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Energy forms and their extensive scale are remarkably significant for the ways that societies are organized. This article shows the importance of how societies are ‘energized’ and especially the global growth of ‘fossil fuel societies’. Much social thought remains oblivious to the energy revolution realized over the past two to three centuries which set the ‘West’ onto a distinct trajectory. Energy is troubling for social thought because different energy systems with their ‘lock-ins’ are not subject to simple human intervention and control. Analyses are provided here of different fossil fuel societies, of coal and oil, with the latter enabling the liquid, mobilized 20th century. Consideration is paid to the possibilities of reducing fossil fuel dependence but it is shown how unlikely such a ‘powering down’ will be. The author demonstrates how energy is a massive problem for social theory and for 21st-century societies. Developing post-carbon theory and especially practice is far away but is especially urgent.

The Tourist Gaze [Urry J, 1990 (Sage, London)] is one of the most discussed and cited tourism books (with about 4000 citations on Google scholar). Whilst wide ranging in scope, the book is known for the Foucault-inspired concept of the tourist gaze that brings out the fundamentally visual and image-saturated nature of tourism encounters. However, some recent literature has critiqued this notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ for reducing tourism to visual experiences—to sight seeing—and neglecting the other senses, bodily experiences, and ‘adventure’. The influential ‘performance turn’ within tourist studies suggests that the doings of tourism are physical or corporeal and not merely visual, and it is necessary to regard ‘performing’ rather than ‘gazing’ as the dominant tourist research paradigm. Yet we argue here that there are, in fact, many similarities between the paradigms of gaze and of performance. They should ‘dance together’ rather than stare at each other at a distance. In this paper we rethink the tourist gaze in the light of this performance turn and of a Goffmanian dramaturgical sociology by examining the embodied and multisensuous nature of gazing as well as the complex social relations and fluid power geometries comprising performances of gazing. The Foucault-inspired notion of the tourist gaze can be enlivened—made more bodily and theatrical—by incorporating Goffman and post-Goffman analyses and aspects of nonrepresentational theory.

This article examines some major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of life upon Earth. It deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich North over the course of the last century or so. These shifts involve moving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societies of discipline to societies of control, and more recently from specialized and differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. Societies become centres of conspicuous, wasteful consumption. The implications of such forms of ‘excess’ consumption are examined for clues as to the nature and characteristics of various futures. Special attention is paid to the interdependent system effects of climate change, the peaking of oil and exceptional growth of urban populations. It is argued that the 20th century has left a bleak legacy for the new century, with a very limited range of possible future scenarios which are briefly described.

OCIAL THEORY is faced by a new spectre haunting the ‘globe’ – thechanging of the world’s climate. Such changes are now thought to bebeyond doubt and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC), very likely the product of human practices (IPCC, 2007).These practices have generated raised levels of ‘greenhouse gases’ in theatmosphere, which seem to be leading to increased temperatures, which willin turn transform future forms of human life around the world. Even attemptstomonitorand‘mitigate’climatechangearelikelytoinvolvedramaticchangesin social organization: the creation of a global assemblage of internationalagreements, carbon atoms, markets, technologies, weather events and socialpractices.Thereseemsnodoubt:the21stcenturyissettobeonewhereissuesofclimate,resourcesandenergyareparamount.Theworldofcultureandvirtu-ality has met its match; the material world apparently does matter and can‘bite back’. The economies and societies of whole continents may well havetransformedconditionsoflife.Andthehigh-carbonworld initiatedinthe20thcentury could turn out to be a mere passing moment in the long-term pattern-ing of human history. It is not so much post-modernism that we should bedebating but the conditions of possibility of ‘post-carbonism’.There are three broad positions or discourses within the climatechange literature.

In this paper, we consider the passenger experience of travel time, and its translation into a transport model of travel time, which is of great significance in the potential funding and construction of infrastructural projects. In the economic appraisals of such projects, which are often of massive scale and impact, it is presumed that travel time is wasted, dead, or empty, and therefore should be minimised. However, in this paper we show how travel time is filled with activities and fantasies. We show that there are multiple travel times and places, and not just a single measured clock time that has to be minimised in getting from point A to point B. Travel time is situated in the sociomaterial practices of travel, which include engaging with other passengers, interacting with wireless networks, views out of the window, things packed in one's bag, and so on. We describe and evaluate various ‘moving methods’ for researching places on-the-move, from survey to ethnography. Finally, we consider how to disrupt the assumption in transport appraisal that such time is empty and should be minimised, and suggest new approaches for presencing the richness of passenger travel time in transport modelling.

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.

‘Complexity theory’ seems to provide some metaphors, concepts and theories essential for examining the intractable disorderliness of the contemporary world. Relations across that world are complex, rich and non-linear, involving multiple negative and, more significantly, positive feedback loops. This article shows how globalization should be conceptualized as a series of adapting and co-evolving global systems, each characterized by unpredictability, irreversibility and co-evolution. Such systems lack finalized ‘equilibrium’ or ‘order’; and the many pools of order heighten overall disorder. They do not exhibit and sustain unchanging structural stability. Complexity elaborates how there is order and disorder within these various global systems. The global order is a complex world, unpredictable and irreversible, disorderly but not anarchic.

A flock of birds sweeps across the sky. Like a well-choreographed dance troupe, the birds veer to the left in unison. . . . The flock is organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. Bird flocks are not the only things that work that way. Ant colonies, highway traffic, market economies, immune systems – in all of these systems, patterns are determined . . . by local interactions among decentralised components. (Resnick, 1997: 3)

Much of the literature on social exclusion ignores its ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility’ related aspects. This paper seeks to rectify this by examining the mobile processes and infrastructures of travel and transport that engender and reinforce social exclusion in contemporary societies. To the extent to which this issue is addressed, it is mainly organized around the notion of ‘access’ to activities, values and goods. This paper examines this discourse in some detail. It is argued that there are many dimensions of such access, that improving access is a complex matter because of the range of human activities that might need to be ‘accessed’, that in order to know what is to be accessed the changing nature of travel and communications requires examination, and that some dimensions of access are only revealed through changes in the infrastructure that ‘uncover’ previously hidden social exclusions. Claims about access and socio-spatial exclusion routinely make assumptions about what it is to participate effectively in society. We turn this question around, also asking how mobilities of different forms constitute societal values and sets of relations, participation in which may become important for social inclusion. This paper draws upon an extensive range of library, desk and field research to deal with crucial issues relating to the nature of a fair, just and mobile society.

This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially how its awesome pattern of path dependency was established and exerted a particularly powerful and self-expanding pattern of domination across the globe. The article further considers whether and how the 20th-century car system may be transcended. It elaborates a number of small changes that are now occurring in various test sites, factories, ITC sites, cities and societies. The article briefly considers whether these small changes may in their contingent ordering end this current car system. The article assesses whether such a new system could emerge well before the end of this century, whether in other words some small changes now may produce the very large effect of a new post-car system that would have great implications for urban life, for mobility and for limiting projected climate change.

In this paper I explore the changing nature of connections ‘at a distance’. I argue that some characteristic ways of formulating these changes are unhelpful. The social sciences have developed weak analyses of the more distant yet intermittent connections that hold social life together. It is shown that intermittent bodily copresence resulting from travel and occasioned encounters is critically significant for social life. The importance of such copresence is characteristic even of virtual communities and of far-flung diasporic communities. But it is also shown that new ‘inhabiting machines’ are emerging, machines that undermine the distinction between ‘transportation’ and ‘communications’. These new machinic hybrids are reconfiguring relations at a distance and constitute something of an epochal shift. Although there have always been complex connections of presence and absence, the current century seems to be ushering in some exceptional changes in those recurrent patterns of presence and absence, through our dwelling within an increasingly populous world of inhabiting machines.

Most conceptions of public and private life within political and social theory do not adequately consider the networks or fluidities involved in contemporary social relations. The distinction of public and private is often conceived of as statically `regional' in character. This article, following an extensive analysis of the multiple meanings of the `public' and `private', criticizes such a static conception and maintains that massive changes are occurring in the nature of both public and private life and especially of the relations between them. We consider flows and networks that enable mobility between and across apparent publics and privates. These mobilities are both physical (in the form of mobile people, objects and hybrids of humans-in-machines) and informational (in the form of electronic communication via data, visual images and texts). We consider the transformations of public and private life that have arisen from `complex' configurations of place and space: the dominant system of car-centred automobility whose spatial fluidities are simultaneously private and public; and various globalizations through the exposure of `private' lives on public screens and the public screening of mediatized events. These mobile, machinic examples demonstrate the limitations of the static, regional conceptualizations of public and private life developed within much social and political theory, and suggest that this divide may need relegation to the dustbin of history.

This paper is concerned with whether a ‘culture of cosmopolitanism’ is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging ‘global’ processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the ‘world as a whole’, and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is something that could be called a ‘banal globalism’, from focus group research they show that there is a wide awareness of the ‘global’ but that this is combined in complex ways with notions of the local and grounded, and from media interviews they demonstrate that there is a reflexive awareness of a culture of the cosmopolitan. On the basis of their data from the UK, they conclude that a ‘publicly screened’ cosmopolitan culture is emergent and likely to orchestrate much of social and political life in future decades.The need for a constantly changing market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere … the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market give a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … The individual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible (Marx and Engels, [1848] 1952: 46–7; emphasis added)

This article assesses whether some notions from complexity or non-linear theory help to make sense of September 11th. This relates to the author's more general concern, to interrogate `globalization' through the prism of complexity. Some of the topics investigated in this article include the nature of networked relationships between the macro and micro levels, the character of a liquid and mobile power, the differentiation between and juxtapositions of wild and safe zones, the world-wide screening of certain global events, the unpredictability and irreversibility of time, the nature of attractors, and the more general character of systems that are neither ordered nor wholly anarchic remaining `on the edge of chaos'.

In this article I discuss just why travel takes place. Why does travel occur, especially with the development of new communications technologies? I unpack how corporeal proximity in diverse modes appears to make travel necessary and desirable. I examine how aspects of conversational practice and of `meetings' make travel obligatory for sustaining `physical proximity'. I go on to consider the roles that travel plays in social networks, using Putnam's recent analysis of social capital. The implications of different kinds of travel for the distribution of such social capital are spelled out. I examine what kinds of corporeal travel are necessary and appropriate for a rich and densely networked social life across various social groups. And in the light of these analyses of proximity and social capital, virtual travel will not in a simple sense substitute for corporeal travel, since intermittent co-presence appears obligatory for many forms of social life. However, virtual travel does seem to produce a strange and uncanny life on the screen that is near and far, present and absent, and it may be that this will change the very nature of what is experienced as `co-presence'. I conclude by showing how issues of social inclusion and exclusion cannot be examined without identifying the complex, overlapping and contradictory mobilities necessarily involved in the patterning of an embodied social life.

This paper is based on a talk given at the BSA Presidential Event, held on 8 February 2010 at the British Library London, on ‘How to put “Society” into Climate Change’, chaired by John URRY.

This issue of Body & Society was assembled to extend the interest in the embodied nature of people's experiences in, and of, the physical world. It thus seeks to develop further the emergent sociology of the body that has provided extensive insight into the embodied character of human experience. Such a sociology has, though, dealt less systematically with the various social practices that are involved in being in, or passing through, nature, the countryside, the outdoors, landscape or wilderness. These practices reflect the apparently enhanced `culture of nature' in many contemporary societies. In particular, we are concerned with various embodied performances. The various articles consider: how is the body implicated in, and reproduced through, the diverse social practices happening within `nature'? Why is the body, and its physical capital, developed by practices thought to be beneficial because of the `natural' setting for such practices? In what form do these practices `in nature' come to be part of the reflexivity about the body, as the self and identity are increasingly matters of deliberation, negotiation and self-monitoring?

In this article, we examine the intimate significance of trees and woods through research on how people engage with and perform their bodies in different kinds of wooded environments in contemporary Britain. We argue that there are significant, contested and ambivalent affordances provided by woods and forests in contemporary Britain - as providing `live' contact with nature, as a source of tranquillity, and as providing a distinct `social' space in sharp contrast to the pressures of modern living. Second, there is considerable variation in the bodily experiences that people gain from woods and forests, influenced by personal and family life-stage, socio-economic circumstance and geographical location. The values people appear to attach to woods and forests arise from the specific `affordances' that the latter could offer for bodily desires. There are, we might say, different `contested' natures of the forest.

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This paper is concerned with the relationship between sociology and nature or the environment. We briefly summarise the various ways in which historically `nature' has been conceptualised, including the connections between the `natural' and the `market'. We suggest that there are many `natures' and then proceed to develop an agenda for a sociology of such natures. This comprises four elements: a sociology of environmental knowledges; social variation in the reading of natures; a sociology of the diverse forms of environmental damage; and a more general examination of environmentalism and society. We conclude with an examination of the relations between culture and nature suggesting that changes in this relationship now demonstrates what has always been the case, namely, that nature is elaborately entangled and fundamentally bound up with the social and the cultural. As the social and the cultural are both rapidly changing provides deciphering that relationship immensely fruitful but complex areas for future sociological work.

It is argued that how societies remember the past should be a key element of social theory. The social sciences should direct attention to time, tradition, and memory. Some implications of developing such notions for heritage are examined. In particular, it is suggested that the implications of heritage are ambiguous and contradictory, especially in the light of arguments about ‘travelling cultures’ and ‘detraditionalization.’ The social practices involved in ‘reminiscence’ are briefly elaborated.

This article is concerned with exploring some of the connections between time and leisure, arguing in particular that leisure patterns are especially significant for changing notions of time. It is further argued that the once hegemonic clock-time is being supplanted in `disorganized capitalism' by a mix of instantaneous and glacial times. A variety of empirical indices of these are developed. It is then shown that contemporary leisure patterns are transformed through processes of de-traditionalization and increased reflexivity, processes that presuppose these newer forms of time. In conclusion, some implications for place are briefly developed.

This paper provides an analysis of a relatively unusual topic, namely, the social divisions surrounding the consumption of tourist-related services. In the first section a number of points are made which suggest that the topic is both important and difficult to analyse. Some attention is paid to the features of the tourist gaze. In the second main section the problems brought up by various economists of congestion and positionality are analysed. It is suggested that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the romantic and the collective tourist gaze which makes the issue of congestion/positionality more complex than economists have suggested. Some sociological implications of this distinction are developed in the final concluding section. `Tourists are vulgar, vulgar, vulgar' (Henry James, quoted Pearce and Moscardo 1986:21)

In this paper I explore some aspects of the rotations between social structures and social struggles, within the context of an overall conceptualisation of the anatomy of capitalist societies. I argue that such societies should be viewed as comprising three interdependent and dissimilar sets of social relations, the economy, civil society and the state I then examine some of the interrelations between social struggles and changes in social structures. I analyse in particular the logic of collective class actions, and the variety of unintended consequences of such actions.

Five related issues involved in the analysis of services are discussed. First, it is shown that it is incorrect to suggest that there is a single route to the contemporary economy with high employment in the service sector. The Fisher–Clark thesis is discussed and criticised. In the specific case of the United Kingdom it is shown that service industries were of considerable importance even during the supposed heyday of Victorian manufacturing industry. This is shown by analysing certain regional indicators. It is further suggested that the crucial role of especially financial services cannot be understood separately from the broader Makler or middleman economy which in part predated the extensive growth of manufacturing industry. Second, some of the recent arguments of Gershuny and Miles are analysed. It is shown that their formulations are insufficiently social, both in the sense of ignoring changes in the social relations underpinning capitalist production both of manufacturing and of service industries, and of neglecting the impact of ‘social struggles' on the forms and levels of service employment. Third, a number of criteria are discussed by which different service industries can be separated off from each other. The criteria considered are ownership, market, product, degree of ‘commodification’, function, and character of the exchange. A classification based on elements of each of these is proposed in order to deal with UK data sources. Fourth, analysis is developed of eleven different forms of service sector restructuring. Some consideration is paid to the problems of explaining which of these will be found in particular sectors. Particular attention is devoted to considering the degree of importance of the ‘labour’ factor. Last, some of the processes affecting the ‘private consumer services' concerned with tourism are analysed. In particular, attention is devoted to aspects of the physical and social setting within which the service delivery takes place. An attempt is made to demonstrate which particular forms of service sector restructuring will be found in those tourist services in British coastal resorts. The exceptionally complex nature of the forces affecting employment levels in such places is shown in some detail.