Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

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402 Chapter 22

could collaborate to develop global arrangements concerning the environ-

ment, human rights, social justice, and fair trade.

A third type of specialized assemblage can be detected in the formation

of a global network of financial centers. We can conceive of financial cen-

ters that are part of global financial markets as constituting a distinct kind

of territoriality, simultaneously pulled in by the larger networks and func-

tioning as localized micro-infrastructures for those networks. These centers

inhabit national territories, but they cannot be seen as simply national in

the historical sense of the term, nor can they be reduced to the administra-

tive unit encompassing the actual terrain (e.g., a city), one that is part of

a nation-state. In their aggregate they house significant components of the

global, partly electronic market for capital. As localities they are denational-

ized in specific and partial ways. In this sense they can be seen as constitut-

ing the elements of a novel type of multi-sited territory, one that diverges

sharply from the territoriality of the historic nation-state.

A fourth type of assemblage can be seen in the global networks of local

activists and, more generally, in the concrete infrastructure of global civil

society. Global civil society is enabled by global digital networks and the

associated imaginaries. But this does not preclude that localized actors, or-

ganizations, and causes are key building blocks of global civil society as it

is shaping up today. The localized involvements of activists are critical no

matter how universal and planetary the aims of the various struggles—in

their aggregate these localized involvements are constitutive. Global elec-

tronic networks actually push the possibility of this local-global dynamic

further. Elsewhere I have examined (Sassen 2006: ch. 7) the possibility for

even resource-poor and immobile organizations to become part of a type

of horizontal globality centered on localities. When supplied with the key

capabilities of the new technologies—decentralized access, interconnectiv-

ity, and simultaneity of transactions—localized, immobilized individuals

and organizations can be part of a global public space, one that is partly

a subjective condition, but only partly because it is rooted in the concrete

struggles of localities. In principle we can posit that those who are im-

mobile might be more likely to experience their globality through this

(abstract) space than individuals and organizations that have the resources

and the options to travel across the globe. Sometimes these globalities can

assume complex forms, as is the case with First Nation peoples demand-

ing direct representation in international forums, bypassing national state

authority—a long-standing cause that has been significantly enabled by

global electronic networking. Other times they are more elementary, as is

the case with various Forest Watch activists in rain forests around the world.

We can see here at work a particular type of interaction between placeless

digital networks and deeply localized actors/users. One common pattern

is the formation of triangular cross-border jursidictions for political action

A Public Sociology for a Global Age: Recovering the Political 403

that once would have been confined to the national. Local activists often

use global campaigns and international organizations to secure rights and

guarantees from their national states; they now have the option to incorpo-

rate a non-national or global site in their national struggles. These instances

point to the emergence of a particular type of territoriality in the context of

the imbrications of digital and nondigital conditions. This territory partly

inhabits specific subnational spaces and partly gets constituted as a variety

of somewhat specialized or partial global publics.

Although these four types of emergent assemblages are diverse, they all

share certain features. First, they are not exclusively national or global but

are assemblages of elements of each. Second, in this assembling they bring

together what are often different spatio-temporal orders, that is, different

velocities and different scopes. Third, this can produce an eventful engage-

ment with the national state, including contestations, and what we might

think of as a “frontier zone” effect—a space that makes possible kinds of

engagements for which there are no clear rules. The resolution of these

encounters can become the occasion for playing out conflicts that cannot

easily be engaged in other spaces. Fourth, novel types of actors can emerge

in the processes through which these assemblages are constituted. These

novel actors will tend to be able to access cross-border domains once ex-

clusive to older established actors, notably national states. These emergent

assemblages begin to unbundle the traditional territoriality of the national,

though they do so in partial and often highly specialized ways.

CONCLUSION

The encounter of a global actor such as a firm or a market with one or an-

other instantiation of the national can be thought of as a new frontier zone

where two very different types of actors intersect and can constitute a novel

condition. That encounter does not merely mark a dividing line between

the national and the global. It is a zone of politico-economic interactions

that produce new institutional forms and alter some of the old ones. Nor

is it just a process that reduces the role of government generally; it may re-

quire more government but on different terms, which is what I find in the

case of the executive branch of government. On the other side, global firms

pursue their global economic projects partly in national territories; even

global financial firms need to execute operations in a growing number of

financial centers worldwide. In these intersections we see the formation of

new economic, political, subjective dynamics and opportunities for global

action among those still largely confined to the national.

One possibility arising out of these formations is that nation-based ac-

tors, notably states and citizens, are far better positioned to participate in

404 Chapter 22

governing and also shaping global institutions and processes, and to engage

in global politics, than is commonly assumed. We can see the constituting

of a larger terrain for global action by national states, including the pursuit

of social justice in its many different institutional settings and contesting

the power of major economic global corporate actors. Either through their

states or directly, citizens can engage in global politics even when confined

to national instrumentalities.

Much of the writing on globalization has failed to recognize these types

of issues and has privileged outcomes that are self-evidently global. Global

formations are part of the transformation; they matter and they are con-

sequential. Yet even global regimes often only become operative, or per-

formative, when they enter the national domain. This entry is predicated

on—and in turn further strengthens—particular forms of denationaliza-

tion. This interaction between national and denationalizing processes is

not an innocent event; it has multiple and variable outcomes. There is a sort

of invisible history of the many moments and ways in which denational-

izing tendencies failed to materialize and succumbed to the powerful (both

good and bad) currents of the national, still alive and well. In other cases

denationalizing processes feed nationalizing dynamics in separate though

at times connected domains—for example, the denationalizing of certain

components of our economy and the renationalizing in some components

of our immigration policy. In brief, there is much more going on than

meets the global eye—or than highly recognizable global scalings allow us

to understand. The current transformation is a complex architecture with

many distinct working elements, only some of which can easily be coded

as globalization.

Both self-evidently global and denationalizing dynamics destabilize exist-

ing meanings and systems. This raises questions about the future of crucial

frameworks through which modern societies, economies, and polities (un-

der the rule of law) have operated: the social contract of liberal states, social

democracy as we have come to understand it, modern citizenship, and the

mechanisms that render certain claims legitimate and others illegitimate

in liberal democracies. The future of these and other familiar frameworks

is rendered dubious by the unbundling of the basic organizational and

normative architectures through which we have operated, particularly over

the last century. These architectures have held together complex interde-

pendencies between rights and obligations, power and the law, wealth and

poverty, allegiance and exit. I emphasize both negative and positive poten-

tials associated with this destabilizing of existing arrangements.

These are charged processes, even though they are partial and often highly

specialized and obscure. They denationalize what had been constructed as

national but do not necessarily make this evident. The institutional and

subjective micro-transformations denationalization produces frequently

A Public Sociology for a Global Age: Recovering the Political 405

continue to be experienced as national when they in fact entail a significant

historical shift. Such transformations often need to be decoded in order to

become evident. These instantiations of the global, partly or wholly struc-

tured inside the national, do not need to run through the supranational

system or international treaties. Nor do they need to run through the

new types of global domains that have emerged since the 1980s, such as

electronic financial markets or global civil society. These transformations

include particular and specific components of a broad range of entities,

such as the work of national legislatures and judiciaries, the worldwide

operations of national firms and markets, political projects of non-state

actors, translocal processes that connect poor households across borders,

diasporic networks, and changes in the relationship between citizens and

the state. They reorient particular components of institutions and specific

practices—both public and private—toward global logics and away from

historically shaped national logics (including in the latter traditional in-

ternational operations, which are to be differentiated from current global

ones). Understanding the epochal transformation we call globalization

must include studying these processes of denationalization.

The importance of public sociology is its potential to redraw the analysis

of the current transformation, making visible what is now obscured and

bringing in actors who are now excluded from the analysis. Critical here is

recovering the fact that powerlessness need not be elementary, that it can

be complex. Through this complexity I see the possibility of a politics. In

this process, public sociology can enable those who are now seen as power-

less and who see themselves as powerless confronted with powerful global

firms. And it can aid in discerning the different logics guiding diverse parts

of the national state. The value of this remapping stems from the need to

identify and shape the grounds from which a sharply different positioning

of diverse actors can be achieved, so that some of the powerless are now

shown to have the capacity of making the political. What a public sociology

cannot do is become the actual launching pad for action; this is up to the

actors, including, of course, public sociologists in their role as activists. But

public sociology is here more than simply the making of any alternative

narrative. It is an alternative narrative that can enable and mobilize those

who have come to think of themselves as powerless.

NOTES

1. These theses range from the multiplicity of public sociologies to the notion of

provincializing American sociology, the latter a project I find extremely important

and one that resonates with the effort among several historians to provincialize

Europe’s role in the narrating of history (Chakrabarty 2000; Duara 1997). For a full

406 Chapter 22

listing and development of these theses and responses by several sociologists, see

Burawoy 2005.

2. A focus on such subnationally based processes and dynamics of globalization

requires methodologies and theorizations that engage not only global scalings but

also subnational scalings as components of global processes, thereby destabiliz-

ing older hierarchies of scale and conceptions of nested scalings. Studying global

processes and conditions that get constituted subnationally 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 subnational 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 glo-

balization (I develop this in Sassen 2007).

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409

Pitirim Sorokin was a sociological pioneer in many important fields, from

the sociology of revolutions, to comparative theories, the dynamics of

large-scale change, and the sociology of time.

For the most part, and un-

usual for the discipline, his works have not lost their actuality for getting a

perspective on our contemporary world.

I take as an example that very much has global relevance today his study

originally published in Russian in 1922, and available in English only since

1975: Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs.

Sorokin (and his wife) had

observed and experienced firsthand the terrible famine that swept Russia

in the immediate post-war years following the Soviet revolution. He had

gone far beyond observation to a meticulous study of historical records in

peacetime and wartime to investigate comparatively the effects of hunger

and famine in social relationships. The finished work is every bit as much

of a reference at the close of this century’s first decade as it was nearly 80

years ago, with perhaps an even larger sphere of relevance.

The sharp rise of energy and other commodity prices, the increase of

population in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, intensive ethnic conflicts,

and growing social inequalities in other “emerging markets” have together

made problematic much progress in human development in its basic as-

pects of subsistence, such as a minimum income for food and shelter, and

even personal safety. Even the scourge of famine, which a generation ago

seemed anachronistic in a new era of “the green revolution,” “genetically

modified foods,” and the benefits of globalization, has returned with a

vengeance, for example in this decade in conflict-torn and drought-ravaged

Africa.

409

Global Altruism:

Some Considerations

Edward A. Tiryakian

410 Chapter 23

At the beginning of the new century (indeed, a new millennium), the

United Nations sponsored a Millennium Summit of world leaders, from

which was formulated a project to be realized by 2015 of improving

world conditions in meeting eight major goals, collectively known as the

Millennium Development Goals. I will indicate how this ties in with the

general theme of this chapter, but let us note at present that the first goal

is to “eradicate extreme hunger and poverty.” The criterion was initially

set as the population living below $1 a day, but some improvement

(notably in China) has “raised” the threshold level to $2 a day. Still, the

United Nations Human Development Report for 2007/2008 indicates that

no less than 73 countries had 10 percent or more of its population liv-

ing below $2 a day, with nearly half (35) of these countries having more

than half of the population with an income below this paltry amount.

The most extreme instances of poverty—India, Bangladesh, Madagascar,

Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Zambia, Niger, Burundi, Central African Republic,

Rwanda, Gambia—have no less than four-fifths of their population eking

out their existence with this abysmal figure. The laconic summary state-

ment in the 2008 Annual Report of the United Nations Development

Programme: “Some 1.2 billion people around the world live on less than

a dollar a day,”

hardly conveys the everyday world—and its man-made

and nature-made hazards—of those living in extreme poverty.

It is a gen-

eral powerlessness in the face of the physical and human environment which is

the condition of about two-fifths of the world’s 6.7 billion inhabitants. Sadly,

it is unlikely for those in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and many in

the West Indies and Latin America and other countries as well, that by

themselves they can harness resources and the social and political will to

emulate the example of East Asia. Free trade agreements and IMF regula-

tions provide strictures which increase, rather than decrease, economic

inequalities.

Unless globalization opens up a new cornucopia and/or unless sig-

nificant structural and motivational transformations can be put in place,

it looks increasingly dubious that the Millennial Project Goals will be met

in whole or in part in recipient countries by the target date of 2015. The

stark reality that “850 million go hungry every night” is, unfortunately, a

reminder of the relevance of Sorokin’s study of “hunger as a factor in hu-

man affairs.” His 1922 study took Sorokin to look at other calamities of the

human condition, and 20 years later he published a more general work in

this vein.

It would be a mistake, however, to view Sorokin as only a seer of the dark

and debasing aspects of social life. In the last phase of his creative career,

he produced pioneering studies of the warmer currents of social life, those

nourished by altruism. This will be the springboard for our following in his

wake to take up a consideration of global altruism.

410 Chapter 23

Global Altruism 411

SOROKIN AND ALTRUISM

Sorokin can well qualify as a “critical sociologist” (of the dominant

“pseudo-scientific” methodology of the social sciences) and even as a “pub-

lic sociologist” (as conceptualized by Michael Burawoy

) in espousing pro-

gressive causes and his adamant denunciations of state policy promoting

wars, including the war in Vietnam. That is not particularly distinctive since

sociology has a well-established tradition of dissent that includes Thorstein

Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and C. Wright Mills. Sorokin, however, went

beyond negativism to search for the reconstruction of society and social re-

lationships in non-violent ways (he greatly admired Gandhi, who showed

the way to non-violent resistance), essentially for a cognitive reorientation

toward the “other,” what he termed “amitology”—a perspective marked by

goodwill, cooperation, and love.

Altruism as a variable of personality and

interpersonal behavior is critical to this recasting or transformation of the

social, at the micro as well as at the macro level.

Accordingly, empirical research (comparative and historical) on altruism

became for Sorokin—retrieving the legacy of Comte (Post et al. 2002:9)—

an important and at the time, untrodden, field of sociological inquiry. With

the patronage of benefactor Eli Lilly, Sorokin—who had launched Harvard’s

Department of Sociology at the start of the 1930s—set up 20 years later the

Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity, which in

four years spawned four scholarly volumes.

Sorokin’s endeavor in this last career phase was to provide a cognitive and

behavioral reframing to the marked negativism of late modernity (which he

termed “the declining sensate phase of Western culture”). Both in the me-

dia and popular culture the negativism shows itself in “hair-raising murder

stories, sex scandals or perversions” which constitute well over 50 percent

of the topics of contemporary Western culture—thus starts Sorokin in 1950

in Altruistic Love. In that same opening, Sorokin raises the cry, “Our sensate

culture . . . dwells mainly in the region of subsocial sewers, breathes mainly

their foul air; and drags down into their turbid muck everything heroic,

positive, true, good, and beautiful” (Altruistic Love, p. 3).

Polar to this dominating orientation is the lives of saints and “good

neighbors,” and the studies of Sorokin’s center focused on the latter as a

dramatic alternative to the negativism in all its forms. Since Sorokin’s death

in 1968, there has been no let-up in the general cultural negativism and

prurience of popular culture and the mass media. Yet the main corpus of

sociology, then and now, does not seem to have responded with enlarging

its sphere of attention, not only to the negativism undermining the civility

of civil society, but also to the positive alternative field of altruism.

And yet, research on “altruism” outside of sociology has come under

increasing attention at the micro and at the macro level. Undoubtedly an