Sociologists in a Global Age

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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

15

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

115

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

11

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

13

My Sociological Practices and Commuting Identities Eiko Ikegami

203

A Journey into Sociology Horst J. Helle

219

My Efforts to Explore the Secret of Chinese Development Tiankui Jing

231

Have Sociological Passport, Will Travel Edward A. Tiryakian

239

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

5

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

Introduction

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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. 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