REVIEW ESSAY
published
in: Global Networks 1 (4) Oct 2001,
pp.389-398.
Migration,
mobility and globaloney: metaphors and rhetoric in the sociology of
globalisation
Adrian
Favell
Dept
of Sociology
John
Urry. 2000.
Sociology Beyond
Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century.
Nikos
Papastergiadis. 2000. The Turbulence of
Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity.
Stephen
Castles and Alastair Davidson. 2000. Citizenship and
Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging.
Just
as the academic publishing world has gone crazy about globalisation in recent
years, so has the subject of international migration risen fast on everyone’s radar. These two fashionable topics are of course intimately
interlinked. International migration - with its well rehearsed themes of growth
in flows and visibility, of their unprecedented diversity and heterogeneity,
and of the dramatic social change brought to western societies and hitherto
stable nation-states - is a central motif and illustration for theorists of
globalisation. This is so, even among those theorists unlikely to have ever
heard of Ravenstein’s laws, or to have ever picked up a copy of the OECD-SOPEMI
report. That our present-day ‘age of migration’ so easily becomes a vaguely
defined rhetorical theme, should point us towards the real issue at stake in
this explosion of interest. The crucial question here about theorists of
globalisation - as with all the various themes they use to illustrate its
contemporary reality - is whether these authors find a way to generate and
present empirical evidence about the novelty, scope and intensity relative to
other periods and places of these urgently ‘new’ phenomena. Only then can it be
assessed to what extent it is necesary to buy into what always seems to follow
in their work: grandiose rhetoric preaching the end of tried and tested
conceptual frameworks or methods of social enquiry; and hurried exhortations to
shelve the disciplinary canons of sociology, human geography or political
science, in favour of a radical post-disciplinary form of theorizing.
Put
this way, it is clear that a great deal of prominent
globalisation writings are top heavy in theory, unable to really
operationalise the vast empirical challenges to which such speculation leads. A
more sceptical attitude, rather, should be taken in face of the academic
obsession with highlighting all that is ‘new’ and epoch-making in this everyday
world of ours. The incentive structures of academic publishing generate an
intense pressure for fads and soundbites no less that in any other media
industry. What might thus be dubbed ‘fast theory’ has long dominated
post-Giddensian social theory, in
Social theories in motion
One
such theorist is John Urry, whose latest work Sociology Beyond Societies offers a
spectacularly ambitious, manifesto-like statement about the demise and rebirth
of the discipline. Old sociology, he tells us, is dead in the face of the
multiple new cross-national, cross-cultural flows and networks that
characterise the global world of the twenty-first century: “the diverse
mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes; and... the
complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these diverse
mobilities” (p.1). Traditional sociology, he argues, has been trapped within a
nation-state centred framework of discrete societies, that
misleadingly pictures a world of stable and bounded national cultures and
citizenries able to endogenously reproduce themselves and the social structures
they are built up on. Urry gets the initial problematic sociologists all now
face exactly right. Behind his wonderfully chosen title, is an opening chapter
which very accurately diagnoses why traditional sociology -
both as an empirical activity, and as a canon of grand theorists - is
challenged by the messy cross-national interconnections of the global. It is
indeed true that some of the most famous sociology of the twentieth century
simply read the sociology of the
The
deeper question, most aptly discussed by Gösta Esping-Andersen in a recent British Journal of Sociology special on
the future of the discipline, is how to respond to Urry’s problematic in
advanced research. Esping-Andersen, one of the few empiricist sociologists in a
volume dominated by theorists, suggests the discipline hang on to a realist,
comparative empirical agenda, in which sociology continues to advance modestly
by comparing the social patterns and structures of past societies with new or
emergent forms of the present, and by constantly testing out its hypotheses
across different comparative societal contexts. Urry’s response was also
sketched in the BJS special, and is
here presented in its full form. The contrast could not be more
stark. After its promising start, Urry proceeds to sweep away
practically every recognisably feature of twentieth century sociological
thought. Social structures, theories of action, empirical methods, the notion
of scientific concepts, the logic of presenting empirical hypothesis; are all
jettisoned in favour of a sprawling, metaphors-based cultural theory, that
piles up recent discussions of scapes, cyberspaces, networks, chaos theory and
time-space compression. The only concession to old-fashioned social democratic modernism
is a touching faith in the relevance of left wing social movement politics in
the construction of new ‘public spaces’ of ‘global citizenship’. For the rest,
real people give way to flows, images and virtual connections, agency to the
intersection of ‘things’ and ‘desires’. As speculative theorizing, none of this
is remotely new. Urry offers us a parade of the usual philosophical heroes -
Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari, Rorty, Virilio - alongside a number of
other social theorists to whom he owes a good deal: notably Zygmunt Bauman,
David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and Michael Billig. The work of Niklas Luhmann,
meanwhile - who is surely the true substantive root of Urry’s central themes -
remains a shadowy
presence. Imitating Giddens’s already pretentious manifesto from
the early 1970s (Giddens 1976), Urry presents his own ‘new rules of
sociological method’. These do a great disservice to the legacy of Durkheim.
There is in fact no methodology as such defended here, just a compendium of
ideas most often recounted in a blur of quotations and brief discussions of
other people’s ethnographic or case study work. As a manifesto of off-the-wall
ideas, Urry’s may delight some readers. But as a serious agenda for sociology,
it is difficult to see much of it lasting any longer than some of the style
magazines where many of these ideas first emerged. It is a relief to know that
Castells’s three volume Information Age - a genuinely visionary synthesis of empirical
observation and data, for all its faults- has already staked out the territory
at which Urry’s work aims (Castells 1997).
As
any migration scholar knows, to really assess the extent or nature of movement,
or indeed even see it sometimes, you
have to in fact spend a lot of the time studying things that stand still: the
borders, institutions and territories of nation-states; the sedimented ‘home’
cultures of people that do not move. Nothing stands still in Urry’s world: his
first ‘rule’ is “to develop through appropriate metaphors a sociology which focuses
upon movement, mobility and contingent ordering, rather than upon stasis,
structuring and social order” (p.18). Yet migration as a form of human
experience is still the exception in the modern world, and it is vast
exaggeration to suggest otherwise. And even most mobilities are nothing new.
What is most curious perhaps about his work is how he ignores the most
substantial body of empirical work that might allow him to illustrate some of
his speculative ideas. That is, the study of actual migration phenomena, or
studies on the free mobility of capital, services and goods in a globalising
world. These are well trodden fields, and one could quickly see how
anthropological studies of transnational communities across the
Given
his frequent compliments throughout to the cutting edge work of avant-guard
human geographers such as Nigel Thrift or Doreen Massey, it is also surprising
that Urry offers no real sense of how any of his ideas might be located in real places. Again, one
consequence of this would be to underline that many of the globalising
phenomena blithely generalised about, would in fact affect different contexts
very differently, and that part of the task of the sociologist should be to show
how and why this takes place. No extended discussion of any
real places or contexts appear in the text, although on occasion he does
rely on other studies that are based on case-study detail. For example, he cites
at several points an interesting ethnographic work on Turks in Denmark by
Diken, to support ideas about the transnational identity strategies of migrants
in the West; This selective generalisation, however, will always be misleading
short of some kind of controlling comparison: which must determine whether it
is something about Turks as transnational migrants or something specific about
Denmark as a country of immigration that actually explains their behaviour
(pp.53, 140-1, 155) . One suspects it is
Urry
is surely right that the synthetical grand theories of the past - all those
long, tedious discussions about structure and agency and so forth - are a blind
alley. But the real future for sociology is surely still in the systematic
construction of mid-range empirical theories, and the patient reassertion of
the insights and methods of past classics. The sociological imagination here
has been betrayed by
the generation of social theorists who, like Urry, took the turn down a
postmodern cul-de-sac. It is has been
immensely depressing to watch these leading social theorists live out a kind of
intellectual crisis with the disciplines they were brought up in. A basically
naive infatuation with literary theory, and the clumsy appropriation of continental
philosophy, offers no inspiration to future sociologists except the lazy excuse
of textuality and deconstruction, and theory for theory’s sake. If established
figures want to write their manifestos they should focus on what it is
sociology can do that other subjects cannot. The answer surely lies in its
ability to systematically explore and test out - via recognisable social
scientific strategies - the speculative ideas that come so easily to the
humanities and cultural studies. Urry’s book, however, is contemporary social
theory at its fastest and loosest. There are many ideas in this book that
properly embedded in empirical projects could form the seed of new research.
But when are sociologists of globalisation going to show how all this talk of
mobility, hybridity, mediascapes, virtual reality, and so on can be brought
back and some systematic evidence delivered for it? These points apply as much
to those influenced by Giddens, Bauman, Beck and company, as Urry.
Turbulent theories
This
indeed should also be the first question we ask of Nikos Papastergiadis’
attractive volume. Papastergiadis is erudite and writes well, and this collection
of essays sets out more specifically than Urry to draw the consequences of new
critical theory and cultural studies for migration scholars and the study of
multicultural societies. He works at the strikingly original intersection of
international political economy and cultural theory, although his grasp of the
latter is stronger. Taken together, the various meditations on hybridity,
deterritorialization and globalisation add up to a comprehensive revision of
the conceptual framework within which mainstream migration and ethnic studies
takes place. Two of the most interesting chapters come early on, as
Papastergiadis engages brightly with the limitations of traditional mechanistic
migration theory, and the way concepts of movement and ways of counting migration
are being confounded by the blurred complexity of new migrations. As would many
less radical migration scholars, he points out the inadequacy of push-pull and
structural theories, of distinctions between economic and forced migration, and
of representations based on classic south-north flows. Yet, as many other
writers have done in writing about the contemporary situation, he adopts the
‘age of migration’ metaphor without bothering to prove it. Held et al in fact
argue that the great migration of the late 19th century was just as intensive
and extensive as anything in the post-war period, and probably bigger. Go back
before the state control of the movement of populations was perfected at the
end of the nineteenth century by emergent nation-states - as recounted in John
Torpey’s brilliant recent The Invention
of the Passport - and the nomadism and the non-national identities of
people in our ‘global’ age become less novel, albeit qualitatively different.
Papastergiadis is, of course, merely guilty of the hype of newness that
globaloney encourages. But it is characteristic of this style of book that its
relentless pursuit of the new should cause it to thus fail to ask the really
interesting counter-intuitive questions that ought to guide original research:
for instance, about the amazing turbulence of migrations of the past. Think of
the migration experience of the millions who set off for distant continents
with no idea of what they would find, of a world in which brand new societies
were built from scratch, and where even the closest of neighbours in Europe
lived in cultural and linguistic ignorance of each other. And then compare this
to our banal, effortless Microsoft and CNN mediated experience of the global
today.
Papastergiadis
is wrong in his claim that no migration theory is being developed today that
fully grapples with the complexity of what he calls “processes of migration”.
Empirical migration theory today is a lot more sophisticated and far reaching
than he credits, particularly in the empirical explorations of the key role of
social capital and migration networks in explaining new migration patterns,
found in recent work by Doug Massey et al (1998), and Hammer, Faist et al
(1997). Of course, they offer empirical theories which are incomplete and only
partially work for the range of cases they consider. But that is because they
set out to be parsimonious, empirically falsifiable hypotheses that seek to
formulate workable but tentative generalisations from a baffling range of
empirical data. They are, in short, social scientific theories. Papastergiadis,
however, is much more at home with the speculative theorizing and conceptual
wordplay of cultural theory, a deconstructive attitude that proliferates
untestable propositions (‘complex’ is his favourite word). Like Urry, he
endorses the deeply mistaken idea that doing social theory is in fact a search
for new metaphors, in which sociologists should really read more literary
theory, and content themselves with writing brilliant, but very brittle, essays
of the kind presented here. Time and again, insightful reflection turns into
rhetorical hyperbole, beyond the recall of any operationalisable study. At the
end of chapter two, where many good points have been made against the
limitations of migration research to date, he concludes with a quite absurd but
characteristic statement: “The patterns of migration that emerge from these
contradictory aspirations are so multiple and of such a complex nature that it
is now impossible to either generalise about the logic which determines its
causes, or to map its flows according to the binary co-ordinates of departure
and destination...A current map of global migration would have to be as complex
as all the migrant biographies” (p.50). If that is the case, sociologists of
migration, seeking to establish some modest unifying social patterns and
structure across the always unruly heterogeneity of everyday lived experience,
really should just pack up and retire.
Papastergiadis’
central organising metaphor is the ‘turbulence’ of migration. As befits this
aeronautical theme, it is a work which views actual migrants and migration
phenomena from a strastospheric height. It is no small paradox that the most
influential cultural theory of migration, diaspora and hybridity, that has
always preached how much better it articulates migrant and oppressed ‘voices’
than mainstream work - the kind of work made most famous by Stuart Hall,
Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha or Paul Gilroy - always
seems to inspire work tangled up in the most tangential obsessions with
philosophy and continental theory. So it is with Papastergiadis, who details
his admiration for these writers at great length, but offers up a work
disappointingly limited by its lack of engagement with the real experience of
migrants or the facts of everyday migration politics. The only material used to
any effect are elite representations by migrant artists, and he is more
comfortable with transatlantic multicultural philosophy than any ‘located’
versions of multiculturalism; of the sort found, say, on the streets of
Birmingham, Brussels or Brisbane. For all its sparkling passages, the book is a
long and tiresome read in its entirety. Key ideas could have been made a lot
more economically. This is a pity, because there are good essays here, notably
the opening two chapters on migration, and the two closing chapters, an
excellent self-contained history of the idea of hybridity, and a summarising
conclusion. It is a book rich in ideas, but how much better it could have been
with a some discipline imposed we will never know.
The
one and only empirical migration scholar Papastergiadis refers to at any length
is Stephen Castles, and it is perhaps appropriate that, wearied from all this
speculative theorising, migration scholars might turn to him for some good
sense and something tangible, amid all the moving feasts of social theory. His
collaboration with the Australian philosopher Alastair Davidson is something
rather different from his own well-known recent works, in that it is a book
that seeks to work through the normative consequences of his analysis of the
globalisation of migration, spelling out a normative agenda only implicit in
other works. Although a collaborative work, the authors specify fairly clearly
their division of labour in the enterprise. Davidson’s historical
reconstruction of the idea of western citizenship retells ably its problematic
projection onto a world of less stable nation-states and emerging international
institutional contexts. The central question here is the impact of the
post-national on migrants no longer willing or able to integrate into national
citizenship. This question is very close to central themes explored in depth in
recent work by Soysal, Joppke, Sassen and Jacobson among others (see Joppke 1998). Citizenship and Migration is thus a work
that contents itself with restating the problem and synthesising it for a new
audience more familiar with globalization and development debates. The same
problematic is sketched from a different angle by Castles, working through the
extension of ethnic minority formations, and the formal acquisition of
citizenship in the post-national age. In later chapters that echo Castles’
pathbreaking empirical work on migration in the Asia-Pacific, they trace
through the impact on these same issues for other parts of the globe.
As
with Cohen and Kennedy, this is a synthetic text, setting out to clarify the
field rather than offer original research. In both of these texts, there is
certain unease to be had in the openly normative structuring of their
empirically based arguments. Castles is a veteran Marxist political economist
who embraced the normative wave of left-liberal citizenship theories of the
1980s and 90s, and one sometimes misses the disaffected, analytical edge of a
genuine Marxist explanation of the migration dynamics of global capitalism. The
language of rights, justice and equality the book embraces can after all also
be a convenient liberal wallpaper for a world that sociologists perhaps ought
to be re-writing in other less ideologically loaded terms. Even allowing for
this, one might wish for a language that was less state-centred and less
focused on the political and institutional, as inevitably is all right-based
citizenship talk. The most significant transnational migration theorists of the
present day, have in fact developed their ideas with insights from the
sociology of economy, stressing how the spaces that have opened up for
disadvantaged migrants of the world, owe more to disorganised market forces
that escape institutionalisation by states than post-national rights structures
(i.e., Portes et al 1999). Castles and Davidson put their faith, rather, in
emergent international state structures such as the UN and the EU, arguing that
citizenship needs to be extended via the pragmatic separation of state and
nation, and the international acceptance of a kind of ius domicili. Familiar too from liberal citizenship theory, is the
warming but over-used faith in social movements and INGOs as the salvation
amidst global capitalist chaos. This sceptical note aside, the real value of
this work is its forceful reminder that the study of international migration
must not be limited to the western world. There is literally is a world out there
in Asia, Africa and elsewhere where post-national migration and its
consequences are so much more spectacular, and where the negative effects of
globalising processes, in terms of growing inequality, insecurity and
intercultural conflict, are so much more dramatic. The closing chapters hammer
home a developmentalist plea with real urgency, offering all manner of dark
warnings about the erosion of state authority and the rule of law around the
globe. Concerns with multiculturalism, it is true, have so often been on the
impact of this facet of globalisation on western societies, and for all the
globalisation hype this too can be yet another brand of western-centric
navel-gazing.
Rescuing the sociological imagination
So
what kind of research agenda is a sociology of
globalisation left with after reading these books? How can sociology beyond the
nation-state-society be done? The authors here present two kinds of responses.
One is the slide towards the eclectic, interdisciplinary theorising of the
humanities, and the lure of cultural theory. The other allies itself closely
with the political agenda pursued by liberal theorists of multicultural
citizenship. The mission of sociology - notably its distinctiveness from other
disciplines which do not share its core explanatory or social scientific
interests - is at risk in both. From an interdisciplinary point of view, these
weaknesses can be seen as quite specific to the discipline. Human geography
faces similar tensions, but this is a much more heterogeneous discipline, more
able to transcend the epistemological limitations of thought centred in the
nation-state-society as object of study. A rigorously empirical economic
geography of the global is thriving today, as is urban geography that takes the
city as basic unit of analysis. Anthropologists seems
to have absorbed some cultural theory, while distinguishing themselves by their
strongly empirical ethnographic core. Economists and political scientists seem also to be
reformulating their disciplines as the study of the international and global,
in ways that do not undermine their core theories and methods. Sociology can,
at its best, embrace elements of all of these disciplines - it is why it often
produces some of the most widely known synthesising theorists - but it does
face massive problems in adapting its ailing empirical wing and its traditional
objects of concern to the new challenge of the global. Yet, as Papastergiadis
in a way suggests, it might take heart from the sub-field of migration studies.
Migration research is inherently interdisciplinary, naturally empirical, and
often manages to combine the precision of fine-pointed case studies and
ethnography, with the methods of extensive quantitative research and mid-range
comparative work. Recent years has seen more textual and discourse analysis
methods used with success. With these dimensions of theory and empiricism
combined, sociology practised within migration studies needs no new manifestos
or rules of method.
The
more general message here is that globalisation theorists should not view
migration and mobility as some kind of font of speculative metaphors from which
to create new theories, but a very real phenomenon through which we can
empirically operationalise the big questions of globalisation. It is also a
very well developed field of research. To take one example.
A recent study by Riccio (2000) of the everyday networks and strategies of
young Senegalese in Italy provides all the sources one might need to explore
the sort of big globalisation questions that so often remain entrapped in
fruitless social theoretical speculation: of the complexities of migration
patterns, of the impact of the global political economy and global cultural
diffusion, of the emergence of the post-national, and so on. In terms of the
impact of migration on receiving countries, meanwhile, propositions about how
globalisation and migration have undermined the nation-state will not really be
put to the test until similarly grounded research is done. To answer this
question, it will be necessary to systematically take the daily structures of
everyday life in the old bounded world of the nation-state-society - one thinks
of family structures, the structures of professions, social mobility, the
life-cycle, etc - and, via the empirical study of individuals whose lives have
crossed boundaries, see how and where these structures are being transformed.
So far, only their impact on national political structures has been examined in
any great detail. There are literally hundreds of global theorists rhapsodising
about the power of transnational networks and forms of life. But little is
known, in truth, about how these emergent transnational patterns of living fit
or disrupt the basically sedentary structures of the vast majority of the world’s
population who do not migrate and who do not live transnational lives. One
suspects that the lived experience of these transnational pioneers to be
immensely difficult and unsettling, often tragic; full of unpredictable social
trajectories that clash with the perceptions and expectations of most people
around them, the ‘normal’ life led within a nation-state community. What
wonderful material this could provide for future sociologists wishing to do
fine-grained, humanistic, empirical studies of the impact of globalisation. And
what a pity it is that there is so little trace of this kind of sociological
imagination in these books.
Other references
Castells,
Manuel. 1997. The Information Age (3
vols). Oxford. Blackwell.
Cohen,
Robin and Kennedy, Paul.
2000. Global Sociology. London:
Macmillan.
Cwerner,
Saolo B. 2001. ‘The times of migration’. Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies. Vol.27, no.1.
Esping-Andersen,
Gösta.
2000. ‘Two societies, one sociology and no theory’. British Journal of Sociology.
Vol.51, no.1, pp.59-77.
Giddens,
Anthony. 1976. New Rules of Sociological
Method. Hutchinson.
Hammar,
Tomas, Grete Brochmann, Kristof Tamas and Thomas Faist (eds).
1997. International Migration, Immobility
and Development. Oxford: Berg.
Held,
David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathon Perraton. 1999. Global Transfomations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Oxford:
Polity.
Joppke,
Christian (ed). 1998. Challenge to the Nation State: Immigration in Western Europe and the
United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mann,
Michael. 1993. The Sources of Social
Power (2 vols). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mann,
Michael. 2000. ‘Globalisation and modernity’. The Wiles
Lecture series, Queen’s University, Belfast. Unpublished, May.
Massey,
Doug et al. 1998. Worlds in Motion:
Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millenium. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Polanyi,
Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Portes,
Alejandro et al. 1999. ‘Transnational communities’, special edition of Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2)
Riccio,
Bruno. 2000. Senegalese Transmigrants and
the Construction of Imigration in Emilia-Romagna. DPhil
Thesis in Social Anthropology. University of Sussex.
Torpey,
John. 1999. The Invention of the Passport.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.