The Blackwell Companion to Sociology Read Online Free PDF

having their own a-spatial structures. Furthermore, societies were viewed as
    separate from each other, and the processes of normative consensus or structural conflict or strategic conduct were conceptualized as internal to each society,
    whose boundaries were coterminous with the nation-state. There was little
    recognition of the processes of internal differentiation across space.
    This was so although the beginning of the twentieth century saw a series of
    sweeping technological and cultural changes which totally transformed the
    spatial underpinnings of contemporary life (Kern, 1983; Soja, 1989). These
    changes included the telegraph, the telephone, X-rays, cinema, radio, the bicycle, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the passport, the skyscraper, relativity theory, cubism, the stream-of-consciousness novel and psychoanalysis.
    However, these changes were not reflected within sociology at the time and
    they became the province of a separate and increasingly positivist science of
    geography that set up and maintained a strict demarcation and academic divi-
    sion of labor from its social scientific neighbors.
    In the next section I summarize some of the early ``classical'' writings on space which developed within the context of geography's colonization of the spatial. In the section following I show what in the late 1970s changed this and brought
    space into sociology and social theory more generally. In the final section
    4
    John Urry
    analysis is provided of the recent emergence of a research program of a sociology of place, which brings out the importance of diverse spatial mobilities across,
    into, and beyond such places.
    Thè`Classics''
    ``Classics'' and Space
    The sociological classics dealt with space in a rather cryptic and undeveloped
    way. Marx and Engels were obviously concerned with how capitalist industrial-
    ization brought about the exceedingly rapid growth of industrial towns and
    cities. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels describe
    how fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away, all newly formed relations
    become antiquated before they can ossify, and `àll that is solid melts into air''
    (1888, p. 54; Berman, 1983). Marx and Engels argue inter alia that capitalism
    breaks the feudal ties of people to their ``natural superiors''; it forces the bourgeois class to seek markets across the surface of the globe and this destroys local and regional markets; masses of laborers are crowded into factories, so concentrating the proletariat and producing a class-for-itself; and the development of trade unionism is assisted by the improved transportation and communication
    that capitalism brings in its wake. In his later works, especially Capital, Marx analyzes how capitalist accumulation is based upon the annihilation of space by
    time and how this consequently produces striking transformations of agricul-
    ture, industry, and population across time and space.
    Some similar processes are analyzed by Durkheim, although the consequences
    are viewed very differently. In The Division of Labor in Society it is argued that there are two types of society with associated forms of solidarity, mechanical
    (based on likeness or similarity) and organic (based on difference and comple-
    mentarity). It is the growth in the division of labor, of dramatically increased specialization, that brings about transition from the former to the latter. This heightened division of labor results from increases in material and moral density.
    The former involves increases in the density of population in a given area,
    particularly because of the development of new forms of communication and
    because of the growth in towns and cities. Moral density refers to the increased density of social interaction. Different parts of society lose their individuality as individuals come to have more and more contacts and interactions. This produces a new organic solidarity of mutual interdependence, although on occa-
    sions