Towards cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing: A metamorphosis in the practice of social theory?

In this short piece, I do not intend to respond directly to the many thought-provoking avenues for empirical analysis opened up by Beck’s new conceptual innovations such as metamorphosis; reflections of this kind may be found in other dialogue articles published in this issue of the journal. Neither do I wish to question what is arguably the underlying long-term intellectual project to which these concepts belong, i.e. Beck’s attempt to foster a paradigm shift in the social sciences, from the methodological nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries to the methodological cosmopolitanism of the 21st (Beck and Sznaider, 2006). Rather, I want to take one step back, in order to reflect on the very process of concept-generation as such: what kind of theorizing is Beck practicing here? What status are we to grant his new concepts, like emancipatory catastrophism? Indeed, in what sense might Beck’s example be pointing towards a ‘metamorphosis’ in the very practice of social theory – one that aims not at a social theory of cosmopolitanism, but rather at becoming itself a cosmopolitan social theory?

While Beck himself is clearly preoccupied by such questions – captured, for instance, in his notions of ‘time-diagnostic’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ theorizing (this issue) – my argument will be that his answers so far remain rather implicit and insufficiently grounded in methodological reasoning. To move discussions forward, my own suggestion can be stated quite simply: Beck’s brand of social theorizing ought to return to Robert K Merton’s (1968) famous ideas about middle-range theory, and to bring this idea up-to-date for our present age of cosmopolitization. If we think along these lines of cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing, I want to argue, we gain an important lever for understanding Beck’s theoretical project: what he is proposing, we might say, is a way of organizing ongoing research conversations across space and time around a set of shared concepts and concerns, helping researchers to focus and refocus their attention. In this way of thinking, the theory itself acts as an intellectual space of ‘inter-crossings’ (Werner and Zimmermann, 2006), flexible enough to accommodate a diversity of historical and cultural experiences, yet determinate enough to sensitize researchers towards a search for shared frames of reference within which to compare what might otherwise remain simply incommensurable social situations.

Here, it is important to remember what Merton meant, and did not mean, by middle-range theory. Contrary to widespread belief, his was not a catch-all metaphor for talking about gaps between micro and macro levels, agency and structure, or some general tension between empirical specificity and theoretical abstraction. Rather, the ‘middle range’, to Merton, meant a particular style of theorizing. Merton situated this style in-between ‘all-inclusive systematic and unified theories’, on the one hand, and ‘day-to-day working hypotheses’, on the other. By contrast, middle-range theory meant focusing on key concepts that may guide the research process and allow the social scientist to capture important mechanisms at work in particular social domains. Status attainment and deviant behavior were prominent examples in Merton’s own time. Emancipatory catastrophism and metamorphosis, I would argue, are present-day equivalents. In other words, my notion of cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing is offered here as a methodological presupposition for the study of emancipatory catastrophism (and related phenomena). At the same time, it is meant to exemplify a form of metamorphosis, now at the level of social theory itself.

In my view, this Mertonian excursion in the first instance helps us realize the extent to which Beck’s thinking on the dynamics of change in ‘world risk society’ (Beck, 2009) was always a form of middle-range theorizing. This claim is perhaps counter-intuitive, given the globalized – or better, cosmopolitized – scale of analysis embedded in this concept. Yet, remember Merton’s definition: compared to most social theories of globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, I would argue, Beck’s has the great virtue of exactly not being ‘all-inclusive’ and ‘unified’ around some systemic logic. Instead, key concepts such as global risk, cosmopolitization and cosmopolitan risk community (Beck et al., 2013) gradually come to be defined in relation to each other, in ways pointing to specific mechanisms and dynamics of socio-political transformation. The same is true for the concept of emancipatory catastrophism, to which I return later.

Over and beyond such issues of conceptual (self-)reflection, I think the argument can plausibly be made that a cosmopolitan social theory – as distinct from a social theory of cosmopolitanism – must necessarily be ‘of the middle range’. The image I have in mind here is what Beck (2009) tries to capture in distinguishing his own ‘time-diagnostic’ theory (Zeitdiagnose), attuned to a social history of transformation, from abstract universalistic theories of social order (like Bourdieu, Foucault, Luhmann, etc.). However, while the notion of time-diagnostic theory is important in situating the work of theorizing in particular historical junctures, it does not quite capture, I believe, what might be specific about contemporary cosmopolitan styles of theorizing.

To see this, we need not only follow in the footsteps of Merton, but also extend and critically reconstruct the notion of the middle range a good deal beyond what Merton himself had in mind when writing in the 1950s (Wyatt and Balmer, 2007). Middle range, we might say, is not just an adjective, denoting a certain style of theorizing (‘middle-range theorizing’), as Merton had it. Pushing further, it may also be taken as a noun (the middle range), connoting thereby an in-between epistemic meeting-place, an inter-crossing; or as a verb (to middle range), pointing to a dialogical process of mutual exchange across difference. In this extended sense, an aspiration to the middle range implies self-restrictions at the level of cosmopolitan theorizing: rather than search for a unified or universal theory, the challenge becomes one of forging a conceptual architecture capable of organizing ever-more meeting-points between diverse perspectives, as these grapple with collective and sharable experiences of encounter with ‘the global other’.

Indeed, the concrete encounter underlying this very text and the present issue of Current Sociology – i.e. Ulrich Beck’s Seoul lecture in July 2014, sparking debate and exchange about his notions of metamorphosis and emancipatory catastrophism with South Korean, Japanese, Chinese and other colleagues (myself included) – nicely exemplifies this critically expanded sense of the cosmopolitan middle range. During such encounters, these very concepts are in need of reinterpretation and recontextualization, because they, too, come from somewhere rather than nowhere. As such, the concepts work to coordinate attention and share experiences across diverse geographical regions and grounded socio-political experiences. In the process, they acquire new connotations, and new concepts are brought into the exchange, as these prove necessary to deal with different histories. This, indeed, is a moment of cosmopolitan theory development.

This present dialogue, it should be noted, extends conversations already underway between European and East Asian experiences of second modernity and risks (Beck and Grande, 2010). Taken as a whole, this conversation provides a suitable practical model for the kind of mutual exchange of perspectives, coordinated around shared key concepts, that needs to sit at the very core of any cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing. None of this would be possible, it bears noting, if Beck’s was indeed the ‘all-inclusive systematic and unified’ theory of which Merton spoke, and which arguably continues to dominate the European sociological landscape.

Many corollary ideas follow in the wake of these brief suggestions on cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing; in this context, however, I can only hint at a few of them. Hence, in describing the practice of theorizing as an inter-crossing, we are invited to think about concepts themselves as traveling entities, crystalizing particular histories and geographies of cross-border encounter. In the European languages, for instance, the concept of metamorphosis has a notable history in colonial practices of naturalist exploration, embodied in the late 17th-century work of Dutch proto-ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian, whose famous Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium documents the wondrous and ever-evolving transformations at stake in the life of butterflies in present-day Indonesia. Such conceptual histories may enrich cosmopolitan theorizing: prior to Beck’s intervention, we might say, metamorphosis already embodies a history of encounters, across Europe and Asia, colonizers and servants, and natural and cultural worlds.

The wider point, of course, is that the very concepts deployed as part of social theorizing carry cultural and political histories, which can serve to open up diverse perspectives on cross-border interconnections. As such, they may also serve to rethink and reposition the practice of comparison – arguably the key ingredient of any cosmopolitan social knowledge-making. Here, the important challenge of cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing, it seems to me, is to rethink comparison as having less to do with fixed units and typologies and more with an active work of travel and juxtaposition, whereby concepts themselves are challenged and re-wrought in the meeting-place in-between different theory cultures (cf. McFarlane, 2010). Taken this way, comparison becomes much more integral to cosmopolitan theorizing, because this practice helps stage encounters between diverse histories and geographies that are taken to carry conceptual, and not simply empirical, import (cf. Englund and Yarrow, 2013). If cosmopolitan theorizing is to mean anything, it must mean theorizing through encounters with global others.

This brings me back to the present dialogue: what the concept of emancipatory catastrophism stages in this context, we might say, is exactly such a shared inter-crossing between diverse historical and geographical experiences. While Beck may have intended the concept as a way of analyzing the ‘anthropological shock’ of global warming, the various participants to this discussion each bring other cases and experiences to the table (many relating to recent East Asian history), in the process shifting also the conceptual parameters in specific ways. This very process of dialogue – full of gaps, slippages of meaning and issues of translation – is not incidental to but rather the core business of cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing. In this process of travel and juxtaposition, the concept takes on new contours, altering its range of connotations, and – eventually – helping us specify what is still sharable across diverse contexts.

Cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing, in short, implies an ideal of theory development as a process of continuously setting up new meeting-points and dialogues around key concepts, working to coordinate attention towards shared challenges across diverse historical experiences, geographical regions, socio-political domains and epistemic paradigms. To my mind, Ulrich Beck is already a pioneer of this practice in today’s world of sociology. All I am adding – my challenge, if you will, to Beck’s project – is a particular methodological suggestion for how to conceptualize this practice; something not yet sufficiently clarified, I argue, by Beck himself.

None of this, of course, implies that Beck’s various concepts – including metamorphosis and emancipatory catastrophism – are necessarily the right ones for all times and purposes. Like all other concepts, these surely have their limitations (yet largely to be specified). It simply means that, in and beyond their semiotic substance, these travelling concepts should be appreciated as pointing towards an important transformation in the very practice of social theorizing, one fit for the task of reinventing sociology in an age of cosmopolitization.