- Why Bother ? -
The pictures that you see on this page reflect the contradictions of our times, we have never been richer, yet, many of us have never been poorer. As you have probably heard through the media, the stock market has been doing very well these last years, making some corporations richer than certain countries and creating large numbers of very wealthy people. At the same time, poverty and misery are widespread throughout the world and for even larger numbers of people, things have gotten worse since we have entered the information age.
Poverty is such a pervasive phenomenon that it is impossible to just dismiss the issue by hiding behind moralizing self-serving characterizations (the rich are rich because they worked hard, the poor are poor because they are lazy). Poverty and misery are structural conditions that have to be explained structurally or, as C.W. Mills would have put it, as public issues and not personal troubles. Here is how he defines these:
"Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu' nd 'the public issues of social structure'. This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination (...)
Troubles occur within the character of an individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and those limited areas of social life of which he is directly or personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of his immediate milieu. (...)
Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter."
Mills, C.W. (1966), The Sociological Imagination, NY: Oxford University Press, p.8.
This programmatic statement is still true today; it may well have gained a new strength in light of globalization: there is no way we can consider ourselves in isolation from the rest of the world. We are connected to many other countries and people in diverse ways, through economic exchanges, migrations, financial transactions and political relations. More and more, issues that we might mistakenly identify as personal troubles or country-specific conditions, have to be re-conceptualized in global terms.
At the same time, in terms of wealth, the main trend is toward an increasing polarization and the growth of the Fourth World, as defined by sociologist Manuel Castells:
"The Fourth World has emerged, made up of multiple black holes of social exclusion throughout the planet. The Fourth World comprises large areas of the globe, such as much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and impoverished Latin America and Asia. But it is also present in literally every country, and every city, in this new geography of social exclusion. It is formed of American inner-city ghettos. Spanish enclaves of mass youth unemployment, French banlieues warehousing North Africans, Japanese Yoseba quarters, and Asian mega-cities' shanty-towns. And it is populated by millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons.They are the majority in some areas, the minority in others, and a tiny minority in a few privileged contexts. But, everywhere, they are growing in number, and increasing in visibility, as the selective triage of informational capi!
talism, and the political breakdown of the welfare state, intensify social exclusion. In the current historical context, the rise of the Fourth World is inseparable from the rise of informational global capitalism."
Castells, M. (2000), End of Millenium, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, p.168.
It is the formidable and depressing task of sociology to provide an understanding of the logic of globalization or the logic of informational capitalism in all its complexity and implications (economic, social, political and personal). Sociology will show you how global informational capitalism has consequences for you lives and the choices you will have to make in future. Sociology illuminates the links between "history and biography and the relations between the two within society" (Mills, 1966, p.6).
Department of Sociology, Liberal Arts Division, IC 3098 (630) 942 2047
monnier@cdnet.cod.edu
Updated 26 March 2001
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