John Urry: E-Special Introduction

Moving Across Theory, Culture and Society with John Urry

This special issue marks our loss of the great sociologist John Urry (1946–2016), who was a teacher, colleague, mentor, and role model to so many of us. John was one of the most important British sociologists of the late 20th and early 21st century, and a key contributor to the theoretical shifts in social science that informed the emergence of Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society, so it is very appropriate to re-publish his whole body of work from these journals along with the introductions to several related publications. I hope that this collection of many of his key articles published in these two journals can both commemorate and continue his profound contributions not only as a social theorist, but also as a network builder and public intellectual who changed the face of British, and indeed global, social science.

First, though, a remark on geographical location. Peter Adey has already written for TCS a moving and comprehensive tribute to John’s work and his influence on so many minds and fields, even while noting that he remained throughout his professional life rooted in one place, Lancaster University. This is where I first met him when I joined the Sociology Department in 1998. From his base at Lancaster, John attracted dozens of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, visiting researchers, and new lecturers to the Northwest of England. He also maintained ties with people around the world, and occasionally brought many of us together for workshops and conferences. Indeed, it is remarkable how John maintained all of these connections with literally hundreds of people across vast distances, bridged by occasional face-to-face meetings: enacting ‘the compulsion to proximity’ that he frequently cited as theorized by his late colleague Deirdre Boden (Boden and Molotch, 1994). It is a proximity that we now miss very much.

On the very week in March that John sadly and suddenly passed away we were just celebrating the publication of our co-written article ‘Mobilizing the New Mobilities Paradigm’ in the new journal Applied Mobilities, in which we assessed the impact of the mobilities paradigm in the social sciences over the past decade (Sheller and Urry, 2016). Despite the seeming hubris of announcing something as a ‘new paradigm’, John was naturally very self-effacing, modest and not one to trumpet his own achievements. He created collaborative environments in which he often wrote with younger scholars, helping significantly to advance their careers. We were also in the midst of writing an essay together for Current Sociology on the relation between the ‘mobilities turn’ and the ‘spatial turn’, which gave me the chance to talk with John about the origins of his thinking on space and movement. It is in that context of reflecting on our work together and taking stock of its impact across various fields that this assessment of his work arises.

In our recent conversations, which I am so thankful we had, John traced the origins of his interest in mobilities to the spatial turn in social theory beginning with Lefebvre’s 1974 Le production de l’espace (translated into English as Lefebvre, 1991), alongside British debates especially engendered by Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984), another great thinker we have sadly recently lost. Her groundbreaking text, according to John, examined the complex and varied movements of capital into and out of place and the resulting forms of sedimentation occurring within each place (see also Massey, 1991, 1994). This was quickly followed by Gregory and Urry’s Social Relations and Spatial Structures (1985) that brought together geographical and sociological contributions by Harvey, Giddens, Massey, Pred, Sayer, Soja and Thrift. This collection partly informed John’s turn to examining what he referred to as ‘the leisured movements of people into and out of place’ further developed in The Tourist Gaze (1990), as well as analyses of multiple mobilities and their spatial consequences in Lash and Urry’s The End of Organized Capitalism (1987) and Economies of Signs and Space (1994). His earlier books Social Theory as Science (1975, with Russell Keat) and The Anatomy of Capitalist Societies (1981) were important theoretical contributions that had already laid the groundwork for this direction in his work. He was a significant sociological/social theorist from the early days and this grounding in a range of theoretical issues provided the platform for his conceptual innovation in many substantive fields (tourism, mobility, nature/climate, etc.).

Interestingly, these developments coincided with the founding of the journals Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and Theory, Culture & Society, along with Polity Press in the early 1980s. John described these publications as seeking to develop a post-disciplinary social science and social theory in reaction to the Thatcher government’s attacks on universities and especially cuts to university social science programs (Adey and Bissell, 2010: 12). He also described his work as oppositional to both American social science and ‘British empiricism’ (2010: 13). From my perspective in the United States, this anti-positivist edge in his work helps to explain the continuing reluctance of the American Sociological Association and many mainstream US sociology departments to engage with the new mobilities paradigm to the extent that it has taken off elsewhere. Alongside these intellectual commitments, John’s personal stance was thoroughly anti-elitist and anti-neoliberal, as was materially evident in his everyday interactions and symbolically evident in his ever-present monochrome work uniform of a (usually) blue cotton shirt, blue jacket and trousers, always with an open collar and no tie. He was an egalitarian through and through, and had no time for pretensions, hierarchies, or status seeking. He welcomed students and visitors from around the world with his infectious smile, and always made a place for them at the table.

By the mid-1990s theorizations of the spaces of ‘flow’ and ‘network’ became especially significant with Castells’ The Power of the Network Society (1996). At the same time feminist critiques developed of postmodern theories of ‘nomadism’ (Braidotti, 1994; Kaplan, 1996), as well as Benko and Strohmayer’s Space and Social Theory which included Cresswell’s early writing on the politics of mobility (1997; and see Cresswell, 2006). Many people have equated John’s work on mobilities with a general postmodern theoretical interest in flows and nomadism, yet because of his distinct post-Marxist theoretical formation and location in the Northwest of England (where he was part of the Northwest Regional Studies Group) his approach is distinct from that of other less materially grounded cultural theorists. By the turn of the millennium the concept of ‘mobility’ emerged as a key term within various analyses of changing economies, cultures and globalization. John held that a major contributor was Bauman, who argued in Liquid Modernity that: ‘Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among coveted values – and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern time’ (Bauman, 2000).

Sociology Beyond Societies (Urry, 2000b; and see Urry, 2000a) appeared in the same year and helped consolidate attention to mobilities as a key concept within an emerging spatial social science. John’s unique approach to mobilities had its own particular qualities of broad theoretical synthesis, omnivorous curiosity about social phenomena, and a culturally fluent accessibility. That openness is part of why it appealed to so many readers. The turn-of-the-century mobilities rush generated various events, including our founding of the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University in 2003; the inaugural Alternative Mobility Futures Conference in Lancaster in January 2004; our creation of the journal Mobilities the following year, with its first issue published in 2006; and our publication of ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’ in the special issue of Environment and Planning A that we co-edited on ‘materialities and mobilities’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006). There was a strong emphasis in this foundational work upon thinking across spatial scales, blurring disciplinary boundaries, exploring materialities and temporalities, moving beyond ‘sedentary’ national or societal frameworks, and exploring whether ‘mobilities’ could provide a vision for a different kind of social science: more open, more wide-ranging, more attuned to other fields, even more speculative and future-oriented.

Urry’s work on mobilities also generated rich debates not only within British sociology, social theory, and cultural geography, but also within European social theory concerned with reflexive modernization and cosmopolitanism (e.g. Canzler et al., 2008). It was sometimes less warmly embraced in feminist and postcolonial circles, where the politics of mobility was freighted with histories of patriarchy, colonialism, and racial domination. Yet John was always open to these interpretations and the kinds of questions about power that they generated. As he put it, sometimes it is the mobile elite who move the most, yet ‘it’s sometimes those with more network capital who are the immobile, who can summon the mobile to wherever they are … Who is moving? Who is moving whom? Who has to move? Who can stay put?’ (quoted in Adey and Bissell, 2010: 7). The politics of mobility struggles and contested notions of mobility justice thus remain key concerns for the future of mobilities research.

For this special issue collecting some of John Urry’s work, I have made a selection of his key articles from Theory, Culture & Society and from Body & Society, which can help to illuminate the broad contours of his overall contributions to social science. It is organized into three sections, focusing first on his theorization of complexity and the social sciences, because in some ways this is his signal contribution and relates most closely to his earliest thinking; second on his development of these ideas through examples relating to mobilities, climate change and carbon capital; and finally turning to his work on tourism, bodies, and nature, which attends more to the human embodied experience. I offer an overview of each of these.

Complexity and Social Science

Urry’s early work on the problem of social order arose out of debates within the post-Marxist social theory of the British left, as seen in his 1982 essay on the ‘Duality of Structure’, with which this collection begins. In particular, he takes to task Giddens’ version of structuration theory for overlooking, first, the non-linear complexity by which structures may or may not generate and reproduce particular social systems and, second, the constraints on the form taken by social struggles and the unintended consequences of such struggles. Interestingly, this critique of the duality of structure and agency leads directly into Urry’s later work on complexity. In his 2002 article on 11 September, he argues similarly for ‘the profound limitations of such a linear view of the global’ and describes globalization as ‘disordered, full of paradox and the unexpected, and of irreversible and juxtaposed complexity’ (2002: 58). He cites Latour, stating that the social ‘possesses the bizarre property of not being made of agency or structure at all, but rather of being a circulating entity’ (Latour, 1999: 17).

This description of a disordered world is also very evident in his 1994 work with Scott Lash, Economies of Signs and Space, which also updates Marx through an account of the late 20th century form of disorganized capitalism, in which ‘objects and subjects are amazingly mobile and that these mobilities are themselves structured and structuring’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 3). Here we see the beginnings of the theorization of mobilities as a key concept, connected to flows of commodities, capital, migrants, tourists, labour, and information. While building on Marx’s account of the circulation of commodities and the alienation of labour, Urry’s focus here is on the increasing mobilities, velocities, and reflexivity of disorganized capitalism, and the complex patterning of social life this turbulence produces.

Urry’s re-writing of Marx therefore connects directly to his theorizations of mobilities ‘that are neither macro nor micro but circulate between each, through “speed; velocity; waves; continuous flow; pulsing; fluidity and viscosity; rhythm; harmony; discordance; and turbulence” (Dillon, 2000: 12)’ (Urry, 2002: 58). Thus we see how his theorization of mobilities parallels and arises out of his critique of structuration theory, and draws on complexity theory to instead depict forms of non-linear networks or circulating relationality between ‘convergent mobile, material worlds’ (2002: 59). His mobilities theory is, in effect, a rejection of the linearity of the classical sociological tradition, with its built-in assumptions about agency and causality. Instead he depicts processes imagined as more mobile, unstable, disorderly, chaotic, with unforeseen consequences, and exceeding the social with material heterogeneity and path-dependent irreversibility. This was a fitting kind of social theory for the turbulence of the last decades of the 20th century, when people sensed a collapse of the structures that had made sense in the past, and it appealed especially to a new generation of social theorists looking for new explanatory frameworks.

Based on his book Global Complexity (2003), Urry then introduced complexity theory into the social sciences with his 2005 special issue of Theory, Culture & Society. Here he drew on the US-based Gulbenkian Commission, influenced by Prigogine (1997), to argue for breaking down the division between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences, since both are characterized by complexity (Urry, 2005: 236). And in 2005 he still tracked this theory back to Marx, discussed in the section ‘Complexity and Marx’, as ‘the best example of complexity analysis within the social sciences’ (2005: 240) – taking us right back to the problems with the ‘duality of structure’ identified in his 1982 essay. Here he returns to the argument that human agency is limited, and that Marx would have agreed (2005: 243) that ‘the social is materially heterogeneous: talk, bodies, texts, machines, architectures, all of these and many more are implicated in and perform the social’ (Law, 1994: 2). In a sense, the movement in all of Urry’s work towards complexity, relationality, and mobilities was an effort to answer the initial driving questions: What produces, reproduces, or disrupts social order? How can we understand emergent patterns of social change?

Mobilities, Climate Change and Carbon Capital

Urry’s work on mobilities was not simply about describing or explaining a more mobile world (as some misinterpreted it), but also about the ways in which immobilities and infrastructural moorings deeply shaped uneven terrains, as described in Global Complexity (Urry, 2003), and the implications of this for the social sciences. The new mobilities paradigm challenged the idea of space as a container for social processes, and thus brought the dynamic, ongoing production of space into social theory across many different domains of research. But it also challenged disciplinary containers and allowed social theorists to move with each other in new assemblages (and, we might say, new assemblies within which to work together). The larger scale ‘distances’ traveled today generate many problems for the sovereignty of states and challenges of governance and control, Urry argued, so mobilities and scales are interlocked and subject to many modalities of struggle.

In the articles gathered in this section, first is our co-authored ‘Mobile Transformations of “Public” and “Private” Life’ (Sheller and Urry, 2003), in which we tried to show the significance of mobilities to transforming wider aspects of social life. This was part of a wider project that Urry was undertaking with a whole series of collaborators, but it clearly builds on his early social theorization of economy, civil society, and the state, while showing how they are being transformed today. He further developed the concept of mobilities through collaborative work on automobility (see Sheller and Urry, 2000; Urry, 2004; Featherstone et al., 2004; Dennis and Urry, 2008), aeromobilities (Cwerner et al., 2009; Urry et al., 2016), mobile lives and network capital (Elliott and Urry, 2010), and mobile methodologies (Büscher and Urry, 2009; Büscher et al., 2011), amongst others. Building on our earlier analysis (Sheller and Urry, 2000) of the shaping of the city by the car system, Urry’s ‘The “System” of Automobility’ (2004) was in some respects an effort to use one empirical case to explain the emergence of one exemplary complex system, in order to begin to imagine how it might be undone.

Urry’s concern with ending automobility was tied to his growing concern with climate change and energy consumption as the key issues of the 21st century. His work with another Lancaster colleague, Bron Szerszynski, first traced the contours of this theme which emerged every more strongly in his later work. Against the prevailing economistic models of human mitigation of climate change – focused on behavioral changes made by individual, rational, calculative actors – Szerszynski and Urry’s 2010 special issue of TCS made the case for understanding climate change as a complex systemic, social and natural process. They sought ‘to use theory to explore the social dimensions of the challenge of the changing climate so that we can better understand the nature of the epoch we seem to be entering, and what is at stake’ (2010: 4). Urry’s article ‘Consuming the Planet to Excess’, reproduced here along with their introduction to the special issue, elaborated the argument for a social science approach to climate change (Urry, 2010) that would emerge fully in his subsequent book on climate change (Urry, 2011).

Like his work on complexity, Urry grounded the argument in a reading of Marx and Engels as theorists of contradictory processes emerging out of capitalism that tend to bring about its own disequilibrium and disordering. Likewise in his 2014 special issue of TCS on The Problem of Energy, he introduces the problem through Marx’s understanding of social-natural metabolisms and the speeding up and intensification of circulation that drives an apparent rift between humans and ‘nature’ through fossil fuel capitalism, even though they are ‘utterly entwined’ (Urry, 2014: 6–7). Thus he effectively reinterprets and updates Marx’s understanding of historical materialism for the 21st century. This interest in climate change and carbon-based mobility led to a turn in this phase of Urry’s work toward questions of peak oil, resource consumption, energy consumption, and a general orientation toward the future, if often a rather dark and catastrophic future of reaching the limits of life upon Earth.

We can see here how Urry’s interest in systems of mobility was part of a wider theory of the transformation of capitalism, linking together his early work on political economies with his later work on climate through an account of high-carbon mobilities as the basis for contemporary capitalism. Ultimately, Urry’s work on mobilities led to what one might imagine as a geo-ecological turn in his thinking. John himself pointed out that in his later work on climate change (Urry, 2011), peak oil (Urry, 2013), and offshoring (Urry, 2014) he was thinking about these in terms of the ‘political economy of mobilities’ and suggested that ‘there will develop a “post-mobilities” mobilities paradigm that will be much more resource based’ (Adey and Bissell, 2010: 3).

Tourism, Bodies and Nature

Finally, this selection of Urry’s work concludes with themes of tourism, nature(s), and the sociology of the body. Although one might have begun this collection from the bodily scale, and moved ‘up’ from the body and leisure to automobility and urban forms, to global complexity and planetary resource consumption, it seems to me that the reverse trajectory is more informative for it moves us from Urry’s early recognition of the contradictions of capitalism, through the relational and material turn, and into the now re-positioned human-scaled problem of how we ought to live in the world. As much as Urry was a macro-level thinker concerned with systems and global processes, he was at his most personally relevant and politically inspiring as a micro-level theorist of the sensuous body, moving through worlds within social practices and relations that are only partially of our own making. He showed how through our own choices and apparent liberation we are coerced into more mobile high-carbon lives, yet might also imagine other futures.

Urry was one of the pioneers of post-humanist relational approaches to social practice that explore the distribution of agency between people, places, and materiality. In their introduction to Contested Natures, Macnaghten and Urry (1998) focus on social practices that they describe as discursively constituted, embodied, spaced, timed, and involving risk, agency and trust. As in earlier work, this is grounded in a critique of conventional sociology and its division from the natural sciences. In their special issue of Body & Society on ‘Bodies of Nature’, they likewise describe their concerns with ‘the varied embodied performances … that produce and reproduce different “natures”’ (Macnaghten and Urry, 2000: 1). In tracing the rise of certain kinds of leisure practices they sought to ‘deconstruct simple dichotomies of what is natural and unnatural, what is countryside and urban, and what are subjects and what are supposedly objects’ (2000: 2), suggesting that there is ‘no asocial (or natural) nature’ (2000: 4). They developed the notion of affordances from Gibson (1979) and Costall (1995) to describe how ‘particular “objects” in the environment afford a range of possibilities and resistances’ (Macnaghten and Urry, 2000: 9). This understanding has become increasingly influential across social theory and cultural geography.

Like Urry’s work on automobility, this approach to bodies and leisure emphasizes the ways in which practices conceived of as ‘escape’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘natural’ are also deeply constrained, regulated, and temporally and spatially managed. This contradiction is then posited as a central feature of Western capitalist modernity, and it is already linked with theories of mobility, complexity and chaotic emergence in the Body & Society introduction (2000: 9–10). This line of work was therefore closely related to the mobilities turn and its relational modes of thinking about movement, space, and material relations between ‘hybrids’ of people, objects, and infrastructures. This emphasis on bodies in motion was especially influential in fields such as tourism studies (Edensor, 1998; Hollinshead, 2016), cultural geography (Adey, 2010; Adey et al., 2014), and design thinking (Jensen, 2013, 2014). It also linked with and inspired new lines of work on social practices, affordances and atmospheres, senses and sensescapes, affect and emotions, and the emergence of non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008).

The excesses of consumer desire that Urry identifies within tourism, travel, mobility and speculative capitalism are the very engine driving the macro-level processes that coerce us into systems of resource exploitation, waste, and ever-greater energy consumption. Reiterating his earlier work on economies of signs and space, this sensitivity to human-scaled desire and consumption joins cultural and economic processes that are at once liberating and coercing us towards self-destruction: ‘The adaptive and evolving relationships between enormously powerful systems, especially those of a deregulated economy and excessive forms of consumption, are catastrophically careering at full speed, it seems, to the edge of the abyss’ (Urry, 2010: 207).

Thus in Contested Natures we find at the core of Urry’s sociological imagination an interpretation of Western modernity that revolves around the demise of national social structures, as well as other structural dichotomies, and instead envisions ‘global flows criss-crossing’ the world with ‘spatial unevenness and temporal diversity’ and producing ‘an indeterminant, ambivalent and semiotic risk culture’ (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998: 31). There was, then, a common project running through Urry’s understanding of tourism, natures and bodies that led directly into his conceptualization of mobilities, and ultimately to the theories of global complexity and social science.

Conclusion

These, then, are the new sociological questions that John Urry and his many collaborators asked, and that generatively continue to move the sociological imagination into new public realms. His work enabled myriad interdisciplinary and vital crossings at the creative margins that he so valued (e.g. Adey et al., 2014; Sheller, 2014; Sheller and Urry, 2016). In reassembling this selection of Urry’s work here, one should note the extent to which he made collaboration a crucial part of his work process, always absorbing and building on the work of those around him, especially a whole series of colleagues at Lancaster who leave traces in this work. In The Tourist Gaze, for example, Urry acknowledges, amongst others, Peter Dickens, Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, Celia Lury, Chris Rojek, Dan Shapiro, Rob Shields, Sylvia Walby and Alan Warde, and of course Jonas Larsen, who revised the third edition. In Contested Nature we see additional influences of colleagues such as Sarah Franklin, Sue Penna, Jackie Stacey, Bron Szerzynski, Mark Toogood, Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne, amongst others. In work on mobilities he collaborated not only with me, but others who passed through or remain at Lancaster, including Kingsley Dennis, David Tyfield, Thomas Birtchnell, Monika Büscher, etc.

The new mobilities paradigm and the larger body of Urry’s work represented here might come to be remembered as a ‘Lancaster School’, which continues to stand in contrast to the quantified empiricist traditions in American and British social sciences, while struggling against the hierarchies of academic departments, professional bodies, and their disciplinary closure. For me it is a beacon of hope for the kind of post-disciplinary social science I hope to create with others who will continue this tradition. It also stands against the market-driven discipline of the neoliberal university, which is deeply complicit in the very processes of coercive modernization that social theory unravels.

Having built a vibrant international network of mobility scholars spanning dozens of universities and many countries, having created new journals and new book series, having inspired new research centres and career trajectories, we can say that John Urry created a new kind of mobile scholarship: one that reaches beyond disciplines, enables new kinds of intellectual formations, and allows for sociology to renew its relevance in the world at large as it addresses crucial public issues including dark economies, resource extraction, climate disasters, sustainable urbanism, migration conflicts and mobility justice. Moving with each other in these new constellations, many of us will continue thinking with John Urry’s graceful and generous moves across theory, culture and society.