I started my sociological readings proper early in October of 2021 with Steven Miles’ short book social theory in the real world. I’d read the first several chapter of Giddens/Sutton’s textbook fo inspiration as to what other books to read. I started to read the Miles book in conjunction with Zygmunt Bauman and Tim May’s book Thinking Sociologically, but this proved distracting, so after this point, I began to focus on one book at a time.
The purpose of the book is clear from the introduction: “The intention of this book is to illustrate that social theory can be meaningful, relevant and full of insight, and, as such, can stimulate the theoretical and sociological imagination” (1). So to demonstrate this, in each chapter, Miles takes a particular social theory or associated group of theories and seeks to prove how each of them is relevant to the ‘real world’.
The theories he’s chosen are each a prominent and socially conscious theory designed to explain society in its aspects or in its totality. They include theories of mass culture, post-industrialism, consumerism and post-modernism. These are some of the most important and relevant theories in the social sciences and each is the centre of a rich literature which has grown up around it. In particular, theory about mass culture in its day and post-modernism in more recent decades have considerable implications for the inter-related areas of culture and media. Post-industrialism and consumerism have similarly grand implications for the sociologies of work and the economy. Still, none of what I’ve said proves that these theories have any bearing on everyday life, so how does Miles prove this?
Well, in the case of the chapter on mass culture, for example, he says that “By its very nature social theory is critical… [it] should not solely be about describing or understanding the social world but should represent an active means of addressing why that society went wrong or how it has managed to go right” (18). I do think it’s important to note that much theorising on mass culture was done by the Frankfurt School, an intellectual group founded in Weimar Germany and composed largely of Jewish German Marxists. Given these characteristics and the historical context in which they lived, they were prime targets for the Nazis and had to leave Germany and relocate to New York City after settling first in Geneva. In light of this, I think these thinkers had an especially good reason to want to figure out how societies might go wrong.
I do think that culture is a useful way to bring social theory to bear on modern society. We spend much of our time outside of work consuming media, e.g. film and TV. Weimar Germany, of course, was hugely important in cinema history and many fimmakers fled the Nazis and landed in Hollywood. This means that the Frankfurt school’s activities coincided with the rise of the mass media, i.e. film in their earlier period and television during their work mid-century and onward. From Miles’ account, however, Frankfurt theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno focused their critiques more on the culture industry rather than the culture itself:
Adorno… points out that in his work with Horkheimer they actually replaced the term ‘mass culture’ with that of the ‘culture industry’. This distinction is important insofar as it reinforces the contention that mass culture does not arise spontaneously from the masses, but is somehow foisted upon them… the crucial point here is not simply that mass culture is bad, but that the masses are an object of calculation. (26)
This is not to say that they didn’t think the culture was bad, they did. But as Marxists, their focus was always on how the profit motive acts to corrode its products: “Lying at the core of this process is the transfer of the profit motive onto the cultural form. The culture industry prioritizes profit at the expense of quality” (26).
My thinking on this point is that, while quality is not required for the profit motive, this does not mean that the profit motive cancels out any quality which does arise. I can despise the capitalist Hollywood system and the suffering required to create products where quality is not prioritised. Even so, where quality products do come out, I can still recognise their quality while also maintaining my discomfort with the processes required to produce them. After all, capitalism is a global economic system responsible for producing everything in our lives. There are those who think this is enough to overpower any critiques of capitalism and I don’t think that; I think there’s plenty left for us to criticise. For me, though, this fact is sufficient that these features inherent to capitalism do not cancel out the utility I receive from my consumption of these products. Does this make me complicit? Absolutely, but I’m not sure that there is any way to exist in capitalism (or any global economic system) entirely free from complicity for the negative outcomes inherent in its mode of production.
This is what Miles means when he says that social theory is relevant to the real world. The work of theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno may be difficult and embedded in an academic world unfriendly to the lay reader. The solution is to render it in simpler terms in a book like this. That makes possible a critical engagement with the substance of the work that allows readers to put it in terms of their moral framework and understanding of society: “it is absolutely essential to remember that human beings do not relate to popular culture in objective ways, but that they do so in a self-consciously subjective… fashion” (35) and
the attraction of the Frankfurt School lies in its ability to address theoretical concerns in practical social and cultural contexts… human beings react to aspects of social change, not objectively, but as subjective interpreters of their own cultural landscapes. (37)
In his next chapter, Miles examines Daniel Bell’s theory that we moving towards a post-industrial society. In recent months, I’ve been reading books on economic and industrial sociology, Bell’s is a theory I will likely return to in future writings. All the reading I have done on post-industrial theory, in Miles’ book as well as my more recent readings, reflects a highly critical tone towards this theory. Each of the writers, including Miles, recognises in this theory certain insights which are useful, but the consensus would seem to be that Bell was way off the mark in both the timescale he proposes and the actual details of the society he foresees.
I think Miles chose to look at this theory because it shows that, even when a particular theory is widely condemned in the fullness of time, it can still generate debate. He gives some pages each to discussing Bell’s theory, to outlining key criticisms it has picked up and also to examining theorists who have moved ‘beyond’ Bell’s foundations. First, by way of definition, “Bell describes a radical transformation of society fuelled by economic and social change. Whereas industrial society had been a goods-producing, profit-driven society, a post-industrial society is more about the emergence of a service economy” (41). Further than this, “Bell didn’t see the dominant social order as any longer dehumanizing or as bureaucracy stifling human creativity. Rather, the world has emerged triumphant. Modernity appeared, at last to be fulfilling its promise. And not before time” (42).
Here are my thoughts: it is not so much that manufacturing has completely disappeared faced with the rise of services, it is that so much manufacturing has been outsourced to China and the developed world. Despite certain reasonable critiques of theories of an all-encompassing globalisation (see for example the works of Hirst and Thompson), it is not possible to make pronouncements about any society’s economic profile without looking at the economy from a global perspective. We still need stuff and much of that stuff is produced, out of plastic, in the developing world. Still, there remain plenty of people in the developed world, and all those people are economic actors, consumers who need jobs. Any great decline in the number of manufacturing jobs such as that seen in the last 30-40 years will require a proportionate increase in service jobs (albeit buffered by unemployment). Levels of manufacturing haven’t gone down, if anything, we’re producing more now than we have at any point in human history. What’s changed is location, the length of supply chains and who, exactly, is doing the work. Regarding services, e.g. call centres we already see those being outsourced to newly industrialising countries, like India and China.
Indeed, as with most theories alleging a paradigm shift or fundamental, epochal economic change, the criticism is less about the changes asserted in the theory itself but more about the extent of those changes or whether or not they constitute a fundamental change in the structure of society, mode of production, etc. Miles acknowledges this straight away in his section on criticism of Bell:
Krishan Kumar… is concerned that [Bell’s work] over-inflates the importance of the trends he describes… [being] especially critical of Bell’s tendency simply to refer to statistics that are used to reinforce his position without recourse to the complexities that underlie those statistics. (44)
The charge, then, seems to be that Bell uses a simplistic lens to analyse the statistics regarding services and manufacturing, so simplistic that he misses potential implications thereof that conflict with his thesis. It’s clear also, though, that Miles has his own critiques of Bell’s work:
To imply that social change is such that market forces are receding to be replaced by the axial principle of theoretical knowledge is little short of preposterous… You only have to look around you to realize that the market does still play a fundamental role in the construction of social life and perhaps a bigger role than it ever has done before (see Miles, 1998a). (45)
Here, Miles actually cites himself! This has little bearing on the substance of the text, really, I just find it amusing how near he has to reach to find criticisms. He’s right, though. Greater focus on services vs. manufacturing in the western world does not entail any defeat of market forces, it just means that the market’s focus has shifted- or rather, that the market itself has been reorganised. Having said that, I can’t actually find any direct references to ‘market forces’ in Miles’ description of Bell’s thesis- indeed, I’m not sure that the word ‘market’ appears before Miles uses it in the section quoted above. It’s pretty obvious, though, that in any contemporary theory regarding a change in the world’s economic profile, some fate for market forces is implied.
Before laying to rest the subject of the post-industrial society, Miles explores the work of other post-industrial theorists besides Bell. Of the French theorist Alain Touraine, Miles says that “where Bell sees the promise of greater social integration and institutional harmony… Touraine argues that the technocratic society is controlling and inhibiting” (49). In posing this contrast, Miles implies that Bell’s theories saw trends and extrapolated from these positive potential for a new world. Touraine saw the same trends and saw their potential for the negative. Together, Bell and Touraine’s work “provides an illustration of how social theorists with differing perspectives on the same phenomena can come up with such divergent conclusions” (49). Miles says, though, that “Bell and Touraine’s work do not acknowledge each other and as such it would be particularly misleading to imply that Bell precipitated a line of thought which Touraine followed, or vice versa” (50). Still, though, I think that their work came about in a particular time (1969-’73) when these were important questions that had to be answered. This, of course, was a decade or two before globalisation really got to work and much of the outsourcing I discussed above had yet to happen.
In the end, the Western economy’s reliance on services did come about, but not to the extent Bell predicted and not on such a worldwide scale, either. Miles says as much in his conclusion to this chapter: “you could well argue that the sorts of projections made… have been realized, but simply not in as fundamental or complete a form as may have been anticipated” (56) but that “social theorists often appear to be tempted into making rather crass generalizations about nothing more than macro-symptoms of economic change that may not have as fundamental social and cultural implications as they might hope” (57). Perhaps the point of this chapter is not to explain the merits of Bell’s theory itself but rather to show that even a theory proven in the longer term to be flawed can provide fertile ground for further theories. Miles talks also about Jerald Hage and Charles H. Powers, who “admit that the effect of the post-industrial order is somewhat patchy, but argue that the changing nature of knowledge and technology is having a profound impact on the nature of face-to-face relationships, and… the nature of the social self” (50). This sounds to me like a more measured theory that reels in the ambition in Bell’s theory, but still admits that there is an order that is changing but has more specific micro-sociological impacts than the sweeping macro changes that Bell suggests. In addition, the chapter uses Bell to show the limits of certain theories and the pitfalls that theorists can fall into when reach exceeds grasp.
The chapter on consumerism is interesting because it is an area that Miles clearly has considerable experience with as a theorist himself. He cites his own work once or twice and at the end of the chapter, one of the Further Reading books, Consumerism as a Way of Life, is one of his own books. He starts by explaining consumerism and how the layman might think about it, i.e. as a huge part of everyday life that we tend to understand intuitively cause it’s something we spend much of our time and money on. Then he looks at how consumption was traditionally treated by the social scientist “as a by-product of production” (61). To demonstrate this, he looks at Marx, who “saw the commodity, first and foremost, as something to be sold and exchanged on the marketplace [and] had a role in determining your social position, but that position was not… determined by how you actively engaged with consumer goods” (62). The commodity, of course, has a huge significance for Marx and leftist theory in general, commodification (or the creation of things for exchange for profit rather than exclusive use by the producer) being one of the hallmarks of capitalism that had to be abolished somehow in order to move on to socialism/communism. Putting aside the fact that, in Miles’ words, “Culture has been commodified… to a greater degree than (Marx) could ever have envisaged” (62-63), even in Marx’ time, consumption was an important component of life that could have been studied for the benefit of its own insights.
Indeed, mere decades after Marx’ death and the publication of his most major works on capitalism in 1899, Thorstein Veblen published his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Miles calls the work “a remarkably biting analysis of aspirational forms of consumption that at times seems as relevant today as it was over a hundred years ago” (65). Today, much of consumer capitalism comes from producers having broadened the ability to consume beyond just the middle class of Veblen’s day but to all sectors of society, even the very poor. This of course has accrued entertainment companies massive profits. This Miles alludes to when he looks at the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in whose work “consumption is so important to the nature of the social fabric that nowadays it actually reflects and reproduces social stratification… This is more than simply a process controlled by the upper classes, as Veblen tends to imply” (68). Bourdieu, of course, is a giant of the social sciences akin to Veblen. He was French and he wrote a lot, so if I ever want to really run my French through its paces, I should try reading his work.
There is more to this chapter on consumption, as there is to all the chapters I have covered. What I think is most impressive about it, though, is how Miles charts a lineage of great European social theorists from Marx through Veblen to Bourdieu. He goes on to other theorists and other aspects of consumption, including the global dimension. This, more than the post-industrial chapter, goes to show the collaborative nature of social theory, where the development of a particular idea can stretch across the better part of a century. The key strength of Miles’ book, besides its stated goal of showing the utility of social theory in general, is as an introduction to a generous spread of important social theories, and I think the consumption chapter does this the most pleasingly. Surely, though, the greatest test of this strength is in how it handles post-modernism, a great storm of a theory which claims implications for all the social sciences and even the humanities more broadly.
Miles gets off to an excellent start in terms of his grasp of postmodernism. There is a consistent pattern in the chapter titles (which I probably should have mentioned earlier, actually), where each one has the name of the theory and then the word society, posed as a question, e.g. A mass society?, A post-industrial society?, A consumer society?, etc. The postmodernism chapter is called A post-modern ‘society’? which is apt. It’s not always clear that postmodernism is concerned with the idea of society as a concept, or rather, that a post-modern world would even recognise the concept of a society. Miles notes that “post-modern theory is not unified in any real sense, but constitutes a sort of ‘unholy’ marriage which joins together a variety of theories and positions” (82). To this end, he doesn’t really talk about postmodernism at all but rather the specifically sociological question of whether or not we are living in a state of post-modernity. Straight away, this puts the movement in familiar terms, akin to the post-industrialism chapter, where the question was whether or not we have experienced a shift in the fundamental character of society. This enables him to narrow his focus to specific areas of postmodern theory and not let the movement completely overwhelm the chapter to the point where it is incomprehensible (something which would give postmodern visual, musical and written artists great delight).
Early in the chapter, Miles asks the question “do we live in an entirely ‘new’ society, or is that society simply an extension of modernity?” (84) In order to – well… gesture at an answer to this question, he examines the work of two thinkers on the subject; Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Jameson is a Marxist and as such his commentary gets straight into the heart of capitalism and its responsibilty for the direction of modern society. As Miles puts it, his work is “refreshing in the sense that he does not discuss post-modernism from an abstract distance, but actively relates it to broader social processes” (84). And in this, Jameson represents the ideal sort of social theory, doesn’t he? What could be more ‘real world’ than literally taking abstract theory and applying it to real world processes?
Specifically, Jameson asserts that “post-modernism is very much bound up with the global progression of capitalism and the expansion of a global culture that this incorporates” (85). This is key, I think, because it grounds post-modern theory and anchors it in an instrumental, capitalistic logic that helps to better understand its processes. It’s in his description of Jameson’s work that Miles first gets close to a specific definition of post-modernism: “For Jameson, post-modernism is a hopelessly commercial culture… a depthless culture of surfaces and pastiches in which the past is used to sustain the present… a ‘culture of quotations'” (85). For me, this is a pretty good definition. I first encountered postmodernism in the literary criticism context, where it is defined by reference or intertextuality. Not only that, there is also intratextuality of a sort where the work refers to itself. Self-referential works are everywhere now, with the phrase ‘fourth wall’ having gone from a phrase relevant mainly to academic theatre studies to a pretty common phrase among the general population. For recent generations, for whom references to media and culture make up a certain portion of everyday speech, who often view their lives through the framework of the media they have consumed and who often define themselves through the media they consume, postmodernism is hugely relevant, even if they don’t know the term itself.
Many of the foundational theorists in the movement were literary or media critics, such as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, who is the second theorist that Miles uses to explore post-modernism. After acknowledging Baudrillard’s “controversial and at times somewhat perplexing work” (86), he says that “The key which unlocks [his] work is the suggestion that we have come to a point in history when the social has ended” (86). This may have pre-emptive echoes of the then neo-conservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s End of History declaration from 1992, a decade after Baudrillard’s work in the early 80s. This was the concept that, post-Soviet Union, Western liberal democracy and capitalism had won, and American supremacy could not be challenged. We must be equally sceptical of both prognoses, but, for Baudrillard at least, his provides a focal point through which we can try to understand postmodern thinking.
Miles says that “Baudrillard… describes a world dominated by the image, and in particular those images generated by the mass media. These images are so dominant that we can no longer genuinely identify anything that can be described as ‘real'” (86). This line of thought has echoes of the Frankfurt School’s criticisms of the mass media or mass culture. Perhaps it’s because of its genesis in and applicabilty to my home field of literary criticism, but I find post-modern theorising way more engaging than critical theory, whose genesis lies in early twentieth-century social theory written mainly by Germans. This is funny cause the largely French postmodern theory has certain roots in critical theory and in the equally French post-structuralism, dominated by Derrida and Foucault. Then again, maybe it’s just cause I like French…
Incidentally, Baudrillard wrote a book in the 90s called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Here, he writes that, in Miles’ words, “Reality is actively defined by the mass media [so] that the Gulf War never actually happened, but was a product of a mass media age” (87). I doubt Baudrillard believed that this was literally true, but it does show how images and the means to capture them are so fundamental in defining narratives of global events, including conflicts (see also the Second Word War (with newsreels) and the Vietnam War (with nightly news broadcasts) for equally fascinating increments of this process).
I don’t believe that the image totally supplanted the social in the ways implied by the postmodernists, but it’s certainly true that the image is hugely important. I would say that it is largely through social processes that this has occurred. Cultural products and their advertising rely on the image and consumers choose between these products often because of how it contributes to their image through identification with the products they consume. Miles touched on this in his previous chapter on consumption: “A world seemed to be emerging in which people were just as likely to be identified by their relationship to consumption as they were to the means of production” (66). It’s certainly true, also, that consumption often operates at a social level. Going back, again, to culture, many cultural forms are consumed with other people, e.g. live performances. We can consume culture together, in the movie theatre or at the concert. Television advertising (as in the literal advertising of televisions) and games console advertising (e.g. the Nintendo Wii or the Microsoft Kinect in previous decades) often push the product as a medium for social activity or consumption. In recent decades, we now have media like youtube.com and twitch.tv, where personalities can play games for audiences, consuming another’s consumption. If movie theatre-going is consumption in parallel, then ‘Let’s Plays’ and livestreams constitute consumption in series. Though fascinating and, in my experience, thoroughly enjoyable on its own merits, it does represent another way for media companies to capitalise on our consumption. Youtube is owned by Google and Amazon owns Twitch, two of the biggest new media companies in the world. I still think, though, that the image serves to create new social experiences, as a by-product of capitalist production, certainly, but social nonetheless.
In his conclusions on post-modernity, Miles provides a funny description of the subject at its worst:
the nearest a lot of post-modern(ist) work actually gets to providing evidence to back up claims about the fragmented medi-saturated world in which we live is to gesticulate about the post-modern MTV viewer who passively sits in front of his or her screen, letting image after image wash over him and her. (99)
I like this cause it makes what is after all a fairly complex, wide-ranging and supposedly sophisticated cluster of theories sound like just another way for cloistered academics to essentially bible thump about ‘the masses’ or ‘the youth’. It makes it sound quite far from the real world or ‘real people’.
In the end, though, I think he does respect post-modern thought for its iconoclastic challenge to the institution of social theory. He notes that “One of the consequences of a post-modern mode of thought is the decline in the meta-narrative” (100). When it comes to the political implications of post-modern thought, this is the first thing I think of. Basically, if the world was as fragmented as the post-modern theorists assert, how can we still employ totalising frameworks such as religion, political theory or even the scientific method? And if these hugely influential frameworks are useless, how does social theory fare? Miles puts this best when he says “post-modernism has forced social theorists to cower in a corner and contemplate their role in life” (101) and I think that this is where he sees post-modernism’s role for social theory in the ‘real world’. It goes back to the process whereby we isolate the useful elements of even deeply flawed theories like Bell’s post-industrialism. Even if post-modernism were to be totally inapplicable to society, it would still be useful as a means to challenge social theory’s place in academia or in other words, a “kick up the backside that social theory and social theorists so badly need” (101).
In these first four chapters of his book, I really think Miles accomplishes his purpose to 1) provide a useful introduction to various influential social theories and 2) show social theory’s usefulness in sociaety more broadly. He goes on to outline three other social theories before finishing with a chapter revising some of his arguments with a view to cementing some overall points that he raised in the introduction and carried throughout the book. Since reading this book, I have read some quite heavy and technical passages, especially in the two handbooks I read as part of my studies on work and the economy. I don’t really consider myself to have benefited all that much from the exercise of reading those denser passages. This is why I not only enjoy prose written in Miles’ style here but I also quite respect writers like Miles and fellow social theorist and introductory book writer George Ritzer. I see no reason why writing for anything but the most technical of subjects can’t be written like this. I think this book, and Ritzer’s ones, and also the next book I read, written by Zygmunt Bauman (with Tim May), really worked to fire my passion for the field of sociology. It was probably important that these were the first books I encountered because maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to continue had I started with the more technical works…
Anyway, this post was quite a bit longer than I expected, mainly cause I wanted to address each of the four chapters I chose and wanted to quote Miles’ excellent writing. Much of it (something like 3800 words) were written on my last day of COVID isolation, so I probably needed something like this after reading for most of the preceding 6 days. I’m hoping to write on the Bauman/May book next, the one I referenced above.
Details of Miles book:
Miles, Steven. Social Theory in the real World, London, Sage, 2001.
Internal Monoblog 