Mobilities

Mobility in Sociological Theory

Theories of mobility exist at two levels: the factual and the metaphorical. First, they refer to a set of facts describing key facets and characteristics of the contemporary social world associated with globalization, technological changes, fluidities, and speed. These bodies of work argue that the world is characterized by unprecedented levels of mobilities: capital, people, information, and objects are circling the globe more frequently, in greater volume, and with greater speed. Increasingly, as the global reach of economic and cultural interactions intensifies, these things recognize no boundaries. This means that social action must be re-imagined as possibly being able to take place at a distance, and that ideas about home and not-home, local and global, must be substantially rethought. Furthermore, it is not just people that are mobile, but various types of objects, which creates increasingly complex global infrastructural and communications networks. In the digital era, as a result of such things as the Internet, laptop computers, and increasingly sophisticated mobile telephony, parcels of information relating to finance, leisure, trade, and politics all circulate relatively freely across borders.

Second, mobility also refers to a set of theoretical metaphors which some argue challenge traditional approaches to describing and analyzing the social world. The new theoretical metaphors of vertigo-inducing flux, mobility, and fast-paced change continue to capture the theoretical spirit of our times. Traditionally, mobility in sociology has been concerned with examining the nature and extent of vertical social mobilities, with mobility referring to a central dimension of class and stratification studies. In this field, mobility measures individuals’ capacity to scale the social ladder, according to their relative accumulation of valuable assets such as education and economic capital, and against social structures such as family history, geographic location, and inherited wealth. In this view, people cannot be said to circulate or be fluid in any real sense. Rather, their mobility is theorized within a schematic, spatially bounded, and often quite rigid or slow-moving model of social relationships, where mobility refers to individuals’ capacity to gradually alter their accumulation of socially valued assets such as education or income throughout the life course. Against this traditional sense of social mobility, the contemporary metaphor of mobility has been used to describe both a set of epistemological and material shifts that drastically reform the way sociologists might attend to theorizing the basic structures of social and economic life. Claiming to challenge sedentarist assumptions that there is a natural connection between places and people and territorial assumptions of traditional sociology, the new emphasis on mobilities attempts to understand contemporary social change and restructurings in such a way as to emphasize the routine movements of things, people, and images across the globe. To understand mobilities and moorings is to pay attention to the fluid and dynamic aspects of social life, leading to a radical reconceptualization of the role of technological objects and systems, diverse media, virtual and corporeal travel, and questions of transfers, fluids, systems, interfaces, networks, corridors, and connections in forming the basis of social life.

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