Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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СКАЧАТЬ (Clegg and Lounsbury 2009; Weber [1921] 1968). Another change in the postindustrial age was the growth of the service sector of the economy, involving everyone from high-status service providers such as physicians and lawyers to lower-status workers behind the counters of fast-food restaurants and now those who drive for Uber.

      The more recent rise of the “information age” (Castells 2010; Kline 2015) can be seen as a part, or an extension, of the postindustrial age. Knowledge and information are critical in today’s world. So, too, are the technologies—computers, smartphones, the world wide web—that have greatly increased the productivity of individual workers and altered the nature of their work. Rather than designers drawing designs by hand, computer-assisted technologies are now used to create designs for everything from electric power grids to patterned fabrics. The widespread use of smartphones has enabled, among many other things, the rise of companies such as Uber and Lyft, the success of which is threatening the rental car industry and especially the taxicab industry and the livelihoods of many taxi drivers (who are also threatened by driverless cars). A passenger uses an app to indicate that he or she needs a ride, and one is provided by an independent car owner for a set fee, which is automatically charged to the passenger’s credit card. Some of the drivers work a few hours a day for these services in search of a little extra money, while others work full-time for the services. Their willingness to do this work has reduced the need for taxicabs and full-time taxi drivers.

      More generally, less and less work occurs in the office because the computer and the internet now allow many people to work from anywhere. Many are part of the “gig economy” meaning that they are temporary workers handling a number of short-term jobs (“gigs”) rather than working full-time for an organization.

      However, it is not just work that has been affected by new technologies. Uber is part of the growing “sharing economy” (Sundararajan 2016), in which people share (for a fee) many things; most notably, some share their homes through websites such as Airbnb.com (Pogue 2014). One key component of this new technological world, Google, is so powerful that a 2011 book is titled The Googlization of Everything (Vaidhyanathan 2011). Thus, much sociological attention has shifted to computers and the internet, as well as those who work with them (Lynch 2016; Scholz 2013).

      The transition from the industrial to the postindustrial and now to the information age has important personal implications. Had you been a man who lived in the industrial age, you would have worked (if you could find a job) for money (pay). You would have done so to be able to buy what you needed and wanted. Women working in the private sphere were largely uncompensated or compensated at a lower rate, as is often still the case. However, in the postindustrial age, it is increasingly likely that men and women will be willing, or forced, to work part time or even for free (Anderson 2009; Dusi 2017; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010), as in the case of interns, bloggers, and contributors to YouTube and Wikipedia.

      You may be willing to perform free labor because you enjoy it and because much of what is important in your life is, in any case, available for free on the internet. There is no need for you to buy newspapers when blogs are free. Similarly, there is no need buy CDs when music is streamed free on various internet sites or inexpensively by Spotify. Why buy or rent DVDs when movies can be downloaded, or viewed, at no cost or inexpensively from the internet (from Netflix, for example)? However, while all of this, and much else, is available for free, the problem is that the essentials of life—food, shelter, clothing—still cost money, lots of money.

      Many hope that the labor they currently perform for free will eventually have an economic payoff. One person (known as PewDiePie) played video games on YouTube. By early 2019, he had garnered nearly 100 million subscribers and almost 21 billion views. He reputedly has earned millions of dollars per year (Jacobs 2014). Playing video games has become big business—one tournament drew 11,000 fans to a stadium and offered $11 million in prize money. Many hope that their work as bloggers or on YouTube will lead to full-time jobs.

      These are a few of the many social changes to be discussed in this book. The essential point is that the social world (people, groups, organizations, and so on)—your social world—is continually changing. Sociology is a field that is, and must be, constantly attuned to and involved in studying those changes.

      Central Concerns for a Twenty-First-Century Sociology

      While the social world has been changing dramatically over the last two centuries or so and sociology has adapted to those changes, sociology has continued to focus on many of its traditional concerns. We have already mentioned industry, production, and work as long-term sociological interests; others include deviance and crime (see Chapter 6), the family (see Chapter 10), and the city (see Chapter 14). Of particular concern to many sociologists has been, and continues to be, the issue of inequality as it affects the poor, particularly racial and ethnic groups, women, and gays and lesbians (see Chapters 8 and 9). The bulk of this book is devoted to these basic sociological topics and concerns, but the discussion also encompasses the nontraditional and very contemporary issues of globalization, consumption, and the digital world.

      Globalization

      No social change is as important today as globalization because it is continually affecting all aspects of the social world everywhere on the globe. A date marking the beginning of globalization cannot be given with any precision, and in fact, it is in great dispute (Ritzer 2012b; Ritzer and Dean 2019; Steger 2017). However, the concept of globalization first began to appear in the popular and academic literature around 1990. Today, globalization is a central issue in the social world as a whole as well as in sociology; globalization and talk about it are all around us. In fact, we can be said to be living in the “global age” (Albrow 1996). However, this fact as well as the advantages of globalization for the United States have been questioned by Donald Trump. Such questioning has led to talk of “deglobalization” (however, see my blog post “Deglobalization? Not a Chance” [Ritzer 2016]). Deglobalization was also behind the vote in the United Kingdom to exit the European Union (called Brexit), as well as actions taken by other European nations to create border restrictions. However, none of these actions are going to have much impact on globalization as a whole or in such areas as the internet, the media, and culture.

      A major component of any past or present definition of sociology is society. There are about 200 societies in the world, including those that encompass the United States, China, and South Africa. Society is a complex pattern of social relationships that is bounded in space and persists over time. Society has traditionally been the largest unit of analysis in sociology. However, in the global age, societies are seen as declining in importance (Holton 2011; Meyer, Boli, and Ramirez 1997). This is the case, in part, because larger transnational and global social structures are growing in importance. These include the United Nations (UN); the European Union (EU); the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); multinational corporations (MNCs), such as Google and ExxonMobil; and multinational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Amnesty International. In at least some cases, these transnational structures are becoming more important than individual societies. OPEC is more important to the rest of the world’s well-being than are the organization’s key member societies, such as Abu Dhabi or even Saudi Arabia. However, this emphasis on the transnational and global has led to a counterreaction in which the focus has shifted back to one’s own society (e.g., “America First”).

      Social processes, like social structures, exist not only at the societal level but also at the global level, and these global processes are increasing in importance. Consider migration (see Chapter 14). People move about, or migrate, within and between societies. For example, СКАЧАТЬ