Part 1: No such thing as society?
In 1987, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that “there is no such thing as society” (McSmith, 2010). I was startled by that statement when it was made in 1987, and I remain startled by it, 37 years later. At this time, I had undertaken both mainstream economics and political economy at The University of Sydney, where the question of whether economics needed to be understood as existing within a larger social system was a fundamental point of disagreement, to the point where students — some of whom would become future Prime Ministers — would occupy buildings and the iconic Quadrangle Clock Tower in order to make this point.[i]
Margaret Thatcher’s statement was one of the clearest expressions of what is known as methodological individualism as a dictum of public policy made by an elected political leader. But her provocation presented the challenge of what it meant to talk about individuals and small groups such as families on the one hand, and what Karl Popper termed “abstract concepts” such as society on the other.
Does it make sense, for example, to refer to large sections of people who receive wages as their primary form of income as “the working class” irrespective of other circumstances, and can such a concept have substantive social agency? For another example, are nations real or, in a tradition that runs from Ernest Renan to Benedict Anderson, are they “imagined communities” to which considerable cultural investment is made to make a geographically defined people feel consonant with one another as part of an overarching entity that is a nation, and which co-exists with a range of other such territorially defined entities.
What arises here is the question of what connects micro-worlds and macro-structures. If we believe that there are entities such as nations, societies etc., and that individuals and families freely choose to be a part of them, what are the processes through which such mediation occurs. In asking the question of “How is society possible” in 1910, Georg Simmel (Simmel, 1910) understood the process as partly cognitive, but also partly the result of the social roles which individuals acquire, thereby becoming judges, teachers, doctors, soldiers etc. that situate them within broader social structure. This is what sociologists refer to as the process of socialization.
It was Max Weber who reframed this question by identifying the critical role played by institutions as mediating forces. Heino Heinrich Nau has observed that Weber’s institutionalism was concerned with “the evolution of institutional arrangements that defines the incentive structure of economic agents”, and with “the interdependence of ideas, interests, institutions and social orders” (Nau, 2005, pp. 127, 128). Weber was less keen on the term society than on the idea of social relations, or socio-economic interests reinforced by ideas and ideologies, and social institutions. From this perspective, we can understand institutions as a series of meso level entities that interconnect individuals and the social relations they are a part of to macro-level historically shaped structures that evolve over time. So the important thing about being a judge, teacher, doctor, soldier etc. is not simply the social role, but the institutional matrix (courts, schools, universities, medical institutions, armies etc.) through which those social roles are deployed.
I used the term mediation earlier, and it would be a somewhat dull and static world in which we lived if we simply accepted roles in institutions that performed functions for society. [ii] It will be no surprise to this audience to note that all such social relations are mediated through technologies, particularly through communications technologies. One of the challenges for communications, media and cultural studies is that of media-centrism, or the extent to which we identify communications media as autonomous actors capable of reshaping our social environments, or we see media technologies and cultural forms as primarily shaped by their social, political, economic and institutional contexts (Flew, 2017).
The former was famously the position of Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, notably with his aphorisms that the content of a medium is always another medium (films are based on books etc.), and that a fish does not know that it is in water until it is out of water, at which point it dies (McLuhan, 1964). The latter position was that of Raymond Williams in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Williams, 1974), which rejected what he saw as technological determinism, in favour of what would come to be known as the social shaping of technology approach.
I don’t think that these positions need to necessarily be opposed to one another. We can agree with Williams that technologies are indeed shaped by their institutional environments, and that these very both over time and across places. For example, the public sphere as a normative concept in enabled and negated in different institutional and political contexts, so while media technologies provide for the possibility of a public sphere, it is only through societal action that such possibilities are realized.
At the same time, technologies can not only shape institutions, but transform them. This was the sense in which Karl Marx was a technological determinist, as authors such as Gerry Cohen have argued (Cohen, 1978). Rapid changes in the techno-economic base can outstrip the institutions which ostensibly contain them, generating contradictions between the economic “base” and the social superstructure.
We can see how the digitization of media transformed the relationship of individuals and groups to communications practices, and how these outstripped the institutional foundations of both mass media practice and media regulations to which we had become familiar. The longstanding dualism of the international Communications Association (ICA) that Everett Rogers articulated, between communication that is between people and communication that is mediated by devices (Rogers, 1999), collapsed in the 2000s in the face of the “digital turn” (Flew, 2024).
[i] One of the leaders of the Political Economy movement, which sought to have political economy as a distinctive stream of courses available to economics students, was Anthony Albanese. Albanese was in the 1980s the leader of the ALP Club, and one of the leaders of the student occupations. In 2022, he would be become Prime Minister of Australia as leader of the Australian Labor Party.
[ii] This was indeed where structuralist-functionalist sociology, as articulated by Talcott Parsons and others, had arrived at by the 1950s.
References
Cohen, G. A. (1978) Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A defence. Oxford.
Flew, T. (2017). The “Theory” in Media Theory: The “Media-Centrism” Debate. Media Theory, 1(1), 43–56.
Flew, T. (2024). The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Communication as a Disciplinary Signifier in Australia: After the “Cultural Turn” and the “Digital Turn.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 54(2), 129–142.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The Extensions of Man (1st ed.). Bantam.
McSmith, A. (2010). No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s. Little, Brown.
Nau, H. H. (2005). Institutional, evolutionary and cultural aspects in Max Weber’s social economics. Papers in Political Economy, 49(2), 127–142.
Rogers, E. M. (1999). Anatomy of the Two Subdisciplines of Communication Study. Human Communication Research, 25(4), 618–631.
Simmel, G. (1910). How is Society Possible? American Journal of Sociology, 16(3), 372–391.
Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Routledge.
