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不可以的英文CONFERENCE PAPER - DRAFT
Futures in the Making:
Contemporary Practices and Sociological Challenges
18k钻戒© Barbara Adam
Cardiff University
高字书法
ASA 2005, Philadelphia
Thematic Session: Sociology of the Future
Tue, Aug 16, 2:30 - 4:00, Philadelphia Mariott
Abstract
The paper explores sociological approaches to the future from early beginnings of the discipline to the prent. It us Max Weber’s methodological writings on futurity to focus the discussion on some of the central tensions and difficulties that ari when sociologists engage with the ‘not yet’. The paper thus b
egins to open up issues for consideration and debate and makes a ca for the need take the temporal extension of contemporary society to the heart of sociological inquiry, that is, to riously engage with the social future.
Acknowledgements
This rearch has been conducted during a three-year rearch project 'In Pursuit of the Future', which is funded by the UK’s Economic and Science Rearch Council (ESRC) under their Professorial Fellowship Scheme. I would like to thank Chris Groves, Rearch Associate on the futures project, for his perceptive comments on an earlier draft of this paper and Andrew Webster for his reflections as discussant at a recent workshop in York (UK) organid by the network of sociologists of expectation where I prented some of the ideas offered for discussion in this paper. Biographical Details
Barbara Adam is Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. She is founding editor of the journal Time & Society and has published extensively on the social relations of time. Her most recent book Time (2004)is published under Polity’s ‘Key Concepts’ Series.She currently holds an ESRC Professorial Fellowship (2003-7) in which she explores the social relationship to the future.
E-mail: adamtime@cardiff.ac.uk
web sites: www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/whoswho/adam/
www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/futures/
Futures in the Making:
Contemporary Practices and Sociological Challenges Introduction
Sociologists study the contemporary social world of which they are an integral part. Conventionally, this social world was conceived within cultural or national boundaries. More recently the rationale for this analytical bounding has been questioned as more and more social process began to span the globe. In the light of globalisation, the social has been opened up to encompass worldwide process and institutions. This stretched our conceptual and methodological but there is no barrier in principle to expanding the spatial and material sociological vision. The study of globalisation, cosmopolitanisation, global governance structures, or the global network society is well within the capabilities of the classical canon and the conventional tools of the sociological tradition. The socio-temporal equivalent of this spatial expansion, in contrast, has not yet found its way into the mainstre
am of sociological inquiry. A ‘Sociology of the Future’ has not yet been established despite the substantial temporal extensions of social activities at every level of social organisation.
Futures are created continuously, across the world, every con d of the day. They are produced by the breadth of social institutions: politics, law and the economy, science, medicine and technology, education and religion. They are constituted at the level of the individual, the family, social groups, companies and nations. The created futures extend temporally from the very short to the extremely long-term and spatially from the local to the regional, national, international and global. Moreover, much of today’s social world encompass not just social relations, institutions and social structures but also the natural environment. In its futurity much of this world is not material in the conventional n but marked by latency and immanence. It is a world of deeds under way that have not yet materialid as symptoms, not yet congealed into matter. It is the future of process – chemical, nuclear, biological, genetic, fiscal and political to name just a few. The are t in motion by socio-political, legal, scientific, economic and everyday performative, enacting practices. The actions and process associated with this ‘future in the making’ are ongoing, producing layers and layers upon layers of past and prent futures as well as future prents and pasts. While ever-expanding futures are created by scientific, medical, political and economic practices, the sciences c
harged to explain that social world continue to focus on society’s spatial extension. The implicit understanding prevails that the study of society is conducted in the now or the extended now. Respon sibility for the study of futures had been abdicated long ago to futurologists who, in the public perception if not their won, are primarily interested to develop increasingly sophisticated tools to forecast and model the future. This sociological neglect of the social future as subject matter has created a black hole of knowledge and concern about a core problem of the heart of the contemporary social condition. I am referring to the crucial disjuncture between the emingly unbounded capacity to produce futures that can extend over thousands of years, the lack of knowledge about potential outcomes and impacts of the creations and the socio-political inability and/or unwillingness to take responsibility for the futures of our making. This disjuncture of action, knowledge and responsibility is in urgent need of our attention. The task is clearly not an easy one.
By definition ‘futures’ have not yet emerged as (prent) phenomena and symptoms. As the ‘not yet’ futures lack reality status and are not amenable to empirical study. But does this necessarily place them outside the domain of sociological competence? Does their potentiality make the creation of socio-cultural and socio-environmental futures an exclusively political problem or is social futurity also a central subject for sociological inquiry? What might be involved in social investigations that ar
e temporally extended into the future? What would be studied by a ‘Sociology of the Future’? And, is sociology equipped conceptually and methodologically to deal with a temporal extension?
In this paper I look at the way social scientists have approached the social future and with broad brush-strokes paint a picture that takes us from early beginnings of the discipline to the prent. I am particularly interested in questions of methodology and u Max Weber’s methodological writings on futurity to focus the discussion on some of the central tensions and difficulties that ari when sociologists engage with the
‘not yet’. I thus begin to open up the issues f or consideration and debate in order to prent, what I hope is a persuasive ca for the need of a collective effort to bring sociology up to date with the temporal expansion of our contemporary world, that is, to engage with the social future.
纪念币收藏Historical Overview of Sociological Approaches to the Future
Historically, concern with the future is to be found at the very beginning of the social science enterpri and of sociology as an independent academic discipline. This early social science interest in the future was cloly tied to industrialisation and the periods of inten political turmoil between the middle of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. With the ri of scientific knowledge and t
he socio-economic capacity to apply a rational calculus to ever widening spheres of social life, the future cead to be the exclusive domain of God and increasingly became pulled into the orbit of social action and concern i. The change in knowledge brought with it a change in practice that facilitated a new dynamics of change with people increasingly able to transcend the socio-economic prent and impo their will on both the personal and collective future. The future was therefore no longer a mere continuation of the past but became increasingly a conqu ence of actions in the prent. This was nowhere more apparent than in France during the period from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Accordingly it was the key social thinkers of France that spearheaded a form of social science that would help to bring about the desired new world.肌肤的意思
In his book ‘The Prophets of Paris’ historian Frank E. Manuel (1962) describes Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Comte as thinkers and social commentators with a social mission. All, he suggests, were concerned not just to
‘unveil’ the future but also to steer it in a particular direction.
They were intoxicated with the future: they looked into what was about to be
and they found it good. The past was a mere prologue and the prent a
spiritual and moral, even a physical, burden which at times was well nigh
unendurable. They would destroy the prent as fast as possible in order to
usher in the longed-for future, to hasten the end. (Manuel 1962: 6)
With France in socio-political turmoil, the ‘prophets’ sought to contribute to the cumulative effects of innovation, to aid progress and to help facilitate a climate of
openness for novelty and change. Despite the one hundred years span of their intellectual and political activities the thinkers shared a number of key assumptions and concerns. Each one placed politics low on their list of significant agents for change and focud instead on the role of science and technology, morality, aesthetics and spirituality. They put their faith not in revolution but in the perfectibility of human beings, the power of reason, tolerance, love and brotherhood. Most importantly, they saw themlves as moral agents for change, labouring for posterity and a better future of disadvantaged groups of society. Not one of them saw a contradiction between their commitment to science as the path to truth and their normative engagement in the active production of futures they prophesid.苏州杭州
From a different thought tradition and political context Karl Marx too sought not merely to interpret but to change the world. As he insisted in his Thes XI on Feuerbach, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (McLellan ed. 1977: 158). While Marx did not rate very highly the work of his French predecessors, he nevertheless took a similar stance regarding his commitment to science on the one hand and the prophetic normative approach to the future on the other. Like the French social thinkers before him, Marx provided visions of how the world could (and should) be different from its prent alienated form and identified paths that would lead to the utopian ideal he constructed. Whether or not it was explicitly argued in tho terms, in Marx’s work, like that of the ‘Prophets of Paris’ (Manuel 1962), social theory was indissolubly tied to practice, interpretation to normative conduct, science to politics, and prophesy to product. What early French social thinkers and Karl Marx held in common, therefore, was a commitment to make the world a better place. They wanted to identify and shape their history in the making. They were concerned not just to foree and unveil the future but also to help usher it in and steer it in a particular direction. All viewed themlves as future makers and placed their faith in the power of reason and science as means to achieve their desired visions.
This explicitly activist, future oriented approach to social analysis came to an end with the normative
science of Marx and was replaced by the more objectivist social science of Durkheim and Parsons on the one hand and the interpretive emphasis in the work of Weber and the Symbolic Interactionists on the other. While the objectivist mode of sociological investigation prohibited the normative stance and thus militated against promotion of specific futures, the interpretative perspective prioritid the past and prent as sources of understanding and the creation of meaning ii. Alternatively, interpretative investigations were conducted in the de-temporalid, synchronic realm of meaning and social rules iii. Thus, with the focus on ‘function’, ‘structure’ and
‘meaning’, concern with the future went out of sociological favour until the 1960s when a renewed interest in the future began to flourish.
During the 1960 in western sociological circles there re-emerged an explicit and inten engagement with the future. In the US this turned into a rious commitment to post-Parsonian sociology that extended over a period of twenty years and more. In the UK and continen tal Europe scientists from across the full range of social sciences received funding from their respective Rearch Councils to think about the future and to establish the social sciences’ contribution to that central aspect of social existence iv. While much of the UK’s social scientists’ work on the future was primarily concerned with the production of better forecasts and methods for foresight,
that is, with improving ways of looking into the future, a number of their US counterparts sought to make the engagement with the future central to the sociological enterpri, that is, to adjust its focus and method to a social world for which the orientation to the future was at the core of social activity. In this paper I will concentrate my efforts on approaches that looked not into but at the future v.
The US social context for this re-emergence of sociological concern with the future was the Vietnam War and the technological promi of space travel, computers and nuclear power. The emergent ‘Sociology of the Fu ture’vi provided an approach to analysing social reality as well as a way of directing social process. It was focud on the study of possible futures that included values and responsibility and it entailed an action orientation that combined description, analysis, critique and a normative stance. As such, it included efforts to create a better world and required from social scientists visions, images and utopias of the ‘good life’. It explicitly accepted the constitutive nature of knowledge thus produced, and saw sociologists as part of (rather than external to) the reality they studied. Like their French predecessors, the sociologists of the future conceived of themlves as ‘future makers’. As such they took on board their responsibility as participants and creators of reality and saw the task of sociology as engagement with purpos, planning and policy, in other words, with social engineering.
Methodologically the American version of the ‘Sociology of the Future’ entailed a focus on not only what is but also on what society could or ought to be. It was concerned with social values, their achievements and their conquences. It emphasid dynamics, emergence and change. As such it left behind much of conventional scientific beliefs in objectivity, value neutrality and scientific detachment without, however, letting go of some of the principle assumptions that underpin the scientific study of reality, as well as belief in progress and trust in scientific control. Furthermore, and in agreement with George Herbert Mead’s (1980/1932) analysis of the reality status of the social future, they considered the future to be real only in the prent and thus conceived of both past and future as the ideational spheres of memory and anticipation. At the same time, however, they insisted that there was an irreducible difference between past and future, which had significant implications for social science study: ‘There are no past possibilities and there are no future facts’ (Brumbaugh 1966:649; Bell and Mau 1971: 9).
This meant that the study of the ‘not yet’ could only be approached from the standpoint of the prent. To rearch prospective and projective, that is, ideational aspects of social life required investigation of images on the one hand and the production of predictions of the possible on the other. Waskow (1969) defined the latter as the study of ‘possidiction’. For the study of images (indivi
dual and collective), visions were conceived as orientations to action in the prent and considered to be facts that could be tested against future events. ‘Possidictions’, in contrast, were en as the arch for real possibilities, that were amenable to planning, projection and activation in the prent. Values were central to this enterpri in which social scientists thought of themlves as agents for change, and engaged in future making and social engineering for betterment of the human condition. This meant sociologists of the future viewed themlves not as mere tools but judges of ends to which their knowledge will be put. They therefore reflected not only on the complexity of their future oriented subject matter but also on the impact their
propod approach would have on both the world they studied and the role of the social investigator. They recognid that attached to the capacity to create and control futures comes the burden of responsibility. As I will argue below, however, as long as the reality status of the future was denied and reality exclusively confined to the prent it was actually impossible to transform this recognition of responsibility into practice.
With renewed socio-political emphasis on evidence-bad science, this 20th century wave of interest in the projective realm has ebbed once more and for another two decades the future cead to be a legitimate topic for social theory and sociological investigation. Funding for sociological rearch rev
erted to subject matters that were considered to be grounded in ‘fact’ and deemed to be socially uful. Thus, with the next objectivist turn the future as empirically problematic realm of the ‘not yet’ once more lost its attractiveness as both object of study and potential subject for normative intervention. With the revitalid commitment to positivist social science, responsibility for the study of this social domain of the future had been abdicated to futurologists and foresight experts in business. Until recently, therefore, the discipline charged to explain our social world was once more silent on this key aspect of social life. It bracketed this part of social existence and relegated it to the shadow realm of the disattended. Sociologists who continued to pursue the social future as the subject matter of their choice found themlves drawn to futurist networks as their intellectual homes vii.南瓜丸子的做法
During the past two decades, interest in the future was once more re-kindled on a number of fronts within sociology. It became important for socio-environmental efforts towards a more sustainable mode of social existence. In addition, it became pertinent to socio-political engagements with the precautionary principle. The developments focud sociological attention on social and socio-environmental issues that were extended across time and space, often producing unpredictable, long-term outcomes (Adam 1998a, Adam et al. eds. 2000, Beck 1992 and 1999). While not explicitly
concerned with the social future, some of that work’s central concepts, such as risks, hazards, uncertainty, indeterminacy, reflexivity and unintended conquences indicate an engagement with the outer edges of the extended prent. Moreover, this work opened for sociological investigation the difficult subject of ignorance and non-knowledge as products of scientific, political and economic rationality, calculation and control (Adam 2004b and 2005a, Beck and May 2001, Böschen and Wehling 2004, Ravetz 1987, Wehling 2001, Wynne 2005). Thus, towards the end of the last century the future is once more emerging as a pertinent subject for sociological inquiry. Furthermore, some of the contemporary approaches, including my own, ek to address the future not just as the prent future but as future prents and are concerned to comment on and critique emergent future practices and socio-technical futures in the making.
On a different front, futurity was taken up in Science and Technology Studies when it was recognid that expectations of outcomes played an important role in the reception, up-take and legitimation of scientific and technological innovations. Arising from insights of this field of sociological investigation, a network of rearchers was formed under the banner of ‘Sociology of Expectation’. What they identified is both a performative element of expectation and an inparable tie between expectations, anticipatory action and agency (Brown et al. eds. 2000; Brown
