Feeling a little critical today...

In the introduction to his book Sociology beyond Societies, Urry (2000) argued that the traditional subject matter of sociology, viz., society, needed to be reconceptualised to better reflect the complex interdependencies and mobility pathways of and between people, objects, texts, images and capital (to name only a handful of actors) around the world. Whereas in the past sociology pursued its subject matter (society/ies) from an analytical (and often implicit) starting point of individual and territorially bounded entities, sociology for the 21st century must, he argued, be built upon, and hence recognise, the “post-societal” state of the contemporary global order. The world, if it ever was (cf. Clifford, 1992), was no longer constituted by discrete, delimited and defined territorial units, e.g., countries, cities, regions or societies, but was in fact a web of flows and relations in and between constellations of people, artefacts and ideas.

Indeed, it was no longer useful to think of the world this way because it was exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to draw clearly defined geographical borders around social phenomena. Societies and social practices do not exist in a geographical vacuum, but are produced, reproduced, and influenced by forces (ideas, capital, for example) beyond their national, regional or urban borders.

Six years later, the emergence of the “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller & Urry, 2006) recognised and championed, as a scholarly turn, the primary role of mobility in the construction of the social world. This paradigmatic shift did not discount the reality or importance of enduring entities or phenomena located within certain spatial containers in the modern world, but simply considered mobility and movement as primary against a backdrop of immobility and stasis: stasis was figure, mobility was ground, flipping the traditional focus of sociology on its head. By doing so, the emergence of this alternative paradigm challenged the foundations of traditional social theory by radically calling into question its (implicit) sedentarist ontological foundations. In effect, the mobilities paradigm, by its very existence, is itself a critique of traditional social theory and research (Manderscheid, 2020).

Relatedly, under a nomadic metaphysics, sociologists can no longer treat society as a discrete object of study. Rather, they must take into account the mobility flows that run through the social world. Society, seen through the lens of a nomadic analysis, recognises the contingent ordering of the social world instead of its structure, that there are multiple and overlapping interactions/connections between people and objects, and the increasing recognition of the transnational in society as well as global governance. “In short, pretty much everything that has been at the heart of the history of sociology has changed or been made irrelevant due to an observable change in the world itself toward increasing levels of mobility” (Cresswell, 2006, p. 43).  Now, sociologists can/should pull apart societies – their traditional object of study – by focusing on mobility flows.