Stable destabilising? Rethinking images of temporality

Introduction

Over several decades, issues of temporality have become ‘a central consideration in social theory’ (Rosa, 2013, p. 4). This article explores a subject related to these debates, namely the contrast between our sense of social stability and instability, and the question of whether social realities are defined by change, acceleration and flux, or slow accretion, endurance and stasis. For example, is contemporary life governed by uncertainty, fluidity and sociotechnical acceleration, or do relative stability or inertia still represent the predominant experience in many domains? In particular, can stabilities and instabilities represent symbiotic processes, the one interwoven with the other?

To some reasonable extent, the concern with temporality has been conditioned by the sense that our sociotechnical landscape is perceived to be ‘speeding up’, ‘slippery’ and transient, so that it can seem that ‘the acceleration of processes and events is a fundamental principle of modern society’ (Rosa, 2013, p. xxxviii). Within this landscape, ‘arboreal’ assumptions of the solidity of social structures, or the ‘weight’ of historical sedimentation, become contentious as our lives appear governed by the ‘transformation of stability into instability’ (Simmel, 1991, p. 30). It is in this sense that we refer to instability as the perception that people and things are being rewritten, so that the sociotechnical terrain is described through referents such as the ‘rapidity of change’, ‘the normalcy of the new’, ‘acceleration’, etc.

Though Simmel reminds us that the concern with speed, acceleration and the ‘runaway character of modernity’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 30) is far from new (Southerton, 2020; Wajcman, 2015), our present-day sense of fluidity and flux seems increasingly dramatised. For example, as well as writers on acceleration, there are also those announcing ‘transformational’ sociocultural changes which proclaim ‘new times’ where previous ‘settlements are being dismantled and remade’ (Hall & Jacques, 1989, p. 32), such as that of ‘singularities’ (Reckwitz, 2020), or ‘hypercultures’ (Han, 2022) and ‘hyperconnectivities’ (Brubaker, 2022), etc. In so doing, they further the question of whether our world is becoming so rapidly redrafted that we are losing our connection to the traditional stabilities of the past. Furthermore, for some observers, this destabilisation appears pathological. For example, Bone laments the loss of ‘security and stability’ occasioned by the ‘neoliberal dismantling of the stabilizing pillars of the post war settlement’, since it has supposedly led to ‘epochal shock’, ‘a growing sense of destabilization’, ‘chronic uncontrolled stress’ and ‘neurological dysfunction’ (2021, pp. 1031, 1040, emphasis added).

In what follows, we will contrast these images of speed and flux with the possibility that stability, endurance or stasis still constitute a continuing reality for many people. The sense of stability is interesting if only because it has become problematised within social theory, given the marked tendency over recent decades to assume that ‘change – not stability – is the natural state of social life’ (Abbott, 2016, p. 24). If we see modernity as ‘“fluid” since its inception’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 3), it is not surprising that we feel that ‘stability is a constant struggle’ (Callon, 2007, p. 329). Within worlds seemingly characterised by change, instability, flow and flux, it can appear as though a belief in the possibility of stability represents unwarranted nostalgia, with reference to the ‘long term’ becoming ‘a hollow shell carrying no meaning’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 125).

Yet though we remain sympathetic to this argument, we are not convinced that stability has gone out of fashion. The problem with the stress on moment-by-moment ‘flow’ is that it carries the danger of obscuring the stabilities that accompany longer term figurational processes. On the one hand, a processual perspective tends to challenge any notion of fixed social structures since it illustrates how the processes surrounding agrarianisation, industrialisation, urbanisation, colonialism, technicisation, globalisation, etc. are ‘in motion’ (Elias, 1994). On the other, their social impact may be variable across time and space, with some groups, and certain parts of the world, far more affected than others. And even where change processes are more apparent, it is not necessarily the case that people’s lives are characterised by fluidity and flux. Stabilities, resistances, endurances or inertia may still occur in many places across significant periods of time (Zantvoort, 2017), especially where people find themselves in an ‘apparently unalterable social position’ (Neckel, 2020, p. 479). For example, even if contemporary labour is not governed by slavery, it may remain ‘unfree’, especially where ‘choice’ amounts to a series of precarious dead-end jobs. In spite of the instability of precarity, people may experience an enforced stability, a sense of being socioeconomically ‘stuck’ with little meaningful possibility of escape.

This observation reveals how it is difficult to be conceptually precise when referring to stability and instability since we are often concerned with a continuum of possibilities rather than an exact state (Abbott, 2001, 2004). At the same time, as Abbott reminds us, social theories tend to be characterised by a ‘cyclical history’ (Warde, 2017, p. 28). For example, sociological titles which announce that they are ‘Bringing the Something-or-Other Back in’ (Abbott, 2001, p. 16) reflect the way in which debate tends to oscillate by ‘re-accommodating’ the conceptually repressed or forgotten. Within this historical process, ‘some positions become discredited, or fall from fashion; but only temporarily’ because ‘to embrace one side of a core opposition makes it impossible to give a sufficiently comprehensive or balanced account’ (Warde, 2017, p. 28). Applying Abbott’s (2001, 2004) earlier contention, the question arises as to whether the current emphasis upon fluidity, instability and acceleration has tended to occlude the continuing salience of stabilisation, immobility and inertia.

In addition, what particularly concerns us is the question of whether stabilities and instabilities may be interwoven. In other words, is it possible that the same terrain can be associated with change and fluidity whilst simultaneously being interrelated with endurance and stability? For instance, do those governed by destabilising sociotechnical acceleration frequently rely on others whose lives are stationary, ‘stuck’ and unlikely to change. In particular, as we ‘suffer’ the ‘swift paced life’ (Rosa, 2013, p. 87), do we depend on those who are largely denied this possibility, such as may be the case with refuse collectors, teaching assistants, carers, auxiliary nurses, etc? Could we lead ‘fast lives’ without others who continually care for our elderly, manage our children, clear away our refuse, but whose options for change, ‘advancement’ or ‘speed’ may be comparatively slim, if not practically non-existent? Similarly, as ‘time-pressured’ consumers suffering the destabilising ‘stresses’ of acceleration, do we experience any ethical concern about the products we buy, or do we come to personify Elias’s (1978) Homo clausus, virtually indifferent to the conditions of postcolonial global production, and the stabilising constraints, forced labour or slavery imposed on those who produce the cotton we wear, or the tea we drink (Newton, 2003a; Shahadat & Uddin, 2022). In sum, as we live ‘at pace’, do we frequently rely on others who are rendered ‘static’, and are the processes surrounding stability and instability more intimately related than we tend to consider?

In addressing these questions, we will explore images of stability and instability in social theory before focusing on their possible symbiosis, with attention to the examples provided by the social science disciplines of economics and accounting. The latter disciplines are interesting as they symbolise the logic of conjoint stability and instability. Following this discussion, we shall further consider its social theory implications, before addressing the way that ‘macro’ level assumptions about (de)stabilisation tends to interact with ‘micro’/‘meso’ level supposition about the (in)stability of the self.

Social theory and stability/instability

In crude terms, social theory tends to exhibit a differentiation between writers who tilt toward the instabilities represented by ‘the new’, fluidity and flux, and those who prefer the stabilising salience of historical sedimentation and the ‘weight of the past’. This contrast also has some correspondence with the distinction between depth/layered ontologies, and those that are ‘flatter’, or more fragile. In other words, if you perceive stronger historical predetermination, you may be more likely to theorise a depth ontology of enduring social structures. Alternatively, if you favour flux and ‘flow’, you may perceive flatter, fluid, networks, and feel the need to account for how stabilising processes can actually occur given the ever-present possibility of their mutability.

Though it is impossible within a single paper to account for all these varying inflections, we can briefly illustrate some of their divergent supposition, such as that between critical realism and governmentality. For instance, critical realists have long argued that it is ‘only on the metaphysical assumption that some relations are necessary and at least relatively enduring can we reasonably set out to practice science or to study society’ (Archer, 1995, p. 166, emphasis added). To buttress this assumption of stability and endurance, critical realists invoke concepts such as Bhaskar’s (1989) appeal to an intransitive ontological realm, or Archer’s trenchant defence of emergence, stratification and irreducibility. In keeping with this supposition of transcendence, they suggest that even where social structures are ‘only relatively enduring’, they are still time transcendent by virtue of operating whenever ‘tendencies x, y, z . . . operate’ (Collier, 1994, p. 244), so that it remains possible to formulate stable time-transcendent social patterns and recipes that ‘will still work if tried a hundred years later’ (Archer, 1995, p. 144).

In contrast, the turn toward governmentality and performativity has tended to be accompanied by a post-Foucauldian attention to rupture, destabilisation and the sanctity of the ‘new’. For example, Rose (1990) commenced his influential Governing the Soul by referencing Foucault’s argument that ‘individuality would be shaped in a new form’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 783, emphasis added). Though Governing the Soul was concerned with the sociohistorical context of this ‘new’ subjectivity, it nevertheless evoked the way that the world was refashioned through ‘new regimes of truth . . . new ways of saying plausible things . . . new ways for thinking’ (Rose, 1990, p. 4, emphasis added). In this sense, Rose’s approach represented a genealogy geared toward explaining destabilisation, accounting for how subjectivity became newly problematised and governed through a plethora of innovative ‘institutions, procedures, analysis and reflections, . . . calculations and tactics’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 20).

The above comparison between critical realism and governmentality is not intended to suggest that there can be a simple mapping of social theories in relation to temporality (Adam, 1990; Newton, 2007). Yet social theories do appear almost riddled with images of continuity vs discontinuity, the weight of the past vs the future, and assumptions about stabilisation vs destabilisation. Take Bourdieu and Callon’s divergent interpretations of marriage. Whereas Callon (2007) sought to defend the present performativity of marriage, Bourdieu (2008) preferred to stress its historical and cultural configuration. For example, interpreting marriage in his native Béarn, Bourdieu (2008) emphasised the stable traditions associated with marriage, especially that related to the patrimonial transfer of land and property. While feminist scholars have drawn attention to marriage in the subordination of women, Bourdieu’s (2008) principal interest in the Béarn lay with the way that the male peasantry were often excluded from the ‘marriage market’ because ‘the better-educated women from the hamlets . . . preferred working in small towns and marrying urban employees’ (Fowler, 2020, p. 448). This urban cultural intrusion meant that the male peasantry became almost maritally obsolete through their ‘subjective attachment to the old world’ (Bourdieu, 2008, p. 185), and Bourdieu repeatedly underscored the historical sedimentation of a long-term rural habitus in a temporal disjuncture that rendered the male peasantry outmoded.

In contrast to such historically conditioned hysteresis, Callon wished to stress the present performativity of marriage rather than reducing individuals to mere ‘puppets of history’. He declared that ‘When the mayor says “I hereby pronounce you man and wife”, he is not expressing something already there; he is making it happen’ (Callon, 2007, pp. 327–328, emphasis added). Of course, this stress on present instantiation makes Callon open to the accusation that marriage cannot be understood without attending to the stabilities surrounding patriarchal patrimony, religion, violence, kinship relations, etc. Yet Callon’s desire was to challenge this longue durée perspective by emphasising how marriage cannot be undertaken without present agency, following from Austin’s precept that it is ‘in saying what I do [that] . . . I actually perform the action’ (Austin, 1970, p. 235), and so ‘cause the reality that they describe to exist’ (Callon, 2007, p. 317).

Given these different interpretations, it is not surprising that they condition the way that Bourdieu and Callon portray major socioeconomic change, such as that associated with monetarist and neoliberal economics (Newton, 2019). Bourdieu interprets ‘institutions and behaviours’ as governed by ‘their historical necessity’ (2008, p. 195, original emphasis) whereby ‘neoliberal economics . . . is immersed in a particular society’ (2005, p. 10, emphasis added), such as ‘its state tradition’ (2005, p. 12) and ‘historically constituted habitus’ (2005, p. 10, emphasis added). In contrast, Callon champions the performative declaration that ‘the economy does not exist before economics performs it’ (2007, p. 328), a statement echoing the earlier governmentality thesis suggesting that ‘in a very real sense, “the economy” is brought into being by economic theories themselves’ (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 62). In this fashion, the stabilising ‘weight’ of Bourdieu’s historical sedimentation is supplanted by a performativity thesis attentive to the instability of a world capable of being made anew by making ‘real monetary markets correspond to [economic] theories or models’ (Callon, 2007, p. 324).

While the comparison between Bourdieu and Callon draws attention to the contrasting images of stability and instability in social theory, there are also finer grained, though still distinctive, differences among authors, such as the more subtle variance between Bourdieu and Elias in their interpretation of habitus. Though Bourdieu’s sense of habitus can constitute a stimulus toward change – such as when there is ‘a habitus divided against itself’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 511; cf. McNay, 2001), the stabilising effect of Bourdieu’s habitus still feels stronger than that employed by Elias because it is not countered by Elias’s emphasis on the open, uncertain and unplanned effects of figurational interweaving, where ‘reality is not stratified . . . but flat . . . and flowing’ (Vandenberghe, 2018, p. 44). As Hughes et al. note, though Bourdieu’s ‘fields’ and Elias’s ‘figurations’ are similar in their focus on power balances, asymmetries and emergent relational patterns, figurations are not understood as overlaying structures within Eliasian analysis but as ‘inter-meshing, intersecting, entangling, interlacing’ (2022, p. 65). As opposed to Bourdieu’s contention that the task of sociology is ‘to uncover the most profoundly buried structures’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 7), Eliasian processualism orients us away from ‘underlying structures with a greater degree of permanence’ (Hughes et al., 2022, p. 65) since Elias is alert to ‘the immanent impetus towards change as an integral moment of every social structure’ (Elias et al., 1997, p. 371). Durability and stability are not denied by Elias, but equally, the uncertainties of figurational interweaving between actors may make it is unwise to take them for granted.

Though the above brief review is very far from exhaustive, it nevertheless points to the way that contrasting notions of stability and instability abound in social theory and often constitute a pivotal axis of differentiation. We can further explore these differences by analysing the way in which social science disciplines have been constructed. In this context, the disciplines of economics and accounting are of particular interest since they simultaneously encodes contrasting images of stability and instability. For instance, while many academic disciplines evidence some elements of stability, economics has shown a notable ability to protect its mainstream orthodoxy by stabilising its mainstream episteme over several decades. Yet at the same time, economics can also be seen to destabilise if we follow a performativity thesis and attend to its ability to rewrite the financial terrain in its own image. Through such divergent depictions, the disciplines of economics and accounting raise the question of whether stabilising and destabilising processes are often interrelated, Janus-faced rather than in opposition, two sides of an interwoven process?

Stabilities and instabilities: Economics and accounting

As noted above, we find distinct evaluations of economics within the divergent analyses of Bourdieu and Callon, the former orienting more toward historical sedimentation, the latter pursuing present performativity (Newton, 2019). Within sociology, it is the latter performativity perspective, together with a governmentality contention, that presently appears to have most currency, especially with the development of social studies of finance (SSF). Though SSF exhibits differences in interpretation, there remains a general tendency to see actors as being ‘configured into the calculative egoists posited by orthodox economics . . . in such a way that the postulates of economics have empirical validity’ (Hardie & MacKenzie, 2007, p. 59, emphasis added). In this manner, SSF can be seen to have furthered the image of economics and finance as performatively shaping the economy anew by promoting ‘rational’ efficiency, and ‘rewriting’ markets and finance through agencement such as the Black and Scholes formula, stock tickers, experimental platform modelling, etc.

This performativity thesis is now relatively well known, given that SSF has come to constitute a major field of study. Yet there has been less attention to the way that these supposedly performative and destabilising effects of economics coexist with an academic discipline that has shown an enduring stability, as denoted by the term, ‘orthodox’. In effect, ‘orthodox economics’ has maintained a dominance constituted by an image of Homo oeconomicus as ‘informed, rational, utility-maximising’, together with a ‘closed system ontology facilitating the heavy, and often uncritical, use of mathematics’ (Thornton, 2017, p. 52). Though there have been reformist agendas, and some promotion of ‘complexity economics’, as Thornton notes, ‘the dominant orthodox branch of the profession, whilst having become less monolithic, is still narrow and insufficiently pluralist’ (2017, p. 26), epitomised by its ‘asocial and ahistorical nature’ (Milonakis & Fine, 2009, p. 9). Similarly, while some economists have argued that the discipline has become more pluralist, this tends to refer to a ‘plurality of topics’, rather than a challenge to ‘the dominant core methodology of economics’ (Gräbner & Strunk, 2020, p. 313). As Fourcade et al. comment, ‘economists manage their field tightly’ (2015, p. 96), so that meaningful pluralism ‘continues to be stifled’ with a failure to ‘even acknowledge that other approaches might have their own legitimacy’ (Dow, 2018, p. 23). In spite of ideological differences among economists (Kozlowski & Van Gunten, 2023), the discipline remains ‘unified by a common discursive core’ (Reay, 2012, p. 72) and a ‘remarkably high degree of consensus’ (Gordon & Dahl, 2013, p. 635), sharing an economic style of reasoning (Hacking, 1992) governed by defaults such as thinking marginally, growth, opportunity costs, cost-benefit analysis, etc. (Hirschman & Berman, 2014). Furthermore, it largely remains the case that ‘the neoclassical stranglehold over the mainstream is as strong as ever’ (Varoufakis & Arnsperger, 2009, p. 15) with the consequence that those critical of this ‘depressing journey’ (Milonakis & Fine, 2009, p. 9) represent ‘a minority approach’ (Thornton, 2017, p. 51).

In this manner, mainstream academic economics constitutes an orthodoxy that simultaneously symbolises the way that its stability coexists with its potential for destabilising performativity, having ‘played a very significant role in making up our world, and the kinds of persons, phenomena and entities that inhabit it’ (Osborne & Rose, 1999, p. 368). Furthermore, this symbiosis between stability and instability can be observed in technologies related to the history of economics, such as that of accounting. On the one hand, as ‘Foucault has been seminal to the critical traditions . . . in both accounting research and management history’ (Bowden & Stevenson-Clarke, 2021, p. 99), there has been a tendency to ‘follow Foucault in perceiving certain discontinuities in history’ (Hoskin & Macve, 1994, p. 68). On the other hand, against this Foucauldian sensitivity to instability, there are accounting technologies that exhibit an extraordinarily stable continuity, such as double-entry bookkeeping (DEB).

The first manual outlining DEB technology is generally accredited to Luca Pacioli’s De Computis et Scripturis, with its advice on how ‘to be a good accountant and sharp book-keeper’ (1494/1924, p. 1), though the double-entry concept can be dated as far back as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. DEB was not therefore an ‘invention’ of academic economics even though it subsequently acted as a key technology in economics and accounting practice. Yet as a financial technology, it illustrates the symbiosis between stability and instability because, while DEB became pivotal in stabilising financial management, it also appears associated with the destabilising predispositions of capitalist economies. With the former, it produced a reliable, ‘balanced’ and replicable financial convention, and thereby allowed financial record keeping to operate ‘according to rule’, and in so doing, ‘stabilized it’ (Poovey, 1998, p. 35, emphasis added). Thus, DEB represented a stabilising process and a financial ‘mode of government’ (Poovey, 1998, p. xviii) that has survived remarkably well over the longue durée. As Carruthers and Espeland (1991) noted:

As capitalism developed, the organizational forms of business expanded and changed. Demands for legitimacy and accountability shifted as different and larger audiences appeared. What is remarkable is that one cultural object, the double-entry method, could satisfy the concerns of such disparate audiences for such a long time. (p. 60)

Yet as well as operationalising a ‘balance’ between ‘debit’ and ‘credit’, DEB also signifies the interdependence between stabilising and destabilising processes, if we extend the argument of writers as various as Berman, Harvey, Schumpeter, Sombart and Weber. On the one hand, its longue durée stability has fostered the proposition that ‘without double-entry accounting [bookkeeping] neither capitalism nor the modern state could exist, for it is the essential tool in calculating profit and loss, the basis of financial management’ (Soll, 2014, p. xiv). On the other hand, DEB can also be seen as stabilising a capitalist system where ‘creative destruction is embedded within the circulation of capital itself’ and ‘exacerbates instability, insecurity, and in the end, becomes the prime force pushing capitalism into periodic paroxysms of crisis’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 106, original and added emphasis), with the well-known corollary that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (Berman, 2010, title page). In this sense, even though DEB represents a stable longue durée technology, it was historically interwoven with the flux and fluidity of capitalist economies. As Dean et al. argue, without the demonstrable financial order provided by the logic of DEB, ‘capitalism may well have failed, or at least taken much longer to obtain prominence’ (2016, p. 18). Though this thesis can be subject to critique (e.g. Macve, 2015), it nevertheless suggests that DEB ‘helped’ to ‘facilitate the development of capitalism’ even if ‘in no sense did it cause capitalism’ (Bryer, 2016, p. 35, original emphasis). To this extent, DEB acted as a stable and enduring technology that ‘played a significant part’ in the destabilising tendencies traditionally associated with capitalism, suggesting a measure of symbiosis over the longue durée between its stabilising and destabilising proclivities.

In sum, economics and its related financial technologies are of interest since they illustrate how we can see the same terrain as symbolic of conjoint macrosociological stabilisation and destabilisation, temporal processes that are interwoven rather than in binary opposition. Given this ‘interweaving of countless . . . interests and intentions’ (Elias, 1994, p. 389), it remains difficult to disentangle their enmeshed effects or establish a clear causal direction. In consequence, this interlacing raises the question as to why we should have to choose between, say, a Bourdieusian position suggesting that the historically sedimented US context ‘produced’ neoliberal economics, and Callon’s ‘reverse’ causal argument that economics ‘performs’ our sociomaterial context anew. Instead, it remains reasonable to suggest that, not only do both causalities operate, but they may be so well interwoven that they are impossible to disaggregate. For example, we might argue that monetarist economics was interwoven with the historically sedimented stabilities surrounding Bourdieu’s (2005) critique of North American neoliberalism, whilst simultaneously constituting an economic thesis that helped to perform and destabilise Callon’s (2007) sociotechnical terrain, so that ‘the creation of a European central bank’ appeared ‘directly inspired by the monetarist theses of Milton Friedman’ (Callon, 2007, p. 324). In this manner, rather than seeing stabilities and instabilities as oppositional, shouldn’t we focus more on their interrelationship?

Implications for social theory and analysis

The above observations have a range of implications for social theory and analysis. In particular, can we make a straightforward differentiation between stabilisation and destabilisation, or may both speak more closely to each other than we traditionally tend to imagine? In addition, have we formulated social theories in a manner that is adequately nuanced in relation to the possibilities of conjoint stability and instability? For instance, do we implicitly classify theories in terms of whether they favour depth ontology, encoding images of more stable social structures, as opposed to those theories which emphasise interrelations that are unstable, fluid and built around a flatter ontology? In this context, have we sufficiently considered the possibility that stabilising and destabilising processes may involve symbiotic interdependence rather than antagonism?

It is not difficult to locate further examples suggestive of symbiotic interdependence. For instance, an illustration of the interweaving of sociotechnical stabilisation and destabilisation can be witnessed within contemporary financial technologies. In particular, though financial devices are frequently associated with a destabilising speeding up of sociotechnical life, where ‘time is compressed and ultimately denied’ (Castells, 1996, pp. 462–463), they can also be seen as encoding an ambition to fix and stabilise the future. On the one hand, the ‘instantaneous time’ of financial technologies is portrayed as accelerating the likelihood of destabilising and sudden shifts in financial climate, with derivates in particular being described as ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ (Buffet, 2002, p. 15). On the other hand, as technical designs, their aim is to stabilise and lessen uncertainty about the future. As Tellmann (2020) argues, the predominant picture of ‘volatile financial futures governed by calculative devices’ has drawn attention away from the fact that this technology actually represents ‘claims on the future’ (p. 347), and to this extent, aims at ‘time binding and durability’ (p. 347). In other words, the focus on performativity within social studies of finance has tended to obscure the durational desire of financial devices. Tellmann illustrates how financial techniques such as the much cited ‘Black–Scholes formula’ are not just performative devices but also represent ‘a contractual binding of time’ (2020, p. 350). Financial technologies, such as derivatives, are therefore not solely destabilising since their reliability is dependent upon on their ‘fixation of the future’ (Tellmann, 2020, p. 355). In this sense, they further encapsulate the interweaving of stabilisation and destabilisation potential. As well as representing a technology associated with potential destabilisation, their design aims to fix and bind the future by making things ‘durable’ and fostering ‘continuity’ (Tellmann, 2020, p. 359).

That images of stability and instability hold wide-ranging relevance can be witnessed in other contemporary debates, such as that between those who point to change and acceleration in the sociocultural, technological and economic sphere (e.g. Castells, 1996; Gergen, 2000; Rosa, 2013), and those leaning more toward stasis, social entrapment (Neckel, 2020) and the ‘refeudalization of the public sphere’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 403). For example, Rosa has presented an influential epistle in favour of the inevitability of sociotechnical acceleration where it is assumed that ‘social acceleration represents one, if not, the, fundamental tendency of modernity’ (2013, p. 304, original emphasis). Alternatives such as deceleration supposedly arise ‘as a result of acceleration’ (Rosa, 2013, p. 85, emphasis added), and counterarguments are generally portrayed as a response to the inevitable ‘logic of acceleration’ (Rosa, 2013, p.179).

Within this ‘totalising account’ (Southerton, 2020, p. 83), there does not appear to be space for the countervailing view that sociocultural stasis may exist prior, during, and after acceleration, and though partially affected by them, not necessarily altered in the process. Yet the increasing attention to refeudalisation suggests that processes of rigidification may be equally salient in their own right, and that where acceleration exists, it may only do so for certain social groups (Neckel, 2020). In effect, accelerating instabilities continuously intersect with traditional stabilities so that the promise and pain of acceleration is only practically meaningful ‘for some’, most obviously those with greater economic, cultural and social capital. Yet many people ‘feel trapped in what they are doing’ (Press, 2021, p. 11), almost akin to an ‘enforced immobility’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 120), a ‘status fatalism’ consequent upon ‘the complete hopelessness of . . . precarious working lives’ (Neckel, 2020, p. 479). If to be static is to fail (Wajcman, 2015), there may be many who suffer the stigma of such failure. In effect, there are many groups for whom ‘standstill’ and ‘stuckness’ are the only possibilities as they are ‘weighted down by the world in which they live’ (Burkitt, 2008, p. 167). Given current conditions of global production and consumption, it also remains the case that many of those producing our everyday products have lives which are characterised by considerable constraint, if not forced labour and slavery.

Though we can question images of acceleration, staticity and refeudalisation (e.g. Van Krieken, 2023; Wajcman, 2015), what remains interesting about these contrasting conceptualisations is how they evoke countervailing images of stability and instability, the one inviting us to consider the inevitability of increasingly rapid change and instability in a world where ‘capital can travel fast and travel light’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 121), the other suggesting that, for many, stability and endurance either remain the norm or are being reinforced, so that they never have the opportunity to ‘suffer’ speed and acceleration, but instead remain ‘trapped on an island that is stagnating’ (Burkitt, 2008, p. 175).

From macro to micro?

The discussion so far has predominantly focused on the ‘macro level’ processes surrounding temporal stability and instability. Yet in spite of recent concerns about the ‘decline in macro-sociology’ (Delanty et al., 2023, p. 411) and the loss of ‘the “big picture”’ (Reckwitz & Rosa, 2023, p. 5), the question still remains as to ‘why . . . time as a “variable” is relevant only to macrosociological concerns’ (Giddens, 1984, p. 141, emphasis added)? Moreover, macroanalytical assumptions about stabilisation and destabilisation often tend to interact with implicit micro and mesoanalytical assumptions about the stability or instability of the self.

Within this imaginary, whether you are someone who is flexible and adaptive, or inflexible and ‘rigid’, late modernity may present difficulties for you. However, this appears particularly the case if you tend toward inflexibility. For instance, Bone (2021) implicitly portrays an inflexible (stable) subjectivity when he suggests that we are unable to cope with the destabilising effects of monetarist economics and neoliberalism, thereby occasioning pathological personal consequences such as neurological dysfunction (see above). This suffering ‘inelastic self’ is not a new concept as it has long informed elements of the literature attentive to psychological stress, as with the argument that stress arises because our unalterable ‘Stone Age biology’ remains ‘far too stable’, and though appropriate to our ‘primitive’ forebears, is now ill-equipped, outmoded and ‘out of step’ with the ‘stressful’ flux, complexity and changeability of modernity. Yet as one of us has previously noted (Newton, 2003b), this biological metaphor remains unfortunate to the extent that it incorporates a highly reductive portrayal of Stone Age societies as somehow being technically and culturally ‘simple’, in spite of argument suggestive of considerable sociotechnical complexity (e.g. Sahlins, 1972), especially in the Neolithic era (e.g. Mithen, 2019).

Unlike Bone (2021), Rosa does not deploy biological imagery. Nevertheless, he still argues that the destabilising effect of ‘social acceleration produces . . . new forms of subjectivity . . . [that] obviously bear potential for creating social pathologies . . . which cause human suffering and/or unhappiness’ (2010, p. 47). These seemingly include such ‘speed-induced sicknesses’ as ‘attention deficit disorder in children’ (2013, p. 43, original emphasis), and ‘stress-, depression-, anxiety-, and burnout-related disorders’ in adults (2019, p. 427), all of which are apparently rooted in the more general ‘state of alienation’ (2010, p. 82) and ‘loss of world’ (2019, p. 427, original emphasis) arising from ‘modernity’s broken promise of autonomy’ (2013, p. 319). Yet in spite of noting this ‘mental health crisis’ (Reckwitz & Rosa, 2023, p. 133), Rosa’s project is plainly not that of Bone. Instead, Rosa argues for a temporalised situational identity where ‘the conception of who one was, is, and will be . . . continually changes’ (2013, p. 238, added emphasis), and where in accelerating societies, ‘forms of identity based on flexibility and readiness to change are systematically favored’ (2013, p. 243).

In effect, what these microanalytical assumptions illustrate is how portrayals of the micro–macro interrelations surrounding stabilisation and destabilisation are intertwined with our view of the self in terms of stability vs instability, whether we project an inflexible stable self, or flexibility, fungibility and adaptability. For example, in direct contrast to Bone, Lifton (1993) argues that macroanalytical change illustrates how people are generally ‘protean’ and mutable. In the case of the US, he portrays a ‘shapeshifting’ self with a ‘frontier proteanism’ (1993, p. 35) that is productive of subjects who are ‘surprisingly resilient’ (1993, p. 1). Though Lifton does not deny that Americans experience ‘struggles with nitty-gritty life issues’ (1993, p. 49), he stresses that ‘the self is always capable of revising its own meaning structures’ (1993, p. 29) and thereby capable of ‘becoming fluid and many-sided’ (1993, p. 1). Rather than Bone or Rosa’s pathologies, Lifton’s (1993) subject is resiliently adaptable, ‘many-sided, mutable’, ‘flexible and fungible’ (Peltz, 2008, pp. 724, 726), capricious according to the changing demands of the day.

In sum, just as we can understand the macroanalytical in terms of stabilising and destabilising processes, so we can also see microanalytical subjectivity as involving interrelated, and not infrequently implicit, assumptions about the stability and instability of the self. It follows that, as we can apply Abbott (2001, 2004) in thinking about macro relations on a continuum from stability to instability (see above), so can we use the same approach in our understanding of the microanalytical. In other words, we can ‘plot’ varying microanalytical accounts of subjectivity along a continuum from representations of ‘stable subjectivity’ that assume more rigid, inelastic, characterisations of the self toward contrasting invocations of instability, fungibility and mutability. Adopting this approach, the more inflexible and ‘pathological’ narrative invoked by Bone can be seen as closer to the ‘stability’ endpoint of the continuum, whereas Lifton’s protean self approximates the opposing instability ‘pole’.

Applying this continuum, we find varying depictions of meso and microanalytical subjectivity. At the meso level, perhaps the most influential concept remains that of habitus, which though not determinist, nevertheless engenders a more stable sense of self. As noted, in Bourdieu’s hands, the social self can appear almost fixed as it fails to adapt to a world where its way of being has become ‘out of sync’, outmoded and redundant. Though Elias’s (1994) concept of ‘psychogenesis’, and his general sensitivity to figurational change, highlight intergenerational plasticity and ever-latent fluidity, his description of habitus as ‘second nature’ nevertheless underlines its stabilising tendencies. To the extent that such stability suggests difficulties in adapting to accelerating change and fluidity, negative psychosocial consequences might be expected. Yet even where writers invoke a more protean subjectivity such that ‘identity . . . becomes transitory’ (Rosa, 2013, p. 233, original emphasis), this greater flexibility does not signify an escape from the pressures of modernity. For instance, though Bauman, Gergen and Giddens all invoke images of a more protean ‘unstable’ self, this does not denote an ability to circumvent the vicissitudes of living with ‘pure’ relationships, individualisation, saturation, etc. Both Bauman and Gergen report the self as being ‘under siege’ (Bauman, 2005, p. 15; Gergen, 2000, p. 1) due to the requirement to live in a ‘society of individuals’ (Elias, 1991, title page) and ‘the vertigo of unlimited multiplicity’ (Gergen, 2000, p. 49). As Bauman comments on Giddens, in this modern world ‘we are “reflexive beings” who look closely at every move we make, who are seldom satisfied with its results and always eager to correct them’ (2000, p. 23). The consequence is that we may come to resemble Bauman’s Homo eligens, ‘a permanently impermanent self, completely incomplete, definitely indefinite – and authentically inauthentic’ (Bauman, 2005, p. 33). Unlike Lifton (1993), these ‘stable instabilities’ and their desired correlate, fungible subjectivity, do not necessarily imply a ‘positive’ psychosocial outcome.

Finally, though Abbott’s (2001, 2004) ‘fractal’ approach is heuristically useful in positioning stable vs unstable images of the self, it can represent something of a ‘forced choice’ since most of us can probably be described as being simultaneously flexible and inflexible, and as at the macroanalytical level, we can posit symbioses between the two. For example, if we accept Giddens’s ontological security, the stability of this quotidian ‘comfort blanket’ enables greater psychosocial flexibility and instability elsewhere precisely because we have a stable ‘trust in the existential anchoring of reality’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 38) and its ‘taken-for-granted routines’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 40). Nevertheless, if we follow Rosa, this symbiotic security becomes increasingly brittle as sociotechnical acceleration means that our lives are no longer governed by ‘routine and tradition’, but instead present with ‘unforeseeability’ (2013, p. 246), with the consequent likelihood of ‘socio-ontological insecurity’ (Reckwitz & Rosa, 2023, p. 150, original emphasis). If we accept Rosa’s thesis, we are therefore left with uncertainty about how individuals and collectives will respond to accelerating uncertainty.

Discussion

In this essay, we have sought to examine the questions that are raised by considering processes of stabilisation and destabilisation as symbiotic and interwoven rather than in direct opposition. For example, though the discipline of economics displays a noteworthy endurance in maintaining a stable mainstream orthodoxy over several decades, it can also appear as a principal agent in the destabilisation of markets and subjectivity during the same period. Equally, as financial derivatives attempt to stabilise and ‘fix the future’, their use may simultaneously arouse fears of market destabilisation. Or as the destabilising tendencies of acceleration proceed apace for some, following Rosa (2013), their actualisation may depend on others whose lives are becoming yet more static, constrained or refeudalised, following Neckel (2020). Similarly, at the microanalytical level, we can see contrasting images of the self on a continuum from stable inflexibility to flexible instability, and these attributions insinuate corresponding depictions of the way that people respond to (de)stabilisation. For instance, is it the case that our personal flexibility is symbiotically interwoven with the degree to which we can internalise psychosocial stability, or has this relationship been bypassed by an ‘often unpredictable’ late modernity (Rosa, 2013, p. 246) that favours the unceasingly protean?

In general, such questions suggest a need to rethink the way we frame and categorise temporal processes. They ask us to reconsider whether the sociological preoccupation with the contrasting couplets of ‘stability vs instability’, ‘history vs performativity’, the ‘timeworn vs the “new”’, ‘depth vs flatness’, has tended to occlude our awareness of the interwoven crosscurrents of temporality, such as conjoint processes of stabilisation and destabilisation. In addition, they raise the question of whether macroanalytical stability may be causal of destabilisation and instability, as the example of economics appears to suggest. This is not just the SSF question of whether ‘economists make markets’ (Mackenzie et al., 2007, title page), but whether the very stability of this discipline furthers its performativity. For instance, if mainstream economics lacked a stable coherence, would it still have the ‘authority to transform the world into its own image’ (Miller, 1998, p. 196, added emphasis)? In other words, could economics destabilise without a coherence built on its stabilisation? Indeed, some writers admire economics precisely because of its ability to ‘enforce both theoretical and methodological conformity’ (Pfeffer, 1993, p. 614), and thereby further its ‘growing dominance . . . as the foundation of policy and practice’ (Pfeffer & Fong, 2005, p. 373).

It is tempting to see this stability of orthodox economics as causally related to its ability to destabilise through policy and market reform, or equally, perceive the longue durée of double-entry bookkeeping as fundamental to its adjunct role in the ‘liquefying’ effects of capitalism. Yet though stabilities and instabilities may be interwoven processes, we are wary of suggesting a clear causal direction to this relationship. Firstly, causation cannot be abstracted from context, and though orthodox economics ‘is unified by a common discursive logic’, it can be ‘highly flexible or fragmented in its practical influence’, so that the degree to which it ‘naturalizes capitalism . . . may depend on a range of local contextual factors’ (Reay, 2012, p. 55; cf. Hirschman & Berman, 2014). Secondly, it is difficult to establish that it is only the stability of orthodox academic economics that garners its policy impact. For instance, is the diffusion of economics also a consequence of economic technologies ‘in the wild’ (Callon, 2007, p. 338), such as that undertaken by ‘economist engineers . . . accountants, marketers, and, more generally, market professionals’ (Callon, 2007, pp. 332–333). Though academic economists may have successfully maintained a core orthodoxy, this does not apply to all of its interrelated technologies of finance, audit and accounting which are very well ‘spread over the surface of things and bodies’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 72). As a result, it may be that any policy ‘success’ of economics is as much the result of the widespread diffusion of its associated technologies as its control by a stable academic orthodoxy (Newton, 2019).

In sum, we prefer the proposition that any causality is likely to be bi- or multidirectional, reflecting interwoven configurations (Elias, 1994). Yet such entangling raises questions about traditional theoretical oppositions such as that between theories promoting stability and historical sedimentation and those preferring to emphasise the present performativity of new discursive regimes, tactics and technologies. If the old is intimately related to the new, the stable to the unstable, does it make sense to favour one perspective over another? As noted, shouldn’t we acknowledge the likelihood that monetarist and neoliberal economics are the historical product of a stabilising sociopolitical sedimentation, following Bourdieu, and performatively destabilising the socioeconomic terrain anew, according to governmentality and SSF, a conjoint process? Indeed, can we meaningfully separate these processes?

At the microanalytic level, though we find Abbott’s (2001, 2004) approach heuristically useful in exploring how macroanalytical assumption about stabilisation and destabilisation interacts with microanalytic presumption, we would suggest that this relationship is probably best conceived as partly symbiotic as well, such that, say, a measure of stability in our subjective world may facilitate our ability to handle instability and fluidity. Yet at the same time, we would also argue for a strong degree of circumspection as we try to ‘read off’ the microanalytical concomitants of any macro context, and say, determine whether alienation is greater under situations of ‘enforced stability’ rather than ‘accelerating instability’. For instance, contra Rosa (2010, 2013, 2019), it may be that it is precisely those who are socioeconomically ‘stuck’ and excluded from the ‘swift paced life’ who are most likely to experience alienation as they feel divorced from a world where others ‘move rapidly forward’ and accrue the economic and cultural benefits of living ‘at pace’.

To conclude, we wish to suggest that we should move beyond the traditional ‘either/or’ tendencies of social theory, and following Abbott (2001, 2004), consider reviving argument that has been downplayed, repressed or denied within a particular theoretical programme. In the present context, this means interrogating approaches stressing stabilisation, continuity and sedimentation, given the increasing dominance of social theory emphasising the performance of ‘flow’, fluidity, destabilisation and acceleration. For those of us feeling the flux of accelerating instability, it can be easy to forget that many people’s likelihood of meaningful change may be seriously circumscribed, if not practically denied. Such observations also reinforce the need to examine how ‘macro’ assumption about (de)stabilisation interacts with ‘micro’ supposition about the (in)stability of the self and interrogate the ease with which we can read one off from the other. At the same time, we need to address the complex historical processes through which stabilisation and destabilisation may be interwoven. In other words, shouldn’t we try and move beyond the implicit differentiation between theories favouring historical sedimentation and those attentive to the performance of the ‘new’? Rather than seeing these processes as opposites, can we meaningfully separate them, and do we need to be more open to the possibility that they are often closely interwoven?