Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
432 Chapter 24
Whether or not it was explicitly argued in those terms, in Karl Marx’s work,
like that of the Prophets of Paris detailed by Frank E. Manuel (1962), social
theory was indissolubly tied to practice, interpretation to normative conduct,
science to politics, and prophecy to product. What early French social thin-
kers and Karl Marx held in common, therefore, was a commitment to make
the world a better place. They were the original public sociologists who wan-
ted to identify and shape their history in the making. All viewed themselves
as future makers, placing their faith in the power of reason and in science as
means to achieve their desired visions.
This explicitly activist, future oriented approach to social analysis came
to an end with the normative science of Karl Marx and was replaced by the
more objectivist social science of Emile Durkheim and his followers on
the one hand and the interpretive emphasis in the work of Max Weber and
the Symbolic Interactionists on the other. The sociological approach to the
future is deeply implicated in this fundamental change which permeated
both these otherwise opposing conceptual and methodological traditions.
While the objectivist mode of sociological investigation prohibited the
normative stance and thus militated against promotion of specific futures,
the interpretative perspective prioritized the past and present as sources
of understanding and the creation of meaning. Alternatively, interpreta-
tive investigations were conducted in a de-temporalized, synchronic realm
of meaning and social rules. A notable example of this would be Peter
Winch’s (1958) influential The Idea of a Social Science. Thus, with the focus
on “function,” “structure,” and “meaning,” concern with shaping the future
went out of sociological favor and professional standards, which bracketed
the future, were instituted and maintained. As Michael Burawoy (2005:5)
notes, “if our predecessors set out to change the world we have too often
ended up conserving it.”
It was not until the 1960s that a renewed interest in the future began to
flourish. In Western sociological circles there re-emerged an explicit and in-
tense engagement with the future, appropriate to the pervasive post–World
War II feeling of optimism, sense of progress, and trust in technological
promise. In the United States this turned into a serious commitment to
post-Parsonian sociology that extended over a period of twenty years and
more. In the UK and continental Europe scientists from across the full range
of social sciences received funding from their respective research councils to
think about the future and to establish the social sciences’ contribution to
this central aspect of social existence. Examples of this work would be Dan-
iel Bell (1974), Arthur C. Clarke (1964), Rene Dumont (1974), Christopher
Freeman and Marie Jahoda, eds. (1978) and Michael Young, ed. (1968) for
the UK, and the edited volume by Robert Jungk and Johan Galtung (1969)
for northern European approaches. While much of the UK’s social scien-
tists’ work on the future was primarily concerned with the production of
Futures in the Making 433
better forecasts and methods for foresight, that is, with improving ways of
looking into the future, a number of their U.S. counterparts sought to make
the engagement with the future central to the sociological enterprise, that is,
to adjust its focus and method to a social world for which the orientation to
the future was at the core of social activity. In this chapter I will concentrate
my efforts primarily on approaches that looked not into but at the future.
2
The U.S. social context for this re-emergence of sociological concern with
the future was the Vietnam War and the technological promise of space
travel, computers, and nuclear power. The emergent “Sociology of the Fu-
ture,” associated prominently with an edited book of that title by Wendell
Bell and James A. Mau (1971b), as well as the work of Wilbert E. Moore
(1966) and Alvin Toffler (1970), provided a fresh sociologically integrated
approach to analyzing social reality and directing social processes. It was
focused on the study of probable, possible, and preferable futures of which
the latter included values and responsibility. It entailed an action orienta-
tion that combined description, analysis, critique, and a normative stance.
As such, it involved efforts to create a better world and required from social
scientists visions, images, and utopias of the “good life.” It explicitly accepted
the constitutive nature of knowledge thus produced, and saw sociologists as
part of (rather than external to) the reality they studied. Crucially, propo-
nents of the sociology of the future recognized that the capacity to create and
control futures comes attached with the burden of responsibility. Like their
French predecessors, they conceived of themselves as “future makers” and
saw the task of sociology as engagement with purposes, planning and policy,
in other words, with social engineering. Since, however, this approach was
inaugurated as a response to the sterile and inappropriate past and present
orientation of the professionalized discipline these sociologists of the future
could no longer take the naïve unified position of the founders of social sci-
ence. Instead, they had to defend their position and theorize their stance.
Thus, in agreement with George Herbert Mead’s (1980[1932]) analysis
of the reality status of the social future, Wendell Bell and James A. Mau
(1971a:9) considered the future to be real only in the present and thus
conceived of both past and future as the ideational spheres of memory
and anticipation. This meant that the study of the “not yet” could only be
approached from the standpoint of the present. To research the prospec-
tive and projective realm (both designated ideational aspects of social life)
required investigations of images on the one hand and the production of
predictions of the possible on the other. For the study of images (individual
and collective), visions were conceived as orientations to action in the
present and considered to be facts that could be tested against future events.
Investigations of predictions of the possible, in contrast, were seen as the
search for real possibilities that were amenable to planning, projection, and
activation in the present.
434 Chapter 24
Regrettably, the sociologists of the future did not achieve a level of ac-
ceptance that would allow their approach to alter the dominant position.
With renewed socio-political emphasis on evidence-based science, this
mid-twentieth-century wave of sociological interest in the projective realm
of our subject matter could not be maintained, and for another two decades
the future ceased to be a legitimate topic for sociology across all its forms
and expressions. Funding for sociological research reverted to topics and
investigations that were considered to be grounded in “fact” and deemed
to be socially useful in and for the present. Thus, with this next objectiv-
ist wave, the future as empirically problematic realm of the “not yet” once
more lost its attractiveness to sociology as both object of study and poten-
tial subject for normative intervention. With the revitalized commitment to
positivist social science, responsibility for the study of this social domain
had been abdicated to futurologists and foresight experts in business. Until
recently, therefore, the discipline charged to explain our social world had
fallen silent once more on this key aspect of social life. It bracketed this part
of social existence and relegated it to the shadow realm of the disattended.
Across the world, sociologists who have continued to pursue the social fu-
ture as the subject matter of their choice, such as Eleonora Masini (Italy),
Wendell Bell (United States), and Richard Slaughter (Australia), thus found
themselves drawn to futurist networks as their intellectual homes and out-
lets for their publications.
We can discern here a scissor movement analogous to the one Michael
Burawoy (2005:6) identifies in his first thesis. We find that the more futures
are made over ever longer periods the harder it becomes for sociologists
to engage with this subject matter. That is to say, professional sociologists
find it ever more difficult to investigate these processes, policy sociologists
to identify paths to desired ends, and public sociologists to offer critical
interventions and open the subject for public debate. This leaves critical
sociologists with the urgent task to scrutinize our disciplinary assumptions,
approaches, and knowledge practices for their appropriateness to the con-
temporary context in which futures are produced for millennia hence.
CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH ASSUMPTIONS
Critical sociological attention to futurity at the level of theory shows that
some of our discipline’s most basic distinctions act as barriers to serious
engagement with our subject matter’s social relations of the future and
demonstrates that our key assumptions shape and frame our world in a
particular way. Thus, for example, it became obvious that the ways we un-
derstand facts, materiality, and the ideational realm are deeply implicated
Futures in the Making 435
in the difficulty. It is thus the task of critical theorists to identify the prob-
lems, make barriers visible, and explore alternatives.
Michel Serres (1999[1982]), for example, shows that “facts” are tied
to specific ways of knowing, that is, to object thinking and an emphasis
on the spatial and material. Object thinking brackets and thus conceals
the temporal and invisible, the immaterial and unbounded in the subject
matter. It negates processuality, temporal becoming, futurity, and creativ-
ity, which are key characteristics of both life and social activity, allowing
“observers” to see only time slices, know facts as freeze-frames, and experi-
ence moments frozen in time. Social facts can be facts only after they have
been de-temporalized, that is, abstracted from the ongoing temporality
of being-becoming and detached from their inherent temporal extension.
Clearly, social facts are not bounded in and of themselves: we make them
so in order to render accessible and manageable the infinite, transient, con-
tingent, and future-oriented complexity of social life. To this end we infuse
the temporal complexity with simplicity and clarity. This a-temporal stance
on temporally extended social “facts,” therefore, facilitates not only count-
ing, measurement, and classification but also the illusion of control on the
one hand and of “objectivity” and “ethical neutrality” on the other. It is
therefore important to remain cognizant of the fundamental temporality
and futurity of any de-temporalized facts under investigation.
Furthermore, in our principle classifications the world of ideas is sepa-
rated from the sphere of facts, the realm of mind from that of matter.
Enacted ideas, however, have socio-physical consequences, whence they
become facts. Some enacted ideas may take on material form quite quickly,
while others, such as effects from smoking, hormone-disrupting chemicals,
or low-level radiation may not materialize as symptoms for a very long time.
Where impacts penetrate matter and are stretched across space and time
these socio-environmental “futures in the making” need to be recognized as
both material reality and latent process-world of an encoded, invisible kind
beyond the reach of our senses. By associating the future and futurity with
the ideational sphere, that is, the mind world of desire and design, projec-
tion and planning, sociology relegates this central domain of social life to
the realm of the immaterial and thus renders it unreal. With this move,
any potential, latent, immanent, and thus invisible impact is considered
immaterial because it is no longer recognized as an empirical “fact,” thus of
“no material consequence” until it materializes as symptom. To restrict hu-
man futurity and the creation of future presents to the ideational domain
of human purpose, therefore, means that we lose sight of the other side
of cultural futures: that we create process futures and thus produce future
presents that are de facto the domain of sociological inquiry, irrespective of
and despite the empirical and theoretical difficulties involved.
436 Chapter 24
To re-center the temporal and to make futurity explicit through critical
analysis, therefore, is to emphasize not merely the present domain of expec-
tation and the empirically accessible realm of social products but, equally,
to stress the importance of an immanent process reality beyond empirical
access. Against the assertion of sociologists of the future that argue that
“there are no future facts” (Brumbaugh 1966:649; Bell and Mau 1971a:9;
Jouvenel 1967) we need to consider that there is a future present in progress
whose process reality is material despite not being accessible by conven-
tional empirical means. Sociological engagement with such future presents
requires a new sense of “facticity,” one that undermines conventional dual-
isms of facts and ideas.
3
It necessitates finding ways that can encompass this
cultural future not just as the realm of predictable knowledge based on past
experience (ours and that of science) or as known or reported goals and
values but, equally, as created process futures in the making: expected and
unexpected, intended and unintended, material and latent, unknown and
unknowable. Dualistic categories of mind and matter, ideas and facts are
clearly inappropriate to that task. Only when the temporal silences begin
to get expressed and the invisible is given form, will the reality expressed
through our sociological theories begin to resonate with the immanent
process-world beyond empirical accessibility. Only then will veracity and
“the real” cease to be associated exclusively with the visual and material.
Only then will facts and values take on a temporal hue.
Clearly, taking these issues seriously is not easy for any of the forms of
sociological inquiry. It demands first identification and then implementa-
tion of changes at the very foundational center of professional sociology.
Importantly, it requires critique to be both sociological and social. For
public sociologists it means absorbing the critique, taking on board the
foundational changes, understanding how engagement with future-making
changes the scientific method, grasping the implications of this for the full
range of social institutions, identifying openings for socio-political change
and helping to translate these implications into potential action across the
domains of social practice. More than ever before, therefore, public sociol-
ogy needs to build bridges between academia and public life and provide
a common frame of reference for sociological and public approaches to
future making. Taking on this task public sociologists will find themselves
on fertile ground.
In the late twentieth century public interest in the future has been ris-
ing on a number of fronts. It became important for socio-environmental
work on sustainability and pertinent for understanding and guiding socio-
political engagements with environmental problems such as ozone deple-
tion, global warming, and climate change. These developments in turn
focused sociological attention on socio-technical innovations whose often
unpredictable effects penetrated matter and extended across vast spatial
Futures in the Making 437
and temporal distances, as shown in the work of Ulrich Beck (1992, 1999),
Brian Wynne (2005) and my (1998a) Timescapes of Modernity. Moreover,
they opened for sociological investigation the difficult subject of igno-
rance and/or non-knowledge as products of scientific control, political
rationality, and economic calculation (Adam and Groves 2007; Beck and
May 2001; Böschen and Wehling 2004; Ravetz 1987; and Wynne 2005).
This focus on uncertainty and non-knowledge brought into sharp relief
the problematic nature not just of sociology’s but also of contemporary
society’s key assumptions and thus required critical engagement with taken-
for-granted presuppositions and categories in both the professional and
public domain. In my own work, which straddles critical and public sociol-
ogy, I have mapped both these temporal domains with respect to action,
knowledge, and ethics and identified deeply embedded and institutional-
ized structures of irresponsibility (Adam 1998a; Adam and Groves 2007).
This work consciously addresses multiple publics. It speaks to sociologists
as both professionals and citizens and to citizens in both their public and
private roles. As such it seeks to keep together what our professional divi-
sion of labor allowed to drift apart and to recover the moral and political
ethos that all too easily gets displaced in the quest for scientific recognition
and academic credentials.
PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY, FUTURE MAKING,
AND RESPONSIBILITY
As public sociologists we are charged to explain social processes and interde-
pendencies, show historical differences and continuities, point to problems
and inequalities, and, where possible, identify openings for social change.
When we investigate contemporary actions whose effects permeate matter
and stretch across time and space, the first thing to note is that both legally
and morally we feel exonerated from responsibility when outcomes could
not be foreseen at the time of action. The nuclear industry can serve as an
example to illustrate this point. The people who counseled governments on
whether or not to establish a nuclear capability, and who happened not to
include in their considerations associated problems of safety, were and still
are not being held legally responsible for either the resulting health hazards
or the economic burden of the billions of dollars required for the decom-
missioning of power plants and the management of radioactive waste. We
find, moreover, that installations are covered by limited liability only, which
means that society is expected to foot any bill that might arise with accidents
or leakages. This explicit recognition of the (non)knowledge-responsibility
link is even enshrined in law. In the United States, for example, the Price-
Anderson Act was introduced in 1957 specifically to limit the liability of
438 Chapter 24
nuclear power plant operators in the event of an accident (Shrader-Frechette
1993).
It has been renewed several times since, and now limits the amount
of liability for each site to $300 million.
Whether formally or informally, non-knowledge as well as unintended
and unforeseen consequences absolve us from personal and public re-
sponsibility. Yet, for some socio-technological unforeseen effects the tide
is turning. Thalidomide, asbestosis, smoking-related diseases, and similar
technologically produced hazards are cases in point where companies are
being held responsible for the unforeseen harm produced by their prod-
ucts. Thus far, however, such apportioning of responsibility for effects that
are stretched across time, space, and matter applies predominantly to cases
where causal chains can be established over the lifetimes of individuals. As
yet, it has not been clarified, either legally or politically, what happens to
responsibility in contemporary situations where effects do not or may not
materialize as symptoms for hundreds and even thousand of years.
Clarification on such matters is difficult to achieve because our implicit
moral codes are no longer appropriate to their contemporary context. In his
seminal The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas (1984[1976]) suggests
that our contemporary models of morality have their roots in Greek antiq-
uity where responsibility was thought to apply between living individuals
in the present and was guided by eternal principles related to goodness
and beauty, truth and justice. This meant that moral action and matters
of ethics were defined by close proximity, thus limited in time and space.
The long-term future in contrast was associated with fate, providence, and
destiny. It was the realm of gods and thus not subject to human planning,
debate, and moral action. As such it was outside the sphere of human
responsibility. Today, however, we find ourselves in a new moral context
of obligation toward a technologically produced, long-term future. This
contemporary condition is tied first to the socio-scientific capacity to create
futures that outlast their originators, second to the potential to threaten
not just individual existences but the continuity of our species and life as
we know it, and third to the pursuit of progress which destabilizes eternal
values and renders them historical. This means that today the foundations
for responsibility have shifted from an exclusively individual to a collec-
tive base, from a predominantly local to a global scale of effects and from
primarily present impacts to actions that may not materialize as symptoms
for a very long time. The commonsense ethical assumptions, which we
have inherited from the Greeks, therefore, are no longer appropriate for the
contemporary condition.
First, while the future has always been uncertain, humans were not called
upon to take responsibility for what was considered the realm of gods
or God. They were merely required to act responsibly in and toward the
realm that did not belong to them. In a secular social world, which is un-
Futures in the Making 439
derstood to be (to a large extent at least) the outcome of human action, in
contrast, the unknown and unknowable futures of our making do become
our responsibility. That is to say, uncertainty of potential outcomes cannot
absolve producers of long-term, open-ended impacts from responsibility
to those affected in remote times and places. The difficulty is that innova-
tion increases the indeterminacy of unbounded effects. This in turn makes
exclusive reliance on scientific prediction and economic risk calculation
inappropriate since both are established on known pasts. Where past-based
prediction and calculation fail we are confronted instead with questions
about justice, rights, and possible harm to future beings that require our
urgent attention.
Second, the effects of today’s socio-technical, socio-economic, and politi-
cal processes, such as nuclear technology, for example, are no longer spa-
tially or temporally bounded. Radiation (although most dangerous in the
immediate vicinity of any leakage or accident) permeates outward in space,
spreads inward in matter, organisms, and bodies, and extends temporally
into the long-term future. Moral principles grounded in the immediacy of
the here and now, therefore, need to be adjusted to both the footprint and
the timeprint
4
of potential outcomes (Adam and Groves 2007). Such expan-
sion of responsibility to the potential reach of actions places us in a differ-
ent position with respect to what can and can’t be known, done, and con-
trolled. This means that responsibility can no longer be exclusively routed
via knowledge. In contexts of extensive uncertainty therefore, a direct link
has to be established between action and ethics, ethics and action.
Third, through the ages responsibility had been associated with indi-
viduals and their deeds. While this still holds good today, especially in the
application of our laws, technological innovations such as nuclear power,
for example, have the potential to affect the living conditions of all people
now and in the future. In recognition of the trans-boundary nature of this
innovative technology (and others that share these features), the ethical
project of modernity has to be expanded beyond individual responsibility
to encompass collectives at the national and international level. Moreover,
since liability for associated costs continues to be increasingly externalized
to society at large, it is society who needs to come to decisions about the nu-
clear present and future. Not politicians whose mandate expires after their
period of office, not scientists who build and maintain the installations,
not insurance companies who cover limited liability but society carries the
responsibility and thus will have to debate trans-boundary policies with the
potential to effect others in space and time—somewhere, some time.
Finally, the transformative power of humans has always been extensive.
In the industrial age, however, this capacity has reached undreamed of
heights and fundamentally changed our relationship to nature. Today,
nature is no longer the mere backdrop to human action but is subject to
440 Chapter 24
scientific intervention and invention. As such, nature in all its facets has
become ethically significant. In light of the mismatch between ethical as-
sumptions and the reach of socio-technical effects we are charged to rethink
our traditional anthropocentric responses and produce principles more ap-
propriate for our ecological footprint and timeprint. This requires opening
up ethical concern beyond the interests of humanity to encompass, as our
responsibility, the material, spatial, and temporal sphere of impact, which
extends beyond the human social to all of nature and the physical bases of
our existence.
Thus, we can see that although moral issues have long ceased to be a
central domain for sociological inquiry and comment they take on renewed
significance in socio-environmental contexts, where our action potential
extends into an open future. To take a position on the ethics of contempo-
rary technological and socio-political action, however, is a political act that
perforates and blurs boundaries between professional and citizen. It allows
the original ethos of sociology to rise to the surface and (re)invigorate the
profession as a “moral and political force,” to quote Michael Burawoy
(2005:6). Once we take that step toward public engagement, we quickly
discover that here too the future is an extremely difficult territory. It is trou-
bling at the level of both assumptions and institutions.
We find, for example, that the system of liberal democratic politics has
developed primarily a politics of space and matter. Its sphere of responsi-
bility extends to a nation’s territory, its resources, and its wealth distribu-
tion. It is in charge of things that can be measured and counted: territories,
people, institutions, traffic, crime, budgets, and Gross National Products.
With political debates on climate change, the management of nuclear
power and its waste products, the regulation of chemicals, strategies about
genetic engineering, and approaches to nano-technology, however, politics
has entered the future worlds of tens, hundreds, and even thousands of
generations hence. This means that decisions made and policies established
by today’s liberal democracies operate outside the spatial and material
framework for which they had largely been established. That is to say, when
risks and hazards, created within the jurisdictional time-space of a particu-
lar liberal democracy, transcend the boundaries of its legitimate authority,
their impacts and costs are in effect externalized: to other nations and/or to
successor generations. The problems are shunted along, moved outside the
sphere of responsibility.
From a spatial and materialist perspective, hazards externalized across
time are no longer recognized in principle as the concern of the offend-
ing nation’s representative government in office. The long-term policies
routinely pursued by contemporary liberal democracies, therefore, trans-
gress the temporal boundaries of their political mandates and realms of
jurisdiction. Moreover, since elected representatives are responsible to their
Futures in the Making 441
electorate only, and since it is this electorate that bestows legitimacy on
a government, the rights of people distant in time who cannot enact that
power relation are discounted. To put it differently, the politics of space
and matter operate with impunity in the temporal domain of the future in
which all of us are trespassers. Incredibly, we have no political structures
in place that address this problem. We have no guardians of the long-term
future, no political body with the task to represent the unborn, no legal
system geared to the long-term effects of future making. This, however, is a
problem not of science, not of economics, not even of law and politics. It
is a problem for contemporary society which needs to be addressed by con-
temporary society. It is to be handled through discussion about what is right
and what is just. As public sociologists we need to facilitate and as citizens
we need to hold those debates in the full knowledge that our decisions and
actions with their effects make us trespassers in the future of others, that we
are inescapably illegal immigrants in their worlds and that they have not
given their consent.
As members of liberal democracies we need to acknowledge that our
collusion with the policies produced by political representatives makes
us responsible for the techno-futures set in motion: yesterday, today, and
tomorrow. We are charged therefore as citizens, professionals, and private
individuals not just to understand the contemporary bracketing of futurity
but also to seek openings for conceptual and institutional change. We can
achieve such a shift in concern and approach only if we reconnect the social
spheres of action, knowledge, and ethics. Moreover, given that certainty of
knowledge is not available for the contemporary process-world of futures
in the making, we need to approach the ethical domain not as the last
dependent element of this relation but as the first one. In other words,
where knowledge is patchy or not available, we need to establish a direct
connection between action and ethics and stop making responsibility for
effects of our deeds dependent on knowledge of the outcomes of such ac-
tions. Knowledge needs to be utilized instead as helpful but subordinate
(re)source to responsible action. To take our responsibility seriously, there-
fore, requires change at the deep structural level of implicit assumptions,
scientific method, politics, law, and organizational structure. As such the
future is our most challenging domain of social inquiry and practice.
The task for public sociology is therefore complex and encompasses
many strands. It entails critical engagement with social practice, identify-
ing problematic assumptions, inappropriate knowledge, and/or the lack
of relevant institutions. It necessitates comment on issues of justice, ethics,
and responsibility. And it requires constructive input such as exploring and
identifying openings for change and help with mapping out possible op-
tions for alternative practices. In each of these strands of engagement public
sociologists are future makers. With the division of labor it is possible for