THE QUOTE OF THE EDITION
[W]e have to recognize that the institutions created by the advent of modernity are not cut of whole cloth, we see more and more clearly that our lives today are dominated by influences no one living anywhere in the world can any longer entirely escape. Yet, together with the rest of the social sciences, sociology is only now starting to come to terms with an increasingly interdependent global system. Moreover, we seem to be living through an accelerated phase of social change. As the twenty-first century approaches, we are experiencing a period of social transformation as spectacular as anything that has occurred in earlier phases of the modern era. It seems certain that some of the leading sociological theories and concepts will have to be substantially overhauled if we are to seek to comprehend both this and the consolidation of something like a world society. Among the changes which might be singled out for mention are: exceptionally rapid technological innovation, coupled with the impact of the computer and of robotics; and apparent erosion of the established manufacturing base of Western economies, associated with a transfer of basic industrial production Eastwards; the deepening involvement of all the industrialised societies within an increasingly integrated global division of labour; widespread political disaffection within Western democracies, associated with realignments in patterns of voting and political support; and the looming threat of the proliferation of nuclear weapons, conjoined with the continuing application of science and technology to the intensification of weapons systems.
The list is a formidable one, and I certainly do not want to claim that sociology is the only discipline relevant to tackling it. But daunting though the intellectual and practical problems facing us in the late twentieth century may be, it is surely indispensable that they are above all organizational and institutional in character. That is to say, they are in a fundamental sense sociological. The sociological enterprise is now even more pivotal to the social sciences as a whole, and indeed to current intellectual culture generally, than it has ever been before. (Anthony Giddens in The Giddens Reader, (Philip Cassell, ed.), (1993), pp.l46-147 (MacMillan Publishers).
The Associate is the newsletter of the
Association for Bahá’í Studies (English-Speaking Europe),
27 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PD, UK.