Opening Plenary: Monday 3rd September, 4.00-6.00
Donatella Della Porta
Biography
Donatella Della Porta is professor of sociology and director of research in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She has received a Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris and a Ph.D in political and social sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. She directs the DEMOS project (Democracy in Europe and the Mobilisation of the Society), financed under the VI FP by the EC. She also coordinated the Gruppo di Ricerca sull’Azione Collettiva in Europa (GRACE). She has conducted research also at Cornell University, Ithaca N.Y, and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. In 1990 she received a Career Development Award of the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation; in 1997 a Stipendium of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung.
Her main research interests concern social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, police and policies of public order. On these issues she has conducted investigations in Italy, France, Germany and Spain. She has directed a project of comparative research on control of public mass demonstrations in Europe and one on the police in Italy. Currently she is involved in several comparative projects on citizenship and social movements. She has collaborated to the research project TEA, EUROPUB.COM and UNEMPOL, and is coordinating the DEMOS project, all STREP projects founded by the EC, as well as a project on right-wing radicalism in Italy, Germany and the US, financed by the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Radicalization and Political Violence.
Among her books are: with Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca and Herbert Reiter, Globalization from Below, Minneapolis, The University of Minnesota Press, 2006; with Olivier Fillieule (ed.), Police et manifestants, Paris, Presses de Science Po., 2006 ; with Manuela Caiani, Quale Europa? Europeizzazione, identità e conflitti, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006; with Mario Diani, Social Movements: an introduction, 2nd edition, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006; with Sidney Tarrow (eds), Transnational Protest and Global Activism, New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; with Maurizio Cotta and Leonardo Morlino, Fondamenti di scienza politica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2004, with M. Diani, Movimenti senza protesta?, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2004, D. della Porta and H. Reiter, Polizia e protesta, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003; D. della Porta and S. Rose-Ackerman (eds.), Corrupt exchanges, Baden-Baden, Nomos Verlag, 2002; D. Della Porta, Introduzione alla scienza politica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2002; D. Della Porta, I partiti politici, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001; M. Cotta, D. della Porta, L. Morlino, Scienza politica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001; D. della Porta, M. Greco, A. Szakolczai (eds.), Identità, riconoscimento, scambio. Saggi in onore di Alessandro Pizzorno, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2000; D. della Porta, A. Vannucci, Un paese anormale, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1999; D. della Porta, H. Kriesi and D. Rucht (eds.), Social Movement in a Globalizing World, New York, Macmillan, 1999; D. della Porta, M. Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1999; D. della Porta, A. Vannucci, Corrup Exchanges, Aldine de Gruyter, 1999; D. della Porta, La politica locale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1999; D. della Porta and H. Reiter (eds.), Policing Protest. The Control of Mass Demonstration in Western Democracies, Minneapolis, The University of Minnesota Press; D. della Porta e M. Diani, I movimenti sociali, Roma, Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1997; D. della Porta, Movimenti collettivi e sistema politico in Italia, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1996; D. della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995 (Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association in 1996); D. della Porta, Y. Meny (eds.), Démocratie et corruption en Europe, Paris, La Découverte, 1995 (published also in Italian by Liguori, in Portuguise by Inquerito, and in English by Pinter); D. della Porta, A. Vannucci, Amministrazione pubblica e corruzione. Risorse, meccanismi, attori, Bologna, Il Mulino 1994; D. della Porta, Lo scambio occulto. Casi di corruzione politica in Italia, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1992.
Abstract - Conflict, citizenship and civil society: How emerging social conflicts challenge social science approaches
The lecture shall start with a discussion of the concept of "civil society" and similar ones developed in different subdisciplines. First, I shall locate the concept of civil society (as opposed to the state and the market) within normative theory of Non-Governmental Organizations (as opposed to nation-states) in international relations, and of social movements (as opposed to party and interest groups) in political sociology and comparative politics. Second, I shall make a plea for going beyond the recognition of the specific origins and location of these concepts and try to bridge them discursively in order to overcome some limitations in their actual use. With respect to the field of social movement studies, I will stress that the risk of self-referentiality and parochialism have their roots, in part, from the very success of the field (with a growing number of journals, chairs and the like) but also from internal cleavages between disciplinary, methodological and national approaches.
In a second part, departing form some results from empirical research on recent conflicts, I shall stress how their very nature poses a strong demand for cross-fertilization among different approaches. In particular, I shall suggest that the new wave of conflict that became visible with the protest against the WTO millennium round in Seattle in 1999 has shaken some dominant images of movements as institutionalized collective actors. These dominant images were reproduced thanks to the tendency in social movement research to conceptualize on the basis of specific historical manifestations of the phenomenon, and then to adapt them to the specific instances of the phenomenon to be studied as well as the methods for studying them. A challenge to those images comes from such characteristics of the new conflicts as; a cross-issue framing of "old" social questions and "new" differential rights; the trans-nationalization of the movement's organizational structures; the emergence of a global discourse and the targeting of supranational institutions; the convergence of different types of actors (social movement organizations, unions, parties, NGOs) in networks and campaigns and the presence of multiple and "tolerant" identities. In concluding this part of the lecture, I shall suggest that these elements - far from making old sociological categories useless - actually stimulate an examination of the emerging nature of social movements as actors capable of producing resources in-action.
Finally, I shall discuss how these conflicts reflect upon conceptualizations of citizenship. While bringing social rights back in, they challenge, however, the conception of national borders, that had helped define the boundaries for the recognition of those rights. At the same time, the language of rights is also much more in evidence, linking social, civic and political universal rights to the specific concerns of new constituencies.
In conclusion, I will express my hope that some developments in the social sciences might facilitate our capacity to understand the new conflicts through a cross-fertilization of different theories and methods. Among the developments that could facilitate a "sound eclecticism", I will cite, in particular, the emergence of a new generation of scholars that embody transnational backgrounds and I will focus on the impact on a variety of disciplines and sub-disciplines; from sociology to political science; from anthropology to geography and from social theory to history.
Closing Plenary: Thursday 6th September, 3.30-5.30
Nicos Mouzelis
Biography
Professor Nicos Mouzelis is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He was born in Athens, Greece in 1939 and was educated in Geneva and London. He received his Licence es Sciences Commerciales and Licence es Sociology whilst studying in Geneva in the 1960’s. He received his Ph.D in Sociology from the London School of Economics. His areas of expertise include: development of the State and Parliamentary institutions in a number of late industrialising societies in the Balkans and Latin America recent theoretical trends and their relevance for the study of Third World politics; recent trends in modern social theory; developments in Marxist and post-Marxist thought; political theory; historical sociology; and theories of the State.
His books include: Organization and Bureaucracy : An Analysis of Modern Theories, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, and Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago. (Translated into Greek, Japanese and Spanish). Second edition 1975 (hardback and paperback) includes a new, long introduction assessing recent trends in the literature. Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment, Macmillan, London, 1978. Second edition in hardback and paperback, publishes December, 1979. Translated into Greek and published by Exaantas, in 1978: Politics in the Semi-Periphery: Early Parliamentarism and Late Industrialisation in the Balkans and Latin America, Macmillan, London, 1986, (hardback and paperback). Translated into Greek and published by Themelio, 1986: Post Marxist Alternatives: The Construction of Social Orders, London: Macmillan, 1990. Translated into Greek and published by Themelio, 1993: Back to Sociological Theory: The Construction of Social Orders, London: Macmillan, 1992: Nationalism in Late Development (in Greek), Athens: Themelio, 1994. Sociological Theory: What went Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies, London: Routledge, 1995 and Bridges between Modern and Late/Post-Modern Theorizing (Forthcoming).
Abstract - Civil Society and Citizenship In Early and Late Modernity
- a) From a sociological point of view, modernity can be regarded as the type of social organization that became dominant in Europe after the English industrial and the French revolution.. It entailed the decline of segmental localism and the large-scale mobilisation/inclusion of the population into the "imaginary community" of the nation state. This led to the concentration of not only the means of production but also the means of domination and persuasion on the national centre; as well as to the top-down differentiation of institutional spheres (economic, political, social, cultural), each portraying (at least potentially) its own values, logic and historical trajectory.
- b) In late (globalised) modernity we see similar processes occurring on a planetary level.
- c) An attempt will be made to see how civil society and citizenship rights are linked to the major features of early and late modernity.
Margaret Archer
Biography
Margaret S. Archer completed her postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. She is currently based at the University of Warwick where she is professor of Sociology. Her main research interest is in social theory and she is internationally recognised for her seminal work on critical realism and the structure agency debate.
Margaret Archer’s most important publications include; Culture and Agency: the Place of Culture in Social Theory (Sage 1979), Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Being Human (Cambridge University press, 2000) Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Making our Way through the World: Mediating between Structure and Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Professor Archer is also author of The Sociology of Educational Expansion: Take-off, Growth and Inflation in Educational Systems (Sage, 1982) and Joint author with A. Collier and D. Porpora of Transcendence: Critical Realism and God. She has edited many important titles including: Defending Objectivity: Essays in Honour of Andrew Collier (Routledge, 2004) with William Outhwaite; Rationale Choice Theory: Resisting Colonisation (Routledge, 2003) with J Tritter and Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Routledge, 1998).
At the 12th World Congress of Sociology (1986), Professor Archer was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) a position which she retained until 1990. She is a founder member of both the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences. She is a Trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism and a former editor of Current Sociology. She currently holds an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant for a project entitled, The Internal Conversation: Mediating between Structure and agency.
Abstract - From High Modernity to Nascent Globalisation: The New Reflexive Imperative and transformations of Civil Society
Reflexivity - the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa - is a prerequisite for all forms of social life. Even in traditional societies, no culture was so consistent in its composition and no structure was so coherent in its organisation to constitute a relatively enduring form of life without constant resort to the reflexively governed action of its members: to adopt social expectations as their own, to improvise through unscripted contingencies and to elaborate upon tradition itself to cover novel eventualities, occurrent even in morphostatic social formations. Nevertheless, reflexivity was limited both in extent and in kind by 'contextual continuity'.
The progressive effect of modernity, as morphogenesis began its unsynchronised emergence in structure and culture, was one that entailed increased reflexivity: a growth in its scope (the proportion of those practising it intensively) and its reach (the range of issues addressed reflexively). However, the heterogeneous impact of 'contextual discontinuity' limited the reflexive response to minorities (as in the great Age of Ideology), its slowness enabled new forms of routinsation to become entrenched (the urban working class community), and its results were dependent upon the collective mobilisation of sectional interests. In sum, these reflexive responses were bound to the lineaments of modernity because they were exclusively concerned with incorporation into existing political and civil society through seeking its institutional elaboration.
Within Europe, nascent globalisation spells the generalisation of 'contextual discontinuity' to all. This results from the tendential effect of morphogenesis, for variety to stimulate yet greater variety, when untrammelled by counter-balancing morphostatic processes - because it reshapes the situations confronted by all. Hence, for the first time in human history, the reflexive imperative applies to all. As decisive structures become located trans-nationally and the cultural system extends a novel situational logic of opportunity, what is to be done and what represents the good life has to be answered by everyone. Reflexively, the (enlarging) European population confronts 'contextual discontinuity' and must deliberate about matching their skills and concerns to new but complementary outlets, to establish their own non-traditional modi vivendi.
However, modes of reflexivity result from a combination of 'social context + personal concerns', as do their consequences. Structurally induced 'contextual discontinuity' and the cultural 'logic of opportunity' may fuel reflexive deliberations based upon instrumental rationality for many, but, equally, they foster meta-reflexive Wertrational concerns, responsible not only for European social movements but also for a transformed civil society in which the 'Third Sector' becomes a serious player. Individual life worlds are no longer amenable to orchestration by 'habitus', but neither is public life at the capricious mercy of individualised serial self-reinvention.
Since reflexivity is held to mediate between structure and agency, its own transformation is re-defining and re-structuring conflict, citizenship and civil society - as the novel reflexive responses to the novelty of 'morphogenesis unbound'.