Abstract
While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that has not happened yet? In this article, I argue that future projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives, performance, and material forms. They are particularly evident in what I call “sites of hyperprojectivity,” that is, sites of heightened, future-oriented public debate about possible futures. As a pilot project, I examine contending narratives about possible futures in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. I propose a framework for studying how public interventions into debates about “sustainable futures” and the “green economy” differ on various dimensions of projectivity, including their temporal reach, attention to contingency and causality, and network mapping of future actors. I present a preliminary analysis at the level of narrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative, and subjunctive verb forms in both programmatic and oppositional texts. I close with a discussion of how different genres of future projection might be put to analytical use in studying processes of interest to social scientists, such as coalition formation, institution building, political mobilization, and policy change.
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Notes
In The Social System, Parsons (1970s) developed the AGIL scheme as part of his general theory of action systems. The AGIL scheme included the four needs or functions that he believed every social system needed to fulfil in order to survive: Adaptation (the capacity to reproduce itself in interaction with the environment), Goal Attainment (the capacity to set and implement societal or systemic goals); Integration (the harmonization of social relations through social norms, values, and roles sets); and Latent Pattern Maintenance (the maintenance of underlying patterns though institutional socialization into shared behaviors and belief systems).
This article focuses primarily on text and talk, but I hope to focus in future work on how future projects are given material form. We can locate material representations of imagined futures in architecture, public infrastructure, lifestyle choices, and consumer goods, to name a few possibilities. These externalizations of future projections express expectations, hopes, and fears for the future at the same time as they lock participants into particular trajectories of action. An example is Maria Islas-Lopez’s (2013) account of how Mexican immigrants send money home to build houses for the future that no one will live in, or Janet Lorenzen’s (2012) account of green consumption lifestyles as part of a long term project of social transformation. One could also look at Chandra Mukerji’s (1997, 2009) work on material culture and urban engineering, as well as other work on urban design, planning, and risk (see Goodman 2008; Zeiderman 2008, 2012).
Other cultural sociologists who are have worked on the relationship between automatic and deliberative cognition include DiMaggio (1997) Cerulo (2010); Lizardo (2004, 2007); Vaisey and Lizardo (2010); Lizardo and Strand (2010); Danna-Lynch (2007, 2010); Harvey (2010); Shepherd (2011); Lorenzen (2012); and McDonnell (2014).
There has been a good deal of theoretical work on the value of such deliberative forums, although less empirical work describing how they work in practice. For exceptions that do focus on empirical settings, see, Fung and Wright 2003; Baiocchi 2003, 2005; Gastil and Levine 2005; Perrin 2006; Mutz 2006; Lee 2007, 2014; Schneiderhan and Khan 2008; Ansell 2011.
The website portal of the People’s Summit can be found here: http://rio20.net/en/ The website of the official UN conference can be found here: http://www.uncsd2012.org/
These are the two main themes of the conference, as stated on the official webpage: http://www.uncsd2012.org/about.html
Assistance with coding the documents has been provided by Leslie MacColman at the University of Notre Dame, and by Julia Flagg and Victoria Gonzalez at Rutgers University.
In total, the website “Rio + 20 Portal: Building the People’s Summit” contains 64 texts under the category of “Proposals” along with 103 classified as “Documents” and 55 “Initiatives.” The differences among these categories are not always clear, and there is some overlap in texts and authors. In addition, the portal contains links to 15 discussion groups and 286 events, some of which have texts attached. The texts are not posted directly by the authoring groups, but rather funneled through an unnamed “editorial team,” which packages the texts in a normalized format, which they describe as “moving from the various initial proposals, argued and developed by the participants, to a brief and concise format, more easily shared and transmitted.” The site’s “methodological page” describes the portal in the following way: “The platform is run by an international team of popular communicators, technicians and translators. It combines functions of interactive communications (social networking, chat, forums), semantic structuring (indexing by keywords, search and summaries of proposals), and shared contents (multimedia, web radio, texts). It is organized around the topics Initiatives, Events, Proposals and Documents, as well as a virtual community of debate” (http://rio20.net/en/methodological-support/). I plan to do a more thorough website ethnography of the portal in future work.
The exceptions to the main pattern are interesting here, often coming in situations of “mixed” classification (those offering proposals with critique), and at times reflecting particular document types as separate from organizational stance. For example, document P13—the big anomaly in Fig. 1, with a dominance of imperative verb forms despite its programmatic orientation—is framed as a set of “People’s Sustainability Treaties,” and offers a general principles that “must” be followed in the UN’s sustainable development goals (e.g., “each goal must integrate social, environmental and economic dimensions, and interconnect these areas”). Another document posted by the same group (P10) was classified as oppositional, because of its clear critique of the notion of the green economy (“A green economy that focuses on a singular growth-driven, high technology, free-market, Intellectual Property Rights- dominated system, is no green economy at all.”)
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the thoughtful contributions and hard work on coding from my team of research assistants, which include Julia Flagg and Victoria Gonzalez of Rutgers University and Leslie MacColman of the University of Notre Dame. I also appreciate the extensive comments on early drafts by Amin Ghaziani, John Mohr, and Fred Wherry, as well as the comments of the participants in the various workshops in which I presented this material, including the Measuring Culture workshops at the University of British Columbia and at UCSB, the Culture Workshop at Rutgers University, the Culture Workshop and the Peace Research and Education Seminar at the University of Notre Dame, the Micro-conference on Cognition and Networks at Princeton University, and the Sociology Colloquium at the University of Chicago. The article also benefitted from discussions with Karen Cerulo, Matthew Chandler, Phaedra Daipha, Karen Danna-Lynch, Paul DiMaggio, David Gibson, Neha Gondal, Maria Islas-Lopez, Janet Lorenzen, Omar Lizardo, John Levi Martin, Erin McDonnell, Terry McDonnell, Hana Shepherd, Iddo Tavory, Alex Tham, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici, as well as with my two classes on future projections at Rutgers University and the University of Notre Dame.
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Appendix A Coding examples from People’s Summit documents
Appendix A Coding examples from People’s Summit documents
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Mische, A. Measuring futures in action: projective grammars in the Rio + 20 debates. Theor Soc 43, 437–464 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9226-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9226-3