Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 70

between the institutional infrastructure and the technological-material
infrastructures. Within the sociology of networks and flows it is espe-
cially John Urry who - relying heavily on the actor-network theories
of Latour (1987) and Callon (1980 and 1987) and on the reinterpreta-
tion of these by Mol and Law (1994) - tries to overcome (or do away
with) the dichotomy of the social and the material. 15 In doing so, he
goes way beyond the conventional schemes of environmental social
scientists, who generally speaking remain comfortable with assert-
ing that social systems should be seen as systems having a material
base and with the recognition that material conditions do matter for
social practices and institutional developments. Hybrids, actants and
sociotechnical systems are the key concepts that point to and anal-
yse the fading dichotomy between the social and the material. Third,
the strong separation between the conventional categories of state,
market and civil society is lifted, in favour of all kind of new emerg-
ing hybrid arrangements in between. Networks and flows, scapes and
sociomaterial infrastructures, they all can no longer be understood in
terms of state and markets. Hence, a new conceptualisation invades
the social sciences. Fourth, ideas of governance, management and con-
trol drastically change following the sociology of flows. Especially in
Urry's notion of global fluids, but also in more general ideas of nation-
states losing their sovereignty and power, possibilities of governance
and control are seriously questioned. Within Urry's ( 2003 ) work this
is related to the emergence of complexity and the disappearance of
agency, against the background of a strongly system theoretical frame-
work.

An environmental sociology of networks and flows

In applying the sociology of networks and flows for understanding
twenty-first-century environmental reform, and thus to build an envi-
ronmental sociology (or social theory) of networks and flows, we
cannot just rely on the work of Castells, Urry and other general -
nonenvironmental - sociologists/social theorists. Their inclusion of

15

Castells is more conventional in a strong separation between the material and
the social: “after millennia of a prehistoric battle with Nature, first to survive,
then to conquer it, our species has reached the level of knowledge and social
organisation that will allow us to live in a predominantly social world”
(Castells, 1996 : 478).