Global Complexity

GLOBAL COMPLEXITY

JOHN URRY

polity

[,verything flows' Heraciitus Time is not absolutelY defined Albert Einstein CopyrightO JohnUrry 2003 The right of JohnUrry to be identifiedas authorof this work has beenasserted with the UK Copyright,Designsand in accordance Patents Act 1988. First publishedin 2003by Polity Pressin association with BlackwellPublishing Ltd. Reprinted2004,2005

Elements are elements only for the system that employs them as units and they are such only through this system.

Polity Press 65 BridgeStreet Cambridge CB2 lUR, UK

Niklas Luhmann We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water.

Polity Press 350 Main Street M a l d e n,M A 02148,U S A

Norbert Wiener

All rightsreserved.Exceptfor the quotationof shortpassages for the purposes of criticismandreview,no partof thispublication may be reproduced, storedin a retrievalsystem,or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, mechanical, recordingor otherwise, withoutthepriorpermission of thepublisher. A CIP cataloguerecordfor this book is availablefrom the BritishLibrary. Libraryof Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Urry,John. Globalcomplexity/ JohnUny. p. cm. Includesbibliographical references andindex. ISBN 0-7456-28t7'6(hbk.)- ISBN 0-7456-2818-4 (pbk.) l. Globalization. 2. International relations.3. Socialsystems.I. Title.

tzt249 .u172003 327.l'01'1851 -dc2l

We are observing the birth of a science that is no longer limited to idealized and simplified situations but reflects the complexity of the real world, a science that views us and our creativity as part of the fundamental trend present at all levels of nature. Ilya Prigogine

20020'72082

Typesetin I I on 13pt Berling by SNPBest-set Typesetter Ltd.,HongKong Printedandboundin GreatBritainby MPG DigitalSolutions, Bodmin,Cornwall For furtherinformation on Polity,visit our website:http://www.polity.co.uk

If you want to humble an empire it makes senseto maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe. Time Magazine, 12 September 2001

Contents

Preface

vl11

1

'Societies'and the Global

2

The Complexity Turn

t)

3

Limits of 'Global' Analyses

39

4

Networks and Fluids

50

5

Global Emergence

76

6

Social Ordering and Power

104

7

Global Complexities

t20

References Index

t4l 155

Preface

Preface

During the 1990s,like many others, I became fascinatedby the idea that social relations are in some senseincreasinglyglobal. [n The Tounst Gaze in 1990 I briefly considered how many different places had to compete on a more global stagein order to attract tourists from all sorts of other places fUrry 1990, 2001J. Later works, such as ConsumingPlaces[Urry ]995), brought out how people across the world's stage are global consumers of other placesand that this very importantly changeswhat placesare like. They are on the world's stage. More generally,Scott Lash and I ar-ralysed such global transformations through the 'end of organizedcapitalism' thesis.Capitalism, we argued, is shifting from an organized national, societal pattern, to global 'disorganization'flash and Urry i987, 1994). In Economiesof Signsand Space[Lash and Urry 1994) we showed that moving rapidly in and across the world are complex and mobile economies,both of signsand of people working in, escaping from or seduced by various signs.These signs and people increasinglyflow along various 'scapes',resulting in further 'disorganization'of once organizedcapitalistsocieties.It was claimed that there is a move from the 'social' to the informational and communicational,from national government to global disorganization. Such a mobile economy of signs produces complex redrawingsof the boundariesof what is global and what is local.We tried to elaboratesome of the time and spacechangesinvolved in what Roland Robertson had termed 'elocalization'.

ix

l.ater in the decade Phil Macnaghten and I maintained that there is no such simple cntity as'nature'[Macnaghtenand Urry l'qqSl. There is nothing'natural', we showed,about nature.There could be ,r" u'variety of ContestedNatures and one of these what Ulrich t".-"a 'globalnature'.We explored the emergenceof 'global describing especially risk society', as a g".k hrt described of the story sad of the in detall the international ramifications British cow roast beef BSE and new variant CJD. This led me in Soaologt beyond Societies[Urry 2000bJ to try to rethink the very basesof sociology. I showed there, following Manuel Castells'strilogy on The Int'ormationAge (1996, )'997, 1998),that the emergenceof giobal networks transformsthe very nature of social life. It can no longer be seen as bounded within national societies.The concept of society is revealedto be deeply problematic, once the scale,range and depth of various mobile and global processesare examined. I suggestedthat such transformations lead us to rethink the nature of sociology,which had been mostly based upon attempts to understand the properties and reproduction of 'societies'.I elaboratedsome 'new rules of sociologicalmethod' to deal with disorganization,global flows and the declining powers of the 'social'. However, in all these works, I, like most other commentators, did not sufficiently examine the nature of the 'global' that was supposedlymaking great changesto social life and undermining 'societies'.The global was almost left as a 'black box', a deus ex machina that in and of itself was seen to have powerful properties.What was not analysedI think by anyonemuch was just what sort of 'system' the global is. Thus there was a rather weak understanding of how the systemic properties of the global interact with the propertiesof other entities such asthose of 'society'.The global is often taken to be both the 'cause' of immense changes and the 'effect' of those changes. As I was completing SociologtbeyondSocietiesI became increasingly aware of the growth within certain of the social sciencesof some conceptsand theories from the complexity sciences.This is over and beyond economics,where complexity was initially developed [see Arthur 1994b). I tried to develop some elements of complexity in SociologtbeyondSocieties,especially in relationship to thinking through how time and space are transformed in a

Preface

Preface

globalizing world. But more recently this small stream of complexity thinking in the social scienceshas been turning into a flood. In this current book I have tried to draw on some elemenrs in a more systematic way, although I am well aware of the dangers of crass simplification and misunderstanding as disciplinary boundariesget crossed.My formulations are qualitative,with no attempts to apply the mathematics of chaos and complexity. The social scienceof globalizationhad taken the global system for granted and then shown how localities, regions, nation states, environments and cultures are transformed in linear fashion by this all-powerful 'glob alizatton'. Thus globalization (or global capitalism) has come to be viewed as the new 'structure', with nations,localities,regions and so on, the new 'agent', employing the normal social science distinctions but given a kind of global twist. But complexity would suggest that such a system would be diverse,historical, fractured and uncertain. It would be necessary to examine how emergent properties develop at the global level that are neither well ordered and moving towards equilibrium nor in a state of perpetual anarchy.Complexity would lead one to see the global as neither omnipotent nor subject to control by society. Indeed, it is not a single centre of power. It is an astonishingly complex system, or rather a series of dynamic complex systems, a huge array of islands of order within a sea of disorder, as Ilya Prigoginemore generallypostulates.There would be no presumption of moving towards a state of equilibrium. And, as I was finishing this book, the tragic events of both l l September and its bloody aftermath showed the profound hmitations of any linear view of the global. These events demonstrate that globalization is never complete. It is disordered, full of paradox and the unexpected.Racingacrossthe world are complex mobile connections that are more or less intense, more or less social,more or less 'networked' and more or less occurring'at a distance'.There is a complex world, unpredictableyet irreversible, fearful and violent, disorderly but not simply anarchic. Small events in such systemsare not forgotten but can reappear at different and highly unexpected points in time and space.I suggest that the way to think these notions through is via the concept of global complexity.

And in thinking through what might be meant by 'global complexity', I have been helped by various colleagues,especially Lrirjof Capra, Biilent Diken, Mick Dillon, Andy Hoskins, Bob Jessop,Scott Lash, John Law, Will Medd, Mimi Sheller, Jackie Stacey,Nigel Thrift and Sylvia Walby.

x

xi

John Urry Lancaster

'societies'and the Global

Introducing the Global It increasinglyseemsthat we are living through some extraordinary times involving massivechangesto the very fabric of normal economic,political and sociallife.Analogieshave been drawn with a century or more ago,when a somewhat similar restructuring of the dimensionsof time and spacetook pl.ace.New technological and organizationalinnovations 'compressed'the time taken to communicate and travel across large distances.Some of these momentous innovations that changed time-space a century ago included the telegram, the telephone, steamship travel, the bicycle,cars and lorries,skyscrapers, aircraft,the massproduction factory, X-ray machines and Greenwich Mean Time fsee Kern 1983). Together these technological and social innovations dramatically reorganized and compressed the very dimensions of time and spacebetween people and places. Today some rather similar changesseem to be occurring.The 1990s saw the growth of the Internet with a take-up faster than any previoustechnology.There will soon be I billion usersworldwide. The dealingsof foreign exchangethat occur each day are w-orth$1.4 trillion, which is sixty times greaterthan the amount ol world trade. Communications 'on the move' are being transformed, with new mobile phonesnow more common in the world than conventionalland-line phones.There are 700 million international journeys made each year, a figure predicted to pass i

'societies'and the Global

'Societies'and the Global

billion very soon. Microsoft pointedly asks:'where do you want to go today?' and there are many ways of getting 'there'. At the same time tens of millions of refugees and asylumseekersroam the globe, with three billion people acrossthe world receiving the same total income as the richest 300. Globally branded companies employing staff from scoresof different courltries have budgets that are greater than those of individual countries. Images of the blue earth from space or the golden arches of McDonald's are ubiquitous across the world and especiallyupon the blllion or so TV sets.A huge array of public and private organizations has arisen seeking to produce, govern, surveil, terrorize and entertain this 'spaceshipearth', including some 17,000 trans-bordercivic associations. Thus new technologiesare producing 'global times' in which the distancesbetween places and peoples again seem to be dramatically reducing.Some writers even suggestthat time and space are 'de-materializing', as people, machines, images, information, powet money, ideas and dangers are all, we might say, 'on the move', travelling at bewildering speed in unexpected directions from place to place,from time to time. Various commentators have tried to understand these exceptional changes.Anthony Giddens [1990) has described modern sociallife asbeing like a massiveout-of-control 'juggernaut'lurching onwards but with no driver at the wheel. The journalist FrancesCairncross (1995) describesin detail the 'death of distance' that these various technologiesseem to produce.Zygrnunt Bauman (2000) talks of the speeded-up'liquid modernity' as opposed to the fixed and given shapes that the modern world had earlier taken. Manuel Castells(2001) has elaboratedthe growth of an 'lnternet galaxy' that has ushered the world into a wholly different informational structure. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) have provocativelysuggestedthat notions of nationstate sovereigntyhave been replacedby a singlesystem of power, what they call'empire', while many writers,indeed more than 100 a year, have described and elaboratedthe so-calledglobalization of economic,social and political hfe. In this book I show how various 'global' processesraise major implications for most of the categoriesby which sociologyand the other social scienceshave examined the character of social life.

,Globalization'debatestransform many existirrgsociologicalcontroversies,such as the relative significanceof social structure, on the one hand, and human agency,on the other. Investigating the slobal also dissolvesstrong dichotomies between human subjects and physical objects,as well as that between the physical sciences The study of the global disruptsmany conand the socialsciences. and debates should not be viewed as merely an extra ventional level or domain that can be 'added' to existing sociologicalanalysesthat can carry on regardless.'Sociology'willnot be able to sustainitself as a specificand coherent discoursefocusedupon the study of given, bounded or'organized' capitalistsocieties.It is irreversiblychanged. So faq, howevel globalization studies are at an early stage of recording,mapping, classifyingand monitoring the 'global' and its effects[see Castells1996, 1997,7998; Held et al. 1999; Scholte 2000). A new social scienceparadigm, of globalization,is developing and extending worldwide, but so far it remains somewhat 'pre-scientific'.[t concentrates upon the nature of the global 'region' that is seen as competing with, and dominating, the societal or nation-state'region'. Globalization studies pose a kind of inter-regionalcompetition between the global and each society, the global on such a view being regarded as an overwhelming, singularcausalforce. Whether writers are critics of, or enthusiastsfor, the global, globalizationgetsattributed exceptionalpower to determine a massive rangeof outcomes.Furthermore,'globalization' is often taken to referboth to certain processes[from the verb, to globalize)and to certainoutcomes (from the noun, the globe). Both get designated asglobalization, as both'cause'and'effect' (Rosenberg20001. In order to develop the analysishere I suggestthere are five major globalizationdebatesand claims that should be clearly distinguishedfrom each other. There is no single and agreed-upon Slobalizationthesis. These five theori., u." based respectivelv upon the concepts of structure, flow, ideology,performanc" ,r,i complexity. Each recurs at different points in this book - but I especiallvdeveloo the implications of the last.This book setsout ard defendsa complerity approach to globalization,an approach that elaborates the systemic and dynamic character of what I previouslycalled'disorganized'capitalism.

2

'societies'and the Global The structural notion of the globaL Chase-Dunn,Kawano,and Brewer [2000: 78) maintain that giobalization is defined as the increaseddensity of international and global interactions,compared with such interactionsat the local or national levels fsee Castells 1996; Held et al. 1999; Scholte 2000). There has been an increasein structural globalizationwith the greatly heightened density of such global interactions, although this is not simply a new phenomenon. This increased density of interactions is seen to result from a number of causes. There is the'liberalization of world trade and the internationalizing of th6 organization of much capitalist production. There is the globalizing of the consumption of many commodities and the declining costs of transportation and communications.Interregional organizationsare more significantwith the internationalizing of investment and the general development of a 'world system'. These together produce a revised structural relationship between the heightened density of the global and the relatively less networked, less dense,local/national levels.Globalization is not the property of individual actors or territorial units. It is an emergent feature of the capitalist economy as a whole, developing from the interconnections between different agents,especially through new forms of time-space 'distanciation'acrossthe globe and of the compression of time-space relations (Jessop2000: 356). This produces the 'ecological dominance' of globalizing capitalism. Relatedly it is argued that this dominance both stems from, and reflects,the growth of a 'transnationalcapitalist class'that is centred within transnationalcorporationsthat are 'more or lessin control of the processes of globalization'(Sklair Z00l: 5). US presidential candidate Ralph Nader summarized this thesis through the concept of 'corporateglobalization'. The global as flows and mobilities These flows are seen as moving along various global 'scapes', including the system of transportation of people by air, sea,rail, motorways and other roads.There is the transportationof objects

'Societies'and the Global .,;qnostal and other systems.Wire, coaxial and fibre-optic cables television pictures and computer informessages, .nrry ,"t"pttone There are microwave channelsthat are used images' .-''r,ion and /n'. nlobll" phone communications.And there are satellitesused receiving phone, radio and television signals for transmitting and and Urry 1994; Castells1996; Held et al. Lash 1990; fApprdurai that, once such physical and organizational argued igbgt It is scape structures are established,then individuals, companies, olacesand even societiestry to become nodeswithin such scapes. Various potential flows occur along these scapes.Thus people travel along transportation scapesfbr work, education and holidays.Objecrsthat are sent and received by companies and individuals move along postal and other freight systems.lnt'ormation, and imagesflow along various cables and between satelmessages lites.Messagestravel along microwave channels from one mobile ohone to another. What Thesescapesand flows createnew inequalitiesof access. becomessignificantis the 'relative', as opposed to the 'absolute', location of a particular social group er town or society in relationship to these multiple scapes.They passby some areaswhile connecting others along information and transportation rich 'tunnels'.These can compress the distancesof time and space between some places while enlarging those between others [Brunn and Leinbach 1991; Graham and Marvin 2001). Globalization as ideologt This neo-liberalview is articulated by transnationalcorporations and their representativesand by variouspoliticians and journalists lseeFukuyama1992;Ohmae 1992).Suchcorporationsoperateon a rvorldwide basis and often lack any long-term commitment to particularplaces,labour forces or even societies.Thus those with economicinterestsin promoting capitalismacrossthe globe maintain that globalization is both inevitable and natural and that nationalstatesor nationallyorganizedtrade unions should not regulateor direct the inevitabie of the globalmarketplace.What ls viewed as crucial is 'shareholder -arch value', so that labour markets should be made more flexible and caoital should be able to invest or disinvestin industriesor countries at will.

'Societies'and the Global

'Societies'and the Global

In this account, globalization is seen as forming a new epoch, a golden age of cosmopolitan'borderlessness'. National statesand societiesare thought unable to control the global flows of information. Such a borderlessworld is seen as offering huge new opportunities to overcome the limitations and restrictions that societiesand especiallynational stateshave historically exercised on the freedom of the 44,000 trans-border corporations to treat the world as 'their oyster'. There were incidentally only 7,000 such corporations in the 1960s [Scholte 2000: 86). The World Tiade Organization both symbolizes this neo-liberal notion of globalization as ideology and represents such an interest, often spreading such notions through closed seminars for business leaders, academics and free-market politicians (see account and critique in Monbiot 2000).

on\,ironmentswhich are often markers of global threats,dramatic Inr.iron-"tttal protests,scientific papers on climate change,the of the cold war, NGO campaigns,records of extreme "nding events,pronouncementsby global public figures,global weather conferencessuch as Rio and Kyoto, and so on. Together these practicesare performing a 'global nature', a nature that appearsto be undergoingchange that needs to be vigorously and systematically resistedand indeed reversed.

6

Glob alization as p erformance Drawing on ideas about the analysisof gender as involving enactment, processand performance,Franklin et al. (2000: 1-17) argue that the global is not so much a 'cause' of other effects but an effect. It is enacted, as aspiration rather than achievement, as effect rather than condition, and as a project to be achieved rather than something that is pre-given.The global is seen as coming to constitute its own domains. It is continuously reconstituted through various material and semiotic processes. Law and Hetherington maintain that 'global space,is a material semiotic effect. It is something that is made' []999). And to perform the global implies that many individuals and organizationsmobilize around and orchestratephenomena that possessand demonstrate a global character.A good example of this involves how the idea of a separateand massivelythreatened 'global nature' has been produced and performed. What were once many apparently separate activities are now regarded as interconnected components of a single global crisis of the natural world [see Wynne i994). This global nature has resulted from fusing various social practices that are remaking space.These include imagesof the earth from spaceand especiallythe Apollo 17 photograph of the 'whole earth' taken in 1972, transportpolicies, deforestation, energy use, media images of threatened iconic

Global complexity This conceptionis nowhere developedin detail, but Rifkin [2000: l9l-3) analysesthe implicationsof what he callsthe'new physics' for the study of property relations in the emerging capitalist world (see also Capra 2O0Z). Rifkin notes that contemporary 'science' no longer sees anything 'as static, fixed and given'. The observer changesthat which is observed,apparent hard-and-fastentities are always comprised of rapid movement, and there is no structure that is separatefrom process.In particular, time and space are not to be regardedas containersof phenomena,but rather all physical and social entities are constituted through time and through space.These ideasfrom the 'new physics' will be elaboratedbelow, so as to explore better the extraordinary transformations of timespacethat'globalization' debatesboth signify and enhance. Complexity does not, of course,solve all the problems of the socialsciences.Nor is globalization only and exhaustively comprehensiblethrough complexity. And most of all I am not suggestingthat the 'social' implications of complexity are clear-cut. But I do suggestthat, since the systemic features of globalization are not well understood, the complexity sciences may provide concepts and methods that begin to illuminate the global as a systemor seriesof systems [for a similar formulation from within complexity', see Capra 20OZ). 'global' and'complexity', the aim is to . In coupling together the show that the former comprises a set of emergent systems possessingproperties and patterns that are often far from equilibrium. Complexity emphasizes that there are diverse networked timespace paths, that there are often massive disproportionalities between causes and effects, and that unpredictable and yet

'Societies'and the Global

'Societies'and the Global

irreversiblepatterns seem to characterizeall social and physical systems. Some of this 'new physics' is also present in the so far most significant examination of the new global order, Manuel Castells'sThe Int'ormationAge fl996, 1997, 1998). His argument restsupon a 'complexity' conception of the global, although thls is somewhat buried in the astonishingmass of material he presents.I now set out aspectsof his argument,especiallyrelating to the concept of 'network', before noting its 'complexity' components. His focus on networks will also be central to the analysis that follows below.

/evelopment of new scapes,with the instantaneousflows of inforI,'r,ion being the preconditionfor the growth of globalrelations. This new informational paradigm is characterized by the ,,etrlork enterprise(see Castells 1996, 2000, 2001). This is a made from either firms or segmentsof firms, and/or from ""i*orn segmentation of firms. Large corporations are internally internal decentralizedas networks.Small and medium businessesare connected in networks. These networks connect among themselves on specificbusinessprojects,and switch to another network when the project is finished. Major corporations work in a strategyof changing alliances and partnerships, specific to a given product, process,time and space. Furthermore, these cooperations are increasinglybased on the sharing of information. These are information networks, which, in the limit, link up suppliers and customers through one firm, with this firm being essentially an intermediary of supply and demand. The unit of this production processis the businessproject. What are important, therefore,are not'structures',which imply a centre,a concentrationof powe4 vertical hierarchy and a formal or informal constitution. Rather, networks 'constitute the new social morphology of our societies,and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processesof production, experience, power and culture . . . the netr,vorksociety,characterizedby the pre-eminenceof socialmorphology over social action' [Castells 1996: 469). A network is a set of interconnectednodes.the distancebetween social oositions being shorter where such positions constitute nodes within a network asopposedto those lying outsidethat particular network. Netlvorks are dynamic open structures so long as they continue to effect communication with new nodes (Castells 1996: 470-I; seealsoCastells2000). Networks decentreperformanceand share decision making. What is in the network is useful and necessary lor its existence. What is not in the network will be either ignored if it is not reievantto the network's task, or eliminated if it is competing in goalsor in performance.If a node in the network ceasesto perform a useful function, it is phased out from the network, and the t-te.tworkrearrangesitselfl Some nodes are more important than others,but they all need each other as long as they remain within

8

The Network Society Castells (2000) argues that there are various technological paradigms, a cluster of interrelated technical, organizational and managerial innovations. Their advantageslie in their superior productivity in accomplishlng assignedgoals through synergy between their components.Each paradigm is constituted around a fundamental set of technologies,specific to the paradigm, and whose coming-together into a synergistic set establishes the paradigm. Castells views information/communication technologies [including genetic engineering) as the basis of the new paradigm that developedwithin especiallyNorth America during the 1970s and 1980s. The main properties of this new informational paradigm are that the building blocks are bits of electronically transmitted information. Such technologiesare pervasive,since information has become integral to almost all forms of human practice.complex and temporally unpredictablepatterns of informational development occur in a distributed fashion in very specific localities.Technologiesare organized through loosely based and flexibly changing networks. These different technologies gradually converge into integrated informational systems, especially the once-separatebiological and microelectronic technologies.Such systemspermit organizationsto work in real time 'on a planetary scale'. These instantaneous electronic impulses produce a 'timeless time' and provide material support for the

l0

'societies'and the Global

the network. Nodes increasetheir importance by absorbingm information and processingit more efficiently.If they decline i their performance,other nodestake over their tasks.Thus, the relevanceand relative weight of nodes come not from their speci Features,but from their ability to be trusted by the rest of network. In this sense,the main nodes are not centres,but switch ers that follow a networking logic rather than a command logic in their function vis-a-vis the overall structure. Networks generate complex and enduring connections stretch ing acrosstime and space between peoples and things (M 1995: 745). Networks spread across time and space,whlch ; advantageous,because 'left to their own devices human acti and words do not spread uery t'ar at all' [Law 1994: 24; see also Rycroft and Kash 1999). Different networks possessdifferent abilities to bring home to certain nodes distant events, places or people, to overcome the friction of space within appropriate periods of time. According to Castells,there are now many very varied phenomena organized through networks, including network enterprises (such as the criminal economy), networked states [such as the European Union) and many networks within civil society [such as NGOs resistingglobalizationor international terrorists). Castells'snetwork analysisis of major importance, becauseit breaks with the idea that the global is a finished and completed totality. And he uses various ideas that prefigure a complexity approachto global phenomena [for a brief comment, see Cast 1996: 64-5). The analysisof networks emphasizescontingency, opennessand unpredictability,suggestinganalogieswith how the 'web of life', accordingto Capra Q996;35), consistsof 'networks within networks'. Castells also emohasizes how networks power produce networks of resistance.Many social practicesare drawn to what could be called in complexity terms the 'powerresistanceattractor' [Castells \997: 362). He also arguesthat the strength of networks results from their self-organizing and often short-term character and not from centralizedhierarchicaldirection, as with older style rational-legalbureaucraciesof the sort famously examined by Weber [see Rycroft and Kash 1999; Rifkin 2000: 2B). Specifically,Castellsshows the'chaotically' subversive effects of the development of the personalcomputer in the 1980s

'societies'and the Global

11

-- rhe workingsoI the sfafebureaucracyin the Soviet Union. lp":l'W;i"rian bureaucracyhad historically controlled all inforflous, including even accessto the humble photocopier. ;;;"" 'jl,r'i *", completely outflanked by the informational effects of global spread of the PC [Castells 1996: 36-7; Itl'u,",p."dlctable 1998:ch' 1J.' b"st"l1, also notes how attempts to regulatethe Internet seem judges have written: loomed to failure, since,as three American Internet is chaos, so the strength of our of the strength i"r, n, the of the unfettered chaos and cacophony the lib"rt' dependsupon .,-,"".h the First Amendment protects' [Castells 1997: 259)' The ,.,J"rkr"r, of hierarchical nation states can be seen in the growth of the 'global criminal economy' and the exceptional mobihty of illeeal money and its transmutation [money laundering) as it .u.""r, around global scapes,often evading detection [Castells l99B: 201-3; this money movement being partly created by different nation-state regimes). This global criminal economy, or indeed global terrorism, takes the global order far from equilibrium, as nation statesrespond to such mobilities with attackson civil libertiesespeciallyof mobile immigrant groups,and as global crime corrupts democratic politics in many societies.Castells fl998: 162) also talks of the 'black holes' of informational capitalism,placesof time-space warping where peoplesand placesare drawn into a downwards and irreversible spiral or vortex from which there is no escape.He argues,similarly, as we will see, to Prigogine,that the global world is characterized not by a single time but by what he calls multiple times.There is clock time of the massproduction factory, the timeless time of the computer and the glacial time of the environment [Castells 1996: ch.7; 1997:125; Urry 2000b: ch. 51. However, Castells's *ogni* opus lacks a set of interrelated conceptsthat would enable these very diverse phenomena to be systemailcallyunderstood. The global remains rather taken for grantedand there is not the range of theoretical terms necessary to analyse the emergentproperti;s of the networked'global'levei. tn particular, the term 'network' is exoected to do too much theoreticalwork in the argument.Almost all phenomenaare seen through the single and undifferentiated prism of 'network'. This concept glosses-o,r". ,r".y different networked phenomena. They

'societies'and the Global

'Societies'and the Global

can rangefrom hierarchicalnetworks such as McDonald's to heterarchic extremely inchoate'road protest movements', from spatially contiguous networks meeting every day to those organized around imagined'cultures at a distance',from those based upon strong ties to those based on very important and extensive'weak ties', and from those that are pretty well purely 'social' to those that are fundamentally 'materially' structured. These are all networks, but they are exceptionally different in their functioning one from the other. Moreoveq,the concept of network does not bring out the enormously complex notions of power implicated in the diverse mobilities of global capitalism, such as those of the Internet [but see Castells 2001). Movement and power are now inextricably intertwined, and the concept of network minimizes the astonishing paradox, uncertainty and irreversibility of the patterns of global emergence. It is the materials, concepts and arguments within the science of complexity that remain undeveloped in Castells's otherwise brilliant examination of intersecting global networks.

ratherinsteadconceivingof nature as active and creative',to make Ithe la*s of nature compatible with the idea of events,of novelty, ond of creativity' (Wallerstein1996: 61, 63). The Commission how scientific analysis 'based on the dynamics of l".o--"nds non-equilibria,with its emphasison multiple futures, bifurcation and choice, historical dependence, and . . . intrinsic and inherent uncertainty',should be the model for the social sciencesand this would undermine clear-cut divisions between humans and nature, and between social and natural science.However, most surprisingly this Commission is silent on the study of globalization, although the global is surely characterized by emergent and irreversible complexity and by processesthat are simultaneously socialand natural. I show in various chaptershow conceptsand theories in chaos andcomplexity theory bear directly upon the nature of the global. In particular, complexity examines how components of a system can through their dynamic interaction 'spontaneously'develop collective properties or patterns, such as colour, that do not seem implicit, or at least not implicit in the same way, within individual components. Complexity investigatesemergent properties, certain regularities of behaviour that somehow transcend the ingredientsthat make them up. Complexity arguesagainstreductionism, against reducing the whole to the parts. And in so doing it transforms scientific understanding of far-from-equilibrium structures,of irreversible times and of non-Euclidean mobile spaces. It emphasizeshow positive feedbackloops can exacerbate initial stressesin the system and render it unable to absorb shocks to re-establishthe original equilibrium. Positive feedback occurs when a change tendency is reinforced rather than dampened clown.Very strong interactions occur between the parts of such systems,with the absenceof a central hierarchical structure that unambiguously'governs'and producesoutcomes.Theseoutcomes are to be seen as both uncertarn and irreversible. Another way of expressingthis is to argue that complexity can .,, lilumine how social life is always a significant mixture of achievernent and failure. Much social science is premised upon the successfulachievementof an agent'sor system'sgoalsand objectives. Sociologyis'imbued with a commitment to and confidenie in the possibility of increasedsuccessin social life'; the social world to

12

The Challenge of Complexity Thus, although hundreds of boola and articles have been written on the'global', it has been insufficiently theorized. In this book I turn to the complexity theory that is now emerging more generally as a potential new paradigm for the social sciences,having transformed much of the physical and biological sciences. Thus 'non-linear' scientistsworking at one of the leading scientific complexity centres,the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, have developed some implications of complex adaptive systems for theorizing the nature of the global,especiallythe idea of global sustainability[Waldrop 1994: 348-53). Moreover, the US-based Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences,chaired by Immanuel Wallerstein and including non-linear scientist Ilya Prigogine,has advocated breaking down the division between'natural' and'social' sciencethrough seeingboth domains as characterizedby'complexity' (Wallerstein 1996). Complexity, they say,involves not 'conceivingof humanity as mechanical,but

l3

'societies'and the Global

'Societies' and the Global

which it directs our attention 'is one conceptualised,for the most part, in terms of practices,projects and processesthat operaterelattvely unproblematically' [Malpas and Wickham 1995: 38). On this account, failure is 'an aberration, a temporary breakdown within the system', the exception rather than the rule fMalpas and Wickham 1995: 38J.Thus there are the svstemsinvestisat by sociology (or the social sciencesmore generally) and there is failure or breakdown. There is thought to be either one or other. It is a duality. And yet, of course,social life is full of what we may term 'relative failure', both at the level of individual goals and especially at the level of social systems.Failure is a 'necessaryconsequence of incompleteness'and of the inability to establish and sustain complete control of the complex assemblages involved in any such system [Malpas and Wickham 1995: 39-40). This is well known but tends to be viewed in the social sciencesthrough the concept of unintended consequences. What is intended is seenas having a range of unintended side effects that may take the system away from what seemsto have been intended.However,this is a limited and often individualistic way of formulating relative failure that does not explicate just how these so-calledside effects may be systemicfeaturesof the system in question.The use of complexity should enable us to break with such dualistic thinkins. system and its failures. Chaos and order are always interconnected within anv such svstem. It is in the light of these argumentsthat the emergent level of the global is examined below. Such a system clearly seems to combine in curious and unexpected ways,both chaos and order. It is not simply another region like that of society,nor is it the product of, or to be reduced to, a pre-existingdifference or some governingelement. Global systemscan be viewed as interdependent, as self-organizingand as possessingemergent properties.I suggestthat we can examine a range of non-linear,mobile and unpredictable'global hybrids' alwayson the 'edgeof chaos'.These should constitute the subject matter of sociology and of its 'theory' into the twenty-first century. Examples of such global hybrids include informational systems,automobility,global media, world money, the Internet, climate change, the oceans,health hazards,worldrvide social protest and so on. Sociologyhas known

with an open system.But the proliferation of inter"l"ar ir deals I-..na"ntly fluid global hybrids operating at immensely varied scalesproduces a quantum leap in the opennessand I.I.-ror." of the systemsbeing analysed,systemsalways com."rpf"l
T4

15

Conclusion Thus it is argued in this book that an appropriate analysisof the 'global ase' necessitatesthe examination of various notions that are not reduclble to, or explained through, single processessuch as network or empire or markets or disorganization (Rescher 1998J.Rather, global ordering is so immensely complicated that lt cannot be 'known' through a single concept or set of processes.

l6

'societies'and the Global

Indeed,it is epistemologicallyand ontologicallyunknowable,wit efforts at comprehension changing the very world that is bein investigated.But, becauseof the power of metaphor in thinking, some notions from complexitv will be interrosated in order assesstheir fruitfulness in representing those processesimplica in such global ordering. The book thus seeksto discusshow much complexity can illuminate an array of issues.First, are there emergentglobal systems? How is an emergent system of the 'global' developing that may be self-producingover time, such that its outputs provide inputs into a circular system of global objects, identities, institutions and social practices? Second,what are the power and reach of such global systemsT What is the impact of such systemsupon the 'society system'? Third, how are the properties of such systems reproduced through iteration over time involving 'inhuman' combinations obiects and social relations,or what I call'material worlds'? Fourth, how should we expect global 'systems' that are often far from equilibrium to develop and change irreversibly over time, especially in relationship to small euentsthat can have big effects [and vice versa)7 Finally, what does 'global complexity' mean for the sociologi cal problem of social order that has normally been seen as operating within and through individual 'societies'?How does a social ordering emerge through diverse and intersecting material worlds operating over varied times and moving across multiple spaces, where systemsare always 'on the edge of chaos'7Can there any longer be societalordering where cultures operate'at a distance': This array of questions and issuesprovides the basis for wha I have described and advocatedelsewhere as 'mobile sociology'

fUrry 2000a).The next chapterturns specificallyto the challen of a turn to complexity.

2 The ComplexityTurn

Introduction In this chapter some of the main characteristicsof what has come to be known as the complexity sciences are elaborated. In this non-mathematicalaccount,chaostheory,the non-linear and complexity are treated as a single paradigm. I thus artificially stabilize a set of sciencesthat are in fact open-ended,uncertain, evolving and self-organizing [see the 'complexity' account of 'complexity' in Thrift 1999). I am not proposing a simple 'transfer' of complexity from the physicalworld into the social world. This is becausecomplexity anyway analysesall phenomena that possessdynamic system properties,whether these are population of flies, firms or people. Ind.eed,significant work at the centrally important Santa Fe Institute concerned the implications of increasingreturns for economic populations [Arthur 1994a;Waldrop 1994). Complexity is thus not simply a theory of the 'physical world' since it deals with the physicsof all populations that demonstrate statistical probabiltties whatever their apparent provenance(Prigogine 1997: 5, 35; hence the irrelevance of P. Stewart's critique [2001) of such a naturalistmove). Moreover,most significantphenomenathat the so-calledsocial sciences now deal with are in fact hybrids of physical and social relations, with no purified sets of the physical or the social.Such hybrids include health,technologies,the environment,

The ComplexityTurn

The ComplexiwTurn

the Internet, road traffic, extreme weather and so on. These hybrids, most of which are central in any analysis of global relations,are best examined through developingcomplexity analyses of the interdependent material-social, or 'inhuman' worlds. Through examining their dynamic interdependenciesvia complexity, their emergent properties can be effectively understood. The very division between the 'physical' and the 'social' is itself a socio-historicalproduct and one that appearsto be dissolving.The complexity sciencesseemto provide the best meansof transcending such outdated divisions, between nature and society,between the physical sciences and the social sciences [see Knorr-Cetina 1997;Macnaghtenand Urry 1998). This book attempts to transcend these divisions as well as those of determinism and free will, thus developing parallel claims to Capra's recent efforts (2002) to theorize the social world as complex living systems. It will do so by investigating the nonlinear, statistical properties of various 'global systems' that often move unpredictably and yet irreversibly away from points of equilibrium. In complexity analyses there are presumed to be neither separateagentsnor deterministic laws; there is a kind of inbetweennessthat is neither deterministic nor involvins free will.

.,o0l.328-9). Complexity authorizes'scientific' accounts of the il,-,r"dl.tnble but neverthelessstrangelyordered. ""Fr"-t*"ntieth-century sciencehad operatedwith a view of time derived from Newton. He said of what he called absolute time, 'its own nature, [it] flows equably without relation to that, from anything eternal . . . the flowing of absolute time is not liable to change'(quoted in Adam 1990: 50). Such a view of absolutetime is invariant, it is infinitely dlvisible into space-like units, it is rneasurablein length, it can be expressed as a number and it is reversible. It is time seen essentially as space, as a kind of Cartesianspacecomprising invariant measurablelengths that can be moved along, forwards and backwards as objects can move along the dimensions of space. Objects are viewed as contained within and strung out along the dimensions of absolute time and sDace. The socialscienceshave historically insistedon the radical distinction between this natural time and what is often known as socialtime. However, most of what they have seen as specifically social time is now comnon throughout the understanding of the physicalworld [Adam 1990). What socialsciencehad treated asthe specifically'human' aspectsof time seemsnow to characterize time within twentieth-century physical sciences. Einstein showed that there is no fixed or absolute time independent of the system to which it refers. Time he saw as a local, internal feature of any system of observation and measurement. It varies on where and how it is measured.There is no objectiveabsolutemeasurementof time. It can be stretched and shnrnk. Furtheq, E,instein demonstrated that time and space are not separatefrom each other but are fused into a four-dimensional time-space curved under the influence of mass [Coveney and Highfield 1990). Amongst various consequencesare the posstbility that the past could catch up with the future and espectally the possibilitiesof time travel. In his How to Build a Time MachinePaul Davies (2001b) entertaininglydescribesthe logical possibilities of travelling through time down what is called a 'wormhole,.

l8

Time and Space Most of the social sciencespresume that they deal with historical phenomena,while the physicalworld dealswith ahistoricaltimeless phenomena. In this section I show how twentieth-century science transformed the understanding of time in the physical world. The physical and social sciencesnow appear to employ rather similar notions of historical time (Adam 1990). lnTheWeb of Life Fritjof Capra argues that nature 'turns out to be more like human nature - unpredictable, sensitiveto the surrounding world, influenced by small fluctuations' [1996: 187). This thbrefore suggestsenormous interdependencies,parallels,overlaps and convergencesbetween analysesof the physical and of the social worlds [Prigogine 1997; Capra 7002; and, from post-structuralism, Cilliers 1998; Rasch and Wolfe 2000). The absenceof prediction does not invalidate a naturalist account of science [P. Stewart

l9

, Time and space are thus not now viewed as the container of bodiesthat happen to move along the various dimensions (Casti t994; Capra 1996; Prigogine1997). The philosopher of science

The Comolexiv Turn

The ComplexityTurn

A. N. Whitehead reflected on how twentieth'century physics would reject the notion that time and space standoutsidethe very relationsbetweenobjectsand subjects[D. Harvey 1996:256-61)' Time and space,he argues,areinternal to the processesby whlch the physical and socialworlds themselvesoperate,helping to constitute their very powers. Such a view leads to the thesis that there is not a singletime but multiple times and that such times appear to flow. In the best-selling A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking summarizes how: 'Space and time are now dynamic qualities: when a body moves, or a force acts,it affects the curvature of space and time - and in turn the structure of space-time affectsthe way in which bodies move and forces act' [1988: 33). Quantum theory generally describesa virtual state in which electrons appear to try out instantaneouslyall possible futures before settling into particular patterns. Quantum behaviour is instantaneous,simultaneous and unpredictable.The interactions between the parts are far more fundamental than the parts themselves.Bohm refers to this as the occurrenceof a dance without dancersfsee Zohar and Marshall 1994). Conventional notions of causeand effect do not apply within an indivisible whole where the interrelations between the parts are more fundamental than the individual parts. Really there are no parts at all as understood in mechanistic,reductionist thinking. There are only relationships, or, as Capra expressesit:'the objects themselvesare networks relationships,embedded in larger networks . . . the relationships are primary' [1996: 37). Relationality is key here, a notion I will often return to. Chrono-biology,or the biology of time, alsoshowsnot only th human societiesexperiencetime or organize their lives through time, but alsothat rhythmicity is a crucial principle of each organism and its relationshipswith its e'nvironment.Humans and other animals themselves appear to be 'clocks'. Plants and animals possessa system of time that regulatestheir functions on a twentyfour-hour cycle. Recent researchhas revealedtimekeeping genes. Biological time is thus not confined to ageing but expressesthe nature of biological beings as temporal, dynamic and cyclical. Change in living nature involves the notions of becoming and rhythmicity. Adam arguestherefore that: 'Past,present, and future, historical time, the qualitative experience of time, the structuring

,'undifferentiatedchange"into episodes,all are establishedas of inregrirltime aspectsof the subject matter of the natural sciences' r 1g9O:i 50) and are by no meansconfined to the socialworld [see )lso Prigogine1997)' fulore generally, thermodynamics shows that there is an irreversibleflow of time. Rather than there being time symmetry and indeed a reversibility of time as postulated in classicalphysics,a cleardistinction is drawn between the past and future. An arrow of time resultswithin open systemsin the lossof organizationand an increasein randomnessor disorder over time. This accumulation of disorder or positive entropy results from the Second Law of Thermodynamics[Coveney 2000). Ho'uvever,there is not a simple growth of disorder. Prigogine shorvshow new order arises,but it is far from equilibrium. There are what he terms dissipative structures, islands of new order within a seaof disorder,maintaining or even increasingtheir order at the expense of greater overall entropy. He describeshow such localizedorder'floats in disorder'(cited in Capra 1996: 184). It is non-equilibrium situations that are sources of new order, as describedbelow For example, turbulent flows of water and air, which appear chaotic, are highly organized. Matter continuously flows into the vortex funnel of a whirlpool in a bath. The system is organizationallyclosed and maintains a stable form although it is far from equilibrium. Thus there is a paradoxicalcombination of continual flow and 'for-the-present' structural stability. In g.eneral,Prigogine and Stengers maintain in Order out of Chaos that it is the 'irreversibility [of time] . . . that brings order out of chaos'fl984: 292; seealso Prigogine 1997: 164-73). The most obvious illustration of this profound irreversibility of time is the expansionof the universefollowing the singularevent ot the 'big bang' fifteen blllion or so yearsago [Coveney and Highneld 1990). It is now thought that the universebegan with such a 'big bang' without a pre-existingcause.The scieniific discovery ol.thebig bang cannotbe reconciledwith thoselawsof the physical world that see time as reversible,deterministic and involving 'classes of phenomena'.The big bang is a one-off phenomenon that is like nothing else ever to occur within the known universe. Laws of nature are thus to be treated as historical and not universal fDavies2001a).

70

21

22

The Compbxiw Turn

Moreover, the very phenomena of time and space are themselveshistorical.The big bang apparentlycreatedin that very moment both spaceand time. There was no pre-existingspacea time: 'any attempt to explain the origin of the physical unive must perforce involve an explanation of how space and ti came into existencetoo' [Davies 2001a: 57). There is therefi no 'time' before the big bang, and, iflwhen the universe ends i another singular event, time [and space) will also then cease. Sga;e and time appear to have been spontaneouslycreated,pan of the systemicnatureof the universe. They are suddenlvswitcht on, through an unpredictable and yet apparently irreversib quantum change [Hawking 1988; Coveney and Highfield 1990; Casti 1994). There are many mundane examples of irreversibihty ln th . physical world: coffee aiways cools, organisms always agl, sprin follows winter and so on. There can be no going bn&,. ,-,t ,"absorbing of the heat, no return to youth, no spring before winter and so on. According to Eddington 'The great thi"g ubo,rt time is that it goes on' fcited in Coveney and Highfield tggO: g3). The arrow or flow of time resultsin futures that are unstable,relativel unpredictableand characterizedby variouspossibilities.Althoug time is irreversible, time is both multiple and unpredlctabi Prigogine talks of the 'end of certainty' as the complexity scienc, overcome what he calls the 'two alienatingimagesof a deterministic world and an arbitrary world of pure chance' [r997: 1g9). complexity thus repudiatesthe dichotomies of deteiminism ani chancg as well as nature and society,being and becoming, stasi, and change.Physicalsystemsdo not exhibit and sustain.tnlhu.,g ing structural stability. The complexity sciences elaborate hc there is order and disorder within all physical and social ph nomena,including, accordingto Kauffrnan [1993), within evolu tion itself Systemsare thus seen by complexity as being ,on the edge of chaos'.order and chaos are in a kind of balancewhere the components are neither fully locked into place but yet do not fully dissolveinto anarchy.chaos is not complete anarchicrandomness but there is a kind of 'orderly disordei' present within all such dynamic systems(seeHayles l99l, l9g9).

The ComplexityTurn

LJ

Emergent Properties A further consequence of this flowingness of time is that mrlor changesin the past are able to produce potentially massiveeffects in the presentor future. Such small events are not,forgotten,. chaos theory in particular rejects the common-sensenoti,onthat only large chan^gesin causes produce large changes in effects. Following a perfectly deterministic set of .rr1"r, ,r.rp-.edictableyet patternedresultsc-anbe generated,with small causeson occasions producinglarge effects and vice versa.The classicexample is the butterfly eFfect that was accidentally discovered by Lorenz rn 1961.It was shown that miniscule changesat one iocation can theoreticallyproduce, if modelled by thiee coupled non-linear equations,very large weather effects very far in time and/or space from the original site.of the hypothetical wings flapping fcasti 1994: 96; Maasen and Weingart 2000: g3+'). Sol,rtior,, tt the equationsin question are thus extremely sensitiveto the specification of the initial conditions. .To express this point rather simply, there is no consistent relationship between the cause and the effect of some event. Rather,relationshipsbetween variables can be non-linear with abrupt switches occurring, so the same ,cause, can in specific produce quite different kinds of effect. Capra :t-rcuTstalces describes how much of the physical world is characterizedby 'non-linearity':'Nonlin"u. ph".ro-ena dominate much of the inanimateworld than we had thought, and they are an -o." essential aspectof the network pattern of liir.rg systems'Ir996: l22). Experimentson the pop.rl"tio., size of insect colonies show dramatic non-linear changesoccurring through often smalr changes and in tlie degree oF ou"...o*dtng of that colony i:^b*h 1a!es C."r,i 1994: 934). Ovei time the insect popul"tto., dramati_ l::,: and then falls with no movement ttwards any point of )1111,.Itr:r r _ q U l l l b r i u m. \I

there has been in western societiesa historical ,^_rrevertheless vtcotspositionto kinds of explanation that posit a single central Sovernor;that such explanationsappear . . . more natural and conceptually simpler than global, in;;ractive accounts, (Fox Keller

1A LA

The Complexi4t Turn

1985: 155). However,what in the end should convinceare expla nations that do capture this 'complexly interactive' nature systemsas a whole [Fox Keller 1985: 157J. Complexity investi gatesthe physicsof such populationsand their emergent,dynami and self-organizingsystemic properties [Prigogine1997: 35). S systemsare unstable.A particular agent rarely produces a sin and confined effect. Interventions or changeswill tend to produ an array of possible effects right acrossthe system in questi (sometimes known as side effects). Prigogine describes system effects as 'a world of irregulaq chaotic motions' [1997 155; seealso,on'system effects',Jervis1997). This notion of the non-linear or comolexitv involves t crucial presumptions.First, there is no necessaryproportionali between 'causes'and 'effects' of events or ohenomena. Seco there is no necessaryequivalence between the individual a statisticallevels of analysis.Thus what may characterizethe indi vidual will typically be very different from what is true at t statistical or system level. Third, the statistical or system effec are not the result of adding together the individual componen There is something else involved, normally known as emergen fJervis1997: ch. 2). These points can be illustrated from the simple example of pile of sand.If we considersuch a pile and place an extra grain o sandon top, then the extra grain (the 'cause')either may stay the or it may cause a small avalanche.The system is self-organi without a 'central governor' and the effects of a particular loca change can be enormously different (Cilliers 1998: 97). There i 'self-organizedcriticality' fwaldrop 1994: 304-6), with the pi of sand maintaining itself at the critical height. It is impossible predict what the consequenceswill be of particular locali actions.The effects of the same 'cause' can be microscooic or elobal. The central idea is that of 'emergence',that there are collective properties of all sorts of phenomena.Cohen and Stewart say that there are those 'regularitiesof behaviour that somehow seem to transcendtheir own ingredients'[1994: 237; seealso Byrne 1998: ch. 3). It is not that the sum is greater than the size of its parts but that there are system effects that are somehow different from its parts. Complexity examines how components of a systern

The ComplexiN'furn

25

their interaction'spontaneously'develop collectivepropthrough patterns,even simple properties such as colour, that do "t implicit within, or at least not implicit in the same way, "rii"r l^l ."em inclividualcomponents. ,rtrfrt" "-ThLrs the flavour of sugar is not present in the carbon, hydroa1d oxygen atoms that comprise it. The sublime taste of -on l"-"uonnuir" is so different from its mundane components fCapra Zg, Cilliers 1998).The interdependentparts of a jumbo jet, ig,siO, ihrougl-ttheir very particular incredibly complex combination, 'plane' to fly. These ,rodu." the emergent property of enabling a that are not present non-linear consequences all striking "re within, or reducible to, the very many individual componentsthat cornprisesuch activities (Jervis 1997). Suchlarge-scalepatternsor propertiesemergefrom, but are not reducibleto, the micro-dynamicsof the phenomenon in question. Thus gasesare not uniform entities but comprise a seethingconfusionof atoms obeyingthe laws of quantum mechanics.The laws governinggasesderive not from the behaviour of each individual atom but from their statistical patterning fCohen and Stewart 1994: 232-31. The statistical pattern is different from and irreducible to the individual components.The key issueif that of relationality,a dance almost without dancers,accordingto Bohm. Also, if a system passesa particular threshold with minor changesin the controlling variables,switches may occur and the emergentproperties switch or turn over. Thus a liquid turns into a gasor relatively warm weather suddenly transformsinto an ice age[Cohen and Stewart 1994:21;Byrne 1998:23). Leadingnonlinear scientist Nicolis summarizes how in a non-linear system: 'addlng two elementary actions to one another can induce dramatic new effects reflecting the onset of cooperativity between the constituent elements.This can give rise to unexpected structures and events whose properties can be quite different from thoseof the underlyingelementarylaws'fl995: 1-2J. Moreover,there is the'trap of linearity'(1. Stewart 1989: 83). ^so, although statisticiansare aware of these complex and emergent properties, given the conventional 'repressionof the nonlinear', these normally get referred to and reduced to so-called nteraction effects. But this is problematic, since, according to Byrne,'complexity is locked away in the interaction term' [1998:

The Complexity Turn

The ComplexityTurn

20.).In order to eiaboratesuch interaction effects and to unlock that complexity, further concepts are necessary,especially to separate out the different kinds of complex 'interconnections' characterizingphysical and indeed social systems.

take the system away from any point of equilibrium [Byrne ''ay l!)98: 26-9). Either such a spacemay be indeterminatewithin the boundariesor there may be various setsof boundaries. This dynamic instability can be seen in the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.fsee its two-dimensional representation in Capra 1996: 133). Such attractorsare immenselysensitivein the effects generatedto slight variationsin their initial conditions.Thus 'very imall differences in the value of control parameters at the bifurcation point determine which of two radically different trajectoriesthe system settlesinto' fByrne 1998: 28). And, as iteration occurstime and time again,so an unstableand unpredictablepatterned disorder developsthat can be mathematicallymodelled. It is impossibleto predict which point in such spacethe trajectory of an attractor will pass through, even though there are deterministic laws involved. Much recent sciencehas been concerned to characterizethe shaping or topology of such strange attractors. Iterationsin non-linear systemsresult in valuesthat topologically produce a kind of repeated stretching and folding effect, often knorvn as the 'baker transformation' [Capra 1996: 132). These attractorspresuppose complex mathematics and massive computerizedcalculationsof the sort that has only been possiblesince the early 1970s. Central to the patterning of attractors in time and spaceare the different kinds of feedback mechanisms.Early cybernetic research under the auspicesof the Macy Conferencesin the post-second Worid War period emphasizedthe importance of negative feedback loops.These would have the effect of restoring the homeostatic functioning of whatever system was under examination. Such systemsof circular causality involved the processingof information that resulted in the re-establishmentof equilibrium and stabllity through negativefeedback. However, in later systemsformulations, of complexity or the non-linear, positive feedback loops are examined. These are viewed as exacerbating initial stressesin the system, so rendering it unable to absorb shocks and re-establishingthe original equilibrium [on the history of cybernetics,see A"yl", tOOO).Very stronginteractionsoccur between the parts of a system and there rs an absenceof a central hierarchicalstructure able to 'govern' outcomes.Positive feedback occurs when a change tendency is

26

Attractors In particular, the emergenceof patterning within any given system stems from 'attractors'. If a dynamic system does not move over time through all possibleparts of a potential or phase spacebut instead occupies a restricted part of it, then this is said to result from an attractor (Capra 1996: ch. 6). The simplest attractor is a point, as with the unforced swingingof a pendulum with friction. The simple system reaches the single point attractor. Metaphorically it can be said that 'the fixed point at the centre of the coordinate system"attracts"the trajectory' (Capra 1996: 130J. A somewhat more complex example is a domestic central heating/air conditioning system where the attractor consists,not of a single point, but of a specified range of temperatures.The relationship is not linear but involves what are called negatiue feedback mechanisms.These feedbacksminimize deviance and reestablisha specified range of temperatures.It is impossible to predict exactly what the precise temperature will be - only that it will lie within the rangethat constitutesthe attractor.Topologically this attractor is like a doughnut, a system close to equilibrium in which effective negative feedback loops always bring the temperature back within the range specified within the system. This is a self-regulating and bounded system where negative feedback is crucial. Byrne suggeststhat this is analogousto social sciencestudiesof Fordism [see Byrne 1998: Z8). An attractor and set of feedback mechanisms have for decades kept so-called Fordist societieswithin the range of possiblealternativeswithin the doughnut ring and did not permit such societies to stray beyond the limits of the system in question. In certain complex systems,though, there are 'strange attractors'. These are unstablespacesto which the trajectory of dynamical systemsis attracted through biilions of iterations.What are important here are positiue feedbacks occurring over time that

27

28

The Comobxiw Turn

The ComplexityTurn

reinforced rather than dampened down, as occurs with the negative feedback involved in a cybernetic central heating/airconditioningsystem. A socialscienceapplication of positive feedbackcan be seenin the economic and sociologicalanalysesof the increasingreturns that can occur acrossa whole industry or activity. This can lay down irreversiblepath dependencewhere contingent events set into motion institutional patterns that have long-term deterministic properties [Mahoney 2000: 507). One example of this would be the way the privately owned 'steel-and-petroleum'car developed in the last decade of the nineteenth century and came to exert an awesome domination over other fuel alternatives, especially steam and electric power that were at the time preferable (Motavalli 2000). The 'path dependence'of the petroleum-based car was establishedand sot'locked' in. Compiexity theory generallyanalysessystemsas unstable,dissipativestructures.They are thermodynamicallyopen and capable of assimilating large quantities of energy from the environmen and simultaneously converting it into increasedstructural complexity (Reed and Harvey 1992: 360-2). Such systemsalso dissipate into their environment hieh levels of residualheat. Such dissipative systemsreach points of bifurcation when their behaviour and future pathways become unpredictable and new higher order, more differentiated, structures may emerge. Dissipative structures involve non-linearity,a flowingnessof time, no separationof systemsand their environment, and a capacity for the autopoeitic re-emergence of a new ordering far from any system equilibrium [Capra 1996: 89, 187). Systems appear to have the capability of reordering themselves into complex structuresfollowing points of bifurcation. "u"i -o.e Maturana and Varela famously developed the notion that any such systems are self-making or autopoietic [Maturana l98l; Mingers 1995). Such autopoiesisinvolves the idea that living systems entail a process of self-making or self-producing. Autopoiesis involves a network of production processesin which the function of each componenr is to participate in the production or transformationof other componentsin the network. In this way the network comes to make itself It is produced by the components and these in turn produce the components.In a living

the product of its operation is its own organization,with systen-r of boundariesspecifiiingthe domain of its operadevelopment lire dgll-t self-making system as such (Capra 1996: tions and _the 98; Flayles1999: ch. 6). Autopoiesis can be seen in non-linear laser theory where the coordinationof the required emissionsis seen as carried out by the laserlight itself through ongoingprocessesof self-organization (capra 1996: 91-2). tt can also be seen in the nature oF urban growth. Small local preferencesmildly expressedin the concerns of individuals,such as wanting to live with those who are ethnically similat can lead to massively segregatedneighbourhoods such as those characteristicof large American cities. Krugman arguesthat residential patterns are unstable in the face of .uridoperturbations:'local,short-rangeinteractionscan createlarge-scale Iself-organizing]structure' [1996: l7). More generally,in the socialsciencesLuhmann has most elaboratedthe implications of autopoiesisfor examining the long-term functioning of social systems. Thus far I have set out some of the key notions in the sciences of complexiti'. I have_briefly outlined the following .o.r."pi, ,,".essaryfor analysingthe physical and socialworlds: multipie times and spaces;the unpredi,ctabrlity and irreversibility of ti-e; order and chaos;non-linear effects;emergence;bifurcation; negative and positive feedback; self-organization; and various attractors. In the rest of this chapter some important usesof complexity found in analyses that interrogatecertain material worlds will be examined. in subsequentchapterselementsof complexity will be connected to the very influential global debatesnow creating'chaos' across manl' socialsciences.

29

Complex Systems ttgn: beginby_notingthat thereis an emergrng.structure of I", both signifies and enhln"ces (Williams l-."ji*_,,h:t -complexity t trrift 1999).such an emergentstructureinvolvesa greater l "J; conringentopenness availableto people,corpoiations ::",t- "f orrcl of the diversity of geographies, of a charity to_societies, wardsobjectsand nature,of ihe diir".L and variegatedpattern_

The ComolexiwTurn

The ComplexiwTurn

ing of relationships,households and persons,and of the sheer increase in the hyper-complexity of products, technologies and socialities[Rycroft and Kash 1999: 55; Thrift 1999: 53-9; Duffield

orocessside of technology.The authors conclude that 'it is now norm"l for both product and process innovation to emphasize 2jjustment and adaptation through continuous feedback' fRycroft and Kash 1999: 55). Such systems thus increasingly involve hardware, software and 'socialware'. Products and constitute systemsthat cannot be understood without Drocesses features.Thus there are increasinglycomplex organizational social systems or what I term material worlds. socio-technical Rycroft and Kash examine how there has been a huge shift towardscomplexity in contemporaryeconomies.Even in 1970 the rnost valuable products in world trade were still simple products such as clothes,papet yarn, meat, producedby simple processes, coffee and so on. But a mere quarter of a century late1,only 14 per cent of the most valuable items in world trade are such simple productsproduced by simple processes. By t 995 nearly two-thirds most valuable products in world trade involved complex of the processesand complex products, involving vast numbers of components, cybernetic architectures and socio-technical systems fRycroft and Kash 1999: 56-7). This 'increasing complexity of products and processes with the greatest export value . . . is linked with self-organizing networks.Such network organizational systemsare continuously selfreproducing themselves by developing the most sophisticated skills and structures necessary to innovate technologies that overcomeobstacles,or create new pathways' [Rycroft and Kash 1999:6l-2). They go on to connect such self-reproductionto the importance of positive feedback and organizational learning within socio-technicalsystemsor networks. if the history of recent technology shows the impossibility ot^But c.onceivingof 'technologies'as merely non-human, so Stephen t5udiansky's Nature'sKeepers(1995) developsan excoriatingcritique of preserving apparently eternal and wild 'non-h.rman' nature.'Strict preservationthrough a hands-off or "natural" mana8ementpolicy has destroyed many of the very things that nature roversclaim to value the most' [Budiansky 1995: 8). Thus there ts no such thing as 'nature'sbalance', no real or primordial nature that would be in equilibrium if only humans had not intruded. It ts shown how the effects of humans are subtly and irreversibly woven into the very evolution of landscape. Countless forms of

30

2 00 1 ). Complexity has already had a significantimpact upon a huge range of social and intellectual discoursesand practices,including alternative healing, architecture, consultancy, consumer design, economics, defence studies, fiction, garden design, geography, history literary theory, management education, New Age, organizational learning, philosophy, post-structuralism, sociology, stockcar racing, town planning and so on. Notions of chaos an complexity move in unpredictable ways from discourse to discourse, practice to practice, creating on occasionsa sense of 'chaoscult' [Maasen and Weingart 2000: 125). However, while most of the non-physical scienceshave 'gon global' in the past decade,the major sociologicalapplicationso complexity remain strangely'societal'[see Luhmann 1990, 1 Reed and Harvey 1992; Baker 1993; Francis1993; Mingers 199

Keil and Elliott 1996;Eve et al. 1997;Biggs1998;Byrne 1998 Cilliers 1998;Hayles1999;Rycroftand Kash 1999;Medd 2000 Capra 2002). And yet this is paradoxical, since 'complexity' practices themselves be conceptualized as a self-organizingglobal ne Chaos/non-linear/complexityresearchersdeploy the techniq of PR and branding, international meetings, guru worship, net working especially centred on certain nodes such as Santa Fe the various Research Institutes named after Prigogine, and

extensiveuse of global media [Waldrop 1994; Thrift 1999 MaasenandWeingart2000). We can begin here by noting how Robert Rycroft and Don Kash inThe ComplexityChallenge[1999: ch.4) examine the complex ity of the material worlds that are involved in various technological systems.They note that there has been a huge increasein sheer number of components within products. The Eli Whitney musket of around 1800 had fifty-one components, while the space shuttle of the late twentieth century contained ten million' Second, there is the massive increase in the cybernetic contribution performed by architectures that integrate components through feedback loops, both in products such as cars, and in the

3l

The ComplexityTurn

The Complexity Turn

human habitation have affected all such systemsover the millennia, especiallythe extensive and regular use of fire by original dwellers to clear land for primitive agriculture [as with native Americans in the USA). And any ecologicalsystem is immensely complex so that there are never straightforward policies tha simply restore nature's balance.Ecologicalsystemsare always on the edge of chaos without a 'natural' tendency towards equili rium, even if all humans were to depart forever from the

efTectsthat made the speciesweaker than it had inltially been fBudiansky1995: I 60-l). This stunning unpredictability of the material world can also be seen from how even roadside and urban environments have beconre sites in whlch rapidly expanding and apparently irreversible populations of various animal and plant species have dramatically emerged. These are sites that are well away from what would appear to be the 'natural' habitats of such species. The 'urban' and the 'wild' are no longer exclusive categories fBudiansky1995; Clark 2000; Davis 2000a). Thus rats and foxes are plentiful within European cities, while, around Los Angeles, coyotes,skunks, squirrels, rats, killer bees,wild dogs, racoons and even mountain lions are rapidly increasing in numbers as they switch from specific predation to a broader-basedopportunistic feeding- in the case of lions, now feeding on small rodents, pets, human garbageand increasinglyhumans (on'non-linear lions', see Davis 2000a:249). Through a non-linear reading of the turbulent 'city', Clark argues that 'in the very heartland of the social . . . there is a resurgenceof "nature", and efflorescenceof "life"' [2000: 29). There is a material world emerging in cities that is mobile, volatile andwe might say cosmopolitan.There is no silent,docile 'nature', especiallywhen confronted by new forms of 'culture'. Indeed, there are various emergent hlghly adaptable viruses,such as Aids and ebola,new superbugs,newly lethal pathogenssuch as prions, andthe reappearanceofTB, cholera and the bubonic plague.Such a medicalized 'apocalypse now' stems from novel patterns of glohal travel and trade, the heightened ineffectiveness of antibioticsthat encounter increased'iesistance', and the development of new powerful risk cultures beyond and especially within 'medicine' itself [Van Loon 2002: ch. 6). This echtes De Landa's more general analysisof cities. He conceivesof them as complex, oynamic and open systems containing exceptional flows and mixtures of the organic and the inorganic, the living and the non-living, the human and the non-human, culture and nature, the risky and the risk free [De Landa 1997; Clark 20001. ._ Mike Davis's Ecologtof Fro, examines one such city in detail. He concentratesupoiome of the emergent material-social intercnanges occurring in and around the paradigm twenty-{irst

JZ

1995:11). fB udiansky

Indeed many ecologicalsystemsthemselvesdepend not upon stable relationships but upon massiveintrusions, of extraordinary flows of species from other parts of the globe and of fire, lightning, hurricanes, high winds, ice storms, flash floods, frosts, earthquakes and so on. The "'normal" state of nature is not one balanceand repose;the "normal" stateis to be recoveringfrom last disaster' (Budiansky 1995: 71). And it is such disasters, swirling pattern of constant change,that produces the rich diver' sity of niches where micro-habitats can develop, although these developments can only be seen over very lengthy peri of time. These periods are often much longer than the lives particular researchersor of research programmes. It is therefo instability and change that makes for diversity and not a stab unchanging'nature' in some supposedstate of equilibrium. So, Prigoginebeganto show in the 1960s,systemscan be ordered b far from equilibrium. Moreovel, the population size of a speciesshows no to stability, and especially not to rise smoothly to the presu carrying capacity of its environment and then to level off a remain stable. Rather populations of most speciesdemonstra extreme unevenness,with populations often rising rapidly when introduced into an area and then almost as rapidly collapsing [Jervis 1997: 28). The food consumption of animal species respondsin a non-linear and time-laggedfashion to changingcircumstancesand this produces massiveunevennessof population size with no natural or equilibrium size [see Budiansky 1995: 90-5). Indeed, the chaotic properties of biological systemsalso make predictions of what favours the protection of a particular species pretty well impossible. Most interventions designed to protect some particular speciesactually triggeredunforeseenside

33

-^

The ComplexityTurn

century city, Los Angeles (Davis 2000a; ch. l). What was thought of as the l,and of Sunshine is being reinvented as ApocalypseTheme Park.Between 1992 and i995 in Los Ange

floods were followed by riots, by floods, by firestorms,by tornado,by an earthquake andby floodsagain.Nearlytwo milli people were affected by disaster-relateddeath, injury or dam to home and business.Half a million people left the city withi two years.Southern California is characterizedby the catastrophic coincidenceof extreme events. Moreover, this is not a random disorder but a dynamic pattern of escalatingfeedback loops resulting from the pattern of urban sprawl. Conditions that have produced this include the widespreadgrowth of what has been called'slopingsuburbia',the overwhelming use of the automobile, the lack of public space,th concreting of the river basin, the building of houses in ecologically unsuitable areas,as well as global warming more generally. Extreme events,especially extreme weather events, demonstrate, according to Davis, 'the principle of nonlinearity where small changesin driving variablesor inputs - magnified by feedback can produce disproportionate,or even discontinuous,outcomes' (2000a:19). Malibu, the wildfire capital of North America, is particularly illustrative here fDavis 2000a: ch. 3). Various interdependent causeshistorically produce a particular intensity of fires in this area.What seems most significant is the non-linear relationshi between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fires that are generated. Filty-year-old trees burn fifty times more intensely than twenty-year-old trees. Howeve4, because of the highly influential residentsliving in the Malibu region, there has been since I9l9 a policy of 'total fire suppression'.This has the effect that the smaller fires that are beneficial in recycling nutrients do not take place,and more importantly the bulk of trees in the area are much older and more intense in the fires that they subsequentlyproduce. So the limitation on small fires results in greater and larger fires subsequently.And, further, the extreme fires that are intermittently generated transform the chemical structure of the soil, turning it into a water-repellentlayer that dramatically acceleratessubsequent sheet flooding and erosion [Davis 2000a: 100-3). Extreme fire events and massiveflooding

The ComplexityTurn

35

follovr,in a non-linear way from the intervention to prevent those iimit"d fires that would otherwise constitute a routine feature of the Malibu ecosystemin l-os Angeles. This example shows that certain kinds of cause can senerate hugeend unpredictablechangewhile orher examples*ould ,ho* that external causescould generatealmost no significanteffects. There is, therefore,a lack of proportionality bet*""n 'causes'and ,effects',although we should bear in mind that there are really no as causes that things are'external' to such a system. such The characterof such systemsis specificallyexplored in charles Perrow's Normal Accidents. He argues that, given certain system characteristics,multiple, unexpected and interacting failures are systemicallyinevitable [Perrow 1999: 5; see also Jervis 1997). Such accidentswill occur when the system is tightly coupled, so that processeshappen very fast and cannot be turned off whe' the failed parts cannot be isolated and when there is no other way ro ke-epthe systemgoing.With such tightly coupled systems, recoveryfrom the initial disturbance that may lravebeen reiatively trivial is impossible.The consequences will spreadquickly,chaotically and irreversibly throughout the system, so pioducing 'systemaccidents'rather than accidentscaused bv individual error (Perrow 1999: I l). In loosely coupled systemsby contrast there is plenty of slack in terms of time, resourcesand organizationalcapacity.-Theyare much lesslikely to produce normal accidentssinie rncidents can be .coped with, so avoiding the interactive complexity found within the dghtly coupled system. in the latter, moreoveq, the ettects are non-linear. Up to a point, tightening the connections between elements in the system i,-r.r""se" efficiency when -ill works smoothly. But, if one small item goes wrong, lverything then that can have a catastrophicknock-on effect throuehout the The system literally switches over; from smooth [unc_ :)/stem ttoning to interactively complex disaster. And sometimes this r_esultsf1o1 a supposed improvement in the system. Thus safety.withina car through the regalryenforcedwearing :Tptoy"q or seatbelts,or the enhanced safety systemson the Titanic,or the systems in raiiway signaiilng, cu.r,in very particular condiilft,V ttons,produce correspondingly more da.,gerouibehaviour and an tncreasedlikelihood of 'normal accidents' [Adams 1995; Jeri,is

The ComplexityTurn

The Complexity Turn

1997: 68-9). What we might call the Titanic effect is a good of systems[on comexample of the 'complex interconnectedness' plexity theory, see Perrow 1999: 386). As Law maintains,on the basis of research on train crashes,'system perfection is not only impossible but, more strongly, it may be selfdefeating' (2000:14). On occasions,system fluidities or imperfections are essential for 'safety' becauseof the complex characteristicsof the system in question. There are some parallelsbetween issuesof system safety and the curious kinds of cooperation found between American stock-car drivers travelling at up to 190 m.p.h. on super-speedwaysfRonfeldt 2001). These racers both cooperate and compete according to complex and emergent sets of rules.The drivers self-organizeinto cooperative draft lines and then intermittently form competitive break-out lines.They use radio communications to generateinformation and especially to seek out allies. According to Ronfeldt, 'this creates a fast-moving, dynamic structure, or system, that exhibits a kind of order - oscillating lines in front of a milling pack, tightly coupled and fraught with nonlinear processes- that is often on the verge ofcriticality, chaosand catastrophe'(2001: l7). Such stock-car racing could be seen as emblematic of US society. It involves peculiar combinations of cooperation and competition and resultsin complex systemoutcomes. More generally,Manuel De Landa'sAThousandYears of Nonlinear History fl997) examines through the prism of complexity different kinds of systemic organization, especiallyof 'meshworks' for networks of networks) and of hierarchy. He is especially concerned with the organization and consequencesof the flows o various materials,especiallyof energy,genesand languages.Where such flows were dominated by 'hierarchical'homogenization [or tight couplingJ, as occurred through centuries of Chinese history then explosive, self-organizing urban development did not take place. I[ is only with meshworks and a resulting 'freedom of motion' and 'maximum mobility' that a 'dynamic pattern of turbulent urban evolution in the West' occurs, involving intense and productive flows of energy, transportation and money [Braudel 1973: 396-7; De Landa 1997:3445). Cities are sites of interchange between various intersecting flows - and some cities develop the capacity for self-organization and massive growth.

Laer I argue_that it is only with such mobilities that complex systemsdevelop in the 'social' world - through combinations of rnobility and moorings. \4ore generally, De Landa develops a wide-ranging analysis of bodies, selves,cities and societies.He views these as merelv 'transitory hardenings' in the more basic flows of minerals, g..r"r, diseases,energy, information, and language that over the past millennium have swept acrossthe earth's crust [De Landa ]997: 259-60). In examining 'global complexity', similar analysesare developedof the flows of such intersecting and non-lin".. ,-"terial worlds' that intermittently realize 'transitory hardenings'.

36

37

Conclusion Thus a wide array of complexity formulations has been introduced here; and a number of illustrative studies drawn on to suggestthe usefulnessof these approachesbeyond the physical and blological sciences Such complexity analysesalso emphasize that scientific observations are themselves components of the systemsbeing investigated.There is nothing outside the system. Hence the notions of complex systems undermine certain 'realist' formulations that speakof an 'external world'. As Heisenberg expressesit: 'What we observeis not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning' fcited in Capra 1996: 40). This connectednessof sciencewith its system of investigation has two major implications for what follows. First, we need to ask lf the particular physical and/or social systempresentsitself to the current practicesof social sciencein ways that mean it can be systematicallyobserved and analysed. What are the conditions of possibility of a scienceof that ,yrt".r, or systemsin question?What forms could it take given the current observational,measurementand theoretical practicesof contemporary science?Second,we should ask if these practicesof investigation themselves produce complex effects upon the system in question, in casesresulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy where researchfindings help to bring about the very effects that they are themselvesinvestigating.

38

The Complexi4tTurn

Both these points are pertinent to global systems.First, the enormously open character of global systems might mean that they are currently beyond systematicanalysis.One could hypothesize that current phenomena have outrun the capacity of the social sciencesto investigate.We should ask whether the global is constituted as a fit object of [social) scienceinvestigation.Are the observational,measurementand theoreticalresourcesup to investigating the enormously complex characterof global systems?My proposal here is that social scienceneeds all the help that it can get to analysesuch systems.This explainsthe necessityto turn to some of the theoretical resourcesof complexity that are centrally concerned with the processesof large-scaleemergence.It seems reasonable to consider how and in what ways such complexity notions may pertain to examining the many processesof global emergence. Second,the proliferation of huge numbers of 'global' analyses has in a way become part of the very system being investigated. They are helping to perform the global in part in a self-fulfilling manner. One element then of what needs investigation are the multiple ways in which acrossvarious systemsthe global comes to be performed through arguments, images, books, TV programmes,symposia,magazinesand information that increasingly represent, speak and perform 'the global' [see Franklin et al.

2000).

In the next chapter I consider certain of these analysesof the global. I show that most are as yet insufficiently 'complex', while in subsequent chapters I develop the notion of 'global complexity', as the complexity turn in the social sciencesis explored and hopefully enhanced.

3 Limits of 'Global'Analvses

Introduction In this chapter I show the limitations of many globalization analysesthat deal insufficiently with the complexcharacter of emergent global relations.This is on the face of it surprising,because the paradigm of globalization would seem to connect to com_ plexity ways of thinking, even where the languageand techniques of complexity are not explicitly deployed Self-evidently,the analysis of globalization emphasizesthat events happening in one piace importantly lmpacl upon many other places, often remote in time and in rpu." 1fo. details, see Goerner l9_94).Giddens defined globalization as early as 1990: .the intensificationof worldwide socialrelationswhlch link distant localitiesin such away that local happeningsare shaped by events occurring_manymiles away and vice versa, [1990: 64). The analysisof globalizationbrings out the obvious lnterdeperriencies oetweenpeoples,places,organizationsand technological systems stretchingacrossthe world. These interdependencies involue econlnli:, social,political and military happenings. With the analysis of globalizationno place'is an island'. ' Complexity-researcher Chris Langton further maintained that: ,rrom the interaction of the individual components. . . emerges somekind of property . . . somethingyou .orrldn't have predicted rrorn what you know of the component parts. . . . And ihe global property, this emergent behaviour feeds back to influence the

40

Limits of 'Global' Analyses

behaviour . . . of the individuals that produced it' [cited Thrift 1999: 33-4; see alsoWaldrop 1994: 329). Globalizationanalyses should bring out theseglobal emergentproperties,such asthe fortunes of the world economy or global environmental change or cultural homogenization through the global media or the worldwide spreadof representativedemocracies[see Held et al' 1999). Within sociology the analysisof such global properties seems to'solve' the debate between those advocatingstudying the social whole [methodological holists) and those advocating the explanation of social phenomenathrough accountsthat begin with the individual [methodological individualists).There appearsto be a new level of the social whole, the global, with emergent properties that are clearly not those of individuals, nor could be reduced in any sense to individuals. The study of the global level would appearto solve the problem of the relationshipbetween structure and agency,with the former'winning' the argument. However, this book is premised upon the idea that many globalization analysestreat the emergent global properties as too unified and as too powerful. Their analysisis simplified, static and reductionist. This can be seen in formulations that state that 'globalization'is x or alternativelythat 'globalization'doesx. The advocatesof, and the critics of globalization 'assume a too linear trajectory of globalizationand . . . make the paper tiger of globalizationinto a nasty and invincible bogeyman' [R. Keil 1998: 619). 'Globalization' I suggestis neither unified nor can act as a subject nor should it be conceivedof in linear fashion.

Regions, Networks and Fluids Thus I examine the idea of the global in terms of the distinctions between 'regions,networks and fluids' made by Annemarie Mol and John Law [l994; see also Urry 2000b). These distinctionsare drawn on to bring out the varied spatial patterns or topologies that characterizediverse'global' systems.What do these terms mean? First, there are regionsin which objects are clustered together' Regionsare defined in terms of three orthogonal coordinatesthat rp".ify each such cluster. Such a topology is familiar and regularly ,rr"d i.r analysingeach 'society'.No.*"i[y each society is deemed

Limits of 'Global' Analyses

4l

to be a region with clear and distinct boundaries drawn around each one' second, there are networlzsthat stretch across diverse regions. within a network as understood here there is a relational con_ stancy between its components.These components deliver an invariant outcome, sometimes known as 'immutable mobiles,, through the entire network crossingregional boundaries.Manv scientific communities deliver such immutable mobil., ".-r', much of the network. Third, there are fluids where 'neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimesboundaries come and go, allow leakageor disappear altogether,while relations transform themselveswlthout f.a.tr.e. Sometimes,then, social spacebehaveslike a fluid, [Mol and Law \994: 643). Such fluids slowly transmutateas they move within an.l acrossspace. Thus there are three distinct spatial patterns, region, network and fluid, and the social sciences ha,re failed tlo distinguish between them satisfactorily.In particular the idea of , fl.rid i, perhapsthe least familiar. Mol and Law use this notion to describe how anaemiais dealt with acrossthe world. Mol and Law esoeciaily show the apparent differences between the treatments of anaemiain the Netherlands compared with various African' countries.They argue that there is no simple regionardifference between its monitoring and treatment in the Netherlands compared with Africa. Nor though is there a single clinical network. operating worldwide with elements that hang together through in'ariant relations that transport the same ,anaemia, to both the Netherlands and to Africa'. Rather than either region or network, they argue that: 'We're looking at uariation without boundariesand transformationwithout discontinuity.We're looking at flows. The spacewith which we are dealing is fluid' [Mol and Law 1994: 658; emphasisin original). like blood, can be seenas a fluid, flowing in and out of"'Anaemia', different regions, across different borders, using jiverse networks. It changesas it goes,although this is often iriways that are more or lessimperceptiblcat the time. Anaemia as an illnessis ttuid-like,similar to blood, and subtectto manv transformatrons evenas itremains as'anaemia'. Fluiis rr" rrrble.i to mixtures and

42

Limitsof 'Global'Analyses

gradientswith no necessarilyclear boundaries.The objects g ated may not be clearly defined. Normality is a gradient and a clear absolute.In a fluid space it is not possible to determi identities once and for all. Various other fluids may combi together with each other; thus a 'fluid world is a world of tures' (Mol and Law 1994: 660). Fluids are not solid or sta Moreove4,fluids get around absencessuch as the location of laboratory in an African war zone and are contingent. In sh Mol and Law fl994: 664) conclude: The study of fluids, then, will be a study of the relations, repulsions and attractions which form a flow. . . . So how does anaemia flow? How does it move between the Netherlands and Africa and back again?. . . It may flow in people's skills, or as part of the attribute of devices,or in the form of written words. . . . And as it moves, it changesits shape and character.

Mol and Law thus bring out the power of the fluid to account the uneven and heterogeneousskills, technologies,interventi and tacit knowledge of those that are involved in monitoring treating anaemia in various clinics acrossthe world. The ex and power of such fluids stretching within and especially societal borders raise important questions about the power societiesfas 'regions') to implement appropriate medical t ment or functioning economies.Especiallythe fluid of 'an will take different forms as it gorges within, or trickles th any particular region. Such a fluid can be distinguishedin of the rate of flow, its uiscosity, its depth, its consistency and i degreeof confinemenrwithin certain channels.The idea of a flui is a very important notion here that provocativelycapturesas of how to think the slobal that the ideas of resion and net ignore. In the following I show how these distinctions of regio4 .,"t*o.k and fluid relate to societiesand the study of the global'

Global Regions,Networks and Flows I have shown elsewherethat social scientific work dependsu metaohors and much theoretical debate consistsof con

Limitsof 'Global'Analyses

43

different metaphors (seeUrry 2000b: ch. 21. In particuhetween ij.' ,n" sociologicalconcept of society is organized around the tl,"r"ohot of a region- namely, that'objects are clustered together l-J Uounduriesare drawn around each particular cluster' [Mol ::; art., 1994:643J There seem to be many different societies, *trtr its specific clustering of social institutions organized "u.n ii.oueh a nation state,and with a clear and policed border sur."unding each societyqua region.Societyqua bounded region has b".n ."nt.tl to notions of the nation state, democracy and citizenshiPfor the Past century or so. One approachthen to the study of globalizationis alsoto view the global as a region involved in increasinginter-regionalcompetition with each 'society'. In the 'struggle' between these two many analystspresumethat the global is winning, albeit in regions, coinphcatedways, vis-a-vis each nation-state society.This is what hasbeen called the hyperglobalistposition fsee Held et al. 1999: 3-71.For example,Martin and Schumannuncompromisinglywrite that globalization,'understoodas the unfettering of world-market forcesand the removal of economic power from the state,is for most nations a brute fact from which they cannot escape'[1997: 216).And, accordingto Ohmae (1992), there is alreadya borderlessworld of global relations with the regions of 'society' acrossthe world being wholly in retreat fsee also Fukuyama 1992;Albrow 1996).The constraintsof spaceor geographyhave been eliminated because of denationalizedflows of information. This victory of the borderlessglobal region is highly desirablefor Ohmae. Castellscharacterizesthe contemporary world not as borderless,but nevertheless poised between 'ih. n"*, informational economyworking on a global scale' [1996: 97) and'the persistence of nations and national governments, and . . . the role of governmentsin using economic competition as a tool of political slr,ategy' II996: 99). There are thus two regions and an implactbl" competition between the two. Many writers of course treat the USA as central to slobal relations and hence see a regional conflictbetween the Ailerican hegemon,on the one hanJ, and individual nation states,whether inburope, Asia or elsewhere,on the other fchase_Dunn et al. 20001. . There aie other writers who also see a war of the regions,but tn this casewhere the region of the nation state is partly capable

44

Limits of 'Global'Analyses

Limits of 'Global'Analyses

of winning vis-a-visthe region of the global. Hirst and Th []9961 particularly articulate this 'global sceptic' position maintain that the institutions of the nation state and especially state institutions do possess'causal efficacy' vis-a-visthe glol

(seeaisoMann 1997:474). However, these are limited ways of understandine the rel ship between the global and societiesbecausethey all take globalto be in somewaysa'region'.In the restof this chapter deficienciesare outlined. First, viewing the global as a regi involves the thesis of a 'territorial trap' lBrenner Ig97l. involves'a-historicalstate-centrism'in which the'national and global scalesare viewed as being mutually exclusive rather relationaland co-constitutive'fBrenner 1997: 1381.In the acc I am criticizing, the global and the national are set apart from other and then seenas involved in intense inter-regionalcom tion. This can be seen when Robertson talks of 'the worldsingle-place',of an unambiguousglobal region [cited in Franklin al. 2000: 3). Brenner arguesrather that we should examine complex setsof socialrelationsbetweenthe national and the elo They constituteeach other.In chapter 5 below the mathematics a'strangeattractor' is used to demonstratehow the global and national can be seen as co-constitutins each other. This issue can also be seen in those analvsesof each nation sovereignsociety,such as Hirst and Thompson's account [l9g of how certain regions of 'national economies and societies'c re-sistthe spreadof 'globalization'.And, analogously,in argun of the'hyperglobalists'such as Ohmae [1992), it is the g region that is overly unified and in equilibrium (see also Held al. 1999). Both accountsimply both a societal or global total tion and equilibrium.The global functions both as 'process' as'outcome',as both'cause'and'effect'.Thereis a relatedfailu to distinguish between a 'theory of globalization' fin terms analysing a complex but incomplete set of determinants) 'globalizationtheory' [where the global level appearsto acco for and to describealmost everything). Indeed,globalization not itself explain anything very much, it has been said [on 'follies of globalization theory', see Rosenberg2000). Also implicit in some of these 'regional' formulations is th spaceand time are treated as relatively static 'containers'of eco-

45

socirland politicalentitiesfBrenner1997: ]40). But in the -;e | , ,:,...^^ | : t ^ L ^ -. , -, L ^ . ^ ^ ^ ^ , -r----: L --;.,u, .hnpt"r it was shown that complexity emphasizeshow prevlou nc 'r t'r l '-

productive.,Theyare not,tiTpY flow. utd lir" una spac; lf", of 'objects',

whether social or physical. l'^.iuin"tt or dimensions 'societal'and the 'global' between the competition of i"h. no,io'l justice to the do complex, overlappingand evolvdoesnot "ooions diverse processes, between including the ways in ,"lutions iil not possess necessarily properties do that are also ro.i"ties .f;i.h global level' the ernergentat Nor do such regional notions acknowledge that the 'global' level is in fact made up of very many 'polities', not just of the nation state and the global with a 'head-to-head' competition between them [see Walby forthcoming). There are also regional blocs(NAFTA, EU), globally organizedreligions fislam, Catholic Church), international organizations[UN), international NGOs and internationaltreaties (Kyoto). There is also one (GreenpeaceJ nation-statesociety,the USA, which enjoys exceptionalcentrality within most of the networks that criss-crossthe globe fexcept curiouslyin the global game of footballl). Game'critiquesmany of theseexisting globalizationanalysesby sayingthat'this sort of Iglobalization] project is remarkablystatic andgovernedby a desirefor stasis'(1998: 42). There is a tendency to treat the global ascharacterizedby the current economic,social and political relations. However, this static view ignores what c.omplexityalso emphasizes.This is that the future is both unpredictable and yet irreversible.Will Hutto n in On the Eclgeexpresses the importance of such irreversibility when maintaining that 'changeis all-encompassing and carries a new inevitabililty; its momentum is a superior power to any other, even that of the state ' . . the force of changeis irresistible'fGiddens and Hutton Z00O: 2, 20,, especially on-no.r-linearity). For Hutton, global 'turbocapitalism' is mobile and ruthless, driving all sorti of relations irreversibly and somewhat unpredictably onwards in terms of 'shareholder' areholder' iinterests. Moreover, t he notion of a global region implies distinct boundariesbetween what is global and what is iti environment. This presumesa distinction between the global as essentially'social' and the environment as essentially :natural' (Macnaght",-, Urry 1998). Complexity theory by ctntrast ".rd maintainsthat systems

46

Limits of 'Global'AnalYses

are always located within their environment and that ther u." .o-pl"x entropic processesas a consequence.Analogousl 'global' iro."rr", should alwaysbe seen as socialand physical,a ,i-r"t".iul worlds'. There are no clear-cut and sustainablebounda ries between global social relations and the environment with which they operate. There are material worlds with a compl, irreversibility over time [see Latour 2000)' Much work within this 'regional' globalization paradigm does not interrogate the iterative character of global systems.Th system characteristics are complexly generated from billions actionsoccurring over multiple times. Hutton statesthat'there a phenomenon called globalisation' [Giddens and Hutton 2 2i; emphasisadded). But this does not do justice to the com cated and contingent array of processesoccurring iteratively time that can produce this in particular circumstances' Hutton's argument that there simply is globalization-is ba upon the conventional distinction in the social sciencesbetw ,structure' and what is 'agency'.Actions are normally see what is as 'structurally' caused,such as by the capitalist structure, patriarchal stiucture, the age structure and so on' Such a st iu.e is 'ordered' and is reproduced. But, since social systemsc change from time to time, the social scienceshave had to dra ,rpori the concept of agency to argue that some sets of human ,g"r,t, are able to 'escape'such structuresand bring about change individually [suih as leaving a violent partner) or collec"ith". through ,ay-.1"r, actions tively [such as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution). Giddens (19841, howevet saw that this was not a satisfactory way of ,rndeistanding the character of social life and social change' He developed the idea of a 'duality of structure' in order to ovefcome the limitations of the structure/agency divlde. Important in this is the recursivecharacterof sociallife. Giddens examinesthe by whlch'structures' areboth drawn on to gentemporal processes erate actions, and then are the unintended outcome of countless a recursive actions by knowledgeable agents' So, rather than a dualism between structure and agency, there is seen to be together up 'duahty' in which structure und ,g".t.y are bound and co-evolve over time [for counter-views,see Archer 1995; Mouzeliz 19951.

Limits ot''Global' Analyses

47

'complex' charflowever, Giddens insufficiently examinesthe processes. the argument Following ^-*', of thesestructure-agency l""ih" previous chapter, these processesare better understood 'recurrence'. It is iteration that *irouelr 'iteration' rather than over billions the tiniest of 'local'changescan generate, ".,"rnithat actions,unexpected,unpredictable and chaotic outrep"ated ^f they were .on]"r, sometimesthe opposite of what agentsthought not'forare ch. 8). Events 2000b: Urry about bring to [see iryi,lg system. a such ootten'in " Sr.h complex change may have nothing to do with agents seelangto change their particular world but stem from the emerging properties over time of the system as a whole. The agentsmay conduct what appear to be the same actions,indeed involving a constantimitation of the actions of others. But, becauseof the tiny modificationsthat occur in such actions,iteration can result in, through the irreverslbihty of time, transformations even in large-scalestructures. Iteration produces, on occasionsthrough dynamic emergence,non-linear changesand the sudden branching of the global order. So changecan occur without a determining'agency' producing different outcomes. The character of such iterative social interactions has been likened to walking through a rr.azewhose walls rearrange themselvesas each new step is taken [Gleick i988: 24). And as one walks,new sets of steps have to be made in order to adjust to the changinglocation of the surrounding walls of the maze. In such iterationsrelationshipsare extremely sensitiveto initial conditions.Small changesin one place [the equivalentof the butterfly's wings) can move the system into a completely different phaseand a resulting bifurcation of the system.Byrne describes suchlarge and non-linear outcomes as'the last straw [that] breaks the camel'sback' fl998: 170). They can produce radical regime change,such as the almost overnight implosion of the Soviet system following the 'small' event in 1989 of demolishing the BerlinWaii [l am unaware of compiexity analysesof the collapse ot the Soviet Empire). More generally,Zoharand Marshall [1994), using notions from quantum physics,provide further criticism of the regional conc€pts of society and of the global. They develop and advocate the concept of quantum society,describing the collapse of the

48

Limits of 'Global'Analyses

Limits of 'Global'Analyses

certaintiesof classicalphysics based upon the rigid categories absolute time and space,solid impenetrable matter and stri determinant laws of motion. As we saw in the previous chap the solid material objects of classicalphysics [and of socie dissolve at the subatomic level into wavelike oatterns of abilities, and these constitute probabilities of interconnecti Subatomic particles have no status as isolated entities but can understoodonly as interconnections.Zohar and Marshall descri 'the strange world of quantum physics, an indeterminate whose almost eerie laws mock the boundariesof space,time a matter' [1994: 33; see also Capra 1996: 30-1). Zohar and Marshall develop analogies between the w particle effects within physics and varied characteristicsof life. They argue that Quantum reality . . . has the potential to be both particle-like and wave-like. Particlesare individuals, located and measurablein space and time. They are either here or there, now and then. Waves [by contrast] are "non-local",they are spreadout acrossall of spaceand time, and their instantaneouseffects are everywhere.Waves extend themselvesin every direction at once, they overlap and combine with other waves to form new realities (new emergent wholes). (Zohar and Marshall 1994: 326J

Social life can likewise be seen as simultaneously particle-like and wavellke. Such a notion is found in Henri Lefebvre's classic The Production of Space [1991). A house, he says,can be understood in two ways. Either it is stable and immovable with starh cold and rigid outlines (as a'particle'). It is the'epitome of immovability', possessingclear and unambiguous boundaries (1991:92). It is to think of a house as a very clear and distinct 'region', to return to Mol and Law's distinctions fl994). Alternatively the house can be thought of as a 'wave', as 'permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route'. In the latter the image of immovability is 'replacedby an image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits', including visitors, electricit/, watet sewerage,deliveries, gas,telephone/computer connections, radio and televisionsignalsand so on (Lefebvrel99i:93;see also Roderick 1997; Urry 2000b: ch. 1).

49

Lefebvrealso elaborateshow commodities involve both moor,^", ortl mobile networks for particlesand waves).Commodities r tr b _

I

I

I

woulo nave he sa}s no 'reality' without such mooringsor points of insertion,or without their existing as an ensemble . . . of stores,warehouses,ships,trains and trucks and the routes used.. . . Upon this basis are superirnposed - in ways that transform, supplant or even threaten to destroyit - successivestratified and tanglednetworkswhich, though material in form, nevertheless have an existence beyond their materiality: paths, roads, railways, telephone links, and so on. ft.ef'ebvrel99l: 402-3, emphasisadded; see chapter 7 below).

Conclusion In the next chapter I develop these arguments,especiallydrawing out how various global systems can be seen as both wave- and particle-like.We should analyse,first, global waues.Through iteration over irreversibletimes 'new emergent wholes' get generated. And, second,we nced to exarninehow such wavesare made up of countlessindividual p articles,of people, social groups and networks that are resolutely 'located and measurablein spaceand time'. In later chapters I examine the very fixities in time and space that enablesuch mobilities - indeed, the more mobile the 'entity' in questionthe larger and more extensivethe immobilities. Thls distinction between global waves and particles breaks with the relativelyimmobile and fixed notion both of societyand especially of the global criticized in this chapter.Material practicesare simultaneouslyparticle-like and wavelike, moored and mobile. Their analysisdemands a set of concepts that properly capture their complex, emergent characteristicsthat take us beyond the notion of the global as 'region' criticized here.This notion stems trom the application of the relatively conventional category of region to examine the extremely unconventional phenomena of emergent global systems.In the next chapter I turn to some of these systems,analysedthrough what I call globally integrated networks and global fluids.

Networksand Fluids

4 Networks and Fluids

5l

whole (Adam 1990: 159). In the hologram the 25 ao erner8ent iLo,ra,Ieof separatecausesand effectsis inappropriate,sincecon;:.-:,i";r are simuitaneous and instantaneous.Everything implies .u"rvthing else and thus it is impossibleto conceive of the sepa'parts' of a hologram. So the hologram ,ut",-if interdependent, properties are J"n-,onr,.",es that powerful emergent or wavelike parts, nor from constituent can it be reduced to such not derived of the hologram captures how relations are oarts.The metaphor simultaneousand networked. instantaneous,

Networks

Metaphors I begin by briefly consideringwhat is an appropriatemetaphor the current global age.Pre-modern societieswere often th of metaohoricallv in terms of various animals.as well as diffe sorts of agricultural work [many are still powerful today). I modern industrial societies.dominant metaohors were those the clock, modern machinery ftrain, car, assembly line) anc photographic lens.The lens provided the metaphor for m epistemology based on the central importance of 'seeing' t world (seeUrry 2000b: chs Z, 4').With the cameralens there is one-to-one relationship between each point on the object and each point on the image of the plate or film. The metaphor of the lens implies a sequence,a separationbetween the parts of the picture and the whole picture, and a relatively extended process through time by which the image is generated and represented (seeAdam 1990: 159). By contrast,the hologram is a plausiblemetaphor for a complex informational age.Information in a hologram is not located in a particular part of it. Ratheq,any part contains,implies and resonatesinformation of the whole, what Bohm calls the 'implicate order' (cited in Baker 1993: l4Z). Hologram means 'writing the whole'. Thus the 'focus is not on individual particles in motion, crossingtime and space in succession,but on how all the information implied within a hologram is gatheredup simultaneously'

In this chapter I examine various spatial topologies,all of which involve hologram-like emergent relations that operate inand-acrossnetworks. The notion of network is also a dominant metaphorfor global times, rather than say'machine' [Kelly 1998; Rycroft and Kash 1999: 107). Indeed complexity-writer Capra arguesthat 'networks' are the key to late-twentieth-century advancesin scienceconcerned with investigatingthe 'web of life'. He maintainsthat: 'Whenever we look at life, we look at networks' [Capra 1996: 82). And, if we think that global networks are complex in order to combine say the l0 million components making up a space shuttle, then we should note that modelling weatherinvolves about I million interdependentvariablesor that the human brain contains 10 blllion nerve cells and 1,000 billion synapses[Casti 1994: ch. 3). Such networks, whether of the weathet the brain or economic and sociallife, compriseenormous numbers of messagesthat, like relations within the hologram, move in all directions simultaneously.I will considera number of characteristics of such networks. Initially, it is useful to note that there are three basic network topologies.First, there are line or chain networks with many nodes that are spread out in more or less linear fashion. Second,there are star or hub networks, where most important relationships move through a central hub or hubs.Third, there are all-channel networks,in which communications proceed in more or less all directions acrossthe network simultaneously fsee Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001: 7-8). Networks also vary as to-whether the ties

57

Networks and Fluids

within it are loosely coupled or strongly coupled, the latter being especially problematic, as we saw in chapter 2 in many safety systemsfPerrow 1999). There are both strong and weak ties in all networks, with Granovetter (1983) having shown that it is especiallythe extensive weak ties of acquaintanceshipand informational flows that are particularly central to successfuljob searches[see also Burt 1992 Z4-7). It is also argued that, where there are'srructural holes' in networks, then this allows particular opportunities for developing informational access and control (Burt lgg2). Networks also vary as to whether obligations and reciprocities acrossthe network members are one way or all ways. We should also distinguish between the connections within a network that are purely'social', basedupon face-to-faceconnections,and those that are mediated by various 'material worlds' such as telephones, media, computer networks and so on fWellman 2001). Networks also overlap and interconnect with other networks so producing what has come to be known as the strangephenomenon of it is a small world'. Watts argues that 'even when two people do not have a friend in common they are separatedby only a short chain of intermediaries' [1999: 4). These distant conneci tions are often crucial to the forming of trust across far-fl networks [see David Lodge's excoriating account [1983) of academic 'small world'). In the following it is presumed that i can be establishedwhere one network ends and another begins. But the networked connectednessof social relationshipsthat 'small-world' phenomenon indicates shows that this is not at a simple and straightforward in many cases. The power of any network can be said to stem from its size, indicated by the number of nodeswithin it, bv the densitv of net worked connections between each node, and bv the connecti that the network has with other networks. Size is the most significant determinant, becausethe value of a network does not merely increase arithmetically as more nodes are connected. Rather, 'the sum value of a network increasesas the squareof the number members' (Kelly 1998: 23; emphasisadded).In other words, asthe nutnber of nodes increasesone by one, there is an exponential increasein the overall value or power of the network. So adding a few more nodes,more weak ties, disproportionately increases

Networksand Fluids

53

the value of that network for all the existing ,members,. Size was particularly,important in the early developir"r,, oi itr"'itt,"..,"t network, where a few extra participants significantiy i..."lr"a ,rr" valueof the network for e,reryone.Like*ise, phone lo-pu.,i", airproportionatelygainedfrom even small increar", i" it of And the value of eachfax machine greatiy r"retwork-users. "'Xl-b". increased everytime a few more machineswere purch"s"d." Keily [1998: 25) thus describeshow networks can generate massive non-linear increases.in output. Networks ,distically amplify small inputs' through long-term oft"n expJnential 'increasingreturns', es.peciallywhere "'rd all-channel n",ri-t, g", extendedtechnologically.Such non-linear outcomes are generated by a systemmoving acrosswhat Malcorm Gladweli ir060j terms 'tipping points'. Tipping points involve three notior' ih-,".,.,r".,., and phenomena are contagious,that little .rrrr"r-.rn i"u" uig effects,and that changes.* h"pp"n not in a gradual linear way but dramatically at a moment when the ,yri"_ ,*ir.fr"r. U" describesthe consumption of fax machin", o. orr"r, when at a moment thesystem ,r"it.h"d ,"d *Ja."f,-obii"-ft neededa fax machine or every mobire "r.# "fn." person needed a mobile phone.The key here is that wealth .o-", not from scarcity,as rn con'entional economicq but from abundr".". E;;h f*-_rr.nin" is so much more valuabreif everyo'" also has a fax machine that enables new networked "lr" .o.rn".tio's to form and extend th_enrselves

[Gladwellzooto,-zi-ii-ih"

b",r.fits

of eachextra Iax machine are non-rinear. The tipping point is reached and extraordinary benefits flow throughort th1 network. The key to understanding thir i.o."r, is the idea of ,increasing

developed ::lli.'' economists by BrianArthur fWaldropirr;t^Th" l, .,ot have normarly unierstood by the )vttat notion of lncreasingeconomies of scale'. Such economies are those that

andarefound*i,frr"l'r;)du orgu;r",L^,,".f, * ,#,"T.^: rnese economies,within

such single firms increaseoutput ^_",,'. over a long time recluc. th" of p.oJ,r.,ioi u,rtil :,1r: such a point that further g"i.r, "u".ug"?or,, u." ,,o'Lrg". possible. By contrast, the notio., ,in..""rirrg of .",,r.ns, involves expo_ l"ntitl increasesin output (and rewardslr weaith) that are spread throughout a networb which a variety of erterprises are located,;l'r"\"*;;i,pr**r,rri"i. ,rr" ,externaritie s, across ""a "f"r","lia

Networlzsand Fluids

Networksand Fluids

-1 f+

produce spectaculart the networked relationshipsthat can with the, humble linear increasesin output and income [as how such econo changes The 'network economy' spreading -".ni""). tft"t rewards operate, on occasions -1::iu"', resulting ""J g"ir,, and benefits,although-j\:t" will be

ii.ou, in the system[Kelly 1998)' Thereareir l"t,t elsewhere betweent ""J i,rf*.rr.t, that result from improvedcoordination across learning of organizational from the processes ,1"', ""d network [Rycroftand Kash 1999:ch' 9)' complexity.anal Increasingreturnsare an exampleof the feedbackin the positive Such p.;;,;;" f";lUu.k mechanisms' escalatiti: of increasingreturns can result in astonishing is the"{In *"utitt [Waldrop 1994)'An obviousexample ;;;; 'small' local changeof ,r"t ."uolrrtionihat "..,ltg"d out of the 1994 and the around of the first Web browser i;;;.; of worldwide e-commerce[seeCastells ;t;;J^;;g".." over-the p This emergencewas fuelled by the break-up markets and the p decade of existing regional and national an insider's view as to ation of new netwo,ki"g t"p"bility [on 1999)' Ove^rtime t difference the Internethakes, see Gates becauseof the i works may bear no tendency to equilibrium and irreversible < tance of such positive feedback' Dynamic and unpredi takes place over time, change that irreversibly u1 depending takes such a system further"from equilibrium' particular topology' innraecins retllrns are connected with Moreover, such increasing retur

development are I theory of how patterns of socio-technical

fn" ,,otio"t ti o"ift dep"endenc" dependent'. "-l^h^T]itl:tof events or processes' Ooitu.r." over time of the ordering

il;^;;"it,

itt" temporalpatterninsin which :t:Y^:t, th€y

the way.that cessesoccur ,r..y ,ig,tin""ttty i"R""nces turn out"[Mahonev 2000: 536)- Caus":::^:;:l ge ;;it ; gelvpowerrul

h:ili'#' #ilJ;';;'-;;";ts

to'hu

t"1t"'1',tf,;" that thr,oughincreasine processes *9:::l#

n,..h a layout meant that the typewriter keys rvould not jam if ]i1", ,uo"a more slowly.Howeula once the keyboard layout had for such small-scaiereasonsin the late rrineteenth Lt"" "rtnblished has then remained even with the rnassive leyout this. i..,rrt, in the late twentieth century in what a i".'nnoiogi.rl changes ,i.uborrd' is [seeNorth 1990;Arthur 1994a). 'Mor" significantin its long-term cffect has been t he way in the petroleum-based car came to dominate which in the 1890s ou", f""1 alternatives to power cars. At the tirne, bolh electric and steam power were almost certainly preferable fu el systems iMot.u^lli 2000). But the 'path dependence' of the petroleumirr"d .r. got locked in, although it was not technologically preferable.But once it was locked in, the rest is history, as an a-stonishing arrayof other industries, activities and interests came to mobilize aroundthe petroleum-based car.As North writes more generally: 'Once a development path is set on a particular c,ourse, the networkexternalities,the learning process of organizations, and the historically derived subjective modelling of the issues reinforcethe course'[1990: 99). The key here is that'small chance events becorne margnifiedby positivefeedback'and this 'locls in' such systems, so th.at rnassive increasingreturns or positive feedback result ower tirne (Brian futhu4 cited in Waldrop 1994:49; see also Mahorrey 2000). Relatively deterministic patterns of inertia reinforce esiabllshed patternsthrough processesof positive feedback.This escalarteschange .L,: a 'lock-in' that over time takes the system a way from :ll"lSh what we might i-ugine to be the point of ,equilitrriuml eauiiibrium' and from

il:; optimali., ,"ffi.t"r,.r;;;;; X|^.,::*.'Ln'". YvvLKl Y rrr

2000).

^rll

the QWERTYU"tT.1l". Thus localreasons. '.;;;?";#slv in is7: in orderto slowdown

i;fi;til';;^;;"ced

rrrrLrLrrLJ

;;;;;

"""keyboardor electricforms of poweriing cars (iMotavalli tLr

th.::ld not be thought that there is necessarily a sirnglepoint

canbe unambiguo"rly;".ifi;du, ih" :|'!11+'P"'mtha_t

-ort sociological'path dependency,see lw{ahon ey 2000). Ti;::i-\t" multiple equilibria and hence no simpl € mov e towards ia ,h;r'': system will generate.The importanc€, th.';::,.t, morreover, of means that institutions matter a gre. at deal to how ry".-""rtl u..rii,r],l"l,etop. Such institutions can p.oduce u long--terrn irrerev.L.i'/^,tnat is 'both more predictable and rrrore d ifficult to -- 1.t'rorth 1990: 104).The effectsof the petroleunn car over

'fii"1#';":'!ry;;;?;;'"ssesor '-ff.il?".T:J:?",if, developments[North 1990: 10o) J;;:;a;, dependent developnrclrL5Lr\urt'r 'JJv' r-^.r r^, .mall. for small i"Ufirfr"a fttit path dependence is typically es'

55

56

Networbsand Fluids

Networbsand Fluids

a century after its chance establishmentis the best example how difficult it ls to reverselocked-in institutional processesI Sheller and lJtrY 2000)' Positive feedbacks and path dependence,where con events can set in motion institutional patterns with deterministic outcomes, are central to the power of various networks operati acrossthe globe.Such global networks are largein size,will involvi dense interactions within their nodes and will interact with other networks, so further expanding their exceptionalrange and influence.They do not derive directly and uniquely from human intentions and actions.Humans are intricately networke dwithmachines, texts, objects and other technologies.There are no purified sociai networks,only'material worlds' that involve peculiarand complex socialitieswith objects(Latour 1993; Knorr-Cetina lgg7l. Such networks thus involve an array of new machinesand technologiesthat extend them in time-space. These include fibre-optic cables,jet planes,audio-visual transmissions,digital TV, computer networks, satellites,credit cards,faxes,electronic point-of-sale terminals, portable phones, electronic stock exchanges,high-speed trains, virtual reality, nuclear, chemical and conventional military technologies and weapons, new waste products and health risla. These machines and technologies generatenew fluidities of astonishing speed and scale fon the 'nanosecondnineties', see peters

1es2J.

These scapesheip to constitute different forms of networked relationships acrossthe globe. But I have so far used the term 'network' or 'networked' to refer to a wide arrav of verv different systems.It was noted in chapter t how Casiells likewise uses 'network' to refer to varied processesthat should be distinguished from one another. So to capture these different modes of 'networked relationships', I distinguish between globally integrated networl?sIGINs) and global fluids [GFs; see chapter 3 above; Mol and Law 1994;Law and Mol 20001.In the next sectionI examine the nature of GINs.

Globally Integrated Networks GINs consist of complex, enduring and predictable networked connectionsbetween peoples,objects and technologiesstretching

57

, . r, multiple and distant spacesand times (Law 1994: 24; is a function of the relail -,,h 1995:745). Relativedistance that network. The comprising .l-, renveenthe components , --'rn,outcomeof a network,such as that for anaemiatesting across its entirety in ways 1 :,. Netherlands, is delilered Things are made close boundaries' l-,- ::tenoyercomeregional network of technola Such .-. ,,; dlgt. networked relations. global hybrid, ensuresthat the ,.,.,,kills,texts and brands,a in more or less the same Jelivered 'product' is or ,,^. '.ruia.' .', r;rossthe entire network. Such products are predictable, routinized and standardized' :,...:.,ble, '-.,..,. .r. many 'global' enterprisesorganized through GINs' Express, Coca-Cola' :,.,-.rlesinclude McDonald's, American and so on' Each United Manchester i:.,,.,0f,,Sony,Greenpeace, this has been 'McDonaldization', as ,j ..., glob"i'netwoiks. with a :.::..j iivolves companies on a global scale organized j.,..r. of central oiganization(see Ritzer 1992,1997, 1998)' l,:,:i,..ldrzrtion p.od,i."s new kinds of low-skilled standardized :.:-.,pecially fo. yo.r.tgpeople(McJobs),new productsthat radi.,. ;rer p.opl"'t eati;g hrbits,and new socialhabits worldwide' ,,-. ,t .riing standardized fast food from take-away restaurants ::,:l fg' ).

.:jce?,most of the transnationalcompanies currently roaming :-: :irnet are organized through GINs' These 'organizations' a .::::.r11! produceiew 'failings'acrossthe network' In part such ::: rik existsto counter the often extraordinarily turbulent envi:.::.:rt rvithinwhich they operate.Such networks,with moreor ..,,:i,tantaneous and simultaneouscommunications'enable the ::.-j associated products andmodes of serviceto roam in much :-: ::re form acrossthe surfaceof the earth [on global brands, ::r r:r'in2000; Sklair 2001). j:retimes there is limited adaptation to local circumstances' ., ":th McDonald's in east Asia. But, even if local ownernet-r:::i0rSareinvolved i" ary-a-a"y management, the global all taste the same' ' ::.rnthe end wins out [on ho* big Macs do in ::: ,','rtSor 1997:77).ihi lnt",'t"ginfDirector of McDonald's not system' S:i-..,:ore explains follo*r' 'McDonald's sells' ' ' a and ", ::.:.rits.'This'system;; ;;.gh;;t Hamburger Universit-v o'l koining Manual '.,,:.natizedin the 600-page Op erations i'...ronf ggZ, Zi't. C".,uin'k"y ieatures of the global network

58

Networks and Fluids

include not only standardizedproducts but also the standardi and monitored 'smiling service' to strangers.Such GINs duce not only predictable material goods and services,but calculableand controllablesimulationsof 'experiences'apparentl 'more real than the original' fBaudrillard 1983; Eco 1986; Ri 1997; Rifkin 20001. GINs can alsobe found within some oppositionalorganizati such as Greenpeace.Like other global players,Grenpeacede much attention to developing and sustaining its brand identity throughout the world. (ireenpeace's brand identity has 'such ap iconic status that it is a world-wide symbol of ecological virtue quite above and beyond the actual practical successesof the organisation' within various societies [Szerszynski 1997 46). These global networks are significantly 'deterritorialized'. They move in and through places in ways that transform and distort time and space.Such networks constitute one of most powerful sets of 'particles' comprising the new world order.They are massively powerful, particularly because of their mobility, their networked character,their capacity to generate increasingreturns from the use and exploitation of their global brand and their endogenous self-organrzing character [Klein 2000). Such GINs show three weaknesses.First, since a set of networked organizationscan generate much greater increasingreturns than can single companies,so these individual companies can be outperfbrmed in the global marketplace, as IBM was in the caseof personalcomputers. Second,the power of a global brand based within a GIN can evaporate almost overnight from quite minor occurrences.The brand of Monsanto disappearedbecauseof the company'sassociation with producing geneticallymodified food. Indeed, the more powerful the brand, the more there is to lose.Klein [2000) shows just how extensive are the various resistancesto global brands carried along the scapesof the emergent global order. I examine below the complex nature of scandalsthat can result in massive consequencesfor individual GINs such as Arthur Andersen, the paper-shreddingauditors of Enron. And, third, these single companies can be very brittle and lack the capacity to bend with rapidly changing circumstances. They may not be quite like the former East European command

Networksand Fluids

59

but their lack of 'fluidity' and 'flexibility' may mean econornies, ii". th"y are very vulnerableto fluid changesin desire,taste and ll,i" ,t-rr, leave them struggling to catch up' On occasionssuch ].jn,'onni"rareinsufficientlyfluid to implementappropriateorganiRycroft and Kash 1999). )n ionnllearning [see I turn to some other global hybrids, GFs, sections next the In 'liquid' more in character. much rvhich are

Global Fluids Emile Durkheim criticized the fluid, unstable,non-authoritative characterof 'sensuousrepresentations'.Sensuousrepresentations 'arein a perpetual flux;they come after each other likes the waves of a river, and even during the time that they last, they do not remain the same thing' fDurkheim 1915/1968: 433). What is required for science,according to Durkheim, is to abstract from these flows of time and space in order to arrive at concepts that are proper'collective representations'.Durkheim seesconceptsas lying beneath the shifting perpetual, sensuoussurfaceflux. Concepts are outside time and change.They do not move by themselves.They are fixed and immutable and it is the task of science to reveal them. Scienceinvolves not being seducedby the endlesslychanging'sensations, perceptionsand images'that lie on the surface[Durkheim 1915/1968: 432-4). However, I dissentfrom this 'structural' view of concepts.The cievelopmentof a 'mobile sociology'demandsmetaphors that do vierv social and material hfe as being'like the waves of a river'. Such fluid notions are necessaryto capture those multiple transformations of collective representationsin which 'collective' relations are no longer societal and structural. Many contemporary rvriters are developing and elaborating various fluid metaphors to capture aspectsof contemporary social life, of the sea,rivers, flux, wavesand liquidity (Bachelard1942/1983;Urry 2000b). Williams describeslatent 'structuresof feeling' as being a social experience that is'in solution' (7977:133-4). Castells(1996) talks of the 'power of flows'. Appadurai [1996J arguesfor the metaphors of 'flow', 'uncertainty'and'chaos'and Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 1988) talk of bodies in a vortex. Shields(1997) maintainsthat

6l

Networbsand Fluids

Networks and Fluids

flows should be seen as a whole new paradigm. White (1992 characterizes the social world as constituted bv disorderlv sticky'gels and goos'. Mol and Law [1994) generallyelaborate 'fluid spatiality' [see also Sheller 2000). So what then is meant here by the notion of global fluid7 while fluids undoubtedly involve networks, such a notion does do justice to the uneven, emergent and unpredictableshapes such fluids may take. Also such fluids are partially structured by the various 'scapes'of the global order; the networks of machineq technologies, organizations, texts and actors that constitute various interconnected nodes along which flows can be relayed [Graham and Marvin 2001). Global fluids travel along these various scapes,but they may escape,rather like white blood corpuscles, through the 'wall' into surrounding matter and effect unpredictable consequencesupon that matter. Fluids move according to certain novel shapesand temporalities as they break free from the linear, clock time of existing scapes - but they cannot go back, they cannot return, because of the irreversibility of time. Such fluids of diverse viscosity organize the messy power of complexity processes[see Kelly 1995). They result from people acting upon the basis of local information but where these local actions are, through countless iteration, captured, moved, represented, marketed and generalized within multiple global waves, often impacting upon hugely distant placesand peoples.The 'particles' of people, information, objects, money, images, risks and networks move within and acrossdiverse regions forming heterogeneous,uneven, unpredictable and often unplanned waves [see Urry 2000b). Such waves demonstrate no clear point of departure, deterritorialized movement, at certain speeds and at different levels of viscosity with no necessaryend state or purpose.This means that such fluids create over time their own context for action rather than being seenas 'caused'by such a context. These global fluid systemsare in part self-organizing,creating and maintaining boundaries. I now describe some such GFs. In the next chapter I develop a complexity analysis that shows the irreversible and non-linear intersectionsthat occur between such GFs as they spread over, through and under multiple times and spaces.GFs are shown in

that chapter to be utterly crucial categoriesof analysisin the globsocial world that have in part rendered both regions and ^l;rine powerful. n",*ott t lesscausally

60

Trauelling peoples Travelling peoples move along various transportation scapes.At the beginning of the twenty-first century there are well over 700 million movements acrossinternational borders each year [comoaredwith twenty-five million in 1950); at any time 300,000 pas,"ng".r are in flight aboue the USA, equivalent to a substantial city; there are thirty-one million refugees and 100 million international migrants worldwide; and international travel, which constitutes the largest movement of people acrossborders that has ever occurred, accounts for over one-twelfth of world trade 2000: 10,41, fMakimoto and Manners1997:ch. 1; Papastergiadis 54;WTO 2000). A crucial component of this fluid is made up of the transnationalcapitalist class,whose pampered routeways of travel between the major industrial, financial and service hubs shorvsby far the greatestdensity [on the life ofthis class,seeSklair

2001 J.

This fluid of travelling peoples involves almost everywhere acrossthe globe [with published travel statistics for over 190 countries).It involves people travelling for work-related reasons, legal and increasingly illegal, those travelling for leisure and pleasure,again legally and illegally, those travelling as refugeesor asylum-seekers,and those being smuggled voluntarily as migrants and involuntarily as short-term and disposable slaves.The most rapidly growing form of smugglingis that of human beingsmoved often acrosshugely policed and effective borders, with an associated growth in the international 'slave' trade. There are thought to be more slaves now than at the height of the eighteenthcentury slavetrade (Bales 1999: 9). Such very different travelling peoples intermittently encounter each other within the 'non-places of modernity', the airport lounge, the coach station, the motorway service area and so on [Auge 1995; although 'businesslounges' separateoff the transnational capitalist classfrom most other travellers).These different peoples also overlap, with one category dissolving into anothel,

62

Networks and Fluids

giving rise not just to the travelling of peoplesbut also to diverss, complex and hard-to-categorize'travellingcultures' [see Clifford 1997;Rojek and Urry 1997). Moreover,whlle there are 200 nation states,there are at least 2,000 'nation peoples', all of which experience various kinds of displacement,movement and ambiguous location [R. Cohen 1997: pp. ix-x). The most striking of such 'societies'formed through the global fluid of travelling peoplesis the 'overseasChinese' [R. Cohen ]997: ch. 4; Ong and Nonini 1997). Such massive, hard-to-categorize,contemporary migrations, often with oscillatory flows between unexpected locationq have been described through the languageof the 'new physics'. These migration patterns are to be seen as a series of turbulent waves, with a hierarchy of eddies and vortices, with globalism a virus that stimulates resistance, and the migration system a cascade moving away from any apparent state of equilibrium 2000: 102-4, l2I). [Papastergiadis The Internet This rather obscure technology, designedby the American defence intelligencein the 1970s and 1980s,unpredictably resulted in an astonishingsystem of many-to-many communications acrossthe globe. The transformation of this distributed, horizontal militarybased system into the huge global Internet stemmed from various small-scalechangesmade by American scientificand researchnetworks and from counter-cultural efforts to produce a computer network that possessed horizontal public access (students 'invented' the modem in 1978 and the Mosaic web browser in 1992:Rushkoff 1994). Castellsnotes:'the opennessof the system also results from the constant process of innovation and free accessibilityenacted by early computer hackersand the network hobbyists who still populate the net by the thousands' (1996:

3 s6 ). The Internet did not originate within the businessworld, nor from within any single state bureaucracy fsee Castells'sbrilliant history: 2001). In significant ways its users are key producers of the very technology. The autopoeitic, self-organizing character of the Internet is described as follows:

Networh.sand Fluids

63

it. . . . It has No centralhub or commandstructurehasconstructed installednoneof the hardwareon which it works,simplyhitching a largely free ride on existing computers,networks, switching telephonelines.This wasone of the first systemsto present svstems, iiself as a multiplicitous, bottom-up, piecemeal,self-organizing network which . . . could be seen to be emergingwithout any control.(Plant1997:49) centralized The Internet is also the best example of how technology invented for one purpose, military communication in the event of a nuclear attack, unpredictably and irreversibly evolved through iteration and a path dependence into purposes unintended and undreamt of by its early developers. It has resulted in a massive worldwide activity,with sixteenmillion usersin,1995,400 million usersin early 2001, and a projected one billion by 2005 [Castells 2001: 3). Information on the Internet doubles every few months [Brand 1999: ]4, 87). An awesomepattern of path dependence has been laid down, a pattern analysedby Castells as the 'winnertakes-all system that characterizes business competition in the new economy' (200i: i00). The Internet enableshorizontal communication that cannot be effectively surveilled, controlled or censoredby national societies. It possesses an 'elegant,non-hierarchicalrhizomatic global structure' [Morse 1998: 187) and is basedupon lateral,horizontallryperrext links that render the boundaries between objects within the archive as endlesslyfluid [Featherstone2000: 187). The Internet can be seenasa metaphor for social life that is fluid, involving thousands of networks, of people, machines, programmes, texts and imagesin which quasi-subjectsand quasi-objectsmix together in new hybrid forms. Ever-new computer networks and links proliferate mostly in unplanned and mixed patterns. Such a fluid space is a world of mixtures. Messages'find their way', rather like blood through multiple capillaries.Fluids can get around absences. Such computer networks are not solid or stable and are contingent. Hypertext programmesand the Net comprise 'webs of footnotes without central points, organizing principles, hierarchies' [Plant 1997: l0; see also chapter 3 below). Such digitized information 'effaceIs] the difference between causeand effect, ends and means, subjectand object,activeand passive'[Luke 1995:97).

64

Networbs and Fluids

Networbsand Fluids

;q transforming education and science because of the exponand irreversible growth in the sheer amount and com"nti.tl of scientific information (Rescher 1998: ch. 4; IJrry "i"xity 'loOZn). More generally, the 'new artificial life-form of the 'nonItoUrt telecommunicationsMatrix' has been described as chaotically-assembled' 1999: 92). uty-metrical, [lmken iin"ut 'migratory', images in with both viewers and The media are sirnultaneouscirculation and recirculation. Neither fit into circuits or audiencesbound to a local or a national space (Appadurai

Information This GF is intimately connected with the Internet, as 'know has been'informationalized'. Knowledge was once found in cific form [the manuscript, the book, the map), located in parti cular places [archives, museums, libraries) and embodied withi the minds of certain people [scholars, archivists, mapmakers).' Such relatively fixed repositories of knowledge could be dei. troyed or killed. Books, manuscripts, paintings and maps, i whole libraries such as that at Alexandria, could be burnt and the knowledge would physically disappear [Brand 1999: ch"

lee6).

Wars have consequently turned into 'virtual wars', at least for thosecontrolling the virtual weaponry.Such'virtual wars' appear 'to take place on a screen. . . . War affords the pleasures of a spectacle.. . . When war becomes a spectator sport, the media becomesthe decisivetheatre of operations'(lgnatieff 2000: 191). And warfare more generally is being networked and informationalized, with the emergence of 'network centric warfare' and what Arquilla and Ronfeldt [2001) call'netwars' often occurring between non-state actors.

12).

But knowledge is now transmutating into digitized information fFeatherstone 2000). This shows the significance of material worlds, hybrids that combine objects, texts, technologies and bodies, to transmit around the globe tiny weightless bits of information. Analysis of either the physical or the social elements of such a shift would be on its own meaningless.And nature itself is being transformed into genetic codesthat are owned, accessedand circulated socially, with the growth of the 'informational body' [Franklin et al. 2000: 128-9). Further, this change can be appreciated through a shifting metaphoq, from the stationary, wooden, fixed 'desk' occupied by the individual scholar [even with chained books in the medieval period), to the ephemeral,mobile and interchangeable'desktop' that can be occupied by anyone. Or there is the shift from the specific religious 'icon' to the ubiquitous and instantaneouslyrecognized computer 'icon'. With digitization, information adopts patterns and modes of moblhty that are substantially separate from material form or presence[Hayles i999: 18-20). Information is everywhere fand nowhere), travelling [more or less) instantaneously along the fluid networks of global communications. Its repositories cannot be burnt down as with the medieval library, although particular computers can [willl) have their memories wiped. The exceptional growth of networked, spatially indifferent, information is transforming commerce and work partly because of the dlfficulty of charging for digitized information that is ephemeral and fluid [Castells 1996). This fluid of information

65

World money

l;)

I

&

Strangefl986) describesthis GF as being a kind of 'casinocapitalism', detached,self-organizingand operatingbeyond both individual national economies and the specific industries and services involved in world production and trade [see also Castells 1996; l,eyshon and Thrift 1997). Daily foreign-exchangedealings are worth sixty times more than the daily value of world exports [Held et al. 1999: 209; the ratio grew fivefold between 1979 and 1995). Money is traded for money especiallyin terms of its future values.Such a GF is organizedthrough 'just-in-time 24-hour networks'. It involves calculationsof and bets on, hugely uncertain futures: 'traders are trading in time itself which is to say in the momentary forward fluctuations of price and value. The latter are . . . expressionsof the most abstract sort: of money itself and, even more abstractly, of the price of money at some future point in time' (Boden 2000: 189). This commodification of the future generates extraordinarily fluid movements across,and beyond, the regions and networks

66

Networbs and Fluids

Networks and Fluids

in which money has been organized and regulated. There extensivemovement of money into 'offshore' locations desi to minimize taxes and to facilitate the launderine of il funds. Martin and Schumann [1997) describe the consequ in complexity terms.They say that the 'abandonmentof [6order controls on capital has therefore set up a dynamic whiclr, systematically nullifying the sovereignty of nations, has been seento have disastrouslyanarchic implications' [Martin and schumann 1997: 6l) At the same time the national controlg are themselvesnow sourcesof financial gain since 'any nation,$ financial controls appear to be made for the sole prr.pore of being e.vaded'(Eatwell and Taylor 2000: 37; all emphairzed in the originalJ. Moreove4,recent decadeshave seenthe'firewalls' between different financial markets dissolve.As a consequence,'all segments of the system are now tightly interdependeni' so that 'miioeconomic responsescan easilyescalateinto macroeconomiccontagion' fEatwell and Taylor 2000: 45; emphasisadded).This resultsin the extreme price swings that occur within global financial marketg especially where so-called derivative trading is involved. These financial instruments, developed to manage the risk that the financial system has itself created,in turn p.nd,r." new systemicrisks. Price movements rapidly move away from equilibrium, stemming from 'the cumulative effect of a beauty contest [that]'may .esuli t in massiveconcentrationsof extreme price swings' f-Eatwelland iirl Taylor 2000: 103;and, on the role of contagioninrtipping points,, see Gladwell 2002') Thus, not only is money hrghly fluid but so too are slobal financial crises.Eatwell and Taylor talk of the 'recent crisisin Asia and its contagior,rs spread to Russia,South Africa, and Latin America' 26; emphasis added).And so far there is no international [2000: body effecting global financial regulation of such fluidities and the resulting 'prevalenceof contagion',the lack of negative feedback mechanisms and the potential of the whole system to 'serfdestruct'. The proposed Tobin tax of I per cent that would be levied on all foreign currency transactionsis indeed desienedto slow down the contagious effects of such global fluidities fMartin and Schumann 1997: 821. .i

fi

67

Global brands or logos Globalbrandsor logosincreasinglyroam the globe.They are enorpowerful and ubiquitous.They result from how the most -outly .,,.."rrfr.rl corporations have shifted from manufacturing products power stems from to b".o-ittg brand producers.Their fluid-like and advertising public relations rnarketing,design, sponsorship, .xp",lditrr."s, with such companiesbecoming'economiesof signs'. Suchbrands include Nike, Apple, G"p, Pepsi-Cola,Benetton, Body Shop,Virgin, Swatch, Calvin Klein, Sony, Starbucks and so on' Central to the branding processis the'global teen market', with about one blllion young people disproportionately consuming similar consumer brands from across the globe, even within mainland China. MTV the key scape of this global teen market, broadcastin eighty-threecountriesin I999 (Klein 2000: I I 8-21). Products thus are the effect of the brand rather than the brand being the effect of the product [Franklin et al.2000: 168-9).The brand createsand maintains links amongst very different products. They thus produce 'concepts' or 'lifestyles':'liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soat less as the dissemination of goods and servicesthan as collective hallucinations' [Klein 2000: 27)'The power of such fluid-like brands is essentially'cultural', not residing in the workplaces,workforces or the objects produce-dand sold journeys [whether these are running shoes,body lotions, aircraft or sweaters). In the ."i" of Nike, a 'company that swallowscultural spacein giant gulps', there is an enormous 'power of the swoosh',a literully free-iloatingsignifier[Goldman and Papson1998;Klein 2000: Stl. nnd this power is insidious, seeping into diverse 'cultural' domains ,, brand replicates through cloning' As for Body "rih Shop and Starbucks,'they had fostered powerful identities by making their brand concept into a virus and sending it out into the culture via a variety ol channels: cultural sponsorship,political controversy,the consumer experience and brand extensions' (Klein 2000: 2I). Moreover, bra.tds do not just seep downwards, since they often emerpe from street life and culture, urban black youth, New Age,

68

Networksand Fluids

political protest, labour movement, Green critiques and so qn. Brands are powerful concepts, but they are always on the movq often ironically flowing in and out of cultures including c,rltures of protest. Indeed, almost every organization is affected by, and becomes an element within, this branding global fluid, with universities, NGOs, governments, artists, charities, political parties, hospitals, architects and so on all increasingly part of the branded hfe. Such brands demonstrate increasing returns; they magnify and expand their power through use, time and time and time again. Their power does not get used up but multiplies. The power; range and ubiquity of such brands are expanded even when they are subject to massivepolitical protest, as with the intense campaigns over Nike's use of sweatshop labour. Brands then have become super-territorial and super-organic,floating free and constituting a 'defining medium of exchange in global nature, global culture' (Franklin et al. 2000: t82). Automobility This GF of immense consequencecould almost be seen as 'viral', taking off in North America and then virulently spreading intq and taking ovet most parts of the body social within all corners of the globe. Such physical mobilities are environmentally costly, with transport accounting for one-third of COz emissions.World car travel is predicted to triple between 1990 and 2050, there are well over half a bilhon cars roaming the globe, and many new countries,such as China, are developing an 'automobile culture'. By 2030 there may be one bilhon carsworldwide fMotavalli 2000:

2 0 -1 ).

The fluid of automobility uniquely combinesthe quintessential manufactured object of industrial societies [the petroleum car), the major system of individual ownership after housing, an extraordinarily powerful machinic complex hnked to most other industrial and service sectors,the dominant form of quasi-private mobility that subordinatesalmost all other mobilities,the leading a culture defining the nature of the 'good life' through possessing car, the single most important form of resource use, and the main determinant of time fragmentation, as multitasking comes to char-

Networbsand Fluids

69

much sociallife (sheller and Urry 2000). Slater points ccteri'ze the key here is not the 'car' as such but the system of tnnt out 'a car because of its physifluid interconnections: car is not a provision and categoriesof things .ulity bnt becausesystemsof are"rnaterialized"in a stable form' [200]: 6). The fluid of automobility combines the notion of the autonornous self with that of a machine with the capacity for autonornous movement along the paths, lanes, streets and routeways of one society after society.It is a self-organizing,non-linear system spreading cars, car-drivers,roads, petroleum supplies and a huge arrayof novel objects,technologies and signsthat petroleum-andsteel cars presuppose and endlessly reproduce. As I noted above, the GF of automobility stemmed from the path-dependent pattern laid down from the end of the nineteenth century.Once economiesand societieswere 'locked in' to the fluid of automobility, then massiveincreasingreturns resulted for those producing and selling the petroleum car and its associatedinfrastructure, products and services.And at the same time social life got locked in to the mode of individualized mobility that automobility generatesand presupposes.This is, of course, a mode of individualized mobility that is neither socially necessary nor inevitable but one that seems impossible to break from (but seeHawken et al. 1999J. Enuironmentaland health hazards These hazardstravel both geographicallyand temporally in nonlinear, unpredictable and irreversible fashion. For example, BSE takes between five and twenty years to incubate, nuclear accidents can affect generations that are not yet born, nuclear radiation can survive for thousands of years,hormone-disrupting chemicals appear to affect species living across all parts of the globe, and no one knows what the environmental consequences will be in various unimaginable futures of the widespread planting of GM crops. Such fluid, moving hazards, which start locally, roam over the globe, producing consequencesthat are un-measurableand indeed 'invisible' in time-space [see Adam 1998: 25-7, 35; 2000). Colborn et al. summarize the globally fluid and complex nature of these processes:'We design new

70

Networhsand Fluids

technologiesat a dizzying p_a9gand deploy them on an unpr dented scalearound the world long before we can beginto fatl their possible impact on the global system or ourselves,[1 244; seealso Beck 1992;Adam et al. 2000). And, if therels sure lessonhere, it is that the physical world is as dynamic, mopolitan and productive of emergent effects as is the s

world [Clark 2000).

Thus it_ was only a small local research project begun in -_ Hawaiian hut in 1958 that'accidentally' revealedthe awesomr significant and probably irreversible forty-year increasein g housegasesfBrand 1999: 138).The resultsof the MaunaLoi recordshave then come to play a central role in the performar of what is now seen as a 'global nature', a nature regarded subject to exceptio nally hazardousand irreversible levels of th stretching over an immensely lengthy period [in rvhat I 'glacialtime' (Urry 2000b)). The world's oceAns These might be viewed as an almost literal global fluid. oceans are_increasingly seen as possessinglife-making properties and with levels of biodiversity that may help to 'save the globe' from some the hazards just outlined fsee Helmrelch 2b00). Bioprospecting the life-making attributes of the sea,such as the curiously liminal coral reefs, involves mobile networks of researchers, governmentfunding [especiallyfrom the USAJ, notions of biodiversity,commercial companies and freezing i'ihe form of 'The marine environment . . . is being .patents.In particular: uploaded into a world wide web which reconstitutes biodiversity . . . as a "life" force to be plugged into projects of healing for individuals and "sustainable"use of the planet' lHelmreich zboo:

26).

Such oceanic networks, under the guise of savins the individual and the globe,roam the global .o--onr, bioprlspectingthe oceansfor patentable properties,as life has .o-" to-b" viewed as a 'network of salty fluids' [Helmreich 2000: 2g). One of thesewebs of relationships,the Monterey BayAquariu- R"r"ur.h Institute, is a leader in the use of deep robotics and of telepresent technologiesof visualizationof the deep oceans.

Networb.sand Fluids

7l

Socialmouements have begun to characterize social moverlanV CofrrrTrentators and unexpected upsurges Y:;;, ;; fl;td-like with the exceptional as involving ;tggt trggg) describesrapid mobilization :ff;;. change initial where a small ::.i;;;;;"; - ,1jf-t"infotcing processes erruub---'contagion r' 'i itive f""aUtcl" This produces a bY Pos: i5 rmPlihed^ strikes wlthin many protest movements where eff'ect'signihcant simi52J fires'' McKay [1998: nr other actionssprea
asebbingandflowing'sroupmovements ij;l;ik;il"#ni', the flows'websand ittp*,tf g97) describes ingandregrouping forms of artful protest [see

in many networks that are lnvoived alsoJordan 1998)' of protest as involving Overall, Melucci describesmovements density' n"bt'I" oi it'dl"lnct shape-and variable '..-."l".ptto.rr uncertain these how shows ;;#'II3-141. Sheller (2000)

in 'socialmovements' lii*"..,"", ""i ar..-il .ir""g" involved non-Euclidean sticky be analysed ihto"gh tlie. prism of should often demonstrate u'd b"r,di,,g times'"Social movements ;;;;; flow along Movements point' or end movementwith no U"gi"titU l."erflow'^ or 'ebb away'' They can be various channels U* il"V domains can enable casmore or less viscose,op"ti"lly as public are involved' particularly cadesof action. U"f"pf" t"-po'"liti"' transformed into power,r ,fr" farticles in a movement may be moveme-ntsto Various kinds of 'free space' can enable iti different bot"'daries' reappearing -.t*through bo.d"., seep "t'd -in lot"tiottt' Such social guises, especially ;;di; """*p"tt"a the ihysical movements of peoples' movements alwavs ;;;;i;" on that coalesce and vehicles, texts, objects, informatio.n and so u:o"11 barriers' disperse, .orl.".ttrri"' u"d dissolve' pouring. and intermittently flooding various switching the poini of "itutk se,"Whi:: 1995) spaces[sheller ZOO0;on 'network,switchings" as follows: 'the moveA protest in Lonclonin 1999 is described force' to find its center' its motive ment bafflea ,n" pJf]." "fftttt f'om th" pond emerged a plague of its central governors;instead, surface of London's crawling, mobile ;i;;t" - {lgyinq ou^"t th"

'cellularslime tln:tJ": 2000:74''on squares, roads, 2000'a mere late ".,j^iitag"" ttt' s)' Iikewisein .];ldl ;* Fo; Kelle;-191s' almostbrought 2,000peopleor.,",it"* "g"-tt highpetroltaxes

72

Networbsand Fluids

Networbs and Fluids

all economic activity in Britain to a halt. For a couple of these protestorsblocked the rer"drrery-few locarizednodes

thejust-in-time delivery of petrolf".;; ,to its ";;;;;i.#;J broughta large k"".r,. il;; l1::.1",,::tors :coll.omy achievedthrough a loose

network of hlg[ly mobile unJ.o, (through their mobile phones) protesto"rs with no to arrestand no crearorganizaiionthat the police "uiJ#

sue'The.fluidity of the petrol supply turned out to

susceptible to particularpointsoi blo.krgi bV

.."ii ..,a b" il;. .i.^,il;ff;

l"iaf' ngtt' il:::'j:::l,T :: :::"-t? I :" i 1: o,at,ge"tti "i. "' ",,i*".*

appropriateimagesonto the world's media, although media skill was learnt during the very course ''".h;i,fi of th"ep.o,& ,*ug They thus learnt from and lontribuied ,o tt _"Urf, protesting occurring at the same time "nutJr"", across"Westeri Europe..q t-r:9-90protestors) thus chaoticully p.odr,."a, fi.r*e :?t^:-T:: ot certain patterns of localized refining, just_in_time deliveryl instantaneousreal-time communications, globalized -."r".-r.nrna motorized mobility, influential protest thui dirrrfi"a -"air governmentsacrossmuch of Europe. overall, Arquilla and Ronfeldt summarize the nature of social movements and ,netwars, within. an age of complexity: 'Information-age threats ':rffr.., are ..,or" lik"l; ;. T";;;" dispersed, multi-dimensional, non_linear; and ambiguous than

threats.. Metaphorically, then,future .o'r,ni.L_rv ::9:,Ilit-p: resemblethe orientar game of Go more than the western game

of chess'[200]: 2).

I have thus set out some powerful fluid systems. ^strikingly Togetherwith GINs, these fluids rJam the lands,th" se"s and outer space,or what we metaph.ri.;lt;;in" 11ner.a.nd !ou., 0ngold 1993).These systemstravel aiong and beyond various scapesintersectingwith eachother in .o-p'i"*, urrp."dr.iubL time-spacecompressed "nd forms.Varioustimes are fbldedinto these roaming hybrids, including nanosecond i.rrt"r-rtun"iw7", *t,rt the Internet), commo-difi:j futures lgf"Uri-_;*rf,'',fri"iro__ fragmentationof time [with autom.biity; u.,a i"ru""iry "*"Jo-" They roam the globe,possessing the power of "ceans). !:l,l:i: raplo movement,across,over and under many apparentregions, disappearingand then reappearing,transmutating their form,

73

.ropping up like the islandsof an archipelago,unexpectedly and They can appear both horizontally but also vertically, "t,aotically. in the case of international terrorists not from the wild irrir,rng lnn"r of the subways of New York, but also astonishinglyfrom the alr as planes or as biomaterials. 11{oreover,extraordinarily rapid and unexpected switches, or'zapping' (Emirbayer and Mische 1998) or 'turning points' t'Abbott 2001) occur between such fluids as they pass into, ihrough, over and under each other. Central to many of these switchesor zappings between the GFs are various kinds of software increasinglyinfused into the very fabric of everyday life [Thrift 2001). Such pervasive computing has largely remained opaque and uncontested. And yet software is everywhere producing snitching and mobility between different fluids, through the Internetwith its massivesearchengines,databasesof information storageand retrieval, world money flows, especially through the ubiquitous'spreadsheet culture', intelligent transport systems, robotic vision machines under the oceans,and vision machines more generally.It was calculated that in 1996 there were some sevenbillion software systems(Thrift 2001: 18). Finally, these complex intersectionsbetween fluid spatialities suggesta further metaphor;what Law and Mol term'fire' [2000). By this they try to capture how a continuity of shape can be the verv effect of movement, even of abrupt and discontinuousmovement [note the previous description of gases).The term also emphasizeshow there is a striking dependenceof presenceupon rvhathappensto be absent.Indeed,more generallysociallife often depends upon peculiar combinations of the presence and the absence.'Fire' also brings out how the forms of absencethat constitute a present are themselves patterned [they discuss a star pattern but there are others).There is thus a complex oscillating pattern of presenceand absence,of contradictions,within social phenomena.There are not fixed entities with stable attributes [Abbott 2001: 40-l). This concept of fire characterizescontemporary communications. In intimate and unexpected forms, an array of technical and instrumental means of communications are combined with humans.They have partially replacedthe spatiality of 'co-present sociality' with new modes of present and absent 'strangerness'

74

Networhsand Fluids

il:lj::rr_m",# frT*H :Jn i. {r':l** :t.,m ; i::tgt'#Hi *iY:? :#:iffi [T.:il; remoreness, or mobirityu"d fi*rii"r-::;:.i::y""n

lapse;,a"r,ul

n€3.D€SS i

onandstasiqinsi

;""';.:_:;:,,.1o,,, ll,1^:: :: :.1 lose correctiviries ",, ;^:::f ,ji:i and,simulated, thejr bora".rl a:

"'"*' n'y d;?",l*'h hk*:111^iil'' u.' llTji: jh" l - on ourmidst jl:::-1,,"'

Networlzsand Fluids

rJl'i1*1r'f

/J

lixe

e attributes :i:l n:, upp,opii"t,r,".*o*i,Jff::"":Tt :jl_T_f:*ss d and stabr ,l::^ li: ryrt"-t. .f, make their fluid u"d_ ,.1r" :"_Tf5:fI,: -?l next chapter I examin" "*i,".;;;.r. ln the ;;;,;;i :ematicallythe nature rhe slobal rol,t;^-"t :^- +L -

:|l5:',"iJj;*:'"."":*: * I t: F"'";'rl'::ililft*:: TiTli:ffi.'"",ffi Tr:h;:"::l:::,1':t4i;;;;J:;:ffi :":il"ii il:'[1il:,::r*:::f i:31'0"''**;".,;*:Jf':"f -o]l:'ff::":'Til"*,"J',"'l "::n:j ;;i; -""ffi:,1' :3: ,spaces' ;,, ; ;:; : : ::;:'il,:"n: within 1". : Tl l': rl i :*, : fi ;:^::lt:f :;?il::' the entire " HH::",l ;X n.ti :?'* ::': : : i l:l: .f gi.id"possibilities. "" "':^ '"ordrin".?;,ljff :::X..","0r"j.^1.h,.u.t".i,",,u,

":iil: :,:l iffi ir:,j ru::,T :*r#{'fi I :*tig Hl;ii

Ii?d]r

evotving'i.u,lro''oit;:o:r'""excellent imase "r,ii i *o.r.,,;;;;",

sroups (B ffi:j:f +Hii :? :1", ili cybe'netic ogard 2 000:, 0j.'il;'."r"b ^]fl|.i:rs, ;ril;T f, :: 1"tfi :*

*ttu i*i t=tr,qlt* ,;i'ff'.,','."'; lu*** * ',":,-t, i:TJ ilf;'fi,:il1: l"#l?''p'e'";;; ilI,?ff ifi,t:Tr'

jl?r;::::; j#,::,:i::jil"Hh ,'*i'r: *iltrt_# conclusion I have thus exan

;,H,'ff t"#lt#i,'ftii ,,;: i #''""d:ff ry ll':'"n: r_:,."il:',|t3*i:;';;;;";';;;:I,,"i;:'J:rL,:UlJnT;i ''.;11',','il":ix"ilr;: ;91*i*:?Ji:*ffi :;ffti** ni;tiritr*i:,"Jx il:"*:r,::il:.:, J:

:T,:T,.,,y tn#;$"f} ,lji il:l#l3r31;T[1]f few I

Global Emergence

5 GlobalEmergence

Emergent Effects and the ,Locai' The social scienceshave wrestled with competing claims that there either are, or are not, properties of the sociul v,iorld that can be reduced to the characteristicsof individuals that make up that world. such debate_ has perhaps generatedmore heat than light and I will not spend too long addlng to that heat. I presume from the discussionof complexity that there are indeed emergent properties at the collectivl levei. To reduce that level to 'facts about individuals' would be to lose important knowledge of those emergent properties. And, anyway, there is no efrective way of characterizing 'individuars'-wiihout describing various sociallinkagesthat make up those very emergent properties. I Jrave already noted how the complexity scienceshave examined the emergent characterof various populations.I have shown the limitations of sciencethat reducescomprex phenomena to linear causes. cohen and stewart talk of thor" iregularities of behaviour that somehow seemto transcendtheir ownlnsredients' (1994: 232; see also chapter 2 above). It is not that tlie sum is thought to be greaterthan the size ofits parts as in some formulations. It is rather that the system effecis are differenl from its parts. we have seen how many notions in 'science',such as the properties of a gas,cannot be reduced to the subatomic particles whose seething movements constitute such a gas.As Kellv

77

expressesthis: 'Emergence requires a population of entities, a pultitude, a collective....More is different [since]...large nunrbersbehave differently from small numbers' [1995: 26). Moreover, with changes in the scientific theory and research, the basic individual constituents of the physical world have substantially shifted over time (from molecules, to atoms to subatomicparticles).So there is simply no ultimately irreducible entity within scienceto which larger-scaleproperties have been unrversallyreducible.Within quantum physicsthe apparent'parts' consist of probabilistic rel^ationshipsor patterns between subatomic particles, relationships that are not independent but are determinedby the dynamicsof the systemas a whole. Heisenberg maintainedthat: 'The world thus appearsas a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole' (cited Capra 1996: 30J. 'Rational action theorists' in the social sciencesadvocatereducing socialpatternsto variousmodes of individually rational,linear actions. But this seems wrong, since it presumes a clear and irreducible 'individual' whose rational actions can explain the socialphenomenain question fsee Goldthorpe 2000). There is no reason to presume that there are such clear and unambiguous rational individuals. Certainly the history of the physical sciences showsthat there are no given and unchangingirreducible entities to which the complexity of the physical world has been, or could be, reduced.Indeed,what counts are the'individual' results from multiple flows occurring over various times. According to De l-anda (1997: 259-60), individual bodies and selves are mere 'transitory hardenings'in the more basic historical flows of minerals,genes,diseases, energy,information, and languagefsee also chapter2 above). Emergent properties are also, as we have seen, never purely 'social'and the processesthat generatethem are alsonever simply social. Complexity would always argue against the thesis that 'phenomena' are bounded, that social causes produce social consequences,that there is a cause that generateslinear effects. Causesare always overflowing, tipping from domain to domain and especiallyflowing acrossthe supposedly distinct and purified 'physical' and 'social' domains. For complexity, emergent

78

79

Global Emergence

Global Emergence

properties are irreducible, interdependent, mobile and non-lrnear. Reductionism of the methodologicallyindividualist sort is simply ruled ou_tfalthough not in some complexity-influenced simula_ tions). This chapter consider.show to think through the nature of such irreducible, interdependent and mobile properties emergent at the global level. How it is that such global properties'emerge,, given that there would appear to be no singlecentre or'governor, of the globe from which, in linear fashion, global relatiois can be derived? It is instructive to begin with the best example of non-linear analysiswithin the social sciences- namely, Marx's analysisfrorn a century and a half back of the unfolding 'contradictions' of the capitalistmode of production. He ,.gr"J that the 'need for a constantly-changing market chasesthe bourgeoisie over the whole i surface of the globe. It must settle everywherg establish connexions everywhere' [Marx and Engels 1848/1952: 46-7;see also I Flster 1985; D. Harvey 2000). This putative globalizationresults . from how individual capitalist enlerprises leek to maximize \ profits and hence pay their workers as little as feasible or make : them work as long as possible.This 'exploitation' of the workforce i continues unless the state, or collective actions by trade unions, prevents it, or unless the workers die prematurely. The consequences of such endlesslyrepeated local actions reproduce the capitalist system and its emergent properties of class relations. Substantial profits are generated,so offsetting what Marx hypothesized as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. such profits reproduce the emergentclassrelationsof capital and wage i"bor' that are integral to the capitalist system. out of thos"e profits certain 'ideal collective interests' of capital are met through a 'capitalist state' that secures and sustains the leeal for; of private property, the availabilityof appropriate laboui power; the conditions of the circulation of capital and so on. Howeve4 Marx shows that sustaining order through each capitalist exploiting his or her local workforce eventuall| results in various system contradictions [see Elster 1985). First, since it is in the interestsof each enterprise fbut crucially not of all enterprises)to minimize the wagespaid to its employees,the emergent level of demand for capitalist commodities is iuboptimal [Elster 1985: 46-7). Hence, in relationship to demand ihere will be

resources errerproduction,the underemployment of capitalist periodic although and capitalist crises, i"specially labour power) that ih"r" ,r" subsequentlymitigated through'Keynesian'policies commodities. increase'effectivedemar-rd'for capitalist is to produce a competition capitalist of effect Second, the deprived and relatively inefficient, ,r,orkforce that is increasingly is a working rebellious.Emergent from ordered capitalist relations will classthat thro.rgh an increasinglywidespread classstruggle of a g;n".u," social ievolution and ultimately the establishment :high"r' emergent order. In seeking its own transcendence from that ,rlu"g",lru"ry, tlh" p.ol"tariat generatesa new communist order or,""r.o-", the emergent contradictions of the capitalist system. Third, the limitations of existing capitalist markets lead individual capitalist firms to seek alternative markets. The Manifesto of the Communist Parry describeshow the: 'need for a constantly .hrngi.,g market ch"s", the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must settle everywhere, establish connexions every*h"i" . . . the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country' (Marx and E'ngels 1848/1952: 46-7). ihis worldwiie capitalist expansion will 'smash down Chinlse walls' and ultimately generatethe emergent property of a revolutionary proletariat streiching acrossthe globe [Marx and Engels 1848/i952; D. Harvey 2000). Thus capitalist relations ove'rmillions of iterations result in the opposite of what capitalists appear to be reproducing through exploiting their particultrr workforce. Local capitalist exploitation results, Marx argues,in effects of a revolutionary proletariat and non-linear ".n".g"ni 'catastrophic' (ln terms of the existing system) branching of a capitalism into a new emergent order of world communism [see Reed and Harvey 1992). We now k ,o*, through the benefits of hlndsight, that his analysiswas'mistaken' in thai it supposedlypredicted worldwide social revolution. However, complexity can illuminate why' Complexity shows that relatively small perturbations in the capitalist system, such as the shift from an industrial to an informational paradigm from [Castells 1996), would have produced a branchlng different a Only ago' half what was pr"ii.t"d by Marx a century and a to relatively small set of causes would have been necessary

,l

80

GIobaI Emergence

Global Emergence

generate a radically different emergent outcome, of post-For 'welfare' consumerism rather than worldwide social revol Large effects do not necessarilyneed large causes,since s out of equilibrium can tip or turn one way or the other thro small rather than large changes. Marx's analysisbrings out the key significanceboth of I forms of information and action and of the emergence of sys effects that are far from equilibrium. According to Marx, eagf, capitalist firm operates under non-equilibrium conditions and i able to respondto 'local' sourcesof information that carriesacross a limited range.Any emergent complex system is then the result of a rich interaction of simple elementsthat 'only respond to the limlted information each is presented with' [Cilliers 1998: 5; on the implications for social simulations,see also Gilbert 1995: f 47-B).Thus, while acrossthe world billions of actions occu1,each is basedupon localized information. People act iteratively in terms of what can be known locally and there is no global control over the system.Agents act in terms of the local environment but each agent adapts,or co-evolves,to local circumstances.But they adapt or co-evolve'within an environment in which other similar agents are also adapting, so that changes in one agent may have consequences for the environment and thus the successof other agents' (Gilbert 1995: 148). In the next section I suggest that, while people know little about the global connections or implications of their particular actions,these local actionsneverthelessdo not remain local.They are captured, represented,transported, marketed and generalized elsewhere. They get carried along the scapes and flows of the emerging global world, mobilizing ideas,people, images,moneys and technologies to potentially everywhere [rather like ping-pong balls in a gutterl). Examples were noted in previous chapters of where decisions based upon local knowledge have resulted through multiple iterations in unpredictable and non-linear consequencesat the emergent global level. Thus the apparently 'rational' decision of millions of individual people to drive cars results in carbon gas emissionsthat threaten the planet's longterm survival.The Internet developedout of countlessunplanned and relatively small-scaletechnological and organizationalinnovations occurring in a particular sequence.The almost overnight

8l

across Eastern Europe seems to have -^llaose of communism '^]|,'.r"d once the particular local centre of the Kremlin was l^,r-rf" and unwilling to eliminate such rebellion. ""ihu, we might say that Marx's analysisof nineteenth-century derionstrates elements of complexity, although the -"-,uliris demonstrably very different from T,l"rr".a system' he analyses the nineteenth-century system with tod"y. Compared i^, "t 'h.g"-on' of the British Empire, the through ih" "rrrrtr"a emergent order is structured through multiple inter.rir"n, lanend€ot organizations that are collectively performing the demonstratingwhat Gilbert [1995: 151) ,fiUrf Each Jo-errolves, "orientate" to macro-levelproperties',in this ."Oability to ;;;; the global level' case -- at the Univerih"r" u"ried institutions include the UN [notably 1948)' December l0 on adopted p".l^.",ion Rights of Human ,ri Greenpeace' Organization, W"Aa Bank, Microsoft, World Tiade BBC' CNN, Inter-GovernmentalCommittee on Climate Change' News Corporation, World Intellectual Property -Organization' OrInternational Air Transport Association, FIFA, World Health 2000;Roche 1999;UNDP al' gr.rlrutio.,,IOC and soon [Held.et institutions of goveriOOOl.Through their interiependence,_these nance and civil society are organizing the rules, structures and regulations of the newly emergent global order (on the contemporary interdependencies th" tOC, WHO' UN and so on, see Roche "f 2000). The nineteenth-century equivalent to this patterning was the t-gg4 establishment of Greenwich Mean Time that synchronized time zones acrossthe world [Nguyen 1992: 33)' Interdependent with these global organizations are various signifiers tf thl, emergent global order' Besides the blue earth' these include the Olyripic F1ag,the sea,Nelson Mandela, whales' tigers and elephants, the sign of th" International Red Cross, the Amazon rain forest, Mother Teresa and so on' These signifiers community uniting dlfferreflect and perform a global "and imagined generations. The astronaut William ent peopler, g"rrd"., Anders most fimourly .o-ni"nted on the image of the blue earth seenfrom space: The earth appearedas a small,blue-greenspherelike a beautiful ii-it.a. ' ' ' fn" ancestralhome of ornament,,rery delicat. ".td

82

Global Emergence

Global Emergence

;1ff ,T:r,Tiii:; *ffi #, h: ilTliit,#;1,,T3 witha'rirr";"; ;' ;' r,'['j* ;Tji T::;::T::;"n "l;y;

B3

Strange Attractors

and especially notb"Ti y,,,;;;,a;;, rn Chapter Z I discussedthe idea of attractors ; if:::' t;1: i B I,U,,t'a.U :"."r.l"rb,ji,urng" attractors.The latter characterizecertain systems where "d

Such imagesdepict.-th:_ql"g"

through signifyingcertain

to ,1",,.l?i".,o.Yof dynamical ,fr."r u." unstableand which and

.,..,,i*a,...:ili, :i :1TX,Tj' gl'kI i-' gl'"l"' produced,

iistems is attracted over time through billions of iterations of Positive feedback. .lrnccsses . , r, Y'' 1 | ,l thave been few attempts within the social sciencesto Th"r" attractors develop analyses drawing on the notion of strange of the i35-41) fgu.n" 1997, 1998). Baker'sexamination[1993: tentriphery' attractor is the most interesting (see also P. Stewart Z00l:331). Baker seesthe centriphery as a dynamic pattern that eetsrepeated at many different levels of the social world. The lentriphery involves irreversible flows of energy,information and ideas backwards and forwards between the centres and perioheries,with each existing only because of the other. And the centriphery simultaneously creates and re-createsboth centres and peripheries.The trajectory of social systems is irreversibly attracted to this centriphery attractor. .Because centring and peripheralizinginvolve the transformation of energy and information and, thus, the creation of entropy, the process is irreversible.

plannedrn"*"_"""j;, ,,, \o:h" describes that . . . channel,mrx.and T,-:'::ilspatio-temporal ^hubs"(2000: "";-;;;t,.h:s,,'t-L^., re-routeglobal flows' lggl condensation, involving the peculiarly intense.localization,of I suchglobalevents ,".,i"" yi:h;i oi".", ar" to the fact that they :

and information towards itself and disorder by peripheralizing its environment.It producesa world on the peripherywhere the flow of energyand informationis awayto somewhereelse. . . the centerhas an entropiceffecton the peripherycausingincreased randornnessand increasinq amounts of unusable resources. (Baker1993:139)

i

u_nd i,,i_"rs. Andsuchi" "1y'1""T,"1,, l,:T:':"ffT1":,, also speak rorthe xrobe, skil;rrftfiffl'iriff;:.i"f j-"3 imagery' f#::ior another way in :::rl1o, 3.? in their ""'il'"",,"'*r"u,r

marketplace.

o,jx'"1,",:t}:ii:':l'

t.",rding,"d frrr"C,rrl*.t1,

andimages arefusedtogether in va

mega_events. On rrah o..r' the .^,^.1t vi ,.:^-.-^ .Jnexpected, th e world ewsitser f ih-r-o r];i';:t'Ji*i, ",..e"1"rl":: :t ;x":ff

Exampresincrudc wort il,:lil*:l' d Exp T'# l,"o^'l: ::i4rv""r, : r ioj. o'"ii,T os, LiveAld . o".".ii^ ^ ijt#i:* prison'Rio Earthsummit,,tr" ,"..oiri""' destructionof the

Ti"adecentre' princess Diana'sa""trr"""a funerar,the worrd olympic Games,millennial."l9b1ati-o-.,r, W;;ii Beijing Women,s Conference andsoon{Albrow iggo,ljo,9rpr, Rochezbo6,.n. 4.ln

scre€nsaround,n"',.1ifi,"":,r"":.,11;l;ffi e**Hfr #:? 'ambienttelevision, ffur.Crr,fri)OOif .' thenis an'attractor',creatingorderby funnellingenergy Cer.rtering,

reer,Th"t;;" ;';#ilil;'?H"J:,":? gi:|ilI :::'^-!1990

il:fi3:'XTJT"i.']"1';dT:"kiTi't'"'po*".i"l*',r.,-

,T:':Ll::t.iiy;,it",, in".n"zrjb;,i.fi;: . into beingthese

rn rhe next section this rerationshipbetween grobal eventsand local host cities is examined It is seen as a specific illustration of a compl""., -".-;;;;alry. ;;;L:,r"'lr ,f," strange attractor of 'glocalization',whereby rhe connectionsof l.."li;;;";-].,,on, and global consesuences i have il;;;;';".onfigured since M t brilliant insightsfrom the ;;1" .".rtr.y before rnr,.i"tt -iddr; & 'n t-

l-

The centriphery is rather like Einstein'sconception of an object whose gravity warps the space around it, drawing in and generating new patterns of order and of disorder.And further, Baker notes that such centring processesare now significantly internationalized. Thus: 'toda.v,particular multinational industries center vast amounts of human activity, Iocating specific aspectsof their enterprise in different continents.In each of these cases,the exchange of goods and servicesbinds and lubricates a dynamic relationship

,1

84

Global Emergence

between the center and the periphery. As- centering progresses, deepensthe periphery' [Baker 1993: 140) Baker'saccount is now historicallydated,sinceit depends the relatively simple thesis of the internation arizing of rrdu production. However, his argument can be developed th suggestingthat the specific form now taken by the atiractor of centriphery is 'glocalization'.Within the phase-spaceof possibilities,the trajectories of many social systems worl are increasinglydrawn into the attractor of ,glocalization, [on

'glocal',seeRobertson199?J.By this I meanthat there pa.i "i" allel,irreversibleand mutually interdependentprocess",br;f,';I

globalization-deepens-loca_lization-deepens-grotalization rrrd so on. The global and the local are inextricably and irreversibly bound together through a dynamic relationship, with huge flowi of 'resources' moving backwards and forwards between ih" ,*o. Neither the global nor the local exists without the other. The global-local develops in a symbiotic, unstable and irreversible set of relationships, in which each gets transformed through blllions of worldwide iterations dynamically evolving over timel what has produced such attractor effecti? crucial to Marx,s account of the contradictions of nineteenth-century capitalism was its foundation upon the localized nature of information. Each firm respondsonly to locally availableinformation. And more generally this systemof localizedinformational limitation oJ.r, remained in place until the late twentieth century -o." [cilliers l99g: 4). The radio, TV, letteq,telegram and fixed rine teiephone enabled some input of information from outside each locaiity. Heidegger wrote about the first in l9l9: 'l live in a duil, drab colliery vifage . . . a bus ride from third rate entertainments and .orrrid..ubl" " iourney from any educational,musical or social advantages of a first classsort. . . . Into this monotony comes a good radioiet and my little world is transformed' [cited in scannell 1996: l6l). The radio [and later the TV) began to disclose the public *o.ld of events,persons and happenings.People were partially thrown into the public world disclosedon radio and TV. But m,y claim here is that the scale,range of media and extensivity of informational flows developing from around i990 have irreversibly transformed such 'discloir."r' from elsewhere. lnformation flows have been dematerialized from place. wth

Global Emergence

8s

A;oitizrtion, information adopts patterns and modes of mobility L,i.t.nttally scparatefrom material form or presence.Information [and nowhere) travelling more or less instantalli. "t"ry*here fluid networks of global communications,along the along l"ourfV to in chapter 4 as 'all-channel'networks. referred *hu, *nt Thesetechnologieschangeat astonishingspeed,with a hundredyears (Brand 1999]. fold increasein computing power every ten 'computime' of time and its the abstraction represents ih" n"rhythms of space and the human experience, from ,"pu.ution 'is about the global nature. The information-based dlgital age movement of weightlessbits at the speed of light' fNegroponte locally or globallyis now more 1995: l2J.What can be accessed becoming identical [see least is irreversibly or at or lessidentical, Cairncross1998J.And it is this spatialindifferenceof information that has called into being the strange attractor of giocalization. This involvesthe remaking of social relations acrossthe world, as extraordinarilydiversesocialpracticesget irreversibly'drawninto' or'sucked into' the ambit of the glocalizingattractor. A number of almost simultaneous,.and partly contingent, transformations occurred from around 1990 to 'kick-start' this dynamically different informational order (see Castells 1996). First, Soviet Communism collapsed.The societiesof Central and Eastern Europe had constructed exceptionally strong frontiers both from the 'West' and from each other. The cold war chilled information and culture as well as politics. But from 1989 the systemdisappearedalmost overnight, partly becauseof the profound failure of Soviet Communism to developnew informational technologiesand the paradoxicaldependenceupon US computing technology (see Castells 1998: ch. l). And, as it disappeared, especiallyfollowing the mega-event of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, so substantiallocalized barriersto informational flow also dissolved. Sirnultaneously,there was the development of systemsof global news reporting, as opposed to the national news reporting that impressed Heidegger in the 1920s. CNN television started in 1980,but, since its'success'in the Gulf War, broadcastsin over 140 countries.This more or lessvirtual war in l99l was the first in which the new pattern of twenty-four-hour real-time reporting occurred acrossthe world. This greatly increasedCNN's visibility

86

GLobal Emergence

and this hassubsequentlyspreadto many other broadcasters have gone global and produced a ,global ,tug"/r..""n;-il;'"

events.nowthoroughlymediated(Volkmert9O9; Hoski", ZOO Analogouslyin the late l9S0: all major nn"n.i"l-*-".1. movedto on-linereal-timetradingaccesribl",o_"*h"." .l twenty-four hours a day.There *, . shift to "af *lobrl- JvrLem rrr".."' electronicfinancialtrading[L"yrhon ,.J irr.tri" t*t). ,inventej, telling,in 1990Tim Berners_Lee . . -B.r,r.T.ort the W; Wide Web and especially_ the concepts .f URL, Hiii;;i fsee Castells'shistory: 200IJ. Togetherthese conc;.; ;;, jumps

seamless from link to ilnk without regard ,o ,h. .o, tional- geographical boundaries within whici i.rfor-"tio",,

been located,stored and^curated 6riedman 2000: OS_a1.';;

fromaround1990*r. li:"]:tfq "'.rr.rai"e **y.iio#r, "*i.l cles, websitesandsymposia devoted," ffi;dffi """-?",.;iil, ordering. These analyses both detail the strong co-evolution

of informational flows occurring across th" glob"'*rrtrri" *.y airferent domains of activity; and assist in citing, perfbrming and drawing into existence a new global ordering ,l*"y, bdr*la on the knife edge,'on the edge oi.hror,. My argument here is that there is not a global centre of poweq, let alone a global conspiracv or global ;;*;;l;-;""i,l.ir"a ," social practice fsee the critique in"Jessop 2000). Rather ih"." i, an attractor of 'glocalization,.This is deveioping ;" ;;;;."rriu.ly worldwide basisand drawing more and more sets of" iela-tionships into its awesomepower. And, as relationship, d."*., _, ," ,fr.y are irreversibly remade. This is productiue "." of a new ordering but not one involving a singlecoordinating centre.Kwa describes this notion as 'complexity without telos. . . .Arry local changg provided it meets the criticar requirements, can induce the rest of_the population . . . to_,,co-operate,,into finding ,"* _"a. behaviour.All individud, ,""- to b" i.rfo.-"a " "f iuort ott at the steps of the transition' (2002:42; ", "".h seealso Duffield z00lJ. one illustration of the w_orkingsof this attractor is how global mega-eventssuch as the Olympics seem both to presuppoi" th. emergence of local host cities and to reinforce ttr"i. -il*i These are places chosen for their supposedly ,niqre, "rl-,'"rg"n.". rtrur_ acteristicsthat make them rspeciaily appropriate for the hosting of what are increasinglygLobaievenrs (Roche 2000J. Vor.g",_,"r-

Global Emergence

87

recent period has seenthe development of a global screen "llv,thc ."on nuht.h localities, cultures and nations appear,to compete themselvesas spectacle[P. Harvey 1996; Roche ,ia,o mobilize uOf,tfl.These events, premised upon global media and mass lnuriim, mean that local identity and nation are conceived of ihroughtheir location within, and upon, that global screening. Thrs'elobalscreening'in turn relatesto the changingnature of nationalityfMaier 1994: 149-50; McCrone 1998). Once nationalitywas based upon a homogenous and mapped national terriror.v,in which law was defined, authority claimed and loyalty soughtby the state within that territory. But now frontiers are oermeableand cultural life is far more interchangeableacrossthe globethtough extensive corporeal, imaginative and virtual travel. Maier concludes that 'territory is less central to national selfdefinition'(1994: 149). Nationality getsmore constituted through specificlocal places,symbols and landscapes,icons of the nation centralto that culture's location within the contours of global business,travel and branding fsuch as the twin towers of New York'sWorld Tiade Centre). Through glocalization,then, nation has become less a matter of the specific state uniquely determining that nation. And the notion of nation has significantly become more a matter of branding, as nation has become something of a free-floating signifier relativelydetached from the 'state' within the swirling contours of the new global order [see P. Harvey 1996; Delanty 2000: 94). British PM Tony Blair famously talked of seeking to 'rebrand Britain'. The power of the attractor of glocalizationcan also be seenin the more generaldevelopment of global branclsand of the often localizedresistancesthat develop againstthem. I noted in the last chapter the insidious power of such brands, a virus sent out into the culture through various channels of sponsorship,consumerisnr,political controversy and marketing additions. Brands are,moreover, always on the move, often ironically flowing in and out of cultures, including cultures of protest. Brands do not just seepdownwards from the centre - they also derive from various streetlife and cultures, turning almost every local resistanceinto a rebrandingopportunity [such as urban black youth, New Age, teminism,labour movement, Greens and so on).

88

Global Emergence

Global Emergence

89

Simultaneouslythere is a growing global opposition1q 1 'brandedlife'. Brandscreate th'"i. opiosite via-ii" p;;;g advertisements [Cancer Country .rifr". than Marlboro C^,,. cigarettesl, ,reclaiming.i;;

that'exist only to the extent that Thcseare virtual communities together through identificationscon.heir constituentsare linked cultural 1..,,.,"d in the non-geographicspacesof activistdiscourses, through local and then global partly through 1996: 333). And, images' media and [Rose ].l"au.,t parties, through Critical Mass bike v.i.;r .ides, through th;;.;;;; of resistanceto the flows, they serve to 'detotalize' oractices ro anti-sweatshopsmove-."n,,(":p:cially targeting Nike, Grp'Vl l-Jlto.ulir"' each national society.Thus 'civil societiesshrink and on for.theii localizeo labour market li.l.ti.ul"te becausethere is no longer continuity between the Y:T,?:l"li11ro and through massiveNGO ."_;;;;;^^;;;;;; exploi :i:Q L*ni. of power-making in the global network [global fluids, in my and,globalization' o." g.r,".rjf representation Y.D.lr] Ir ri;.0.6b, v if
if",#:'; illl; "?::," l""l1;, 3::'-',Ii:i'-:: id'";;;; i* t,?^

it,I;,.,hiI" ".i r :i:i:'nT; ffi "^fl,l, ,united 3::,::lf :i,i..: : : "i*' ^. of the colou,. oin?iffi;.:i i.;1,.,"1ry.,."1ks iilr'J"'iffi

3 2 2 ,3 5 7 ).

generally,_passionate opposition to the networks and flows . Yo." of the new global order many networked groups and "rr".gir., associations.Globalization generatesits opposition, forming an 'elaborate web' that especia*lly opposes'McGovernment, fKlein 2001:86).

Sucha resistant o.d".'_togtoUutl;r,il;;;;,J^;;;-

mented and disparate,.including the 2apatistas in Mexico, the American Militia and the patriot"s generally,Aum shinrikyo in Japan, global terrorists, many -o..environmental NGOs, the women's movement concerned with the i-p;J;^"i'J"-gt.Ua marketplace upon women and children in developing countries, New Ageists, religious fundamentalist movementq the Global Resistancemovement and so Ali ;ppose aspects of the new "". global and are organized th.ough 'resistanceidentities, .ordering [Castells1997: 356).

unfolding event. Deteriitorialized global entities are strikingly vulnerable to the processesof democratic 'mobilization' by similarly mobile, deteriitorialized social movements of a fused private-in-public. On public screensacrossthe world the images of peaceful prot€stors teing beaten over the head by American police are globally circulaGd. The WTO has been unable to force through the new round of trade liberalization.It was subject to public shaming via global screening that exposed the economic private re-alm to a gtob"t pubhc (see Sheller and Urry 2007). Moreover, this event iuu, oniy on" of many in a wave oi proteit reverberating around the world and its screens with similar 'anti-capitalist' events springingup in June 1999, May Day 2000, July 2001 and so on' As the orga.tizersput it, 'Our resistanceis as global as capital' [see http ://www. freespeech.orglmayday2k).

Global Emergence

Global Emergence

Thus new 'organizations' have developed that are globalb mediated. People imagine themselves as members (or supporters) of such organizations through purchases, wearing the T:shirt, hearing the CD, surfing the organization's page on the Web, participating in a computerized jamrning and so on. Howevet for all the power of global fluids, 'members' of organizationswill intermittently come together to 'be with' others in the presen! in moments of intensely localizedfellow-feeling. These moments, involving what has been called the 'compulsion to proximity', include festivals,businessconferences,holidays, camps, training camps for terrorists,seminars and, of course,sites of global protest [Boden and Molotch 1994; Szerszynski1997; Urry 2002b). The workings of the glocalization attractor can also be seen in global financial systems. Such systems have got progressively disembedded from place with the commodification of markets operating through twenty-four-hour global trading in real time. But this global disembedding occurs only with a simultaneous intensificationof the 'local'. Becauseof the fragile and symbolic communities that are formed in electronic money space, so re-embedded particularistic spacesdevelop to cement relationships of trust more intensely.New meeting placesbecome nodes of reflexivity that then resonate back over billions of iterations acrosstime to enhance and augment the globally organized electronic money spaces. Boden summarizeshow the attractor operates:

card [Leyshonand Thrift \997:349-50). Financialpracbusiness almost all countries are drawn into and are organized across tices such relations between locally tight social worlds of through intense trust, on the one hand, and hugely disembedded and abstractedglobal money space,on the other. Each strengthens and reinforcesthe other; asmany other trading patterns get drawn into, and transformed through, such a glocalized attractor. Something similar seemsto characterizework relations in the softrvareindustry. O Riain [2000) describeshow software developersrely upon intense 'team' working in order to offset two features of their global experience. First, the workforce, in this case involved in software development in Ireland, is multicultural, so forms of face-to-face bonding are necessary to deal with an otherwise disruptive'difference'.'And, second, these developers have very mobile careers and relatively fleeting associationswith each other. So what is required is 'an intense experience of a sharedspaceand culture in order to create a cohesivework team' [O Riain 2000: 189). These places 'are increasingly"between" other places' and are part of the 'innovative regional milieu' that is to be found in and around Dublin (O Riain 2000: i89). A somewhat broader account of glocalization can be seen in Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Oliue Tiee (2000). Half the world he saysis intent on producing a better Lexus through modernizing,streamlining and privatizing their economies so as to thrive within a global world. This is the 'first modernity'. And the other half is caught up in a fight to determine who owns which olive tree, the olive tree standing for roots, anchoring, identity, what l,ash fl999) calls 'another modernity'. Olive trees also involve excluding others.So the strugglebetween the Lexus and the olive tree is taken by Friedman as a metaphor for the kinds of relationshipsthat characterizethe new global order.They are not alwaysin conflict - considerthe Global PositioningSystem IGPS) to enableMuslim air passengers to know exactly where the plane is in relationshioto Mecca. hr Ltarber[996) seesthe glocal attractor in apocalypticterms. He , oescri_bes the emergent global order as increasinglylocked into a conflict between consumerist'McWorld', on the one hand, and the identity politics of the 'Jihad', on the other. There is a lnew world disorder' in which McWorld and Jihad depend upon, and

90

Surroundedby complextechnologyand variabledegreesof uncertainty,socialactorsseekeachother out, to makethe dealsthat, writ large acrossthe global electronicboardsof the exchanges, make the market.They come togetherin tight socialworlds to of 'what'shappenuseeachother and their sharedunderstanding move the world' levers that those ing' to reach out and move (Boden2000: 194) New places of face-to-face interaction have sprung up in the City of London, so stabilizing the informational fienty of twenty-fourhour global trading.There is an increasedimportance of the-busit-t"r, l"r.t.h [less d-rlnk and meat-based with 'feminization'J, the conference,iesidentialtraining, corporate hospitality and even the

9l

92

93

GLobalEmergence

Global Emergence

globally reinforce, each other. Together they constitute a stran attractor,a spirallingglobal disequilibrium that threatensexisti public spheres,civil society and democratic forms. He arguqg that 'the dialectical interaction between them suggestnew xpd startling forms of inadvertent tyranny that range from an invisibly constraining consumerism to an all too palpable barbari5pl-, [Barber 1996:220). Such_astrangeattractor moreover involves existing nationally encodednotions of 'citizenship'being drawn into two alternativei of consumerism,on the one hand, and localist identity politics,on the other. Thus existing nationally focused notions of ;itizen;hi; are drawn into and transformed through the strange attractor of 'glocalization'. All sorts of further relations get -drawn into a gravity effect of such an attractor. lslam, Hinduism, ,born_again, Christianity and many 'local' religions themselves come to develop global characteristics, each seemingly knowledgeable about how each is developinga global vrsibrrityand respo.,iing to such processesof co-evolution [seeAppadurai lgg6). Finally,post-communist Hungary illuminates how the attractor of glocalization can be said to draw diverse sets of relations into its powerful embrace (Gille 20001. Eastern Europe is typically now viewed as a wasteland- of the failed politiial project of Communism and of an economy that generated disjroportionate amounts of waste.The siting of a new waste incinerator plant in Gare on the site of a waste dump funded in part by the EU relates both to the nature of the global waste incineration industry and to the global environmental movement. The EU is .r :i funding the building of variouswaste incinerator plants in former ir ,I E-asternEurope, plants that would turn local waste into energy. 'ii However, accordingto the greenssuch siteswould also incinerate }: west European waste, out of sight and smell of west Europeans. il So the siting of a waste incinerator plant in Gare appearsto be the product of 'globalization',aided and abetted bv^ti-," EU, and explicablein terms of the logic of the global waste incineration industry. However, Gille presentsan analysismore consistentwith the thesis of a powerful glocalization attractor. Thus one effect of complex post-Communist politics within Hungary has been the relative disappearanceof the national state. This enabled this

locality of Gare to form a direct relationship with the ".eci6c '-"^I.,nno originally responsible for the waste dump in order to :-; ,j. incinerator built on the site.Relationshipswere established l^),ri urrlo"s other global companies,while EU funding was also in favour of the incinerator were able ,"|"r"a. Local elites a strong sense of local history, which helped to ,1" localitiesand to global'greens' -oUtt,r" objectionsto neighbourin^g ,iraut,-r from outside. Gille summarizes ,""f"rg to influence outcomes here: 'The void created by if-'" *f"U"t-local relationships operating life . . . was quickly filled Gar6's from ii," i,","'t disappearance new [local] elite successthe UVSlobulfo..", and discoursesthat in its own interests. . . . Such a direct connection tuii' '.rtilir"d local and global could not have emerged undel social;;;i"""" global weathOnr, the state'sumbrella shielded localitiesfrom ", or shine' how'global summarizes thus [2000: 252). She they once "rr,'r"i" than forces . . . are less constraining and more enabling ;;;;; as society after society ir dt"*n into and remade through (Gille 2000: *h", i, t"r*"d, in this book, the glocalizing attractor 261).

Global Emergence So far I have shown that there is no global society or single centre is of global power and hence no clear-cut global'region'. There ulso ,ro rl.tumbigrous set of outcomes providing evidence of the I thus argue againstthose who mainpower of 'globai' processes. iain that tlobaliration produces a,set _of linear effects, such as the heighiened homogenization of culture, or itrcreased socioinequalities,lr the worldwide growth of democracies' ".ono-]. set of What is treated tt"." u, the 'global' prodt""t no single just menprocesses effects,although it is bound up with all those entails tioned. The dJvelopment of th" attractor of glocalization and a wholesaleshifting in the very structure of economic' social political relations ui.o* the globe. However, the evidence for this that can provide a direct 'test' ioes not consist of a set of "-ff".tt or'measurement' of the 'global'. Of course,there must be.substantialprogrammesof researchexamining thesesetsof putatlvely 'global' relations.

t 94

Globnl Emergence

Global Emergence

According to Abbott (200f : ch. 1), much socialscienceassumesl 'linear reality' in which the social world consistsof fixed en_, a tities with variable attributes, that these attributes have only ong meaning,that the past sequencingof events is irrelevan, u"j th.t context does not affect these attributes. He makes a general argument againstsuch a position, but global processesand especially the global-local processesthat construct and reconstruct the reh_ tions between the global and local further undermine the notion that there are or indeed could be clear and unambiguous fixed entities with variable properties whose history is irrelevant. Indeed the 'evidence' that relationships acrossthe globe are being globalized is necessarilyambivalent, contradictory and contestable.If it is right to argue for a complexity formulation of the emerging system,then the researchneeds to reflect and capture uneven, farl from-equilibrium setsof interdependentprocessesinvolved in the very making of the global and especiallyof the glocalizingattractor fas Duffield (200]) arguesfor global governanceJ. Held et al. (1999: 17) do provide massiveevidenceof an extensivity of global networks and flows, an intensity of interconnectedness,a velocity of mobilities around the globe and the high impact of such interconnectedness.And these have powerful effects,especiallyof powerful local perturbations in the system that resuit in unpredictabiebranching emerging acrossthe global system.Examples of these local perturbations include the demolition of the Berlin wall, the invention of the first web browser in the USA, the releasefrom a South African orison of Nelson Mandela, and the presenceof twenty bombers on four American planeson 1l September2001. But such emergenteffects are often produced by 'small causes' and these get relayed through the diverse and overlapping global networks and fluids that interact physically, and especially informationally, under, over and across the earth's surface, stretching over hugely different temporal scaies.These interactionsare rich, non-linear and move towards the attractor of 'glocali zation'.There is no simple empirical research here of unambiguous global or local entities.Rather,the processesare much more like 'gravity'. There is an increasingly powerful gravity effect upon numerous, diverse localized patterns. Such globally complex systems,especially developing from around l99o and the desubstantiationof

inforrnation,involve positive feedbackloops that render the global the attracir,. fro. equilibrium as many entities are drawn into relationshiPs. 1111 Further, this set of global systemsis like no other social system. Its ernergent features make it different from anything that has eone before. Paradoxicallyit does have some similarities with ieudal Europe. Some have described the globalizing world as 'neo-feudal'.In the global world there are multiple political units beyond individual societies[seeWalby 2001); there are empires, such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft or Disney, more powerful than societies [see Klein 2000); there are competing city states, such as London, Sydney or Los Angeles [see Roche 2000); and there are many wandering intellectuals,sports stars, musicians and so on, as well as internati onal uagranfs,with declining national attachments [see Urry 7007a). But there are also many differences between emergentglobal ordering and Europeanfeudalism,especially in terms of the technologiesof the household and of warfare, production, circulation, distribution, and exchange,such that few useful lessonscan be drawn from such a comparison. Likewise the system of nation statesseemsto bear few resemblances to global systems. The former is organized through a nation state that 'governs'its citizens,there are clear boundaries and memberships,they possessa self-organizingcharacter,and each derives a unity from opposition to each'other'. There is a s-vstemof competing, self-organizing nation states that characterized the twentieth century (albeit with plenty of exceptions). Global systems,by contrast, are not governed by a central state, although there are very significant attempts by the corporate world to draw up variousrules for global governancein their interests.Monbiot rather brilliantly describesthe 'corporate bid for world domination' [2000: ch. 10). Thus we are confronted with a global sociallaboratorybut one within which we have almost no guides to appropriate investigation. Three things are sure. Developments towards the global are irreversiblebut unpredictable.The global possesses systemiccharacteristics that urgently demand investigation and are distinct from those of other social systems.And, since the global is like nothing else, the social scienceshave to start more or less from scratch.Existing theoriessuch as that of classdomination will not

95

97

Global Emergence

Global Emergence

work when converted onto the global level. Hence there are sigr, nificant limitations of Sklair'shugely ambitious efforts [200]) iq, .l write classtheories as global. Complexity has thus been drawn on here, since it deals with odd and unpredictable systemsoften far from equilibrium and without a central 'governor'. Complexity we have seen empha-, sizesthat no distinctionsshould be drawn between structure and process,stability and change,and a system and its environment [see Duffield's analogous formulation from security studies:

experienceat leastputatively the 'endof the jevelopment we can other ' r -.-Mo.l"rrl science has created this monster of the global risk through treating the environment as its laboratory.But ,^,-,or,,,

96

2 00 1 ).

I have resisted defining 'globalization' as a single, clear and unambiguous 'causal' entity. Jessopsimilariy arguesthat globalization is 'best interpreted as the complex resultant of many different processesrather than as a distinctive causal process in its own right' (2000: 339). If we resistdistinguishingbetween structure and processrstability and change,a system and its environment, then there is indeed no 'globalization' as a causal entity involved in 'contests' with various other regions.There are in more formal languageno such entities with variable attributes (Abbott 2001). There are 'many different processes',but the key question is how they are organized within certain emergent irreversible global outcomes that move backwards and forwards between the more localized and more global levels.On such an account then globalization is a characterizationof the system as 'effect' rather than asin any sensea'cause',although I havenoted the likely inappropriatenessof such causallanguage[Rosenberg2000). This leads me to thinking the global through the lens of performativity. I will now considersuch a way of thlnking the global. First, the'globe' is an object of concern for many citizens across many different countries. I noted above the remarkably widespread availability of global images,in TV programmes,branding by global corporations,advertsand especiallypolitical campaigns. Also countlessoppositional organizationsconcernedwith aspects of global governancehave developed since the 1960s.There are also many more form al organizations,especially since the founding of the UN in 1948, that take the whole earth as an object of reflexive concern.The globe has become an object of widespread reflexivity stretching acrossthe world in the face of what has been termed the'world risk society' lBeck 19931.With such a

5uu'-

--

,

I

arso scienct-has is a lonely fragile spaceshipthat is the demonstratedthat the Earth however riven by divisions based on humanity, Iniu tron.," for all or ethnicity; how it has community colour, nu,i.rnntl,y, religion, now available capabilities the with place small a ,tt.*orlJ services;and goods and people, information, -ra.n-,.,u"-".rt of ideas, io, onenessof and essential fundamental the t,onui, has demonstrated 35-6) 1997: all living systems.[Menon that we can and must Nobel prizewinner Joseph Rotblat argues 'humanity' rather than to the 'nation' d"u"loi an allegiance to

the world's iiggZu, pp *-"i1. It is global interdependencebetween allegiance a universalist )op.rlutio.r that is the key to developing ih,rn-r",-rity'rather than to national identities. He maintains that: io The fantasticprogressin communicationand transportationhas transformedthe world into an intimately interconnectedcommunity,in which all membersdependon one anotherfor their wellbeing.We arenow abieto observeinstantlywhat is goingon in any ' ' ' We must part of the globe and provide help where necessary' to bring us communication of channels new exploit the many trecome must We global community' truly a toiether and form Z00l) Walby also see pp' x-xi; t09la: worlcicitizens.fRotblat The Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs expects und i.,dled hopes that the global media will play a particularly significantrole in this but not only becausethey carry cognitive information across the globe. Raiher, cultural work is carried 'an images that are able to engender through co-present such portray'; -"di" emoti,onal."rponr" to the *o.ld events that they imagesheighten the awarenessof regional and global interdepen,l".tl" and"put pressure on offending governments to moderate their often offensiveactions [Rotblat 1097a:14)' More generally' Vaclav Havel describes how the 'perspective of a bette-r tuture deoendson somethinelike an internationalcommunity oi citizens

98

Global Emergence

. . . standing outside the high game of traditional politics . . will seek to make a real political force out of . . . the phenomenon qf human conscience'(cited Rapoport 1997 97; on'distant others,, see also S. Cohen 2001). Furthermore,scientists[and other groups of professionals)are increasinglyorganizedin a post-nationalmanner.They are almost 'quasi-nations', with their own system of globally organized events, timetables and rewards [such as Nobel and other prizes). And, as modern electronic communications develop, so theie quasi-nationsbecome more important, widespread and drawn into the attractor of glocalization. Professionalsindeed see the global village as replacing the nation state,as electronic communication supplants written communication and the 'whole earth, replacesthe 'territory with borders'.There is a widespreadsense of the increasingrole that communities that cut acrossnational boundariesplay in the lives of ordinary people fRotblat 1997b). Various authorities have talked of the growth of a 'transnational civil society as an arenafor struggle' (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 33), as well as massively extensive and self-organizing'ungrounded empires' like the overseasChinese (Ong and Nonini 1997J. Some analysts also argue that women are more likely to be drawn to notions of global citizenship.Women appearto be more opposed to wars (on the Gulf War, see Shaw 1994: 1Z7).They often find the malenessof symbols of national power particularly alienating fYuval-Davis 1997). Survey evidence shows that they are particularly committed to conservation and environmental issues(Anderson 1997: 174). Thus women are more likely to convince others of the superiority of a relatively countryless notion of citizenship and indeed to advancea notion of universal rights under which specific women's rights, such as freedom from sexual violence,can be lodged (Shiva 1989; Kaplan 1996;Walby 2001). So various social practices,of science,the media, international groupings,women and so on, which stem from the putative universalism of the globe as an object of reflexive concern, may begin to make or perform the global. Global Nature, Global Cuhure formulates a conception of the global as 'performance' (Franklin et al. 2000). Indeed, it uses various complexity notions: of ideas of catastrophe, chaos and fractals, of how global culture is partially self-organizing,of the open characterof the global system,of the

Global Emergence

99

the generally disruptive effects irnportance of iteration and of recognition of a .rf ,p".ifi. informational flows. There is strong character of irreversible temporally and ih" .o-pl"x, non-linear processes. ""lobal The authors draw especiallyon Butler's claim that performa"act", tivity 'must be understood not as a singular or deliberative dlsbrrt ruth"a as the reiterative and citational practice by which brings Butler .o,r.r" producesthe effectsthat it names' [1993:2). out the crucial importance of iteration for performance. Structures are never fi"ed o. given for good. They always have to be worked at over time. And naming something [such as the global) is itself partly to call that which is named into being. Franklin, L.rry ani Stacey argue that the global is 'performed' by itself and is not caused by something outside itself not does it cause effects external to it. The global is seen as auto-enabled or auto'autopoeisis'from reproduced,although they do not use the term complexity [see chapter 2 above). Thus they ex_aminehow the global is being brought into being asan emergent effect, asit comes to constitute its own domain especiallythrough various materialsemiotic practices[Franklin et al. 2000: 5). The global is shown to ,perfoimed, imagined and practised'acrossnumerous domains be thai are operating at enormously different scalesor levels' The autho., ulro describe how the global 'enters' the self through what they portray as the 'intimate global'. Becauseof ,kind' to 'brand" they describe how nature is the shift from being drawn into the attractor of globalization.Nature gets comtechnologized, reanimated and rebranded' And many -odihed, material-semiotic practices - from the economic, to politics, to medical science,to theme parks, to computer technology - are involved in the global ,"-"kittg of culture and nature and especially the increasing fusion of the two. Does this therefJre mean that we should conceiveof the global system as autoporetic [see chapter 2 above]7Is the global system 'are ,elf-m"king? Maturana writes how autopoietic systems defined as networks of productions of components that recursively,through their interactions,generateand realizethe network that produ.!, th"- and constitute, in the space in which they exist, the boundaries of the network as components that participate in the realizationof the network' II981:21)' Such a system

100

Global Emergence

is thus not a set of relationsbetween static componentswith fixed attributes. Rather there are processesof self-making through iteration over time of the production of components that are in fact necessaryto make up that very system.There is continuous regenerationof the processesof production through an array of feedbackmechanisms(Capra 1996: 168). In a sociological context Luhmann has most deployed this notion of autopoiesis.He defines it thus: 'everything that is used as a unit by the system is produced as a unit by the system itself This applies to elements, processes,boundaries, and other structures and, last but not least, to the unity of the system itself' (Luhmann 1990: 3; see also Mingers 1995). Such systemsdeploy 'communications' as the 'particular mode of autopoietic reproduction', since only communications are necessarilysocial. A theory of autopoietic systemsinvolves the development of communications as the elementary component of each system.Such communicationsare not living or consciousunits but involve three elements, information, utterance and understanding. Luhmann understandsthese as co-createdwithin the processesof communication. Social systemsare not'closed systems'but open systems that are recursivelyclosed with respectto such communications. Such communications result, he says,in the self-making of 'our well-known society' [Luhmann 1990: 13; see also P. Stewart 2001). These systemsincreasetheir complexity and their selectivity in order to reduce the complexity of the environment in which they have to operate (Luhmann 1990: 84). How relevant is autopoiesis to examining the nature of global systems?Certainly, the notion of autopoiesis bears some similarities with analyses in Global Nature, Global Cubure as to the spreadingof global communications and consequentialremaking of the natural and cultural domains around the world. Autopoiesis alsobearsa resemblanceto the argument that it is through naming the global,and through blllions of iterations,that the global is then brought into being. Luhmann talks of the differentiations involved in the development of 'world society'. Howevel, Luhmann's argument is couched at too high a level of abstractionto graspthe very specificcharacterof the global networks and fluids that I outlined and defended above ffor a more circumscribed application, see Medd 2000). Luhmann's account

GIobaIEmergence

l0l

is functionalist, not capturing the contingent, far-from-equlibrium processesimplicated in the current world 'on the edge of chaos'.Feedbacksare predominantly negativerather than positive. Luhmann refers to 'our well-known society'. But this suggests that the general concept of self-making cannot be connected to the very detailed workings of networked phenomena that are complex, fractured entities often operating far from equilibrium. These limitations are even more problematic where such notions of self-making weakly capture the extensivity of global networks and flows, the intensity of global interconnectedness,the heightened velocity of mobilities around the globe and the massive impact of such interconnectedness. Indeed, applying Luhmann's autopoeitic formulation to the global or'world society' would result in a 'global functionalism' where everything that affects the system acrossthe globe is seen as contributing to its self-making. Thus the massive inequalities that accompanyglobalization,or the rising of global temperatures through 'global warming', or the growth of global terrorism might all be viewed as necessaryfunctional componentsof the processes of global self-making.This position is unconvincing.But so too is an alternative view that treats the global as the clear and determinant outcome of a partially self-conscioustransnationalcapitalist class[sklair 2001).

Conclusion Thus the notion of global self-making seems plausible, but the global system as a whole should not be viewed as autopoeitic. How to combine these positions here? It is necessaryhere to return to the discussionof Prigogine developedin chapter 2. He showshow new pockets of order arise that are often far from equilibrium. These pockets involve dissipative structures, islands of new order within a general sea of disorder.He argues that these islands of order can maintain or even increasetheir order at the expenseofgreater overall entropy or disorder. Prigogine describeshow each of these pockets of order'floatsin disorder'[see Capra 1996: 184). It is variouscontexts well away from equilibrium that are sources of such new

tI t02

I

I i

Il

i

Global Emergence

localized order. Examples of such pockets of order are tur flows of water and air that appear chaotic but that are in highly organized.Such turbulent flows involve processesof making with highly effective feedback mechanisms. It seemsthat Prigogine'sformulation provides an important to understanding global complexity. This position will be bri summarized, since it provides the basis for the revived scienceof the global developed in the next chapter. First then, contrary to the claims of a number of authoritieq there is no single equilibrating global system [see Sklair Z00li: There is also no 'other' to the global that, as with other social systems,is necessaryfor governmentality and social order. But there are systematic forms of global interdependence or what is termed here global complexity. This 'system' is hugely open, comprising various interdependent and hybridized networks and fluids. They move in, through and across time-spacg in remarkably different and contrasting trajectories. There is no tendency of this global 'system' to move towards any obvrous equilibrium. And there is no evidence that this global system is iz toto organized through autopoeitic self-making, in part becauseit would be impossible to specify what the relationships are between the array of biological, social and physical processesinvolved in such a system and its environment. We should avoid positing a global functionalism or a global conspiracy,especially in the light of the critiques of both formulations developed over the past century. Howevel, global complexity is not simply anarchic disorder. There are many pockets of ordering within this overall patterning of disorder, processesinvolving a particular performing of the global and operating over multiple time-space with various feedback processes.Such pockets of ordering include various networks, fluids and governancemechanisms.These different pockets of order develop parallel concepts and processesof what we call the global. At different levels there are what we may term 'global fractals', the irregular but strangely similar shapesthat are found at very different scalesacrossthe world, from the household say to the UN. And, as such pockets of ordering emerge,so various often very substantialnon-linear effects of 'global-local' obiects, identities,

GlobalEmergence

103

. -":r,rrionsand socialpracticesdevelop.These come to form and tl'ii,l.ru," the strangeattractor of glocalization. Like gravity,this ::,:;:i", can be viewed as drawing multiple sets of social relaL'^".frior worldwide into its tender embrace and restructuring llLi ."trtionships through countless iterations that occur over of time. The speed, range and depth_of espei]Lr.rrrirt periods '-iii" tt," informational and transport revolutions heighten the effectsof such glocalizingrelationships in,"ra"p"naent non-linear the world' across ""ih,ls there are pockets of order [or ordering) within a sea of olobaldisorder.And, indeed, such pockets of ordering operating risk It diff".ent time-space scalesheighten the turbulence, the folthe in I elaborate as global of disorder, sea .ultrr."r, of the lowing chaPter.

,&

I

t

l

Social Ordeing and Power

6 SocialOrdering and power

Social Order and Global Complexity A long-standingissue in sociorogyand social sciencemore generallyconcernshow somekina"of order getsestablished and maintained in sociar.life. Earry formurations, ,;-;;";erbert Spencer's, maintainedthat the *o.t i.rg, of the ,..i"r boiu *".. analogousto those of the human boJyAnd, as societiesJ.r,"rop and grow,there is, as with the b-ody, i.r..""r" in the structurar differentiationof specializedf"".uLr. ".r The social body, llke the human

b^ody, is characteriz"J uu ,rr"

integration of the separate parts. Expiaining-i".J"f*i#" ".,a any pr.ti.ri", ,o.i"t institution is achieved^byshowing its contribution or ,function, to the reproduction of the social"organism as a whole fspencer 1876/l 893). Talc3tt Parsorrs [1960J generally argued that the central issue . tor sociologyis how it is that sociarordEr is securedand sustained. In order to answer this he deveroped a normatiue functionalist analysis'order in societies gets maintained thro"grr-".r-r,ir" consensus rather than through either ttt" rnt".J"p'."a"".,* the marketplace, as Spencer "r.gr.a,-n. "r the coercive relations of economic, political and ideologicai domination, as Marx and others maintained. However,for a number of reasons,these and other formulations ^ from 'classicalsociology,now ,"";';; dated. First, these soci_ ologistsdid not drsti.rguishbetween iiui,-,gorganismanda livine "

105

Nsrcm.They concentrated upon the characteristicsof the former in order to derive appropriate metaphors for understandinghow order within a social system is possible.They did not seehow the propertiesof living systemsmight provide appropriate analysisof socialorder, given that order is never simplg fixed and achieved. The scienceof complex systemsprovides a way of thinking about socialorder that transcendsthe static nature of classicalsociological functionalism, where the fixed parts of the social body are seen as providing specific functions within the workings of the social rvhole. Second,classicalsociology tended to adopt a relatively simple notion of what constitutes'socialorder'. In Parsonsthere is a hierarchy of values and norms that works through each society at all levels, a clear notion of social equilibrium, and strong negative feedback or steering mechanisms that can rapidly and effectively restore order. But the implications of complexity, as opposed to the early post-Second World War cybernetics that influenced Parsor-rs, is that there never is such a clear and effective set of reequilibriatingprocesses. And, indeed,.effortsto restoresocialorder almost always engender further unforeseen consequences.These are often of a kind that take the society further away from any ordered equilibrium. In a later section of this chapter I consider the extraordinarily 'complex' and unpredictable characterof 'mediatized scandals'as an example of the systemicworkings of such unforeseen consequences. The classicaltradition little consideredthe mobile patterning of sociallife that problematizesthe fixed, given and static notions of social order. Ordering one might say is achieved 'on the move'. 'fhird, formulations from classicaland early twentieth-century sociology deploy a society focus with little recognition of how what lies beyond each society'sborders is relevant to apparent social ordering [Urry 2000b: ch. l). For Parsons,such a notion of autonomous self-reproducing societies stemmed from the apparent autonomy of American society throughout the twentieth century. He then universalized this characteristic to all other apparent societies without acknowledging the specificity of twentieth-century USA [Urry 2000b). Parsonsdefined'society' as 'the type of social system characterizedby the highest level of self-sufficiencyrelative to its environment, including other social

10 6

Social Ordering and Power

systems'[l971:8). But such self-sufficientsocietiesare rare and almost alwaysrely upon their domination of other societies,such as that effected by the USA during all of the twentieth century. And no analysisof social order could now be envisagedthat does not addressthe immensely complex forms of global interdepen_ dence, economically, socially, politically, culturally and environ_ mentally. Social order in one society always depends upon its multiple connectionswith emergent transnationalrelations. Finally,it is now increasinglyclear just how socialorder is not the outcome of purified social processes.As Law argues: ,the notion that social ordering is, indeed, simply social also disappears. . . . what we call the social is materially heterogeneous: talk, bodies, texts, machines, architectures,all of these and many more are implicated in and perform the social'[1994:Z).ln thai sense classicalsociology'snotion of accounting for a purified social order is past and should be relegatedto the dustbin of history flatour 1993; Knorr-Cetina1997). In this book I have elaboratedsome theoretical resourcesthat break with such classicalnotions of social order. A number of claims have been advanced and defended. Thus criss-crossing 'societies'are diverse systemsin complex interconnectionswith their environments.There are many chaotic effects that are distant in time-space from where they originate.These in part result from the positive as well as the negative feedback mechanisms that mean that order and chaos are always intertwined. There are many increasingly powerful self-organizing global networks and fluids that are moving systemsfar from equilibrium. And there is not a socialorder that can be accountedfor by purified socialprocesses. Such complexity thinking enables our thinking to overcome the dichotomies of determinism and free will. We can begin to see how powerful material worlds are unpredictable, unstable, sensitive to initial conditions, irreversible and rarely 'societally' organized. Indeed, does this therefore mean, following former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcheq, that 'there is no such thing as society'?Is there no longer a societalordering, although Thatcher argued this for very different 'methodologically individualist' reasons? This book seeksto show that there are 'societies',but that their societal capacity has been transformed through becoming ele-

Soaal Ordering and Power

107

possess of global complexity.These^systems rnentswithin systems relationsocial of sorts and equilibrium all .o tendenciestowards attractor of glocalization. drawn into ,[tp, g", -"r" ineluctably ^the_ various networks and fluids roaming the globe that, ih"." across,over unlike societies,possessthe power of rapid movement 'regions' 4 above; see chapter as [see und rrd". many societies alsoBauman 2000J. I will now make a few comments about how societiesare transglobal comformed by becoming elements within the systemsof separate apparently centuries of olexity. For the past couple iro.i"ii"r' have rim) Atlantic [especially those within the north been characterizedby a 'banal nationalism' that separatedone from the other. A banal nationalism involves waving celebratory flags,singing national anthems,flying flagson nationally important p.tlii. b'nildi.tgt, identif ing with national sports heroes'-being udd."rr"d in the media as a member of a given society, celebrating that society's independence day, slafng certain similar politic,rlt.r.ul practicesand so on [Billig 1995)' Many of these .ul "nd core components of such a natiopalism date from the late nineteenth century. The development of global complexity means that each such banal natio.rulir- increasinglycirculates along the global informational and communicational channels and systems'They become fu-ili". to, and indeed part of, each society'sbranding, within the wider global order.Mega events increasinglyoccur when the nation are placed upon the world's st-agefor and its"'banal' characte"ristics of display and consumption, especially through the global fluid ,t."u"ih.,g peoples'. Each ,r.h b"n"l nationalism is increasingly a ty oth".r, compared and evaluated, and turned into .onrr-"i brand. We might say that ihere is a move from banal nationalism to brand nationalism in the new global order,especiallyat moments of global celebrationand consumption [Roche 2000)' 2'000 indeed, I noted utou" that therl are thought to be.at least 'nation peoples' all suffering various kinds of displacementand u*bigrrotr, location in. CJtt"" 1997: pp' ix-x; .Papastergiadis 2000i. Only a minorii of 'societies'are constituted as apparently nations'let separatenation state societies'Most societiesare not socialonenation states,the most striking of suchnon-nation-state into drawn increasingly etiesbeing the'overseasChinese'.E,achls

108

Social Ordeing and Power

Social Ordering and Power

the attractor and gets rebranded within global complexity. \4, over, in many places people develop multiple identitieq si

t o est ablisha zone of r ight sover an ent ir e ti .ns rrnJ,m or e gener ally, ,"*1.'rior',over ail the flows traversingthe ecumenon.If it can help it, the State does not dissociateitself from a processof capture of flows of all kinds,populations,commodities,money or capital, etc. . . . the State never ceasesto decompose,recomposeand transform rnovement, or to regulate speed. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:

often there is no longer the o'e 'true national self,.O;;;Hii thoseliving in scotlandconsiderthemselves Scottish i*r, (McCrone1998:140J. "na

Mike Davis's Magical yrb:"i:ry (2000b) brings out some extra+ ordinarv dimensions.of the fluid diaspo.lor tn9 ihi..y-.*o Li[ioo or so Latinos now living within the usA. They aie the largest ethnic group in Los Angeles,forming n .1q wlthin a .lty, ti.y will soon outnumber whites living in cahfornia. or, ,o'pri'ia "ri aif. ferently, US Latinos are already in. nftn largest ,natio-ni within Latin America. There are wide-ranging processesof 'cultural syn_ cretism that may become a transformative template for th" *hola society' as the USA is becoming inexorably Latinized (Davis 200ob: 15). Much of this syncretism stems from 'transnational_ ized communities' moving between especiallyMexicq .ro* u.ry much a'nomadic' country and the USA: 'like quantum particles in two places at once' (Davis 2000b: 77). Levitt [zoor; sornewhat similarly describes the self-organizing'transnational villages; formed by those living more or less simultaneously in the us.q, and the Dominican Republic.There is an extensivetransnationalism from below This system_ofglobal complexity is thus comprised of many , different 'islandsof order', a notion elaboratedin chaoter 5. There are not only national societies and complex hybrid d'iasporas,but other networked/fluid polities rncluding'supra-natiorr"i rt",.r', global religionsor'civilizations', internationalorganizations,international meetings, NGOs and cross-borde. ."gions (perkmann 2000; Duffield 20Ol; Habermas 2001; ch. 4;Wally forthcoming). Any society as a particular bounded territory typically finds _ diverse self-organizing 'polities' seeking to striate its space, subjecting it to diverse forms of social regulation. In particular, according to Deleuze and Guattari, nation states are necessarily involved in seeking to regulate those numerous mobilities that move in and acrosssuch spaces.One of the fundamental task of the state is, they say,

5e-601 But global complexity means that stateshave increasinglyshifted awayfrom governing a relatively fixed and clear-cut national population resident within its territory and constituting a distinct and relatively unchanging community of fate (Urry 2000b: ch. 8). Shifts towards global networks and fluids transform the space beyond each state that they have to striate. Habermas arguesthat "'glol:alization" conjures up images of overflowing rivers, washing away all the frontier checkpoints and controls, and ultimately the bulwark of the nation itself' (2001: 67). Statesthus can be said increasinglyto act as a legal, economic and social regulator; or gamekeeper;of practices and mobilities.that are predominantly provided by, or generatedthrough, the often unpredictable consequences of many other entities.Social regulation is both necessitatedby, and is only made possiblethrough, new computer-based forms of information gathering,retrieval and dissemination.Such databases can refer to almost everyeconomic and socialinstitution. Such internationalizedinformation flows derive from the emergence of a widespread 'audit society', a subset of the vision machinesthat ubiquitouscomputing ushersin fPower 1994). Thu-sone paradoxical consequenceof the intensely fluij and turbulent nature of the global complexity is that 'the role of the state.is actually becoming more, rather than less,important in qeveloping the productive powers of territory and in producrng new spatialconfigurations' fswyngedouw I99Z:431). One Iurther consequenceis that statesare not convergingin a uniform powerlessdirection direction but are becoming becomr much more diverse,from :uw:rl9ss tle Talibnn to the EU to the USA (Weiss 1998: ch. fW"irs 1998: ch. 7). 71. Indeed, Indeed +L '."".^ \,J.^ r r g L L u ,

urcre has been -

L

an 'enor m ous expansion of nat ion- st at e st nr ct ur cs, JLCI L

JLI

t rLLUlLJ,

agenda, revenues and regulatory capacitiessince iJt.,.,u:fl.ies, rvorld W:r II', in order to deal with global fluids i.rch inforrnation flows, ", travelling peoples,inteinational terrorism, health \ ^ I , o _ -. --' l v l )l g } J q v rl rl J J

to striate the spaceover which it reiqns.. . . It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish no-udism, but to control migra-

109

l I

r

110

SociaLOrdering and Power

Social Ordering and Power

and environmental risks and so on that all move across

11t

Statesindeedcanbe subject or threatof scandals. scandals ^6(rring revealsubstaninterestingly scandals that scandals', ioi."Jtu,"d in the very complexitiesof power. ,Ll ,"r,.r.,urings

in dizzying and transmutating_form fMeyer et al. tg97: iS summarizes such developments by maintainingfl fit q1998)

globalizationproduces new kinds of 'states,.

_. In somewaysnation statesacrossEuropeare becominq like the E_uropean union. The EU is organized.round tliu motion of variousmobilities.It has soughtto d"u"lop th" freedomsof movement- of goods,services, labour l"oi .t and hasintervenedwith nationalstatepoliciesto ""i "li-i.rutJm", barriersto mobility,.tradeand competition.The EU ."" t;.# asa'regulatorystate',mostlyinvolvedin the monitoring ""dr.il lation of the policies and practices of its individual nu"tioo

Power and ComPlexitY

,t"t.*, that have freely joined up (Majone 1994, 1996). Its r.e"ties and Directives are particularly powerful. They mean both that governments must bring their own legislation in line with such Theaties,and that individual citizens in the EU can appeal direct to the European court of Justice when it is believea trr.t national governments have not implemented appropriate policies (walby 1_g9gl Significantly, European laws take p.".ede.ri" over national iaws where they conflict and it is poisible for the actions of individual governmentsto be declaredillegal. Some states,such as the EU, indeed function as what we might call'midwives' for developingand enhancingglobal networks and fluids and are not merely subjected to them. And statesincreasingly act as catalystsof networks of countries operating at the regional or international level and hence function as onJclass of agenciesin a more dynamic system of unpredictableglobal complexitv [Hirst and Thompson r996: ch. gj. castells qiooo, rggT) more generally talks of the increasingly networked character oi states.There are many international conferencesand events that involve individual states forming, negotiating and signing up to international agreements that then have the further of "if..t promoting and performing the global as Kyoto the 1997 [such Protocol on climate change).There has also been the growth of 'networked wars' and indeed of what we might call 'networked terrorists' (Duffield 20011. There is also heightened mediatization such that regulatory failure of individual states can be brought into the op"i, visible, and individuals and organization.,.".r be shamed by -ud! the

:|; 'tu t* 'n ,II I

sciences has been Much thinking about power in the social between apparently.powerinterrelationships io.rr"d upon the as iril und apparently powerless agents. Power is conceptualized attributes of agents,through observing two or more human agents and seeingin what ways, and to what degree,the actions of each are influenced by that of the other. If one agent is able to get the other to do somethingthat he or she would not otherwisedo, then that is deemed to be an exercise of power. Steven Lukes's Power: A RadicalView (1973J famously critiques this intersubjective conception of power through advocating a three-dimensional view basedupon 'real interests'.Lukes shows how the most effective exerciseof power occurs when there is no overt or even covert bending of the will of one agent by that of the other. Power is exercisedif people'sreal interestsare securedand this is best realized without overt or covert intersubjective competition and struggle.Power is thus conceived of as structural and not intersubjective. However, this argument has remained partly buried, becauseLukes usesthe languageof Marxism to identifii 'real' as opposedto expressedor visible interestsor'false consciousness'' But what is notable in Lukes's account is his critique of the subject-oriented position and his advocacy of the analysis of 'domination' as opposed to that of 'power' [A. Stewart 2001). But in much social sciencepower conceived as a property of agentsremainscentral to the analysisof socialrelations.In the end power is often seen to involve human agentsappearing able to get their way, forcing the other who is in some ways co-present to do something that he or she would not otherwise do, to be able to bend the will of this other. Power gets attached to agencyin the couplet agency-structure. However, many developments describedin this book subvert this very distinction between agency and structure. Complexity transcends the division between free will and determinism and

t12

Social Ordeing and power

Soaal Ordenng and Power

hence between agency and structure. It transcends the char

rrhornpson 1995: ch. 4',Szerszynskiand Urry 2001). Citizens are l^* no, just watchersbut objectsof statesurveillanceand moniis a generalizedincreasein 'visual reflexivity'; public ,Jrtn* there are^increasinglyexpected to-provide open and trans,"rJort,l"t l"r"nt forms of behaviour;therearenew forms of impressionman'mediated l""nl"n,' in reaction to increasedmedia visibility; and grow more significant[Foucault 1977;Meytowitz 1985). .iundutr' "Bv the twenty-first century citizens are subject to informational their mechm"iirt"d power, forms of power that are complex in ,nir-, and consequences.On the one hand, there are extraordithe nu.y ,r"* forms of int'ormational and mediated power with satelof thousands of the tens machines, of vision development lites,bugs, listening devices,the microscopic cameras,CCTV, the Internet,the possibilitiesof sharinginformation, GISiGPS and so on.And, on the other hand, the mobilities of everydaylife involve speed,lightness and distance,and the capacity to move unnoticed tirrough even the most surveyed of societies, such as by transmutating from student to tourist to terrorist back to student and so on. Informational and mediated power is'mobile, performed and unbounded. This is its strength and its vulnerability. Attempted ordering even by the most powerful can result in an array of complex unintended effects that take the system away from equilibrium. In such unpredictable and irreversible transformations, power, and especially mediated powet is like sand. It may stay resolutely in place, forming itself into clear and bounded shapes,with a distinct spatial topology waiting say to be arrested or bon-rbed,or it may turn into an avalancheand race away,sweeping much else in its wake. This unpredictability of power, its capacity to transmute from fbrm to form, its capacity to be nowhere or everywhere, will now be illustrated through examining some aspectsof the contemporary phenomenon of scandal.

y.y ll yht:l powerhas.beenlocated, :* thenwould ",L "*"".u.tl constituiea complexi,y

i"*J.r"' "ppro"ln Power would not be regarded ,'thing o, u porr.rrion. somethingthat flowso. .r.,, and",

may b"'irlr*i"dr;.1: ,.i"#^:0,";.tf:.."..i::.y or space.tt i, non-contiguorr. B",l l0-14)

outlinesand defendsa 'post-panopticar, [2000: .ojl* tion of power. power is not necessarily it.."gillilpri co-presenceasone agentgetsanotherto """r.rr"d do what h" o. rfr. *outd otherwise not have done through interpersonal threat, force ot persuasion'But also power no l0nger necessarilyi.rrroir"r"imagined co-presencewithin a riteral or"simulateJ *h... the powerlessare actualryor potentialryvisible;;";;,i;;i" to the powerfur. -i".t"rq* By contrast,Bauman suggeststhat"the p.i_" power now is that of 'escape,srippage, elisionu.rd,uoiJ".,.c-e,, "f the 'end of the era of mutual r r;. rur.J"r" ,".i ""grg.-";i, 1zooO, eties had involved a mixture ol citizenshipwith settlementand h5nc5with co-presence within the confinei iJrrito.i ally based society.But now the new glob4 "rl,p"-.ti. l..r.airg .o Bauman,can rule 'without burdeningitself "fit", with the choresof administration,management,welfare"concerns,, even involving developingdisposable slaveowningwithout .o--i,-""i izooo, 13;on 'disposable peoples,, seeBalls lggg). Truuelli'gli;l,Ji, ,1,. power new assetof power. is all about sp"ed, lightn."rr,?istancg the weightless,rhe global,and this is t.ue both of eritesand of those resistingelitessuch.as anti-globailzation protestorsor terrorists.Power.runs and especiallyjumps acrossthe different _in tluids.poweris hybridizedand is not simply s91:?1t,ne.two1ks.and oc lal but m a te ri a l . In particular; citizenship and sociarorder have always depended upon relations of mutu aluisibilitybetween the citizen and the state. In medieval and early modern societies, ,t ,t .o_pr"r"nt visibility of the monarch to his or her court " ""tri.ut,to was centrar the maintenance of society'ssymbolic order and power relations.The ritual procession or 'progress'of the king or queen around his or her lcngdom turther servedto constitute his or her wider subjectsas a com_munity of direct wa.yhe^rsof power. With the of modern societiesespecially.fromthe eighteenth "_"rg..r." century o'n*u.d., the economy of visibility between citizen and state transmutes

1l?

The Complexity of Scandal

i

,ft '.r,

, 'I . i

The late-twentieth-century emergence of a 'mediated power' criss-crossingthe globe produced distinctly new forms of

11 4

Soaal Ordering and Pouter

Social Ordering and Power

mediated scandals.The complex scandalof power and the of scandal can be viewed through John Thompson,s Scandal: Power and VisibiliN in the Media Age (ZOO0). The globalmedia disembedevenrsfrom local contextsand

them, often instantaneously and simultaneously, acrossthe dG At the sametime, the breaking-downof more solid class-Lased forms of politics means relatio_nshipsin most countries and -that_ regionsare lessorganized and more fluid and mobile - more waveiike - and hence these scandaievents can mo^rerapidly emerge,and passin, through and beyond the frontiers of given societies." Four processesin combination generate'complexity' outcomes with regard to contemporary scandals.These are normative transgressions,the significance and vulnerability of trust, the fact of exposure and the power to make events instantaneously and simultaneouslyvisible First, then, globally mediated scandals occur where there are significant transgressionsof particular norms of 'expected behaviour' that characterize a given society or type of society.According to Thompson, these transgressions normally relate to sexual behaviour,to financial matters or to the use/abuseof power. Given the ambivalent, contested and often quite strict norms relating to public figures and institutions, then 'scandalous' transgressions regularly occur [as most citizens are well awarel).There ur" potential scandals,especiallysince public figures and institutions -"rry are normally confronted by stricter norms of what is appropriate behaviour than those not in the mediatized 'public' eye. But the public eye seducesincreasingnumbers of new 'subjects'into the visual media and who are then subject to cyclesof transgression, revelation and confession [what we might term Big Brother narcissism). Second, the power of certain incumbents of official positions, of companies and of states, rests upon a 'politics of trusf . With particular incumbents such trust is basedon their presumedcharacter rather than on specificskills.Sometimesthere appearsto be a kind of 'giobai trust' (such as that enjoyed on occasionsby the Presidentof the USA, the General-Secretaryof the UN, Nelson Mandela, certain states,certain global companiesand so on). But such trust has to be continuously earned or performed and hence it can rapidly erode.There is much to lose,especiallywhere trust

1iH' 'I

.i,

1r5

establishmentand maintenanceof ^-.1characterare core to the And, the greater 1'll t"ni,i-ucy of an incumbent or organization' put line, then the on been the more.that characterhas i'fr. ;r;r,, *ettet is any ensurngscandal[other things being equal). Trust is strottg but an incredibly brittle resource'It has ?" "l
ll6

Soaal Ordering and Power

Social Ordering and Power

t1,7

from equilibrium, especiallywhere those involved try lead away lay the ghost to rest' ," turug" events, to cover their tracks, to feedback mechanisms where characin"l" ui" po*".frrl positive and the shameis massively ,"rl"a trust dissolu" ulr.rortovernight mode, most attempts to In complexity and magnified. of the scandal, enlargement the "i-,nrn."d exposure will result in nrirrimrze 'concealment'. Efforts to with the further scandal of produce complex magnifica"r'".i"fty iu'-p"r-, down the evolving events consequences. irreversible further tion with diverse and 'backstage' then there is Indeed, once the media have peered figures' escalatingexposure and visualization of the scandalous grfh" (iggg, +OZ)describesthe'self-amplifying focus' of a media in its i""dlr-rg 'frenzy' that takes root and leaves little standing flow of all-consuming kind *t i.tr.,ui"apatir. Scandalscan possessa Thompson that can 'wash' over those caught up in its wake' As g5) argues,,the experience i,s likely to be overwhelming, [2000: rapilly spin out of control', away from any movement n, "u".,,, equilibrium. towards are particularly inter'Financial' and 'abuseof power' sc.andals estingin that they often occur at moments of globalscrutiny conductJd in, and through, the world's media. Especially significant are those big public rneetingswhen the company or country-brand is put ott ditpl"y and revealedto the world fstevenson 1997: 46 Kein ZOOOI.f" u single week in the 1990s, Rio Tinto, Shell, premier Oii Nestl€ and ICI all held Annual General Meetings in which groups of protestersmobilized the world's media to expose ancl to ihu..t" these companies for their misdeeds' Significantly, these normative transgressionsoften and unpredl.t"bly o..r'ri."d in countries far away from where the AGM was actuallyheld. But, of course,with instant communicationsthere is oft"r, ,no hlding pi"."'. The trand in questiongetsthreatenedwith exposure,nd rh"-" at the very moment that it is being presented upon the world's stage.The power of a brand can evaporaterapidly' Th" of Nik-e,and the threatening of its brand bec.auseof ,slave "*"-ple the wages'paid to its workforce, show that 'public shan-ring and consum". pr"rrrr." can have a mighty impact upon mighty manufacturers'[Dionne 1998: 11; seealsoKlein 2000)' Thus liquid mediated power is a key component transtormtng power r"lutio.t, in the globalage'Such symbolicpower flows across

power or a 'public intimacy' through figures made visible and revealed on the world's media. But this immense biopower is exceptionally vulnerable - to exposure, as-figures, of pow.. can zuddenly, overnight, be seen (through) as flawed, ,s bodily ,can_ dalous.All those watching on the media can bear witness to the public shaming, the making transparent,of the transgresser xnd on occasionstheir public confession.Gitlin Ilgs0J describedthisas The whob world k watching. The exposed individuals, c.mpanies or states are revealed, their scandalnessis made visible and their biopower dissolvesin front of the world's saze. Moreover, the competitive nature of the overlapping and digitized media enhances the attractor of transparency.competition enables the figure of the 'wrongdoer' to be revealed,."pl"y.J again and again, and his or her global shame made visible before, and endlesslyrepeated across,the globe.This was paradigmatically seen with former President clinton and the fascination with his immense but vulnerable biooower. Scandals,we might say, involve small causes fthe furtive embrace,the tiny lie, the small payment, the hand*iitten note). These small causescan, in very particular circumstances,produce distant and catastrophicconsequencesfor those involved'and for many others drawn into the swirling vortex of a scandalizing event. Events are typically unpredictable, with no one able to control the trajectory of a scandal [Thompson 2000: 75). There are unexpected, unpredictable and uncontrollable visibilities as images flow within, and rapidly jump across,the various media. The media compete for global stories and produce what Balkin [1999: 402) terms a 'cascadeeffect'. Different iournalists with diverse standardsof lournalistic integrity compete with each other for further scandalsto reveal.Especiallycrucial in producing such cascadesare visual images that disrupt or ridic;le or overturn existing relationsof biopower. Such imagesget endlesslysold and resold across the globe, as they subvert, humiliate and transgress the apparentpower of the powerful. Those who live by the media can also die a horrible death throueh such mediated cascades. Scandalsthus involve complex sets of events that are unpredictable and irreversible. They run out of control once there is exposure,becauseof the mobility and speed of the processesof exposure,visualization and recirculation.The irreversible events A ,ft

I 18

SocialOrd.ering and pou.,er

I

.-o-, ffiffJ: i';i:::,ln;":*theworrd's

pl"nx *l:.i$ i,:li::{:i':i [*{,;tilr:

Social Ordeing and Power t

*o in.r"rsingly components within various systemsof global to^lil"tity. The discussionof scandalshows that forms of in.' -J C Ol "t .,--^.1 ..o o.rl performed and mobile, are power ^^,.,^^o"f^"-o.l iol..'r,i"nnl and mediated -o' { i .+ -J -^k i l o foli^rnd"d. This provides both their strength but also their vulthe most powerful within '')i"v,ilirv.Attempted ordering even by complex unintended effects that take the can result lr'.11,"r ^in away from equilibrium. question further i., ],,.r"nt irreversibletransformations,power, and unpredictable "jn ,r.h ,ndespeciallymediated power, is, we have seen,like sand.It may .iavrerolttely in place forming clear and bounded shapesor it ..,uu,urn into an avalancheand raceaway sweepingmuch elsein 'liquid modernity' is full of unexii, *ri." What Bauman terms pected,unpredictable and irreversible movements, including the ,nor" r".".tt emergence of a culture of scandal that takes social [fe further away from points of equilibrium. In the next chapter I return to some implications of global complexity for sociology and its characteristic theories of the social world. And I go on to explore some implications of machines, empiresand the cosmopolitan for the strangelyordered world that seemssimultaneouslyto be on the edge of chaos.

fiTff,'ffi l,ffirfif#f+ffi*t*r-ruw ;lfr:Lil}HHiit{il,:ilffi ,:l':ini"i:i;l",'ff H Indeed, the ocr

'rr cte and much, else besides - ' 'o" 1sQ[.,

ge nera r .; i;;;";ii:T;; :l: tT i : 1.r,,i,s* *o. i: ;: ".",,ng,

*ff::H1i: fi#;*I J:,Tj :i.T,r'j';:::t*';',1xnil'.;*lii!'6,ry::Hi.,",'T; ::i'ri"q:l[#,"-T #l1F ,.TTiii "i:ri,il.il"f ff; :,fi fl : ri:,T:,;':";;iliil t erfect sen through

R.os,i 1iver""aJ".t"iri":fL:ft "jTl.",*m; "JJ ;l: H:, in"'hil"*,:iflj :: in :i.ffl "; ::, :: * ff 3 or p u ur i., t[ n :'", ;:;1::'JJ,i,FJ;: lt l"J,: f*J:;'i:"x':':H:1 i#[ir.;T,',',:Ttl'i::-i3;ii:i"fi

*Ttri.1i.{#Jii}i:t'*j;,ffi t.'T:,.hf,:r",t:j Conclusion This chapterhas examined socralorder contingen, a varietyof mobile processes that make nna unu.riri,io.,"r,es have been shown

i19

Global Comolexities

7 Global Complexities

Complexity

and Social Theorv

Auguste Comte f

can result from drawing strict analogiesbetween models -,ipnces liln"norn*na developed within different domains of enquiry. li^i""u"r, given the necessarilymetaphorical nature of all science, li" Uookhas consideredwhether complexity could generatepro),,.,i"" mctaphors for the social analysisof various 'post-societal' lrli"ri.l rvorlds.I follow complexity-theoristBrianArthur's views ihr, .o-pl"xity writers are'beginning to develop metaphors' and 'is in the businessof formulating the that the Santa Fe Institute this new for science, metaphors that, with luck, will rnetaphors euide the way these sciencesare done over the next fifty years of io' (1994b; 6801. Complexity thus seeks to establish pattern similarity operating within and across many different systems, whetherthey are nominally'physical'or'human'. Specialfocus has been placed here upon the metaphors appropriate for examining the material worlds implicated in the apparent 'globalization' of economic, social, political, cultural and environmentalrelationships.In the past decadethe social science of the global has extensively described many of these relationships.However, much social sciencehas not developed complex analysisof global systemsthat transcendthe societalor national. It has tended to take the global for granted and then shown how, and in what ways, various localities, regions, nation states, environments and cultures have been transformed in linear fashion by this all-powerful entity that many call 'globalization'.Thus globalization [or sometimes global capitalism) has come to be viewed as the new'structure', with localities,regionsand so on as the new 'agent'. _ Ilowevel, I have shown the limitations of the structure,/agency divide,drawing in part upon Giddens's'duality of structure' thesis I I 9B4J This structurationist formulation breaks with linear notions,sinceit seesthe rules and resourcesof systemsboth being drawn upon by knowledgeable agents and then feeding back through actions to reproduce system rules and resources.In Giddens'saccount there are not hxecl and separateentities possessingvariablecharacteristics. There is some appreciationof relationality. Moreovel, functionalist arguments partly presuppose a non-linear account, since there are circular negative feedback mechanismsin which 'causes'and'effects' are in effect co-Dresent within the functionally integrated'system

wh"ether;;';;;,yiili"ri'".ili,T,:,?:*gil,:;:,11x.?:T:;

b eginni g n o qifi :f i"n3n: r tr' if ::1,,'i:: ;: *i' " t*",,ty-n,,t of the phvsics plexity

r";; ;;;ffi;:$TTL :"ls# itHfflf,n1m::ifr tr.'"' p-u'i-Il ari s ti c a c c ounts |,i :'rTi5:Xil within spe" ro. .o,'t"i;;;;::':jl:,11:y'":",

of .o*-

"'1."1:: i ges,,;',*ik,, Biggs Iggs,".;,..,:il 'lt"J;j:Bv.n lJ'#:fi " Moreover; the ":

st"*-i,,;:";;'"#ff"..J1,i:i:.:,:,'1nj'"",11,,11;.l-J#:;Jj plex. for complexity ,h";-;;';;';

consid er,h "; ;;;ii d ;i ;_;Hir1,,:_!f?l,l,ll];ffil::

it already constitutes u .o-pl"te ,o;iui theory. Thrt i, ,rrely the wrong question' since no one wourd imagine that it is already tormed as such a theory ln The Hi;rtm Connecilons,complexity_

;; ;J;;;,anan Qogzl arvsi s'oi-ii,'i',o.iur :ffn'Jil;?,:i compl exItf b;i ;;' "?l'l so.aI Iire,o ayn, 'il:;,",L|'

";,'.",Ju..

shoutd notbedirectry ,.rilji}fffiT?"o,1:"';' 'ci""'" models

.rtr,".._jr;; ; :"i:,:ri 5:ffi:HT:ilt,fiJ,chaotic, :ilhT:ilJ;

that they purport to .hr.r.t".;;;:'Uil.r"seen

conse-

tzl

122

Global Complexities

But this book uses complexity to move beyond vr

l::,'"::*tl_':.lnl 'structure'and no

theory.i huu"-ro,,ght ,agency', ,-".r1, to showthat

no no ,ai.l "na 'individuals',and no 'system wortd, wulr., and i"i ,:::l::t":, world'. This is lo becauseeachsuch.ro,ioi''"'"r that tl entitieswith separateand distinct that are ";" LlrenIbro inr n av * ---^ r juxtaposition :..---- , ,.. :et '^r then into "rr".,llTumes external with its oti--

;il Hf TilTs"i::l:i: ll :11"1: lui ff ._.da;";' simple formulations_of finalized ;;;;';;;';;.i

towardswhich socialprocesses ""d necessarily move. Overall my argument

is onc tlu 'rerationaiiiv:lir'i, o rr,iohere n i s arso ."",."it l"i::JX.il"rri: " gqol,

o-.,,_l,,,.,uralist ro.*,,i 1""".i. f(Dillon *f^:*Y?t ^: to-criti., 2000jand of ", g"r,"rrf rr"a"i r*rr'i:#ilfii maintai"";h;;, {2099:t2J r\o partyto arelati -mola4, 1o^o_ll^gtlol therefore a monadic, or

;"fii: 5",i.y rl"J H;{#: of ,p; and 3:::::f:l for relationarity' *:.:n"li:,:: (see 3"+_of_being-rerated capacity

e-irioyer 1997).Rerati "rro is hrought aboutthrough a wide networkedor circ relationshipsthatareimplicar"a".;t;; *i

irri" a',rr.r"""ffi #:ff ffi .,.1I:1s"", rn examining,u.h _J :::::Ti::ll" T*:dd terial ^yortds. worlds I have noted whatcrr.r.^iioiib,

iffi"r:ilff:r?hi of th" ,i.i"l ih" ,i"i, .i ,r,. .the,studv. that co^rresponds ""d "T::i,l_:::y:"1 to it op"r,,r"r, .f ifr" h"_""?r**r* :^":y*l

" to the greaterflux or energy,matter andlife,. linear metaphorof"rirles, ,;;-;, that stretchingfrom the .The micro levelto the macrolevel,or froth. life world to the systern world, which hasplaguedso.inl,rr".rv rr._:;;*";;,;;;r-t o,rta thus be replacedty itr" Such connecbe viewedasmore -""prr".-.f'.o'n".tions. or lessintense,more or lessmobilg 1.:r^ morei.",* or lesssocialand more or less,at a distance,fseeDickenet al.2001: 702-4;on system,/rir"*".r,ir, see Sayer20001.Latour maintainsthat the social,possesses the bi;;:;;p"ri, ,* made.ol1q"^1? "fu an or structure at all, but *,rrJ, i iJing TIX cuLating.entity' [1999: l7]. Thereare many trajectories or movements that are neither macro nor micro but circuraalu*..n of 'speed;velocity;*.u"rl-.on.inuous flow; pulsing; ;::l,l: u,o':y.le_rys viscosity;, rhyth.m; harmony;discordance; I, :n,9 rrrj turbu_ lence'fDillon 2000: l2). Thereis therefore." .o ;;*,._ "f

Global ComPlexities

l zJ

or circulations that effect rela.^^, but rnany connections varied distances' socr"',1: .throush performancesat multiple and struciftu,'there is no zoom going from macro tionaltty""""i?t -i","ractions and macro are La|@u.r^1i.1.r" ' ' ' fsince] both micro ture,torr::'rLl ,,p to ii"ulating entities' (1999: 19.) "r'r.r".r.t.*

,?I,:JfT:i;;";:'t;i?",::::l::rr,*:t.l:::::Til":;l

j:::;:T1fr':'.:ild;; "'tri1t:::.tr:::l':"#::""i'li'*: "--.-^'--io-" donal ctvt"" formulations from complexity have connecilols Lobile advancethe analysisof non-equilibrium^con-

ofthis .r,u.".t".i'tics ur"uurioi,, rhere ll::"1':rudffTF,rng. relatlonatttY' 'comPlex'

makes such systems the.very la,ge number of elements 'order'' These elements any finalized unpredictableano 'utki"g and, blcause of various dematerializingtrans;;:;;.; physicallv They are informationally over multiple time-spaces' i";;;i;r,' ";il,

irreversiblydrawnto*a.dsua.ious.attractors'thatexerciseakind especiallv what I have termed the glocalization ;i;;;;t;y'"ffect, rich and non-linear' involving attractor.Interaction' "'" to*plex' p ositive f;edU5\ multiple negative and, more-signific antly' loons and patn oepenreturns with ineluciable patterns of increasing with their environment' dence.Such systemsinteract dissipatively within any such system operate under.conditions ih. element "l.*"nts that are far from equilibrium, partly because each at respondsonly to 'locai' sources of information' But elements elsewhere effects one location have very significant time-space prothrough multiple connectiJns and trajectories'There can be a systems 'effects'' Such fo.rnidisfroportionality of 'causes'and past events where and evolv-es possess hirio.y that irreversibly " of bif"ttution{"il}v"Be reached are thus never 'f"t;;;'.;;;i;; when the system dru.t.h"r. And the various sciences are them,"1u", po*"rful elements within such systems and.have unpredi.trbl" ancl irreversible effects upon systemic development, especiallyon the character and development.of global systems' St.f-t tvt,"*, ,iorrld never be seen as involving simply.linear increasesin the ..f.^it^aJn of the life world, or of enhanced agency,or of greater risk. have This then Jo*prir"r-u significant array of general claims' I of tried to make some ."tt,.iUi,l"n to the f"tth"i development the

r24

Global Complexities

social sciencesof complexity with analysesof the material worlds implicated within processesof global ordering. Further topics where I think subsequentwriters could also work would b", fi.rt, the enhancementof some complexity methods,data setsand simulation techniquesthat are appositeto 'sociallife'. Further,it would be desirableto develop formal methods for speciS'ingthe bound_ aries,limitsand consequences of different kinds of networks,especially what I have termed GINs and GFs. And, most ambitiously, complexity notions should be seenasthe basisof a thoroughgoing -worldl post-disciplinarity appropriate to the diverse material currently moving across the globe [see http://www.math. uptras.grl-mboudour/). Such post-disciplinarity would involve systematicanalysesto transcendthe physical science/socialscience divlde.

Machines This book has particularly emphasized the apparently more 'liquid' character of contemporary global relations,involving the dematerializing of information und the unpredictable and rp"-.d.d up character of networked and fluid relationships, wheiher of money, risks, tourism, terrorism or information. Indeed, key to examining the global are the wide array of elobal networks and global fluids that occupy complex, contiadiciory and irreversible relationships with each other. some features of these have , been elaborated; they constitute what I called, foilowing Prigogine,'pools of order' within increasingdisorder.Their importance means that linear accountsof the global, such as those ihat point to increasing wealth, or homogenization, or democracy/ or violence, are wrong. A1l such processesare to be found, brrt ih"y are hugely interdependent with each other; each providlng the conditionsunder whlch their 'other' develops. But why is thisTtrVhy does not the increasingly'liquid' character of the global world mean that relationality is simply unproblematic? Why does not 'liquid modernity', as Bauman 12OOO1 characterizesthe contemporary world, generatemobile solutions to system'failings'7The answer is that those mobilities connecting the local and global always depend upon multiple stabilities.

Global CompLexities

t25

peterritorialization presupposesreterritorialization, as Lefebvre f 199I ) consistentlyshows[seealsoBrenner 1999b: 435-6;1999a). ih" complex characterof such systemsstems from the multiple time-spacefixities or moorings that enablethe fluidities of liquid 'mobile machines',such as mobile modernity to be realized.Thus ohones,cars,aircraft,trains,and computer connections,all presume overlappingand varied time-space immobilities fsee Graham and Marvin 2001). This relationality between mobilites and immobilities is a There is no linear increasein flutvpical complexity characteristic. of immobilities. Thus the so-far systems extensive without idity the aeroplane,requiresthe largest most powerfui mobile machine, and most extensive immobility, of the airport city employing tens of thousands of workers (on the complex nature of such multiple 'airspaces',see Pascoe2001). The least powerful mobile machine, human legs, requires almost no such immobilities [except maybe the armchairl). I now outline variousimmobilities involved here.

3

There aretempora{ymoments of rest of a machine and/or its such as at a bus stop,voice mailbox, usersand/or its messages, passportcontrol, railway station or web site.The machine or its object or user waits in preparationfor its next mobile phase. There are short periods of storage,such as the overnight stay of a car in a garageor an aircraft on an airfield or information within a databaseor a passengerwithin a motel. Such modes of temporary storageoften involve complex sorting and stacking procedures. There is the long-termint'rastructural immobrlity - of airports or CCTV camerasor railway lines or pylons or satellitesthat orchestrate the intermittent mobilities throueh a literal path dependencv. There is the inter-generationaldisposal of the materials from 'dead' machines,such as the transforming of immobile train carriagesor carsor landlinesinto 'disposed'wasteand recycled materials. Thesemobilities are hugely uneuenin time-space,so that some zones are rich with movement and some are movement poor, and in fact become relatively poor as mobilities happen

a t26

Global Complexities

Global Complexities

elsewhere[see Graham and Marvin 2001). Statesare cen implicated in seekingto increasemovements within anJl certain zones and in compensating for the massive quencesof overlapping zones of relative immobiliW. There are therefore specialized periods and places temporary rest, storage, infra-structural immobility, disposal a immobile zones. How, when and where these materialize are immense systemic consequence,relating to the organization time-space. The intersections of these periods and places tate or preclude the apparently seamless mobilities of information, objects and equipment acrosstime-space. Ouerail is these moorings that enable movement. And it is the dialectic mobility/moorings that produces social complexity. If all tionality were mobile or 'liquid', then there would be no plexity. Complexity,l suggest,stemsfrom this dialecticof mobi ano .q-r"q!nngs. s frLrr' I 4r1

There have, moreover, been significant transformations in operation of this dialectic over time. This can be seen bv bri considering the changing nature of 'machines'.The ni century was the century of industrial machines', machines mainly made other machines or material obiects or that tra ported such machines or objects. Each technology deve relatively independently, although a key development was emergence of steam power. Experts, who were often experts that machine itself and not in other machines.inhabited industrial machines. The twentieth century was the era of 'familial machines' and of 'war machines'. Family household members inhabited familid machines,including white-space goods,the family caq,telephone, the radio, the household TVIVCR, the PC, heating appliances and the camera/camcorder. Such machines were rn-ui"iy stored within the home/garage and helped to form twentieth-century family life. Most famiiy could operate most of these -"-b"i, domesticatedmachines.These machinesdepended wholly or pattJy upon electricpowet except strangelyfor the car.Twentieth-centurl 'lr1ar machines' were non-domesticated, and included, besider technologiesof massdestruction,variousspin-offssuch asjet trans' port, nuclear energy,space travel for science,and virtuai

r21

Thesernachineswerestored . _^..l,rions of work and science. fq lli, .r"cializedcampsor baseswherethe public wasforbidil n'::;i.,;'hichhad enhancedsvstemsof sur.r-eillance' d"l.l'j"r*"nty-first century will be the century of what I call in by ,,.i|'Ur,"i-.u.hi.t"r'. These are machinesthat are dwelt ii'ji-',"Ji"tJuals or by very small groups.Such inhabitedmactrlErL

^'-

privatized, mobilized and depend upon :ilH, "." powei -l"i"t"rrzed, is substantially separate from material This '::':::; -nrver. erceptionaI Ievelsof miniaturization and mobiIil\'^'^:JinvoIves are portable,carried around by'digital irrrManv oi these -".hi.r", 1997)- Such machines are Manners and l:;;;-i fMakimoto and demonstratea lightness and i"rtr"a f"; their style, smallness form closely interwoven with the corporeal' Early exmobile phones, the "irrnd #j1'j, include walkmans, new generation indiviinJiuid"ul T! the networked computer,/Internet, the air'travel', personal small srnart dualizedsmart car,virtual reality interesting involve craftand othersyet to emerge.These machines reconfigurations of storage: the portals to these machines are carriedlrouqd with the individual, they are stored on or close to the personand yet their digital power derives from their extensive connectivity. Thesein-habitingmachines enable 'people' to be more readily mobilethrough space,or to stay in one place becauseof the capacity for 'self-retrieval' of personal information at other times or spaces. Through s.rch machines people inFrabit global networks and fluids of information, image and mo,''ement. 'Persons'thus occurasvariousnodes in these multiple machines of inhabitation and rnobility.The storagein such machines is digitized and hence is not only 'just in time' but also'just in space'. There is a personto-personconnectivitv that representsa further shift in the dematerialization of info.*"tion and moblllty discussed in chapter 4 Gee Wellman 2001). The global fluidi of 'travelling peoples', 'lnternet' and 'information' increasingly overlap ,^J .orru"tg", generating irreversible changes that further move social life towardswhat Wellman (200i) terms 'personalized networking'. his involves the furthei linking-together of 'physical space' and ,l This convergenceacross the various global fluids ^cYberspace'. Iurther transcendsdluirio.r! of structure and agency,the global and the local

W

f f

Global Complexities

Global ComPlexities

r29

r ^..^riationally 'complex' [as in Held et al'

*hui hupp"nsto nationstates ,onallY ^1?:":il;;""pr"it 'empire'. once 'empire'' though, once is as as though' It is It Further',"'.:i";- su'h .,,.h u" an

" then "'1" state>,o.lo. .':::[: li5;1"ryil*],*m : lil:n:''ntv' empire' ""'societies' All they imply is Sion deployedby Hardt andNegridoes l'r'llij:";iil;

s1-^'",n:.::.?",

"1'"-pire'

#;:ru'.;il:':^.T*i:::;'":::T::Tlin';*:1'

iott"Ti'ij':i;":;; be characterizedas'a sovereignpower that .Tetonty rrr H"' " /1000. p. xi).Although Hardt and Negri conl.rerns the worta. le

Sili;+;::::^ri::::::"S.:x1fr :::':tulf#i,iHiu:i iheirclaimthat'thereis worldorder' matize

Empires and Multitudes

@rillliu"\'{rr,

In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000 the conceptof ,empire,o.,imo"Ji:;:^-^,_-,,

#flfi'r"Jo"lUi"

ttll.J'i:ffi IIJ*: rj; o :l ra ; dynamican t*j.,1.; : :"f:"' d n ; i ;'ff" :i;1" "",:bi"' tally across the globe, i,ffi ,sovorroh-6 TTJ,lt; a kind Nrrq ut of r^,:!L_ .

that sweeps ,"*J,6",

'

Sovernance without gover

Q0003)' the concept of 'empire' is a useful one' Rather,I suggesttnat of ch"ura.terizeoverall global relations. My analysis b";;;;; be to said that all societiescould be il;;i-;"-Olexity.suggests ,empires'. contemporary societies possess libe [ecoming more power such as buildr" t*r"""tf.gly visible ."nt.", with icons of there is a i.gr, f""at.Jp", ur-tdbrands, while beyond the centre of ,pi."aing of effects outwards with a relative weakness borders' Within such'empires'there are emergentinequalitiesrather than, as in at least welfare societies,an attempt to create citizenship rights that are common throughout the territory. In particular, ,oii.ti", are on the world's stage, showing off their trophies, competingwith each other for the best skyline,palaces,galleries, stadia,infrastructures and so on, and seeking to avoid scandal and risk. Societiesare endlesslydrawn into the glocal attractor and it is thisthat remakesthem as'empires',the USA being the most powerful and dominant of such societalempires currently strutting the world'sstage.The USA possesses a number of exceptionalcentres (NY LA,Washington),many iconsof power (Pentagon,WallStreet, Hollywood,Ivy ieague Universities,Texan oil wells,SiliconValley, MOMAI, a porosity of borders (on the USAs Latinization, see Davis2d00bj r"d hug"'imperial' economic and socialinequalities. It is the purojig- ..s" of 'societyasempire'.Thus,rather than there beinga single'empire',globalcomplexity suggeststhat eachsociety is drawn into ttLe attractor of glocalization and is remade, so developingsome characteristicsof 'empire'.

.^dry";;"tdd :;'j:;il 1._"; .1 :1,"_: Ji:i,il.,|1 ^ . *ior. l'#l';llifrffi'",I:'"or'ur"'h";;;;;;)"?il'"."'I?3r'J is deterritoriatir"a u"a with a rneroin_ al."]., wor ld" t he .s i n o l . l n o i ^ f ,,,1 .,

,tinterdependentfluid globaihybridsthat both

u€rergnpow e4,a' r

g*'iil.TT'Jf,it'itt;"'il"fi,{il1{ii*$',i:;:l ^-.,,o,u,"r"r,qnty

boundaries __r r s qr r L r u ,aso oir b"..i".r. u a rrre rs .,l h e ,a g e nf The _ . .r o f g l obal i zati on i s,t. -l^t-^I,-^.,

l

r* . oi r r r g, r r ", .. rr Z.ffi U Ui: U : IrJ3 O6 J). A A nn dd, , e m_ p i fp , Lrary 1;i < ;,,.""*:iy i".iits .j oppos.itg, l:, d,;; iry generates ";;, whaIHa.dt " ei.., N"gri +;#;r,

desires r,' ".a tude,t :::::i,T:,],'fl,li',": _:nd :I r "-i - ouir"1murti*:' . '

iiooo, [r]11l'r;'61" T::f:Tj[;"j?:t "-pi." parallelsmy argument as to the

tra Iitvor thea :':1"i,fff iiloil:it"'r'tri ",".'iioi"i, Ji'is*;' little ,p"cifi."tion

tralitv of tL- ,^.^-:lliie' global system.Howr

Negri Nesriof rhe o,"r_*..^=lll l.h*" of th esv stemi' ."ru.i o,',*i ;i;; :

U, H".ji *a

#:l:: ilnrtJ"lilit T;

rt operatesin co'dirion, fbl ft"; ;;;,1]0.,,r,',, Theirs is a remark ably undynamicaccount of serf-repilJ,r.ir,ggrobal rerations. They say,for example,thr

supp orts,r, 'il:fiJ:il?,:il**l.mt :Hi "'*i.u"iTffi ; ;;.'""; ;i il;";'^iii-' ""t5#"t"t$ lf] .?y"ehere un.dtuiJft ";;;:;ii,;H:,i'"""rrl;f:'r:,#*".,.;#;i::

130

GIobaIComPlexities

.,,,:alComplexities

And each society qui:npire produces its opposite,its its rebellious multitude ird the globalizing of capitalistm has generated some str.,i-:.g new zones from which ,multi emerge to challengeen:.:es. The events of l l September to have emerged unprec.,:rbly from one of the very poorest c tries in the world, and :: are said to have irreversiblv ch many parametersstruct;l]g economic,socraland political life.-l I September demonstrat* :re c-omplexity of 'asymmetric threats,i that 'wars' are increasL::ry fought between formally .rn.qual powerswith the appare'-r weakable to inflict massiveUlo*, oi the apparently powerfu. : is almost the secular equivalent of ,thu first shall be last, and t-,,.astshall be first,. The mightie, i, ihe power of society as eL-::e, the greater the harm ihat can be inflicted. _ Global complexity ca:*rusbe seen in the power of the powerless to inflict the utrn;i: harm upon the institutions of imperial powet especially::rsebuildings, institutions and people that symbolize the inte:it condensationof imperial power. The USA is the paradigm casi'i'societyas empire'. And it is the New York skyline that most gi:hically symbolizes its imperial power. Moreovel, huge trans;.:mationsare taking place in the very production of 'empire a:imultitude' across the elobe. This can be seen as a specificexa::leof the glocalizine atlactor. Bhabha summarizeshow: 'The g ,:eshrinksior those*ho o*n it; for the displaced or the disposs*;ed, the migrant or refugee,no distance is more awesome than'-:. few feet across borders or frontiers' []992:88). Indeed one effect of ;'lal markets is to generate ,wild zones' of the increasinglydispos,ossed. In parts of the former USSR,subSaharanAfrica, the Balkii. central America and central Asia are zones that are places c'.bsence,of gaps, of lack. Such zones possessweak states witL rry limlted infrastructures, no monopoly of the means of coer.r.n, barelv functionine economiesoften dependent upon comrnurfiringlilegal materlls, an imploded social structure and a re.;:rtelylimited set of connections to the global order. In the 'West' socio-spi:.rlinequalities have remained largely invisible.There is a 'splir,:::ing urbanism', with the invisibihty of the 'other' taken to extre': lengths in the 'gated, cities of North

131

and Marvin 2001)' There are gatedcommuniamerica[Graham theme parks' workplaces' 'l^- .nndominiums, shopping centres' gatesseparate ttt:;;;, ;irpo.,t, fi,tut'tiul districts and so on'The within the t'Tl# .lf" ,'on"r'fro- th" wild and dangerous.z:ne's

thepoorand s"t' 'o""' of the""gou"'n"ble' w",J :il"5tTi: across the are found in many cities especially

the dispossesseo ut*r,, of these safe and the increasingly, the time-space-edges new juxtapositions .omingli"to strange and dangerous *iiJt" from the wild flows the Wesi' The .'an or oerhaps --^r CvLrr' .^r i increasingly "rp".iully,"in on nsrs, substances'images and so zonesof people, chaotiiftt""gft tft" tuf" gates'suddenly and slip under, over and that had kept the zones apart' cally eliminating the invisibilities urbancrime'asvlum

;ffi;h

;o.'"1i t"""J;ti;;, the drugtrade'

the tlave tradlng and urban terrorism' seeking,people t-"ggfl"g, safe are chaoticallv juxtaposed' wild ;ithZ r"L"t%i,fte zones have "" of glo$al co;nplexitv' wild and safe I; ,;,;;s

ii' "#:l becomehighly tO,S,1ai'ilri' *-t'tto.t ffiIl

o" "

1:;: ist world the capi:lt al Ther e is' time-sp a."f-pt""io'i" zones are now only a telebut also of the'a"..o'i* i"o'ld''Wild plane.ride away' Capitalphone call, an Internet connection or a 'whole world' closer and this is ist markets ft"t" U.""gltt the its violent pu.udox"ically true. of those bent on especially "nd destroving the dominance of ; destruction and ;;i;lt' 'Americans' within th" glotd order' 1l September^demonstrates th" few feet were drathis new curvature oi'i"t" "lttJ- and time' "' ittuitibility was no more' Suddenly matically t.".tr."ndli the tot" f'o- ihut zone and struck at those from th" *ill-Jo""' The wild and safe vertical city that had previously beeninvisible' manner no one in a in New York zones collid"a in tt ,ky "Uou" " also collide in the safezoneshrd ;.;J1;ed' of course'the zones cheap petrol for Saudi Arabia, whele ,f.r" Uint obsessionwith unholy alliance one-third of the world,s cars has generated the between American power and Saudi oil wealth' the most dramatic Moreover, the events of 1l September are or 'netwar' involvro iu. of a non-territorial network war "*"-fi" taken by the 'multitude'' And hierarchies i"; J;" tou"l f**,

h"?;-g.;ut aifn."ii'"nghti',g i.,.h networks.Indeed,networks are best

"t

fightirrg tL,o-'"

"""g"ged

in netwars [see Arquilla and

ij

132

Global Complexities

Ronfeldt z00l: r 7). Al-eaida hasbeen likened.tl a self-3rqanizing system 'on the edge of ihuor'. The 'amorphousness of a-l-rgaida not only makes it difficult to hunt down its members and pin blame on individuals: it also means it does --6,^prAeek "o, ""."..".ijy h.uu the same form from day to day,a clear beginning or 200IJ. Indeed, 'what they receivefrom Bi;Lade; hr, associ""d ates is less specific orders and training than a crea4, rimple ideorogy, which they are expected to go out into the *o.tj pua into practice on their own' "na 200.1). This emergeni fMeek global fluid of international terroriim is hard i" d"f""f ;;?;;re it is made up of very diffuent self-organizingelements.They regurarry change their shape, form and ,Jtiuities] Such cTpacity renders them 'invisible' if on occasionsawesomely -;,;;ilp..r".* castells (2001) describesthe nature of ,non-line"., ,"".r".. ,rr",

;';'Hr"ffi li",,[1nil,r"'f i.].T"i*'$kftT':*.lL ,ftaiiff

small autonomous units posserrr"g higl, fi.. po*.f ,ie.y rapid mobility, robust communications, reai-time information' and a capacity to 'sense'the enemy.This 'non-linear warfare represents a high-tech version of the old tradition of guerrilr" rt.rggi"r. rhi, "network-centric" warfare . . . is entirely de-penden,,roJi .ourrrt. secure communication, able to maintain constant connection between the nodes of an all-channel network' fcastells z00r: 16l-2; Duffield 2001: t4J. thus suggestedthat, rarher than there beingan,Empire, .l.h.l": with 'its' multitude, there is what we might hypoth"'rJ" ,r-" rr"* attractor.This could be designatedas 'societiesas emoires,. societies acrossthe world are being drawn into developing ,empire,. as And, as they are drawn into iuch an attracto{, so new unsiable and unpredictable multitudes arise,seekingto topple those empires and their icons. societies as empires=u." d"u"loping some strange new practices as systems develop to deal with the non_ linear multitudes that are increasinglyin their very midst.

Cosmopolitanism But there is something else going on here within the emergent system of global complexity. Let me return briefly to when there

Global Complexities

133

.^,rsa 'sirnple'systemof hierarchicalnation states.When the world of nation states,the 'other' society was almost always -,.]-'.irr.'d .,]r"thing to fear, to attack, to colonize, to dominate and to keep on the move, ut bny The other was dangerous,especially others travellers who might migrants, traders, vagrants, armies, as such came to of rights attributable to tightly consist xa.v.Crtizenship within and specifiedcategoriesof those who were unambiguouly 'society'. of national societies involved This system the of oart rnassiveantagonism towards the other, with relationships normally being'nasty, brutish and short' (see Diken 1998). But we should consider here whether a 'cosmopolitan' global fluid is uncertainly and contingently emerging [D. Harvey 2000). Is a set of 'global' values and dispositionsbecoming an emergent and irreversibleimplication of global complexity? Are 'societies' increasinglyforming themselveswithin such an evolving complex and will they be subject to scandalizeddisapprovalif they do not display cosmopolitanismupon the global screenTIs the 'enemy' fbr each society as empire the global risk that have few borders or boundaries and that can be as much within the society as terrorists, diseases withoutT These risks include asylum-seekers, and viruses,environmental and health risks (seeVan Loon 2002). Such a cosmopolitan fluid involves various characteristics[see Waldron 1995; Tomlinson 1999; Beck 2000; Cwerner 2000; Franklinet al. 2000;Walby 2001). There is extensive mobility where people have the right to 'travel' corporeally, imaginatively and virtually and, for significant numbers of workers, students, tourists, asylum-seekers and so on, the meansto travel and to consumeplaces,peoples, rights and environmentsen route. There is a cunosity about places, peoples and cultures and a rudimentary capacity to 'map' one's own society and its culture in terms of history and geography.There is a stance of opennessto other peoples and cultures and a willingness/ability to value elements of the language/culture/history of multiple, contested and fragmented 'others' to one's own culture, provided that they meet certain global standards. There is a willingness to take nsks by virtue of encountering various'others',combined with a semioticskill to interpret and

134

4

Global Complexities

evaluate images of other natures,pracesand societies,to see what they are meant to represent,and to know *h",, th.v r." ironic. There are some global standards by which other places, cultures and people are positioned and can be judged Many international organizationsfollowing the founding -of th" uN advocateand promulgate such stanJards.

Two writers that articulated the notion of the cosmopolitan are Salman Rushdie and c. L. R. James.Rushdie wrote i,, tggo, ,tr The Satanic Wrses is-anything, it is a migrant,s_eyeview of the world. It is written from the very experilnce of uprooting, dis_ juncture and metamorphosis. . . that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metafhor for all humanity' (cited in waldron 1995: 93). And c. L. R. James once wrote: 'The relation of classeshad to.h"r,g" before i discovereJlhu, ia', not quality of goods and utility that matter; but movement, not where you are or what you are, but where you come from, where you glg going and the rate.at which you are getting th"r"; [cited in Clifford 1992: 96; see also Clifforj 1997.). Such an global fluid stems from the intensively -emergent mediated relations now swarming the world. This is even true in mainland china where the massivegrowth of diverse media is generating a recosmopolitanism (Ong and Nonini 1997; yang 1997)' The UN commission on Grobal Governance (1995J, sei up to report on the first fifty years of the u\ talks of 'our Grobal Neighbourhood', arguing that a mediated, enforced global pro"i_ is-generatingcosmopolitanism ltity fsee alsoTomhnin 1999: ch. 6; Beck Nelson Mandela ofien refers to 'the p"opre of -2000). South Africa and the world who are watching' o,, th"i. tV ri."",r, IUN Commission on Global Governance l9-95: lO7). The ,we, in M^andela'sspeechesalmost always evokes those beyond south Africa that view South Africa upon the global and have collectively. participated in the country;s rebirth -"di"through an enforced televisualproximity. when Ma,rd"la statesthat '#" ur. one people', he is pointing both to south Africa and to the rest of the world that is witnessing.Likewise the pointing f.o* th" TV commentators to the collective 'we' at princeis Diana's funeral was to the astonishing2.5 bilhon people witnessing and

Global Complexittes

r35

sharing on the global screen, as the iconic 'global healer' sanctifiedby the whole world [Richards et al. 1999: 3). Indeed,sincethe fallof the BerlinWall in 1989,there have been various 'global events' when The Whole World is Watching fGitlin 1980). On 11 September2001, the whole world watched the surreal and stranger-than-Hollywoodmoment when live planes with live passengersflew into and demoiished two of the largest buildings in the world. The World Thade Cente4 with up to 150,000 workers and visitors,a city in the ai4,was at two strokes bombed out of existencewith the whole world agog.The hugely unlikely forming of a 'global coalition against terrorism' both depended upon such collective watching and helped to promote further the cosmopolitan fluid. Collective global disastersare the key to the forming of such cosmopolitan global fluids, perhaps beginning with the founding moment of the Nuremberg trials in the immediate post-SecondWorld War period. Moreover, various visual representations of the earth or globe increasingly challenge the importance of 'national' flags fsee Ingold 1993; Cosgrove 1994). The iconic blue globe involves seeingthe earth in dark space,as a whole defined againstthreatening emptiness,with no lines or political colouring, freezing a moment in time. The globe functions as a symbol of authority, organization,and coverageof global infbrmation, particularly in news programmes. More generally,imagesof spaceare often used to connote the endlesspossibilitiesof travel and the potential 'cosmopolitan'consumption of other places and cultured from all acrossthe globe [Urry 2000b: ch. 7). Hebdige concludes that a 'mundane cosmopolitanism' is part of many people's everyday experience,as they are world travellers,both corporeally and through the TV in their living room: 'lt is part of being "taken for a ride" in and through late-2Oth century consumer culture. In the 1990s everybody [at least in the West] is more or less cosmopolitan'

[1990:2 0) .

A powerful 'televisual flow' throws viewers into the flowing visual world lying beyond the domestic regime.There is an instantaneousmirror reflectingthe cultures of the rest of the world that are mirrored into people's homes (Williams 1974; Al|an 1997; Hoskins 2001). Arundhati Roy evocatively describesan elderly

13 6

Global Complexities

Global Complexities

woman whose life is transformed by the instantaneousand often 'live' visual perception of multiple'global others'.Roy writes:'She presided over the World in her drawing room on satellite ry. . . . It happenedovernight.Blor-rdes, wars,famines,footbaii,sex,music, coups d'etat - they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel . . . whole wars, famines, picturesque massacresand Bill Clinton could be summoned up hke servants'[1997: 27). There is thus a hugely diverse and changingarray of 'referencegroups' that is disclosedand exposed especiallythrough TV and now the Internet. The 'cosmooolitan traveller' may derive ideas, values,norms and sensesof iustice from an incredible array of such sources[Waldron 1995; Walby

2001).

Such sensationsof other placescan create an awarenessof cosmopolitan interdependenceand a 'panhumanity' [Franklin et al. 2000). The flows of information, knowledge, money, commodities, people and images 'have intensified to the extent that the sense of spatial distance which separatedand insulated people -which from the need to take into account all the other people make up what has become known as humanity has become eroded' [Featherstone1993: 169). By participating in the practice of consumingin and through the media, people experiencethemselvesas part of a dispersed,global civicness,sharingsimilar experiences and united by the senseat least that they are witnessing the world and its mosaic of cultures with millions of disperseJ others [Gitlin 1980; Dayan and Katz L99Z) Acording to the U\ this global civicnessis generatingsome senseof the universalstandardsby which human development is to be judged [see UNDP 2000). One paradoxicalconsequenceof global complexity is to provide the context in which universal rights, a panhumanity, relating not only to humans but also to animals and environments, comes to constitute a framing for collective action. Illustrations of such panhumanity are the wide range of what we can call'global gift giving', the giving to distant [unknown) others of money, time, objects, software and information [via mega events like Liveaid, via local events or via the Internet). Cosmopolitanism should be seen as produced by, and further elaborating, the glocalization attractor through transforming rela-

)a

ji 6

fi C

t37

Uonsbetweenthe global and the iocal (Tomiinson i 999 194-207). The drawing of many 'localities' into the attractor of 'glocality' provides preconditions for emergence: 'changes in our actual physicai environments,the routine factoring in of distant political-economic processesinto life-plans, the penetration of our homes by new media and communicationstechnology,multiculturalism as increasinglythe norm, increasedmobihty and foreign travel, even the effects of "cosmopolitanizing" of food culture' [Tomlinson 1999: 199-200; see also Rotblat 1997b; Beck 2000). Thus the apparently local and the apparently cosmopolitan should not necessarilybe counterposed.Powerful sets of dispositions in the contemporary world are neither localist and proxirnate nor global and universal.As Zygmunt Bauman argues in Liquid Modernity via a discussionof Derrida's to 'think travel': 'the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment' [2000: 207). Cosmopolitan fluidity thus involves the capacity to live simultaneouslyin both the global and the local, in the distant and proximate, in the universal and the particular. Such cosmopolitanism involves comprehending the specificity of one's local context, to connect to other locally specific contexts and to be responsiveto the complex threats and opportunities of a globalizing world. We can thus talk of a 'glocalizedcosmopolitanism'in rvhich 'in the everydaylifestyle choicesthey make, cosmopolitans need routinely to experiencethe wider world as touching their local lifeworld, and vice versa' fTomlinson 1999: 198J. Such cosmopolitanism as a global fluid appears increasingly widespreadthrough the 'shrinking world' of various intersecting global fluids that were outlined in chapter 4. Its increasingscale and complex impact will irreversiblytransform each civil society, altering the conditions under which 'social actors assemble,organize, and mobilize' [Cohen and Arato 1992: 151). And, as they assemble,organizeand mobilize differently,so new unpredictable and emergent cosmopolitan identities, practices and cognitive praxeswill emerge fEyerman and Jamison 1991J.Out of TV and jet travel, the mobile and the modem, there is an emergent global fluid of cosmopolitanism.This transformswhat it is that appears to be co-present and what is mediated, what is embodied and

7

138

Global Complexities

Global ComPlexities

what is distant, what is local and what is global [D. Harvey 2000:

8s-6).

of the cosmopolitanglobal fluid thus showsthe T(e "m"rgence irreversible, ,rnp."di.table and chaotic workings of global complexity. And complexity theory seems to provide the means to !*"-ir-r" how cosmopolitanism has come to develop as a new emergent fluid of global ordering.

Conclusion John Gray [2001) describesthe current state of the globe as ,an intract"bly diro.dered world'. I have tried to show that 'complexity' provides a wide array of metaphors, concepts and for examining such intractable disorderliness. theoiies "rr"ntl"l that world are complex, rich and non-linear, Relations across involving multiple negative and, more significantly, positive feedback loops. There are ineluctable patterns of increasingreturns and long-term path dependencies.Such global systems,or re-gions, GINs and GFs, are characterizedby unpredictability and irreversibility;they lack any finalized 'equilibrium' or 'order'' They do not exhibit and sustain unchanging structural stability. Complexity elaborateshow there is order and disorder within all physical and social systems. Following Gray we can see how there is a complex world, unpredictable and irreversible, disorderly but not simply anarchic. Suih complexity derives from what I have described as the dialectic of mooring s and mobilities. If, to express this far too simply, the social world were to be entirely moored or _entirely then systemswould not be dynamic and complex' But -obii", social life seems to be increasingly constituted through material worlds that involve new and distinct moorings that enable, Pfoduce and presuppose extensive new mobilities. So many more systemsare complex, strangely ordered, with new shapesmoving in and through time-space. In such ,yrt"-, the various components are irreversibly drawn towards uuiio,r, 'attractors' that exercise a gravity effect. Such components within any system operate under conditions that are 'local' fu. i.o,,' equilibrium, partly because each responds to

it ir li

ri

1 fl

I39

sources of information. But components at one location have substantial time-space effects elsewhere through multiple connections and awesometrajectories.Such systemspossessa history that irreversiblyevolvesand where past eventsare not'forgotten'. Points of bifurcation are reached when the system branches,since 'causes'and 'effects' are disproportionate.There are non-linear relationshipsbetween them, with the consequencethat systems can move quickly and dramatically from one state to another. Systems'tip' or'turn', especiallythose that are organizedthrough 'networked' relationships that usher in some surprising and distinct effects. Finally, let me consider briefly here how this connects to the theory of 'reflexive modernization'.It has been arguedthat'social structures,national in scope,are being displacedby such global information and communication fl and C) structures' flash and Urry 1994: 6). These emergent systemsof information and communication are the bases for increased reflexivity. Through the increasingly structural power of information and communications the 'structure' of 'societies'has progressivelylesspurchase. And there is heightened reflexivity produced by and through these new 'l and C' structures. Reflexive modernization characterizes social life in which individuals and systems reflexively monitor especially the side effects of modernity. Such reflexivity moreover gives rise to many new structures, especially of various expert systems.Such reflexivity is, however, cultural aswell ascognitive [see Lash and Urry 1994; Waldron 1995). It is not only a matter of scientific or expert systemsthat enable the side effects of the modern to be monitored, organized around and in cases rectified. Rathel, reflexive modernization involves aestheticexpressive systems that result in huge new cultural industries, a veritable economy of signs. I want though to suggestthat these processesof reflexive modernizationstem from what I have describedasthe emergentglobal fluid of the cosmopolitan.Cosmopolitanismprovides dispositions of an appropriate cultural reflexivity within emergent global complexities. The form now taken by reflexive modernization is the global fluid of cosmopolitanism.Such a cosmopolitan fluid involves redrawing the speed of the global and the slownessof the ontologically grounded. It irreversibly transforms the conditions

14 0

Global Comolexities

under which other networks and fluids operate as well as have been historically ry understood urrusr)LUULT ds as 'societies'. suLt.crra, This nts connects ..,.,.I

.r, the shift that Lashdescribesasthe move from the .irk roll.*

examined by Beck,to the moresenerd;;k;i;"-.;bll[iBri

to;

,-

1998; Lash 2000). Such a risk culture has to deal wiih risks that unambiguously run across borders. These.include post-industrial risks, especially involved in informational flows [biotechnolog; cybersurveillance, epidemics, waste products, GM foods, .ybur, crime, international terrorism), as well as with the risk taklnj that is part of the very processesof innovation zooz)."ano, ,[van .L9o1 corresponding to this shift is a corresponding shift from national society to the increasing power of a cosmopolitan global fluid from modernity to reflexive modernization, as others have exoressedthis. And we might further see complexity theories as deriving from and in turn enhancing cosmopolitanism. This global fluid, with many convergent, overlapping and irreversible interdependencies with other networks and fluids, serves to remake social relations across the world, but not in a linear, closed and finalized form. Complexity is the theory that cosmopolitanism produces and generalizes, that captures and reflects the qystenic features of powerful material worlds. Thus cosmopolitanism involves an emergent global fluid that will in part reconfigurehow the social sciencesdevelop in a postsocietal era of global complexity. It will lead to the spread of theories of global complexity as one of the major meansof capturing, representing and performing the new world ordering that remains balancing'on the edge of chaos'.Complexity theoriesthemselves seem irreducibly part of the emergent systems o/ global complexity. Thus we are going with the flow, so to speak, if we develop, as I have tried to here, the implications of the complexity sciencesfor the many global systems currently haunting the world's population.

References

I i!

I

$

Abbott, A. 2001 . Time Matters. chicago: university of chicago Press. Adam, B. 1990. Time and SocialTheory. Cambridge: Polity' Adam, B. 1998. Timescapesof Modernity. London: Routledge' Adam, B. 2000. 'The tempor al gaze:Thechallengefor sociologicaltheory in the context of GM foods', British Journal of Sociologt,5l 125-42' Adam, B., Beck, U., and van Loon, J. (ed$ 2000. The Risk Socieryand Beyond.London: Sage. Adams,J. 1995. Risk. London: UCL Press. Albrow, M. 1996. The Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. Allan, S. 1997. 'Raymond Williams and the culture of televisualflow', in J. Wallace and S. Nield (eds), Raymond Williams Now: Knotuledge, Limits and the Future. London: Macmillan. Anderson,A. 1997. Media, Culture and the Enuironment London: UCL Press. Appadurai,A. 1990. 'Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy', Theory, Culture and Society, 7: 295-3 10. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modemity at Large. Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press. Archer, M. 1995. RealistSocialTheory.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arquilla, J., and Ronfeldt, D. 2001. 'The advent of netwars frevisited)', in J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt (edsJ, Netuorks and Nefu;ars. Santa Monica: Rand. Arthur, B. 1994a. lncreasingReturnsand Path Dependencein the Econorny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Arthur, B. 1994b. 'Summary Remarks', in G. Cowan, D. Pines and D. Meltzer (eds), Complexity, Metaphors, Models and Realiry. Santa

142

References

Fe Institute: Studies in the Sciences of Complexity vol. 19. Auge, M. 1995. Non-places.London: Verso.

References

143

and Time: n-..nn S., and Leinbach, R. (eds) 199J,. Collapsing Space ttl u'|!'

o'Z'o,rgrnplil,.Aspects ' of Communicationsand lnt'ormario'r'London: HarPc'rLoLttns'

._ i.ri",lrtu, S. I 995. N ature's Keepers.London: Weidenfeld and Nicoison. "^;l;':to*7;)li/i!r'i";y#'ru!,!:*"*s:AnEssavonthermas,na,. Mass.: Harvard University

t1$:

'Chaos,ordet andso"ciological theory',Sociotogical rnquiry, i;11?3. B*t.\ 1999. DisposablepeopLe: New Slaueryin the Global Berkeleyand LosAngeles:uniu".rity Jf.Californiapress. Econorry _

u^rt)*1, _.o,, simul atep.iiiri.iL"nsparency,, \:yr{;;,r ^,ti)i,,, Barbe4B. 1996.lihad usMcWorlcl. york:

New Ballantine. Baudrillard,J. 1983.Simularions. New york: S._i;;;,t"). Bauman,Z. 2000.Liquid Modernity.Camiridge: polity.' ' Beck,U. lgg2. Rkh Society. London:Saee. Beck,U. 1998.World Risk Sociery. CamBridge:polity. Beck,U. 2000.'The On the sociologyof the ;oslopolilan.perspective: s9c9ndageof modernity,, Britisi JournaloySorioig,,"ii,;;:iU6 _. Bhabha,H. 1992.'Double Visions,, Aftfo;^.January:g2_g0. Biggs,M. 1998.'collective mobilizl:ation as self-reinfo..i.,g-p".o."*,Th" organizationof chicago'sworking class in lgg6', Harvard-oxfordStockholmSociologyConference,"AprllBillig,M. 1995.Banal Nationalism'London, S"g". Boden,D. 2000.'Worldsin action:Information, instantaneityand global futures trading',in B. Ad_am, U. g".L, ; and J. van Loon [eds), Tle Rist Socie4tand Beyond.London:S"g". _ Boden,D., and Molotch,H. 19g4.,Tfr".ornptrlsion to proximiry,,in D Boden (eds),Norutz ere:Space,Timeand Modernity. l^j_:1,::i,1f DerKerey, Lalitornia:Universityof Californiapress. U",e,:1J.:Y; rhe Simulatioi of Surueillance Cambridge:Cambridge I9!G-. unrverslty rress. Bogard,w 2000' 'simmel in cyberspace: strangeness and distancein postmoderncommu.nications,, Spaceand Cubire, +tS, ZS_iA. Brand,S. 1999.'lhe Cbcb of the'LongNoru. London:phoenix. Braudel,F 1973 Capiralkm and MZterial Life, 1400_1g00.New york: Harper & Row. Brenner,N. i997. 'Global,fragmented, hierarchical: Henri Lefebvre,s geographies of globalization':publi, Cuhurr,l0: I35_6g. ^BrenneriN. 1999a.'Beyond state-centris-Z Sp".", territoriality, andgeo_ graphicalscalein globalizationstudies', Thiory and Society,ig, zg-la. -Brenner,N' 1999b.'Globarisation asreterritoriaiisation: The re-scaling of urbangovernance in the EuropeanUnion,,(JrbanStudies,:0,+li_s r .

1gg2. S,*t,ural Holes. Cambridge, ffi;, [ Press' .-*i..' t 1993. Bodies the Matter. London: Routledge. i;;;;. b 1997. 'Chaotic piacesor complex places',in S' Westwood and "'j. (eds), Imagrning Cities. London: Routledge' willir.t Complexity Theory and the Social sciences.London: 1998. Bvrne, D. Routledge' Orion' Cairncross,F. I998. The Death of Distance' ['ondon: HarperCollins' Life London: TheWeb of 1996. i.^or^, F. A Science for SustainableLiuing. i^oro, F.20OZ.The Hidden Connections: : Har per Collins. Loudon . Castells,M. I 996. The lnt'ormationAge, i. The Riseof the Networb Sociery Blackwell. Oxford: castells, M. 1997. The lnt'ormationAge, ti. The Pouterof ldentiry. oxford: Blackwell. Castells,M. 1998. The lnt'ormationAge, rit. End of Millenniurn. Oxford: B l ackwell. castells, M. 2000. 'Matc.rials for an explanatory theory of the network society', Bitish Journal of Sociolog, 51 : 5-24. Castells,M. 2001 . The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casti, J. 1994. Compbxification. London: Abacus. Chase-Dunn,C., Kawano,Y., and Brewer, B. 2000. 'Trade globalisation since 1795: Waves of integration in the world-system', Amencan SociologicalReuiew, 65: 77 -95. Cilliers, i tgg8. Complexity and Post-Modernism.London: Routledge' Clark, N. 2000. "'Botanlzing on the asphalt"?The complex life of cosmopolitanbodies',Body and Society,6:13-34. Clifford, J. 1992. '?avelling cultures', in L. Grossberg et al' [eds), Cuhural Studies.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes.Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard University Press. Cohen, J., and Arato, A. 1992. Ciuil Socie4t and Political Theory' Cambridge,Mass.,and London: MIT Press. Cohen, J. ;d Stewart, I. 1994. The Collapseof Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cohen, R. 1997. Global Diasporas.London: UCL Press. Cohen, S. 2001 . Statesof Denictl. Cambridge: Polity. Colborn, T., Meyers,J.,and Dumanoski, D. 1996. Our StolenFuture:How

144

References

Man-Made Chemicals are Threatening our Fertiliry, Intelligence and Suruiual.Boston: [.ittle, Brown & Company. Cosgrove,D. 1994. 'Contested global visions:One-rvorld, whole-earth, and the Apollo space photographs', Annak of the Association sf American G eographers,84'.270-g 4. Coveney,P. 2000. 'A clash of doctrines:The arrow of time in modern physics', in P. Baert (ed.), Time in Contemporary lntellectualThought. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Coveney, P., and Highfield, R. 1990. The Anow of Time. London: Flamingo. Cwerner, S. 2000. 'The chronopolitan ideal:Time, belonging and globalization' , Time and Sociery,2/3: 331-45. June: 56-9. Davies,P. 2001a. 'Before the Big Bang', Prospect, Davies,P. 2001b. Hoto to Build aTime Machine.London:Allen l.ane. Davis, M. 2000a. Ecolog of r'ear. London: Picador. Davis, M. 2000b. Magical Urbanism. London: Verso. Dayan, D., and Katz, E. 1992. Meditt Euents:The Liue Broadcastingof History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. De Landa, M. 1997. AThousandYears of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve. Delanty, G. 2000. Citizenship in a Global .Age. Buckingham: Open University Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1986. Nomadologt. New York: SemiotextIe).

Deleuze,G., and Guattari,F. 1988.AThousandPlateaus:Capitalismand London:Athlone Press. Schizophrenia. Dicken,P.,Kelly,P.,Old, K., andYeung,H. 2001.'Chainsandnetworks, Towardsa relationalframeworkfor analysingthe territoriesand scales: globaleconomy', Global Networks,1: 89-l 12. Ambiuolenceand Sociall'heory.Aldershot: Diken, B. 1998. Strangers, Ashgate. complexityand poetics',Theory, Dillon, M. 2000. 'Poststructuralism, Cultureand Sociery,17 1-26. Dionne,E. 1998.'swoosh:Public shamingnets results',International HeraldTiibune,l5May,I l. and the Neut\Mars.London and Duffield, M. 2001. Global Gouernance New York:Zed Books. Durkheim, E. 1915/1968.The ElementaryFormsof the ReligiousLit'e' ;i London:GeorgeAllen & Unwin. Eatwell,J., and Taylor,L. 2000. Global Financeat Risk.New York: New Press. London:Picador. in Hyper-Realiry. Eco,U. 1986.Trat,eLs

Ret'erences

145

of Marx' Cambridge: Cambridge University Irlster,J. 1985. Making Sense Press. }:mi rbayer,M. l997. . M ar r if - est of or ar elat ionalsociology', Am encat t Journalof Sociologt,I03: 281-3 I 7' 1998''What is agency?"Amencan Joumal Unrirbuy"r,tr,l.,and Mische,A' 023' of Sociologt,103: 962-i (ed$ 1997' Chaos' Complexity'and E;;, R., Hirf"U, S., and Lee, M' Sage' Calif,: Thousand Oaks, S,ociologt. l99l A' ' Socia| Mouements:A Cognitiue and Jamison, E;;";R., Approach. Cambridge: PolitY' (eds), M. lg93:'Globai and local cultures',in J. Bird et al. l..ri'h"..ton", 'Sage' London: Change. Global Cuhures, l,,tioppirgt:heFutures:Local M. 2000. Archiving cultures', British Journal of Sociologl, Feathersto"ne, 5l :161-84. Allen Lane' For.rr.rlt, M. lgTT Disciplineand Punish' London: New Haven: Yale Science' and Gender on fo* Kell.r, E. I985. Reflictions University Press. a comment" SocioF.r,-r.ir,n. igg:. 'Chaos, order, sociologicaltheory: logical'fheory, 63 : 239-42' Global Cuhure' Fruiklin, S., Lury, C., and Stacey,J. 2000' Global Nature, London: Sage. Harper. ljriedman, T. 2"C00.The Lexus and the olive Tree.London: Last Man' the and History of End Fukuyama, F. 1992. The Harmondsworth: Penguin. Game,A. 1998. 'Tiavel', InternationalSociologt,l3: 4l-58' Gates, B. 1999. Business@ the Speed of Thought' Harmondsworth: Penguin. Giclde'ns,A. 1984. The Constitution of Sociery'Cambridge: Polity' Calif,: Gidclens, A. 1990. The Consequencesof Modemiry' Stanford' Stanford UniversitY Press. Giddens,A., and Hrriton, W. 2000. 'Anthony Giddens-and-Will.Hutton in conversation', in il Hrr,,o,-, and A' Giddens [eds), On the Edge' Liuing with CIobaI Capitalism. L'ondon: Jonathan Cape' ,Emeig..,c" in social simulation', in N. Gilbert and Gilbert] N. 1995. Artificial Societies'London: UCL Press' R. Conte (eds), -'Cognitive cartography in a European wasteland', in Gille, Z. 20b0. M. Burawoy et ;1. [edt , Glibal Ethnography Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California PressGitlin] T. 1g80. The iMhole World is Watching.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gladwell, M. 2000. Tipping Points:Hout Little Things can Mahe a Big Difference.Boston: Little, Brown & Company'

l

146

References

Ret'erences

2002. TheTippingPoinr,Boston:Black Bay Books. Gleick,J. 1988.Chaos.London:Sphere. Goerner,S. 1994. Chaosand the EuolvingEcological(Jniuerse. Amsterdam:Gordon& Breach. Goldman,P.,and Papson,S. lgg8. Nil<eCuhure:'the Signof the Sutoosh. l,ondon:Sase.

K. Milton (ed.), Enuironmentalism: The View from Anthropologt. [.ondon: Routledge. .lasper,J. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest:Culture, Biography and Creativiry in Social Mouemettts.Chicago and London: University of Chrcago Press. .lervis,R. 1997. SltstemEffects.Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jessop,B. 2000. 'The crisis of the national spatio-temporalfix and the tendential ecological dominance of globalizing capitalism', lnternational Journal of Urban and RegionalResearch,24:323-60. Jordan,J. 1998. 'The art of necessity:The subversiveimagination of antiroad protest and Reclaim the Streets',in G. McKay [ed.), DiY Cuhure: Part and Protestin Nineties Britain. London and New York: Verso. Kaplan, C. 1996. Questionsof Trauel. Durham, UNCS: Duke University Press. Kauffman, S. 1993. The Origins of Order. New York: Oxford University Press. Keck, M., and Sikkink, K. 1998. Actiuists beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY Princetor-rUniversity Press. Keil, L., and Elliott, E. (eds) 1996. Chaos Theory in the SociaLSciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Keil, R. 1998. 'Globalization makes states:Perspectivesof local governance in the age of the world city', Review of International Political E conom y, 5: 616- 46 Kelly, K. 1995. Out of Control: The New Biologt of Machines. London: Fourth Estate. Kelly, K. 1998. Neu; Rulesfor the New Econotny.London: Fourth Estate. Kern, S. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1914. London: Weidenf'eld & Nicolson. King, A. 1996.'Worlds in the city: Manhattan transfer and the ascendance of spectacularspace',PlanningPerspectiues, I l: 97-l 14. Klein, N. 2000. No Logo. London: Flamingo. Klein, N. 2001. 'Reclaiming the Commons', New Left Reuieut.Second S enes,9 : 81- 9. Knorr-Cetina, K. 1997. 'Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocialknowledge societies',Theory,Culture and Society,14:1-30. Krugman, P. 1996. The Selt'-OrganizingEconomy. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Krva, C. 2002. 'Romantic and baroque conceptionsof complex wholes in the sciences',in J. Law and A. Mol [eds), Cozplexities: SocialStudies of KnowledgePractices,Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lash, S. 1999. Another Modemity: A Different Rationality. Oxfbrd: Blackwell.

Goldthorpe, J. 2000. on Sociologt.oxford: oxford University press. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. 2001 . Splinteing (Jrbanism. London: Routiedge. Granovetter, M. t983.'The strength of weak ties: A network theorv revisited', SociologicalTheory, l: 203-33. Gray, J. 2001.'The era of globalisation is over,, New Statesman,24 September. Habermas, J. 2001 . The PostnationalConstellation.cambridge: polity. Hardt, M., and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mais.: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. 1996. Justice,Nature and the ceograplty of Dit'ference.oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. 2000. spacesof Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Universiry press. Harvey, P. 1996. Hybrids of Modernity. London: Routledse. Hawken, P., Lovins, A., and Lovins, L. H. 1999. Natiral Caoitalism. Londo n : E a rth s c a n . Hawking, S. 1988. A Bnef History of Time. London: Bantam. Hayles, N. K. (ed.J l99l. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science.Chicago: University of Chicago press. Hayles,N. K. 1999. How we Becameposthuman.chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hebdige, D. 1990.'Fax to the future', MarxismToday,January: lg_23. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., and perrato", L tggg. Global Transformations.Cambridge : polity. Helmreich, s. 2000.'Life @ Sea:Networking people,polities,and planet Earth through marine diversity and blotechnology,, School of American ResearchSeminar, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April_May. Hirst, P., and Thompson, G. I 996. Globalization in euestiin. cambridge: Polity. Hoskins,A. 2001 . 'Mediating time:The temporal mix of terevision'.'lime and S o c i e v ,l 0 :2 1 3 -3 3 . Ignatieff, M. 2000. VirtualWar. London: Chatto & Windus. Imken, o. 1999. 'The convergenceof virtual and actual in the Global Matrix', in M. Crang, P. Crang and J. May (eds), Virtual Geographies. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 1993. 'Globes and spheres:The topology of environment', in

(:

;6"

'n s

147

rI I

148

References

References

Lash,S.2000.'l{isk culture',in B.Adam,U. BeckandJ. van Loon (eds The Rkk Society and Bevond.l-ondon:Sage. Lash,S.,and Urry,J. 1987.TheEndof OrganizedCapitalism.Ca Polity. [,ash,S.,and Urry, J. 1994.Economies of Signsand Space.London:Sagq Latour, B. 1993. we Haue Neuer Been Modern. Hemel g".prt"ld' HarvesterWheatsheaf. Latour,B. 1999.'On recallingANT', in J. Law and J. Hassard(edst j Actor Networb Theorv and After. Oxford: Blackwell/Soctologicai, Review Latour, B. 2000. 'When things strike back: A possible contribution of "sciencestudies"to the socialsciences',British Journal of Sociolog,5l;

. 1 ' I r: ^ L ^ -^ . ^ " -) l \ I ^ * ^ ^ , C . I139-.52 ? 6 -5 7 Memory5: 'r"j J""'rt', Ilistory.and

Iv l ar r "

,i1.,. rise of t-heregulatorystate in Europe" wext .,::i.'e.'iygq. rrn I l7: 1rll -l0l "'"ii,r,,orr,'Politics' ' London:,Routledge. 1996' C. M;;;. .RegulatingEurope' DigitalNomad. Chichester: John 1997' D *Iiu.n.,,,',T, and Manners'

lvldj'"'-

Wilt-Y failure: On the limits J.,a nd Wickham , C' 1995.'Governanceand Y 31pa., of Sociologt,3T Journal Zealand , Aust r alian and New ,,I s.t.i ologY'

37-50.

systems',

Law,J.,and Hetherington,K. I999. 'Materialities,spatialities,globalities,, Dept of Sociology,LancasterUniversity. Law, J., and Mol, A. 2000. 'situating technoscrence:an inquirv into spatialities',Dept of Sociology,LancasterUniversity. Lef'ebvre,H. l99l . The Production of Space.Oxford: Blackwell. Levitt, P. 2001 . The Transnational viLlagers.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Leyshon, A., and Thrift, N. 1997. Money/Space.London: Routledge. Lodge, D. 1983. SmallWorA. Harmondsworth: penguin. Luhmann, N. 1990. Essays on Selt'-Ret'erence. New york: Columbia University Press. Luhmann, N. 1995. Social System.s. Stanford, calif : Stanford university . Press. Luke,T. 1995. 'New world order or neo-world orders:power,politics and ideology in infbrmationalizing glocalities', in M. Featherstone,S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities.London: Sage. I-ukes, S. 1973. Power:A Radical Vieta.London: Macmillan. Lyotard,J.-F.l99l .The Inhuman:Reflections onTime. Cambridge;polity. Maasen, S., and Weingart, P. 2000. Metaphorsand the Dvnamics of Knowledge.I.ondon: Routledge McCarthy, A. 2001 . Ambient Teleuision.Durham and London: Duke University Press. McCrone, D. 1998. The Sociolog of Nationalisrz. London: Routledge. McKay, G. 1998. DiY Culture: Par4t and Protest in Nineties Britain. London and New York: Verso. Macnaghten,P., and Urry, J. 1998. ContestedNatures.London: Sase.

dependencein historicalsociology"Theoryand plahoneY, l..t?9.0;'Path in.i'o"2?-:9i-48 of history,melancholy .,:,::t. ._ iiga.;o ,rr.f.i, of memory?Reflections

endedthe riseof the nation-state?', M 1997.'Has globalization M;;", "' "R'"riir 4 : 472-9 6' u of lnternational PoliticalEconomyr, The GlobalTrap'London: Zed. H' 1997' H -p, and Schumann, ftlritit,'K, of the Communist Manit'esto The and Engels,F 1848/19s2' il;;;,

t07-24.

Law,J. 1994. OrganizingModerniry. Oxford: Blackwell. Law,J. 2000. 'LadbrokeGrove,or how to think about Dept of Sociology,l,ancasterUniversity.

149

v

:t

x'

,i

Party. Moscow: Foreign Languages' A ZelenY (ed'), AutoPoeisis: Maturana, H' 1981. 'Autopoeisis',in M. Holland. North York: Theoryof Liuing Organization' New DePt of SociologY, Medd, W. 2000. 'ComPlexitY in the Wild'. Ph.D. LancasterUniversitY hearing-aid maker Meek, J. 2001.'\\rhy the management of a Danish 18 October' Guardian' ['aden', ;.; hold the key to stopplnfBin the Int'ormation in Action Collectiue frl"l"..i, A. l 996. thoilrngirg iodrrt Press' 1ge. Cambridge: Cambridge University relations t,t"n-u,-,, Vt. l997:'Effects of irodern scienceand technologyon to Allegance Citizenship: World (ed'), between nations', in J' Rotblat Humanity. London: Macmillan' 'World society and Meyer,J., Boh, J.,Thomas, G., and Ramirez, F 1997' 144-81 Sociologt,l03: of the nation-state',Ameican Journal University Oxford York: New Place' Meyerowitz, J. 1985. No Senseof Press. Mirrgers,J. 1995. Self-I'roducingSystems'New York: Pienum' and Mol, A., and Law J. 1994. 'Regions,networks and fluids: Anaemia 641-71 ' social topolo gy', Social Studiesof Science,24 Monbiot, b ZOOO.Captiue State: The Corporate Tabeouerof Bntain' London : M ucm illan. Press' Morse,M. 1998. Virtualities.Bloomington,Ind':Indiana University Club' Sierra Francisco: Motavalli, J. 2000. Forward Diue. San Theory' I'ondon: Routledge' Mouzelis, N. 1995. Sociological the evolution of economic forms: Murdoch, J. 1995.'Actor-n"etwo.k, "ttd in theoriesof regulation'flexexplanation Combining descriptionand

150

References

;:,[TTlT,1''H',f"ff%jff ,lll*,:i.,, :"J:ff riryL,lJ,',f;'+;:ff c t""l RojekandJ'Urry [eds)'

ibie specialisation, and networks' , Enuironment and pLanning

731-57. Negroponte, N. 1995.BeingDigital.NewYork:AlfredA. Knopf

w . ,,V.Uisneyization" and "postkitzer, ,'.,'ui

it' c' iii"t' p-"-lll)' "^'.;;t;;t"ry-tot'ri'm;' R.utledge' : cs'l'ondon Thesis' T^'lx t)t'T i,jgs rh' McDonari,atioi Tti;*":ri^ff^b Social Globalization: *:till;rX", n ttlgz

Nguyen, D. 1992. 'The spatialisationof metric time', Time q;;

l: 29-50. Nicolis, G. 1995. Introduction to Non-Linear Science. CambridgeUniversityPress. North, D. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic mance.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O Riain, S. 2000. 'Net-working for a living: Irish software developers the global market place', in M. Burawoy et al. (eds), GlobaI Etinop

aI Curture.

:"nff:t"'o3l-""'' R""1""i1::'s;, l : lo5-32' -:p:pi;ll,yt*;;,'l:tr'!^y:i;::";#if ,, onaCuhure' Routledge' London: 'TounngC,ultures' UrrvI' ,;,:"k,C and

ititi'tsst7

; ;??l; ili?iol i,.#Am:*il:):tHff"'i::";l;$:

pfry.Berkeleyand Los Angeles:Universityof CaliforniaPress. -,, World.London:Fontana. Ohmae,K. 1992.TheBorderless Ong, A., and Nonini, D. (eds) 1997. UngroundedEmpires.London:

LvtL soeedrvaY, llrsr

Routledge. Papastergiadis,N 2000. The Turbulence of Migration Cambridge: Polity. Parsons,T. 1960 Structure and Processin Modern Societies.New York: Free Press. P ar s o n sT, . 1 9 7 1 . The System of Modem Societies.New Jersey: PrenticeHall. Pascoe,D. 2001 . Airspaces.London: Reaktion Books. Perkman, M. 2000. 'Euroregions: Strategiesof institution-building in the new European polity'. Ph.D., Dept of Sociology,LancasterUniversity. Perrow,C. 1999. Normal Accidents.Princeton: Princeton University Press Peters,T. 1992. Liberation Management London: Macmillan. Plant, S. 1997. Zeros and Ones. London: Fourth Estate. Power, M. 1994. The Audit Explosion.London: Demos. Prigogine, I. 1997. The End of Certaintlt. New York: Free Press. Prigogine, I., and Stengers, I. 1984. Order out of Chaos. London: Heinemann. Rapoport,A. 1997.'The dual role of the nation state in the evolution of world citizenship', in J. Rotblat (ed.),World Citizenship:Albgiance to Humanity. London: Macmillan. Rasch,W., and Wolfe, C. [eds) 2000. ObseruingComplexiry.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reed , M ., a n i H a rv e y , D . 1 9 9 2.' The new sci ence and the ol d: Complexity and realism in the social sciences',Journal for the Theory of SocialBehauiour,22:353-80. Rescher, N. 1998. Complexity. New Brunswick, NJ: Tiansaction Publishers. Richards,J.,Wilson, S.,and Woodhead,L. fedsJ 1999.Diana: The Mahing of a Media Saint. L,o:ndon:I. B. Tauris.

r51

References

the territorvof lee6.'Refiguring 327-56

75 Socierv, -i::il jffi:; i I )6ool

governme nt' , Econonrytand

*uiesor ct

?- "i|il

?b i^Y"i:l ! K:,^:,! !,i,"in !J. Rotblat [ed'), oli']'llr:j p'"face' Executt'" ^, iggz" ft:ilT'i - 'iilii;L,i'll"'i;';r,ni'i;;;;ii:'^""gL"l$:::Y:'T"li J

worldetuzensnrP'"u%'*rii'ciit";iip:AllegiattcetoHumaniry'

Rotblat, J. [ed.) 199' I-ondon:Macmillan'

Flamingo' *"r,'l'.lggi'-it t C"a of Small.Thinqs london: London: Hvperspace' of kenches iite in lit D' 1994'Cry;;;;' Rushkoffl London: Challenge' and Kash,D' 1999' The Complexiry -,lt,ft,:fr:,

r.i:l:"1

:f::* "2000;

Tl:::^.11 if,S;i*::

versus associationar

e'l rd:BIackw oxro I'r' * Ji' y ,.::::l':'i:iHl :1TH'd;l',1,?; fi Basingstoke: A CnticalIntioduction' Scholte, J.A. 2000.ii"i';"""":

Sociologlcal Relations: clobol socieryand Intenn.tional t#:ffi]til,gq. r"' t'10 Cui rr rlp,, a, d Political i' o pi-.t o tiquidity: Rcn ol 10"*;,,1;"lt; 'The mechanisms Sheller, M. 2000. Study Group in social movements" tiA/gSA' thinking th" Manchestel November' -ou"-"nt S"tl"]'Vou"-"n"' on Protest .na Journal Inrcrrlationel

itt"'t"t;' Sheller, M., andu..v, 'l''zob"o'+il;' ""a ' 24:73.1-57 Research' of (JrbanandRegional :lt,,.U'lJt..nrfo.mations of "public" Sheller, M., andU." l::i";#-i^,

;; '1;.i;;;l'ftr.",rheo'v,

r-4 ::d^2?i'i?;),'^,0 Cutture,1:

par adr gm 'il1Y: S hi el d s,R. 1997. 'Flow as a new

I

ft

157

r53

References

References

,;:;:;:::"ciotos,of u,o,1.11"1'?oM'?Tu";)'#irT#iJ,;,'3iiilff

Shiva, V 1981).Staying Aliue. London: Zed

Skiair,L. 2001. TheTiansnationalCapitalist,a]ii:. o.fo.d, Blackwe[] Slater,D. 2001. 'Markets,materialityand the "new ..onoay,,,,'or*

t";ii";i::lrTd',t"):",lll2".,"rat Study andits o{cNN A Sphue: u"ii,:;:;;;'\.,G^t:bl,c"^;""i'iiont-"ion'"ii"""::Htif :ltf 1';"

given to 'Geographiesof New Economies' Seminar,Birmin;ha;: October.

.:;f#,iii;'iff *. ; ; {F*ll :i:,:,[:n i?" Hi[ , rh,,ory, ,"i'i,.o"ii."n -^, H"'"rT'T[l'?i

Spencer,H. lB76/1893.ThePrinciples of Sociologr, i London:Williams Norgate. Stevenson, N. 1997. 'Globalization, national cultures and cul citizenship', Sociological Quarterly, 3 8 : 4 I -66.

,i:ffi::l.i:l 'Vlll;i_11'J

; ;i : !'-!':::'y :' 3i;bn#o,^ rNo,ionatpathwavsLondon: Sage

Stewart,A. 2001. Theories of Pou,,er and Domination.London:Saee. ,1 Stewart,l. 1989.DoesGod PIayDice?TheMathematics of Chao.td*fo.d,i

$l,l];1,!:T$;Tili"#;;i;;;;, ;il iintt

Blackwell.

t"t i' irrW.Kvmlicka

Stewart,P. 2001.'Complexitytheories,socialtheory and the question of socialcomplexity',Philosophy of the SocialSciences,3t:323-00. Strange,S. 1986.CasinoCapitalism.Oxford: Blackwell.

u,,dth".o,-opori,"',.alternative', oxford

oxford: tn*oriry Cuhure''

UniversitYPress'

*il;;'il wqi co^Pk'',v l"ld,'l.l-'X"'; ir : w;l*:i;,li,liil.'?i,1':;t";;;;;ti::::::!:^,\:::i. k':; ;;; ;i ii'"s"" a si i" "' Stanrord'car ti*X* :i",7,Y; StanfordUniversitY Press' *:,,Ji:!","rU:1i'1":"u,i.'uri'-,.localization',::r1-?'::'#'.ilF

Swyngedouw,E. 1992. 'Territorial organization and the space/technol_ , ogy nexus', Transactions,Institute of British G eographers,77 : 417 -33. Szerszynski,B. 1997. 'The varieties of ecological piety', Worlduiews: Enuironment,Culture, Religion,I : 37-55. S z er s z y n s k i ,8 ., a n d U rry , J .2 0 0 1 .' Vi sual ci ti zenshi p?'i,n L. S hort (ed.), Cityshape,Landscape.Cadisle: Carlisle College of Art and Design. Thompson, J. 1995. 'fhe Media and Moderniry. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, i. 2000. Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity. Thrift, N. 1999. 'The place of complexity', Theory,Cuhure and Society, 16:3 1 -7 0 . Thrift, N. 2001 .'The machine in the ghost: Sot'twarewriting cities', Hegemonies Conference, Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University. Tomlinson, J. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity. UN Commission on Global Governance 1995. Oar Global Neighbourhood: The Report of the Commission on GlobaL Gouernance.Oxford:

iiliJ,'li'#1,,"Ti:JiiE#'i;;;;;;'r"'s""r"rd'carir:Stan

UniversitYPress' Press' Princeton: Princeton University Watts, D. 1999' Small Worlds' Cambridge:Politv'

io'u"L"stare' weiss,L' 1998'Theiv:t;;i;;' The rise of per.sonal tvberspace: to"i" 'Ph;;l Wellman,B. 2001 ""a Research'25: of U'rbanand Regtonal rretworking',,r**ti'"i)i1tr"*a **ifi.

PrincetonUniversity 1992.Idetttiryand Control' Princeton:

P ress.

.

-r.^. D ^-^nc rrr

forks:Reconstructlng andBavesian White,H. 1995.'Networkswitchings 62: 1035-63' Research' So-ciil tlre socialundb"t'uuio"*t "i"ni'' ' &Windus' Chatto t'ondon: ond th" Ciry' williams,R. i973. rh;'e:;;'; Form' London: Cuhural and Williams,R. 1974. iirttt""lirrhnologt

Oxford UniversityPress. UNDP 2000.Iluman Deuelopment Report.CD Rom. New York: UN. Urry, J. 1990.TheTouristCaze.London:Sage. Urry, J. 7995. ConsumingPlnces.l,ondon:Routledge. Urry, J. 2000a. 'Mobile sociology',British Journal of Sociologt,5l: I 85-203. Urry, J. 2000b.SociologtbeyondSocieties. l.ondon:Routledge. Urry, I. 2001. TheTouristGaze.2nd edn. London:Sage. Urry,J. 2002a.'Globalizing the academy',in K. Robinsand F.Webster (eds), The Virtual Uniuersi4t?Int'ormation,Markets and Managements. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

oxford: oxford Universitv 1977.Marxism and Literature' *li,l3l"* Press. Database' WfO iOOO.World'lburismOrganisation

dJl.;1t$#t':L",if;.

in environment', andthegtobat knowledge GIobaI the

M. Redclift ."d ;'';;,",t""

i"di'

so'ioi-fh'o'1' and

ge' Enuironment'London : Routled subjectivity media and transnational i'ggz'-;fuf"" Yang, M. Mei-hui metropolis" Chinese a in in Shanghai:Xcl'"' o" i'j tt't"nolitanism

'1.

ffi

7 I54

References

Ungntunded Empires' Londory in A. Ong and D. Nonini [eds)' Routledge. yuval-Davi"s, N. l997.'.National Spacesand collective ldentities:Borden, Inaugural Lecturg Boundaries, Citizenship and Gender Relations" University of Greenwich' Society' New York: Z.n^t, U, ,.,d Marshall, I' 1994' The Quantum William Morrow.

Index

122 A . 73, 74'94' 96' A bbott, r;absence,and P res enc e access' frec 62 i nequal i ti es nf .? .'normal ^J) D ecci Jcrrts, l /l ^ c. t(rr-net\vork the()rY

l; : ; : ' ;

r " ,z o ' ; 6 - f i i o '7 o

' r. 5 A d r m s ,J . 3 of 88 Parodies ,r.t"".,ir"-"rttt, -^*.n.r relations ree structure-agency 8 2 . 4 3 ' M . Albrow. l-: a l i _h, , r n n c ln e tw ( ) r ks) A1lan,S. 135 AmericanPatriots88' 89 with African anacmia,Dutch compared 57 4l-Z' treatrrlents anarchism7l William 81-2 Anclers, An.lcrson,A. S)8 33 ,^t..i-, ,,nnt"unistii feeding 88 movement anti-sweat.shoPs of 33 ,"itSt"".t ineffectiveness 92 65' 59' 5, ;\pPadurai,A' A r a t o ,A . 1 3 7 Archer, M 4ti architcctures30--1 -^ , " A r u u i l l a ,J . 5 1 , d 5 ' 7 Z' 1 3 1 I2 l , l r l t '" ] . n t'.," i x, I7 ' 5 3 ' 5 5 ' 133 l 3 l ' 2 ,6 1 ' .tti"-.""ft*s

83 'centriPherY' -1 93' ^^ ,, 94- 5 98' 86 ni*t n. . t i'nt lnn "' 1367 io: , t ot , 123,129' 90 of 88' ooeration

10 por,l'er-resistance 'see ako 'strangeattractofs audit societY 109 Auee,M. 61 AuL ShinrlkYo 88 automobilitY68-Sl ^ .^, 9:l-tu t autoPoiesis28-9'

It

il

Bachelard'G 59 Baker,P 30, 50' 83-4 ; / 'haker translirrmatlL)n"" l l I 6 1 , K. Ba l e s,

I

ll8 nrii.]",r ll5' l16' I l7' barbarism 92 Ba r b e rB , 9l-2 ot x: barriers,Jissolution 5 8 Ba u tJr i l l a r d ,J ) ^ ,^ a !r Ltm u n t j '.l u /' Ba u m a n ZYg ,

r?7 '- '

""i",ili)Mo'Jentiry lle 124'137 BBC 8 I

"uli,'jt".n ix,7o'96-7't33'137 t40 becoming 20, 22 b ci n g 2 2 ri l l 4 7 , 8 5 . 9 {' otc tr BerlinWall, eftccts 135 Tim 86 Berners-Lce,

r38-e t s,I 23'132' :iii;il';;; t a--',

7

15 6

Index

Indsx

Bh ab ha ,H. 1 30 bifurcationpoint 26-7, 28, 29, 47, 1 7 3 , 13 9 'Big Ba ng ' 2l - 2 Biggs,M. 30, 120 Billig ,M. 1 07 biodiversity 70 biological systems,chaotic propertiesof 32-3 biopower,performative I 15-16 patentsand 70 bioprospecting, Blair,Tony 87 blu e e arth 81- 2, 135 Boden,D. ti5, 90 body, informational 64 socialanalogousto human 104 Bogard,W. 74 Boh m, D. 20 , 25, 50 borders, policedof nation states43 p oro sityo f 6, 41, l2! ) boundaries, blurring of 74 dissolutionof 85-(j bounded systems 26-7 bourgeoisie78, 79 brain 5l bra nchin g4 7, 79- 80 Bran d,S. 63 , 64, 70, 85 b ran ds 8 2, 87, 99, 107 cultural power o[ 67-8 global 57, 67-8, 87 and identity of oppositionll organizations58 and nationality87 public shamingof I l7 Braudel,F. 36 Brenner,N. 44-5, 125 ISrewer,B. 4 8i British Empire,hegen-rony Brunn,S. 5 Budiansky,Stephen,Nature's Keepers 3 l-3 Wcbcrirn l0-l I bureaucracies, Burt, R. 52 business, competition 63

ncrv places of face-to-face interaction

90-1 projects !) Butler,J. 99 butterfly effect 23,27 , 47 Byrne,D. 24, 25, 26-7, 30, 47, 83, 120 Cairncross,Irrances2, 85 capital, lack of border controlson 66 transnational88 see,.tlsosyrnboliccapital capitalism, 'blackholcs' of informational l1 'casino'65 crlsesor /v disorganizedviii,3 ecologicaldominanceof globalizing 4 pmpropnt

f-'-,rtrrrec

4

end of organized viii global see globalization ' ideal col l ecti ve i nterests' of 78 rcsistance tcl 88-9 systemi c and dynami c character 3 ' turbo-' 45 ca p ital i st mode of producti on, contradi cti ons of 78-80 Ca pra, Fri tj of 7, 10, 19,20,21,23,25,

26-7, 78, 29, 30, 37, 51, 77, 100, l0t The Hidden Connections 120 The Web of Lit'e l8 cars 68-9, 131 and carbongasemission68, 80 use of petroleum-bascd34, 55-6, I26 c as c a d e f f e c t 7 1 , 1 1 6 Manuel 2, 3, 4 , 5, 15, 43, 54, Castells, 56, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 79, 85, 86, 88-9, 110,132 The lnformation Age ix,8-12 Casti,J. 19, 22, 23, 51 catastrophe34-5,98 causality, circular 27 cause-effect3, 6, 7-8, 20,23-4,77-8, 96, l2l,123 lack ofproportionality 34-5, 139 centring 83-4

t57

shrinkage 8!) Central and EastcrnEuroPe 85 transnational98 centriphery 83-4 C l a r k,N . 3 3 ,7 0 ,1 2 2 certainty,the end of 22 classdomination 95-6 chain networks 51-2 classreproduction 78 22 and chance,dcterminism Clifford, J. 62, 134 change, cl i m a tech a n g e8 1 , l l 0 constantecological32 C l i n to n ,Bi l l Il 5 , l l 6 53 switches with dramatic cloning 67 individual or collective 46 clusters,and regions 40-1,43 and stasis22, 45 cNN 8r,85-6 27-8 tendencies co - e vo l u ti o n4 6 ,9 2 t h r o u g h 'l o ck- i n 5 5 - d , 6 9 co - p r e se n ce\1 2 , ) 2 1 c h a o s 1 3 , 2 2 ,3 0 , 5 9 , !) 8 coercion 104 o n t h e e d g eo f 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 6 ,2 2 ,3 2 ,8 6 ' C o h e n ,J.2 4 ,2 5 ,7 6 ,1 3 7 t O l , 1 3 2 ,1 4 0 Cohen,R. 62, 107 a n d o r d e r 14 ,2 1 - 2 ,2 9 , t0 6 Cohen,S. 98 c h a o st h e o r y 1 7 ,2 3 Colborn, T. 69 Chase-Dunn,C. 4, 43 and individual levels collective, China, 76-7 automobile culture 68 collective action, framing of universal history 36 standardsfor 136-7 m e d i ai n 13 4 commodification, C h i n e s e , 'o ve r se a6s'2 , 9 8 , 1 0 7 of financialmarkets 90 92 Christianity,'born-again' of the future 65-6, 72 chrono-biology Z0 commodities,rvith moorings or points Cilliers,P. 18, 24, 25, 3(),80, 84 of insertion49 circulating entities I 22-3 communicatiotr, cities, computer-mediatedB9 as complex dynamic open systems horizontal of the Internet 63 33 communications4, 57, 97, 100 'gated'of north America 130-l metaphor of fire 73-4 as interchangesbetween intersecting 'on the move' l-2 flows 36-7 communism, nonlinear readingof 33-5 co l l a p seo f 8 1 ,8 5 36-7 self-organization world /:l seeako 'host cities' 97-8, communities,transnationalized citizen,and state,mutual visibility 108 1l 2 - 1 3 community of tate 109 citizenship43, l33 politics competition, identity consumerismor local and cooperation36 92 inter-regional43-4 and settlement I 12 systemslZ, 18,29-37 complex global 98 women and complexity 3, 7' 8, 17, 79-80, 96, 100, world 97-8 r 38-40 city states 95 th e ch a l l e n g c,r f | 2 - l 5 civic associations2 ideas98 civil society, methods 124 networks llj

L

158

i59

complexity cor?t. an dp or v er lt l- 13 of scandal I I 3-l I sciencesix-x and socialtheory 120_4 without telos 86 complexitytheory 36, 45_6, 140 as new socialscienccparadigm l2 -15 complexitythinking 3g+0, 106_7 complexityturn l7_J8 'compulsionto proximity, 90 'computime' B5 computing, pervasive l0_l l 62, 73, ,

8s,89

Comte, Auguste ) 20 conccpts, branding and 67 as collective representations 59 parallel 102-3 c o n n e c t i o n s 1 2 2 , lZ 7 conscience 98 c o n s e n s u s 10 4 c o n s p i r a c y ,glo b a l 1 0 2 consumerism 80, 135 citizenship and !12 ' M c W o r l d ' 9 t- 2 Cutsuming Placas (tJrry) viii c o n s u m p t l o n, c o s m o p o l ita n ch a r a cte r 7 9 global viii, 4 c o n t a g i o n 6 2 , 7 l, l2 B m a c r o e c o no m ic 6 6 Contested Natures (lvlacnaghten and

UrryJ ix co ntin ge ncy10, 42, 56, l0l contradictions73, 7g_g0,g4 cttoperativity25, 36 corporations2, 9 bid for world domination 95 creatingopposition88 globalseetran-snational corporatlons useof globalimagery 82 Cosgrove,D. 82, 135 cosmopolitanism132-8, l3g-40 characteristics I 33-4 glcrcalized137-40 In u l to 3 n e

l - i5

Coveney,p. lg,Zl,22 cn m l n a l e c o n o m v l 0 l l Critical Mrss bike ,ia", gg aulturo,.tusion rvith nature gg culture industries139 culturesat a distance 12, 16 curiosity 133 Cwerner,S. 133 cybernetics27, 30_1, 105 c y b e r s p a c e7 4 , 9 9 , l Z 7 cyborg /4 Davies,Paul 2l-2 How to _ ,Buil.d a Time Machine 19 Davis,Mike, EcoLogtof Fear 33_5 MagicaL Urbanism lOg Dayan,D. 136 De Landa,Manuel 33, 77 A Thousand years of Non_Iinear History 36_7 decisionmaking, shared 9 deep robotics 70 Delanty, G. 87 Deleuze,G. 59-60, 108-9 dematerialization84-5 democracy43, 89 democraticpolitics, corruption by crime ll Derrida,Jacques137 determinism,and free will 18, 22, 106, I 1l _ 1 2 deterritorialization44, 58, 60, 87, 125 Diana,Princess, funeralof 134-5 diaspora,fluid 107-8 Dicken,P. 122 differentiation 28, 104 digitization63, 64-5, 85, ll5, lZ7 Diken, B. 133 Dillon, M. l 22 Dion n e ,E . I l 7 di.sasters, collectiveglobal 135 in ecologicalsystems32,34-6 discourses,complexity in 30 disembedding90-l dis o r d e r v t i i ,2 1, 2 7 an d o r d e r 2 2 , 1 3 8

rrPletr l,-Z 107-l) r:.nla."l Pe

tl"ill'j, ' '' ii,po'.t't' 2r,28, jl|i:,;:.::,'iitures -1 6 di s tantc ' - .- r 7d l collap\e '_"_ ' " :r , r el ati v e I a1 JZ r 'tr l ogl c al ,l i v er s i tY, tr l l r s t en t l e n re l l - '.',,,* , Ulv'"

,l^flinati('n

r i,

in/ rUa'

of

I8

ltt r r I

ltt8 inm;nt..tt RePublic , r - , ot r a l t l 3 I 8 6 ,9 4 , 9 6 , l u 8 , l l 0 ' O " m . 'U , M . 3 0 , t32 D u r k h e i mE , mile 59 17 24 J y n r t '. P r t r P t 'r ti e3s , ' 54, 64 e-comnrerce of 81-2, earth,visualrepresentations 135 EasternEuroPe 92-3 o f c o m m u n i sm 8 1 ,8 5 collapse J. 66 Eatrvell, Eco,LI. 58 ecoiogicalsYStems, complcxityof 32 dominanceby globalizingcapitalism 4 c c o n o m i c s3 1 , 53 economies of scale 53 Econotit:sof Signsand Space[Lash and Urry) viii ecosystems, and lire intensity 34-5 Eddington,A. S. 22 Einstein,Albert 19, 83 electricpower 126 e l i t e ,g l o b a l l l 2 Elliott,E. 30 Elstcr,J. 78 emergence74-5, 29, 38, 54 and collcctives 77 prcconditionsfbr 137 seeako global emergen.:e cmergenteffects99, 139-40 a n d t h e l o c a l 7 6 - 8 2 ,9 4 c m c r g e n tp r o Pe r ti e sx, t l , l 3 - 1 5 , 1 8 , 2 3 - 6 , 3 9 - 40 , 4 7, 4 9 ,5 l , 7 7 - tl

emergentsystems7-8, l6 Emirbayer,M. 73, 122 e m p i r e s9 5 , 1 2 9 and nrultitudes 128-32 cnergy 28, 83 flows 36-7, 48-!) turning waste into 92-3 Engels,Friedrich 78, 79 enterprises,global 57 e n tr o p y 2 1 ,4 6 ,8 3 enviroliment,as laboratorY97 cnvironmentalhazards69-70, 110, 133 environmentalissues,women and 98 environmentalmovement, global 92-3 environmentalNGOs 88 equilibrium 27, 44,55-6 Ethernet network 53 Ettrope,feudal 95 EuropeanCourt of Justice 1 10 EuropeanUnion (EU) 10, ll0 Eve,R. 30 events, localizationof global 82-3, 135 mediation of global 85-ii seealso extremc events;mega-events evolution 22 expert systems139 explanation,Western-tYPe23-4 exposure,the Power of I I5-18 externalities,acrossnetworks 53-5 extremeevents 34-5 Eye r m a n R , . 137 interaction52, 90-l face-to-face failure, accidentsand sYstem35-6 a n d a ch i e ve m e n t1 3 - 1 5 1 ll falseconscic'rusness far from equilibrium 7-8, 1 l, 13, 21, 3 2 , 5 4 ,8 0 ,9 4 - 6 , 1 0 6 , 1 1 8 - l e , 1 2 3 , 1 2 8 , 1 3 8 - :l pocketsof t>rderl0l-3 M. ti3, 64, l3tt Ireatherstone, lecdbackmechanisms27, 29, 3O-I ' 34, 1 0 0 ,1 0 2 see ako negativefeedback;positive feedback emcrgingstructurcsof 29, 5!) f-eelir-rg,

Index

16 0 feminization

90 f e u d a l i s m a n a lo g y 9 5

FIFA B1 financialcrises,globaland national 66 financial markets, interdependence of 66 on-linereal-timetrading 86 financialsystems,global 90 fire, intensityand ecosystems34-5 metaphor 73-4 use in primitive agriculture 32 flows 3,2 1, 40- 2, 80 from wild zones 13l the globalas 4-5, l4t) power of 59-60 seealso global fluids IGFsJ fluidity,cosmopolitan137 fluids 40-2, 59-74,124 3nd networks 5U-/5 seealso global fluids (GFs) food culture, cosmopolitanizationof t37 r(rrolsm Zf) Fo ucau ltM , ic hel 113 Fox Keller,E. 23-4,71 fractals74,98, 102-3 Francis,R. 30 Franklin,S. 6, 38, 44, 64, 67, 6g, 99, 99 , 1 33, 136 free rvill, and determinism 18, 22, 106, I I t-l 2 Friedman,Thomas 86 The Lexus and the Oliue Tree 9l frontiers,permeable 85-7 Fu ku ya rna, F. 5, 43 fu nction alis ml0l, 102, l2l, 122 normative I04-5 fundamentalism,religious 8tl fu ture 1 9, 22, 45 commodificationof the 65-6,72 futures trading 65 Came,A. 45 Care (Hungary) 92-3 Gates,Bill 54 ga ze I l6 gcnder 6

generationsnot yet born 69 genes36-7 timekeeping20 genetic engineering8 geneticallymodified food 5g, 69 GFs seeglobal fluids G i d d e n sA , nthony 2,39, 45,46_7, l2l gift giving,global 136 Cilbert, N. 80, 8t Gille, Z. 92, 93 GINs saeglobally integratednetworks G i t l i n ,T . 1 1 6 , 1 3 5 , 1 3 6 Gladwell,Malcolm 53, 66 Cleick,J. 47 global,the ix, l-8 as flows and mobilities 4-5 'intimate' 99 and the national 44, 85 as processand outcome 44 a sa r e g i o n 4 3 - 4 , 4 9 societiesand l-16 structural notion of 4 globalanalyses, limits of 38, 39-49 global capitalismseeglobalization global complexity 120-40 the conceptof x, 7-8, 95, 102 and socialorder 104-l l globalemergence93-l0l globallluids (cF 42-9, 56, 59-75, 94, t24, 138 characteristics72-4 cosmopoliran135, 137-40 examples60-72 CIobaLNature, GLobaLCulture fFranklin et al.J 98, t00 global networks seeglobally integrated networks [GINs) global order, emergent 81 far from equilibrium I I resistanceto 88-9 social relationsin the new 9l Global PositioningSystem[GPS) 91, 1t3 globalregions42-9 Global Resistancemovement 88 global scepticism 44 globalscreen87, 89, 135

svsrcms ' el ol ti rl ., ,nrtl t'si strl tz t 99-101.. l , n,,t,'P u't' ti t 1,,'..ti u,' charac ter of ' 16 95. ,',.l nt"ud.l i tm prophecies in social s"li-tittnft,ng science's 3 8 profes s i onal s 98 ,l ,rbrl vi l l agc , and l 0l 34' w armi ng l i .bal

r6l

gr avit y83, 92,94, 123,l3u Gra;',John 138

greenhouscgases70 Gr e e n p e a ce5 8 ,8 l greens,global seeenvironmental rnovement GreenwichMean Time 8l Guattari, F. 59-60, 108-9 89 guerrillas,'informational' Commissionon the Gulbenkian 1023' l) 3' 94' 84 l i ,,i ..l tu.rt r clat ions Restructuringof the Social r27, 136-7 Sci e n ce s1 2 - 1 3 ol,rbalization, Gulf War 86 ' 4 !trrPtlrate debates3-4 Habermas,Jiirgen 108, I09 Giddens'sde{inition39 habits,new social 57 Habermason 109 Hardt, Michael 2 as ideologY 5-6 EmPire 128-9 43-4 state end the nation H "r u e y,D . 2 0 ,2 8 ,3 0 ,7 8 ,7 9 , 1 3 3 , 1 3 8 x structLrre new the ils Harvey,P. 87 outcomcsof 93-l0l Havel, Vaclav 97-8 39 of paradigm Hawken, P. 69 n, pe.fc,rm"nce6-7, 38, 96-103 Hawking, StePhcn,A Brief HktorY of 96 problemsof definition Time 70,22 of relationshiPsI Zl H a yl e s,N . K. 2 2 , 2 7,2 9 ,3 0 , 6 4 rtsistanceto 44, 58, i;2, 87-9 environmentaland health hazards, 44 theory globalization theory of and 6 9 7 0, 110,133 vs.localization88-9 marine envtronment projects, healing globally integratednetworks [GlNs) 70 and 12-9, 56-9, 7 4-5, 94' l0l ' lz4 ' health hazards69-70, tl0, 133 138 HebdigeD , . 135 sclflorganizing106 hegemonY, 58-!) weak-nesses British EmPire 8l globe,as syrnbol of authoritY [35 usA 43,45,85 137 glocal,the 84, M. 84 Heidegger, g l o c a l i z a t io nvi i i , 1 5 , 8 2 - 3 ,8 4 - 5 W. 37' 77 Heisenberg, 1 0 3 , 9 8 , a t t r a c t o ro f 8 6 - 9 3 ,9 4 - 5 , D . 3 ,4 ,5 ,4 0 ' 4 3 , 4 4 , 6 5 , 8 1 ' 9 4 ' H e l tJ, 1 3 6 7 r o 7 , 1 2 3 ,1 2 9 , r29 Goerner,S. 39 Helmrcich,S. 70 Goldman,P. 67 Hetherington,K. 6 Goldthorpe,J. 77 h i e r a r ch y3 6 - 7 ,1 3 1 governance, of values 105 134 global 95-6, attemptsat H i g h l i e l d ,R . 1 9 , 2 1 , 2 2 without government 128 Hinduism 92 governments, H i r st, P. 4 4 , l l 0 brands 87-8 h i sto r y 2 l - 2 , 5 4 , I2 3 , 1 3 9 role in globalization 43 Chinese36 1 2 5 6 G r a h a m ,S. 5 ,6 0 , hologram 50-l Granovetter,M. 52

t62

Index

I loskins,A. 86, l l5, 135 'host cities' 82-3, 86-7 h ub net wor k s 5l- 2, 82 human dcvelopmcnt l3ti humanity, an d nat ur e ll_lJ and science97 humans,netrvorkedwith machines56 Hungary,post-CommunistSl2-3 Hutron, Will, On the Edge 45, 46 hybrids 63-4,74, t02 gl obal l4- 15, 59, 129 of physicaland socialrelations I 7_lg hypercomplexity30 hyperglobalist position 43, 44 hypertext 63 icon, religiousto computer 64 identities, tt

D ra n o s a n d h /- u c o s m o p o ttta n lJ / a n cl flu id ity 4 2 m u ltip le 1 0 8 resistance 88 identity politics, and new global order

91_2 ideology3, 132 g l o b a liza tio n a s 5 - 6 Ignatieff M. 65 images, co-present media 97 IIOW

J

g lobal 8l- 2, 96- 7 organizations and 82 (]ra spacc rI^J) imaginedcommunity,global 12,gl_2 Imken, O. 65 immobilities,relationshipwith m ohllt t les 1l) - b rmpressionmanagementI I3 increasingrcturns 53-4, 74, )23, l3g of brands 68 ftrr economicpopulations l7 exponentialof networks 53+, 5g individual, and collective levels 76-7 orvnershipand mobility 68-9 and statisticallevelsof analysis24_5

lndex

i n e q u r l i t i e sl 0 l , i 2 g , 1 3 0 _ l of access5 incrtia,pattcrnsof 55 i n f o r m a r i o n6 4 - 5 , 8 3 , l 1 3 , l 2 7 t.

or gttl z ed

bJ

localized60, 80, 84, 123 irrfbrmationagc ix, 8-12, 43, 50_1,72,

8s

information and communication (l and C) structures8, 139 informarionflows 5, 84-5, 99 co-evolutionof 86 internationalized43, 109 post-industrialrisks 140 information networks 9-l 2 infcrrmationsharing9, I l3 Ingold,T. 72, 135 i n n o v a t i o n sl , 8 , 6 2 , 1 4 0 product and process3l instability 24, 27 rnstantaneity50, 72 institutions, global 8l and systemdcvelopment55-6 intellectuals,wandering 95 In(er-Governmental Committeeon Climate Change 8l inter-regional organizations,l interaction effects 25-6, 123 interconnectedness 36, 48, tjg, 94,97, t0l interdependence l4-15, 18,39, 79, gl, 94, 97_8,\02, t04, t24 cosmopolitan136 ,'f financialmarkcts 6ti interests, economic 5 'real' I I l InternationalAir TiansportAssociation 8l intcrnational non-gtlvernmental organizations (NGO{ 45 internationalorganizations45, 108, t34 InternationalRcd Cross 8l internationaltreaties45, ll0 internationalization of production 4, 83-4

l n t o r n e t l , 1 2 ,5 4 , tr 2 - 3 ,7 3 ,8 0 , 1 2 7 ,

r3 6 attemptsto regulate I l, ti3 of and informationalization knowledge 64 use by oppositionmovements89 intimacy',public I I6 of 4 investment,internationalization Ireland 9 I irreducibility 77, 7B irreversibility13, 45, 83, 95, 99, I 16, 138 o f t i m e Z l - 2 ,2 9 , 4 6 - 7, 4 9 ,6 0 Islam 92 i t e r a t i o n \ 6 ,2 7 , 4 6 - 7 ,4 9 , 6 3 , 8 3 , 9 9 , 103 Jarnes,C. L. R. 134 Jamison,A. 137 J. 7l Jasper, J e r v i sR , . 24 - 5 ,3 2 ,3 5 J e s s o p1, 3 .4 ,8 ,9 6 Jihad 9l Jordan,J. 7l Kaplan,C. 98 K a s h ,D o n 1 0 ,5 1 ,5 4 ,5 9 The Complexity Challenge 30-l K a t z ,E . 1 3 6 Kauffman, S. 22 Karvano,Y. 4 Keck,M. 98 Keil, L. 30 K t 'i l , R . 4 0, 1 1 0 K c l l y ,K . 5 1 , 5 2 - 3 , 5 4 , 6 0 , 7 6 - 7 Kern, S. I keyboards54-5 Keynesianism79 K l e i n ,N . 5 7 , 5 8 , 6 7 , 8 8 , 9 5 , 1 I 7 Knorr-Cetina,K. 18, 56, 106 knoivledge,informationalizationof 64 Krugman, P. 29 Krva, C. 86 Kyoto Protocol on climate change I I0 Langton,Chris 39-40 languages, flows of 36-7 lascrtheorv non-linear29

163

L a sh ,Sco tt vi i i , 5 ,9 1 , 1 3 9 , 1 4 0 Latinos,in USA 108 Latour,B. 46, 56, 106, 122-3 law, Europeanand national ll0 L a r v,Jo h n 6 , 1 0 , 3 6 , 4 O- 2 ,4 3 ,4 8 ,5 6 , 5 7 ,6 0 ,7 3 , 1 0 6 , t2 2 Lcfebvre,Henri 125 The Productionof Space 4B-9 Leinbach,R. 5 lensmetaphor 50 Levitt, P 108 L e ysh o nA. , 6 5 , 8 6 ,9 1 liberalizationof trade 4, 89 life, as nctwork or web 51, 70 lifestyle choices 67, 137 line networks 51 2 linearity 25-6, 93-4, 127-3 local, the, emerpenleffectsand 60, 7tj-82' importancc of 86-7 local-globalrelations84-93, 94, 102-3, 1 2 7 , t3 6 ,7 localization,vs. globalization 88-90 'lock.in' 55-6, 69 Lodge, David 52 logos,global 67-8 London, City of 90 looselycoupled systems35-6 Lorenz,K. 23, 27 Los Angeles34-5 L u h m a n n ,N . 2 9 ,3 0 , 1 0 0 - l Luke, T. 63 Lukes, Steven, Power:A Radical Vieut ill l-ury, C. 99 M a a se nS. , 23, 30 McCarthy, A. tt2 McCrone,D. 87, 108 McDonaldization57-8 m a ch i n e s5 6 , l 2 4 - S changingnatureof 126 f-amiliall2ii humans networked with 56 mobile 125 McKay,G. 7l Macnaghten,Phil ix, 18, 45 Macy Conferenceson cybernetics27

a 164

Mahoney,J. 28, 54, 55 Maier, C. [i7 Majone,G. I l0 Makimoto,T. til, 127 Ma libu 34 -5 Malp as,.l.l4 Man de la,Ne ls on 81, 94, 134 Manifesto of the Communist Party, The 79 Ma nn , M. 44 Ma nn ers,D. 61, \ 27 marineenvironment,exploitationof 70 market,globaland 'u,ild zones' 130 Marshall,l. 20, 47-8 Martin, H.-P 43, 66 Marvin, S. 5, 60, 125-6 Marx, Karl 78-80, 84, 104 Marxism I I l materialworlds 16, 31, 46, 56, 64, 106, 1 21 -2, 124, 138 mediationby 52 systcmicfeaturesof 140 unpredictabilityof 33 practices99 material-semiotic Maturana,H. 28, 99 measurement19, 37 Mcdd ,W.30 , 100, 120 media, g lob al 86 - 7, 97, 113, 114- 17 migratory 65 scaleand rangeof 84-5 mediation, by materialworlds 52, 90 of globalevents 85-6 med iatizati on110- 11, i 15- l6 medicalization33 medicine, fluidity of treatment 4 I -2 risk culturesand 33 Mee k,J. 13 2 gkrh:rlS2, 8ti-7, l()7 mega-cvents, Melu cci,A. 7l Men on ,M. 8 2, 97 'meshworks'36 messages, flo w 5,6 3 protestors 72

165

Index

lndex metaphors16,42-3, 50-l , 59, 64,74-5,91,I05, 122,3,t34, r38 scienceand I 2l method,significance of ix, 37 methodologicalholism 40 methodologicalindividualism40, 78, 106 Mexico 108 Meyer,J. I l0 Meyerowitz,J. I 13, I l5 micro-habitats32 Microsoft 8l migrantcondition 95, 131 migrationpatterr)s6l-2 Mingers,J. 30, 100 Mische,A. 73 mixtures 42, 63 mobilities 6l-2, 74-5, 78, 94, 101, 1 1 0 ,i l 3 , 1 3 3 cnmnlew


?7

and fi xi ti es i n spacc and ti me 37,

48-9,124-5,r3rl the globalas .1-5, l4 individualized 68-!) physical68-9 and power 12 moblllzatton / I -l democratic 89 Mobius strip 74 models, network 5l relationsrvith phenomena120-1 modem 62 modernity, first and other 9l 'liquid' I19, 124,137 t h e 'n o n - p l a c e s 'o f6 l side effectsof 139 M o l , A n n e m a r i e4 0 - 2 , 4 3 , 4 8 , 5 6 , 6 0 , 73, t22 Molotch, H. 90 M o n b i o t ,G . 6 , 9 5 money, nows Jo-/ future values 65 world 65-6 m on e y l a u n d e r i n gI l , 6 6 , l 3 l

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute 70 m o o r i n g s3 7 ,4 9 , 1 2 5 - 6 , 1 3 8 Morse,M. 63 Mosaicweb brorvser62 Motavalli,.1.28, 55, 68 Mouzelis,N. 46 m o v e m e n t 6l - 2 , 1 3 4 freedomsof 110 seeako mobilities multiculturalism137 multinational industries 83-4 mrrititesLino

ti*-Q

multitudes,and empires 128-32 M u r d o c h ,J . 1 0 , 5 7 Muslims,and use of GPS for Mecca 9l Nader, Ralph 4 naming 99, 100 nation state 108-9 autopoietic 133 clusteringof social institutions 43 and globalization43-4, 95 relativedisappearance of 92-3 scvereigntl,replaeedbi' imperial

r 28-9 national,the, and the global 44, 85 nationalism, 'b a n a l '1 0 7 brand 87 8, 107 male symbolsof 98 nationality,and globalscreening87 nations,persistence of 43 natural sciences,and socialsciences t2-13 naturalism I 7 nature, drawn into attractor of globalization 99 fusion with culture 99 g l o b a l i x , 6 - 7 , 7 0 ,9 9 a n d h u m an i ty l 2 - 1 3 laws as historical2)-2 our obscrvationof 37 a n d t h e s oci a l 1 3 , 3 3 - 5 ,4 5 ,1 2 2 and society I 8 and technology3l-2 transformeCinto geneticcodes 64

negativefeedback26,27 , 105, 123, 138 Negri,Antonio 2 Etnpire 128-9 Negropor-rte, N. 85 neighbourhood134 neo-liberalism5-6 'n e tw a r s'6 5 ,7 2 , I1 0 , 1 3 1 - 2 network analysis,Castells's8-12 network enterprises9, 10, 54 network society 8-i2, 15, 54 rretworking,personalizr:d54, 127 n e tw o r l c 8 ,4 0 - 2 ,4 9 , 5 l - 6 , 7 4 ,1 2 4 , 139 all-channel85 autopoietic 28-9 characteristics51-6 defined 9 and Ilulcls

)t.,- / )

hierarchical I 2 ov erl appi ng and i nterc onnec ti ng 52 pow er or )t-J , /.+ s el f-organi z i ng gl obal 30-l s truc tural hol es )l us e ofterm l 1-12, l 5 see ako globally intcgrated networks

(GINsl New Ageism 88 new physics7-8,62 News Corporation8l news reporting, global 85-6 Nervton,Isaac I9 N g u ye n ,D . 8 l Nicolis,G. 25 N i ke 6 7 , 6 8 , 1 1 7 N i xo n , R i ch a r d l 1 5 n o d e s 9 - 1 0 , 5 2 , 6 0 ,7 2 , \2 7 nomadism 108-9 digital 127 n o n - e q u i l i b r i u m1 3 , 2 l organizltions non-govcrnmental

INGOt 4s,r08 campaigns88 non-linearity12, 14, 17, 73-5, 28, 29, 3 4 ,4 7 ,7 8 ,1 0 2 3 , l 2 l 3 Nonini,D. 62, 98, 134 normality, as a gradient 42 norms,and scandalsI i4-17

166

Index

North, D. 54-5 Nurerlberg trials 135 O Ria in,S. 9l ob;ects, ilow

)

socialitiesu,ith 56 obligations52 o bscn at ion lg, 37, 1 l5 oceans70 crffshorebanking ti6 Ohma e,K. 5, 43, 44 Ong , A. 62, 98, 134 o pe n sy s t em s21, 100_1,102 openn^ess 10, 15, 29, 62, gg, t 13, lZZ, 1 33 opposit.ionseeresistance order; a nd c haos 14, 21, 29, 106 a nd d is or der22, 139 far from equilibrium pockets of l0 l_3 'implicate' 50 isla nd sof 21, l0g, 124 organism,and system 104_5 organizational learning31,54, 55, 59 organizations, and imagesg2 ncw globallymediated 90 o pp osit ional59, 96_7 othe4 end of the 97 'panhumanity' 136 Papastergiadis, N. 61, 62, i07 Papson,S. 67 paradigm, new globalization3, 6-0 new informationalB_l 2,7g_g0 technological8 Parsons, Talcott 104, 105_ti particles48-9, 5g, 60 Pascoe, D. 125 past, and futurc 19, 20 patents,and bioprospccting 70 path_dependence 2U, 54-6, 63, 69, j4, 12 3,1 38 performance3, 38 globalizationas 6-7, 96_103

r67

Index

pc.rformativity gg_9, I lti periphery,effect of centre on 83 Perkman,M. l0g Perrow,Charlcs 36, 52 Normal Accidenrs 35_6 personalcomputer I 0_l I Peters,T. 56 phenomena, compl exi ty and 77_g rcl ati ons of model s rvi th physi tal , the soci al and the

46

I 20-l 17_18,20,

physicalsciences,and social sciences3, 18,124 Plant,S 63 point, as attractor 26 s e ea k o b i {u r e a t i o np o i n t polnts of insertionseemgorings politicalunits 95 p o r r t r c sI l 4 populations,and statisticalprobability t7 positivefeeclback13, 26_g, 54, 55_6, 7.t,83,95, ll7, l18, 12l, 123, t38 post-disciplinarity 124 post-society128, 140 post-structuralismlg, 122 poverty 130_l power, and complexity l l l_13 cligital 127 of flows 42 hybridizationof I t2 informational I l3 mediatedll3-14, ll9 and mobilities l2 ar-rdresistancel0 and socialordering 104_lg techniquesof ll2 typesand machinesI 26_7 visibilityof t I 2- l3 Power,M. 109 powerless, power of the 130 practices, complexityin 30 cosmopolitan137 effectsin scienceon results 37

l n d abs ente 73-4 ^r,.s('tl Le,

l: r ,20' frt,' * i n,' ,l lYax, I l, 12,17,18, t 24 22,24, 30, 32, 10r ' Orderout of Chaos2l 17, 48,77 t' ^.,rbabi l it ies 6r tl duc tl on,

cosmopolitancharacter79 of 4' 83-4 internationalization products, as c'ffectsof brands 67 standardized57-8 valuablcin world trade 30-l and the global village professionals, 98 profits 78 proletariat79 property relations 7 protest, anti-globalization1 I 2 culturesof 68, 87, 88-9 rnovements7l-2 PugwashConferenceon Scienceand World Affairs 97 Q a i d a ,A I - 1 3 2 quantum societY47-8 q u a n t u mt h e o r Y 2 0 , 2 2 ,2 5 , 4 7 - 8 ' 7 7 quasi-nations,and attractor of glocalization 98 radio 84 rainbow,global 128 Rapoport,A. 98 R a s c hW , 18 rational action theorY 77 rcciprocities52 reductionism20, 40, 77-8 R e e d ,M . 2 8 , 3 0 , 7 9 refcrencegroups 136 rcflerivemodernization139-40 reflexivity 96-7, 1 13, 139-40 refugees2, 6l regimechanges47 regionalblocs 45 regions40-2, 43, 49, 107 cross-border108 war of the 43-4 regularities76, l2I

relationality15, 20, 25, 121-3, lZ4 relationships, globalizationof l2l networks of 53-4 probabilistic77 relative,the 5 religions, g l o b a l 4 5 ,8 8 , 1 0 8 local with global characteristics 9Z representations, collective 59 sensuous59 N. l5, 65 Rescher, research,self-fulfillingprophecies 37 rt-sistance10, 128 antibiotic 33 identities 88 to globalization44, 58, 62, 87-9, 96-7 rhythmicity 20 J. 135 Richards, Rifkin,J. 7, 10, 58 rights, universal98, i36 women's 98 risk cultures,in medicine 33 risk managemcnt,in financialmarkets

6ri risk society ix,96-7, I40 risks, global 133 willingnessto take 133-4 Ritzer,G. 57, 58 R o b e r tso nR, o l a n d vi i i ,4 4 , 8 4 R o ch e ,M . 8 1 ,8 2 ,8 6 ,8 7 ,9 5 , 1 0 7 Roderick,I. 48 Rojek, C. 62 Ronf'eldt,D. 36, 51, 65,12' 137Rose,N. 89 R o se n b e r gJ., 3 , 4 4 ,9 6 Rotblat,JosePh97, !18,l37 Roy,Arundhati 135-6 Ru.shdie,Salman,The SatonicVerses I3 4 Rushkoff D. 62 Rycroft,Robert 10, 51, 54, 59 The ComPlatitY Chalbnge 3tl1

168

I

tI i

i

saf'ety,and systemcharacteristics36, 52 simulations58 SantaFe Institute,New Mexico 12, 17, simultaneity51 t2t S k l a i aL . 4 , 5 7 , 6 1 , 8 2 , 9 6 , l O t , t 0 2 SaudiArabia l3l Slater,D. 69 Sayer,A. 122 slaveowning I l2 scales, linearmctaphorof 122-3 slavetrade,international61, 13I scandals, small events,with big effects 16, 23, complexitynatureof 58, t l3-18 3 4 - 6 , 4 7 , 5 3 , 5 4 _ s ,6 2 , 9 4 _ 5 , I l 6 financial and abuseof power I I 7 small and medium businesscs, networks med iatiz ed105, 110- l 1, 113 of9 Scannell,P. 84 smuggling,people 61, 131 'scapes'viii,4-5,9, 56, 60-2, 80 social,the Scholte,J. A. 3, 4, 6 and natural 13, \22 Schumann,H. 43, 66 n a t u r ea n d 3 3 - 5 , 4 5 - t t sclence, the physicaa l nd 17-18,20,46 and collective representations59 sociallifc, and humanity 97 and failure l3-14 irrctluciblenot ionsin 76 7 Internet as metaphor for fluid 63 metaphoricalnatureof l2l multitasking 69 post-national97-8 and quantum society 48 rore ln systemsIZJ recursivecharacter 46-7 and systemof investigation37 social morphology 9 Scotland 108 socialmovements7l-2, 88-9 SecondLaw of Thermodynamics2l socialorder, secretscrvicesll5 and globalcomplexity 16, 104-ll, self il8_19 and the global 99 as outcome of socialprocesses106 and machine 69 and power 104-19 self-fulfilling prophecies,in rcsearch 37 social practices,universalismand 98-9 self-makingsystems16, 28-9, 31, socialregulation 108-9 10 0-1 , 102 socialsciences, self-organization 10, l4-15, 24, 29, 58, application of positive feedback 28, 60 ,98 , 106, 132 83 cities 36-7 conditions of possibility for 37 or lnternet ol-J individual and collectivelevels 76-7 of nation states 95 and naturalsciences12-13 scmioticskills 133-4 new complexityrheoryparadigm scrvice,standardizedmodcs of 57 l2-15 sh amin g,public 89, l l0- l l, I l4- lB and physicalsciences3, 18, 124 shareholdcrintcrests5, 45 in post-societal era 140 Shaw,M. 98 relevanceof complexity for 1204 Sh elle r,M. 56, 60, 69, 71, 89 sclf-Fulfi lling prophcciesin Shields,R. 59-60 investigationof global systems Shiva,V. 98 37-8 side effects 14,24,32-3, l3g socialspace4l-2 srgn rne rsdl, d/ socialsystems, srgns,economiesof viii, 67, 139 autopoietic29, 100-l Sikkink, K. 98 trajectory 83 4

169

Index

Index socialtheory, and complexity l2O-4 co-Present73-4 sociality,

's o c i a l w a r e '3 1 societies, autonomousself-reProducing105 106 criss-crossing and the global l-16 like empires 129-32 transformt:dwithin global systems 106-7 society, as a bounded region 43 the concept of ix as empire 129-32 and nature 1B Parsons'sdefinition 105-6 and regions 40-l s o c i o l o g yi x, 1 3 - 1 5 , 1 2 0 applicationsof comPlexitY 30 classical104-5 of socialorder 104-l I cstablishment and globalizationdcbates 3-4 limits of global analyses40 'mobile' 16, 59-60 Soctologtbeyond Societies(Urry) ix software 73 software industry,teamworking 9l solidarity,electronic networks of 89 sovereignty,nation state replacedby imperial 128 Soviet Union, former, collapseof 47, 85 state bureaucracy I I space l8-22 Cartesianl9 creationof 22 and physical 127 cyberspace dematerializationof 2 fractal 74 rrce

/ I

multiple 29,123 remakingof 6-7 for systems 75 transformationof ix-x, 7, 136 treated as static 44-5 seeabo time-space spatialpatterns 40-2 spatiality,fluid 45,60

specles, hazardsaffecting 69-70 population size not correlatcdwith stabiltty 32-3 sp e cta cl e6 5 ,8 7 Spencer,Herbert I04 spontaneity 25 spreadsheetculture 73 stability 21, 27 population size not correlatedwith 32-3 Stacey,J. 99 g l o b a l 1 3 4 , I3 6 sta n d a r d s, star networks 5l-2 stasls, and change22 desire for 44-5 state, capitalist 78 and citizen,mutual visibility 112-13 nation detachedfrom 87 and nomadism 108-9 regulatory I l0 role of the 109-10 state bureaucracy,effectsof personal computers on I I statesurveillancell3 state-centrism44 states, 'm i d w i fe ' 1 1 0 networked l0 weak 130 statistical,and individual levelsof analysis24-5 stcampower 126 stce r i n gm e ch a n i sm s1 0 5 Ster,g"is,1.,Order out of Chaos 2l N. 1 17 Stevenson, Ste w a r t,A. l l l Ste w a r t,1 .2 4 ,2 5 ,7 6 Ste w u r t,P I7 , 1 8 ,8 3 , 1 0 0 ' 1 2 0 36 ,rn.t -.". racing,and US societY storage125, 127 83-93' t,-.r.'*" attractors' 26-7 ' 44' 103 --\ , Je .t o" ^, ,. h

vS. 6--5

presentano1 a b s e n t stranqerness, structurationism )'2]r-2

73_4

t70 structure, Giclclens's duality of 46-7, t2I structure-agencyrelations x, 3, 40, 46 - 7, 80, I I l_12, lz t , t 27 subject-objectdichotomy 3 succcss, and failure l3-15 supra-national states 108 surveil lanc eI 13, I 15, 127 sustainability12, 70 'swarm ing' 132 switches25, 53, 73, 82 Swyngedouw,E. 109 symDlosts/4 symboliccapital,vulnerabilityof I l8 syncretism,cultural 108 synergy 8 system,and organism104-5 systemaccidcnts 35-6 systemeffects 24-5, 76-7 systemperfection,self-defeating characterof 36 systems, autopoietic99-100 contrildtctlons/U-u(.) dynamicand complex 3, 138-40 on the edgeof chaos 22 of globalcomplexity 107 institutions and development of 55_6 located within environments 45-ti Iooselycoupled 35-6, 52 ordered but l'ar from equilibrium 32 pattern similaritiesacrossl2l self-regulating26 and side eflects 14 tightly coupled and accidents 35-6, 52 Szerszy ns kB. i, 58, 90, lt 3 taste 25 Taylor,l-. 66 teamworking9l technology8-9, 30-1, 56, 95 evolution 63 and the human 3l-2 teen market, global 67 telecommunications 65 te levisio n82, 84, 87, ll8, 135- 6

Index territory, lesscentral . national selfdefinition 44,8;o terrorism 11,88, ll2, l13, l3l,133 globalcoalitionagarnst135 growth of l0l international73, 109, l32 networked I l0 urDan lJ I Thatcher,Margaret I06 thermodynamics2l Thompson,G. 44, I l0 T h o m p s o n , J o h nl l 3 , l 1 6 , l l 7 , llg polirical Scandal:power and V"Ut;w ---r in the Media Age ll4

Thrift,N. 17,29,30,40,65,73,86, 9l ties,strongandweak 12,52 ugnr couplrng J5_b time 18-22 arrowof 21,22 biological 20-l biology of seechrono-blology clock I I 'computime' 85 creationo€ 22 dematerializationof 2 flow of 20,21-3,28, 45 fragmentation 68-9, 72 'g l a c i a l '1 1 , 7 0 historical 18, 20-1 irreversibilityof 2l-2,29, 46-7, 49, 60 natural and social l9 Newtonian absolute l9 synchronizationacrossthe world 8l timeless 8-9, I I trading in 65 transformationof ix-x, 7 treated as static 44-5 time travel l9 tlme-space, c o m p r e s s i o nl , 4 , 7 2 , l 3 l .n.uutrr." under mass l9-20, l3l distanciation 4 fixities seemoorings networked paths 7-8, 123 times,multiple \1, 2O-1,29' tippingpoints 53,66, 139 'Titanic effect' 36

t7l

Index 1, 33< 137 Toml i nsr]r^n' r l3il' toPolo8ies

+"-"'

' '-, "

uiri il'J")'; 7r"(r-i"1,) ttud,ri.rr""t'n"{'. 6l' 89, ,n.j nt"J i ' ul ' "' J

' ap' i i al v ps t' n' x t'

33

tradi ng, deriv:rtive 66 86 electron tc financial futures 65

real-timc90 capitalistclass4, 61' l0l transnational 4' 5-6' 57 trrnrnutiunrlcorPorations ' 67-8 106, 108 transnationalism I 1 3 t r a n s p a r e r r cy , I l 5 - 1 6 4-5, 36, 68, 97 transportirtion scapes(i l-2 t r a v e l3 3 , 6l - 2 , 6 8 , 1 3 5 - 7 p e o p l e s5 ,6 1 - 2 , 1 0 7 , 1 0 9 , travelling 171 t r u s t 1 0 , 52 , S) 09, 1 , I l 4 - 1 5 turningpoints 73, 139 U N C omrn i s s i on on Gl obal Gov ernanc e

0ees)134 uncertai nty 13, 22 5g

U N D P8I, I 36 unintended efTccts 14,46-7,105, l l 3, ll9 U ni ted N ati ons (U N ) 8r , 96, 134,136 U ni versal Dec l arati on of H uman R i ghts (1918) 8l uni verse,ex pans i on of

21-2 unpredictability 10,14, t 9, 27, 29,33,60,95, 113,116, 123, 138 , uroan cri nte l 3l urban and ^envi ronment, JJ-5 trrban grorvth,

t he'wild'

selflorganization 29, 36_7 slopin!jsuburbs,34 , u r b a n i s m, sp l i n tcr i n g1 3 0 I U5A, l l , s c p t t'm b cr ( 2 0 0 l J x,9 4 , t3 0 , rrt,l35 Constitution: FirstAmendment I I

culture of scandalI l8 as glocalattractor 129-30 h e g e m o n y4 3 ,4 5 , 8 5 Latinosin 108 Militia 88 resistance to hegenronyBB,89 societyand stock-carracing 36 spccificityof 105 values, global 133 hierarchyof 105 Va n L o o n ,J. 3 3 , 1 3 3 , 1 4 0 villages, global 98 self'-orglnizingtransnational I 08 violence,womcn's freedom from sexual 98 virtual communities 88-9 virtual reality I26-7 virtual war 86 vi r u se s3 3 , 6 2 ,6 7 ,6 8 ,8 7 , 1 1 8 , 1 3 3 viscosity60, 7l vi si b i l i ty I l 2 - 1 3 , I l 5 - 1 6 vi si o nm a ch i n e s7 0 , 1 1 3 Volkmer, I. 86 vortex, bodies in a 59 vulnerability, of symboliccapital I l8 to fluid changes58-9 Wa l b y,S. 4 5 , 9 5 , 9 7 , 9 8 , 1 0 8 , I1 0 , 1 3 3 , 136 Wa l d r o n ,J. 1 3 3 , 1 3 4 , 1 3 6 , 1 3 9 Wa l d r o p ,M . 1 2 , 1 7 ,2 4 ,3 0 , 4 0 ,5 3 ,5 4 , 55 Wallerstein,Immanuel l2-13 war, networked see'netwars' war machine l2[i wars, asymmetric130 n o n - l i n e a r1 3 2 virtual 65 women'soppositionto 98 waste incincration,and global cnvironmentalmovemcnt 92-3 WatergatescandalI l5 Watson,J. 57

172 Warts,D. 52 ivave-particlceffects 48-9 waves48- 9, 51, 59, 60, 62, 7l r,vealth,from abundance 53 Weber,Max l0-ll Weingart,P 23, 30 Weiss,L. 109 rvelfaresocieties I 29 Wellnran, B. 52, 127 West, inequalities130-l socio-spatial urban development 36-7 wh ite, H. 60, 7l Whitehead, A. N. 20 rvholes,new emergent49, 50-l Wickham,G. 14 'wild zones' 33-5, 130-l Williams,R. 29, 59, 135 Wolfe, C. l8 women, and globalcitizcnship98 women'smovement 88 work, team working 9l

Index transformationof 64-5 rvorkfbrcc,local in capitalism 7g_9 working class,Marxist socialrevol 79 World Bank 8l World Health Organization8l World lntellectual Property Organization8l world order,problematizationof claim t29 world society 100 world system 4 World Tiade Organization [WTO) 6, 6I,81,89 World Wide Web 62, 86, 94 Wynne, B. 6 Yang,M. Mei-hui 134 Yuval-Davis,N. 98 Zapatistas,Mexico 88, 89 'zapping,' 73 Zohar, D. 20, 47-8