Sociology. Anthony Giddens
their relative merits.
For a collection of original readings on sociological theories, see the accompanying Sociology: Introductory Readings (4th edn, Cambridge: Polity, 2021).
Additional information and support for this book at Polity: www.politybooks.com/giddens9
Sociologists: Dead and Very Much Alive – excellent resources on a range of sociological theorists: www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/Sociologists.html
The Feminist Theory Website – feminist theories and perspectives from academics based at Virginia Tech University: www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html
Phenomenology Online – phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists: www.phenomenologyonline.com/
A series of websites devoted to the work of some contemporary theorists: Jean Baudrillard: https://baudrillardstudies.com/ Zygmunt Bauman: https://baumaninstitute.leeds.ac.uk/ Judith Butler: https://bigthink.com/u/judithbutler Ulrich Beck: https://webarchiv-ulrich-beck.soziologie.uni-muenchen.de/en/ Norbert Elias: http://norbert-elias.com/en/ Michel Foucault: https://michel-foucault.com/ Anthony Giddens: www.thoughtco.com/anthony-giddens-3026484 Erving Goffman: http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/goffmanbio.html
CONTENTS
1 Early societies and civilizations
4 The transformation of societies
5 Modernity and industrial technology
6 Classifying the world’s societies
10 Structuring the globalization debate
11 Consequences of globalization
12 How to govern a global society?
This image of Europe and North Africa at night, taken from space, is one illustration of the global extent of human settlement.
Human beings have existed on Earth for less than half a million years. If we think of this entire span of human existence as a 24-hour day, agriculture came into existence at 11.56 p.m. – four minutes to midnight – and civilizations at 11.57 p.m. The development of industrial societies began only at 11.59 and 30 seconds, and yet, in those last 30 seconds of the human day, there has been more rapid population growth and socio-environmental change than in all the ages leading to it.
As we will see throughout this chapter, the period sociologists call modernity brought large-scale societies into closer contact with each other in a variety of ways, from systematic trade and long-range economic exchange, international political agreements and global tourism to electronic communications and large-scale migration. In all these ways, people have become more interconnected, interdependent and geographically mobile than ever before (Sheller and Urry 2004; Urry 2007).
Migration and the research agenda on ‘mobilities’ in sociology is discussed in chapter 8, ‘Race, Ethnicity and Migration’.
The sheer pace of change in the modern era is evident in rates of human population growth. Livi Bacci (2012) studies the global population and its long-term growth. From an estimated 6 million people in 10,000 BCE, the global population rose to more than 6 billion by 2000 and reached 7.7 billion by 2019. However, the pace of population growth has been uneven, accelerating from around 1750, the start of the industrial period. The most striking demographic aspect here is the shrinking ‘doubling time’ of the global population. In 1750, it took 1,000 years for the population to double in size. By 1950 this was down to 118 years, and in 2000 it was a mere forty years. Livi Bacci (2017: 26) calculates that, at this rate, the world’s population will reach 11 billion by the end of the century, which, the UN (UN DESA 2019c: 5–6) estimates,