Fulbright grant predestined me) without turning now to the second coping strategy—Bauman’s—namely pretending symbolic loyalty and doing your real job. In 1972 I acquired membership in the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party, like some two million of my compatriots before me. Among them, there were perhaps fewer true communists than in Paris, Oxford, or New York. I wasn’t one either. Fortunately, this was a time of considerable liberalization: the country was opening to the West. Due to foreign credits there was a visible increase in living standards, and the party became more of a pragmatically oriented club than an ideologically disciplined organization. When questioning me as a candidate for a nominally Marxist-Leninist party, they did not even care about my Catholic faith. I reciprocated in kind by using my party membership entirely opportunistically, as a protective shell, without getting involved in any party activities. This was, of course, a kind of personal compromise, but at the time I felt it could be achieved without losing face and self-respect. However, my opportunism had its limits. Nine years later, in December of 1981, when the regime turned to repression again and just one day after it imposed martial law crushing the “Solidarnosc” movement, I threw away my party card. Stuffing my backpack with warm clothing, I waited for the secret police to knock on my door. Nothing of the sort happened, perhaps because I was not alone in my gesture; some 700,000 party members did likewise. But I am jumping far ahead. Let’s get back to 1972. Landing in the U.S.A.: The Formative Year After a long flight, my first crossing of the Atlantic and the American continent, I land at San Francisco airport. A Pan Am helicopter—yes, that was a standard service then—takes me across the Bay. I get out on a strip of asphalt next to the freeway. A colorfully dressed, long-haired girl approaches. “Do you need a taxi?” “Yes, take me to the International House, please.”

We go to the car, a wreck of a stretch executive limousine, all painted in bright yellow sunflowers. A dog, a big Alsatian, is lying on the back seat. I carefully place myself next to the beast. “It won’t bite, provided you don’t rape me”, the girl says cheerfully, and then discusses some business on the CB radio with the dispatcher. I haven’t seen a CB radio before; this invention, despite the claims of “convergence

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theory”, hasn’t arrived yet in my country. This is my first encounter with America, its civilization, and the Flower People. The eight months spent at Berkeley were extremely important for my future. To live on a $500 scholarship per month, without any possibility of bringing my unconvertible Polish money from home, demanded a lot of sacrifices. I rented a small room at what was euphemistically called the Shattuck Hotel, but was, in fact, a retirement home. Sharing the sad and nostalgic life of elderly Americans, often abandoned by families, and feeling equally lonesome, I sat inside for hours typing— on a portable Olivetti Lettera (an investment of $70, second hand)—the manuscript of my first English-language book. It was an either-or decision: either I leave some sort of mark on American sociology, a hook for future contacts, or I will just return to Poland, perhaps never to be let out again. I decided to put into English an extended and enriched version of my Polish doctoral dissertation. The topic being structural functionalism, I now had access to the immense, earlier unavailable literature, and at least one living classic of the school at hand: Talcott Parsons’ co-author of Economy and Society (1956), Neil J. Smelser. For the methodological part of my analysis I could use the advice of Arthur Stinchcombe, then working on his book on strategies of theory construction. Moreover, my theoretical imagination was developing in an informal circle of graduate students, the “Theory Group”, in which I met such future stars of American sociology as Jeffrey C. Alexander and Eric Olin Wright. This was the beginning of long friendships and professional collaborations. I was also learning American ways, and their enviable informality, so different from customs back home. On Friday evenings I was enjoying the open house of Art Stinchcombe, the chair of the department, with the host working in a bathrobe in his study while graduate students were ransacking his fridge in the kitchen. Or that party at Philip Selznick’s house at which I arrived dressed in my best suit and tie, only to behold the host nonchalantly opening his door in a white t-shirt, shorts, and bare feet. I was consoled a few minutes later when Leo Lowenthal appeared clad in his best Viennese jacket, and a tie even darker than mine. Classes at Berkeley were also teaching me how to teach. Attending the seminars of Herbert Blumer on G.H. Mead’s “theory of the act”, I listened day after day to an incredibly powerful voice coming from a huge and amazingly athletic body (at least for a septuagenarian) as he pounds into our heads this or that wisdom of the Chicago School master. Still, I was not only learning how to teach, I was also learning how to treat one’s students. When Neil Smelser discussed the work of great classic masters in his theory class, he invited me to give the particular lecture on Karl Marx in his place, assuming quite correctly that I had been exposed to more Marx than anybody else in the classroom. My teaching debut in America went fine, there was a good discussion, and I sorted out some of my ideas, using them later in the final chapter of my book comparing Marxism with functionalism. Yet most important was that gift of trust received from a famous professor. In eight months the manuscript was ready. I showed it to Smelser, who liked it and gave me some advice about potential publishers. Of course my written English was far from perfect, but I could not afford a professional editor who would charge seven dollars per page. And I was in a hurry—desperate to place the manuscript with a publisher before leaving the U.S. Thus I decided to break all customary rules: after

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xeroxing the manuscript at the self-service shop on Bancroft Street, I mailed it to twenty American publishers at the same time. Some days later, I received seventeen letters with the usual polite phrases of couched rejection, but three publishers expressed serious interest. Stanley Holwitz, a great social science editor (then head of the sociology and anthropology section at Academic Press, New York, a subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), was the first to come with a signed contract. He also soon became a true friend. The volume came out as System and Function: Toward a Theory of Society (New York 1974). I returned to Poland, leaving the door open for my return. Nevertheless, before departing from the sociological paradise of the U.S.A., there were three months more at Harvard, at a time when Talcott Parsons reigned on one floor and George Homans, the chair, on another—reportedly so as not to cross paths in the corridors. Their theories were as equally at odds as their personalities, but, for me, sitting in on the classes of both was another invaluable experience. Parsons was teaching his last seminar before retirement, on the sociology of religion, a naturally fascinating topic for a student coming from deeply Roman Catholic Poland. In turn, Homans, in his class on elementary social behavior, was pushing me down from the heights of functionalist macro-sociology, furthering the earlier efforts of Blumer. Both are certainly responsible for my subsequent interest in micro-sociology and most recent fascination with the sociology of everyday life. Finding My Master and Mentor In my first American book I defended the functionalist approach against the current onslaught of radical, leftist criticism. I even ventured to suggest that there are some affinities between the functionalist model of a social system and the Marxist model of socioeconomic formation. Coming from a Polish young scholar, from behind the Iron Curtain, it caused some heads to turn. One of these was Robert K. Merton’s. Some time after returning to Poland I received his letter, telling of his interest in my ideas and offering to arrange a series of summer school appointments at Columbia University in order to bring me to New York and discuss my work. One hot and humid summer day, I appeared at Feyerweather Hall at a small departmental reception and met a tall, handsome, slightly gray-haired gentlemen in a tweed jacket and an ascot instead of a tie. The center of attention, surrounded by most people present— including a contingent of beautiful women, his assistants. Yet Merton was at once friendly, open, easy-going, and helpful. What ensued were numerous meetings at his Riverside Drive apartment overflowing with books, manuscripts, all manner of papers on the floor, and a gallery of pictures of great scholars (in sociology but also in the sciences), with whom he collaborated and corresponded. He also took me to meet Paul Lazarsfeld, who had apparently also read my book as I found it on his desk heavily annotated in small, precise handwriting. Very soon, Merton in typical American fashion started to address me as “Piotr” and requested reciprocation. But my Polish traditional upbringing did not allow for the outrageous familiarity of “Bob”—as most of his friends called him. The most I could make myself utter to my master was “Robert.” He graciously accepted my

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reservations, and this remained our own special secret until the end of his days. He always remembered, and all his letters to me are thus signed Robert. With the passing years, Merton has become for me perhaps the most important influence—intellectual, but also personal. A true “role model”, as he would put it in his theory. I have learned much from him. There has been not only the wealth of ideas, but, perhaps most importantly, a manner and style of doing sociology—truly classic, analytical, precise, balanced, and avoiding dogmatism or extremes. Without becoming another Joseph Conrad, I could never dream of emulating his mastery of the English language. Still, a souvenir he handed me one day, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1984), bears an encouraging handwritten dedication: “for Piotr to help him on his way to become a stylist in the English language”. I have been trying ever since. I have also tried to learn his perspective on moral, political, and human issues, which he always generously shared—showing true concern also with regards to quite private issues, such as living under martial law at the beginning of the 1980s, or tending to my ninety-six-year-old mother in the 1990s. I had the great fortune of finding my true master and mentor. My chances to reciprocate for what I have received from him came twice. The first was given to me when Anthony Giddens approached me to write an intellectual biography of Merton for the series he was editing for Macmillan, “Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences”. This offer came in the gloomy winter of 1981 when, for some time, Polish dreams of freedom and democracy were suppressed by the communist regime which crushed the “Solidarnosc” movement. The opportunity to escape from the sad realities of the day into the realm of pure ideas was more than welcome. We called such work at that time an “internal exile”. The task mandated reading, at last, all that Merton had ever written, as well as everything that has been written about him. A sizable library it was indeed. This was the most instructive course in social theory that I have ever taken. When the book (Robert K. Merton: An Intellectual Profile) came out in 1986, my master was clearly pleased, purchasing thirty copies for his friends and admitting that I had discovered some logical connections among the pieces of his work. This unveiled a coherent theoretical system rather than the merely brilliant mosaic earlier commentators had tended to see. “You plainly understand what I have been up to over the years, and in places more profoundly so than I did at the time of writing—and sometimes since”, he wrote in a letter to me. The second opportunity came some years later when Merton was receiving his twenty-second in an amazing row of honorary doctoral degrees—this time from my alma mater, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I played the part of the promotor rite constitutus and remember how proud I was, reading an extensive appraisal of his work in Latin at a solemn ceremony in the mediaeval hall of Collegium Maius. In response he graciously referred to Bronislaw Malinowski and Florian Znaniecki among his own masters, as well as to Stanislaw Ossowski, Stefan Nowak and myself as his longtime Polish friends. He preserved good memories of his visit. Years later he sent me an amusing ad for LOT Polish Airlines clipped from New Yorker Magazine: “Fly to Krakow, the city of Paris cafes without the Parisians.” On yet another occasion, he forwarded a picture of the monument to the Polish

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King Ladislaus Jagiello, the founder of my University, raised somewhere in Central Park. He was famous for his epistolary talents, and I keep and cherish a fat file of correspondence I have received from him over the years. Each letter contains some piece of wisdom phrased in witty and colorful prose as well as meticulous and pedantic form. The first were typed on his IBM Selectric typewriter, and later, after a period of struggle against his writing habits, processed beautifully on an Apple Macintosh. The enthusiasm with which he embraced computer technology at a very late stage in his life became obvious when I started to receive a flow of emails with his most recent papers as attachments. The last email proudly referred to the 2003 Italian edition of his new book, The Adventures of Serendipity. I keep in mind the last occasion when we met. It is at the end of the 1990s, on a sunny but chilly New York day in October. We are walking together along Broadway to his favorite lunch place. Merton strides briskly in a light tweed jacket and small cap, ignoring the wind and cold. Myself, I am freezing in an overcoat. A blue bus stops at sizable distance. “Let’s catch it,” he says and runs like a youngster, leaping onto the bus steps just in time. He was almost ninety; nothing but cancer could have defeated his body. In 1996 I published a single-volume collection of his most important work (Robert K. Merton on Social Structure and Science) through the famous Heritage of Sociology series of the University of Chicago Press, closing a very important chapter of my intellectual development. Communism Crumbles: Sociological Miracles The next chapter begins with unexpected, exciting changes in my own country, Poland. At the end of the 1970s the democratic opposition against the communist regime became increasingly visible, articulate, and organized; concurrently, in 1978, the bishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, was elected Pope John Paul II. In 1979 he made his first pilgrimage to Poland. On a broad green field in Krakow I participate in a mass with around two million other people in attendance. And I witness a true sociological miracle (perhaps worth invoking during the current process of his beatification!). There is an absolute calmness and religious concentration of the crowd during the mass, but the moment the liturgy ends, an outburst of patriotic emotions with thousands of flags and banners appearing out of nowhere. People smile at one another, embrace, shake hands with the hated police officers guarding the parameters of the gathering. The civil society, suppressed for decades by totalitarian rule, is suddenly reborn. People regain dignity and identity. And I discover the crucial social significance of intangibles and imponderables; in the Polish case this means a unique mixture of nationalism and religiosity. A year later one of the biggest social movements of the twentieth century—comparable only to the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.—is born in Poland. ”Solidarnosc” starts the avalanche which some years later buries the communist system and changes the world. But before that, the old regime undertakes one final, convulsive attempt to maintain power. The conflict between the massive democratic movement and entrenched regime grew in strength during the fall of 1981. At the time I was teaching a graduate

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seminar on social change at the European center of Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy. With an international group of students we trace and discuss the developments in Poland. On December 12, a sunny winter Saturday, I start by car toward home for Christmas break. Joyful and excited, I go through picturesque snowblanketed Brenner Pass, then the Bridge of Europe, and the cities of Innsbruck and Salzburg. After a night at a motel in Sankt Valentin, some 200 miles from Vienna, on the morning of Sunday, December 13, I find myself on the main freeway nr. 1, driving toward the Austrian capital. And suddenly on the radio I hear the Polish communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, declaring martial law, delegalizing “Solidarnosc”, arresting dissidents, closing borders, halting all gas sales, and cutting the telephone lines. For five minutes I sit in a car on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, pondering what to do. I have a good job, an apartment, and money in the bank in Bologna. Yet against all logic and reason, I don’t turn back. With grim determination I drive through a heavily guarded checkpoint on the Austrian-Czech border. The soldier alerts me: “Do you know there is a war in Poland? You may still turn around. I will not shoot.” No, I do not turn back. The checkered gate closes behind me and I wonder if I will ever find myself in the West again. But I must drive on. I have business to settle in Poland; the limits of my opportunistic compromises have been reached. Arriving home by the evening, I hand in my party membership card the next day. My fling with the communist government ends once and for all. Two months later I am allowed to return to Bologna to complete my classes (the military government is adamant about fulfilling international obligations, feigning “normality”). I remember leaving a grey, sad, poor, and hopeless country still under martial law, passing the barbed wire at the Czech-Austrian border at Mikulov, and arriving in colorful, joyous, and affluent Vienna. And then the idea strikes me: perhaps high time to emigrate. I work at an American institution, I have excellent connections in the U.S., and Reagan’s administration, as a gesture of help, is easily granting residence permits for Poles. Again reason clashes with emotions: I am so attached to my homeland, to my town, to my culture, to my university, and to my friends. There are long walks along the beautiful, sun-bathed hills of Tuscany, while hell is burning inside. Yet I decide to test myself to the extreme. The American green card is ready and just waiting for my signature; American colleagues have arranged a job in New York. I travel by train to Rome to make my final decision and sign the papers. For two hours I circle the U.S. Embassy at Via Vittorio Veneto and cannot make myself enter. Then I do what perhaps only a Pole would do: I go to the Vatican, to at least draw nearer my Polish Pope, and sit for several hours in the cold, empty Basilica San Pietro. And then, like an illumination, I know what I must do. No, there was nothing metaphysical about it, just a lost soul finding reconciliation with oneself. I make my way back to Bologna, pack my bags, send a fax to the U.S. ambassador canceling my visa application, and drive back to Poland. I have never regretted this choice. Less than a decade later I became the citizen of a free and democratic country—my own.

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Focusing on Social Movements and Social Change Finding myself back in Poland, I realized I needed to enrich my intellectual tools to understand what was going on in society. Once martial law is lifted, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies again brings me to the U.S., to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the center for research on social movements. Charles Tilly, its founder and guru, has already left for New York, but I find Meyer Zald, Aldon Morris, and a whole group of younger scholars extremely helpful in studying the theories of social movements. One product of this is an article, “The Social Functions of Defeat”, in which I predict that the Solidarnosc movement will reconsolidate, only made stronger by the experience of repression, and eventually win its struggle for freedom. This “prophecy” comes true during that miraculous autumn of 1989 when communist regimes fall like dominoes in Eastern Europe and, some time later, in the Soviet Union itself. The biggest and strongest empire of the twentieth century lies in ruins, brought down by the mobilization of the common people, and led by an electrician from the Gdansk shipyard, Lech Walesa. I recall the preamble of American Constitution—“We the people …”—and, from my early sociological education, the phrase by Karl Marx—“People make their own history ...”. This becomes the motto of a book, Society in Action: The Theory of Social Becoming (1991), published by Polity Press in Cambridge a year later. It proposes an abstract theoretical model of social change driven by grassroots, popular movements. A “volcanic model”, if you will, but it is inspired by the very concrete “revolutions” of 1989. Through it I attempt to demonstrate the old wisdom that there is nothing as practical as a theory, and that only a theory is able to provide a map, an orientation in the complex processes of social change. The year 1989 ends one period in the history of Eastern and Central Europe, but begins another, known as the transition or transformation toward a fully democratic, viable market society of the Western type. This provides a major challenge for a social theorist. To build the foundation for further research I take up thorough studies of the theories of social change, from classical evolutionism and historical materialism, through theories of civilizational cycles, to the current constructivist approaches. As we all know, there is no better way to reach full understanding of ideas than to teach them. I have the chance to test my interpretations and systematizations on Polish, but also American students while teaching UCLA summer sessions for ten years in succession. One day, over lunch at the Faculty Club, Simon Prosser—an editor at Blackwell Publishers fishing for new manuscripts—persuades me to turn my lectures into a book. His skillful arguments and the spell of the place make the project inevitable. The Sociology of Social Change comes out in 1993, soon translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and finally Polish. The Russian edition becomes a standard textbook not only in Russia, but in other post-Soviet republics. At one of the World Congresses of Sociology, a delegate from the Republic of Azerbaijan approached me, glanced at my badge, and exclaimed: “You are Sztompka? You are still alive? We believed you were a classic!” Imagine the peculiar satisfaction of a Polish sociologist in learning that his book has replaced Lenin as obligatory “classic” reading.

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Turning toward Intangibles and Imponderables But general theories of change do not solve all the problems of post-communist transition. The process is historically unique and requires new concepts and new models. Yes, “people make their own history”, but as Marx was ready to add: “... they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (see my Society in Action, p. 44). This was exactly the situation of post-communist societies, struggling to transform themselves radically from a centrally planned to a market economy, from authoritarian to democratic rule, and from a censored culture to a free flow of ideas. Nonetheless, which circumstances “given and transmitted from the past” were most decisive in hindering the process, blocking the road toward prosperity and freedom? I recalled my discovery of intangibles and imponderables during the Pope’s first pilgrimage to Krakow. From that moment on, I focused my research on “soft variables”, the cultural and mental legacies of communism that comprised barriers to the quick and complete success of transformation. I first proposed a concept of “civilizational incompetence” as an acquired and learned syndrome of beliefs, rules, and subconscious reflexes, born under communism and completely incongruent with the demands of a civil and open society. This was the “trained incapacity” of Homo sovieticus, as my mentor Robert K. Merton would have it. Then I turned to the study of a single albeit crucial component of this syndrome—the pervasive “distrust culture” (Trust: A Sociological Theory, 1999). Eventually, I attempted to diagnose the “post-communist trauma”, understood as the shock of sudden, rapid, comprehensive, and unexpected change. This idea was born over some glasses of California wine at a restaurant in Palo Alto, where I was dining with a group of international friends: Jeff Alexander, my companion from a graduate class at Berkeley and a close friend ever since, Neil Smelser, our teacher there twenty years earlier, plus Ron Eyerman, Bernd Giesen, and Bjorn Wittrock, other friends from Europe. We were to spend together an exciting semester as fellows of the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies and its fruition, some years later, was a co-authored book, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004). Drawing Lessons from My Tale By 2004 I was the citizen of not only free and democratic Poland, but also of the European Union. Since 1995 I have been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, since 2002, President of the International Sociological Association (ISA), elected at the World Congress in Brisbane, Australia. Returning yet again to the Bay Area where the American chapter of my biography commenced thirty-two years earlier. I was now the invited guest of the American Sociological Association during its annual convention. One afternoon I left my luxurious apartment at the San Francisco Hilton, and took a BART train to Berkeley. There it was: the Shattuck Hotel, and the window of my little room without a bath on the fourth floor, where for eight months I had typed my first book in English.

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That old Virginia Slims cigarette advertisement echoed in my mind: “You’ve come a long way, baby”. Is there a message inherent in this brief autobiographical story? What have been the keys to success? As a theorist I am ever tempted to generalize. Hence, perhaps the following guidelines, my personal Decalogue, may bear more than personal validity. •

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The old prescription of Thomas Edison is absolutely fundamental: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Disciplined, focused, persistent work—there is no substitute for it. Inspiration comes only to the meticulously prepared mind. It is the reward, the added value to a life of drudgery. One should set life goals at the highest, seemingly unrealistic level. As Max Weber reportedly remarked, “If Columbus were not trying to reach India, he would not have discovered America.” Utopias are powerful motivational forces. Choosing a career in academia, one must remember that in this field it is one’s professional duty to strive for excellence, to be better today than yourself only yesterday, and always better than other scholars around, past and present. There is no place in scholarship for mediocrity. If you prefer not to stick out from the crowd, choose another profession. In initiating a long-range project—e.g., commencing to write a book—imagine how it will look when finished, where it will stand in the library, next to which famous volumes. Never succumb to the obsessive feeling, so typical of all creative thinkers—“I will never write anything sensible again!” Sit down and try. Or just leave it for a few days. In the early stages of your career, accept any and all offers, invitations, and opportunities that come your way. Never refuse. On the other hand, in the later stages, learn to refuse and focus exclusively on doing things most important to you, taking up themes you would still like to resolve. Otherwise you may lack time. Try to get through the first stages of your academic career as quickly as possible. Later the famous “Matthew Principle”—the Mertonian paraphrasing of the Gospel—begins to function: climbing up will become easier and easier the more reputation, credentials, and capital you accumulate. The greatest piece of luck is meeting and befriending outstanding people, not only to get tangible help and support from them, but also to have clear role models to emulate. Watch out for such people; assist your good fortune. If absolutely necessary, stretch your high principles a little bit: use manipulative, even opportunistic strategies, try to influence those in power, and do not be ashamed of some self-advertising—as long as all this does not harm other people. Moral heroism should be rewarded and heroes put on pedestals. But this cannot be expected of everybody: most people are not made of marble. Some compromises of even the highest principles are sometimes excusable although, of course, I wish everyone a life without such a necessity. Remember that there is much more to life than research. Live life to the fullest. You will not get another chance.

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Selected Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: California University Press. Sztompka, Piotr. 1970. Analiza funkcjonalna w socjologii i antropologii spolecznej (Functional Analysis in Sociology and Social Anthropology). Krakow: Ossolineum Publishers. ———. 1974a. Teoria i wyjasnienie (Theory and Explanation). Warszawa: Polish Scientific Publishers. ———. 1974b. System and Function: Toward a Theory of Society. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1986. Robert K. Merton: An Intellectual Profile. London: Macmillan. ———. 1988. “The Social Functions of Defeat.” Pp. 183–193 in L. Kriesberg et al. (eds), Social Movements as a Factor of Change in the Contemporary World. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ———. 1991. Society in Action: The Theory of Social Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1993. The Sociology of Social Change. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1999. Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Socjologia: analiza spoleczenstwa (Sociology: The Analysis of Society). Krakow: Znak Publishers. Sztompka, Piotr, ed. 1996. Robert K. Merton on Social Structure and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 13

My Sociological Practices and Commuting Identities Eiko Ikegami

Introduction: Commuting Identities For the last several years, I have been working on a research project in which I intend to combine ethnographical and historical approaches to analyze the civic life of Kyoto, a city with 1,200 years of history. I usually arrive in Kyoto in June, after the end of my spring term courses at the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research. June is part of the monsoon, or rainy season in Japan. Kyoto welcomes me with the sweet smell of misty rain. As I walk around the neighborhoods alongside the Shirakawa River, with their rows of old wooden houses lining the riverside paths, I feel my internal cultural gears begin to shift. This city has the power to bring about a switch in my cultural mode of existence. The force of this place is not a simple byproduct of the city’s physical landscape. It emerges through social relationships— what one might call “a culture of sociability” in Kyoto. When I was interviewing people there, I found I could still gain access to my cultural upbringing. I can easily differentiate between polite expressions with keigo (honorific words) and colloquial expressions according to the conversational context and the person addressed. I can sometimes inject a note of informality into the conversation by omitting the formal

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keigo, which can make it easier to establish a connection with my interviewees. The fact that I am able to switch effortlessly between cultural modes as soon as I begin to communicate with Kyoto people indicates that my identity depends on the realm of the social interactions in which I am currently involved. After a month of intensive fieldwork in the merciless heat of the Kyoto summer, however, I am usually completely exhausted. I pack my gear into my suitcases and dash to the airport. The casual brashness of New York City feels like a secular salvation after a month in Kyoto, where everything, including human relations, is meticulously cared for and tended to. In New York there is no need to be conscious of one’s degree of politeness. As soon as I resume my life in the hustle and bustle of the American city, I am immediately taken by its particular rhythm. It is usually not long before I come to feel that my life in Kyoto is almost unreal. Sometimes I feel a sense of unease when I shift from one of my cultural modes of existence to another. The unease soon goes away, however, just like my jet lag. Because my experience of switching among cultural modes has been a recurrent pattern in my life, I am clearly developing a transnational identity—a phenomenon familiar to those individuals who develop multiple geographical “home ports” in the fluid world of contemporary globalization. My transnational identity, however, is not an abstract transcendental concept. Different aspects of my selfhood emerge and re-emerge when I find myself in varying forms of social and cognitive relationships and in different physical locations. In this sense it may be more accurate to say that I have developed a set of commuting identities. Globalization has changed the cultural adjustments of immigrants enormously in terms of their relationship with their own cultures. Just a few decades ago, before the age of inexpensive telecommunications and mass airline transportation, it was difficult for cross-continental immigrants to maintain live contact with their country of origin. Although they might visit their hometown, it was often a “once in a lifetime” event. Now that we have access to discount airfares, inexpensive international telephone connections, and email, a new kind of immigrant is emerging—one who can actively maintain a strong personal and professional foundation in more than one country. This new breed of immigrant is no longer exceptional, and sociologists are no exception to this trend. Sociology as a discipline originated during the nineteenth century as a way of understanding the profound and ongoing transformations of European societies that were facing modernization and industrialization. Reflecting this history, the major sociological theories of social change have been constructed in most cases on analyses of Western social developments. Nowadays, however, it is not only the world that is changing within its web of dense and extensive global networks but also those who observe and study this world. An ever-increasing number of sociologists are developing multiple identities and cognitive frameworks. Their compound identities will eventually affect their sociological practices. I was born, reared, and educated in Tokyo, Japan. As a sociologist who developed her career in the United States, I am one of the new breed of global commuting sociologists. Living in the United States for two decades as a sociologist while struggling to find my own professional niche in American academia, I clearly came to incorporate the viewpoints and tacit professional styles typical of American society.

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At the same time, since my research subjects were related to Japan, I frequently returned to my homeland: hence, unlike previous generations of immigrants, I never lost touch with my cultural upbringing. In Japan, I am treated as a Japanese because I still look and behave like a Japanese; while in the United States, I can uphold my own professional identity as a sociologist even though I come from a different culture. As I travel back and forth between the two countries, I switch unconsciously from one cultural mode to another. My identities are not only multiple but also formed, negotiated, and revised within concrete situational contexts defined by contingency. My personal experiences and situational contexts affect my theoretical work as a sociologist. This interrelationship between my situational experiences and sociological theory-building, however, took some time to develop. In fact, the interaction between my sociological practices and the situational contexts of my identities became self-consciously evident only during the last several years as I developed a theoretical focus, which I have elsewhere called a public-centered approach (Ikegami 2000, 2005a, 2005b). This approach emphasizes the spheres of communicative actions (called “publics”) as sites of cultural production and identity formation. The relationship between social or cognitive network dynamics and the cultural and identity-shaping practices that issue from them should be understood as a form of emergent properties—a term borrowed from complexity theory in the natural sciences. As a historical sociologist who emphasizes path-dependency and contingency in social analysis, I reflected on my own intellectual development as a path-dependent phenomenon as I encountered and engaged in various kinds of communicative spheres of publics. In the following account, I trace my intellectual journey as a path-dependent development in which I traveled through various forms of communicative spheres in Japan, in the United States, and elsewhere. Growing Up in Japan I was born in Nihonbashi, a district in the heart of downtown Tokyo. My old neighborhood is close to the areas that have been historically associated with the centers of Japanese finance and commerce. At the time that I grew up, however, our neighborhood still retained an air of the old Japanese neighborhood. My mother, Kiyoko, raised me as a single mother, as my father died when I was three years old. As a typical member of her generation of Japanese women, who survived World War II and the occupation that followed it, my mother is a disciplined, practical, and strong-willed person. She is very intelligent, but again, as was typical for her generation of women, she did not go beyond a middle-school level of education. She has two sisters who did not marry and maintained independent lives through their work. According to my Aunt Hatsuko, the Ikegami family supposedly has a long history as a samurai family residing in Edo (the old name for Tokyo) for many generations. By the time of my mother’s birth, however, there were few remaining traces of the family’s social legacy. Furthermore, my mother’s parents both died very early, before the war, leaving their children—my mother and her two sisters—alone; they all grew up in the custody of relatives.

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Although my mother is a practical person who ran her own small business, she also loves the art of the tea ceremony. In fact, although the Ikegami sisters were not living in privileged circumstances while growing up in wartime Japan, they showed me by personal example how to bring the pleasures of beauty into everyday life. I saw my Aunt Hatsuko, who worked as a nurse for a steel company for forty years, develop a completely different identity as an accomplished teacher of ikebana, the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangements. Even in the late twentieth century, these traditional aesthetic pursuits of late medieval origin constituted an important form of networking among ordinary people. This observation later contributed to my interest in the history of the civic networks centered around Japanese arts and literature. Raised by a mother of independent mind, I inherited a healthy aspiration for independence. On the other hand, growing up in a very small female-headed family without close extended family networks had its own drawbacks. I had very few mediators between myself and the outside world. In part because of the lack of information about various options, I majored in classical Japanese literature at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, the first national university for women in Japan. I had always had a genuine admiration for Japanese classical poetry since my high school days. The major in Japanese literature at Ochanomizu University was intensive and rigidly structured from the first year. I enjoyed the inspiring seminars offered by Tsutumi Seiji, a professor who was involved in a monumental scholarly project, the compilation of all extant manuscripts and published editions of Japanese classical literature; by Imoto Noichi, an authority on haiku poetry; and by Asai Kiyoshi, an expert on modern Japanese literature. I was fortunate to have a thorough philological training in classical Japanese, as it opened the door for my later research when I became a historical sociologist. As a young undergraduate, however, I did not fully appreciate at that time the intellectual benefits that I would later derive from a classical education. Rather, I felt frustrated that I could not find a way to connect with the dynamic movements of contemporary society. The winds of student political radicalism outside the quiet seminar rooms of Japanese literature inevitably influenced my thinking and interests. Thus I began to develop a personal interest in the social sciences together with my pursuit of classical Japanese literature. Entering the World of Work The postwar liberalism of Japanese education provided women with equal opportunities for higher education. Once these college-educated women entered the job market, however, they quickly got a bitter taste of social reality. Before the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1986, in particular, Japanese companies routinely recruited men and women for openly separate tracks with completely different sets of responsibilities, expectations, pay scales, and promotion ladders. The majority of permanently employed male college graduates were considered for career tracks while women, regardless of their level of education, were treated as assistants to the men. Except for becoming a public school teacher or entering the civil service, which provided equal career opportunities and pay scales

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for women, there were very few professions open to women with four-year college degrees. I was shocked to realize the realities of the Japanese job market. I was not interested in becoming a so-called “OL” (office lady), nor was I interested in taking one of the safe career options for women, such as public education. However, since some large newspaper companies were recruiting young college graduates through a system of written entrance examinations, which was a more meritocratic approach to hiring, I aspired to work in the media. I was probably unconsciously encouraged to take this option because of my sense of having been insulated from social realities, first by growing up in a small female-headed family without an intermediary to the larger world, and then by immersing myself in the elegant traditions of Japanese classical literature. I was fortunate to get a job at the Nikkei (the Japan Economic Journal), a financial newspaper, the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. The company also compiles and publishes such financial data as the Nikkei stock index. Gaining work experience as a full member of a large Japanese organization was a wonderful preparation for becoming a sociologist. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Japanese economy was energetically growing into a giant of the world economy. I was able to observe the growth of post-industrial Japan from the inside. It was competitive with but yet organizationally and culturally distinctively different from Western models of modern capitalism. I observed a full range of idiosyncratic organizational practices and office cultures. Being an insider rather than an observer of this world had its own psychological cost, however. Although journalism gave me some exhilarating experiences, I also felt that I could not develop deeper and more systematic insights into this energetic society. I decided to quit my job and subsequently enrolled in graduate school at Tsukuba University, near Tokyo. Ayabe Tsuneo, an anthropologist who at that time worked on Southeast Asia, along with Miyata Noboru, an ethnologist of Japanese society, introduced me for the first time to social-scientific ways of thinking. As a woman and as a dropout from the life-long employment system at the Nikkei, however, I saw the limitations of rebuilding my professional life in Japan. For the first time, I began to think of studying abroad. Moving to America I applied to the Fulbright program for a fellowship and arrived at the sociology department of Harvard University in 1983 as a graduate student. When I came to the United States as a somewhat older Ph.D. student, however, I did not speak English. I had never driven a car because Tokyo has ample public transportation; and I had never learned to type, as I arrived just before the advent of the affordable personal computer. At that time I wrote the complicated Japanese characters only in pen, often in vertical columns. I could hardly participate in class discussions since I did not yet speak English well. I also felt a sense of uneasiness in joining American-style parties among the graduate students, where an implicit norm was a mixture of casual informality with intellectually pretentious conversations. To be sure, I had grown up in a world full of American icons, the film stars and singers who dominated Japanese

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popular culture. Moreover, the extensive political influence of the United States over Japan during the Cold War period brought news from Washington into the lives of ordinary Japanese people. Thus it was not so much a matter of knowledge per se that was a problem for me. The problem was more or less the implicit grammar of socialization that was a source of my alienation. After a period of intense reading and internal observations of my own experiences at Harvard, however, I began to realize that my cultural and social upbringing was not after all simply a disadvantage in sociology but was also a kind of cultural capital. I had an ample store of lived experiences of Japanese social relations and intimate observations of Japanese organizational dynamics from the inside. I also realized that I often read my assigned readings rather differently from my classmates. My approach came naturally to me because whenever I read any work of sociological theory, I tried to think it through within my own cognitive frame of reference, which was informed by my own experiences and observations of people, organizations, and social relations in Japan. Three faculty members whom I met at Harvard, Orlando Patterson, Alessandro Pizzorno, and Ezra Vogel, helped me to recognize my own internal resources through their succinct questions about Japan. They were genuinely curious about Japanese society as they considered Japan an ideal testing ground for various sociological theories. At that time Patterson, a Jamaican who was trained at the London School of Economics, had completed his monumental comparative study Slavery and Social Death (1982) and was moving on to an ambitious project on the historical sociology of freedom in Western civilization. Pizzorno, an Italian sociologist, was then interested in the comparative study of organized crime; he later employed me as a research assistant. Beyond their own research interests, however, these scholars’ backgrounds in European history appeared to generate various unexpected questions regarding Japanese history and its organizational cultures that made me reflect on the aspects of Japanese society that I often take for granted as a native. The presence of Ezra Vogel, who published Japan as Number One (1979), a very popular book both in Japan and in the United States, also offered a sounding board for my ideas. I also began to objectify my own cultural background and to reevaluate my insider’s observations of Japanese society. By the early 1980s, the most lively area of sociological research on Japan published in English was the exploration of the distinctive structural patterns of contemporary Japanese organizations. This research had been stimulated by the economic success of Japan. I began to read such works as Ronald Dore’s British Factory—Japanese Factory (1973), Robert Cole’s Work, Mobility and Participation (1979), and Thomas Rohlen’s account of a bank office culture, For Harmony and Strength (1974). Many ethnographical descriptions of Japanese organizations in these books were understandably quite familiar to me. Nonetheless, reading these books made me aware of the extent to which some of the aspects of Japan that I had always taken for granted had significant sociological implications. Consequently, I often entered into an internal dialogue between my own previous experiences and observations in Japan and my newly acquired sociological perspective. In other words, I was starting to practice comparative sociology. In this way, I began to look for the ways in which the social experiences of non-Western

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societies could be effectively incorporated into the process of theory-building in sociology. In the 1980s, the resurgence of a historical approach became apparent in American sociology. I was fascinated by this trend. I started to read the works of such scholars as Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Michael Mann. Their large-scale sociological imaginations were attractive to me. Meanwhile, in the middle of my graduate study, Theda Skocpol returned to Harvard from the University of Chicago and began to organize a workshop on historical sociology. Many graduate students, myself included, presented papers in her workshop. Around that time, I also became aware that such historical sociologists as Moore and Anderson sometimes used Japan in their works as a critical test case in order to make their theories, which were primarily constructed from analyses of European historical cases, more nearly universal. Japan is a significant case study for sociological theories because it was the first non-Western society to successfully modernize itself. Furthermore, historical sociologists have been interested in the case of Japan because Japan underwent an outwardly similar transition from its medieval to its early modern period. In contrast to the relatively crowded field of research on contemporary Japanese organizations, sociological inquiries into Japanese history scarcely existed around that time except for a few such pioneering works as Robert Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion (1957) and Ronald Dore’s Education in Tokugawa Japan (1965). I felt it necessary to present a more accurate understanding of the comparative meaning of Japanese social developments without subordinating Japan to European models. At the same time, the prevailing journalistic discourse, as well as an older view of modernization, overemphasized the importance of culture as a causal mechanism for explaining the success of East Asia. In such discourses, culture is often narrowly associated with morals, values, and religious belief, while the role of culture within the larger context of macrosocial structures is not analyzed. Culture and State Formation On the other hand, comparative works of historical sociology on the grand scale that were written in the 1980s rarely engaged the realities of microprocesses in people’s everyday lives. Furthermore, the dimension of culture was almost untouched in the resurgent literature of state formation in the 1980s. Nonetheless, a discussion of culture appears to be an essential component of understanding East Asian patterns of social development. It was in this context that I began to develop an interest in the interconnections between culture and the trajectories of state formation. I began to find my own theoretical niche within the current discourse of American sociology. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard in June 1989. I started teaching at the department of sociology at Yale University as an assistant professor. I had originally intended to come to the United States only for graduate study, but I unexpectedly began to walk down the road to become an immigrant. By this time it became clear that I was engaged with three lines of theoretical challenges. First, I wanted to situate Japan within a comparative context in such

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a way as not to subordinate its unique experience to European models of social change. Second, I wanted to introduce the dimension of culture and everyday life into the literature of state formation. Third, I began to explore the possibility of writing a historically grounded work that would be sensitive both to the forces of social structures and to the agency of individuals. I wanted to develop these theoretical points through an in-depth investigation of Japanese history. The first line of theoretical development required the articulation of the broad pattern of Japanese political development from a comparative perspective as a starting point. In this context, my encounter with Charles Tilly at a conference on the comparison of two great cities—Tokyo and Paris—held in Tokyo in 1990 was helpful for sharpening my own perspective. We eventually co-authored a paper on the historical patterns of Japanese and French collective actions in the context of large-scale political and economic developments (Ikegami and Tilly 1994). The experience of writing this paper helped me to articulate the distinctive pattern of Japanese state formation. Nonetheless, I also recognized that comparative studies of social change have their own methodological pitfalls. When scholars use categories or concepts that were originally derived from European historical experiences and apply them to the study of non-Western societies, they sometimes fall into the trap of overestimating the significance of relatively minor elements in a non-Western society simply because an analogous causal factor plays a key role in the Western experience. As a result, the social experiences of non-Western societies are often subordinated to Western experiences, on which many theoretical models and concepts of the social sciences are founded. I thought that this methodological problem was especially conspicuous when social scientists discussed the cultural aspects of East Asian societies. At that time the existing literature on East Asian developments often focused on certain sets of morals, values, and such religions as Confucianism as sources of their social disciplines. Implicit in this line of argumentation is the desire to identify the functional equivalent of the Protestant ethic à la Max Weber. This is not to say that morals, values, and religious beliefs are not important in East Asian societies. Rather, the internalization of values as a means of discipline is only one of many different venues of cultural control over human actions. In other words, equating culture with generalized systems of morality seemed to me to be rather an insufficient conception of culture. Furthermore, the position of the Japanese religions within the matrix of social relations is clearly very different from the place of Christianity and Judaism in European societies. In Japan, a country in which no single religious group has ever acquired the gatekeeping power of moral control, I felt the necessity of situating the cultural dimension within the context of a long-term structural pattern of political and economic history. I thus began to focus on the interrelationships between the dimension of the everyday lives of Japanese people within their culture and the longterm macroconfigurations of political developments in Japan. I found a relatively small pool of theoretical inspiration in this area of sociological literature. Among them, Norbert Elias’ pioneering work, The Civilizing Process (1939), appeared to be insightful, particularly his emphasis on the interconnections between microcultural processes and large-scale transformations. Elias’ focus on the “habit” of human behavior (which preceded Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term) in his

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study of the transformation of etiquette and manners appeared to be pointing in the correct direction to overcome the Parsonian conception of culture. On the other hand, when Elias discussed the impact of state formation on the micro-level of cultural transformation in etiquette and manners, he tended to become speculative, relating his findings to a universalistic psychological explanation. I thought it was necessary to find a mid-range vantage point permitting observation of the ways in which individuals incorporate the changing world around them—social structures—in the course of their actions. In other words, what is the relationship between the “toolkit” aspect of culture (Swidler 1986) and its structured dimensions? William Sewell, Jr.’s (1992) conception of the dual nature of structure made sense to me in this context. Sewell contends that structures, both symbolic and social, have two simultaneous aspects that both constrain and empower the course of human action. On the other hand, how is it possible to analyze the dynamic interrelationship between structures and human agency in a concrete historical context? Studying the Samurai It seemed to me that a study of the actual moments of interpersonal conflict would give me a chance to observe the hidden relationships among social structures, human agency, and cultural transformation. I had already begun to look into primary sources that would allow me to examine the dynamic relationships between culture and social structures as part of my dissertation research. They were various types of records of private fights, quarrels, and acts of revenge among the Japanese samurai warriors. These records usually included the consequences of these private fights, namely how these conflicts were adjudicated during the different periods of Japanese history. This in-depth historical investigation trained my powers of sociological observation. Through a close examination of the samurai’s private use of violence, I was able to observe the ways in which the “objective” social constraints were understood by the samurai, and how the force of institutionalized culture—that is to say, the tradition of samurai honor—played a role in the outcome. At the same time, in an event involving violent conflict, an individual samurai’s strategic actions, emotions, and cultural habits all intersected at the moment of confrontation. I found that analysis of specific cases of such conflict resolution is an effective gateway to observing the cultural dimension of state formation. As I examined a number of such fatal encounters, family conflicts, and acts of revenge, I noticed the patterns of samurai fights and the authorities’ adjudication of such conflicts changed over the course of time. These alterations were triggered by the changing power structures of the Japanese state. In the earlier periods, when the samurai were more or less self-equipped independent warriors, the samurai could increase their power by developing a credible reputation, usually through defending their own honor against even the slightest challenges. The authorities rarely intervened in these fights or punished individuals. During the later period, however, after the country had been pacified, the relationship between the authorities and the samurai changed. Private quarrels were now forbidden by law, but the legacy of the samurai’s cultural tradition—to respond immediately when their honor was being challenged—also did not cease to exist, because to fail to

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respond to insults to one’s honor would be detrimental to one’s reputation among his peers. I constructed my project from this experience, which evolved into a book: Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (1995). The book provided an opportunity to integrate the three lines of theoretical questioning mentioned earlier. It covered several centuries of the development of the Japanese state from the medieval through the early modern period in relation to the origin, development, and transformation of the samurai class. In medieval Japan, the samurai were self-equipped mounted warriors and autonomous military landlords. But during the early modern period under the long-lasting peace imposed by the Tokugawa shoguns, the samurai became stipended quasi-bureaucrats, although their collective identity as the warrior class remained politically important. This dimension of the samurai’s reorganization as a class is a critical backdrop for understanding the transformation of the samurai’s cultural control of honorific emotions. In 1991 I received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and was able to take a leave of absence from my teaching duties at Yale in order to write the manuscript of Taming of the Samurai, then an enlarged project. I had occasions for enculturation through socializing with scholars from various disciplines. It was simply a pleasure to sit down each day at lunch for conversations in the dining hall with such scholars as Clifford Geertz and Albert Hirschman from the faculty of the School of Social Science at the IAS, whose work I had admired since I was a graduate student in Japan. Although my project had already been formulated before I came to the Institute, I was in a subtle way influenced by Geertz’s ethnographical methods and Hirschman’s concisely argued book, The Passion and the Interests (1977). Socializing with interdisciplinary fellows was beneficial for my intellectual development; I came to have a better sense of the audience outside sociology. In general, the opportunities provided by fellowships at interdisciplinary institutes have been beneficial for my intellectual development. Ten years after my Princeton fellowship, I spent a year at the newly established Center for Scholars and Writers in the New York Public Library in 2001. A year spent with colleagues who included writers of best-selling novels was interesting. In particular, since I was then working on the question of the performing arts and poetry as social networks in Japan, doing my research side by side with creative writers was an interesting experience. Sociology is a wonderful discipline but it has its own professional culture and limitations. Reflecting on one’s intellectual orientation in the mirror provided by other disciplines and viewpoints has almost the same effect in shifting one’s identities as crossing international cultural boundaries. My stumbling upon the notion of honor as its core of the samurai project opened a new comparative dimension. From ancient Greece to the contemporary Mediterranean basin, from the American South before the Civil War to the samurai warrior culture of Japan, there have existed various cultures in which honor and shame played central roles. Thomas Hobbes was perhaps the earliest social scientist who noticed the significant implication of honor in politics in his Leviathan, when he said that the “reputation of power is power”. Thus Leviathan can be seen in part as Hobbes’ answer to the need to tame the violent culture of honor that prevailed among

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aristocratic elites of the time. The several centuries of cultural developments in Japan that channeled and domesticated the culture of honor sentiments appeared to offer an effective analytical tool for articulating the distinctive trajectory of Japan’s passage to modernity. More importantly, however, the study of honor cultures trained my epistemological views of structures, culture, and human actions. Honor is a fluid, dynamic, and multidimensional concept. As honor is inevitably a social concept concerned with the evaluation of individuals within the social groups in which they claim membership, the social and organizational transformation of the groups and the spaces they occupy will affect personal notions of honor. At the same time, honor is profoundly personal as it resides in the innermost core of an individual’s sense of self-worth. Because of this very nature, honor mediates between individual aspirations and the judgments of society. Consequently, the study of honor cultures thus allowed me to observe the dynamic linkages between such macrostructural changes in society as state formation and the everyday level of microcultural formulations. Civility and Aesthetic Japan After completing the samurai project, I began to extend the scope of my research in various ways. For example, since I had worked for a financial newspaper in Japan, I had predictably kept my eyes on the transformation of Japanese capitalism. The study of the samurai honor culture also deepened my understanding of Japanese capitalism, as it served as a cultural resource for the construction and explanation of Japan’s distinctive pattern of capitalism: competitive yet collaborative. All human action occurs in time, but no one can predict how other persons may act in the future. Our understanding of another is opaque at best. Since I had defined honor as acting as a cultural mechanism to create trustworthy social relationships across the dimension of time, the samurai project opened up my interest in the notion of trust (Ikegami 1995a, 2004). Since the concept of trust has been central in the new economic sociology, it also contributed to my renewed interest in the transformation of Japanese capitalism. The ongoing cyber-globalization of the world economy appears to pose a challenge to the existing models of Japanese capitalism by eroding various institutions of trust, such as the system of life-long employment and senioritybased pay scales (Ikegami 1999, 2003). I have also been engaged in writing a book about Kyoto, which was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. It is an investigation of the civic culture and organizations of the Kyoto downtown. This project connects ethnographical research on the contemporary life of Kyoto with the historical development of this ancient city. My research focuses on a famous Shinto festival that has been held for a thousand years; it is perhaps the world’s oldest continually celebrated city festival. The festival has been the center of social life in downtown Kyoto. My research has brought me back every summer to this city. The experience of developing social networks in a city with a very different culture from Tokyo, where I was born and grew up, has been refreshing for me.

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I also began to extend my comparative horizon (Ikegami 1995b). After moving to the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research, I co-organized a conference in 2000 with one of my colleagues, William Roseberry, an anthropologist specializing in Latin America, on the theme of “State, Markets, and Culture”. After the conference, Karen Barkey and Bin Wong, who were both conference participants, and I decided to collaborate. Our idea was to write a book comparing the trajectories of state transformation in Japan, China, and the Ottoman Empire. Although this book has been a challenging on-going project, it has given me the opportunity to reflect intensively on the Japanese pattern of development compared to the historical experiences of China and the Ottoman Empire. All these projects and the interactions with the various people associated with them—researchers, collaborators, friends, and interviewees—have opened my social and cognitive circuits. Every time I shift my attentions to a different set of social relations, I am consciously or unconsciously obliged to leave, if only temporarily, my pre-existing cognitive associations and forced to see the world from a different angle. Although I have undertaken a variety of projects, the book on the origins of Japanese civility has been central to my intellectual development because it helped me turn my epistemological theory of culture and social actions in a new direction. Civility serves in part to reduce the emotional cost of transactions. In this sense, the transformation of a violent honor culture and the development of civility both reflect my interest in the social and cultural regulation of emotion. In this book, which was eventually published as Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (2005a), I trace the cultural history of Japan from the medieval to the early modern period, exploring such wide-ranging topics as the central role of networks in the performing arts, the tea ceremony and haiku poetry, the politics of kimono aesthetics, the rise of commercial publishing, the popularization of etiquette and manners, and the rise of tacit modes of communication. In a world in which feudal hierarchies rigidly defined and differentiated the standings of individuals, Japanese people carved out spheres in which various kinds of aesthetic associations allowed them to socialize horizontally outside the formal political order. The discovery of the fact that the arts and such literary forms as haiku were at the very center of the civic social life of traditional Japan explains why aesthetic life became so important to the Japanese people. The study of the traditional Japanese arts and literature as network-based activities of socialization was, in retrospect, the merging of my undergraduate background in Japanese classical literature with a new professional identity as a sociologist. Many scholars recognize that although they might move away from their intellectual interests in their undergraduate days, they return to their original interests later in their career. I was probably unconsciously walking along this path of intellectual development. Bonds of Civility is not only about aesthetics, but also about politics. These days, given the current situation of contemporary global politics, intellectuals around the world have a renewed interest in the search for indigenous possibilities for achieving democracy by focusing on civil society. The cookie-cutter application of Western models of civil society to non-Western societies, however, often distorts accurate

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assessment of political cultures in these societies. Uncovering the distinctive and widespread characteristics of Japanese aesthetic sociability has wider political implications beyond the case of Japan because it touches on the issue of horizontal associational life in non-Western societies. Humanity’s search for the possibility of social orders built on horizontal associations of free individuals rather than on structures of vertical integration imposed from the top down is considered the central issue of contemporary political theory. I try to address this question from a very different angle. The dynamics of arts and poetry circles has been deeply ingrained in the sociopolitical dynamics of Japanese society because the circles allowed people to interact comfortably with individuals of different social backgrounds and status. In the Japanese “aesthetic publics”, the participants were required to take a temporary leave from their official feudal identities as dutiful samurai, merchants, farmers, or craftsmen. Instead, they assumed alternative identities as artists or poets, signified by their frequent use of artist names for private socialization. Without negating their class and occupational identities, however, people easily shifted their gears from one identity to another as artists, haiku poets, or performers of popular songs in these circles. In this book civility implies a grammar of sociability that is most suitable for less committed social relations; that is to say, interactions mediated by weak ties. Even though Japanese society under the shogunate was deeply segmented by feudal categories, bonds of civility loosely united the people and allowed them to socialize as individuals. Consequently, by using the term civility rather than civil society as a keyword, Bonds of Civility demonstrates the distinctive path of Japanese society toward modern civility. I argued that the aesthetic image of Japan played a central role in the process of creating a sense of commonality before the rise of the modern nation-state. A Phenomenological Approach to Networks, Publics, and Identities While I expanded my historical investigations into the aesthetic social life of Japanese people, I became more and more interested in some epistemological questions relevant to my historical study of Japanese civility. The activities of premodern Japanese people reminded me of my own “commuting identities” as my recurrent switching of identities. Aesthetic sociability is a distinctive cultural practice in Japan but it also highlights a basic feature of our common humanity, namely the constant switching of social functions, roles, and identities as we move from one communicative site to another. In 1998 I participated in a workshop on networks organized by Harrison White at Columbia University. White’s dynamic and phenomenological view of networks made sense to me. In particular, his idea of switching, decoupling, and shifting of network connections as central to identity formation influenced my thinking. Through my study of honor-related conflict resolutions among the samurai, I had already developed my phenomenological view of culture and human action. This research experience made it clear to me that culture and human identity as such are not fixed entities but emerge recurrently within the various contexts of social interactions. I have not, however, spelled out my understanding of the relationships

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among the state, associational networks, and market on the other hand, and my phenomenological views of cultures and identity. Although I had already nearly completed historical surveys on the subject of civility, I wanted to make Bonds of Civility a truly historically grounded theoretical work; it required a bottom-up effort to reconfigure the project. Subsequently, my book project was accepted for the series on Structural Analysis of Social Sciences, published by the Cambridge University Press. I was fortunate that Mark Granovetter, the series editor, unflaggingly supported this book project by giving me valuable feedback. The idea of “publics”, or sites of communicative actions as the primary sites of cultural production and transformation became central to my argument. As I use the term, a public is the sphere—an actual-physical and/or imaged-virtual space—in which the actions of switching, connecting to, and decoupling from networks take place. Each individual in a public carries an amalgamation of cognitive, social, and symbolic networks. Therefore, understood phenomenologically, a public emerges on the smallest scale as the site of temporary interactions among individuals. In Bonds of Civility I proposed that meanings and representations as such are “emergent properties” arising in publics. The interacting individuals bring their cognitive associational networks into the sphere of interactions. New meanings emerge through these interactions while the individual actor’s preexisting identities and worldviews are challenged, negotiated, and transformed through their communicative activities. All of this may sound quite abstract. For me, however, it is not simply an abstract theory detached from social realities. It is connected with an epistemological description of my own upbringing and of my intellectual career as a sociologist. I have encountered numerous individuals, mentors, friends, colleagues, and interviewees in different places over the course of my life. These individuals often carry very different sets of social, cultural, and cognitive associational networks. Not only my encounters with individuals but also my reading of various books as well as my research experiences themselves also challenged me to shift my thinking, departing in part from my existing set of cognitive associational networks. The life of an individual is an amalgamation of successive experiences of shifting one’s connections in publics. My successive encounters in the various communicative sites of publics in my life have been influenced by the surrounding macropolitical economic structures. For example, my commuting identities, which straddle the United States and Japan, would not be possible as they are now without the ongoing new phase of globalization. My historical investigation into early modern Japanese civility also proved that point. The reason that the aesthetic publics became central to the networks of civic socializing was conditioned by the distinctive trajectory of the Japanese state. The shogunate strictly prohibited the formation of voluntary political alliances, which made aesthetic networks a safe haven for creating alternative realities. Yet the vitality of communicative actions centered on the Japanese aesthetic publics cannot be reduced to a function of the power structure of the shogunate. Thus the public-centered view offers the researcher a twofold theoretical advantage. By describing human interactions as a continuous process of co-dependent emergence of publics and identities, we can recognize the fluidity of social processes in creating and revising identities and culture. This view allows actors to carry out their own

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strategic actions in creating their identities and culture in publics. At the same time, I recognize the power of macro-organizational structures over cultural domains; these structures influence the types, hierarchies, and interrelationships of publics. Furthermore, once the view of culture as an emergent property becomes a stable and widely recognized cognitive associational map, it can be regarded as a cause in social processes (Ikegami 2005a, 2005b). More than ever, the sociology departments of American universities receive numerous applications to their graduate programs from students from nonWestern societies. The intellectual vitality and resources of American universities are certainly unmatched in the competitive field of higher educational institutions around the world. We cannot, however, deny the fact that the political and economic strength of the United States plays a significant role in attracting continuous streams of graduate students from abroad. When we encounter bright graduate students from non-Western societies, however, American mentors sometimes hasten to encourage them to apply our “theories” to their local “cases” as a quick way of helping students to become professional sociologists. Although it may sometimes be an inevitable side-effect of education, I often fear that this process of enculturation may serve to reduce the originality of students’ thinking and the possibility of finding different and refreshing points of view. I said earlier that a sociologist’s formation of compound identities will eventually affect his or her sociological practices. This formation cannot be achieved, however, by permitting graduate students to examine their homelands—which often turn out to be the site of their research—only on the basis of theories and concepts derived from American and Eurocentric viewpoints. I was fortunate to have mentors and friends who inspired me by passionately sharing their own viewpoints with me and asking steady streams of questions but never forcing me to follow in their footsteps. My career as a sociologist is far from reaching full circle. Yet I hope that this review of my intellectual development may be useful not only for the purpose of my own self-reflection—thanks to the editor who proposed that I write this piece—but also for those who are struggling to make sense of their own commuting identities and sociological practices. References and Selected Bibliography Bellah, Robert. 1957. Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Cole, Robert. 1979. Work, Mobility and Participation: A Comparative Study of American and Japanese Industry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dore, Ronald. 1965. Education in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———.1973. British Factory, Japanese Factory: The Origins of National Diversity in Industrial Relations. London: Allen & Unwin. Elias, Norbert. (1939) 2000. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.

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Hirschman, Albert. 1977. The Passion and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ikegami, Eiko. 1995a. Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1995b. “Citizenship and National Identity in Early Meiji Japan, 1868– 1889: A Comparative Assessment.” International Review of Social History 40, Supplement 3:185–22. ———. 1999. “Democracy in an Age of Cyber-Financial Globalization: Time, Space, and Embeddedness from an Asian Perspective.” Social Research 66(3): 887–914. ———. 2000. “A Sociological Theory of Publics: Identity and Culture as Emergent Properties in Networks” Social Research 67(4):989–1029. ———. 2003. “Military Mobilization and the Transformation of Property Relationships: Wars That Defined the Japanese Style of Capitalism.” Pp. 118– 146 in Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation, edited by Diane E. Davis, and Anthony W. Pereira. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. “Shame and the Samurai: Institutions, Trustworthiness and Autonomy in the Elite Honor Culture.” Social Research 70(4):1351–1378. ———. 2005a. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005b. “Bringing Culture into Macrostructural Analysis in Historical Sociology: Some Epistemological Considerations.” Poetics 33:15–31. Ikegami, Eiko and Charles Tilly. 1994. “State Formation and Contention in Japan and France.” In Edo and Paris: The State, Political Power, and Urban Life in Two Early-Modern Societies. Ed. James L. MacClain, John M. Merriman, and K. Ugawa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1991. Freedom. New York: Basic Books. Sewell, William Jr. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51: 273–286. Vogel, Ezra F. 1979. Japan as Number One. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 14

A Journey into Sociology Horst J. Helle

Has my life so far been a journey into sociology? It has probably been more of a journey into social problems with sociology appearing later as a way of finding answers. And what kind of social problems were those? Many different kinds, but they often had a view on the United States of America from a European perspective as the organizing principle. I am German, and to be German was extremely dangerous when I was young. When allied aircraft deposited their loads of carpet bombing over the city of Hamburg in July of 1943, they could have killed me as they did the other twelve women, children, grandmothers, and aging men who sat in the same cellar with my mother and me. The others died; my mother and I were dug up—strange coincidence? An early lesson in social problems? Why do these aircraft pilots want to kill me? Later, in 1981, I met Ken, a warrant officer in the U.S. Air Force. He had been ordered to bomb German cities in World War II, then was shot down, parachuted to safety, was made a prisoner of war in Germany in the forties, and became a friend of mine in the eighties. He died of cardiac arrest while exercising on his bicycle in the outdoors—one of those Americans brought up to be very strict with themselves? When president Eisenhower was running for re-election, I traveled to the University of Kansas under an exchange program that was initiated by Senator Fulbright from Arkansas. I came to New York by boat and continued my journey

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to Kansas by rail, using the services of the New York Central to Chicago and of the Santa Fe Railway from Chicago to the Midwest. Soon after I arrived there, Hungary rose up against Russian suppression. I remember listening to President Eisenhower’s public address explaining to the American people why the U.S. could not send their military force in support of the anti-communist uprising. A terrible massacre occurred in Hungary when the uprising was crushed. After the Hamburg experience as a child, this was my second confrontation with U.S. military politics. In 1972, during my tenure as a sociologist in Vienna, I met a colleague who had managed to get out of Hungary alive, and who recently retired as a sociology professor in Germany. Did all this make me a pacifist? No, probably not, but it contributed to making me a sociologist. While a graduate student at the University of Kansas I met my wife-to-be, Carolyn Joyce Craft (1935–1999). She became my English tutor as well as the ambassador of the American Midwest in my home. Carolyn had grown up in a Presbyterian family, and her relatives had been supporters of Republican candidates for generations. She, however, had alternative political ideas. When on one occasion upon her insistence I helped her remove Goldwater stickers from her father’s car (Carolyn: “I am not about to drive on campus to have my former professors see me with those stickers on the bumper”) it caused a major conflict in the family. But that confrontation was minor compared to what happened when—as an exchange student in Germany—Carolyn decided to join the Roman Catholic Church. This alienated her entire Kansas family. Another lesson in social problems? An incentive to study the sociology of religion? Maybe. But it was also an experience in American Studies (And it made me respect and admire Carolyn’s courage. She was of course my favorite American). To leave the University of Kansas with a Master’s degree in business administration required that I write a thesis. In order to complete it I interviewed blue-collar workers in a maintenance plant of Trans World Airlines in Kansas City. When I returned to my German alma mater in Hamburg, my professor rejected the notion that I could elaborate on that for a Ph.D. dissertation in business administration: “That is not business administration as we do it here, that is sociology!” Having been discouraged from further pursuing my studies in the Hamburg graduate school of business on account of outlandish dissertation interests, I approached the only sociologist who taught in the field at the University of Hamburg at the time: Helmut Schelsky. He had spent the majority of his life in Saxony in the cities of Dresden and Leipzig, and as an academic and former officer in the military spoke, of course, educated German. However, when he quoted United States publications in English, his Saxon past became audible, so one of my closest college friends remarked whispering during Schelsky’s lecture: “He speaks Anglo-Saxon!” While working toward a Ph.D. in sociology at Hamburg University I had very clear career plans: I was going to be a manager in industry, like my father. I viewed sociology as a preparation for personnel work or for finding employment in marketing and advertising. A dissertation on blue-collar workers would therefore be appropriate. I had already written the first chapters of my would-be dissertation, when Schelsky’s assistant called: “Come into the office, the boss wants to see you!” Schelsky revealed to me that a prominent member of the employers’ association of the ports of Bremen had contacted him about a study on longshoremen. Bremen

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dock work was reeling under poor human relations and high accident rates and the operations were falling behind in Bremen’s competition with Rotterdam in the Netherlands. I had just sent a folder to Schelsky with information about myself asking him to support an application for scholarship money. In that application I had stated that I studied the literature and language of the Netherlands, so Schelsky correctly concluded that I spoke Dutch. Being able to interview dockworkers in Dutch was crucial to conducting that part of the research project that was to be carried out in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and in Antwerp in Belgium. Schelsky suggested during our conversation that I should change my dissertation, or rather, give up what I had intended to do so far! I was reluctant, so he suggested simply that I think about it, and after a day or two I realized that I really had no choice if I wanted his continued support. So I scrapped what I had written, bought heavy boots (and everything else one wears to minimize the likelihood of getting killed while working on the docks), and started being a longshoreman. In the course of one year I interviewed 500 dock workers, about 100 each in Hamburg, Bremen, Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, and Antwerp (in that order), and this, my re-education of a middle class college boy, is—I believe today—what made me a sociologist. But I did not know that at the time. Being a Ph.D. candidate in Hamburg I had been exposed to Schelsky’s teaching, and maybe more importantly, to the eventful sessions of his graduate seminar. He had key figures come visit and give guest presentations, among them Gehlen, Dahrendorf, a theologian who later became a bishop in the Lutheran Church, and Everett C. Hughes from Chicago, who came with his wife. Both, Everett and Mrs. Hughes spoke German (!), which saved Schelsky from having to resort to his “Anglo-Saxon”. I had, of course, no idea at the time, that I would eventually meet these sociologists again much later. I received my Ph.D. without too much trouble, and considered my graduation a final farewell to academic life. I was successful in qualifying for the management training program of Unilever Germany, and spent two years being sent to various departments of that international company. While I was stationed in Münster to drive around the countryside in a small truck selling margarine and cream cheese, I felt bored after work, and got myself accepted to the graduate seminar of Professor Joseph Höffner, a priest, Catholic theologian, and expert in the social teachings of the church, who later was to become bishop and cardinal. But my stay in Münster was abruptly ended by the premature birth of my oldest son, Paul, who needed only eight months of pregnancy to (almost) fully mature. This triggered a visit from my in-laws in Kansas, but it was not a happy occasion, not even for Carolyn, because their stay included Paul’s baptism, which, alas, did not take place in the Presbyterian Church. Once my two years as management trainee were complete, Unilever Germany gave me a position in marketing in their soap and detergent division. I tried to explain to myself that my growing discontent was because of a lack of familiarity with the work environment, because of narrow-minded colleagues, and because of a general impatience on my part, but it became more and more obvious to me that I would not be happy in the long run were I to continue working in business. So I started looking for employment alternatives, and interviewed for the position of program director in

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the America House Hamburg. In the meantime Schelsky had accepted a position at Münster University, and Heinz Kluth had become his successor in Hamburg. Kluth was a former student of Schelsky’s, and we knew each other well from the graduate seminar sessions. Kluth had two positions of assistants to fill, and he was in touch with two very good men who wrote excellent Ph.D. dissertations. He hired one of them, and then offered the second opening to me. I gladly accepted, and years later, I asked him why he did not hire the second very good candidate at the time. He replied that he did not want to have two Catholic assistants work for him, and since both of the original applicants were members of that church, he took one and then reserved the other slot for me. “But I am a Catholic too, did you not know that?” He was surprised. “You were born in Hamburg, and your first name is Horst! That seemed sufficient indication to the contrary to me,” Kluth replied. Then he added: “But really I do not care which church you belong to.” Another lesson? I got a university position by mistake! Being German almost killed me as a child, being a Catholic almost locked me out of a job as a young adult! I started teaching sociology as a non-tenured assistant at Hamburg University in May of 1962. I remember struggling with the books by Parsons, trying to translate his texts into German and wondering why his sentences were as long as is common in German academic writing. Then David and Evelyn Riesman came to visit my department. None of the tenured faculty felt that their English was good enough to host them, so they delegated that task to me, and of course Carolyn and I felt honored and were delighted. We found the Riesmans to be the most sensitive and wonderful people. To my surprise David asked me to take them to the mass graves of the victims of the carpet bombings in 1943. I did, and David stood for the longest time, looking at the large area in which the 30,000 persons were interred in the Central Cemetery in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf. Then he said: “Now I know why I did my teach-ins against carpet bombing.” I have been a lazy reader of sociological literature, but knowing the author well, it motivated me to read The Lonely Crowd (Riesman 1950) and the collection of essays Individualism Reconsidered (Riesman 1954). David Riesman was a lawyer by training. He shared that background, of course, with Max Weber. Later in his life Riesman occasionally appeared in court as an attorney for small colleges that had a long tradition of educating males or females, respectively, but who were sued by feminists, claiming gender discrimination. Riesman on his own could not hold back the tide, but he was deeply sad that many of those traditional colleges went bankrupt as a result of legal battles. He was, among many other things, an expert in educational institutions and a much sought-after advisor when new universities were founded. David Riesman was close to the Quakers. He loathed violence. He gave me a manuscript entitled “Is American Society Violent by Nature?” which I translated into German and have now made available on my website.1 He also gave me a manuscript of a sermon he preached at Harvard chapel. I should have kept closer track of these documents, and I regret now not to be able to retrieve them. But I do remember one line of reasoning clearly that referred to the origin of racist ideology. Riesman argued that slavery was common in the southern United States and also in many 1

See http://www.horst-helle.de/riesmand.htm.

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areas of Latin America. In the latter case the slave owners were usually Catholics, which according to Riesman had to mean that they knew full well that it was a sin to have slaves, and that humans tended to be sinners, but had a chance to repent and better themselves. The southern United States, on the other hand, was inhabited by Protestants of the kind who tended to argue “Since we have a tradition of doing this, it must be the right thing to do!” Riesman then considered the references to slaves held by the biblical patriarchs and to slavery in ancient Greece and ancient Rome as ideological concepts for the justification of slavery, and he was of the opinion that racist doctrine resulted from that. Since using Parsons’ texts proved to be a burden on my students, I was happy when I discovered that Peter L. Berger had published his Invitation to Sociology in 1963. Berger’s take on the social problem of racism as spelled out in that book struck me as being consistent with Riesman’s interpretation. Also, Berger offered sociological insights, which took me back to my experience in Kansas. He points out that the “Black Belt” and the “Bible Belt” occupy geographical areas in the United States which largely overlap (Berger 1963: 113). I remember the barber in Kansas who explained that he could not cut the hair of African-Americans because he did not have the special tools it takes to cut curly hair. Berger writes in Invitation to Sociology that the conflict over the question of slavery isolated the ultraconservative fundamentalist Protestant groups from a wider exchange of Christian ideas, and as a result kept them from developing. He is also of the opinion that the fundamentalist Protestant churches concentrate on private sins, mainly on sexual offences, and leave infringements against very basic Christian principles in public matters out of consideration. As a result, a politician is not allowed to have sex with his secretary, but he is free to wage war. In Berger’s opinion this religious attitude is functional in “maintaining the social system of the American South” (Berger 1963: 114). Berger also made reference to David Riesman, although not in this particular context. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) gave me a fellowship to do research at the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago during the second half of 1966 and the first half of 1967. This extended stay in the U.S.A. gave me an opportunity to resume contact or meet sociologists who would greatly influence me in the following years. In New York City I meet with Peter Berger. He showed me to a nearby bookstore and we took a fresh copy of The Social Construction of Reality from the shelf (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In Columbia, Paul Lazarsfeld took time to see me for a brief interview. He pointed out that I ought to study the writings of Hans Freyer. In Brandeis University, Kurt Wolff kindly made an appointment with me. I introduced myself to him in English, but he spoke German during our encounter and created an atmosphere of a German university. We talked about Georg Simmel, whom Wolf had translated and introduced to teaching in the United States. In Santa Barbara, California, I met Tamotsu Shibutani, one of the most influential students of Herbert Blumer. Since I had been given my fellowship to study the concept of the symbol in sociology, I was going to Chicago to find the Chicago School of symbolic interaction. But when I arrived in Chicago, that school had already disappeared and its former representatives had scattered around the country. Shibutani in California was one example. But I also met again with Everett Hughes, who had visited Schelsky’s graduate seminar in Hamburg, and

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whose kindness during our second encounter left a deep impression. But he was no longer with the Chicago department, which he had dominated for so many years. Sociology at the University of Chicago had moved in the direction of objectivism. The school of symbolic interaction was gone. I met with Peter Blau before he also left Chicago (and grew a beard). The department heads were Morris Janowitz and after him Nathan Keyfitz, both very friendly, but in no position to advise me with my project. In those months, I met Donald N. Levine. He had retreated from the department and concentrated on the college of the University of Chicago. From him I learned that Parsons knew the work of Simmel quite well, and that Parsons did not ignore Simmel because he was unfamiliar with him, but rather because he could not integrate Simmel’s ideas into his own system. There was one professor in the sociology department with whom I managed to establish an ongoing relationship: Edward Shils. He taught a seminar on the sociology of the university which I attended regularly. I was struck by a number of parallels between the style of Shils and that of Schelsky. Both talked most of the time themselves rather than listen to less intelligent graduate students, both had a cigar in their mouths (leaving it up to the people in attendance to wonder how much of the cigar they smoked and how much they chewed). Both struck me as utterly well informed. In addition, Shils showed an interest in Schelsky and asked me about him when he learned that I had been his student. The stay in Chicago and work during the months following back in Hamburg resulted in my book on “Sociology and the Symbol” (Soziologie und Symbol, Helle 1969) and in getting my post-doctoral degree, the Habilitation as Privatdozent, which is the license awarded by a faculty to privately teach a course—sociology in my case. This does, however, not include a position, but is a necessary credential for being appointed to a tenured professorship. To make money for my family and myself I returned to the pre-Chicago job as assistant that had been given to me by mistake. But in my new academic status, I was now asked to give the lecture “Introduction to Sociology” in a large lecture hall with an audience of several hundred students. My students could, of course, benefit from what I had learned in the United States. A small but very loud minority had adopted from America what started in Berkeley as the free speech movement. Their representatives approached me after my lecture and informed me that I had the wrong consciousness not realizing that I should fight on the side of the labor class since I too was merely a wage earner. For them to decide whether my consciousness was right or wrong meant to me simply that they grossly ignored my intellectual autonomy. In 1969 I was called to succeed Arnold Gehlen as professor at the Aachen Institute of Technology (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen). I looked forward to possibly co-teaching seminars with him, but he had been attacked by leftist students as a fascist, and did not want to take any more of that. As a result, my contacts with him occurred in private meetings, and when he handed over the sociology chair and library to me he remarked: “I have always tried to keep this as small as possible!” Like Gehlen before me, I received one secretary, one assistant, and a very good small library. Gehlen did not think much of colleagues who tried to show off the number of people they had working for them. He was very knowledgeable of American pragmatism and knew more about George Herbert

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Mead than was typical in Germany at that time. He was interested in what I had learned in Chicago and he encouraged me to pay more attention to Mead. I got involved in organizing the celebrations that were to be held at the centenary of the Aachen Institute of Technology, and upon my request Gehlen chaired a work group with international participation. After only three years in Aachen I accepted a position in Vienna, Austria, at the venerable old Universität Wien. There too—as previously in Aachen—teaching was overshadowed by student unrest. When the surprising invitation came to join the Department of Sociology at the Universität München, it made my colleagues in Vienna unhappy, but it meant getting back to Germany and teaching in one of the best schools in the humanities. I was appointed to a new position, so I was nobody’s successor in Munich. During the many years of active research and teaching there (1973–2002) I was host to a large number of international visitors, most of them from North America and from Asia. Among them were Jeffery Alexander, Reinhard Bendix, Phillip Hammond, Talcott Parsons,2 Edward Shils, Neil Smelser, Ralph Turner, and Kurt Wolff. Needless to say, considerable influence on my thinking as a sociologist was derived from these contacts. I found it to be of great importance to have been able, during visits to the U.S.A. as well as during encounters in Germany, to discuss in German with American colleagues texts written by German authors. This applies to my contacts with Martin Albrow from London, with Peter Berger (whose Viennese accent we jokingly identified as not German but Austrian), with Reinhard Bendix, Barbara Heyl, Everett Hughes, Carl W. Roberts, and Kurt Wolff. Bendix told me on one occasion that the generation of American sociologists who mastered the German language will die out and that thereafter, German authors cannot expect to be noticed in the U.S.A. unless their books are translated into English. The year 1981 brought me back to the U.S.A. for several months during a sabbatical. My family and I lived in Ventura, California, a location that enabled me to stay in touch with the campuses of the University of California in Los Angeles as well as in Santa Barbara. In Los Angeles I met with Ralph Turner who introduced me to Harold Garfinkel and recruited me to organize and chair a session for the Tenth World Congress of the International Sociological Association (ISA) to be held in Mexico City in 1982. Turner was then vice president of the ISA and needed all the help he could get. He wanted two theory sessions in Mexico, one on macro theory to be chaired by S.N. Eisenstadt, and the other on micro theory, which he wanted me to prepare. Among the presenters whom I succeeded in persuading to participate were—in the preparatory stage—Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman. Garfinkel did not make it to the meetings, and Goffman (1922–1982) informed me that he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer.3 I never met him face to face, but we had telephone and air mail contact prior to his death. Overall the Mexico meetings went well. I got to know and appreciate Eisenstadt, and we agreed to publish the papers from the sessions we had organized. In order to work on that project in detail, Eisenstadt and I met in Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt 2 A note about Parsons’ last day at Munich can be read on my website; see http://www. horst-helle.de/parsonsd.htm. 3 See http://www.horst-helle.de/goffmand.htm.

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am Main in Germany several months later. It so happened that Shils was in the same hotel, and so Eisenstadt, Shils, and I had the most remarkable conversations over dinner and late into the night in Bad Homburg. The two volumes that were based on the Mexico meetings finally appeared in 1985 (Eisenstadt and Helle 1985; Helle and Eisenstadt 1985). In my work on the sociology of the family I had noticed the writings of Joseph Ratzinger on marriage. He pointed out that in the history of Christianity, specifically in the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Churches there was more flexibility in dealing with divorced Christians than in the Roman Catholic Church. Until 1977 Ratzinger was a professor (and for a while also Vice President) at the University of Regensburg. Thus, from the time I was appointed in Munich until 1977, Ratzinger and I both worked at Bavarian universities and had overlapping interests in religion and pastoral work. I had also noticed that Ratzinger received his post-doctoral degree, the Habilitation, at my university on the basis of a thesis on Saint Bonaventura, which interested me for the somewhat ridiculous reason that I had been in Ventura in California, and had learned then, that the official name of that settlement was City of San Bonaventura. According to university lore, the Roman Catholic faculty in Munich almost failed Ratzinger, because his theological ideas were too progressive for the taste of some if its members. Later Ratzinger was well liked by his students and highly respected for his publications, so when he, a simple priest with no hierarchical history, was to the surprise of the public appointed archbishop of Munich, the news was received with regret by the academic community and interpreted as a sad loss to theological research. The University of Munich needed an additional position for a full professor of sociology in order to cope with the rising number of students in that field. It so happened that at that time the state of Bavaria entered into negotiations with the Vatican in Rome to change the treaty Bavaria had with the Vatican, and in the course of that renewal, a Catholic chair of sociology was established which could only be filled with the consent of the archbishop. We, the Munich sociologists, had no experience with that procedure, so, having been in touch with Ratzinger prior to his becoming archbishop, I was delegated to visit him in his residence to discuss finding a sociologist whom Ratzinger was not going to veto. It became clear to me that someone who had spent his entire career teaching in German universities was an easy partner who would have no problem understanding what goes on in faculty meetings. It was my impression that he would have preferred to continue his life as a scholar, and that may still be the case now that he is Pope. In 1988 my Munich team and I organized a summer school in interpretive sociology for which the English sociologist Paul Atkinson invented the name Organization for Advanced Studies in Interpretive Sociology (OASIS). I became more and more interested in alternative approaches in sociological theory and posted information on important authors on my website for my students to use.4 We had a separate list of names for those who were still alive at the time, and only transferred them to the “Dead Sociologists Society” once they had died. Of this group, Friedrich Tenbruck and Tamotsu Shibutani were present at our OASIS convention in Munich 4

See http://www.horst-helle.de/deads.htm.

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in 1988. Both of them made the most memorable contributions in their lectures and discussions. Tenbruck proved to be incredibly knowledgeable on Max Weber, and Shibutani was the authority on George Herbert Mead. We published the papers that were prepared for this conference in English as Verstehen and Pragmatism: Essays in Interpretative Sociology, and some colleagues still use this book in their teaching (Helle 1990). It was because of my interest in Mead that in 1989 I spent several months at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, because there I was close to another American, Harold Orbach who, like Shibutani, is an expert on Mead. Orbach invited me to Kansas State, and I liked the idea also, because I had been a student at KU. I visited Kansas State in between semesters, so back in Munich few people noticed that I was gone. Then at the beginning of the academic year 1990–1991 I had a sabbatical, which enabled me to accept an invitation from Richard Coughlin to spend a semester at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. There, as previously in Manhattan, Kansas, I was in contact with colleagues from the department of cultural anthropology to learn about the original religions of Native Americans. In Albuquerque I had a Navaho in my class on the sociology of religion, who contributed directly toward that goal. The most significant influence on my orientation from cultural anthropology came from Elman R. Service, whom I met on several occasions in Santa Barbara, and whom I invited to Munich University, where we spent a semester co-teaching. His “law of evolutionary potential” has made me look at cultural and political change from a new and very fruitful perspective. My travels throughout my career have been oriented towards the West. Most of the time away from Germany, I spent in the U.S.A. But that changed in 1995 when I went to Asia for the first time. Visits by colleagues from Japan and South Korea in Munich prompted invitations by scholars who wanted to return the hospitality they felt my team had shown them while they were in Munich. In 1996 I gave a lecture to teachers and students of sociology at Peking University (which still is known by that name, even though the city is now called Beijing). I tried to use the sociology of knowledge to explain why certain schools of theory became dominant at certain times and later were replaced by another mainstream approach. I used Germany as an example to illustrate why Marxist sociology was dominant there in the seventies and eighties, and why it was on the retreat in the nineties. This had tacit but obvious implications to the state of the discipline in mainland China. After the end of the question period, an elder Chinese colleague dressed in a Mao-style uniform took me aside, so we could talk in private. He said that China had spent too much time taking over Western ideas like those from Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and others. It was time, he said, to return to China’s own old traditional texts! He told me that he thought that I would understand his point and agree with him, and I did. And since then, I believe, that is (in part) what is happening in China. In Seoul, South Korea, I was a guest at Sogang University several times in the late nineties, and the intense contact with Korean Shamanism, by witnessing (video taping) a ritual that lasted for two days, I internalized a totally new approach to religion. This experience has influenced my teaching the sociology of religion, where I emphasize the Meadian concept of taking the role of the other in the sense that you can have no notion of what goes on in the ritual of a religion that is not your own

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unless you at least try to take the perspective of those who believe in what is going on. The Korean experience also taught me that it is pointless to try to re-introduce Shamanism in a culture in which that tradition is no longer alive as it is in several cultures of Asia. Mao had thousands of Shamans executed and still could not root out Shamanism in China, because they are the pontifices who help build a bridge to the deceased loved ones. My team and I had spent years in Munich collecting remote and little known texts by Georg Simmel on religion. I wanted to show the discipline that Simmel must be recognized as a sociologist of religion. Having first published a collection of Simmel’s work on religion in the German original (Helle 1989), one of the greatest challenges in my career was then to translate those texts into English. This was initiated by Phillip E. Hammond, a sociologist, a professor of religious studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara and a past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. A three-way-contract was negotiated between the Society, Yale University Press, and I to have the project materialize. It is due primarily to the devotion and patience of Ludwig Nieder in Munich, and Susan Abel, then at Yale Press, that the book finally appeared (Helle and Nieder 1997). Working through Simmel’s texts on religion with the unusual intensity that was required in the course of this project helped me find additional conceptual tools for the study of religions. In April of 1996, Gary T. Marx and I organized an International Conference on “Georg Simmel’s Actual and Potential Impact on Contemporary Sociology” in Boulder, Colorado, which was attended by the most noted Simmel scholars, including Kurt Wolff and Donald Levine. The final years in Munich prior to my retirement were the most fruitful ones, also with regard to the relationship with the other senior members of my department. Jutta Allmendinger and Norman Braun joined and brought with them their extended exposure to the most distinguished higher education in America: Allmendinger has a Ph.D. from Harvard, and Braun has one from the University of Chicago. In addition, we recruited Armin Nassehi, the son of a German mother and a father from Iran. A devoted disciple of Luhmann, Nassehi makes sure our students know all about systems theory, and his international family background also makes him the professor of choice for our foreign students. Finally, our department shares with the London School of Economics the privilege of counting Ulrich Beck among their own, probably one of the most widely read sociologists at the present time. These and other colleagues, including many in other departments and in the two divinity schools (Lutheran and Catholic), plus the many years of tenure in Munich made it hard to retire in 2002. The traditional legal status of emeritus professor (which, unfortunately, the German state legislatures have abandoned because they felt it was old-fashioned) gives me the rights and privileges of a professor without being subject to any duties (except, of course, good behavior). I have therefore continued to teach, but only the courses I enjoy. Most recently, I was invited to spend time as a guest professor at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, U.S.A. This is the site where Winston Churchill, upon the invitation of President Truman, delivered his Iron Curtain Speech in 1946, and I was there to witness the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of that event. It was like a homecoming to the American Midwest for me. When I was an international student

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(in those days we were referred to as “foreign students”) at the University of Kansas, I was included in a group of students from all over the world who were invited to visit then ex-President Truman in Kansas City. During that visit, Truman was verbally attacked by a student from the Near East for having allowed the State of Israel to be founded on—what the student referred to as—Palestinian territory. Much later I shared long debates with American friends during the war in Vietnam. Now I am back in the United States during the war in Iraq. It seems that some problems simply stay with us in spite of the promising progress that sociology and humanity in general have made over the decades. References and Selected Bibliography Berger, Peter L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Doubleday. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Donati, Pierpaolo and Horst J. Helle, eds. 1990. La Famiglia Oggi/Familie Heute. Annali di Sociologia/Soziologisches Jahrbuch 6 1990-I-II. Trento: Temi. Eisenstadt, S.N. and H.J. Helle, eds. 1985. Macro-Sociological Theory: Perspectives on Sociological Theory, Volume 1. London, Beverly Hills, New Delhi: Sage. Helle, Horst J. 1960. Die unstetig beschäftigten Hafenarbeiter in den nordwesteuropäischen Häfen. Eine industriesoziologische Untersuchung in Antwerpen, Bremen, Bremerhaven, Hamburg und Rotterdam. Dissertation. Stuttgart: G. Fischer. ———. 1969. Soziologie und Symbol. Ein Beitrag zur Handlungstheorie und zur Theorie des sozialen Wandels. Habilitationsschrift. Köln und Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1974. Familie - Zwischen Bibel und Kinsey-Report. Osnabrück: A. Fromm. ———. 1977. Verstehende Soziologie und Theorie der Symbolischen Interaktion. Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner. ———. 1980. Soziologie und Symbol. Verstehende Theorie der Werte in Kultur und Gesellschaft. 2. überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. ———, ed. 1982. Kultur und Institution. Aufsätze und Vorträge aus der Sektion für Soziologie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. ———. 1985. Aufsätze zur Familiensoziologie. Reihe Soziologenkorrespondenz, Band 11. München: Sozialforschungsinstitut München. ———. 1986. Dilthey, Simmel und Verstehen. Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Soziologie. Frankfurt/M., Bern, New York: Peter Lang. ———. 1988. Soziologie und Erkenntnistheorie bei Georg Simmel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ———, ed. 1989. Georg Simmel, Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

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———, ed. 1990. Verstehen and Pragmatism. Essays in Interpretative Sociology. Frankfurt/Main, Bern, New York, Paris: Peter Lang. ———. 1992. Verstehende Soziologie und Theorie der Symbolischen Interaktion. 2. überarb. und erw. Aufl., Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner. ———. 1997a. Einführung in die Soziologie. 2. Auflg. München: Oldenbourg. ———. 1997b. Religionssoziologie—Die Entwicklung der Vorstellung vom Heiligen. München: Oldenbourg. ———. 1999. Verstehende Soziologie: Lehrbuch. München: Oldenbourg. ———. 2001a. Georg Simmel: Einführung in seine Theorie und Methode. München: Oldenbourg. ———. 2001b. Theorie der Symbolischen Interaktion. Ein Beitrag zum Verstehenden Ansatz in Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. 3. überarbeitete Auflage. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 2005. Symbolic Interaction and Verstehen. Frankfurt am Main, New York: Peter Lang. Helle, Horst J., and S.N. Eisenstadt, eds. 1985. Micro-Sociological Theory: Perspectives on Sociological Theory, Volume 2. London, Beverly Hills, New Delhi: Sage. Helle, Horst J., and L. Nieder, eds. 1997. Essays on Religion by Georg Simmel. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Riesman, David, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press. Riesman, David. 1954. Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

Chapter 15

My Efforts to Explore the Secret of Chinese Development Tiankui Jing

1. My Career as a Scholar to Explore the Secret of Chinese Society Chinese society, like Chinese culture, always seems too abstruse for us to understand. In particular, the economic growth and social changes taking place in China since the reform and opening-up began in 1978 are very rapid and dramatic. A Nobel Prize laureate in economics once remarked that if an economist were able to explain clearly the growth of the Chinese economy, he would deserve the prize. It is also a challenge with the same degree of difficulty for sociologists to find out the secret of the social developments in China. I was born in Penglai, a coastal city of Shandong Province in eastern China. Penglai, where sometimes such natural phenomena as mirage take place, is literally “the place where celestial beings live”. It is said the famous Taoist fairy tale “Eight Immortals Crossing Sea” happened there. The place began to stimulate my curiosity in my childhood. In 1962, I passed the admission exam and was enrolled at the Department of Philosophy in Peking University. (Sociology was cancelled in China at that time for political reasons.) What was most interesting to me was social

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philosophy. In 1966, I experienced the “unprecedented” social movement—the Cultural Revolution—at the university where the event began. It puzzled me why several hundred million people had so strong a political impulse that upheavals would last as long as a decade in society. From 1968 to 1978, I lived and worked in the countryside, where I tried to understand more about lower social layers. Although there was no opportunity for me to do research in the period, I had been considering problems in the field of social theory—I began to think about them when I was an undergraduate in Peking University. Then, in 1978, China resumed training of postgraduates. I passed the admission exam of the graduate school of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and formally began my career in academic research. After I got my Ph.D. degree in 1987, my interests began to move from social philosophy to experimental social studies, and I have done many surveys and investigations around the country since then. After a number of investigations on the reform in Anhui Province in 1992, I founded the Center for Social Development at CASS and became the head of the center. I organized a research team and, in 1994, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations entrusted us to investigate the influx of peasant workers in urban areas. The next year, I was appointed as deputy director of the Institute of Sociology at CASS and became a professional sociologist. I was assigned to play the role as the head of the institute in 1998, and appointed as its director in 2001. In the same year, I served as the vicechairman of the IIS. And recently in 2006, I was elected a member in CASS. The main fields in which I am currently doing research are developmental sociology and social policy. I have also dealt with some topics in political sociology in recent years. 2. First-Hand Experiences of Dramatic Social Changes Interested Me Greatly in Social Studies (1) It was the Cultural Revolution that first made me very interested in social studies. The “revolution” was a fierce political movement in which several hundred million people were involved between 1966 and 1976. At the time, I was at Peking University, the beginning place and a vortex of the movement, and so I was a witness to it. As a 23-year-old senior undergraduate, I was involved in the event soon after it began in 1966. Then I became an onlooker. What has been occurring to me time and again is why several hundred million people were so crazy for it. What were its real reasons and driving forces? Why did it go wrong and eventually get out of control? Can a political revolution really give impetus to economic production? What are the relationships between politics and economy, and between masses and leaders? Who is propelling societal progress and history? Why had the country generated “Greatscale Democracy”? And why did “Great-scale Democracy” turn to chaos? During the decade, living standards became lower and lower in China, necessary goods more and more scarce, and most of them were rationed. For example, one person was rationed with only 150 grams of edible oil a month in many cities. Chinese

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society became more and more chaotic, and violence and force continued to take place in some parts of the country. The situation was troublesome and puzzled me. Therefore, I studied with great eagerness and kept on reading and writing after China resumed the training of postgraduates under the effort of Deng Xiaoping and I enrolled in the graduate school of CASS in 1978. In 1981, I published my first work, The Key to Open the Secret of Society, which was the result of my thinking during the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Upon its publication, the book was regarded as a theoretical argument for Chinese reform policy. The book was influential in academic circles. (2) Chinese reform has opened wide areas for academic research. The annual rate of China’s GDP growth has been about nine percent during the years ever since the reform began in 1978, and the changes in social structure and social life are profound. As a scholar, everything I see and hear interests me and stimulates my research. A lot of challenging problems stemming from social developments are tough test on the abilities of sociologists. Under these circumstances, I feel the toughest challenge is to solve the conflicts in methodology. Firstly, how to deal with the relationship between description and explanation? China had adopted a system of economy planning for nearly thirty years (1949–1978). The social structure before the reform was organized on the basis of a planned economy. For example, the power system was one in which political party and administration were mixed, and the governmental administrative system had administration and people commune mixed. The distribution system was “eating from the same big pot” (equalitarian), and the ideological system and public opinion were uniform. All those systems need to be reformed. And such reform, especially the shift from a planning to a market economy, could cause huge and profound unexpected changes. For instance, ownership becomes diversified, and the private sector grows rapidly; the income gap becomes larger and larger; values become diversified, and people change from uniformity to diversity. Some sociologists have borrowed a word from economics and named the process as “transformation”, and the studies of it as “transformational sociology”. Although it should not be regarded as without creativity, “transformation” is a descriptive concept, and its potential for explanation is limited. Of course, description is meaningful and of value. It is said that it would be good enough if a dramatic historical event could be recorded. That is true, but how should we describe or record it? Even in such activities as picture taking and tape recording there is a difference brought about by which place you would aim your camera at and whose words you would record. Good description depends on the ability to explain and the theoretical perspective one chooses. There should be a theoretical framework. Without such perspective or framework, it may be impossible for us to assess what has been described or recorded, not to mention getting results from assessment. Secondly, how to deal with the relations between the macro and the micro and between one-dimensional and multi-dimensional analyses? When sociology was resumed and reconstructed in China (1979), Parsonsstyle “grand theories” and “grand narratives” were harshly criticized in American sociology. This trend also expanded to China, which resulted in “grand theories” being

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treated with only negative comments. Because there is generality (or universality) in any theory, the universal has not been differentiated from “the grand” in China, although there has not emerged real grand sociological theory in the country. Thus, the enthusiasm for theoretical research is dampened, even though no real macrotheory has ever come into existence. Indeed, you could do research with more assurance through a one-dimensional or “small situation” analysis, or by dealing with a topic “in a small perspective”. The resulting work would also look more professional and well done. Nowadays, it may be easy to find essays with general comments inside journals in China, but they are not the Parsons-style “grand theories”. Furthermore, what is important is that both the situation of social developments in the United States and the phases in which American sociology has been evolving are different from those in China. The social developments in China have been comprehensive and multidimensional since the reform began. Situations with stable states are rare. Moreover, there are many differences around the country, and a lot of differences are big and even in opposite directions. Therefore, one might not be able to see the full picture only through one small-scale study. That is why I cannot help asking whether “grand theory” is more suitable to the present situation and expectations of Chinese social studies. (3) There are important concerns over the life conditions of disadvantaged groups in China. The new social problems emerging in China since the reform began, especially social inequality and the difficulties of disadvantaged groups, have urged me to pay attention to issues of social security. When I began to work at the Institute of Sociology in 1995, China was beginning to focus on the reform of traditional practices and the building of a modern system of social security. In the period of China’s planning economy, the income gap was small. Although everybody was relatively poor, all had security for a low standard of living. Peasants could rely on their collectives. Workers were provided with security by working organizations (enterprises) and received medical care as well. There was no unemployment, on the whole, in the period. The problem of unemployment, however, quickly became evident after the market model was adopted. China became “flooded” with unemployed people after state-owned enterprises (SOEs) began their reform in the mid-1990s. Insufficient medical care for common people and inadequate old age security became a severe problem as the aging population increased. The Chinese government began to adopt a system of bare necessity security to help the poor groups in urban areas. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the government has also launched aid-the-poor programs to help the poor in rural areas. Since then the rural poor population has decreased from 250 million to 26 million. Today, a “system of cooperative medical care”, which is under a pilot scheme and funded by both the government and the peasants themselves, has been set up as an attempt to offer medical care for 800 million peasants. On a personal level, my dear mother died of disease all too early in 1955 when I was twelve, which has made me feel that it is my mission to find out a solution to the problem of medical care for peasants. Therefore, I founded the Center for Social Security and Social Policy at the Institute of Sociology in CASS. In recent years, I have been making efforts to investigate the health condition of peasants in rural

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areas at different levels of development, and study the feasible practices around the country, in order to find a way to provide efficient medical care for peasants when investment is not enough at the present low level of economic development. If several hundred million people were to benefit from the adoption or influence of my research findings in social policies, I would feel good and satisfied. Of course, I would feel strongly sorry if the results of my research were inadequate. In short, my experiences of huge social changes in the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution (a rare event in world history, involving millions of people) and the Chinese reform process (which is also rare in world history in terms of scale, influence, and duration) are strong enough to excite and encourage me to continue to work hard on my academic research even though I am getting old and my health is poor. 3. New Theoretical and Methodological Explorations (1) To solve the methodological puzzle mentioned above, my Ph.D. dissertation was an effort to compare different modes and methods by which people recognize social phenomena, with the purpose of finding a way to incorporate macro and micro models and integrate one-dimensional and multi-dimensional analyses. Such an objective would be beneficial to both description and explanation. In the dissertation, I analyzed the structures of the modes of scientific, technological, aesthetical, value, religious, philosophical, and routine recognitions. The shifts and mixes among these modes of thinking were studied, and they were organized into a system of social recognition. The paradoxes in the system were also analyzed. Then I investigated the sociological methodology of Marxism and analyzed the relationship between individualism and holism. I also traced the trajectory of social thinking in Chinese history and concluded that the traditional Chinese outlook on social development was holistic and harmonious. Against the backdrop of this outlook, the Western outlook on social development was also scrutinized. (2) Time-space analysis has special importance. I expect that time-space analysis can create a link of mutual incorporation and communication between Chinese thinking and Western thinking, Chinese and Western cultures, and Chinese and Western societies. It could also become a bridge between Chinese traditional and modern thinking, traditional and modern cultures, and traditional and modern societies. One of my books, Temporal and Spatial Structures of Social Development, reflects from my explorations in this area. I also hope that the analysis could be used in experimental studies of concrete problems in Chinese social development, and in the design and argumentation of blueprints for social policies. (3) I engage in efforts to connect social philosophy, sociology and social policy. The ideal in my academic efforts, or my pursuit for my life, is to connect vertically the different levels of social philosophy, sociology, and social policy. It is very necessary and difficult to communicate among different disciplines on the same level. (For instance, incorporation of sociology and economics, or of sociology and political science.) It is even much more necessary and difficult to communicate vertically across various levels. I argue that sociology should have such a vertical

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communication if it wants to be a fundamental discipline among the social sciences. Otherwise it would just become the “remaining discipline to study social relations”, next to the study of economic relations (economics), political relations (political science), legal relations (law), and cultural relations (anthropology). It was also the vision of the classic masters—who created the discipline of sociology—that sociology should become a fundamental discipline. The difficulty in establishing vertical connection is not the same as “crossing disciplines”. Instead, it involves “crossing models of thought”. Vertical connection is not to apply the same method of experimental studies to different areas of social phenomena. Instead, it is to apply different models of thought—philosophical, scientific, and pragmatically technological thinking—to the study of the same areas of social phenomena. That was the theme of the Ph.D. dissertation I wrote in 1987 (Structures and Paradoxes in Social Recognition). It is also an academic path I have been trying to follow for several decades. The topic on which I am currently doing research is to summarize the path and model of Chinese development in terms of several key perspectives. These perspectives include: dealing with the development of democracy with Chinese characteristics (in terms of political life); dealing with the relation between state and market (in terms of economic life); dealing with the ways to reach social justice (in terms of social life). Based on the theoretical generalizations of this research, I plan to formulate a theory named as ‘time-space sociology’ as an attempt to explain Chinese development. I am presently working hard to finish this work, which may give deeper answers to the questions mentioned above. I hope those who are patient enough to read this essay by me may acquire more knowledge of China through my forthcoming work. Selected Bibliography1 Jing, Tiankui. 1981. The Key to Open the Secret of Society. Taiyuan: Shanxi People’s Publishing House. Jing, Tiankui and Wang Ruisheng. 1984. On Marx’s Doctrine of Human Being. Shenyang: Liaoning People’s Publishing House. Jing, Tiankui. 1990. Structures and Paradoxes of Social Recognition. Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press. ———. 1992. The Basic Principles of Modern Social Sciences (Qualitative and Quantitative). Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press. ———. 1993. Sociological Methodology and Marx. Beijing: People’s Publishing House. ———, co-ed. 1994. Chinese Society in Transformation. Harbin: Heilongjiang People’s Publishing House. ———, ed. 1997. Chinese Outlook on Social Development. Kunming: Yunnan People’s Publishing House.

1

All works appeared in Chinese and are here mentioned in English translation.

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———. 2000. Social Development in China and Sociology of Development. Beijing: Learning Press. ———. 2001. Basically Integrated System of Social Security. Beijing: Huaxia Press. ———. 2002. The Temporal and Spatial Structures of Chinese Social Development. Harbin: Heilongjiang People’s Publishing House. ———. 2004. Theories of Social Justice and Policies. Beijing: Social Sciences Documentation Press.

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Chapter 16

Have Sociological Passport, Will Travel Edward A. Tiryakian

My entire academic career has been as a sociologist, from being an undergraduate major to becoming (in 2004) emeritus, a milestone in anyone’s career, to be sure, but for me not the end point of being professionally active in coming years. Contributing to the present volume provides an occasion for stocktaking of the stages in one’s career, the stimuli that have given it a bearing, and retracing the road map along the way. To state at the onset my major enduring intellectual stimuli, I consider Emile Durkheim and Max Weber as my major totems; Talcott Parsons and Pitirim Sorokin as my major personal mentors. But the trajectory that I have taken has other elements in my fields of research and major preoccupations, since if theory is a primary area of self-identification, I also am much taken with the interaction of theory and questions of religion, ethnicity and ethnic conflicts, national identity, development, and modernity. How these have bundled over the course of years and the bearing of the international setting on the bundling will be the thread of Ariadne for my long intellectual journey. To provide a simple structure to a rather complex excursion, I will follow a modified chronological route of tracing the career in four major stages: childhood years, formative years, early adult years (post Ph.D.), and mature years. Seemingly discrete, I view them as a totality in which, to paraphrase the great positivist historian Hyppolite Taine, what I have produced as my sociological oeuvre is a resultant of idiosyncratic family circumstances, the particular environment in

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which I was formed, and the historical intersection of my life course with the national and global setting at career stages.1 Early Years: History as an Important Feature Although nobody is born a sociologist, there are early circumstances which may play a part in the process of becoming one. Of course, this recognition is after the fact. In my case, my predilection for comparative-historical sociology may well have some very early family circumstances that have sensitized me to history and large-scale social change. History is not only a continuous time series of occurrences. It is also punctuated by breaks, by unexpected events, which may alter the course of events and the societal structures in which they are embodied. I tend to view globality as having not only continuities, for there is a basic aspect of the socialization process which is to reproduce what has been institutionalized or internalized at the personality level, but also discontinuities. I take discontinuities to be both “bad surprises” and “good surprises”. My family background being on both sides Armenian, it is perhaps not surprising that history should have cardinal importance, though unfortunately, the weight of history for Armenians has tilted toward the “negative surprise” side. Most persons on either side of the Atlantic have heard about the Armenian genocide, which took place at the height of World War I in Turkey. But most have no or little knowledge that in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, an initial wave of massacres took place under the rule of the Sultan Abdul-Hamid, who might in retrospect qualify as the mentor of Saddam Hussein. Both of my grandparents’ families, long settled as esteemed professionals in the capital of the Ottoman Empire which then and for centuries past was known to the civilized world as Constantinople (modernized in the twenty-first century by Ataturk as Istanbul), were told by Turkish friends to leave as fast as possible because of a forthcoming campaign of nativistic ethnic violence aimed at Armenians in particular. Given the sources, both grandparents took their families and precipitously left, going in separate direction to the confines of the Ottoman Empire, one family going to Egypt, the other to Iran. What happened to the unfortunate ones who did not leave in time is documented in a recent work in French (Bérard 2005). This was, in a sense, a warm-up for the even bloodier genocide that took place twenty years later, but I will not dwell on it. The historical break that my grandparents painfully experienced, leading to their exodus from home, was experienced in the year of my birth as a global economic tsunami: a few weeks after I was born in a comfortable suburb of New York, the October 28–29, 1929, stock market crash punctured the great “bubble” of the 1920s, wiping out millions of investors and speculators alike. This was a horrendous “bad surprise” since only a few months before it had been widely thought that the world—and certainly the United States had entered into a new era of wealth and 1 Taine’s historical positivism, of course, saw a work as a resultant of race, moment, and milieu.

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prosperity fueled by the stock market. Instead, the new era that came in was the Great Depression decade, which permanently marked adults and children, as well captured by Glen Elder’s classic study, Children of the Great Depression (1974). I both was and was not one of the latter. Leaving out the details, my father’s business was wiped out, yet as the oldest child, he felt obliged to provide for his mother and several of his siblings. To ease the severe financial strain, it was decided that my mother would take me to live with her family, then living in Europe, until economic recovery would permit coming together. And thus, early in 1930 at a very early age I took my first trans-Atlantic voyage. Undoubtedly the 1930s in Europe was a very different decade for Europeans than it was for Americans in the United States. Living in (southern) France, learning French as my maternal tongue (my grandparents, although fluent in many languages, only spoke French to me), I attended French primary school and learned history through French eyes. Among other things, this meant an identification of myself with the brave French—first the Gaelic ancestors who had courageously defended Gaul against the Romans, then the brave French who turned back the invading Muslim hordes at Poitiers in 732, saving Europe for Christianity, then the Hundred Years War against the English with the redemption of France by Joan of Arc. On and on I learned the passionate side of French history, through the glorious campaigns of Napoleon and the tragedy of Waterloo. The rise of the Third Republic in 1871 was not given that much attention—though in my later years, it has come to be an historical object of great interest. But we did in our class of geography appreciate the far-flung colonial empire developed during the Third Republic—and perhaps that class and the colonial stamps of distant lands that were given me initially by a major who had served in Africa were childhood stimuli for my research and travels 20 years later in the dying days of colonialism. “Modern” French history emphasized the dark clouds that came from across the Rhine—we learned about the disaster of 1870 at Sedan (but no mention of the equally bloody Paris Commune) and the amputation of Lorraine and Alsace. Then came the even worse bellicosity of the Kaiser in overrunning Belgium and invading France to launch the holocaust that became World War I. And if the Allies won, with American help, by the mid-1930s, clouds coming from across the Rhine had gathered again. I still distinctly remember listening on the short wave radio an emission in a language I did not understand but whose harsh, metallic voice made a strong though unpleasant impression—it was one of Hitler’s radio emissions, which paralleled with a very different message the soothing tone of what Americans were hearing as Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”. A young child has a limited knowledge of what is going on in the larger society, much less the world. But the decade of the 1930s were tumultuous enough that some of the violence filtered through, so that I had awareness of a nasty civil war in Spain, of an Italian bombardment of a country called Abyssinia, and of some nasty political conflicts in France involving “reds” and “Cagoulards” (hooded ones), the right-wing Croix de Feu militants and the left-wing Front Populaire. In grade school, especially the one I attended in Southern France (Nice), far from the political maelstrom of Paris, everyday life was relatively tranquil, the violence not in the immediate vicinity of school and home. Little did I know that I was living in

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what would be the last decade of the Third Republic. But much later as a mature sociologist, my fascination with Durkheim and the Durkheimians took me back to the Third Republic, to analyze and study it as the historical and cultural setting for the Durkheimian school, and to understand their collective oeuvre not only with the outsiders’ knowledge of scholarship but also, as Merton so beautifully paired it off (1972), with insiders’ knowledge from having lived my early years in the midst of the Third Republic. Before the start of the school year 1939–1940, in a horrible repeat of what had taken place a quarter of a century before, the dark clouds from across the Rhine gathered again. In August, my mother, like other American citizens residing in France, received an urgent message from the American consul saying it would be well to return to the States. My mother was a woman of action, and like her parents who had left Constantinople without hesitation, she also secured passage on the first ship available. It was an Italian ship sailing from the port city of Genoa, and after spending the night in Italy, we boarded the ship that departed on September 1, 1939. Our departure date coincided with the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II—another break with history which had global consequences as well as personal ones, since it led to my return to the States, as an American who only spoke French and had only known French culture. Getting to Gibraltar as a gateway to the Atlantic proved to be uneventful but nevertheless suspenseful since our Italian ship was followed a few hundred yards away by a German submarine, and Italy had not committed itself so that the submarine appeared to me and most of the passengers more like a potential shark than an escort. And so I came back to America as Europe—where I had left family, friends, school—was sinking in World War II. After a few months with a tutor, I could enroll in public primary school in Mt. Vernon, the first city north of New York City. Looking back, it was rather amazing how quickly I came to experience the world as an American, not as a transplant. Although a pre-pubescent boy would not have heard the term “melting pot”, this one did his best, and rather easily in many ways (but perhaps not all ways), to become like his peer group. The school was a key institution: a meeting place for the children of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants; of Irish, Italian, and other ethnicities. Doing well in academics was one way of being accepted by the teachers, but engaging in the common pastimes of baseball and football was equally important for peer acceptance. And when the United States entered the war in December 1941, there was further integration and solidarity in the patriotic efforts we engaged in. I dwell on the school as an institution which played a major part in my becoming (really, renewing) an American. If in the third grade in France I had no problem identifying with nos ancêtres les Gaulois, in the fifth (or sixth) grade in the United States, I did not blink in reading about our Pilgrim fathers, and going on in later grades to read about the rich history of New York State, the novels of Fennimore Cooper, the winning of the West and so on. All in all, it took very little time for me to become “assimilated” in the mainstream ethos of American life, and Mt. Vernon was very much a microcosm of the American macrocosm of the 1940s, one in which teenagers, at least, were evaluated by their peers in terms of who they were as persons and their personal talents (I remember one year in high school the senior

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class president was Dick Clark, who has been an icon for decades; the next year it was Charles Taylor, an African-American—both were popularly elected for their personality and leadership qualities). Unfortunately, I think, the decades of the 1970s and 1980s gave a bad name to “assimilation” under the cover of “multiculturalism” that it deprived persons of their collective cultural roots. I have become very interested in “multiculturalism” as an ideology and its bearing on national identity (Tiryakian 2004). However, my childhood personal experience with assimilation— and observing the rapidity with which new immigrants to the United States today, and certainly their children attending public schools and utilizing popular culture can become part of the mainstream, no matter what their physiognomy or cultural background—makes me skeptical of those who advocate and seek to implement pluralism as a paramount value of the educational system. At least I find it gratifying that two major authorities on immigration have recently made the case for a new look at assimilation (Alba and Nee 2003). I will close this section with a different vignette, but one that also has a sociological bearing. My father had had to drastically alter his lifestyle during the depression years, and unfortunately I only knew him for a few years before his early death (he died the same age as Durkheim). We lived in an apartment and only used public transportation. But what was a great thrill for me was on his free day—Sunday—when he took me on the train to New York City. From Grand Central Station we would walk down 42nd Street to the East River, then walk uptown on 2nd or 3rd Avenue for countless blocks, and my father would point out various ethnic neighborhoods as we passed one after another. On the way back, before taking the train home, we might walk outside or even go inside the New York Public Library, with all its wealth of books, for my father, though having had to forego a college education, had a deep love for books and learning. This outing to New York was for me all I needed for a perfect day (made more perfect on rare occasions by going to see my beloved New York Yankees play). How does this vignette fit into a later sociological career? First, because walking in ethnic neighborhoods and taking delight in observing in the urban setting how different cultural milieus are to be found in close proximity to one another—and the social interaction taking place in everyday life—this was a very early appreciation of outdoor sociology. Much, much later it made me resonate with the urban sociology that became the hallmark of “the Chicago School”. Second, this childhood memory of the urban wonders of New York became reawakened in 1994 when I attended a special event in Philadelphia on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The invited speaker was Robert K. Merton, who gave a magnificent spellbinding autobiographical talk, disclosing more about himself than he had ever done (Merton 1994). What is relevant here is that Merton began by indicating he had been born just a few blocks away from the setting of the ACLS meeting, the American Philosophical Society. Merton’s home was in a poor Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Philadelphia, and Merton displayed for the audience a large city map indicating not only where his home had been but also all the various cultural sites of major importance scattered around. And Merton indicated that, as a boy, driven by curiosity and intellectual desire, he could and did walk to enjoy the various cultural treasures the city had to offer. Merton was

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a master of subtlety and there was a context to the point he was making, but that is extraneous here. When I heard Merton mention his childhood experience, mine came back immediately. Formative Years: Education/Teachers as a Key Feature I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had my career formed in two great institutions of higher learning, Princeton University and Harvard University. For the purpose of this essay, I will concentrate on the teachers and intellectual stimuli I had in the course of eight years at both places, and will gloss over friends and personal experiences that were equally rich in my overall development. While entering college intending a career in medical research—I had been much taken in high school with Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters and had some vague hopes of finding a cure for an ill of mankind—after three semesters I decided I was not cut out for laboratory work.2 The semester (Spring 1950) we had to make a decision as to a major, I took a course in social anthropology with Melvin Tumin, who made the subject matter very lively. We had a long talk and he convinced me with little difficulty that I should major in sociology (at the time there was a single Department of Economics and Social Institutions; there was an introductory course in Anthropology but the rest of Social Institutions were listed as sociology offerings). So I became a sociology major and by the time I graduated I had taken all the departmental offerings for undergraduates and two at the graduate level. There were relatively few sociology majors, certainly in comparison to economics majors, which made it possible to have a lot of interaction with the faculty. I found sociology a fascinating subject and not very difficult to master. Mel Tumin was not only my advisor (and thesis director in my senior year), but also opened his home to me, which for an undergraduate student was almost a privilege. His major interests were social stratification and race relations. Quite different was Marion Levy, much more haughty but also more intellectually challenging; Levy had a Harvard Ph.D. and had done his Ph.D. research applying Parsonian structural-functional analysis to the modernization of China and Japan. His theory course was to a large extent an explication of structural-functional analysis, but also gave considerable attention to the theorist Levy most admired after Parsons, Vilfredo Pareto.3 I also found a great deal of satisfaction taking demography with Frank Notestein, who straddled economics and sociology and headed the Office of Population Research; the comparative and historical materials he provided us in dealing with population

2 In retrospect, having laboratory instruction in chemistry, physics, and biology is a very sound training/discipline for social scientists in providing them with experience as to empirical “facts”—the “science” component of “social science”. 3 I came to share Levy’s evaluation: reading Pareto’s Mind and Society and The Socialist Systems offers not only a wonderful training in logical thinking but also the pleasure of finding a sociologist/economist with a great sense of humor. Unfortunately, while still highly respected by economists, Pareto seems to have fallen outside sociological radar screens, perhaps because of his views on the inevitability of social inequality.

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trends have continued to be what I consider important aspects of the infrastructure of social relations. Lastly in the department there was a very junior faculty person whom I actually found to be the most intellectually exciting sociologist, an instructor by the name of Harold Garfinkel. He gave a course on deviance and one on criminology which used a frame of reference radically different from the prevalent positivist one. Most people who took his courses, and most of the department faculty, found him very opaque, but I found him as clear and as refreshing as mountain water. I don’t think he ever used the term “phenomenology” in his lectures, but in retrospect, he was applying Husserl to empirical phenomena.4 He was delighted to find me an appreciative audience, and when at the start of my senior year came the occasion to do a senior thesis (a requirement of all students at Princeton, then and now), Garfinkel asked me whether I would like him to direct my thesis on a research project he planned to embark on. I was very eager to do so, but unfortunately it turned out that for his research, he needed an associate with advanced knowledge of chess, because, he wanted to design a three-person chess game. So I did not get Garfinkel as an advisor; he left Princeton the next year once he received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and perhaps had I been an advanced chess player I would have been one of the first trained by Garfinkel in “ethnomethodology”. My undergraduate exposure to Garfinkel has led to my lifelong respect for him as a true American sociological genius, despite his becoming for some a cult figure. Princeton was more than majoring in sociology. I found a great deal of stimulating materials with a minor in psychology, especially in taking courses with Hadley Cantril in social psychology, who had studied with Gordon Allport and whose own work on social movements and public opinion polling were pioneering efforts, and with Sylvan Tomkins who also was a Harvard Ph.D. and who gave fascinating courses on abnormal psychology. Another field of study in which I took various courses was philosophy, including ones in the pre-Socratics (who really developed consciousness about theory, as acknowledged by Husserl [1970]), Hindu philosophy with Walter Stace, with whom I also took a course on Hegel; Nietzsche with Walter Kaufman, and, perhaps of lasting significance, a special ongoing seminar taught by the great French philosopher Jacques Maritain. Although Maritain’s seminar was nominally for graduate students only, I was allowed in, having some background in France and having retained fluency in French. His seminar’s theme changed each year, with the first one being devoted to how the problem of evil was treated in various philosophies and traditions, from the ancients down to Sartre. It was a unique learning experience, greatly enhanced by the friendship and fellowship that Maritain and his wife shared in their home, not only during the rest of my undergraduate days but well beyond, until his retirement and leaving Princeton for a return to France. Maritain, in retrospect, was one of the two or three most powerful intellects I have met in my career, and his linkage between philosophizing and theorizing was something very palpable.

4 For whatever reasons, Garfinkel did not publish his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, which is an exposition of Husserlian phenomenology and its application to the problem of the meaning actors give to the situation.

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Princeton was also something more than academic courses, albeit these were taught at the highest caliber in both lectures and small discussion groups (“precepts”). It was (and still is) very much cosmopolitan in the etymological sense. It had been modernized at the turn of the century by its president Woodrow Wilson whose Presbyterian sense of duty and service made his taking as a mission statement “Princeton in the nation’s service”; as reluctant wartime leader, Wilson sought to take the United States to a new level of world moral leadership with his vision of a League of Nations where transparency would prevail over secret covenants that had brought about the horrors of World War I. Wilson’s idealism had crumbled at Versailles, but his vision of the United States providing moral leadership was still (and still is, I believe) very much present on the Princeton campus when I was an undergraduate. In my senior year, I took a course in international law and became fascinated with the cases we studied and the development of international law from Hugo Grotius in the sixteenth century down to the present. Noting my interest, the instructor invited me to become a student member in the American Society of International Law. That spring its annual meeting was in Washington, D.C., and listening to the papers and the discussion I felt this was an exciting milieu for a career in public international law. To cap it, the Society was received at the White House, and I had the distinct pleasure of being first to shake hands with President Harry Truman. I left Washington in a rather exalted mood of seeing public international affairs as a meaningful career. One last component of the college years which may be noted in the background preparation of a career in sociology: the international setting. First, during the summer of 1949, and again in 1950, I thought it well to complement knowing French with learning German, and found an ideal setting in the summer school of the University of Vienna, which was held not in Vienna but in the Salzkamergut region near Salzburg. In going to Austria, I stopped in Paris (where I had not been during my stay in France in the 1930s) to visit family and pre-war friends from AlsaceLorraine. The latter took me to visit historical sites of Northern France, such as the Normandy beachhead of 1944. Perhaps what shook me the most were the military cemeteries and the ossuary of Douaumont near Verdun, where a titanic battle was fought in 1916, and where the remains of 130,000 unidentified soldiers are kept in view. Seeing these and seeing the fields of graves—wooden crosses for the French soldiers, stone ones for Americans—has not only left a burning impression but also an equally strong repulsion for warfare. It is only in recent years that I have made use of this stimulus to begin work on the sociology of war (Tiryakian 1999, 2002, 2003), a still understudied and undertheorized area. Austria in the postwar period was struggling for autonomy and a regained sense of identity. I took courses in the history of Austria which had gone from a world power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to an unwitting tool of German bellicosity in the twentieth, succumbing to Hitler’s enticement in 1938 with the Anschluss that incorporated Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich. The price Austria paid was that at war’s end it was an only semi-autonomous country, with its capital Vienna carved into four semi-protectorates of the European great powers: an American zone, a French zone, a British zone, and a Russian zone. Vienna’s strategic geographical location in Central Europe made it, among other things, a convenient meeting ground in the

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early phase of the Cold War, and it was quite exciting when at the end of the summer session our cohort spent a week in Vienna where so much past history had taken place, and possibly so much present history might, given that Vienna (and Austria) were on the cusp of East and West, where conflict might break out. Vienna was a cross-road rife with espionage and counterespionage vividly exploited in the film The Third Man shot on location and just released shortly before we got to Vienna. In fact, conflict did break out, but not in Central Europe: in the summer of 1950, North Korea did invade the South. My college years served me well in preparing me for a professional career. I had done well and had enjoyed sociology, receiving a summa and completing a 250-page honors thesis (“Towards a Sociology of Occupations”) directed by Melvin Tumin. But I also had a strong vocational interest for international law. Uncertain, I applied to Harvard and Yale law schools and to the graduate school at Harvard, and was accepted by all three, leaving me with a decision to make less than a month before graduation. After much cogitation, I thought I might go to Harvard and be able to do a five-year program, taking the required courses for sociology and for law, and then, in the fifth year, doing a dissertation in some aspects of the sociology of law. I notified Harvard of this and when I was told this was possible, I knew that Cambridge was my next venue. The sociology component was, of course, actualized but after one year, the law part was abandoned. It was in September 1952 when I entered Harvard as a graduate student in the Department of Social Relations, probably at the peak of the golden age of this unique interdisciplinary program bringing together under one roof sociology, social anthropology, social psychology, and clinical psychology. The department had come into being in 1946 as a new intellectual venture seeking to integrate conceptually major fields of human behavior. It was intellectually fueled by a vision most forcefully articulated by Talcott Parsons in an evolving theoretical approach called “the theory of action”, oriented to bringing together the analytical realms of the social, the cultural, and the psychological in a comprehensive frame of reference. Just the year before, Parsons had brought out The Social System that some took as the new bible of sociological theory (Parsons 1951) and he was co-editor of a volume that sought to advance the integration of the four behavioral sciences by laying out a common conceptual framework of inquiry (Parsons and Shils 1951). It was very heady to be a graduate student at what appeared to be the center of theoretical action, not only in the United States but globally. I say “globally” because Parsons—who served as chairman of the department from 1946 to 1956—became rapidly recognized in the postwar world as offering new theoretical conceptions that were tacitly in keeping with the desire in the world to promote social and economic development in a liberal, non-coercive set of institutions. Essentially, the “theory of action” and the analysis of social systems, including societies, as phenomena that are not reducible to a single stratum but rather are made of interrelated and interdependent functional components, did fit in the political (and liberal) ethos of the postwar world. The Department of Social Relations as a new innovative center of social science learning was a microcosm of the pax Americana that had set in the “free world”.

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To do justice to the Department of Social Relations as a center of innovative research and as a center of graduate training would require a full-length essay, if not a monograph, but perforce I can only condense and unwittingly leave out materials (and individuals) that are important but tangential to the unfolding of my own career. The department accepted only a small cohort, about half of whom in sociology, and the other half in the three other areas. The first year we all took “proseminars” in the four areas, which meant learning the basic texts, core problems, and conceptual frameworks of sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, and clinical psychology—essential knowledge given the guiding assumption that social interaction involves personalities and their motivation, cultural symbols, and structured role relations. In addition to statistics and reading proficiency in a foreign language, there was a requirement that a certain number of hours needed to be completed before graduation in some sort of field research, which might be done as part of course work or separately. Aside from that, students were free in the first two years to take any electives they wanted, and at the end of the second year take comprehensive examinations in two areas in addition to theory. It was natural for students to take the bulk of their coursework in the discipline in which they were admitted to the department but there was considerable cross-fertilization in the taking of courses, and several faculty appointments were persons who were equally at home in two disciplines. Gordon Allport was the director of Graduate Studies for all departmental students and helped me devise my program. I opted for his seminar in social psychology since he was one of the foremost figures in the field of personality. It was stimulating in many ways, since he dealt not only with the bearing of values on motivation but also with the dark side of personality, the nature of prejudice—the latter with the very title The Nature of Prejudice came out two years later as a landmark study. The seminar dealt extensively with racial prejudice, a topic that concerned me deeply, and I asked Allport if I could do it on other than American materials. I had while at Princeton had a long conversation with a person who pointed out to me some interesting parallels between South Africa and the United States as two advanced countries with severe restrictions based on color. I remembered that conversation and Allport readily encouraged me to do research on South Africa for my term paper. The serendipitous result of the research was to make me informed as to similarities and differences in the sociohistorical development of the two countries, given their similar starts in the seventeenth century, their Calvinist matrix, their identity as an “elect nation”, the importance of the frontier setting and their democratic institutions within, but only within, the dominant white population. How is it, I began to ask, that the “Protestant value orientation” and the doctrine of predestination cardinal to Calvinism, so manifest in common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had led to the patent divergence in race relations in South Africa and the United States in the postwar world of the 1950s? In 1948, Harry Truman had won an upset electoral victory in the United States over the conservative Republican candidate; in 1948, D.F. Malan and his National Party had won an upset electoral victory in South Africa and introduced the ideology and retrogressive policies of apartheid. My comparative historical research on South Africa and the United States did not end with Allport’s

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seminar, and led to some early publications written “at a distance”(Tiryakian 1955, 1957, 1960), but equally important, with a desire to go to Africa to see things in sito. Also important for my training, I entered the ongoing seminar that Parsons (who had agreed to be my advisor), Florence Kluckhohn, and Samuel Stouffer co-taught. The substantive topic of the seminar, if I remember correctly, had to do with the American family and kinship structure. Parsons provided the theory, Florence Kluckhohn cultural aspects of family variation, and Stouffer provided statistical modeling. Being in the seminar was an essential and exciting socialization experience into the ethos of the department, to see theorizing and empirical analysis taking place with the three major organizers and with the free-and-easy contributions by graduate students and distinguished visitors (such as Guy Swanson and Alain Touraine) coming from abroad as well as at home. There was a certain stratification system operative, with advanced graduate students (like Neil Smelser and Robert Bellah) sitting up front close to Parsons, Stouffer, and Kluckhohn, and first-year students in the rear of the room. Yet, even at a distance, one felt that this was where the action in sociology was and that one should demonstrate being a contributing part of it, no matter how modest the initial contribution!5 There also was an informal structure in our graduate training. In the fall of the first year, the new cohort met Monday evenings for a non-credit session with a young instructor. He would invite the luminaries of the department to come in and talk about their work and anything else. This for the cohort was a visit of Titans coming down to impart the secrets of academic pinnacles to neophytes. Early in the semester Pitirim Sorokin was the visiting speaker. I had read his Social Mobility and Contemporary Social Theories as an undergraduate and knew of his monumental Social and Cultural Dynamics, and had expectations he would motivate us to write an epochal dissertation in keeping with being at Harvard. Much to our surprise Sorokin admonished, “The best advice I can give you is to pick a small, empirical topic for your dissertation, do it well but quickly, then after you get out with your sociological passport (meaning the Ph.D.), then go and do something important!” For a while I retained my initial desire to produce a blockbuster for a dissertation, but I wound up doing exactly what he had suggested. There were some other stimuli during the year 1952–1953 which added to it being a very memorable year. In the fall, the presidential campaign pitting Democrat Adlai Stevenson against Republican Dwight Eisenhower was hard fought with great civility, perhaps the last such presidential campaign. Stevenson had great appeal with intellectuals, and had a tumultuous welcome at Harvard (where I had the good fortune of meeting him at a press conference) but Eisenhower related better to middle America and won, vox populi vox Dei. In the spring of 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy had 5 As the seminar progressed, I did for a term paper a bit of theorizing on the differentiation of sibling roles as a function of birth order which was original enough to get a positive acceptance from all three organizers, though each read a different meaning into my analysis. Encouraged, I submitted my paper and had it accepted for presentation that spring at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society. It was a sort of climax of a first-year socialization experience into becoming a career sociologist.

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risen to fame and notoriety as a hunter of communists in government, the media, and higher education, preying upon the popular imagination of the dangers to American security. He sought to bring his sub-committee to investigate communist infiltration at Harvard, seen as the Mecca of left-wing subversion. While the rest of America had crumpled before his tactics of intimidation and allegation, the young president of Harvard, Nathan Pusey, shut the gates of Harvard Yard, refusing McCarthy access to the university and its faculty in the protection of academic freedom. For all of us, students and faculty, this was a courageous and heroic moment, perhaps akin to Bunker Hill in 1775 repulsing Howe’s charge. McCarthy returned empty-handed from his foray against the academic citadel, and in effect his power in American affairs waned shortly after. Just prior to the second semester, I met with Parsons, who suggested that since I had taken a number of philosophy courses at Princeton, I might be interested in one given that spring by Norman Kemp Smith, who was retiring after the semester. The Department of Philosophy was in the same building at the Department of Social Relations, so attending the course presented no logistic problem. Practically the whole semester was devoted to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a foundation of modern philosophy and an excellent sharpening ground for sociological theorizing (Parsons himself in several essays made extensive reference to Kant). The following year I also availed myself of the proximity of Philosophy to audit a course on existentialism by John Wild, who greatly filled in holes in readings on existential thought that I had begun in the seminar with Maritain, who had introduced us to Kierkegaard. Although these audits were not at the time related to making progress toward the Ph.D. in sociology, in the long run they proved to be important intellectual investments in developing theory as one major area. I entered my second year with two prizes: my first year record entitled me to a teaching fellowship, and on the eve of the new academic year I was able to persuade a charming, multilingual graduate student in Latin-American history to marry me, promising her in lieu of riches that we would see a lot of the world. This we certainly have done. I was assigned for the fall semester to be the teaching assistant of Pitirim Sorokin in his course on the history of sociological thought. This was considered something of a hardship assignment for graduate students, since Sorokin was de facto relegated to teach only undergraduates and was alienated from the rest of the sociological faculty. Immediately, Sorokin’s impassionate and learned lectures greatly impressed me, as much by his erudition as by his sense of the dramatic: they were on the European style of the magisterial course in which the lecturer puts on for the audience a dizzying area of knowledge, then retires without interaction from the audience. In contrast, Parsons equally captivated the attention in his lectures but also invited interaction from peer and graduate students alike. Years later while on sabbatical in Paris I witnessed the same difference of styles going to lectures at the Collège de France of Foucault and Lévi-Strauss: the former made the audience feel he was engaging with them, inviting their interaction, the latter keeping the whole time a distance and avoiding eye contact. Perhaps the salient difference for me as

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a graduate student was that I could (with intellectual pleasure, to be sure) listen to Sorokin and (when the occasion arose) talk to Parsons.6 Early in the semester, Sorokin’s secretary telephoned me to say that he had developed laryngitis and could not give his scheduled lecture on Herbert Spencer the next day. I could, she said on Sorokin’s instruction, announce to the class a cancellation, unless I wanted to give a lecture on Spencer. I hastily said I would give the lecture, although Spencer, as everybody who has read Crane Brinton’s opening quote in Parsons’ Structure of Social Action will remember, was “dead”, expunged from the sociological canon, having perished with his theory of evolution. Immediately after the telephone, I rushed to Widener Library, grabbed all books I could find on Spencer and for the next several hours immersed myself in the sociological works on and by this figure who had in his lifetime made the English-speaking world aware of sociology. My lecture the next day must have not been too bad because word got to Sorokin, who thereafter took interest in his teaching fellow, even inviting him and his new bride in the Sorokin’s home in Winchester. Thus began a long friendship, even though my thesis advisor would be Parsons, for whom Sorokin had rather negative feelings. I felt then, and still do, that both provided important complementary rather than zero-sum models of large-scale societal systems, and exposure to both provided me with much theoretical fuel. In the spring semester of the second year, I was assigned to be the teaching assistant to George Homans in his course on social organization. Homans was not as flamboyant a speaker as Sorokin, not as analytically profound as Parsons, yet gave clear, crisp lectures, many derived from his well-written, jargon-free books English Villagers and The Human Group; the materials were thoroughly comparative and historical, since Homans also brought in materials on social organization from social anthropology. I took a course with Homans in industrial sociology, in which he was recognized as a major authority.7 The course was excellent, covering all the major works (Chester Barnard, Elton Mayo, and so on), including Durkheim’s influence on Mayo in dealing with the human group outside the individualistic perspective of Taylorism. This led me to my second close reading of the Division of Labor in Society, and reinforced the importance that Parsons gave to Durkheim in The Structure of Social Action, a “must” reading along with The Social System for anyone taking Parsons’ theory seminar. During the year, I profited from the department’s numerous courses on comparative analysis to take a social anthropology course on sub-Sahara Africa, which provided a lot of factual materials on traditional African social structure. More interesting was work on comparative aspects of Far Eastern social structure with sociologist/social anthropologist John Pelzel; after taking his course, myself and a first-year student, Ezra Vogel, took a reading course with Pelzel, and I took comparative aspects of modern China and Japan as one of my areas of specialization, 6 In retrospect, I think I have internalized something of both styles depending upon whether I am lecturing to a large and rather impersonal audience away from home, or in the classroom as part of a regular course. 7 As a recognition of his status, Homans not only taught in the department, but also gave courses in industrial sociology at the prestigious Harvard Business School.

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the other being industrial sociology and stratification. In the ongoing seminar of Parsons, Kluckhohn, and Stouffer, Florence Kluckhohn took a warm liking to Vogel and myself, and highly recommended that we go overseas to do a dissertation in a non-Western setting instead of remaining in the confines of the United States (she was a social anthropologist under the shadow of her husband, Clyde Kluckhohn, a dominant figure in cultural anthropology; the two were part of a team that organized a long-term project of cultural diversity and value orientations in the American Southwest). As it turned out, Vogel did a dissertation on the family and the new middle class in Japan, and became one of the leading American sociologists of modern Japan and China. I was to do my dissertation on occupational stratification in Central Luzon, the Philippines. Years later when we met a professional meeting, we reflected on the wisdom of following Florence Kluckhohn’s admonition to go outside the United States to do comparative research, and I quipped to Vogel that he had had the foresight of choosing a “winner” in the modernization process (Japan) while I had chosen a “laggard”. I will skip most of the details of my dissertation. Going to the Philippines in the first place was serendipitous since my wife and myself had applied for Fulbright fellowships to South Africa; after receiving and reviewing our application, the Fulbright Commission informed us that we had good credentials but that there was no Fulbright program in the Republic of South Africa (where I had hoped to go to study race relations in the mining industry). However, there were two openings for graduate fellowships to the Philippines, if we could submit new projects within thirty days. Although I knew little about the country, which fell outside my preparation in East Asian materials, it seemed to be an opportunity to travel and do research in the geographical region of the Far East. As to a research focus, I had taken work on stratification with a young assistant professor fresh at Harvard from a Ph.D. at Columbia: Peter Rossi. Rossi and another young colleague also formed at Columbia, Alex Inkeles, collaborated on empirical studies of social stratification at the community level and of industrial occupational structures. The literature indicated intriguing similar patterns of occupational stratification in various countries where questionnaires had been administered to samples of the population. As I went over the materials, which indicated an interesting convergence of countries undergoing industrial development, I spotted a lacuna: all the countries previously studied were Western countries (including Australia and New Zealand). Would this pattern of occupational stratification hold or not hold in a non-Western setting undergoing an early phase of modernization, such as the Philippines? Rossi and Inkeles agreed this would make an interesting test case, and Homans and Parsons also agreed. I submitted a thesis prospectus to the department with these four on the committee and Parsons as the director, and the Fulbright Commission accepted both my proposal and that of my wife (who planned to study the influence of Spanish colonization on the Philippines, as an extension of her own developing professional specialty area of Latin American colonial history). Doing field research in the Philippines during 1954–1955 was an invaluable experience, of far more lasting value for me than just crunching numbers from a data set that others had arduously prepared. I had had some practice the year before in

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questionnaire construction, and had devised a questionnaire that had a large number of items that would permit comparison with the studies done in Western settings. But the Philippines was not near the level of urbanization as the West, hence I felt it important that besides the urban site I had chosen in proximity to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, I should also seek a sample from the agrarian countryside. I eventually did but in the process had some methodological and non-academic adventures, which enrich the stock of knowledge in the formative years of a career. The methodological challenge I faced seeking to interview peasants in the countryside was twofold. First, a majority was illiterate, so that presenting them with cards on which were written occupations and asking them to sort the piles in hierarchical rankings (what had been the common practice in previous studies) was not an option. Instead, I had to provide for each card with an occupation either a photograph showing the occupation in practice or a schematic drawing of a person in that occupation. After some pretesting I was satisfied that the set of stimuli was providing the responses needed for my comparison; admittedly, some methodological purists would challenge the accuracy of the results for the non-urban sample, but I plead here the case for pragmatism. More taxing was that it took me one afternoon to realize that interviewing in the communal open field situation where farmers work was not a one-to-one situation, like interviewing an urban dweller in her/his apartment. At the side of the interviewee and behind the interviewer gathered a crowd of men, women, and children curious to see and hear what was going on; moreover, they were highly amused and intrigued by the interviewer’s hairy legs so that while asking the interviewee where he ranked, say, a school teacher, the interviewer had to nonchalantly ignore having hair plucked from an arm or a leg. Even more challenging than conducting interviews in open fields near Manila was trying to go further inland to more remote villages in Luzon. In the post-war setting of the Philippines, devastated by the Japanese occupation during World War II, the old prewar problem of unequal distribution of land between peasants and absentee landlords—a pattern rather similar to other Spanish colonial settings, including Central America—had returned with a vengeance. Agrarian unrest and violence took the form in Central Luzon of what was generally known as the Huk (Hukbalahap) Rebellion, which received assistance from communist groups.8 The year before we arrived a new popular charismatic leader, Ramon Magsaysay, had swept in office and won popular support for reforms and for disarming the Huks. The latter had become fragmented with some factions committing brutal violence not only against landlords, but against common Filipinos. While the movement was on the decline and eventually came to an official end during our year, there were pockets of Huk strength in some of the inland parts of Luzon, including a no-man zone where I spent some tense moments. Although I never got to interview Huk guerillas for my non-urban sample, I did get the taste of a setting marked by agrarian unrest. Completing my study in the spring of 1955, we flew home with a stop-over in Japan for my first exposure to that amazing country which has been able to blend tradition and modernity and, like Germany, learn to shed militarism in favor of peaceful transformations. The year of my stay in the Far East, if one had to wager 8

See http://countrystudies.us/philippines/25htm.

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which country would become a dominant modernizing country, the odds would have favored the Philippines: the country had (and still does) a high rate of literacy with English spoken throughout most of the islands, a large amount of natural resources, and having fought on the winning side of the war. Yet, when Ezra Vogel published Japan As Number One (1979), Japan had successfully transformed itself into a global economic giant, while the Philippines remained economically and politically anemic, subject to authoritarian rule (of Marcos) and the same ruling oligopoly as before. Why the difference has become for me one major problematic area involving not only the Philippines but other so-called “less developed” or “underdeveloped” areas. After my dissertation was accepted the following year, circumstances led me away from research in the Philippines (I greatly regret not having yet the occasion to revisit it). Although I published some empirical papers related to my survey data, I had no occasion to take a serious look at social change taking—or not taking—place in the Philippines until unexpectedly I was invited to have my dissertation published in 1990 as part of a series The series editor invited me to provide an introduction, and this gave the opportunity to catch up with important happenings since my departure from the field (Tiryakian 1990). This is not the place to dwell into the factors that have retarded the country’s development; for the purpose of the present essay, the advice of Sorokin and Kluckhohn proved to be excellent: I had done independent research in what became known as a “third world” country, the specifics of my research allowed me to complete field work and data analysis within two years, and I got some rich experience and insights regarding problems of development outside the West. My fourth year was spent back at Harvard working furiously in data analysis (yes, on the first generation of IBM computers where we had to wire our own board). The most important stimulus was being a teaching fellow in a year-long course on Ideas of Human Nature, from the Greeks to Freud, given by Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray. They had collaborated on a very successful textbook, Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, and combined their knowledge of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and clinical psychology to give captivating lectures showing the interconnectedness of the human condition. My peak teaching experience as a graduate student was when during the course of the year Kluckhohn and Murray invited me to give a lecture late in the spring on existentialism, which in the 1950s had become seen as an important alternative to analytical philosophy. The response of Kluckhohn and Murray and of the students taking the course was very positive and encouraging. In April 1956 I submitted my completed dissertation and was gratified that it was accepted without needing revisions. It also made me realize that I had completed all my requirements, and that therefore I needed to find a job for the coming year. Unexpectedly and without my having applied for it, a “good surprise” happened less than a month from commencement: I received a phone call from Wilbert Moore, who headed sociology at Princeton, and asked me if I was ready to return to my alma mater. The department needed someone to teach a graduate course in research methods and an undergraduate course in social disorganization, with the other two courses being up to the individual to choose. I accepted on the spot although I had no

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special background or skills in the two required courses. I could take with me in my first full-time employment the Ph.D. as a passport and an intellectual baggage with adequate comparative and theoretical materials and some equally valuable research experience. Early Adult Years Princeton in the fall of 1956 was not very different from when I had left it in June 1952. My appointment the first year was as Instructor in the Department of Economics and Social Institutions, with a promotion the second to assistant professor. Sociology was autonomous in its appointments, but since it shared the same building as economics, it was very easy for the junior faculty in each discipline to interact freely with colleagues in the other. I found this stimulating, in part because Weber and Pareto offered common bridges, in part because several of the economists were doing comparative work on social factors in development; although the interdisciplinary contacts were less extensive than those of social relations, the overall atmosphere of the department was exciting, especially since the top-ranked economics branch had world-class figures like Oskar Morgenstern (of game theory fame) and Jacob Viner (a leading economic historian). In addition, there were shared research centers, such as the Office of Population Research with demography an important bridge between the two, alongside an Institute of Labor Relations that had both sociologists and economists as participants. My major adjustment was that I arrived back having as areas of specialization comparative aspects of the Far East and industrial sociology. In a relatively small unit, such as sociology was, there was no duplication of specialty areas. Hence, with Wilbert Moore as the senior person in industrial sociology, and Marion Levy as the senior faculty in comparative aspects of the Far East as well as giving the basic theory courses, a junior faculty had to develop a different niche as a matter of protocol and survival. A “substitution” for industrial sociology was the development of my fascination with the sociology of religion. I had read Durkheim and Weber in graduate school and had sat in on Parsons’ course on social institutions, which emphasized religion. But I had not thought about is as a specialty area before getting an invitation from a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to attend a two-week Danforth-funded faculty seminar on the sociology of religion during the summer of 1958. Will Herberg, Bill Kolb, and Howard P. Becker were the three presenters who offered challenging critiques of a methodological positivism which tended to see religion (as part of the realm of values) as not a subject for sociologists to take seriously. While initially skeptical, by the end of the two weeks, I had started to view the presuppositions of present-day sociology as getting in the way of treating religion with the same relevance and significance for understanding social organization and social change as had Durkheim and Weber. I went back to Princeton with a new perspective and in the spring of 1959 found a congenial colleague in the religion department, Paul Harrison, with whom I cotaught a seminar in the sociology of religion. The role of religion and religious

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institutions in the dynamics of large-scale change in modern societies has since been a never-ending topic of teaching and research in the rest of my career in at least three areas: (1) finding linkages between religiously grounded motivations (including those outside the religious mainstreams) and symbolisms in social movements, (2) explicating certain texts and seminal works, notably those of Durkheim and his associates, and (3) making sense of the United States as “the first Protestant nation” with an underlying Calvinist culture adapted to the American setting (Tiryakian 1975). The religious field has also led me to lasting contacts and friendships with persons in comparative aspects of religious studies, especially in an interdisciplinary society of scholars known as the American Society for the Study of Religion (ASSR)—a sort of “invisible college” (Crane 1972) by election, which I joined in the latter part of the 1960s. Their annual meeting put me in early (and continuing) contact with outstanding comparativists in various religious traditions of all the continents: besides sociologists like Parsons, Robert Bellah, and Benjamin Nelson (the latter doing some pioneering essays in the sociology of civilizational encounters which I have found extremely heuristic for some of my recent theorizing), ASSR had at one time or another such noted world-class scholars as Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Ninian Smart. Besides their own respective fields of studies, whether Buddhism or Islamic mysticism or Hinduism, members of ASSR have a deep appreciation of Durkheim and Weber. It still has maintained its lofty standards of scholarship and fellowship, enabling me to extend considerably my horizon of comparative religious studies. All in all, then, I have found that in my career development the sociology of religion has been an excellent substitution for industrial sociology. As to finding an alternative to the Far East, I drew on some of my African interests and immersed myself in contemporary African materials. This proved to be fortunate because sub-Sahara Africa was beginning to awake from colonial turpitude with movements of autonomy and independence sprouting in different parts of the continent. I could share my interests in Africa with the only anthropologist in our midst, Jim Bohannon, who had received his training at Oxford under E. EvansPritchard. While Bohannon introduced a course on Africa in kinship structure and rituals, I introduced one on the sociology of modern Africa that took in urbanization, race relations, and African nationalism. The investment of time and energy in developing African materials paid off when Princeton received funds from an alumnus to develop African studies. The research funds made available enabled me to make in 1959 the first of some very extensive travels in sub-Sahara Africa to visit countries from Senegal to Zanzibar and points in between, such as South Africa, the Congo, and (what was then called) the Rhodesias. I would make in this phase of my career two further extensive travels to Africa, in 1962 and 1966, going to cities, rural areas, and gathering a variety of materials from interviews and archives. My focus was to understand the dynamics of social change in sub-Sahara Africa as stemming from urbanization and industrialization, and their context in the colonial situation as ideology and policy, and from the reactions in opposition to the colonial situation. I was particularly interested in the comparative aspects of colonialism in francophone and Anglophone territories. Retaining French fluency enabled me to move around readily in all the French-speaking countries in West and

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Equatorial Africa. Some of these, such as the Cameroon, were experiencing or had just experienced agrarian unrest and violence (not too different from the situation of the Huk revolt in Luzon), which authorities felt were communist-inspired. Besides a few bad moments, the on-site travels, observations, and discussions with a wide spectrum of both Europeans and Africans added immensely to my understanding of the problems of development. Going to English-speaking East Africa, I noted sociopolitical differences between Uganda and Tanzania, on the one hand, and Kenya, on the other. The latter has a small but significant settler power elite in its second generation and the use of British force had put down the agrarian Mau Mau uprising among the Kikuyu people. Structurally, the situation had parallels with the bloody war of Algerian independence that was still going on, ultimately threatening France with civil war until DeGaulle’s intervention. Still, the end of the 1950s and early 1960s was on the whole a period of optimism for Africa’s development and emancipation from colonialism, and, for the United States and the former Western colonial powers, this meant acceptance of maintaining friendly ties (and markets and resources that could not fall in communist hands of the Soviet Union). The idyll of Africa came to end during the decade of the 1960s—a straw in the wind being the first assassination of an African head of state, Sylvio Olympo of Togo, in 1963, and the military revolution in Nigeria the week I arrived in Lagos in 1966. Thereafter, it seems, Africa has wrestled continuously with political instability and corruption, or else with something unknown the years of my travel, AIDS. Why it has lagged badly behind all other global regions when it has so many natural and human resources is one of the great tragedies of our modern world. I again think about this as an extension of why the Philippines has lagged behind the “sinitic” countries of East Asia that do not have the resources of the Philippines. This is not an essay to account for this major discrepancy but I do want to indicate some of the major problems of development, or lack thereof, that have concerned me along my career path. My idyll at Princeton also came to an unexpected end in the 1960s. I had gotten a junior sabbatical leave for the year 1959–1960, and took my family to Paris for the purpose of writing what I saw as an interesting possible complementary fit between the “objective” positivist approach of Durkheim and the more “subjectivist” approach of existential phenomenology. The year in Paris was a most stimulating intellectual experience, with the extra enrichment of my meeting Georges Balandier, the leading French-speaking sociologist of modern Africa, who had helped formulate the analysis of “third world”. It has been a lifelong friendship and stimulation to find a colleague with whom one has congruent ideas regarding sociology and current global trends.9

9 Moreover, Balandier was one of the founders of what became known as the International Association of French-speaking Sociologists (AISLF), which had as an unstated mission the preservation and promotion of French in sociological research, with special attention given to third world areas, such as the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. I was to join AISLF in 1965, and ironically since AISLF tacitly sought to retain its autonomy from American quantitative sociology and American (read Parsons) theorizing, by dint of long service and friendships, I was elected president for a four-year mandate in 1988.

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When I returned to Princeton, having nearly completed a manuscript that would turn into my first theory volume (1962), I found the ethos had greatly changed. Sociology and economics had split into two departments; sociologists had brought a new chair from the outside; and I certainly was not part of the new power elite. It was a hard landing from the halcyon years before my sabbatical, but once again a “good surprise” awaited me in the spring of 1962 when I received a phone call from Leon Bramson at Harvard. The Department of Social Relations was seeking a new cluster of junior faculty who had interdisciplinary and comparative interests to reorganize some of the basic departmental courses. I had been recommended by some who knew I had been an effective teaching fellow and had noted my continued comparative interests. Would I be interested in returning as lecturer for a term appointment? The timing could not have been better, and once again I headed for Cambridge. My second stay at Harvard was short but very fruitful. The department had suffered attrition from death or imminent retirement of its “founding fathers” and those replacing them at the helm did not share the vision of an integrated department of social relations, but more of a cluster of sociology, social anthropology, social psychology, and clinical psychology. Still, if the golden age was behind, there still was much the “silver age” had to offer: the opportunity for the junior faculty from the three or four main disciplines to interact, either co-teaching the year long introductory course to social relations or having offices on the same floor of the new William James Building. Aside from teaching the year-long introductory course, one could teach pretty much what one wanted to, which gave me the occasion to give my course on modern Africa and to develop courses in the sociology of religion and a seminar in existential phenomenology in the sociological tradition. Equally important, there was a special seminar on evolution that Parsons offered with Robert Bellah and Shmuel Eisenstadt, a visiting scholar from the Hebrew University. The seminar attracted a large number of graduate students and visiting scholars, just as had the Parsons-Klukhohn-Stouffer seminar during my first year. Sitting in on the seminar gave me the opportunity of getting to know one of the visitors in particular, Niklas Luhmann from Germany, but even more, Eisenstadt, with whom I have since had a special friendship, partly based on rather similar outlooks on comparative analysis of social change and a common interest in the problematic of modernity. Just as I had been at Princeton in October 1957 when the launching of Sputnik generated a national crisis—for Sputnik brought to consciousness the vulnerability of a thermonuclear attack on the United States10—I was in the Harvard Club on November 22, 1963 when the announcement came that President Kennedy had been shot. For the next several days, the foundations of our world were shaken in a situation of anomie. There was no collective faculty response that I am aware of, but the assassination of a youthful president who had seemed to capture a generation’s desire for change was for me eerily reminiscent of the premature death of Ramon 10 Immediately following the news of Sputnik, the Princeton faculty of all ranks drew together to see what sort of informed response we could make drawing on our own special field of knowledge. I opted to canvas the literature on reactions to disasters and look for general patterns of response that might be of use in civilian defense program. I published my results in a scientific journal (1959).

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Magsaysay in the Philippines. The spirit of reform and social change each had generated in a younger generation suffered badly with their sudden loss. It certainly emphasized the part of contingency and “bad surprises” in the historical process. Yet, in the spring of 1964 a more positive development in my career took place. I received a phone call from John McKinney, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Duke University. McKinney, a capable theorist who knew Parsons, was looking for a person to take up the graduate theory core of the department since he had to give most of his attention to administrative matters. McKinney had read my recently published Sociologism and Existentialism and other writings, and thought that with my comparative interests I would fit it well with the department, which also had several anthropologists. I made the trip to Durham, met the department, accepted a tenure offer and joined the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the beginning of the academic year 1965–1966. I did not anticipate at the time that this would be home for the rest of the century and into the new millennium. The Mature Years Duke University in the 1960s was in transition from being a high quality regional university to becoming a nationally and eventually internationally recognized center of learning. With funding from the Ford Foundation and vigorous backing from the provost of the university (Taylor Cole, himself a distinguished political scientist who shared my interest in Africa), the university significantly expanded its comparative international studies. I became active in several faculty area committees such as African studies and European studies, while in the department I developed theory courses and courses in the sociology of religion in addition to teaching introductory sociology. In terms of career development, being at Duke as a tenured faculty provided me with learning experiences in various administrative functions, starting with unexpectedly being appointed departmental chair when John McKinney, with whom I had the pleasure of collaborating in organizing a conference that led to an important theory volume (McKinney and Tiryakian 1970), left that post to become dean of the graduate school. Effectively, mine was to be a transition appointment with the majority of sociologists and anthropologists opting to form separate departments, much as I had hoped to put in place an integrated department. My later major administrative experience at Duke came twenty years later serving as the director of International Studies at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, a period of enormous global transformations, foremost being the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rejoining of Eastern European countries to western neighbors, and the rapid rise of the East Asian “dragons” as global economic powers. The dynamics of change in East Asia and the dynamics of change in Europe have been of particular research and travel interest for me, and when I served as director I was able to encourage the university to broaden its international programs and increase visitors and networks from overseas, while finding it of equal importance for me to multiply travels to East

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Asia and Europe to get first-hand knowledge of scholars and institutions with whom the university and myself could develop collaborative ties. Starting in the 1970s and continuing today, I developed a new empirical focus for my comparative interests, one of which was an extension of previous work in Africa (where in the 1970s and 1980s political instability greatly curtailed the scope of travel and research). The focus was on unexpected nationalist movements in the West, not against neighboring countries but against the nation-state, movements seeking the liberation of the “nation” from the “state”, movements from the “periphery” against the “center”. This focus and its elements (have) provided me rich materials for research, teaching, and even administration. It came about serendipitously in the course of a stay in Paris in 1971–1972. Passing by a popular forum meeting hall (La Salle de la Mutualité), I saw a poster for a meeting that evening of “oppressed peoples of Europe sing their songs of freedom”. The three-hour meeting featured various groups from “regions” of Western countries such as Wales, the Basque area, Brittany, the southern French region of Oc, Catalonia, Flanders, and Quebec. All expressed in French their plight of subordination to the nation-state, their being “internal colonies” deprived of their culture, including their own vernacular, by the hegemonic culture of the nationstates. I was struck by some similarities in their proclaimed grievances, on the one hand, and the discourse against colonialism and for independence, on the other, that had been expressed in African movements of independence in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was sociologically challenging to find as an anomaly of modernity that in the midst of democratic and economically advanced nation-states there would be found movements of national liberation. Following up this initial observation has led me to do extensive research in the interrelated areas of nationalism, national identity, and ethnic conflicts. Besides an underlying sympathy with those seeking the autonomy of nationhood from the traps of colonial or neo-colonial or internal colonial dependency, I have found in the study of national identity, nationalism and nationhood an area where I can apply my theoretical background in existential phenomenology. From the latter’s focus on intersubjective consciousness and the meanings that structure perception, I have given attention to the dynamics of social change involving radical changes in the collective consciousness of groups of actors. Moreover, an objective situation may have multiple sets of meanings: so, as I first found this to be the case in the national identity issues of Quebec, there may be multiple meanings of what it means to be, say, a Quebec nationalist (or a Welsh nationalist, or an American nationalist, etc). National identity as any collective identity is a set of possibilities, some of which are actualized as the dominant form but under certain conditions, a new consciousness may become operative, and the consequences may be real significant structural changes. What these turning points are should thus be of critical sociological importance. This research vein opened up developing new professional networks and new research sites. At Duke I started with modest resources Quebec studies as an adjunct of the new Canadian studies area program; the latter was Anglophone to the core and in effect promoted Canadian unity in a period of growing secession-mindedness in French-speaking Quebec. Quebec studies brought to the Duke campus academics from the major French-speaking universities of Quebec and organized tours of those

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universities by Duke’s administrators. Essentially, I saw our limited program as providing information about a region that Americans knew as a tourist haven but had little information regarding its history and on-going structural changes. After Quebec studies had served its purpose of raising on campus awareness of “the other Canada”, I turned to organizing in the 1980s a faculty seminar with a broader sweep. For several years, the seminar treated contemporary aspects of nationalism, drawing on participants from within as well as outside the Duke faculty. At a meeting on campus of Europeanists, I met a colleague in political science, Ronald Rogowski, who had a keen interest in both political theory and comparative European studies; we found it meaningful to organize a group of scholars with comparative interests and a focus on the new nationalist movements of the West. The end product of the interdisciplinary collaboration was a well-received volume (Tiryakian & Rogowski 1985). The breakdown of the Soviet Empire in the 1980s, particularly under pressure from the Eastern European satellites, increased the scope of my comparative interests in nationalism and national identity. Here the anomaly noted about nationalism surfacing in regions of well-established nation-states appeared again: the Soviet system and the promise of a classless society also carried with it the eradication of bourgeois national sentiments and aspirations. Yet, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania strong national movements emerged rapidly, and as the reform-minded Soviet Union under Gorbachev rather unexpectedly lost power and legitimacy, it became far easier for a sociologist to travel to Eastern Europe to observe ongoing change and meet with counterpart colleagues. The “return to normalcy” of the academic community in the 1990s took me to various sites and professional meetings that had been closed off ten years before. Some of the windows opened with participation in the activities of AISLF, the French-speaking international association of sociologists, which had network ties with sociologists in Eastern Europe; these networks resulted in conferences and meetings in Macedonia (the province of ex-Yugoslavia, not the one bearing that name in Greece), Bulgaria, and Romania. I will skip the details but only wish to indicate that in the past three decades, I have complemented my interests in the more established areas of theory and the sociology of religion with an equal interest in observing both at a distance and close-up areas of the world where large-scale social changes are taking place, notably Europe (and its evolving and expanding European Union) and East Asia. Trying to make sense of the world, trying to make sociological sense of the human condition, is an ultimate challenge for theory, one which concerned Parsons greatly in one of his last major essays (Tiryakian 2005). Trying to make sense of what leads people to engage in violence and protracted conflict against “the other” and under what conditions can there be a restoration of processes of integration, is another theoretical and empirical concern that has come to grip me in my “mature” years, as a strong echo of my student days interest in prejudice and race relations. In this regard, I had in the present decade the “good surprise” of being invited by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars to organize and direct a team of Fulbright scholars who would use their fellowship during 2003 to study collectively and individually comparative aspects of ethnic conflicts and peace

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processes. Working—even if mainly online—with thirty scholars from various disciplines and from countries in addition to the United States as diverse as Nepal, Tibet, Senegal, Sri Lanka, as well as Israel, Belgium, France, and Northern Ireland was an exciting learning experience for all of us.11 Although we did not find a “magic bullet” to eradicate the virus of severe ethnic violence anymore than had De Kruif’s microbe hunters, we did through individual and collective research and publications provide at least some incremental advancement in the comparative approach to conflict and peace processes.12 Severe ethnic conflicts and violence, as well as wars of various sorts—including wars that cut across national boundaries—constitute the dark side of modernity. I will continue seeking to make sense of the dark side. But I also have been challenged to make sense empirically and theoretically with the constructive, innovative side of modernity. The breakup of the Soviet Union, ultimately a closed Marxist system based on fear and coercion, provided an opening for a theoretical retooling with a renovated modernization theory of large-scale social change, which emphasizes that collectively actors can redirect their energies to authentic development rather than be at the mercy of external or imposed economic determinism (Tiryakian 1991). Lastly, stemming from the challenge of making theoretical sense of the processes of globalization, with some others who are especially active in the International Sociological Association, we have begun to rethink the conceptual tools of macro theory, giving place to “civilization” as a dynamic unit of analysis. This is still at an early stage of formulation (Arjomand and Tiryakian 2004) but hopefully will provide a stimulus for new creative theorizing and research, and for me personally, new sites to travel with my sociological passport. References and Selected Bibliography Alba, Richard, and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arjomand, Said and Edward A. Tiryakian, eds. 2004. Rethinking Civilizational Analysis. London: Sage. Crane, Diana. 1972. Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elder, Glen H. 1974. Children of the Great Depression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of the European Sciences and transcendental Phenomenology, an introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. with an introduction by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. McKinney, John and Edward A. Tiryakian, eds. 1970. Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

11 See http//www.cies.org/download/2002_2003 NCS.pdf. 12 For a sample of relevant materials, see Tiryakian (2005a).

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Merton, Robert K. 1972. “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 9–47. ———. 1994. “A Life of Learning”. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 25. Online: http://www.acls.org/op25.htm. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. New York: The Free Press. Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils, eds. 2001 (1951). Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences. Abridged edition with an introduction by Neil J. Smelser. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Tiryakian, Edward A. 1955. “Apartheid and Education in the Union of South Africa.” Harvard Educational Review 25: 242–259. ———. 1957. “Apartheid and Religion.” Theology Today 14: 385–400. ———. 1959. “Aftermath of a Thermonuclear Attack on the United States: Some Sociological Considerations.” Social Problems 6: 291–303. ———. 1960. “Apartheid and Politics in South Africa.” The Journal of Politics 22: 682–697. ———. 1962. Sociologism and Existentialism: Two Perspectives on the Individual and Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1975. “Neither Marx nor Durkheim … Perhaps Weber.” American Journal of Sociology 81(1): 1–33. ———. 1991. “Modernisation: Exhumetur in Pace (Rethinking Macrosociology in the 1990s.” International Sociology 6: 165–180. ———. 1999. “War: The Covered Side of Modernity.” International Sociology 14(4): 473–489. ———. 2002. “Third Party Involvement in Ethnic Conflict: the Case of the Kosovo War.” Pp. 207–228 in George A. Kourvetaris, V. Roudometof, K. Koutsoukis, and A.G. Kourvetaris, eds, The New Balkans: Disintegration and Reconstruction. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press, distributor. ———. 2003. Review essay of Hans Joas, War and Modernity. Contemporary Sociology 32(4). ———. 2005a. “Talcott Parsons and the Human Condition.” Pp. 267–288 in V. Lidz, R. Fox, and V. Bershady, eds, After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Russell Sage. ———, ed. 2005b. Ethnicity, Ethnic Conflicts, Peace Processes: Comparative Perspectives. Whitby, Ontario: de Sitter Publications. Tiryakian, Edward A. and Ronald Rogowski, eds. 1985. New Nationalisms of the Developed West. London: Allen & Unwin. Vogel, Ezra F. 1979. Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Index

Abbott, Andrew, 119, 127 abortion, 178-184 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 66, 72, 74, 79 academic freedom, 149, 250 Addams, Jane, 2, 9 Adorno, Theodor W., 35, 53, 102 aesthetic publics, 215, 216 Afghanistan, 155 Africa, 68, 132, 241, 249, 251, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260 Al Qaeda, 41 Albert, Hans, 35, 102, 103 Albrow, Martin, 6, 7, 15-27, 225 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 105, 106, 161, 194, 200, 225 Allport, Gordon, 245, 248 Althusser, Louis, 137 American Council of Learned Societies, 117, 199, 223, 243 American Sociological Association, 3, 26, 105, 200 Amsden, Alice, 73, 77, 79 Amsterdam, 19 Anderson, Perry, 209 Andreski, Stanislav, 20 anthropology, 17, 34, 54, 72, 118, 121, 127, 192, 195, 227, 236, 244, 247, 248, 251, 252, 254, 258, 259 Antwerp, 35, 221 apartheid, 248 Arato, Andrew, 75 Archer, Margaret, 12, 163 Ardigò, Achille, 159, 165, 172 Arendt, Hannah, 75 Argentina, 77 Arjomand, Said, 26, 262 Armstrong, Louis, 54 Aron, Raymond, 18 Asian nancial crisis, 154 Atkinson, Paul, 21, 226 Atteslander, Peter, 103 Augsburg University, 103, 104

Auschwitz, 59, 136 Austria, 7, 30-42, 58, 105, 198, 225, 246, 247 autopoiesis, 161, 162 Baczko, Bronislaw, 115 Balbo, Felice, 159 Baldwin, James, 54 Baltimore, 50, 54, 55 Bamberg University, 104 Bangladesh, 22 Barnard, Chester, 251 Baudrillard, Jean, 162 Bauman, Zygmunt, 115, 162, 192, 193 Beck, Ulrich, 25, 162, 171, 228 Beckett, Samuel, 216 Belgium, 19, 221, 241, 262 Bell, Wendell, 3 Bellah, Robert, 209, 217, 249, 256, 258 Bendix, Reinhard, 4, 56, 57, 225 Berger, Bennett M., 3, 4 Berger, Peter L., 20, 50, 94, 223 Berkeley, California, 45, 69, 70, 79, 193, 194, 200, 224 Berlin, 30, 44, 53, 59 Bernard, Jessie, 4 Bevan, Bill, 21 Beyme, Klaus von, 102 Bielefeld, Germany, 23, 30, 39, 40, 42, 43, 53, 103 Blau, Peter, 3, 224 Blumer, Herbert, 194, 195, 223 Böll, Heinrich, 53 Bologna, 161, 198 Bonacich, Edna, 68 Borucka-Arctowa, Maria, 191 Boston University, 117 Boston, 54, 55, 117, 118 Bottomore, Thomas, 17, 18 Bourdieu, Pierre, 108, 110, 111, 162, 163, 164, 172, 210 Brandt, Willy, 52

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Braun, Hans, 53 Braverman, Harry, 137 Brazil, 22, 96, 151 British Sociological Association, 21, 22 Brown, Richard K., 19 Brubaker, Rogers, 127 Buenos Aires, 82, 86, 94 Bulgaria, 105, 261 bureaucracy, 4, 20, 26, 37, 43 Cairo, 7, 131, 132 Callaghan, Jim, 21 Cameroon, 54, 257 Cantril, Hadley, 245 capital punishment, 55 capitalism, 45, 68, 88, 107-109, 112, 136137, 150, 153, 161, 170, 207, 213 Cardiff, 20-23 Carleton College, 54 CASS, see Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Castells, Manuel, 69-73, 79, 80 CERN, 33, 40-41 Chambliss, William, 60 Chicago School, 38, 66, 68, 194, 223, 243 Chicago, 209, 220-225, 228 Chile, 69 China, 232-237, 244, 251, 252 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 8, 232-234 Ching Dynasty, 147 Christianity, 127, 155, 210, 226, 241 Cicourel, Aaron, 36, 39 cities, 7, 54, 59, 65-84, 86-90, 92, 96-98, 117, 124, 198, 210, 219-220, 232, 242, 256 citizenship, 87, 107, 166, 167 civil rights movement, 54, 58, 197 civil society, 81, 87, 152-157, 167, 197, 214, 215 civility, 96, 213-218, 249 civilization, 16, 155, 169, 192, 194, 199, 200, 208, 256, 262 Cloward, Richard, 55 coercion, 73, 74, 77, 262 Cohen, Albert, 45, 60 Cohen, Percy, 19 Cole, Robert, 208, 217 Coleman, James, 4, 35, 164, 172

colleagues, 7, 17, 32, 34, 40, 42, 43, 44, 60, 73-80, 118, 119, 121, 125, 126, 133, 149, 184, 198, 212, 214, 216, 221, 224, 225, 227, 228, 255, 261 collective memories, 50, 51, 58-61 Cologne, 15, 30, 49, 53, 104 colonialism, 67, 127, 153, 241, 256, 257, 260 Columbia University, 195, 215 communism, 120, 149, 190, 191, 197, 200 commuting identities, 8, 203-205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215-217 comparative development, 79 comparative-historical sociology, 72, 117, 119, 240 conict theory, 149 Confucius, 147, 210 Conze, Werner, 102 Cook, Peter, 16 cooperative workplaces, 141 corruption, 77, 80, 267 Coser, Lewis, 3, 58 Cowling, Maurice, 16 Coxon, Tony, 21, 22 Cressey, Donald, 4 criminalization, 53 Crozier, Michel, 18 Cuba, 69, 149 Cultural Revolution, 232-235 Czechoslovakia, 20, 261 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 18, 221 DaSilva, Fabio, 95 Davis, Diane E., 7, 54, 65-83 Davis, Miles, 54 Decraemer, Willy, 119 Delamont, Sara, 21 demilitarization, 77 democracy, 42, 55, 80, 81, 82, 106, 119, 126, 137, 141, 146, 148, 151, 153, 154, 160, 167, 196, 214, 232, 236 democratization, 42, 75-77, 146, 151, 152, 155 Denmark, 105 detraditionalization, 29 Detroit, 55 differentiation, 44, 53, 107, 109, 147, 160, 170-173, 249 discursive eld, 108, 110, 111

0nde2 division of labor, 108-110, 251 Donati, Pierpaolo, 7, 159-174 Dore, Ronald, 208, 209, 217 DuBois, W.E.B., 2, 9 Duke University, 259-261 Dunning, Eric, 19 Durkheim, Emile, 2, 49, 60, 104, 105, 107, 108, 116, 117, 163, 239, 242, 243, 251, 255-257 Duster, Troy, 39 Dylan, Bob, 54 Eade, John, 24 Eastern Europe, 75-77, 199, 259, 261 ecology, 126, 154, 155, 169, 170 econometrics, 34, 109 economic development, 67, 72, 148, 153, 164, 210, 235, 247 economic sociology, 213 economics, 17, 22, 53, 66, 72-74, 78, 96, 135, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154, 231, 233, 235, 236, 244, 255, 258 Egypt, 131-132, 240 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 126, 150, 225, 226, 258 Elder, Glen, 241, 262 Elias, Norbert, 19, 23, 210, 211, 217 elites, 33, 42, 56, 134, 153, 213 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 122, 123, 124, 164 England, 16, 125, 132, 139 Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs, 4 ethnocentrism, 72, 77 ethnology, 33, 34 ethnomethodology, 36, 245 ethnoscience, 34 Etzioni, Amitai, 26 European Court of Justice, 109 European Organization for Nuclear research, see CERN European Union, 125, 200, 261 Evan, Peter B., 151 Faunce, Bill, 137, 138 Fennell, Graham, 24 Feyerabend, Paul, 35, 36, 38 Fine, Gary Alan, 60 Firth, Raymond, 17 Fogelson, Robert, 79 Ford Foundation, 18, 95, 259

267

Fox, Renee, 119 France, 8, 51, 88, 96, 105, 106, 109, 131, 139, 140, 148, 241-242, 245, 246, 250, 257, 262 Frankfurt School, 34, 35, 53, 102, 103, 160 Freedman, Maurice, 17, 19 Freyer, Hans, 223 Friedmann, John, 68, 69 Friedrich, Carl Joachim, 102 friends, 21, 23, 26, 32, 45, 52, 55, 117, 118, 120, 133, 134, 150, 195, 196, 198, 200, 214, 216, 217, 220, 229, 240, 242, 244, 246, 251, 258 Frost, David, 16 functional systems, 107 functionalism, 7, 21, 108, 110, 149, 160162, 164, 166, 170, 192, 194 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 38, 102 Gans, Herbert, 55 Garnkel, Harold, 20, 225, 245 Garland, David, 55 Geertz, Clifford, 35, 43, 44, 118, 212 Gehlen, Arnold, 221, 224, 225 Gellner, Ernest, 17 Gemeinschaft, 165, 169 gender, 4, 6, 22, 66, 119, 121, 126, 183, 222 Geneva, 40 geography, 87, 89, 91, 127, 189, 241 German idealism, 112 Germany, 5, 7, 8, 16, 18, 20, 25-27, 30, 35, 40, 42, 49-51, 53, 55-59, 75, 102, 104-106, 108, 109, 148, 209, 220, 221, 225-227, 253, 258 Gesellschaft, 165, 169 Gibraltar, 132, 242 Giddens, Anthony, 18, 19, 23, 26, 118, 121, 162, 167, 171, 196 Ginsberg, Morris, 17, 19 Glass, David, 17 global cities, 88, 89, 92, 96 global citizen, 155 global communities, 30 global identity, 29, 30 global sociology, 5, 34, 192 global world, 30, 41, 42 globalism, 26, 45 globality, 23, 25, 26, 93, 240

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globalization, 93, 106, 107, 126, 138, 154156, 171, 172, 204, 216, 262 glocalization, 126 Goffman, Erving, 39, 225 Goldthorpe, John, 19 Gordon, David, 72, 74 Gramsci, Antonio, 166 grand theory, 66, 67, 233, 234 Grass, Günter, 52 Graumann, Carl F., 102 Graz, 31, 58 Great Britain, 125 Greeley, Andrew, 4 Greenberg, Ed, 141, 142 Gross, Llewellyn, 3 Grunberg, Leon, 7, 131-143 Habermas, Jürgen, 25, 35, 38, 102, 104, 109, 110, 112, 161 habitus, 108, 154 Hae-y!ng, Lee, 148 Haferkamp, Hans, 54, 106 Hagan, John, 60 Halbwachs, Maurice, 58 Hall, John R., 124 Hamburg, 219-224 Hammond, Phillip E., 225, 228 Hannerz, Ulf, 26 Hanover, 50, 54 happiness, 8, 176, 179-186 Harre, Rom, 35 Harrison, Paul, 255 Harvard University, 245, 247, 249-252, 254, 258 Harvey, David, 137 Heidegger, Martin, 38 Heinrich Heine University, 104 Held, David, 21, 26 Helle, Horst, 8, 25, 219-230 Heller, Agnes, 75 Hendrix, Jimi, 54 Hirschman, Albert, 212 Hirszowicz, Maria, 115 history, 15, 16, 17, 20, 24-26, 65, 68-75, 77, 78, 93, 102, 112, 117, 118, 122, 127, 146, 147, 149, 203, 214, 240, 241, 246, 250 Hobbes, Thomas, 212 Hobhouse, L.T., 17

Hobsbawm, Eric, 72 Holocaust, 58, 59, 135, 241 Holt, Stephen, 24 Holwitz, Stanley, 195 Homans, George C., 2, 3, 102, 195, 251, 252 Hopkins, Keith, 19 Horowitz, Irving Louis, 2, 3, 9 Hove, Eric van, 35, 40 Hughes, Everett C., 221, 223, 225 humanism, 117, 147 hyperglobalism, 25 ideal speech situation, 110 Ikegami, Eiko, 8, 203-218 immigration, 7, 86, 96, 117-119, 122, 125127, 243, 262 imprisonment, 55, 56, 59 India, 142, 201 individualization, 29, 169, 171, 182 industrialization, 146, 150, 151, 172, 204, 256 Inkeles, Alex, 252 Institute for Advanced Study, 32, 34, 43, 45, 212 institutionalism, 108, 109, 110 instrumental reason, 112 integration, 101, 106-108, 110, 147, 165, 247, 261 intellectual elitism, 23 intellectuals, 32, 36, 108, 115, 152, 153-154, 214, 249 intelligentsia, 153 International Sociological Association, 22, 24, 53, 184, 200, 225, 262 0nternational Sociology, 21-23, 26 internationalism, 5 internet, 5, 25, 79, 126, 136 interpretive sociology, 73, 75, 226 intimacy, 30, 31, 32 Iraq, 80, 155, 229 Irle, Martin, 102 irregular armed forces, 76, 77, 80 Israel, 81, 131, 229, 262 Italy, 5, 7, 96, 105, 160, 165, 198, 242 Ivy league, 44, 118 Jagiellonian University, 190, 191, 196 Janowitz, Morris, 224

0nde2 Japan, 8, 25, 147-154, 203, 205-218, 227, 244, 251, 252, 253, 254 Jedlicki, Jerzy, 116 Jerusalem, 81, 82 Jing, Tiankui, 8, 231-237 Johannesburg, 80, 82 Johns Hopkins University, 54, 198 Joplin, Janis, 54 journalism, 139, 207 Judaism, 107, 120, 210 Kalberg, Stephen, 50, 56, 60 Kaldor, Mary Kansas State University, 227 Kant, Immanuel, 104, 250 Katznelson, Ira, 72, 74 Keuth, Herbert, 103 Kidder, Robert, 55, 60 Kimeldorf, Howard, 74 King, Martin Luther, 54 Kinnock, Neil, 21 Klausner, Samuel, 119 Klein, Viola, 20 Klima, Rolf, 103 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 252, 254 Kluckhohn, Florence, 249, 252 Knorr Cetina, Karin, 7, 29-47 Kolakowski, Leszek, 115 König, René, 49, 53 Kraus, Karl, 38 Kuhn, Thomas, 35, 38, 94 Ky!ng-dong, Kim, 150 Kyoto, 25, 203, 204, 213 laboratory science, 38 Laslett, Barbara, 4, 119 late modernity, 55, 56, 159, 163 Latin America, 68-78, 94-96, 214, 223, 250, 252, 257 Laumann, Edward, 55 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 192, 195, 223 Lefebvre, Henri, 81, 87 legal studies, 127 Lepsius, Rainer, 102 Levi, Primo, 135 Levine, Donald N., 105, 120, 224, 228 Levy, Marion, 244, 255 Light, Ivan 68 Lim, Hy-Sup, 150

269

Lim, Hyun-Chin, 7, 145-157 Lingerolles, Michaela de, 45 Lipset, Seymour M., 3 London School of Economics, 15, 17, 18, 24, 26, 208, 228 London, 131, 132, 137, 225 Los Angeles, 68, 69, 105, 225 Loughrey, Bryan, 24 Lowenthal, Leo, 2, 194 LSE, see London School of Economics Ludwig-Maximilian University, 104 Luhmann, Niklas, 39, 42, 104, 161, 162, 168, 171, 228, 258 MacIver, Robert M., 2, 10 Malamud, Bernard, 135 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 38, 52, 196 Mann, Michael, 209 Mannheim, Karl, 2, 17, 20, 51 Maoism, 137 marginality, 49, 50, 51, 58, 121 marginalization, 72 Maritain, Jacques, 159, 245, 250 Marx, Gary T., 4, 8, 228 Marx, Karl, 194, 199, 200, 236 Marxism, 103, 118, 134, 149, 160, 166, 170, 172, 191, 194, 235 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, see MIT May 1968, 34 Mayntz, Renate, 53, 110 Mayo, Elton, 251 McKinney, John, 259, 262 Mead, George Herbert, 29, 194, 225, 227 Mellon Foundation, 77 Mencius, 147 mentor, 5, 16, 66, 67, 70, 95, 120, 138, 195, 196, 200, 216, 217, 239, 240 Merton, Robert K., 3, 6, 55, 117, 119, 139, 140, 163, 192, 195-197, 200-202, 242-244 Mexico City, 7, 67-72, 76-80, 82, 225 Meyer, John, 60 Michigan State University, 131 migration, see immigration Mikulov, 198 Milberg, William, 77 Miliband, Ralph, 17

270

Sociologists in a ,lobal Age

Mills, C. Wright, 2, 3, 17, 18, 132, 140, 149, 192 Mische, Ann, 122, 123 MIT, 78-82 MNC, see multi-national corporation modernity, 7, 23, 25, 55, 56, 58, 105-107, 127, 150, 159-161, 164, 167-171, 213, 239, 253, 258, 260, 262 modernization, 58, 147, 149-151, 159, 166, 204, 209, 244, 252, 262 Moehn, Franz, 45 Moore, Barrington, 209 Moore, Wilbert, 254, 255 Morawska, Ewa, 7, 55, 115-129 Morris, Aldon, 199 Moscow, 80, 82, 192 Mühlmann, Wilhelm E., 102 multiculturalism, 106, 119, 170, 243 multi-national corporation, 138-139 Münch, Richard, 7, 53, 60, 101-114 Mungham, Geoff, 21 Munich, 25, 58, 104, 225-228 Münster University, 222 Murcott, Anne, 21 Murray, Henry, 254 Naschold, Frieder, 35 National Institute of Justice, 55, 57 nation-state, 69, 79, 81, 90, 92, 126, 160, 215, 260, 261 natural sciences, 33, 35, 38, 39, 190, 205 Nazi, 16, 19, 49, 51, 53, 58, 75 neo-functionalism, 108, 161 Netherlands, The, 5, 25, 175, 178, 179, 221 Neugarten, Bernice, 3 Neustadt, Ilya, 19 New School for Social Research, 72-80, 203, 214 New York, 8, 44, 45, 55, 132, 193, 195, 197199, 204, 219, 220, 223, 243 Nihonbashi, 205 non-Western societies, 209, 210, 214, 215, 217 normative sociology, 74, 80, 82 Northwestern University, 66 Notestein, Frank, 244 Oakeshott, Michael, 17 Ochanomizu University, 206

Oel, Hans G., 102 Offe, Klaus, 39 Ohlin, Lloyd, 55 Open University, 20 Orwell, George, 136 Osborne, John, 16 Ossowski, Stanislaw, 191, 192, 196 Page, Charles H., 2 Pappi, Franz-Urban, 53 Pareto, Vilfredo, 244, 255 Paris, 18, 34, 88, 96, 132, 139, 193, 196, 210, 241, 246, 250, 257, 260 Park, Robert E., 2, 10 Parsons, Talcott, 7, 102, 104, 105, 161-166, 168, 192, 194, 195, 222-225, 239, 244, 247, 249, 250-252, 255-259, 261 Paterson, Orlando, 150 pattern variables, 165 peace, 18, 54, 81, 96, 155, 212, 261, 262 Peking University, 227, 231, 232 Pereira, Anthony, 73, 77 Philadelphia, 55, 120, 243 physics, 33, 40, 41, 42, 189, 190, 192, 244 Pittsburgh, 55 Pizzorno, Alessandro, 208 Poland, 5, 7, 8, 105, 115, 118, 119, 190-192, 194-200, 242, 261 Polanyi, Karl, 107 police violence, 77 police, 55, 77, 79, 80, 82, 132, 193, 197 political asylum, 7, 118 political economy, 65, 67-70, 72-74, 77-79, 96-98, 137, 151, 154, 155, 216 political praxis, 75 political science, 72, 74, 102, 104, 109, 127, 147, 148, 152, 154, 235, 236, 261 political sociology, 105, 151, 232 politics, 4, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 34-36, 52, 56, 65, 66, 71-74, 76-79, 81-83, 87, 91, 93, 95, 102, 106, 127, 150, 155, 176, 177, 189, 212, 214, 220, 232 Poole, Deborah, 73 Popper, Karl, 17, 35, 38, 102, 190 positivism, 35, 38, 101, 102, 117, 161, 240, 255 postmodernism, 120, 121, 164 post-modernity, 58

0nde2 Poulantzas, Nicos, 96, 137 poverty, 86, 109, 134, 146, 150 Preda, Alexa, 40 Princeton University, 44, 45, 244 public opinion, 56, 233, 245 public sphere, 164, 166, 169 publics, 205, 215-218 quantitative sociology, 73, 75, 257 Quebec, 260, 261 rational choice, 109, 164, 168 rational social reconstruction, 17, 22 Ratzinger, Joseph, 226 Reagan, Ronald, 198 reective pessimism, 147 Reimann, Horst, 103, 104 relational differentiation, 170-172 relational inclusion, 170, 171 relational realism, 163 relational sociology, 7, 160, 163-174 religion, 8, 60, 82, 126, 162, 169, 195, 209, 210, 217, 220, 226-230, 239, 255, 256, 261 revolution, 16, 58, 72, 75, 80, 125-127, 134, 137, 147, 149, 153, 190, 199, 232, 257 Rex, John, 17 Rieff, Philip, 119 Riesman, David, 4, 222, 223 Riley, Matilda White, 3, 10 risk society, 25 Robbins, Lionel, 17 Robertson, Roland, 18, 23, 26, 126 Roehampton, 24 Rogowski, Ronald, 261 Rohlen, Thomas, 208 Romania, 105, 261 Rosch, Eleanor, 38 Roseberry, William, 72, 73, 214 Rossi, Alice, 3 Rossi, Peter, 252 Roth, Günter, 4, 56 Rotterdam, 176, 178, 221 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 56 rule of law, 80, 107 Russia, 51, 105, 153, 199 Salzburg, 30, 198, 246

271

samurai, 205, 211-215 San Francisco, 37, 190, 193, 200 Sassen, Saskia, 7, 85-98 Savelsberg, Joachim, 7, 49-63 Schelsky, Helmut, 39, 220-224 Scheuch, Erwin, 53 Schleyer, Hans-Martin, 53 Schmid, Michael, 103 Schutz, Alfred, 2, 20, 39 Scott, Allen, 68 Second World War, see World War II Selznick, Philip, 194 sentencing guidelines, 50, 54 Seoul National University, 146, 148 Seoul, 82, 227 September 11, 155 serendipity, 197, 248, 252, 260 Service, Elman R., 227 Sewell, William Jr., 122, 123, 211 Shibutani, Tamotsu, 223, 227 Shils, Edward, 2, 224-226, 247 shoguns, 212, 215, 216 Short, James, 3, 60 Siewert, Jörg, 53 Silberman, Alphons, 53 Simmel, Georg, 23, 49, 50, 107, 108, 163, 223, 224, 228 Skocpol, Theda, 3, 119, 151, 209 slavery, 59, 208, 222, 223 Smelser, Neil J., 26, 194, 200 social history, 72, 102, 117, 118 social movements, 70-72, 76-81, 154, 197, 199, 245, 256 social philosophy, 17, 180, 232, 235 social policy, 17, 232-235 social problems, 148, 153, 176, 179, 219, 220, 234 social reform, 152, 153, 176 social structure, 123, 147, 151, 161, 163, 164, 197, 210, 211, 233, 251 social system, 137, 152, 168, 195, 223, 247, 251 socialism, 115, 137, 148, 149, 150, 191 sociological imagination, 18, 136, 145, 149, 155, 209 sociological lifestyle, 18 sociological paradigms, 71 sociologism, 168

272

Sociologists in a ,lobal Age

sociology of development, 7, 39, 145, 150, 151 SocioSite, 5, 10 Sogang University, 227 Soja, Edward, 68, 70 Solidarnosc, 193, 196-199 Sorokin, Pitirim, 2, 239, 249, 250-251, 254 South Africa, 248, 252, 256 South Korea, 7, 77, 145-157, 227 Spain, 105, 241 Spencer, Herbert, 17, 251 Spohn, Willfried, 124 St. Louis, 66, 82 state formation, 8, 72-74, 77-80, 209-211, 213 Sternberger, Dolf, 102 Stinchcombe, Arthur, 119, 140, 194 Stocking, George, 43 Stones, Rob, 122, 124 stratication, 244, 249, 252 structural-functionalism, 149, 192, 244 sub-national, 86-92 suburban milieus, 65 Sussex University, 134 Suttles, Gerald, 55 Swanson, Guy, 249 Sweezy, Paul, 137 Switzerland, 41, 49, 104, 105 symbolic interactionism, 116, 223, 224 Szacki, Jerzy, 116 Sztompka, Piotr, 8, 116, 189-202 Taipei, 82 Taiwan, 77, 151 Tanzania, 137, 257 Taylor, Lance, 73, 77 Taylor, Ralph, 60 Tazelaar, Fritz, 103 Tel Aviv, 132 television, 56, 59, 132 Thatcher, Margaret, 21, 22, 140 third world cities, 67, 71, 72, 75 Thompson, E.P., 118 Tilly, Charles, 41, 72-74, 76, 81, 119, 136, 199, 209, 210 Tilly, Louise, 77 Tiryakian, Edward, 8, 105, 239-263 Titmuss, Richard, 17 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 55

Tomkins, Sylvan, 245 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 2, 165 Topitsch, Ernst, 102 Touraine, Alain, 163, 249 transformational sociology, 233 transnational identity, 204 Tübingen, 18 Tugendhat, Ernst, 102 Tumin, Melvin, 244, 247 Turkey, 240 Turner, Jonathan, 105 Turner, Ralph, 225 Turner, Stephen, 4, 34 Twain, Mark, 54 UCLA, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 79, 199 unemployment, 21, 56, 234 United Kingdom, 5, 7, 124, 139, 148 United States, 5, 7, 8, 26, 50, 54, 55, 57-60, 72, 105, 106, 117-120, 122, 125, 131, 135, 146, 148-151, 155, 191, 204, 205, 207-209, 216, 217, 219, 222-224, 234, 240-243, 246-248, 252, 256-258, 262 University College Cardiff, 21, 22 University of Bielefeld, 23, 39, 42, 43, 53 University of Bremen, 54 University of California at Los Angeles, see UCLA University of Chicago, 39, 67, 209, 223, 224, 228 University of Colorado, 141 University of Essex, 124 University of Heidelberg, 7, 101, 102 University of Kansas, 219, 220, 229 University of Michigan, 36, 199 University of Minnesota, 50 University of Munich, 104, 225, 226 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 255 University of Notre Dame, 94 University of Pennsylvania, 118, 119, 121 University of Regensburg, 226 University of Trier, 53, 54 University of Warsaw, 115, 116 urban development, 67, 72, 76 urban sociology, 53, 66-70, 72, 74, 117, 118, 243

0nde2 urbanization, 65, 67-69, 78, 79, 80, 150, 253, 256 USA, see United States Veenhoven, Ruut, 7, 8, 175-186 Versailles Treaty, 51 Vidich, Arthur, 74 Vienna, 30, 32-39, 42, 45, 198, 220, 225, 246, 247 Vietnam War, 54, 66, 102, 134, 148 Vogel, Ezra, 151, 208, 251, 252, 254 voluntary childlessness, 179, 181 Waldenberg, Marek, 191 Wales, 23, 260 Walesa, Lech, 199 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 79, 137, 151, 209 Wan-sang, Han, 150 Washington, DC, 26, 45, 55, 208, 246 Weber, Max, 2, 7, 15-18, 22, 23, 25-28, 42, 50, 56, 58, 87, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110-114, 149, 153, 163, 168, 201, 210, 222, 227, 239, 255, 256 Weimar Republic, 51 Weinert, Franz, 102 welfare state, 52, 107, 108, 110, 160, 167 Westernization, 149 Westminster College, 228

273

White, Michael, 60 Whyte, William Foote, 2, 11 Wikipedia, 5, 11 Williams, Raymond, 118 Williams, Terry, 74 Willis, Paul, 133, 134 Willke, Helmut, 53 Wilson, Bryan, 19 Wilson, William Julius, 3 Wippler, Reinhard, 103 Wolff, Kurt, 223, 225, 228 World Bank, 108, 109 world society, 24, 109 world system theory, 79, 151, 161 world trade order, 109 World War I, 51, 240, 241, 246 World War II, 16, 54, 60, 75, 102, 115, 159, 175, 205, 219, 242, 253 Wright, Eric Olin, 194 Wuthnow, Robert, 119 Yale University, 209, 212, 247 Yugoslavia, 105, 106, 137, 261 Zald, Meyer, 199 Zeitlin, Maurice, 69-70, 73, 79 Zijderveld, Anton, 25 Znaniecki, Florian, 116, 117, 196