Steve Matthewman

Exergy and the City: The Technology and Sociology of Power (Failure)

Abstract Blackouts—the total loss of electrical power—serve as a reminder of how dependent the modern world and particularly urban areas have become on electricity and the appliances it powers. To understand them we consider the critical nature of electrical infrastructure. In order to provide general patterns from specific cases, a large number of blackouts have been analyzed. Irrespective of cause, they display similar effects. These include measurable economic losses and less easily quantified social costs. We discuss financial damage, food safety, crime, transport, and problems caused by diesel generators. This is more than just a record of past failures; blackouts are dress rehearsals for the future in which they will appear with greater frequency and severity. While energy cannot be destroyed, exergy—the available energy within a system—can be. Exergy is concerned with energy within an “environment;” in this case a city. The bottom line is simple: no matter how “smart” a city may be, it becomes “dumb” when the power goes out.

Renewable Energy in New Zealand: The Reluctance for Resilience

This chapter explores renewable energy governance in the context of New Zealand’s “energy culture”. New Zealand enjoys an international reputation as being a clean and green country. Yet surface appearances can be deceptive. Image frequently trumps reality. The green label is largely an exercise in branding (the country is the latest recipient of the “Fossil Award”), although energy is one of the areas where this might not hold. New Zealand’s energy supply mix is impressive, the majority of it being drawn from renewable sources. However, global warming will severely impact upon our ability to generate adequate amounts of electrical power in a sustainable manner, and our centralised corporate-dominated supply system is poorly placed to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. These issues are compounded by various political problems such as ownership of resources and access to the grid. Numerous questions arise: can water be commodified or is it held in common? Does it properly belong to the indigenous people of this country? Why is there no feed-in tariff and why are smart meters not being installed? To explore the topic of renewable energy governance we examine various components of the national energy culture, energy policies and resources. We then look at the likely impacts of climate change, the current state of the deregulated electricity supply industry and why the “business as usual” model is set to prevail. This is illustrated by reference to two case studies—of the potential for distributed generation to contribute towards future electricity demands in Auckland and the proposed district energy system in Christchurch—in both cases we identify a worrying reluctance for resilience.

Towards a strong program in the sociology of war, the military and civil society:

In this article we make the case for a strong program of sociological research into war, the military and their symmetry with civil society, pointing to the ways in which sociology has failed to appreciate their relationship as a central feature of modernity. We particularly emphasize the need for a multi-dimensional comprehension of militarization and the relationships between representation, belief and action in conflict and post-conflict environments. We conclude that a strong sociology of the war and the military requires a greater appreciation of the influence of organized state violence on the shaping of contemporary social relations, breaking with weak traditions that only comprehend the significance of military institutions and warfare through analysing capital and other material and political forces.

Theorising Personal Medical Devices

This chapter theorises Personal Medical Devices (PMDs) as technologies and as agents in the construction of self and society. PMDs are at the forefront of technological evolution, taking on biological properties. As interactive network devices, they also connect to issues pertaining to Big Data and the sensor society, including new ways of being tracked and hacked. But these new technologies also map onto old anxieties regarding what it is to be human. We have always used technologies to be competent in the world and to enhance ourselves. For this reason, it is urged that we see PMDs as prostheses.

Book Review Symposium: Is Racism an Environmental Threat? With a response from Ghassan HageReview symposiumIs Racism an Environmental Threat?HageGhassanCambridge: Polity, 2017, ISBN 978-0-7456-9227-2, pbk, 145 pp., £9.99

In recent times intersectionality has emerged as a particularly popular slogan among feminist and anti-racist activists. For some, most notably in mainstream white feminist circles, the concept is an after-the-fact buzzword that allows lip service to be paid to social positions such as race and class. For others, the concept is deployed to draw attention to structural crossovers between gender, race, class, sexuality and disability. The identification of gendered or racialised or classed lives – that is, the existence of inequality – is thus either tacitly acknowledged or explicitly foregrounded. Yet what is often missing is pushing this analysis further, beyond the comparative, to interrogate inequality not as fact, but as relation. This, it seems to me, is Ghassan Hage’s greatest contribution to understanding contemporary expressions of Islamophobia. Is Racism an Environmental Threat? is another Hage contribution that vividly and powerfully provokes new and fresh ways of thinking about ‘intersections’ as not merely points of comparison, but sites of exploitation. To do this Hage provokes us to think more deeply about how a particular way of inhabiting the world produces a certain way of relating to the Other – embodied here as the Muslim Other – and the environment. This and is not merely a point of comparison. It is crucial to Hage’s essential argument that there is an intimate relation between racism and the ecological, and that is one of mutual dependency. Thus, Islamophobia (and inequalities in our intersectionality conversations) on the one hand, and environmental degradation, on the other, are not simply events or coordinates for mapping social location, but structures, permanent features, hard-wired logics. The mutual dependency between racism and the ecological is, Hage argues, part of their very nature, arising as one and the same crisis because they reproduce the dominant mode of inhabiting the world, what Hage calls generalised domestication. Hage first takes us into a particular mode of race-thinking and race-practising (p. 12) which, he argues, is fundamentally entangled with the ecological crisis. He defines Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism plus the fear that anti-Muslim racism isn’t doing its job (p. 50). To understand this definition is to understand the connections between wolves, racism and the environment. Since 9/11, the racialised Muslim has evolved as 770315 JOS0010.1177/1440783318770315Journal of SociologyBook review symposium book-review2018

Book Review Symposium: Is Racism an Environmental Threat? With a response from Ghassan Hage:

In recent times intersectionality has emerged as a particularly popular slogan among feminist and anti-racist activists. For some, most notably in mainstream white feminist circles, the concept is an after-the-fact buzzword that allows lip service to be paid to social positions such as race and class. For others, the concept is deployed to draw attention to structural crossovers between gender, race, class, sexuality and disability. The identification of gendered or racialised or classed lives – that is, the existence of inequality – is thus either tacitly acknowledged or explicitly foregrounded. Yet what is often missing is pushing this analysis further, beyond the comparative, to interrogate inequality not as fact, but as relation. This, it seems to me, is Ghassan Hage’s greatest contribution to understanding contemporary expressions of Islamophobia. Is Racism an Environmental Threat? is another Hage contribution that vividly and powerfully provokes new and fresh ways of thinking about ‘intersections’ as not merely points of comparison, but sites of exploitation. To do this Hage provokes us to think more deeply about how a particular way of inhabiting the world produces a certain way of relating to the Other – embodied here as the Muslim Other – and the environment. This and is not merely a point of comparison. It is crucial to Hage’s essential argument that there is an intimate relation between racism and the ecological, and that is one of mutual dependency. Thus, Islamophobia (and inequalities in our intersectionality conversations) on the one hand, and environmental degradation, on the other, are not simply events or coordinates for mapping social location, but structures, permanent features, hard-wired logics. The mutual dependency between racism and the ecological is, Hage argues, part of their very nature, arising as one and the same crisis because they reproduce the dominant mode of inhabiting the world, what Hage calls generalised domestication. Hage first takes us into a particular mode of race-thinking and race-practising (p. 12) which, he argues, is fundamentally entangled with the ecological crisis. He defines Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism plus the fear that anti-Muslim racism isn’t doing its job (p. 50). To understand this definition is to understand the connections between wolves, racism and the environment. Since 9/11, the racialised Muslim has evolved as 770315 JOS0010.1177/1440783318770315Journal of SociologyBook review symposium book-review2018

Riskworld? New Species of Trouble

We began by considering the contributions that disaster research can make to sociology and social theory. Here we bring social theory to bear on disasters. Social theory has announced a series of ends: the end of the Enlightenment project, the end of history, the end of nature. Now we are faced with the biggest end of all: the end of everything, threatened as we are by civilizational collapse and mass species extinction. Thus undergirding all of the discussion of new risks and hazards is the profound shift in relations between the bio-sphere and human life.

Sociology and Disasters

There are two rather obvious reasons why sociologists should be interested in disasters. The first is to interpret the world. Given their increasing magnitude and severity, disasters are an integral part of social reality. As the UN secretary Ban Ki-moon said, we are ‘living in an era of an unprecedented level of crises’ (quoted in Borger, 2014, p. 1). Despite there being good grounds for sociological interest, Wolf R. Dombrowsky (1995, p. 242) bemoaned the fact that ‘there still is a lack of sociology in sociological disaster research’. Failure to engage means that we fail in the sociological enterprise, for our task is to map the modern condition.

Accidents, Disasters and Revelation

The previous chapter addressed the question: why should sociologists study disasters? Two connected reasons came to the fore: to aid the enterprise of sociology and to assist with our comprehension of social reality. We noted how disasters lift veils. Here we offer an extended meditation on this theme of disasters and revelation. It is one of the literature’s most recurring motifs and it is central to this publication. As noted, studying disasters returns us to core business. It also returns us to the origins of social science.

Political Economy, II: Capitalism as Disaster

Sociologists have long understood history as something more than the triumph of collective will or the rule of great men or ideas. A recurring theme throughout the history of sociological thought since its inception is that of the unintended consequences of social action. Marx’s focus on dialectics and contradictions is seen to be evidence of an interest in the unanticipated (Elster, 1985). There can be marked differences between individual actions and overall design. Individuals have desires. They act upon them and their aggregation determines the end result. In some instances, as with one of political economy’s most important laws — the tendency of the rate of profit to fall — the intentions of individual actors to increase their profitability result in its very antithesis. Increased investment in constant capital relative to labour (variable capital) may increase productivity, but it will ultimately reduce profitability as labour is the source of profit. Anything which reduces surplus labour time relative to overall production capital negatively impacts on profits. Jon Elster (1985, p. 48) thinks that Marx’s attention to the unintended collective consequences of individual actions ‘is [his] central contribution to the methodology of social science’. Louis Althusser (2006) elevated Marxist notions of the accidental, unforeseen and unintended into a new ‘philosophy of the encounter’ in which neither the encounter nor its effects can be guaranteed.