Exploring the nature of relationship between capitalism and society, Urry (2000) claims that due to increased mobility of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes and the complex interdependence between these mobilities the power of national societies has declined. As a consequence of this, the new economic, social and cultural phenomena have to be understood more in terms of various global networks and flows. In other words, the power of the concept of social structure as determining various processes within a society has weakened (Box 18.1).
Box 18.1: End of the Concept of Society |
I argue that the concept of society has been central to sociological disc- ourse. I then argue that if there is any agreement on the concept of society this is embedded within notions of nation-state, citizenship and national society, working through a ‘banal nationalism’ … . Then I show that it is this sense of ‘nation-state-society’ that contemporary mobilities call into question and which suggest that maybe Thatcher was oddly right when she said there is no such thing as society. But she was at same time quite wrong in that she ignores many ‘post-sociatal’ processes that lie beyond individual men and women, including especially those on the global market place.
Quoted from Urry (2000). |
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