John Urry is one of Britain's foremost sociologists and in this book he concerned to correct the tendency of his discipline to treat the nation-state as the "natural" object of inquiry. Thus, he works to construct a sociology appropriate for global study. In this sense the book is a major contribution to the sociological literature on globalization, and can be considered alongside the best that the field has yet produced.

Urry turns his attention to the sociology of movement: of travel, communication, and technology. More than this he argues convincingly for the constitutive nature of movement in social structures and social transformation. For Urry, the study of globalization is the study of mobilities: "mobilities, both as metaphor and process, are at the heart of social life and should be central to sociological analysis" (p. 49). Urry rightly points to the ways in which sociology has ignored the mobilities of people. He also makes the interesting point that by and large sociology has not been interested in their automobility either, failing to register the important socializing impact of cars.

The traditional notion of civil society is used extensively by Urry but not subjected to any significant scrutiny. This is a weakness as the idea of civil society, which here is given a rather liberal interpretation - as the realm of possibility for political change, and that which escapes control by the state - can also be interpreted as a sphere in which social control is exercised, in other words, a technology of government. One would have also thought that civil society would have also been one of the sociological concepts most blind to the mobilities which Urry holds to be so important. That aside, the book achieves a high degree of success in reorientating sociology around a new set of concerns. It facilitates a new approach to studying more traditional sociological interests, and at the same time, provides the basis for a much more global form of sociological analysis.

buy here from amazon.co.uk

back to books reviewed