In this contribution to social theory, John Urry argues that the traditional basis of sociology - the study of society - is outmoded in an increasingly borderless world.

This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially how its awesome pattern of path dependency was established and exerted a particularly powerful and self-expanding pattern of domination across the globe. The article further considers whether and (...) how the 20th-century car system may be transcended. It elaborates a number of small changes that are now occurring in various test sites, factories, ITC sites, cities and societies. The article briefly considers whether these small changes may in their contingent ordering end this current car system. The article assesses whether such a new system could emerge well before the end of this century, whether in other words some small changes now may produce the very large effect of a new post-car system that would have great implications for urban life, for mobility and for limiting projected climate change. (shrink)

This article examines some major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of life upon Earth. It deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich North over the course of the last century or so. These shifts involve moving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societies of discipline to societies of control, and more recently from specialized and differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. Societies become centres of conspicuous, wasteful consumption. The (...) implications of such forms of ‘excess’ consumption are examined for clues as to the nature and characteristics of various futures. Special attention is paid to the interdependent system effects of climate change, the peaking of oil and exceptional growth of urban populations. It is argued that the 20th century has left a bleak legacy for the new century, with a very limited range of possible future scenarios which are briefly described. (shrink)

Most conceptions of public and private life within political and social theory do not adequately consider the networks or fluidities involved in contemporary social relations. The distinction of public and private is often conceived of as statically `regional' in character. This article, following an extensive analysis of the multiple meanings of the `public' and `private', criticizes such a static conception and maintains that massive changes are occurring in the nature of both public and private life and especially of the relations (...) between them. We consider flows and networks that enable mobility between and across apparent publics and privates. These mobilities are both physical and informational. We consider the transformations of public and private life that have arisen from `complex' configurations of place and space: the dominant system of car-centred automobility whose spatial fluidities are simultaneously private and public; and various globalizations through the exposure of `private' lives on public screens and the public screening of mediatized events. These mobile, machinic examples demonstrate the limitations of the static, regional conceptualizations of public and private life developed within much social and political theory, and suggest that this divide may need relegation to the dustbin of history. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the mobilities turn and its studies of the performativity of everyday (im)mobilities enable new forms of sociological inquiry, explanation and engagement. New kinds of researchable entities arise, opening up a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical, and new avenues for critique. The mobilities paradigm not only remedies the academic neglect of various movements, of people, objects, information and ideas. It also gathers new empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations, methods and motivations to examine important social (...) and material phenomena and fold social science insight into responses. After an outline of the mobilities paradigm, this article provides a wide-ranging review of emergent `mobile methods' of studying (im)mobilities. We discuss some of the new researchable entities they engender and explore important implications for the relationship between the empirical, theory, critique, and engagement. (shrink)

This article examines the centrality of Brazil within the future of climate policy and politics. The state of the carbon sink of the Amazon rainforest has long been an iconic marker of the condition of the Earth. Brazil has been innovative in developing many non-carbon forms of energy generation and use and it has played a major role in international debates on global warming since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. We examine various ways in which climate change has come (...) to be centrally important in Brazilian public opinion. Survey evidence shows that Brazilians are the most concerned about issues of climate change – with less climate change scepticism as compared with more ‘advanced’ societies. Through using techniques of corpus linguistics we examine how Brazilian media has engendered and stabilized such a high and striking level of climate change concern. We show that the media helped to fix a ‘climate change framing’ of recent often strange weather. The article analyses the newly constructed Brazilian Corpus on Climate Change, presenting data on a scale and reach that is unique in this area of research. (shrink)

Energy forms and their extensive scale are remarkably significant for the ways that societies are organized. This article shows the importance of how societies are ‘energized’ and especially the global growth of ‘fossil fuel societies’. Much social thought remains oblivious to the energy revolution realized over the past two to three centuries which set the ‘West’ onto a distinct trajectory. Energy is troubling for social thought because different energy systems with their ‘lock-ins’ are not subject to simple human intervention and (...) control. Analyses are provided here of different fossil fuel societies, of coal and oil, with the latter enabling the liquid, mobilized 20th century. Consideration is paid to the possibilities of reducing fossil fuel dependence but it is shown how unlikely such a ‘powering down’ will be. The author demonstrates how energy is a massive problem for social theory and for 21st-century societies. Developing post-carbon theory and especially practice is far away but is especially urgent. (shrink)

The term ‘complexity’ has recently sprung into the physical and social sciences, humanities and semi-popular writings. ‘Complexity’ practices are constituted as something of a self-organizing global network that is spreading ‘complexity’ notions around the globe. There is a new ‘structure of feeling’ that complexity approaches both signify and enhance. Such an emergent structure of feeling involves a greater sense of contingent openness to people, corporations and societies, of the unpredictability of outcomes in time–space, of a charity towards objects and nature, (...) of the diverse and non-linear changes in relationships, households and persons, and of the sheer increase in the hyper-complexity of products, technologies and socialities. (shrink)

This article assesses whether some notions from complexity or non-linear theory help to make sense of September 11th. This relates to the author's more general concern, to interrogate `globalization' through the prism of complexity. Some of the topics investigated in this article include the nature of networked relationships between the macro and micro levels, the character of a liquid and mobile power, the differentiation between and juxtapositions of wild and safe zones, the world-wide screening of certain global events, the unpredictability (...) and irreversibility of time, the nature of attractors, and the more general character of systems that are neither ordered nor wholly anarchic remaining `on the edge of chaos'. (shrink)

‘Complexity theory’ seems to provide some metaphors, concepts and theories essential for examining the intractable disorderliness of the contemporary world. Relations across that world are complex, rich and non-linear, involving multiple negative and, more significantly, positive feedback loops. This article shows how globalization should be conceptualized as a series of adapting and co-evolving global systems, each characterized by unpredictability, irreversibility and co-evolution. Such systems lack finalized ‘equilibrium’ or ‘order’; and the many pools of order heighten overall disorder. They do not (...) exhibit and sustain unchanging structural stability. Complexity elaborates how there is order and disorder within these various global systems. The global order is a complex world, unpredictable and irreversible, disorderly but not anarchic. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the intimate significance of trees and woods through research on how people engage with and perform their bodies in different kinds of wooded environments in contemporary Britain. We argue that there are significant, contested and ambivalent affordances provided by woods and forests in contemporary Britain - as providing `live' contact with nature, as a source of tranquillity, and as providing a distinct `social' space in sharp contrast to the pressures of modern living. Second, there is (...) considerable variation in the bodily experiences that people gain from woods and forests, influenced by personal and family life-stage, socio-economic circumstance and geographical location. The values people appear to attach to woods and forests arise from the specific `affordances' that the latter could offer for bodily desires. There are, we might say, different `contested' natures of the forest. (shrink)

This issue of Body & Society was assembled to extend the interest in the embodied nature of people's experiences in, and of, the physical world. It thus seeks to develop further the emergent sociology of the body that has provided extensive insight into the embodied character of human experience. Such a sociology has, though, dealt less systematically with the various social practices that are involved in being in, or passing through, nature, the countryside, the outdoors, landscape or wilderness. These practices (...) reflect the apparently enhanced `culture of nature' in many contemporary societies. In particular, we are concerned with various embodied performances. The various articles consider: how is the body implicated in, and reproduced through, the diverse social practices happening within `nature'? Why is the body, and its physical capital, developed by practices thought to be beneficial because of the `natural' setting for such practices? In what form do these practices `in nature' come to be part of the reflexivity about the body, as the self and identity are increasingly matters of deliberation, negotiation and self-monitoring? (shrink)

Seront examinées dans cet article les mobilités, du point de vue des systèmes qui structurent, organisent et permettent des mobilités multiples. Double, l’étude porte à la fois sur les aspects historiques du phénomène et sur ses manifestations dans le siècle en cours. Au XXIe siècle, les systèmes de mobilité numériques interdépendants se situent au cœur même des sociétés contemporaines. Plus généralement, il sera aussi montré que l’étude des mobilités joue, sans conteste, un rôle central dans le décryptage des contours essentiels (...) de la vie dans un monde qui conjugue liberté exceptionnelle et dépendance des systèmes exceptionnelle. Méthodes et théories doivent constamment se remettre en question afin de rendre compte de l’évolution des nouveaux systèmes de programmation individuelle ainsi que de la structuration et du contrôle des systèmes.This paper discusses mobilities from the viewpoint of the systems that structure, organise and permit multiple mobilities. This is considered both historically and in the current century. The paper shows that in the twenty-first century, interdependent digitised systems of mobility are at the core of contemporary societies. It also shows more generally that the study of mobilities cannot but be central to deciphering the principal contours of life in a world that combines exceptional freedom and exceptional system dependence. Methods and theories need to be ever on the move to keep up with new systems of individualised scheduling and of system structuring and monitoring. (shrink)