The Future of Society

Hélène Cherrier (University of Sydney)

Qualitative Market Research

ISSN: 1352-2752

Article publication date: 23 January 2007

244

Keywords

Citation

Cherrier, H. (2007), "The Future of Society", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 109-110. https://doi.org/10.1108/13522750710720431

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Is there a society? And if there is, what is it that we call society? To these questions the structural functionalistics and system theorists respond that society exists as a “conscience collective” or a “mechanical solidarity.” For them society is a rational intentional and economic entity from which social processes derive. It is the state of society that determines individual well‐being and conflicts. For example, the insufficient degree of social integration and regulation in society can be considered as an independent variable to explain social phenomena such as high crime rate or suicide. In opposition to the structuralist view the voluntaristic idealists respond that society does not exist. It is only the people who are real; the structures are in some sense fictional. For them any social structures or wholes are merely representations. Society is an illusion; an imagined entity that cannot exist as an independent organism. If used, the term society or sociation is purely a conceptual and discursive system. Therefore, to understand the social, one needs to use a discursive constructivist approach. The duality between society as a concrete and autonomous entity versus society as a social representation has long been debated in the arena of sociology. Such debate has had a vigorous impact in marketing research, notably in forging the distinction between positivism and interpretivism in consumer research.

In his book The Future of Society William Outhwaite intends to provide a third view on society. For him the concept of society needs to include both a voluntaristic idealism with respect to our understanding of social structure and a structural determinism with respect to our understanding of people.

Outhwaite introduces the book with the origin of the term “society.” With a quick look at ancient Chinese and Greek thoughts and further elaborations on the views of Aristotle, Montesquieu, Durkheim and Weber, Outhwaite emphasizes the divergent and often contradictory views on society. This first chapter ends with a question on the contemporary relevance of society: can society exist in a world where globalization processes dissolve the nation‐state and where neo‐liberals and postmodern theorists proclaim that social institutions are constructed realities?

The discussion on the relevance of society opens with Margaret Thatcher's famous claim in 1987: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” The quotation clearly links the neo‐liberal perspective to the dissolution or denial of society. Inspired by rational choice theory and individualism, the neo‐liberals reduce any social structures to the actions and interactions of people. This perspective ultimately positions society as either a collectivist illusion or an undesirable past in forms of extinction. Further critiques on the concept of society materialize with postmodern and globalization theories. For the radical postmodernists, society has never existed. The social is simply a comedy orchestrated around symbols, magic and irrationality. All that exist are the actions and interactions of people. Similarly, globalization theorists argue that the concept of society is obsolete. The world‐level political institutions and the diffusion of virtual networks have dissolved society into global networks.

Yet Outhwaite is not satisfied with the neo‐liberal, postmodern or empirical critiques of society. For him globalization and virtualization processes have not and do not erase society. Society is still an existing structure. With the example of Europe Outhwaite shows that the concept of society expands beyond the traditional nation/state framework. Europe and the idea of a European society exist as the members of the European union share a common history and all sustain the will to be included under a unique structure. This structure allows each country to gradually form a European identity(ies). With this argument we learn that society is both a background on which social relations operate and a product of cultural processes. As a pre‐existing background society provides the necessary conditions for any human activities; and as a product of cultural process society is reproduced and transformed by human actions. Therefore, any human action is enabled and constrained by society. These human actions in turn reproduce and develop the structures of society. As such, society is neither a rigid structure imposed upon individuals – the error of the structural functionalists, nor a pure product of individuals – the error of the voluntarists.

It is on this closing debate that Outhwaite's work appears most interesting to qualitative marketing researchers. Reading Outhwaite arguments (in reference to Bhaskar's critical realism), we learn that social structures exist; that they are both the conditions of and the outcomes of human actions. This insight reconciles the long standing society/structure – society/agency dualism. It recognizes the existence of human agency alongside a socially constructed framework. With this perspective in mind we can consider using qualitative research to identify the generative structures and mechanisms through the examination of social phenomena. This approach responds to the call for exploring consumer understanding, incorporation and negotiation of history and temporality (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). Furthermore, Outhwaite's perspective (again following Bhaskar) is a useful perspective capable of solving some of the criticisms to qualitative research such as ontological ambiguity and methodological transgression (Goulding, 1998).

References

Arnould, E.J. and Thompson, C.J. (2005), “Consumer culture theory (cct): twenty years of research”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 31, pp. 86882.

Goulding, C. (1998), “Consumer research, interpretive paradigms and methodological ambiguities”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 33 Nos 9/10, pp. 85973.

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