In social sciences the concept of space has been widely used to address capitalism, modernization, and globalization via examination of political, material, legal, and urban space that has remained overly theoretical in its insufficient treatment of empirical record and underdeveloped conceptualization of concrete historical situations (Arnade et al. 2002: 515). In the process of bringing space into the center of theoretical attention the causal relations deriving from material, social, cultural, and economic dimensions of space become assembled in spatial relations as generative structure of historical change. Urban spaces have to be recuperated from the historiographic reification, causal insignificance, and subsumption into social networks without, however, breaking with existing scholarly traditions that sharing an interdisciplinary momentum increasingly take recourse to space from more empirically grounded positions (Boone and Stabel 2001; Hanawalt and Kobialka 2000). During late capitalism the notion of space underlies the accounts of formation and disintegration of modern metropolitan centers, of rising preeminence of global spaces, and of spatial erasures, resistances, and contraditions that owe most in their theoretical underpinnings to Lefebvre ([1971] 1991) whose Marxist theorization of relations between space and capitalism has made greatest explanatory contribution.
According to Lefebvre, the transition to modernity has been conjoint with subordination of space to the needs of capitalist reproduction that presupposes, mobilizes, and expresses spatial relations participating in legitimation, regulation, and materialization of action that in the recoursive process of structural functionalist production of space allows for analytical differentiation of spatial practices, representations of space, and representational or lived space (Gottdiener 1985). Lefebvre offers a point of critical reflection on diverse sociological traditions of registering the effects of transition to modernity in the urban space that for German sociology (Tonnies [1887] 1963) was accompanied with institutionalization of abstract and complex interpersonal ties, for Chicago school of sociology (Park 1926, 1969) made human interaction into site of social reproduction, and for ethnographic methodology (Rothenberg and McDonogh 1993) has meant reorganization of affective relations within the structure of urban grid. From Lefebvre's perspective, conventional treatments of space conceive of it as passively preexisting container that due to lack of theoretical attention has been variously conflated with geographical place, sphere of activity, and mental abstraction overlooking the actively generative aspects of space as its rendering in social sciences as a product rather than agent of capitalist production has evidenced (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 15).
Lerebvre's reading of capitalism allocates to space the status of an independent factor of production equally under control of property relations as other productive forces are. In an attempt to restore historicity to the category of space, Lefebvre has put the transition from premodern to modern to postmodern Western city at the center of his theoretical attention to the formation of abstract space under capitalism as a regime of accumulation that produces spaces corresponding to each of each stages of development (Arnade et al. 2002: 519) so that mechant capitalism and industrial revolution had transformed urban space in its material, discursive, and practical dimensions (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 265, 271). Lefebvre's historical analyses have contextualized modernity's rupture with traditional societies in terms that qualified the claims of national formation to diminish the importance of place in favor of recovery of the continued relevance of spatial relations (Agnew 1989). In North America the decline of public space offers one of the corroborations of Lefebvre's theorization with concrete examples of the independent effects that urban sprawl, shopping malls, advanced communications, and commericialized entertainment facilities have on the positions different groups can claim within the current mode of capitalist accumulation (Leach 1999; Sorkin 1992) as it generates its characteristic spatial, emotional, and social structures.
Sennett in historically superimposing classical Athens and contemporary New York shows that modern urban life is defined by subjective estrangement as a function of "interaction between the individual, the community, and the built environment" (Arnade et al. 2002: 520) that follows the dynamics of modernization in spatially recreating the grid of interrelations reflecting in their form the functional integration of disconnected communities rather than structurally indicating the connection between the individual and society experientially exposed to each other (Sennett 1990, 1994). Sennett's emphasis on culture brings him into proximity with postmodern theorization of space that treats it as incommensurable with time ruling out thereby the historical analysis of the spatial relations on the grounds of ontologically antithetical status of the two categories (Foucault 1980: 149) that in their postmodern separation invite the charges of meta-narrative, linear, positivist, and objectivist essentialisms. At the intersection of cultural geography and critical theory, Soja (1989, 1996) and Dear (2000) develop their heuristics of spatiality as part of the programme of the Los Angeles school of urban studies reportedly aiming to bring the historical corrective to the urban geography of late capitalist postmodernism (Schneider 2001) in clear departure from the Chicago school functionalist interpretation of structures of metropolitan life.
As opposed to epistemologically privileging antiquity as a point of comparison for the urban studies of modern cities, Lefebvre's suggestion to recognize medieval cities of Western Europe as more immediate predecessors to modernization shifts the ground of its understanding from the traditional subjects of humanities, as does Sennett, towards the actual urban spaces where commercial, industrial, and social preconditions for modernity were forged (Arnade et al. 2002: 522). Though Lefebvre pays significant attention to the place of cities in medieval and early modern history it does not come at the expense of the blurring of such distinct theoretical aspects of space as historical production of space, conceptual multivalency of space, and social construction of space so that its actual and imagined experience, its material and discursive reification, and its physical and ideological perception fall into functionally differentiated structures that the concept of space refers to. The production of space receives its historical significance in comparative perspective that follows conceptual typology of spaces rather than historical chronology so that such kinds of space as "legal space, ritual space, or mental space" (Arnade et al. 2002: 523) allow for theoretical superimposition and differentiation of reconstructed urban spaces.
Instances of construction and realization of legal space as a consequence of specific claims-making practices expose both the indeterminacy of the space-centric interpretations and the power of space to make possible and generate realities of politics and ideology (Arnade et al. 2002: 523). In history of European cities property rights, as in London (Harding 2002), reveal complex course of development where any claim to private ownership has hardly implied clear-cut definition of rights, inviolability of their exercise, or freedom from their contestation in the legal space of cities where conflicts, overlapping jurisdictions, and unstable demarcation are commonplace rather than exceptional while involving strategic action of organization, distribution, and positioning of legal claims within cultural, social, and physical dimensions of urban space. Inverse of the private property in definition, the public domain has likewise been shapeless, illimitable, and insufficient to serve as a legal basis to claims on space in the strict sense to the extent that unpredictability and redefinition has been characteristic of pre-modern forms of urban governance having led only under the economic pressure of demographic crisis to more unambiguous definition of rights, applications, and ownership (Camille 2000; Harding 2002).
The transition from contested jurisdictions of medieval cities towads discursive production of urban space took place in the course of competition among institutions and interest groups seeking authority over control of residents, legal titles, and physical space (Attreed 2002) that leading to protracted legal adjudication have called to life strategies of narrative organization of competing claims to rights, privileges, and powers elaborated in the "process of negotiation, dispute, compromise, challenge, and counter-challenge" (Arnade 2002: 524). The initial conceptualization by historians and anthropologists of separate political, legal, and ritual spaces, in line with functional differentiation approach, (Davis 1975; Hunt 1989) is complemented by evidence that that these spaces interpenetrate each other as social actors, practices, and relations generated by them draw on the spaces of their action to acquire legitimacy, power, and resonance (Eastabrook 2002; Boone 2002). To the extent that kinds of space correspond to the operation effects of social systems, the political space of early modern England has been forged in the struggles over ritual spaces that actors representing the governmental, religious, and monarchical systems fought during the civil war (Estabrook 2002) as the mutual effects of cities, politics, religion and law have contributed to an interpenetrating redefinition of the corresponding institutions.
Over the course of seventeenth century the struggle against the subordination of religion to political authority in England has led to an increase in instutitutional autonomy of both systems at the price of their systemic interpenetration since even though secular authority over sacred spaces has been reasserted both systems became more functionally differentiated no longer sharing rights over religious spaces and systemically integrated at the same time through recognition of exclusive rights of political authority in sacred spaces (Estabrook 2002). Historiographical applications of the notion space clearly show its limitations for neither can it adequately account for social change nor supply explanatory mechanisms for strategic action since the processes of production of space undergo perfomative reduction to collective struggles over rights the power over exercise of which is sufficiently explained as the power to perform rights in the corresponding spaces, as in the case of relationships between power and ritual that appear to exclude spaces from their reproduction as mutually constitutive performances (Eastabrook 2002). Similarly, the explanation of the struggles over urban spaces of medieval Low Countries has to make micro corrective to Pirenne's (1914) imposition of macro dynamics of class analysis upon economic relations to the effect that economy as macro environment for action cannot produce impact on the micro level of individual and group action before its differentiation from other medieval systems takes place (Boone 2002) as is recognized by Lefebvre ([1971] 1991: 263-275) as he refers to the mediating role of such cities as Ghent in the production of economic space.
The contestation of ritual spaces in medieval Low Countries was part of the struggles among competing citizen groups to accumulate power to claim existing spaces for communal use, to demolish physical spaces of rival groups, and to construct architectural structures symbolizing communal space with significant economic benefits accruing to the winning party under the conditions of undifferentiated relations between capital and labor (Boone 2002). Though political space underlies the transition to guild rule as constitutive mechanism of legitimation of the political power of artisanal corporations (Boone 2002) the mirco effects of space are insufficient to explain the departure from the class struggle terminology that historical discourse has to make to account for the institutional continuity of political, ritual, and economic spaces across social change (Arnade 2002: 526-527). As scenes for struggles over dukal authority in Burgundy the urban spaces of the medieval cities are subordinate to the strategies for gaining sovereign power by the seizures into possession, symbolic appropriations, and demolitions of selectively chosen sites (Boone 2002). Reducing action to performance (Arnade 2002: 527) historiography neverless connects banner marches, kneeling ceremonies, royal inaugurations, public beheadings, church burnings, and charter destructions with the functionally differentiated structure of Lefebvre's abstract, concrete, and representational spaces as the macro environments reciprocally dependent on individual and collective action.
Without recognizing historical change as an outcome of the interplay between social action and its systemic environments Lefebvre's concept of space cannot theoretically restrict or specify the process of discursive production of distinctly legal, ritual, or material spaces on its own (Andrade 2002: 527) all the more so since the basic classification of spaces by Lefebvre into imagined, practiced, and representational also folds into them the capabilities to confer social power. The characterization of early modern Catholicism in England as feminine can be seen as an outcome of individual, discursive, and institutional action by its such female patrons as Queen Henrietta Maria more dependent for success of their activity on social systems of religion, family, and royalty than on gendered spaces or classifications (Dolan 2002). Likewise, the macro environment of histility to Catholicism in periods of its disestablishment had micro-effect of restricting its practice to private households causing thereby its association with women-related spaces. Consequently, the historiographical discourse that takes spaces into narrow focus of discourse on production of spaces not only fails to explain causal mechanisms behind historical change but also offers tautological explanation for constitution of spaces in their rhetorical construction (Dolan 2002) the latter being from the structural functional perspective only an aspect of strategic action.
Consistent application of the notion of mental space to history of medieval Christianity shows the contradiction between its origins in Greek and Roman cities and its anti-urban ethos, between its polarization into aristocratic and monastic strategies of institutional action, and between Roman empire as an historical macro environment for the Church and Christendom as an otherworldly community (Milis 2002) that cannot be explained by a process of production of space. Though the Christian discourse on urban life exhibits significant continuity from antiquity to the middle ages, informs physical constutition of religious spaces, and consistently structures monastic and canonical texts (Milis 2002) there are no explanatory relations among spaces as conceptualized by Lefebvre beyond self-constituted agency of their production or developmental factors that analysis of spaces could uncover (Andrade 2002: 529). As an example of representational space, medieval romances and didactic literature in Low Countries do not constitute an autonomous space where acts of imagination would be unaffected by the commercial, pragmatic, and enterpreneurial urban influences that have restructured the literary canon of artistocracy in order to redraw the distinctions between the city and the countryside (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 268) according to the emerging language of capitalism (Pleij 2002).
The discursive and rhetorical reconstruction of the representational space that was constituted in the medieval cities (Pleij 2002) draws its reality from the struggles between burghers and peasants, between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, between commerce and argiculture, and between social norms of traditional respectability and "energy, intelligence, and wit" (Andrade 2002: 530) of nascent capitalism. Consequently, the methodological implications of the general theory of action, structural functionalist approach, and microsociological investigation of the role of cities in the processes constitutive of transformations of capitalism have to rest on the substantive, comparative, and theoretical studies of urban space. Due to the special role that the cities of medieval and Renaissance Europe play in sociological theories of modernity, attention to the comparative urban studies also provides historical basis for contemporary theorization of the changing "nature of urban space" (Arnade 2002: 530), especially given the case that late medieval cities in Northern Europe were capable of challenging stongest hierarchies of power of the period (Ennen 1979). In the history of the Middle Ages the effective definition of the city draws its boundary in the space where the city walls separated it from the rest of the world thereby performing defensive, legal, and social functions as urban rights only applied within so demarkated urban space, as civil equality of cities sharply contrasted with feudal system in force in the countryside, and as city-dwellers had constitutionally guaranteed political autonomy and self-governance thus providing the blueprint for the Western social and political modernization (Ennen 1972; 1979).
Not merely the sites of introduction of innovative political or legal practices, the uniqueness of the medieval cities consisted in high geographical and social mobility of their populations, in widely ranging scale of social differntiation based on economic hierarchy, social dividions, and cultural practices, in exclusive hosting of nascent industrial production and specialized occupations, in serving as nodes of world-spanning mechant networks pursuant of mercantilist trade policies, and in regulating economic exchange within city and with countryside around urban markets (Arnade 2002: 531). The late medieval city has produced its urban space as a special macro environment for action taking its preconditions from the wall defenses, multiplicity of consumer and producer services, and proximity of locations dedicated to production, commerce, exchange, politics, sociability and culture (de Certeau 1988: Kobialka 2000). However, the tradition of representing late medieval cities as sites with distinctive spatial qualities dates from the mid-nineteenth century when Marx (1978) and von Gierke ([1868-1913] 1954) have sweepingly concluded that cities had higher historical significance than countryside for the processes of capital accumulation, bolstering market relations, and creating a more egalitarian sociopolitical community (DuPlessis 1997).
Most lasting historiographical impact on theories of cities is Pirenne's (1939; 1951) explanatory structure of urban social, political, and cultural life taking recourse to centrality of marketplace, distinct privileges, and universal urban rights (Prevenier 1986; Van Uytven 1986; Verhulst 1986, 1999) and Weber's (1968: 1212-1372) casting of late medieval Northern European cities into an ideal type of Western cities as bounded, corporative, and self-governing spaces (Callies 1973; Nippel 1991; Schreiner 1986). Urban studies not only follow in the steps of the historical scholarship bearing the stamp of the penchant for theoretical reflection and for associating markets with progress prevalent in the nineteenth century, but also shares the strategies of representation of cities current as early as thirteenth century to defend special urban rights of citizens by constructing urban space of their republics as orderly, idependent, and civic enclosures surrounded by socially, culturally, and politiclly alien territory (Arnade 2002: 533). Reflecting powerful legal and political interests, the representational strategies of cities gave rise to collective action that took form of such spatial practices as construction projects, legislative acts, and documentary records aimed at making urban distinction into reality of physical space, cultural production, and abstract classifications designed to separate cities from the hinterland (Pleij 2002).
Within complex geographies of urban jurisdictions, detailed legal regulation drew many boundaries restricting access to citizenship, guilds and crafts, property ownership, and residence in order to create the space where cities enjoyed self-governance, collected idependent taxation, enforced market rules, maintained police force, and provided freedom from feudal obligations (Bodin 1954, 1955; Ennen 1955; Postan 1965). Rather than functionally differentiating itself into an abstract space for decontextualized social action, as Lefebvre would have it, the actual urban space has always been part of the relations of structural functional integration of the urban community with the lordly manors, the suburbs, and the countryside as economic, demographic, commercial, and financial flows constantly connected cities to their outside (Britnell 1996; Nicholas 1971; Reynolds 1984; Stabel 1997). On the general level of preconditions for action cities have been integrated with the country by kindred religious beliefs and organizations (Rubin 1992), by mutual support ties between urban liberties and territorial sovereigns (Chevalier 1982), and by strategic alliances and struggles playing out in a macro environment inclusive of both fedual and urban spaces alike (Mundy and Riesenberg 1958), which is revealed by attention to individual and collective action rather than to abstract, physical or representational spaces alone.
Structural functional interpenetration between cities and the country does not equal integration between the two though since it is not their aggregate qualities as concentrations of people but their systemic characteristics that made cities into important nodes of relations with feudal countryside, into novel forms of social organization, and into focal points of struggles ranging far outside the urban limits. The integration of social practices, representations of space, and social spaces into comprehensive conceptual framework has to proceed by paying attention to discursive, material, and social conditions of action within a macro environment of diverse systems that exhibit development, interpenetration, autonomy, and effectivity so that a particular urban space can be contextualized as "a site of radical experimentation, distinct powers, and privileged actors" (Arnade 2002: 535). Such attempts at understanding of urban space in structural functionalist and action theoretical perspective can hope to bridge the gap of incommensurability with social, cultural, and economic urban studies of Italian Renaissance (Muir 1995) as well as with traditions of institutional and social historical studies of Northern Europe (Arnade 2002: 535-536).
For the study of modernity and urban space Burckhardt's ([1860] 1990) work on Renaissance Italy has been a path-breaking account of transition from medieval to modern governmentality replacing parochial allegiances with wider civic collectivities that gave rise to economic, political, and cultural modernization (Baron 1955, 1966; Becker 1981; Goldswaite 1980, 1993). However, overly sharp drawing of distinction between medieval and early modern cities as macro environments offering distinctively different conditions for action overlooks similarities in the urban spaces of the cities characteristic of each mode of governmentality, as formulated by Weber and Pirenne, so that spaces ideal typically representative of modernity can be equally likely found both in Renaissance Italy and Northern Europe (Andrade 2002: 537). The process of decoupling of conceptualization of modernity from decontextualized theorization of space took inspiration from detailed archival research of extended time periods aided by sociological and athropological theories dealing with "how people experienced their cities, formed alliances, established social identities, and claimed authority" (Arnade 2002: 537). Consequently, the claim to the exceptional importance of Renaissance Italy to the process of transition to modernity has been debunked in favor of reasserting the role of urban contexts, networks, and identities in individual and collective action giving no modernizing function to a European urban space (Brucker 1969).
Neither in terms of time nor space do the cities of Renaissance Italy distinguish themselves with respect to modernization as overlapping, situated networks have been overwhelmingly constitutive of their action environments (Hughes 1977; Klapisch-Zuber [1976] 1985), as usage of urban space has been subordinated to imperatives of individual or collective action geared to gaining control over it (Muir 1981, 1989; Trexler 1980), and as collective actors maximized effeciency of cities' exploitation, rationally divided them into zones of influence, and reciprocally reinforced their symbolic and political power (Guidoni 1977). Consequently the association of cities of Renaissance Italy with modernity has increasingly come into question (Vitale and Scafoglio 1995) as the cessation of long-standing social, cultural, and ritual practices receives its appropriate recognition as crucial factor in the process of modernization (Crouzet-Pavan 1992; Davis 1994) that in the form of obviation of previous spatial hierarchies and local networks took from the medieval period until the modern developments of nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fulfill (Burkhardt 1958; White 1973). The predominant historical understanding of the Renaissance Italian city tends to concur with the theory of structural functional interpenetration as their urban spaces have been particularly instrumental to the cultural, social, and political achievements of the epoch rather than merely integrated into an overarching dynamics of modernization as rupture with medieval structure and functions of cities so that comparable processes of systemic interpenetration can be found in late medieval Northern Europe where urban law attests to both growth in autonomy and interdependence of its urban spaces (Harding 2002; Dolan 2002).
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, urban space played important role in the struggles among urban communities and feudal hierarchies for control of cities the possession and deployment of whose symbols came into being only after protracted conflict over urbanity, privileges, and related claims. Spaces carried memory of previous struggles in the legitimacy they confurred on their occupants, in the meanings that on-going negotiations of power added, and in the power relations stemming from monopoly on urban spaces and symbols. Spaces reveal themselves as embedded into macro environments as actions are since historical research of particular places shows them to be "the result of specific contests, specific institutional changes, and specific responses to chance occurences" (Arnade 2002: 540). The historical research building upon Lefebvre's generalization of the production of space in the medieval cities of Europe fills the concepts of representational space, spatial practices, and physical space with documentary detail that replaces the emphasis on participation of space in functional differentiation with the concern with "historical change, causality, and agency" (Arnade et al. 2002: 540).
Growing attention to space follows the tendency to provide context-specific micro corrective to largely macro oriented discourses to account for reciprocities between macro and micro processes, to describe structural change in terms appropriate to its scale and scope rather than personify or de-historicize it as Renaissance city or urban democracy would, and to make analytical transition from case studies towards generative structures of historical processes that cities are embedded in. Departing from utilitarian, teleological, and deterministic assumptions, spatial history foregrounds "power, intentionality, and agency" (Arnade et al. 2002: 541) as it reflects the actions of individual actors, weighs the historical causes of experience, traces the structural impact of institutions, interprets the collective meaning of change, contextualizes the legal practices, maps geographies of the economic exchange, and draws the pictures of military confrontations. The process of production of space articulates the structure of its functional differentiation according to the specificities fully belonging to places where it becomes physically, discursively, and experientially visible as an abstract category born of reconstruction of the structure of relations that ground particular places in architectures, infrastructures, communications, distinctions, functions, and relations.
Mental, material, and practical aspects of space do not pass into each other unmediated (Milis 2002; Pleij 2002) but belong to struggles over spaces, to appropriations of space, to collective confrontations, to regulation of practices, to competing representations, and to emergent meanings and expectations (Dolan 2002). Introduction of spatial production and urban space into the scholarship of cities definitely opens new avenues of inquiry into how economic, gender, and public relations find reflection in the legal, literary, and other kinds of record of the collective and individual agents bearing an imprint on urban history. Without displacing the importance of economic relations, the formative influence of economy on cities has to be complemented with attention to space-specific accounts of urban development (Boone 2002). Never alien to cities of medieval Europe, markets were subjects of urban regulation by physical space of architecture, abstract space of legal discourse, and lived space of political decisions so that urban marketplaces were functionally differentiated by traded goods, transaction type, and traders' identity within the structure of personal mediation of market relations, of micro equilibration of supply and demand, and of particularized oversight of economy geared to everyday life and local industry (Arnade et al. 2002: 543).
Marketplaces have also interpenetrated with the rest of the medieval cities as numerous other sites have claimed their place in the economic structure that neither privileged formalized economic exchange nor kept its instutitional form unaffected by social change (Braudel 1992). Cities as sites of systemic interpenetration bring in the medieval marketplaces the logic of participation restrictions, prescribed exchange rules, production controls, and innovation prohibitions into joint operation with unrestrained freedom of action within these rules allowing the excercise of rational choice to individuals considered equal and free within these spaces (Arnade et al. 2002: 544). However, the focus on spaces leaves the process of transition to modern socities unexplained as the structure of closed places has become replaced with open societies. Medieval cities have been the historical sites of of multiple urban cultures that within the inclusive spaces of marketplaces, streets, fairgrounds, and shops have claimed legitimate participation in the production of urban space (Stabel 1999). Later differentiation of spaces, practices and representations coupled with transformation of the structure of gender, social, and economic relations demands elaboration of larger framework of spatial reorganization cutting across public, private, and market spheres (Arnade et al. 2002: 545).
Significantly, the process of creation of European domesticity has proceeded along the lines of structural differentiation that within the emerging spatial structure of social, gender, and property relations has separated domestic from public spaces, sleeping rooms from dining halls, servant rooms from bath rooms, salons and guest rooms from private chambers (Goldthwaite 1982). Of special importance to the modern production of space is the spatial construction of functional differentiation between domestic and business spaces that while not beginning until the Industrial Revolution has become combined with legal regulation of production for the market, with gendered integration of households into the economic exchange, with institutionalization of trade on corporate principles, and with transformation of firms into permanent capital-holding entities (Howell 1986; Wiesner 1993). Equally connected was marketplace to the formation of public sphere that became associated with physical space, legal protection, and legitimating power after the medieval conception of common good finding ready reflection in the shared market of corporate community served as a precursor of much later ideas of public space (Arnade et al. 2002: 546; Harding 2002).
Additionally, public space derives its history from the police regulation undertaken as part of the political efforts by princes and municipalities to constitute, legitimate, and secure public good in the streets and marketplaces (Weidenfeld 1996) as part of the urban economic policies insuring "set weights and measures, fixed time and place of commerce, established quality standards and controls, determined currency exchange rates, guaranteed safety in travel, and registered and enforced contracts" (Arnade et al. 2002: 547). Control over public spaces has inextricably been connected to political power that municipal governments, urban institutions, and corporate bodies and confraternities claimed by regularly staging symbolic appropriations of common spaces through festive, ceremonial, and ritual perfomances of collective action in display and celebration of their authority (Arnade 1996; Kertzer 1988; Kipling 1998). As the city lost its sovereignty to the territorial state the urban space has become a stake in the hegemonic struggles facilitating the transition from the ritual appropriation of the right to perform the emergent state in public to its integration into the state that replaced the space of urban autonomy with the space of state authority no longer in need to legitimate itself via urban spectacle (Arnade et al. 2002: 548). As urban spaces had actively participated in dramatic historical changes they contributed in time-, place-, and society-specific ways to the formation of structures, cultures, and communities that by participating in collective struggles have produced the spaces of cites across their history as active agents in relations of power, exchange, and accumulation.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Monday, December 17, 2007
Analysis of Doel and Hubbard's (2002) Taking World Cities Literally
World cities are defined as cities that perform key functions in the global economy that in the process of competition with other urban locations for capital accumulation obtain competitive advantage not from their indiginous infrastructure but from their strategic positions in the networks of flows. The attempts at introduction of entreprneurial urban strategies (Jessop 1998) oriented at improving the image of the city by reflexive design of urban spaces through the means of their association with emotion, art, and spectacle frequently leave the task of theoretical discourse, policy-making, and urban design to define the characteristics of world city unfulfilled (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 351; Harvey 1989; Leitner and Sheppard 1999) especially when it is set in contexts of greater role of translocal economic relations on global scale (Amin and Thrift 2002). Place promotion and urban policy that seek to be effective on a global stage have to change their orientation from the local-bounded essentialist perspective counterposing city to the world as an object or a flow to the world-bounded relational approach to city as distributed across performances, clusters, and scales (Brenner 1999; Law 2000) that in their sum achieve various degrees of urban existence as world-city (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352).
Considered from the poststructural perspective (Gibson-Graham 2000), world-cities fall short of requirements for turning their concept into an empirically specifiable phenomenon (Markusen 1999) which leads to greater stress on the self-reflexive impact of theoretical construction of world-cities on policy-making that has to become multi-scalar, context-sensitive, and process-oriented correspondingly (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352). Since the central tenet of poststructuralism is phenomenological attentiveness to the complexity level any given research subject exhibits (Derrida 1988: 118), a theorization attempt commensurate with the poststructuralist approach has to translate the complexity of the phenomenal world into its concepts. First coined in 1915, the notion of world city (Geddes 1915) has remained shaped by its original definition as a place "where a disproportionate amount of the world's business was conducted" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352) despite its subsequent qualifications, abstractions, applications, and quantifications. Even though the operational definition of world cities can require large-scale empirical support (Short et al. 1996: 698), the commonly used world city attributes are transnational corporation (TNC) headquarters presence, service-sector employee numbers, foreign residents proportion, and equity market capitalization (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353) whereas the more comprehensive rankings are based on financial assets, transportation infrastructure, population size, business services, manufacture output, TNC headquaters, and international institutions presence (Friedmann 1986) while the point esimates take the presence of internet doman names (Townsend 2001), public-private partnerships (Kresl 1995), and cultural vitality (Smith and Timberlake 1995) as indicators.
Due to the epistemological, ontological, and methodological weakness of the notion of world cities (Markusen 1999), the leading criteria for ordering their hierarchy have experienced shift from economic and financial orientation to focus on advanced producer services, credit ratings, multi-jurisdiction law, and risk management (Beaverstock et al. 1997; Friedmann 1986; Short and Kim 1998; Taylor 1997) such definitional flexibility following from irreducible polysemy of urban discourse, multiple urban contradictions and complex factor correlations of city life, and discontinuous, dispersed, and abstract character of constitutive urban phenomena (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353-354). From the relational perspective, world cities are conceptually assembled via "distanciated social relations" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) in order to countervail the tradition of theorization of cities as fixed and bounded phenomena that emphasizes "clustering, agglomeration and localization" (Amin and Thrift 2002: 51) belying the structural underpinnings of such approach. Based on dependency and world-systems theories, the analysis of world economy that highlights its structure makes the function and composition of economic activities on different scales more important in explanatory terms to undertanding how world cities operate as a global system affected in its turn by the stages of world capitalism (Storper and Walker 1989), while such form of structural analysis is open to the charges of excessive macro bias, decontextualized functionalism, and teleological essentialism (Guattari 2000).
To understand the world importance of certain cities taking over command and control functions an epistemological "shift from atomism to structural functionalism" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) is necessary under the influence of temporal and spatial dispersion of relations, time-space compression via media and communication, and globalization of capital, migration, and knowledge (Harvey 1989; Virilio 1997). Arguing that globalization changes the structure of translocal flows, Castells (2000a) gives priority to global networks at the basis of the novel organizing principles of the capitalism that while being built on information significantly alter the relationships among commodities, individuals and institutions as they become complexly embedded into a networked space of flows. As capitalism acquires increasingly abstract and distributed qualities (Barnes 2001; Buck-Morss 1995; Gibson-Graham 1996), Castells (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) offers diagrammatic representations of the structural relations among world cities constituted through the global flows linking urban cores and peripheries into nodes of multiple networks that remain in need of further research on their nature (Bromley 1999), on their relation to the developmental stages of global capitalism (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), and on their definition (Friedmann 1986).
Due to Castells' (2000b) insufficient attention to the performative, contingent, and material aspects of the world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), the attention should be shifted from the formal structure of global flows to its production and reproduction that the discourses on global capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1996; Thrift 2000), institutional, entrepreneurial, and organizational action (Amin and Thrift 2002), and interaction between global networks and urban hierarchies contribute to. To reconcile between the principles of contingency and invariance that derive structure out of the network of world cities a redefinition of the structure in action-terms is in order should its emergent, process-dependent, and dynamic properties be accounted for. From this perspective, Castells (2000b: 10) theorization of network as integrated unit of global operation not reducible to the scale of cities comprising it makes important contribution to the structural functionalist understanding of the global space of flows (Taylor 1997) which stresses within a global inter-urban network the functions of world cities that follow from their connectivity (Storper 1997), centrality, and nodality (Beaverstock et al. 1999; Taylor 2000).
While, exhibiting greatest connectivity, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo claim dominant positions in the global urban hierarchy, the structuring effects of connectivity as an ordering principle in the world economy promulgate themselves throughout the urban networks to produce markedly different regional variations in concentration (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 356) that within the geography of unequal globalization (Castells 200b: 10) allow for a wider number of cities to play significant roles in national, regional, and global economies precisely because they are parts of the network of global flows. In contrast to Castells' (2000b) presupposition of a set structure of the global economy where financial flows connect its nodes into a novel network, the formulation of the structure of relations among actors active at different institutional, political, and territorial scales has to take critical account of the processes, contexts, and concepts that constitute world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 357). From the poststructural perspective, the global economy is emergently constituted in the movement of heterogeneous assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1984), in the configuration of carrying forces (Doel 1995), in the relational dynamics of flows among spaces (Doel 1999), in the becoming, mutability, and dissemination (Law 2000), and in the contradictions of network formation (Doel 1999).
As relational properties of global networks receive greater attention the heterogeneity of their constitution via the processes of production of images, discourses, and organizations (Sayer 1994; Thrift 2000) the corresponding parameters in which global spaces can be reconstructed also multiply (Amin and Thrift 2002: 61) so that an overarching conception of globalization is replaced with an emphasis on its unstable geography emerging with the help of institutional reflexivity (Amin and Thrift 2002), fragmented practices, and relational performances (Rose 1999: 248). With the practices of everyday life coming to the forefront of structural analysis of globalization, the interpetation of world cities becomes attuned to the interruptions and fluidities of their constitution (Gibson-Graham 1996; Guattari 2000), the movements of displacement, intensities, and human and non-human actors (Amin and Thrift 2002; Brenner 1998; Murdoch 1997; Thrift 2000), the spatial heterogeneities of global networks (Taylor 1997), the irreducibility and incalculability of spatial practice (de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1991), and financial and legal service as translation practices (Beaverstock and Doel 2001). After the poststructuralist departure from excessive emphasis on the macro theoretical factors (Thrift 1997: 143), the conceptualization of world cities gives equal weight to the microsociological reconstruction of urban phenomena from multi-sited perspective (Thrift 1997: 143) which together with the institutional approach to network formation and reproduction (Beaverstock and Doel 2001; Bingham 1996) and relational mapping of translocal assemblages (Amin and Thrift 2002: 52) avoids the reductive pitfalls of both atomistic and structuralist urban studies.
Urban agglomeration of know how and capital being the dominant approach to competitiveness of world cities (Amin and Thrift 2002) the majority of urban scholarship concentrates upon enterpreneurial strategies on the local level aimed to gain competive advantage (Kresl 1995; Porter 1998) not only decoupling the notion of the world city from international competitiveness but also treating connectivity with regard to global networks and economic competitiveness separately. Urban competitive success is widely accepted to derive from internal characteristics (Duffy 1995; Oatley 1998) while among the factors decisive for competitiveness are initial local conditions and individual entrepreurial strategies (Deas and Giordano 2001: 1413), strategic economic complementarity (Krugman 1995: 28), untraded interdependence (Boddy 1999; Storper 1997), and entrepreneurial governance of city asset bases (Jessop 1998; Swyngedouw 1997). World cities serving as arenas for individual and collective action that localize, cluster, and agglomerate urban economy that calls for such entrepreneurial strategies as growth coalitions between urban administrations and business communities (Hubbard et al. 2002), urban elites coalitions among business, real-estate, and political sectors (Logan and Molotch 1987), negotiated power clusters among dispersed urban spheres (Stone 1989), and non-hierarchical co-operation between governmental and non-governmental actors (Stoker 1995).
The major objective of the world city promotion strategies is creation of "favourable environment for business and commerce" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 360) that comes to expression in new localism policies (Hall and Hubbard 1996; Valler et al. 2000), entrepreneurial place promotion (Gold and Ward 1994), communicational urban image marketing (Rutheiser 1996), and mixed-use urban quarters construction (Olds 1995), which while meeting with criticism for deliberate commodification of urban representations seek to reinvent cities as centers of innovation, creativity, and exchange. In spite of charges of standardization, polarization, and deleteriousness (Harvey 1989), staging of international cultural, exposition, and sports events is geared to urban transition towards post-industrial development by means of the transformation of city infrastructure (Short 1999) and strategic urban investment even though without guaranteered success (Fainstein 1994; Leitner and Sheppard 1999; Loftman and Nevin 1996). To integrate the perspectives on world cities as either self-contained economic engines or innovation hubs in a space of flows an institutional perspective is needed since it allows to show how informational, analytic, and legal translation among incommensurate networks, division of labor among human and non-human actors, and place-based constellation of distantiated practices is implemented (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 361).
Understanding global economy as a single institution where world cities mediate heterogeneous flows rather than as a hierarchical order of cities vying for access to economic gain (Amin and Thrift 2002) opens crucial possibility for structural functionalist conceptualization of urban economy within the framework of collaboration and division of institutional labor where every participating urban center enhances its global positioning, where global structural transformation brings greater urban network centrality than national economy, and where integration into global economy is facilitated by proximity to world cities (Sassen 1991). The synergies obtainable among world cities do not obviate the competition among them to the extent that the entrepreneurial strategies reflective of urban agency resulting from alliances between public and private agents (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 362) affect the relative standing of cities in the global economy in accordance to their success (Dicken 1992; Taylor 1997). The notion of urban agency depends on the structural functionalist decoupling of the place of world cities in the global structure of heterogeneous flows from the function of integration of an assemblage of mediating practices with agents, objects, and relations making part of the translocal circulation within the networks participating in construction of a world city's positioning such as local stakeholders (Stone 1989), urban institutions and agencies (Newman and Thornley 1997), globetrotting individuals and groups (Cox and Mair 1988), and practice-inventing highly mobile subjets (Thrift 2000).
Despite being embedded into global networks, world cities possess capabilities of urban agency that via connective, performative, and translative strategies can improve the relative standing the city has in these networks (Thrift 2000). Over alternative attempts to either reinforce the globality of the world versus the locality of cities or collapse the difference between the two (Massey 1999: 191), the place-based conceptions of the world cities have to be corrected with the flow-based approach (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 363) that in its emphasis on contingency and context-dependency shows a way to go beyond infrastructure projects, multi-media spectacles, and local asset base investment towards network-oriented urban policy of global extension of its translation capabilities in heterogeneous environments. To build global networks a corresponding investment into translocal projects sited outside of the world cities is necessary since only non-hierarchical, non-bounded, and non-deterministic urban policy is able to deliver benefits unrestricted to narrow segments of urban popublation, evenly distributed across global networks, and propagating "their city networks into a multiplicity of sites" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 364).
The adoption of the flow-oriented model of urban agency opens possibilities for mutually enhancing urban identities, growth promotion within an urban network as a whole, and knowledge transfer facilitation among cities by means of pursuing regional urban growth models (Terhorst and Van de Ven 1995), innovating transnational networking (Phelps 1998), and translocal involvement of policy-making (Church and Reid 1996). While it remains to be seen whether highly conditional model of national-scale place promotion or forstering of transnationally collaborative and coalition supportive networks will prove more successful in improving relative positions of world cities, the risks attendant to excessive dependence on a small number of world cities as financial, industrial, or cultural centers need to be mitigated by the balance between both structural effects of network development and functional implications of infrastructure investment so that flexible hierarchies of world cities can appear (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 365). As established relationships among world cities undergo change, theoretical attention towards networked nature of cities can more adequately secure gain in urban competitiveness not by overly stressing their structural position in existing global hierarchies or by narrowly restricting the possibilities of their functional differentiation but by structural functionalist emphasis on enterpreneurial strategies oriented towards reflexive functions of translating among heterogeneous flows, mediating between wide-spanning networks, and multi-sited performance of globally open city.
Considered from the poststructural perspective (Gibson-Graham 2000), world-cities fall short of requirements for turning their concept into an empirically specifiable phenomenon (Markusen 1999) which leads to greater stress on the self-reflexive impact of theoretical construction of world-cities on policy-making that has to become multi-scalar, context-sensitive, and process-oriented correspondingly (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352). Since the central tenet of poststructuralism is phenomenological attentiveness to the complexity level any given research subject exhibits (Derrida 1988: 118), a theorization attempt commensurate with the poststructuralist approach has to translate the complexity of the phenomenal world into its concepts. First coined in 1915, the notion of world city (Geddes 1915) has remained shaped by its original definition as a place "where a disproportionate amount of the world's business was conducted" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352) despite its subsequent qualifications, abstractions, applications, and quantifications. Even though the operational definition of world cities can require large-scale empirical support (Short et al. 1996: 698), the commonly used world city attributes are transnational corporation (TNC) headquarters presence, service-sector employee numbers, foreign residents proportion, and equity market capitalization (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353) whereas the more comprehensive rankings are based on financial assets, transportation infrastructure, population size, business services, manufacture output, TNC headquaters, and international institutions presence (Friedmann 1986) while the point esimates take the presence of internet doman names (Townsend 2001), public-private partnerships (Kresl 1995), and cultural vitality (Smith and Timberlake 1995) as indicators.
Due to the epistemological, ontological, and methodological weakness of the notion of world cities (Markusen 1999), the leading criteria for ordering their hierarchy have experienced shift from economic and financial orientation to focus on advanced producer services, credit ratings, multi-jurisdiction law, and risk management (Beaverstock et al. 1997; Friedmann 1986; Short and Kim 1998; Taylor 1997) such definitional flexibility following from irreducible polysemy of urban discourse, multiple urban contradictions and complex factor correlations of city life, and discontinuous, dispersed, and abstract character of constitutive urban phenomena (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353-354). From the relational perspective, world cities are conceptually assembled via "distanciated social relations" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) in order to countervail the tradition of theorization of cities as fixed and bounded phenomena that emphasizes "clustering, agglomeration and localization" (Amin and Thrift 2002: 51) belying the structural underpinnings of such approach. Based on dependency and world-systems theories, the analysis of world economy that highlights its structure makes the function and composition of economic activities on different scales more important in explanatory terms to undertanding how world cities operate as a global system affected in its turn by the stages of world capitalism (Storper and Walker 1989), while such form of structural analysis is open to the charges of excessive macro bias, decontextualized functionalism, and teleological essentialism (Guattari 2000).
To understand the world importance of certain cities taking over command and control functions an epistemological "shift from atomism to structural functionalism" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) is necessary under the influence of temporal and spatial dispersion of relations, time-space compression via media and communication, and globalization of capital, migration, and knowledge (Harvey 1989; Virilio 1997). Arguing that globalization changes the structure of translocal flows, Castells (2000a) gives priority to global networks at the basis of the novel organizing principles of the capitalism that while being built on information significantly alter the relationships among commodities, individuals and institutions as they become complexly embedded into a networked space of flows. As capitalism acquires increasingly abstract and distributed qualities (Barnes 2001; Buck-Morss 1995; Gibson-Graham 1996), Castells (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) offers diagrammatic representations of the structural relations among world cities constituted through the global flows linking urban cores and peripheries into nodes of multiple networks that remain in need of further research on their nature (Bromley 1999), on their relation to the developmental stages of global capitalism (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), and on their definition (Friedmann 1986).
Due to Castells' (2000b) insufficient attention to the performative, contingent, and material aspects of the world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), the attention should be shifted from the formal structure of global flows to its production and reproduction that the discourses on global capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1996; Thrift 2000), institutional, entrepreneurial, and organizational action (Amin and Thrift 2002), and interaction between global networks and urban hierarchies contribute to. To reconcile between the principles of contingency and invariance that derive structure out of the network of world cities a redefinition of the structure in action-terms is in order should its emergent, process-dependent, and dynamic properties be accounted for. From this perspective, Castells (2000b: 10) theorization of network as integrated unit of global operation not reducible to the scale of cities comprising it makes important contribution to the structural functionalist understanding of the global space of flows (Taylor 1997) which stresses within a global inter-urban network the functions of world cities that follow from their connectivity (Storper 1997), centrality, and nodality (Beaverstock et al. 1999; Taylor 2000).
While, exhibiting greatest connectivity, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo claim dominant positions in the global urban hierarchy, the structuring effects of connectivity as an ordering principle in the world economy promulgate themselves throughout the urban networks to produce markedly different regional variations in concentration (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 356) that within the geography of unequal globalization (Castells 200b: 10) allow for a wider number of cities to play significant roles in national, regional, and global economies precisely because they are parts of the network of global flows. In contrast to Castells' (2000b) presupposition of a set structure of the global economy where financial flows connect its nodes into a novel network, the formulation of the structure of relations among actors active at different institutional, political, and territorial scales has to take critical account of the processes, contexts, and concepts that constitute world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 357). From the poststructural perspective, the global economy is emergently constituted in the movement of heterogeneous assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1984), in the configuration of carrying forces (Doel 1995), in the relational dynamics of flows among spaces (Doel 1999), in the becoming, mutability, and dissemination (Law 2000), and in the contradictions of network formation (Doel 1999).
As relational properties of global networks receive greater attention the heterogeneity of their constitution via the processes of production of images, discourses, and organizations (Sayer 1994; Thrift 2000) the corresponding parameters in which global spaces can be reconstructed also multiply (Amin and Thrift 2002: 61) so that an overarching conception of globalization is replaced with an emphasis on its unstable geography emerging with the help of institutional reflexivity (Amin and Thrift 2002), fragmented practices, and relational performances (Rose 1999: 248). With the practices of everyday life coming to the forefront of structural analysis of globalization, the interpetation of world cities becomes attuned to the interruptions and fluidities of their constitution (Gibson-Graham 1996; Guattari 2000), the movements of displacement, intensities, and human and non-human actors (Amin and Thrift 2002; Brenner 1998; Murdoch 1997; Thrift 2000), the spatial heterogeneities of global networks (Taylor 1997), the irreducibility and incalculability of spatial practice (de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1991), and financial and legal service as translation practices (Beaverstock and Doel 2001). After the poststructuralist departure from excessive emphasis on the macro theoretical factors (Thrift 1997: 143), the conceptualization of world cities gives equal weight to the microsociological reconstruction of urban phenomena from multi-sited perspective (Thrift 1997: 143) which together with the institutional approach to network formation and reproduction (Beaverstock and Doel 2001; Bingham 1996) and relational mapping of translocal assemblages (Amin and Thrift 2002: 52) avoids the reductive pitfalls of both atomistic and structuralist urban studies.
Urban agglomeration of know how and capital being the dominant approach to competitiveness of world cities (Amin and Thrift 2002) the majority of urban scholarship concentrates upon enterpreneurial strategies on the local level aimed to gain competive advantage (Kresl 1995; Porter 1998) not only decoupling the notion of the world city from international competitiveness but also treating connectivity with regard to global networks and economic competitiveness separately. Urban competitive success is widely accepted to derive from internal characteristics (Duffy 1995; Oatley 1998) while among the factors decisive for competitiveness are initial local conditions and individual entrepreurial strategies (Deas and Giordano 2001: 1413), strategic economic complementarity (Krugman 1995: 28), untraded interdependence (Boddy 1999; Storper 1997), and entrepreneurial governance of city asset bases (Jessop 1998; Swyngedouw 1997). World cities serving as arenas for individual and collective action that localize, cluster, and agglomerate urban economy that calls for such entrepreneurial strategies as growth coalitions between urban administrations and business communities (Hubbard et al. 2002), urban elites coalitions among business, real-estate, and political sectors (Logan and Molotch 1987), negotiated power clusters among dispersed urban spheres (Stone 1989), and non-hierarchical co-operation between governmental and non-governmental actors (Stoker 1995).
The major objective of the world city promotion strategies is creation of "favourable environment for business and commerce" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 360) that comes to expression in new localism policies (Hall and Hubbard 1996; Valler et al. 2000), entrepreneurial place promotion (Gold and Ward 1994), communicational urban image marketing (Rutheiser 1996), and mixed-use urban quarters construction (Olds 1995), which while meeting with criticism for deliberate commodification of urban representations seek to reinvent cities as centers of innovation, creativity, and exchange. In spite of charges of standardization, polarization, and deleteriousness (Harvey 1989), staging of international cultural, exposition, and sports events is geared to urban transition towards post-industrial development by means of the transformation of city infrastructure (Short 1999) and strategic urban investment even though without guaranteered success (Fainstein 1994; Leitner and Sheppard 1999; Loftman and Nevin 1996). To integrate the perspectives on world cities as either self-contained economic engines or innovation hubs in a space of flows an institutional perspective is needed since it allows to show how informational, analytic, and legal translation among incommensurate networks, division of labor among human and non-human actors, and place-based constellation of distantiated practices is implemented (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 361).
Understanding global economy as a single institution where world cities mediate heterogeneous flows rather than as a hierarchical order of cities vying for access to economic gain (Amin and Thrift 2002) opens crucial possibility for structural functionalist conceptualization of urban economy within the framework of collaboration and division of institutional labor where every participating urban center enhances its global positioning, where global structural transformation brings greater urban network centrality than national economy, and where integration into global economy is facilitated by proximity to world cities (Sassen 1991). The synergies obtainable among world cities do not obviate the competition among them to the extent that the entrepreneurial strategies reflective of urban agency resulting from alliances between public and private agents (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 362) affect the relative standing of cities in the global economy in accordance to their success (Dicken 1992; Taylor 1997). The notion of urban agency depends on the structural functionalist decoupling of the place of world cities in the global structure of heterogeneous flows from the function of integration of an assemblage of mediating practices with agents, objects, and relations making part of the translocal circulation within the networks participating in construction of a world city's positioning such as local stakeholders (Stone 1989), urban institutions and agencies (Newman and Thornley 1997), globetrotting individuals and groups (Cox and Mair 1988), and practice-inventing highly mobile subjets (Thrift 2000).
Despite being embedded into global networks, world cities possess capabilities of urban agency that via connective, performative, and translative strategies can improve the relative standing the city has in these networks (Thrift 2000). Over alternative attempts to either reinforce the globality of the world versus the locality of cities or collapse the difference between the two (Massey 1999: 191), the place-based conceptions of the world cities have to be corrected with the flow-based approach (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 363) that in its emphasis on contingency and context-dependency shows a way to go beyond infrastructure projects, multi-media spectacles, and local asset base investment towards network-oriented urban policy of global extension of its translation capabilities in heterogeneous environments. To build global networks a corresponding investment into translocal projects sited outside of the world cities is necessary since only non-hierarchical, non-bounded, and non-deterministic urban policy is able to deliver benefits unrestricted to narrow segments of urban popublation, evenly distributed across global networks, and propagating "their city networks into a multiplicity of sites" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 364).
The adoption of the flow-oriented model of urban agency opens possibilities for mutually enhancing urban identities, growth promotion within an urban network as a whole, and knowledge transfer facilitation among cities by means of pursuing regional urban growth models (Terhorst and Van de Ven 1995), innovating transnational networking (Phelps 1998), and translocal involvement of policy-making (Church and Reid 1996). While it remains to be seen whether highly conditional model of national-scale place promotion or forstering of transnationally collaborative and coalition supportive networks will prove more successful in improving relative positions of world cities, the risks attendant to excessive dependence on a small number of world cities as financial, industrial, or cultural centers need to be mitigated by the balance between both structural effects of network development and functional implications of infrastructure investment so that flexible hierarchies of world cities can appear (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 365). As established relationships among world cities undergo change, theoretical attention towards networked nature of cities can more adequately secure gain in urban competitiveness not by overly stressing their structural position in existing global hierarchies or by narrowly restricting the possibilities of their functional differentiation but by structural functionalist emphasis on enterpreneurial strategies oriented towards reflexive functions of translating among heterogeneous flows, mediating between wide-spanning networks, and multi-sited performance of globally open city.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Analysis of Munch's (1981) Parsons and Theory of Action Part One
General theory of action of Parsons shares with critical philosophy of Kant its basic structure and method, its epistemological assumptions, and its object theory since the core of Parsons' theory is that "concrete action is to be explained as a result of the inner laws and the characteristic interrelations of analytically disctinct sybsystems of action" (Munch 1981: 709) so that Parsons's response to the problem of social order lying in interpenetration derives from Kantian transcendental philosophy. Parsons takes normative orientation to be fundamental to conceptualization of action that he understands as an "effort to conform with norms" (Parsons [1937] 1968: 76-77) conceived of in relational terms that map it onto space of regularities. The relation between individual action and environments that affect it as "transcendental normative conditions" (Parsons 1987: 370-371) is formulated by Parsons in clear cognizance of Kant's constitutive impact on both Durkheim's and Weber's theorization of social structure. In the field of applied sociology, Parsons' work, beginning with analysis of Weber's and Sombart's concept of capitalism (Parsons 1928, 1929), extending to economic theories of Marshall (Parsons 1931, 1932) and Pareto (Parsons 1936, [1933] 1968), culminating in discussion of social action within classic sociology (Parsons [1937] 1968), and leading to elaboration of action theory (Parsons 1978a), demands discussion as classical contribution to social theory in its own right.
Although Parsons' sociology has been associated with conservatism (Dahrendorf 1955, 1958; Gouldner 1971; Mills 1959), complicated model building, and theoretical reifications the adequacy of his theory has barely been tested to explore the range and limits of its application. Nevertheless, the groundwork for constructive interpretation (Munch 1976a, 1976b, 1978a, 1978b) and conceptual contributions (Loubser et al. 1976) to Parsons' action theory has been laid. Though the importance of Parsons' work has been ranked very high (Faris 1953; High 1939, 1950), the abstruse style of his writing has led to his theories attracting few followers not least because its complexity has continued to increase over time, which does not diminish his contribution to sociology that similar to philosophy may need to pay systematic attention to its theoretical foundations (Munch 1981: 710-711). Neither general arguments nor global judgments make possible to assess the explanatory power of Parsons' theory that draws its fruitfulness from the "joining of opposites - of general theory development with empirical-practical analysis" (Munch 1981: 711) that continually systematizes its formulation of relations between theoretical logic and social practice.
Parsons has demonstrated that when applied to diverse particular cases his theoretical framework had effect of bringing "considerable clarity, consistency, and continuity" (Parsons 1970: 868) to mutual clarification of both formal definitions of theoretical problems and empirical insight deriving from research proceeding not unlike legal adjudication. The theoretical effort of Parsons has primary importance for mutual reinforcement of explanatory power of both theoretical research and practical problem solving that can supply theoretical constructions with content and empirical intitutions with frames of conceptual reference (Munch 1981: 712). The interpenetration of theoretical concepts and intuitive experience finds it earliest explication in works of Kant that had profound importance for development of Parsons' theories of action and social systems. Via repeated engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ([1781] 1956b) Parsons's high level of understanding of it was instrumental in structuring his engagement of sociological discourse through the lense of Kantian thinking (Parsons 1970: 876). Since Parsons' theorization of action and social systems follows conceptual track of development of its structure and method that is parallel to the critical philosophy of Kant, the deficiency in historical contextualization that Parsons' work exhibits can be rectified by utilizing Kantian philosophical perspective for the sake of various concretizations of the theoretical framework of Parsons' sociology (Munch 1981: 713).
Previous attempts at assessing correspondences between theories of Parsons and Kant (Bershady 1973) have committed the error of conceiving of Parsons' action theory in narrowly functionalist, evolutionist, and historicist terms whereas Parsons work stresses "interpenetration between categories of the understanding and sense data, between the categorical imperative and hypothetical imperative, between the teleological principle and concrete judgments" (Munch 1981: 713). Parsons integrates into his theory of action the classical contributions of Durkheim, Weber, and Freud that form the underlying conceptual structure that informs without undergoing major change its expansion in his subsequent writing career. Throughout his theoretical development Parsons has stressed the importance of Kant's transcendental arguments (Parsons 1978c). Taking his point of departure from Kant's duality of theoretical categories and empirical knowledge exemplified in practical ethics or aethetic judgment Parsons expands this duality across other fields of science to formulate theoretical structure as "an a priori set of conditions without which the phenomena in question could not be conceived" (Parsons 1978c: 355-356) systematically.
In contrast to Kant, Hume's ([1748] 1902, [1739-40] 1973) empiricism and skepticism reduces knowledge to sense perceptions that bear no intrinsic connection to causal laws formulated by science that finds its support for its claims of necessary correspondence between its generalizations and regularities of experience in belief only. For Kant the possibility of scientific knowledge has as its transcendental condition the interaction between theory and experience that reciprocally verify intellection by empirical data and perception by universal categories without reducing one to Descartes' rationalism or the other to Hume's empricism (Munch 1981: 715). The hallmark of the interpenetration of abstract knowledge and emprirical data is the rational experiment of the Western science developed from the Italian renaissance and English scientistic movement when between 15th and 17th centuries diverse forms of social practice were brought together for the first time (Weber [1920] 1972, [1922] 1973). Central to the critical philosophy of Kant is the transcendental argument that only established connection between a priori categories of judgment and the sensory experience grants universal validity (Kant [1799] 1968: 22, 61-68). Kant's Critique of Practical Reason ([1797] 1967) rejects utilitarian moral theories on the basis of impossibility to derive objective necessity of moral law from individual calculations of utility thereby concluding that judgment founded upon general rules though producing on avearge correct practical decisions cannot make claims for universal validity necessary for formulation of practical laws (Kant 1956a: 37).
Binding moral laws only derive for Kant from the "linking of abstract categories and empirical ethical problems" (Munch 1981: 717) since practical validity cannot approximate universal validity for the reason of its falsifiability on particular grounds so that recourse to theoretical categories is indispensable should universally valid and order-producing laws be established (Kant 1956a: 30). The philosophical foundations of Kantian categorical imperative allows it to organize particular rules according to their universal validity that through interpenetration of logical abstraction and practical utility leads to universal moral order impossible without preventing by their mutual reconciliation conceptual systems from irrelevance and particular rules from incommensurability (Munch 1981: 717). Social development does not inevitably end in such an interpenetration, as Weber ([1920] 1972: 1: 435-438, 2: 143-146) has demonstrated, since whereas concept of natural law has consistently evolved in the West, both in China and in India abstract moral theory and practical regulation were kept in isolation from one another (Munch 1981: 717). Kant's philosophy providing presuppositions of modern scientific and moral judgment allows for reassessment of Parsons' treatment of Durkheim, Weber and Freud in order to shed light on his theory building as systematization of sociology.
Drawing upon Kant's transcendental conditions of judgment, Parsons ([1937) 1968) has been developing his theory of action with the aim of establishing its universal validity, the concern he shared with Durkheim, Weber, Marshall, and Pareto, as he recognized that social ordering directly links to the level of human action that is as much recognized to conform to the criteria of transcendental judgment as do the conceptual formulations of social theories should adequate theory of action be arrived at (Parsons 1978c: 370-371). Enlarging upon works of Pareto, Marshall, Weber, and Durkheim, since his earliest attempts at sociological theory Parsons sought to reconcile the general theory of action with the particular social systems in their interrelationship that is not unlike Kant's development of critical philosophy. Hobbes ([1651] 1966) anchors social order in shared patterns of behavior that forming a system of rational expectations prevent the war of all against all that individual calculations of utility can neither rule out or minimize its possible negative effects in situations where prisoner's dilemma applies unless some distribution of rights is universalized (Munch 1981: 719). For Parsons ([1937] 1968: 89-94) utilitarian action not only does not prevent but is also conducive to socially irrational and destructive consequences that normative distribution of rights and duties prevents by putting the principle of adherence to norms above utility calculation should normative order become a reality.
In Hobbes' ([1651] 1966) view, consistent utilitarianism has as its own limit the rational realization by actors that should lasting security be achieved only sovereign rule can guarantee common order to which their individual power should be transferred that Parsons ([1937] 1968: 93) contests on the grounds that rationality is limited to individual rather then collective level that their immediate situation makes incalculable in utilitatian terms. As long as normative limitations to the utility calculations do not obtain, the normative order is impossible to establish through the force of agreement alone, for the reason of which Hobbesian conception of sovereignty makes its authority unconditional as guarantor of legal accountability (Munch 1981: 720). That utilitarian calculations cannot provide basis for social order demonstrate Hobbes ([1951] 1966) when he opposes the state of nature when trust is absent and social order arrived at through external sanctions, Coleman (1971, 1974a, 1974b) when social exchange fails to produce social order other than via collective resources, and Vanberg (1978) when centralized power to make binding decisions collapses norms into decisions supported by force. Even though according to utilitarian models the individual motivation to accept a social order based on centralized decision-making can come from an ability to impose sanctions, the limitless field of purely utilitarian calculations undermines the possibility of a stable order where changes in the distribution of power resources can undermine an institutionalized hierarchy of power unless a normative limit to utilitarian calculation is posed to prevent an "unlimited struggle for power" (Parsons [1937] 1968: 94).
Arguing that utilitarianism does not offer explanation of social order, Parsons follows Kantian critique of skepticism in postulating that even incomplete realization of social order requires explanation of its existence especially once utilitarian solutions to the problem of order (Ellis 1971; Vanberg 1975, 1978; Schutte 1977) prove to give inadequate account of its conditions of possibility (Munch 1981: 721-722). Neither utilitarian nor normative, Parsons' solution to the problem of order is voluntarist that makes possible to represent society as not "a completely causally determined factual order" (Munch 1981: 722) but one where voluntary consent requires rational justification of norms that interpenetrate with means-ends rationality (Parsons [1937] 1968: 82). The interpenetration means, just as it does for Kant, the existence of a normative boundary to calculation of utility so that together they form the necessary structure that makes rational action possible. In parallel to Kant's treatment of universal validity, logical consistency, and causal laws as following from structured perception, cognitive boundedness, concept formation, and logical conclusions, Parsons examines action as consisting of ends, available means, given conditions, and selection principles (Parsons [1937] 1968: 77-82) that he considers as systemically generative of social order or lack thereof (Munch 1981: 724).
As condition of possibility of social order only categorical principles of action can serve since by combining normative with conditional grounds for action they offer basic dimensions for analytical description of how action takes place (Parsons [1937] 1968: 76-77) as do space and time for Kant's discussion of classical mechanics (Munch 1981: 724). As a matter of Kantian categorical rule, action based on normative principle of action can only lead to social order when exclusion of use of force and fraud is unconditional, when peaceful means of exchange is not enforced by external sanctions, and when motives for action remain constant whether one is in position of power and authority or not. To explain how social order is possible, Parsons maintains that it is necessary to step outside of utilitarian framework of explanation since action based on categorical principle does not follow from common norms, social exchange, or centralized authority (Coleman 1971; Ellis 1971; Vanberg 1978) but from a situation where "categorical obligation toward common norms" (Munch 1981: 725) is constitutive of a social system. Neither means-ends rationality nor obligation to categorical norms can alone produce existing social order but only their historical interpenetration that depends on specific conditions promoting or impeding it that adequate theoretical framework has to reconstruct. Thereby Parsons has provided theoretical articulation of how social change can be explained via reconstruction of interpenetration among institutions that compose social order.
The epistemological, sociological and psychological foundations for Parsons' theorization are provided by Whitehead, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud. Both Kant's and Whitehead's ([1925] 1967) epistemology enable sociology to formulate analytical realism (Bershady 1973, 1977; Parsons 1977b) consisting in foregrounding the role that theoretical frames play in definition, interpretation, and classification of empircal phenomena (Parsons [1937] 1968: 30) that participate in "interprenetration of empirical observation and a theoretical frame of reference" (Munch 1981: 727) that reciprocally differentiates reality, examines causal relations, and develops abstractions. Since the interplay between abstraction from particulars and particularization of abstractions is at the foundation of Parsons' theory, the latter remains unaccessible unless this backrground is brought to bear on elucidation of the "function of analytical schematization" (Munch 1981: 728). While Parsons has borrowed from Whitehead formal aspects of his theory, from Durkheim, Weber, and Freud he adopted substantively sociological, idealist, and biological aspects of conceptualization of action respectively that neither represent nor lead to reductivism.
As opposed to utilitarianism of Spencer, Durkheim ([1983] 1964) asserts the importance of categorically binding rules that in forming preconditon for social exchange should not be subject to utility calculation were societies to avoid moral crises associated with erosion of normative authority. For Durkheim normative order depends not only on obligation but also on desire to accept norms which essentially poses interpenetration between society and personality. Making observance of norms dependent on a group belonging, Durkheim (1973a, 1973b; Parsons 1967, [1937] 1968: 324-408) excessively particularized the connection between personality and society which breaks down either whenever social ties become overly weak (Durkheim [1897] 1972) or whenever institutionalization of norms is insufficient (Durkheim [1983] 1964: 1-31). Durkheim also has demonstrated that norm internalization and personality development do not exclude or take place at the expense of each other since division of labor and autonomy from primary group reinforce each other to the point where comperensive normative order and individualization presuppose one another corresponding to Parsons' interpenetration of social institutions and personality (Munch 1981: 729).
In his comparative study of religion, Weber ([1920] 1972) also refers to interpenetration to explain social change and historical development that for religious ethics and the world produces such four types of their interrelation as accommodation, isolation, reconciliation, and mutual penetration (Munch 1981: 730; Parsons 1963). Worldly accommodation is prevalent in societies where groups promoting categorical norms are not separate from pratical life and social hierarchies, as are Chinese literati (Weber [1920] 1972: 1: 276- 536), which leads to dominance of utilitarian rationality. Reconciliation is characteristic of societies separated into internally organized social spheres, such as castes (Weber [1920] 1972: v. 2), with only weak symbolic integration that makes general normative order impossible. Isolation results from separation of categorical norms as subject of intellectual discourse from conduct of everyday life, as is characteristic of Buddhism (Weber [1920] 1972: v. 2), leading to impossibility of generalized normative rules that could exercise regulatory function across society. Mutual penetration brings institutionally independent spheres under normative control that limits utilitarian calculation with ethical regulation as does Protestant capitalism (Weber [1920] 1972: 1: 17-237).
The formation of medieval city gave strong impulse to the process of interpenetration among religion, economy, and politics (Weber [1922] 1976: 1: 17-236) by bringing the respective communities into proximity that with increased interaction gradually lead to polarizing tensions that after Reformation alternatively strengthened either absolutism of dominant worldly interests or Puritanism of universal ethical conduct (Munch 1981: 731). The normative order characteristic of modernity with its co-existence of universalism and individualism, of rationalism and activism, and of its natural law and commercial law has institutional interpenetration as its major generative structure of which Weber discerned the origins in the West and Parsons systematized into theory of action (Munch 1981: 732).
Freud has contributed the psychological perspective to the theory of interpenetration of society and personality that Parsons saw as important as sociological perspective of Durkheim (Parsons 1953: 15). While Freud's analysis of personality differentiates it into an id, ego, and superego that respectively represent the libidinal drives, external reality, and cultural norms (Freud 1972), emphasizing their interpenetration Parsons points out that they are equally affected by their interrelationship with each other and their social environment (Munch 1981: 732). In the process of socialization Freud identifies forms of object cathexis transfer and differentiation of libidinal objects that are at the basis of progressive internalization of cultural norms and of growing individual autonomy that Parsons summarizes as mutually reinforcing interpenetration (Parsons 1956a, 1956b, 1964a, 1964b; Parsons and Bales 1956).
Parsons lays the foundations of a theory of interpenetration by constructively integrating Durkheim, Weber, and Freud into a theory of action that over the course of its refinement has exhibited widely reaching analytical accounts of relations of interpenetration of subsystems that while possessing their own institutional autonomy allow both for their reconstruction as ideal types and for exploration of "nature and extent of their interpenetration" (Munch 1981: 734) that only in their interaction allow for new levels of the interrelated systemic development, of the containement of tensions among social systems, and of the reproduction of institutional unity and identity (Luhmann 1977a, 1977b, 1978a, 1978b). The theoretical integration of classical sociological perspectives accomplished by Parsons remains peerless since while his efforts are directed at creation of a general theory (Munch 1980s), other attempts at theoretical generalizations mostly reduce Weber to historicist conflict theory (Bendix 1971), reinterpret Durkheim and Weber in realist and utilitarian terms (Pope 1973; Pope, Cohen, and Hazelrigg 1975; Warner 1978), produce idealist reading of Weber's sociology (Tenbruck 1975), and restrict Weber to dialectics between ideas and interests (Schluchter 1976, 1978, 1979).
Different systems do not have to exhibit complete autonomy of their rules and laws to claim independence since they usually rest on different social groups, promote disctinct social practices, and enter into relations of practical interpenetration while remaining analytically separable as would ethics and business. To grasp the dialectics of systemic interpenetration an attention has to be paid to the phenomenon of the zone of intersection between institutionalized spheres where interpenetration between them should not be equated with incorporation of one sphere into another, institutional incompatibility, and expansion of one system at the expense of another (Munch 1981: 735). The dialectics whereby the power and scope of each system in enhanced in the process of interpenetration should not be interpeted in crude functionalist terms of economic determinism (van den Berghe 1963) but rather as a direction of emancipatory development towards growing autonomy and interdependence (Nelson 1969). Over the successive stages of his theoretical development Parsons has refined his approach to analytical differentiation of social systems (Parsons 1951; Parsons and Shils 1951), to differentiation of systemic development and to theorization of the micro-macro link (Parsons, Bales, and Shils 1953), and to systemically specifying the relations of control and interchange among society (Parsons and Smelser 1956; Parsons 1969a, 1969a, 1969c), action (Parsons and Platt 1973; Parsons 1977c), and personality (Parsons 1978c). Matching in its importance the critical philosophy of Kant, the body of theory formulated by Parsons invites the examination of substantive and methodological implications his theory has both for an adequate understanding of classical social theory and for the development of contemporary sociology (Munch 1980a; Munch 1981: 735).
Although Parsons' sociology has been associated with conservatism (Dahrendorf 1955, 1958; Gouldner 1971; Mills 1959), complicated model building, and theoretical reifications the adequacy of his theory has barely been tested to explore the range and limits of its application. Nevertheless, the groundwork for constructive interpretation (Munch 1976a, 1976b, 1978a, 1978b) and conceptual contributions (Loubser et al. 1976) to Parsons' action theory has been laid. Though the importance of Parsons' work has been ranked very high (Faris 1953; High 1939, 1950), the abstruse style of his writing has led to his theories attracting few followers not least because its complexity has continued to increase over time, which does not diminish his contribution to sociology that similar to philosophy may need to pay systematic attention to its theoretical foundations (Munch 1981: 710-711). Neither general arguments nor global judgments make possible to assess the explanatory power of Parsons' theory that draws its fruitfulness from the "joining of opposites - of general theory development with empirical-practical analysis" (Munch 1981: 711) that continually systematizes its formulation of relations between theoretical logic and social practice.
Parsons has demonstrated that when applied to diverse particular cases his theoretical framework had effect of bringing "considerable clarity, consistency, and continuity" (Parsons 1970: 868) to mutual clarification of both formal definitions of theoretical problems and empirical insight deriving from research proceeding not unlike legal adjudication. The theoretical effort of Parsons has primary importance for mutual reinforcement of explanatory power of both theoretical research and practical problem solving that can supply theoretical constructions with content and empirical intitutions with frames of conceptual reference (Munch 1981: 712). The interpenetration of theoretical concepts and intuitive experience finds it earliest explication in works of Kant that had profound importance for development of Parsons' theories of action and social systems. Via repeated engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ([1781] 1956b) Parsons's high level of understanding of it was instrumental in structuring his engagement of sociological discourse through the lense of Kantian thinking (Parsons 1970: 876). Since Parsons' theorization of action and social systems follows conceptual track of development of its structure and method that is parallel to the critical philosophy of Kant, the deficiency in historical contextualization that Parsons' work exhibits can be rectified by utilizing Kantian philosophical perspective for the sake of various concretizations of the theoretical framework of Parsons' sociology (Munch 1981: 713).
Previous attempts at assessing correspondences between theories of Parsons and Kant (Bershady 1973) have committed the error of conceiving of Parsons' action theory in narrowly functionalist, evolutionist, and historicist terms whereas Parsons work stresses "interpenetration between categories of the understanding and sense data, between the categorical imperative and hypothetical imperative, between the teleological principle and concrete judgments" (Munch 1981: 713). Parsons integrates into his theory of action the classical contributions of Durkheim, Weber, and Freud that form the underlying conceptual structure that informs without undergoing major change its expansion in his subsequent writing career. Throughout his theoretical development Parsons has stressed the importance of Kant's transcendental arguments (Parsons 1978c). Taking his point of departure from Kant's duality of theoretical categories and empirical knowledge exemplified in practical ethics or aethetic judgment Parsons expands this duality across other fields of science to formulate theoretical structure as "an a priori set of conditions without which the phenomena in question could not be conceived" (Parsons 1978c: 355-356) systematically.
In contrast to Kant, Hume's ([1748] 1902, [1739-40] 1973) empiricism and skepticism reduces knowledge to sense perceptions that bear no intrinsic connection to causal laws formulated by science that finds its support for its claims of necessary correspondence between its generalizations and regularities of experience in belief only. For Kant the possibility of scientific knowledge has as its transcendental condition the interaction between theory and experience that reciprocally verify intellection by empirical data and perception by universal categories without reducing one to Descartes' rationalism or the other to Hume's empricism (Munch 1981: 715). The hallmark of the interpenetration of abstract knowledge and emprirical data is the rational experiment of the Western science developed from the Italian renaissance and English scientistic movement when between 15th and 17th centuries diverse forms of social practice were brought together for the first time (Weber [1920] 1972, [1922] 1973). Central to the critical philosophy of Kant is the transcendental argument that only established connection between a priori categories of judgment and the sensory experience grants universal validity (Kant [1799] 1968: 22, 61-68). Kant's Critique of Practical Reason ([1797] 1967) rejects utilitarian moral theories on the basis of impossibility to derive objective necessity of moral law from individual calculations of utility thereby concluding that judgment founded upon general rules though producing on avearge correct practical decisions cannot make claims for universal validity necessary for formulation of practical laws (Kant 1956a: 37).
Binding moral laws only derive for Kant from the "linking of abstract categories and empirical ethical problems" (Munch 1981: 717) since practical validity cannot approximate universal validity for the reason of its falsifiability on particular grounds so that recourse to theoretical categories is indispensable should universally valid and order-producing laws be established (Kant 1956a: 30). The philosophical foundations of Kantian categorical imperative allows it to organize particular rules according to their universal validity that through interpenetration of logical abstraction and practical utility leads to universal moral order impossible without preventing by their mutual reconciliation conceptual systems from irrelevance and particular rules from incommensurability (Munch 1981: 717). Social development does not inevitably end in such an interpenetration, as Weber ([1920] 1972: 1: 435-438, 2: 143-146) has demonstrated, since whereas concept of natural law has consistently evolved in the West, both in China and in India abstract moral theory and practical regulation were kept in isolation from one another (Munch 1981: 717). Kant's philosophy providing presuppositions of modern scientific and moral judgment allows for reassessment of Parsons' treatment of Durkheim, Weber and Freud in order to shed light on his theory building as systematization of sociology.
Drawing upon Kant's transcendental conditions of judgment, Parsons ([1937) 1968) has been developing his theory of action with the aim of establishing its universal validity, the concern he shared with Durkheim, Weber, Marshall, and Pareto, as he recognized that social ordering directly links to the level of human action that is as much recognized to conform to the criteria of transcendental judgment as do the conceptual formulations of social theories should adequate theory of action be arrived at (Parsons 1978c: 370-371). Enlarging upon works of Pareto, Marshall, Weber, and Durkheim, since his earliest attempts at sociological theory Parsons sought to reconcile the general theory of action with the particular social systems in their interrelationship that is not unlike Kant's development of critical philosophy. Hobbes ([1651] 1966) anchors social order in shared patterns of behavior that forming a system of rational expectations prevent the war of all against all that individual calculations of utility can neither rule out or minimize its possible negative effects in situations where prisoner's dilemma applies unless some distribution of rights is universalized (Munch 1981: 719). For Parsons ([1937] 1968: 89-94) utilitarian action not only does not prevent but is also conducive to socially irrational and destructive consequences that normative distribution of rights and duties prevents by putting the principle of adherence to norms above utility calculation should normative order become a reality.
In Hobbes' ([1651] 1966) view, consistent utilitarianism has as its own limit the rational realization by actors that should lasting security be achieved only sovereign rule can guarantee common order to which their individual power should be transferred that Parsons ([1937] 1968: 93) contests on the grounds that rationality is limited to individual rather then collective level that their immediate situation makes incalculable in utilitatian terms. As long as normative limitations to the utility calculations do not obtain, the normative order is impossible to establish through the force of agreement alone, for the reason of which Hobbesian conception of sovereignty makes its authority unconditional as guarantor of legal accountability (Munch 1981: 720). That utilitarian calculations cannot provide basis for social order demonstrate Hobbes ([1951] 1966) when he opposes the state of nature when trust is absent and social order arrived at through external sanctions, Coleman (1971, 1974a, 1974b) when social exchange fails to produce social order other than via collective resources, and Vanberg (1978) when centralized power to make binding decisions collapses norms into decisions supported by force. Even though according to utilitarian models the individual motivation to accept a social order based on centralized decision-making can come from an ability to impose sanctions, the limitless field of purely utilitarian calculations undermines the possibility of a stable order where changes in the distribution of power resources can undermine an institutionalized hierarchy of power unless a normative limit to utilitarian calculation is posed to prevent an "unlimited struggle for power" (Parsons [1937] 1968: 94).
Arguing that utilitarianism does not offer explanation of social order, Parsons follows Kantian critique of skepticism in postulating that even incomplete realization of social order requires explanation of its existence especially once utilitarian solutions to the problem of order (Ellis 1971; Vanberg 1975, 1978; Schutte 1977) prove to give inadequate account of its conditions of possibility (Munch 1981: 721-722). Neither utilitarian nor normative, Parsons' solution to the problem of order is voluntarist that makes possible to represent society as not "a completely causally determined factual order" (Munch 1981: 722) but one where voluntary consent requires rational justification of norms that interpenetrate with means-ends rationality (Parsons [1937] 1968: 82). The interpenetration means, just as it does for Kant, the existence of a normative boundary to calculation of utility so that together they form the necessary structure that makes rational action possible. In parallel to Kant's treatment of universal validity, logical consistency, and causal laws as following from structured perception, cognitive boundedness, concept formation, and logical conclusions, Parsons examines action as consisting of ends, available means, given conditions, and selection principles (Parsons [1937] 1968: 77-82) that he considers as systemically generative of social order or lack thereof (Munch 1981: 724).
As condition of possibility of social order only categorical principles of action can serve since by combining normative with conditional grounds for action they offer basic dimensions for analytical description of how action takes place (Parsons [1937] 1968: 76-77) as do space and time for Kant's discussion of classical mechanics (Munch 1981: 724). As a matter of Kantian categorical rule, action based on normative principle of action can only lead to social order when exclusion of use of force and fraud is unconditional, when peaceful means of exchange is not enforced by external sanctions, and when motives for action remain constant whether one is in position of power and authority or not. To explain how social order is possible, Parsons maintains that it is necessary to step outside of utilitarian framework of explanation since action based on categorical principle does not follow from common norms, social exchange, or centralized authority (Coleman 1971; Ellis 1971; Vanberg 1978) but from a situation where "categorical obligation toward common norms" (Munch 1981: 725) is constitutive of a social system. Neither means-ends rationality nor obligation to categorical norms can alone produce existing social order but only their historical interpenetration that depends on specific conditions promoting or impeding it that adequate theoretical framework has to reconstruct. Thereby Parsons has provided theoretical articulation of how social change can be explained via reconstruction of interpenetration among institutions that compose social order.
The epistemological, sociological and psychological foundations for Parsons' theorization are provided by Whitehead, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud. Both Kant's and Whitehead's ([1925] 1967) epistemology enable sociology to formulate analytical realism (Bershady 1973, 1977; Parsons 1977b) consisting in foregrounding the role that theoretical frames play in definition, interpretation, and classification of empircal phenomena (Parsons [1937] 1968: 30) that participate in "interprenetration of empirical observation and a theoretical frame of reference" (Munch 1981: 727) that reciprocally differentiates reality, examines causal relations, and develops abstractions. Since the interplay between abstraction from particulars and particularization of abstractions is at the foundation of Parsons' theory, the latter remains unaccessible unless this backrground is brought to bear on elucidation of the "function of analytical schematization" (Munch 1981: 728). While Parsons has borrowed from Whitehead formal aspects of his theory, from Durkheim, Weber, and Freud he adopted substantively sociological, idealist, and biological aspects of conceptualization of action respectively that neither represent nor lead to reductivism.
As opposed to utilitarianism of Spencer, Durkheim ([1983] 1964) asserts the importance of categorically binding rules that in forming preconditon for social exchange should not be subject to utility calculation were societies to avoid moral crises associated with erosion of normative authority. For Durkheim normative order depends not only on obligation but also on desire to accept norms which essentially poses interpenetration between society and personality. Making observance of norms dependent on a group belonging, Durkheim (1973a, 1973b; Parsons 1967, [1937] 1968: 324-408) excessively particularized the connection between personality and society which breaks down either whenever social ties become overly weak (Durkheim [1897] 1972) or whenever institutionalization of norms is insufficient (Durkheim [1983] 1964: 1-31). Durkheim also has demonstrated that norm internalization and personality development do not exclude or take place at the expense of each other since division of labor and autonomy from primary group reinforce each other to the point where comperensive normative order and individualization presuppose one another corresponding to Parsons' interpenetration of social institutions and personality (Munch 1981: 729).
In his comparative study of religion, Weber ([1920] 1972) also refers to interpenetration to explain social change and historical development that for religious ethics and the world produces such four types of their interrelation as accommodation, isolation, reconciliation, and mutual penetration (Munch 1981: 730; Parsons 1963). Worldly accommodation is prevalent in societies where groups promoting categorical norms are not separate from pratical life and social hierarchies, as are Chinese literati (Weber [1920] 1972: 1: 276- 536), which leads to dominance of utilitarian rationality. Reconciliation is characteristic of societies separated into internally organized social spheres, such as castes (Weber [1920] 1972: v. 2), with only weak symbolic integration that makes general normative order impossible. Isolation results from separation of categorical norms as subject of intellectual discourse from conduct of everyday life, as is characteristic of Buddhism (Weber [1920] 1972: v. 2), leading to impossibility of generalized normative rules that could exercise regulatory function across society. Mutual penetration brings institutionally independent spheres under normative control that limits utilitarian calculation with ethical regulation as does Protestant capitalism (Weber [1920] 1972: 1: 17-237).
The formation of medieval city gave strong impulse to the process of interpenetration among religion, economy, and politics (Weber [1922] 1976: 1: 17-236) by bringing the respective communities into proximity that with increased interaction gradually lead to polarizing tensions that after Reformation alternatively strengthened either absolutism of dominant worldly interests or Puritanism of universal ethical conduct (Munch 1981: 731). The normative order characteristic of modernity with its co-existence of universalism and individualism, of rationalism and activism, and of its natural law and commercial law has institutional interpenetration as its major generative structure of which Weber discerned the origins in the West and Parsons systematized into theory of action (Munch 1981: 732).
Freud has contributed the psychological perspective to the theory of interpenetration of society and personality that Parsons saw as important as sociological perspective of Durkheim (Parsons 1953: 15). While Freud's analysis of personality differentiates it into an id, ego, and superego that respectively represent the libidinal drives, external reality, and cultural norms (Freud 1972), emphasizing their interpenetration Parsons points out that they are equally affected by their interrelationship with each other and their social environment (Munch 1981: 732). In the process of socialization Freud identifies forms of object cathexis transfer and differentiation of libidinal objects that are at the basis of progressive internalization of cultural norms and of growing individual autonomy that Parsons summarizes as mutually reinforcing interpenetration (Parsons 1956a, 1956b, 1964a, 1964b; Parsons and Bales 1956).
Parsons lays the foundations of a theory of interpenetration by constructively integrating Durkheim, Weber, and Freud into a theory of action that over the course of its refinement has exhibited widely reaching analytical accounts of relations of interpenetration of subsystems that while possessing their own institutional autonomy allow both for their reconstruction as ideal types and for exploration of "nature and extent of their interpenetration" (Munch 1981: 734) that only in their interaction allow for new levels of the interrelated systemic development, of the containement of tensions among social systems, and of the reproduction of institutional unity and identity (Luhmann 1977a, 1977b, 1978a, 1978b). The theoretical integration of classical sociological perspectives accomplished by Parsons remains peerless since while his efforts are directed at creation of a general theory (Munch 1980s), other attempts at theoretical generalizations mostly reduce Weber to historicist conflict theory (Bendix 1971), reinterpret Durkheim and Weber in realist and utilitarian terms (Pope 1973; Pope, Cohen, and Hazelrigg 1975; Warner 1978), produce idealist reading of Weber's sociology (Tenbruck 1975), and restrict Weber to dialectics between ideas and interests (Schluchter 1976, 1978, 1979).
Different systems do not have to exhibit complete autonomy of their rules and laws to claim independence since they usually rest on different social groups, promote disctinct social practices, and enter into relations of practical interpenetration while remaining analytically separable as would ethics and business. To grasp the dialectics of systemic interpenetration an attention has to be paid to the phenomenon of the zone of intersection between institutionalized spheres where interpenetration between them should not be equated with incorporation of one sphere into another, institutional incompatibility, and expansion of one system at the expense of another (Munch 1981: 735). The dialectics whereby the power and scope of each system in enhanced in the process of interpenetration should not be interpeted in crude functionalist terms of economic determinism (van den Berghe 1963) but rather as a direction of emancipatory development towards growing autonomy and interdependence (Nelson 1969). Over the successive stages of his theoretical development Parsons has refined his approach to analytical differentiation of social systems (Parsons 1951; Parsons and Shils 1951), to differentiation of systemic development and to theorization of the micro-macro link (Parsons, Bales, and Shils 1953), and to systemically specifying the relations of control and interchange among society (Parsons and Smelser 1956; Parsons 1969a, 1969a, 1969c), action (Parsons and Platt 1973; Parsons 1977c), and personality (Parsons 1978c). Matching in its importance the critical philosophy of Kant, the body of theory formulated by Parsons invites the examination of substantive and methodological implications his theory has both for an adequate understanding of classical social theory and for the development of contemporary sociology (Munch 1980a; Munch 1981: 735).
Sunday, December 02, 2007
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