Book Review for Contemporary Sociology Christopher Chase-Dunn
Sylvia Walby, Globalization
and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities
520 pp. Sage, 2009
Paperback ISBN: 9780803985186 £25.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 9780803985179 £70.00
(v. 7-31-10)
Sylvia Walby’s Globalization
and Inequalties uses carefully selected elements of complexity theory to
reconstruct central concepts in social theory. This is an ambitious, courageous
and largely successful effort to rebuild general social theory in response to
the challenges posed by postmodernism and globalization. Walby is Professor of
Sociology at
Walby thoughtfully responds to the postmodernist critique
of social science by combining a sensitive awareness of the particular cultural,
historical and structural roots of notions of modernity and progress with a new
dedication to building a general theoretical apparatus for explaining modern
social change.[1] Yes
there are importantly different modernity projects, definitions of progress and
varieties of capitalism. Progress and modernity (and democracy) are contested
concepts. But it is nevertheless
possible and desireable to construct general explanations of human social
change and to assemble a sensible list of broadly accepted desiderata that
allow us to know where in the world
modernity and progress have been somewhat achieved and where they are still
lacking. These tasks are done admirably in this volume.
Walby provides a useful overview of the different
branches of complexity theory as they have emerged from the natural sciences and
a review and critique of earlier efforts to use complexity theory in sociology.
Her selection of several of the concepts of complexity and systems theory
differs significantly from that of Niklas
Luhmann in being more concerned with power and inequalities. She rejects the
equilibration assumption that is prominent in most earlier
systems theory. And she embraces the capability of complex systems ideas to
deal with changes that are transformative, while also avoiding the tendency
among historians and many historical sociologists to see events as entirely
conjunctural. She focusses on notions of catalysis, dampening, positive
feedback, path dependency and contingent turning points.
Walby propounds a schema of basic
institutional domains: (economy, polity, violence and civil society) for
analyzing the institutional aspects of different dimensions of inequality.
Treating violence as a separate domain is useful because it makes visible the
extent to which some social orders rely on uncriminalized “informal” coercion
and violence, especially in gender and racial hierarchies. Avoiding the usual
trap of examining gender only within the confines of the household leads to a
fruitful investigation of how all the inequality regimes operate in all the
institutional domains.
Walby reconstitutes the notions of
polity and economy mainly in order to deal with the challenges to social theory
posed by globalization processes. The nation-state is a mythical institution,
(but so are all institutions) and only one possible way of constructing
sovereignty and citizenship. The national economy is another myth that has been
strongly challenged by globalized production networks and financial flows.
Societalization is understood as competing projects that try to make economic, political,
violence and civil society practices compatible and interlinked. Societalization
has been more successful in some countries than in others, and there are strong
competing societalization projects such as the
Walby sees two main competing
modernity projects operating in the contemporary world: neoliberalism and
social democracy. Social democracy is championed mainly by European countries
and the EU, and neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus have mainly been
proffered by the
Most of the theoretical innovations in
Walby’s book solve the main problems posed by globalization and postmodernism.
I am glad she has taken postmodernist philosophy seriously enough to try to
come to terms with it in reconstructing concepts for a general approach to
critical social theory. The endeavor to bring gender relations into the core of
social theory is successful and admirable. But I strongly disagree with Walby’s
contention that there is coevolution of complex adaptive systems (inequality
regimes), but “no single unified world system or world society” (p. 89). She
justifies this by emphasizing path dependency that has led to very different
modernity projects and varieties of capitalism. But the whole global system
reappears in her analysis under the guise of a “fitness landscape” and the capacities
of some of the actants – the hegemons – to set the rules of the game. This
implies that there are some games that are far more important than others.
Analysis of the whole global system need not assume homogeneity. Indeed, systemic
interaction often produces differentiation, not homogeneity. More attention to
interaction networks and multidimensional hierarchies in a global “system of
systems” would provide a more powerful purchase for explaining the patterns of
world history as far more than one damned thing after another.
Walby is a cosmopolitan British
sociologist who mainly focusses on European integration and comparisons among
the most developed countries. This focus results in a kind of “core-centrism”
(focus on the most developed countries as the leading edges of evolution) in the
understanding of how modernity projects have contended with one another in the
past and how they may do so in the future. Walby’s main future projects are
basically the left and right strands of the European enlightenment. This
probably underestimates the role that the Global South has played in world
politics and is likely to play in the future. Global democracy is on the
agenda, and the majority of the world’s people do not live in the Global North.
Also, despite incorporating the recent sociological literature on the human
body and also Marx’s emphasis on technology, Walby follows most other social
theorists in failing to incorporate ecological processes into the explanations
of social change. There is no mention of population pressures despite the
consensus among demographers that the number of humans on Earth will continue
to increase for another several decades. This could be due to the core-centrism
mentioned above because the demographic transition to population stability has
occurred in the core, and is occuring in the non-core, but not fast enough.. There is little mention of peak oil, peak water, or
global environmental catastrophes as likely to play an important role in future
“tipping points.” I agree with Walby that the struggle between neoliberalism
and social democracy is important, and also I hope that social democracy will
win, as she does. But this will not solve all the major problems of the human
future, or even the next few decades. The coming “globalization from below”,
led by the indigenous peoples of the world, will include models of democracy,
social relations, spirituality and relations with nature that Walby has tended
to consign to “premodernity.” Her tendency is to see strong challenges coming
from the non-core as mainly unprogressive, and she is certainly right about
some of these. But there are also other developments, such as the Social Forum
process and the Pink Tide regimes in